The Last Page (95 page)

People changed. Priorities about-faced. There were no demonstrations at Shaerzac University, no more antiwar sentiment in the major press. Zeppelins. A countless host of zeppelins was coming and everybody knew it. Chemical bombs would fall on the capital of Stonehold, on Hullmallow Cathedral, on Cripple Gate, and D
m
lt Hall. Terror and destruction would mar the ancient statues at Shaerzac University and kill the helpless in the slums of Gorbür D
yn.

Of course there were factions that still insisted a peaceful transfer of power could be achieved through several rather optimistic channels. They published rushed articles in flyers and held rallies in tiny bistros with an attendance of half a dozen souls. But their rhetoric had become the lunatic fringe and it drowned quickly in the tumult of a rising indignant mass. People were incensed by Saergaeth’s attack.

How dare he? How dare he attack Isca! The capital of Stonehold?

While the citizenry of Isca voiced their outrage, the military turned abstract anger into tangible force.

Caliph left Isca by zeppelin at seven fifty-six on the morning of the advance. He and a crew of twenty airmen headed west.

Boys in black flight uniforms tumbled across the decks, winding up the nickel-plated Pplarian guns. They adjusted slides, bolts, and loosened various clamps with ratchets, pulled safety pins that prevented rotation and fine-tuned a variety of other obscure settings on the clawlike turrets.

Caliph had sent word to Kl
, thanking him.

Kl
had sent eight strange cannon that Caliph divided judiciously among Isca’s fleet of forty. One he had harnessed to the
Byun-Ghala
. The rest he placed on his fastest ships.

Their long slender barrels gleamed with alien elegance, vaguely phallic. Glittering hoses coupled compression units to six-inch bores that conducted a unique shell down the weapon’s length.

Ammunition was limited.

Twenty shots per gun. The shells, like strange silvery seeds nested in racks to the loader’s right flank. Pointed at both ends and screwed together at their meridian, the shells were designed to break in halves after launch. Once the twentieth shot was fired, the cannon would be reduced to decoration, worthless until more of the special ordnance arrived.

Unfortunately, brigs from Mort
rm had sunk a Pplarian frigate carrying just such a load. A second shipment was not likely to arrive until the war with Saergaeth had become a matter of historical debate.

Caliph gazed at the twenty alien bullets with a sinking feeling. He wasn’t counting on one hundred sixty Pplarian shells winning this war.

The
Byun-Ghala
slid west, following the Trill Hills that separated the mud pots to the north from the village of Burt. A thousand feet below and receding fast, brown lanes chugged with gray shapes. Steam engines, horses and carriages. Small platoons of local men stood in formation in the village square.

Caliph aimed one of the railing-mounted spyglasses and discovered they were armed with swords, pitchforks and probably a handful of chemical grenades. They were local militia lacking uniforms or armor. Some of their fellows loped along trails presumably hidden at ground level, darting under leafless trees that hardly camouflaged them from the sky.

They were getting ready.

But B
rt cowered in the folded hills eight miles west of Isca. And if Saergaeth made it to Burt, Caliph knew nothing else would stop him.

In the cold air over Gl
mwood, Caliph squinted, checked charts and
finally made out at nearly twenty-five miles just exactly what he was up against. Tiny flecks of red had begun to resolve against the hazy western chalkboard of the sky. Saergaeth’s zeppelin fleet numbered one hundred thirty-four according to the latest intelligence.

As the intervening miles shortened, the young soldiers on the deck looked solemnly west. Saergaeth’s cloud of measles swelled to the size of ruby-bellied reed flies, then cherries and, finally, they looked like great crimson balloons filled with blood.

Saergaeth had dyed his entire fleet red.

The crew began to take turns looking through the spyglass. They smoked nervously and peered into the lens.

One of the men cursed and grinned. He read the numbers painted on the taut skins and started calling them out. Caliph was looking too. He could see the enemy airmen walk across somehow hostile decks, smoke and look east through similar spyglasses. Caliph felt awed by the resolve. All around him, his men were ready to die and Saergaeth’s aeronauts were strange mirrors or doppelgangers.

The landscape below drifted in pastel grays, surreal and quiet except for five choratium horrors plowing through the snow. The Iscan heavies were heading west, ordered to provide ground support for the High King’s tiny fleet.

The
Byun-Ghala
had caught up with the rest of the airships. It slid between a pair of leviathans, a spiny minnow between goliath pike. Airmen on the other ships flashed signal lights in salute as the High King’s tiny dirigible sped past.

A condensation trail arced suddenly into the sky, launched from one of the Iscan heavies. Like a crayfish darting in clear water, it left an organic muddy-looking trail. The projectile reached its zenith over a cavalry of light Iscan engines and plummeted past them into Saergaeth’s ranks of heavy foot. It detonated remote catastrophe. Orange smoke surged like a sudden mushroom. An exclamation point above imperceptible carnage that served to mark the beginning.

Saergaeth’s array was highly visible now. Floating from the Greencap Mountains with a kind of fatuous malignancy. Perhaps Miskatoll had built more. By Caliph’s estimate, nearly two hundred zeppelins darkened the sky, many nearly half a mile long.

They bristled with weapons and spines.

Faint concussions echoed across the plains as the first artillery burst from flight decks and engines on the ground. Legions of infantry and horse marched in eccentric, primitive formations between the lumbering machines. They made easy targets against the white fields.