The Last Page

the shylock in her room.

As she moves, the birds’ agitation increases. A sporadic drizzle of sable feathers touches the floor. She does not attempt to soothe them.

She stands before a blackboard and makes the calculations, scribbling out the numbers she will translate into words. As the chalk moves she begins to whisper, the sky outside begins to turn. Her eyes notice it as if from miles away, vast gouts of chocolate stratosphere and sapphirine vapor rotating like toilet water centered on Isca’s tallest spire.

She sees the streets, the pavement nymphs and worm gang members and gadabouts from Winter Fen to Ironside who stop to marvel at the snail shell of cloud. But when little fingers of lightning begin to play the city’s cables like discordant strings, when the lines that carry short supplies of power begin to lap the wind and a fine gray sleet begins to fall, she sees the rubbernecking end. People run for cover.

Sena opens the Csrym T. Her vocal cords are incapable of pronouncing any of the Inti’Drou glyphs. She must dilute them, take parts of them and transpose them with the Unknown Tongue. Something she can use. Even so, its primacy is extant.

She speaks a word and both rooks die in an explosion that splashes the floor. Her tongue moves, knocking out words made of numbers made of blood. They are brighter and darker than the Unknown Tongue. They are smoother. They are pure. She cannot reduce them further any more than she can use a stick to draw a sunset in the dirt.

Her incantation pours several different algorithms into one; then puts her argument in place.

It is a proof so she follows all the rules, doesn’t cut corners, makes everything painfully clear.

The test she has chosen is the equivalent of tipping a dart with an unknown chemical and hurling it at a creature in a cage. After it is done, she will wait and watch, morbidly, because she doesn’t know exactly what the Csrym T’s concoction will do.

Her conscience troubles her minutely in a purely scientific way. She has to know. So she aims her missile at a seemingly overeager volunteer, a target she has been saving all her venom up for years.

Sena speaks and her lips launch the invisible and ancient bolt, hurling it beyond the Greencap Mountains, across the Valley of Eloth, into the Country of Miryhr. Her aim is perfectly precise, pointed at a parody of family that has so often made her choke. With long-anticipated retribution, with angst grown bitter as a root, she spits her dart at Megan.

Alani knew everything.

He knew how carefully Caliph had planned this war. He knew how the bodies from Ghoul Court had been dressed in zeppelin uniforms and laid at the site of the Orison’s crash. He knew how the timing had been so critical, perfectly synchronized with the departure of Bjorn Amphungtal’s airship from Isca. King Lewis could be arrested and imprisoned but Mr. Amphungtal was a diplomat: far beyond the reach of Stonehold’s criminal system. He was untouchable.

Alani imagined Amphungtal’s smile as he bid Caliph good-bye the evening before his flight left. How he must have relished the fact that the blueprints had been recovered, that Caliph Howl was doomed and that he, Bjorn Amphungtal, was escaping via airship just before calamity struck! But such was not the case.

In clear dawn, Mr. Amphungtl’s zeppelin was brought down under a hail of gunfire. Its gasbags were rent. Its luxurious cabin was riddled with holes. It crashed near Clefthollow in broad daylight to the amazed eyes of townsfolk and soldiers stationed below. There were no survivors.

The news rocked the Duchy and spread south: that a Pandragonian ambassador had been fired on, murdered as the papers said, killed ruthlessly and illegally by a Stonehavian airship. But the airship that killed Mr. Amphungtal was not part of the High King’s fleet. It was a sky shark flying the colors of Saergaeth Brindlestrm.

Alani smiled.

Caliph had made it impossible for Pandragor to publicly support Saergaeth in Stonehold’s civil war. He could do nothing about the munitions and supplies that the Pandragonians had already delivered, but there would be no southern zeppelins in Saergaeth’s fleet. The war was back to being fair. As fair as it would ever be.

Alani and his men had landed behind enemy lines after shooting down the southern ship and moved swiftly to the next stage of Caliph’s multiphase plan.

But despite Alani’s pride in a mission well done, when he reached Miskatoll, his hope faded. Like reading ahead in a novel, he knew what was going to happen. He could skip all the intervening chapters of pointless violence and exposition and know with the solid assurance that his many years of experience provided, that nothing Caliph Howl could do would change the inevitable.

Alani omitted this grim personal assessment in his note to the High King and wrote simply that he had discovered the date and time of Saergaeth’s main attack. He sent this (and only this) information back to the High King.

Caliph received the note within two hours, pulling it from the exhausted hawk’s leg. Alani had cranked the tiny golden screws on the chemiostatic governor in its brain to maximize speed.

Day after tomorrow, read the note, second of Thay. Saergaeth will be coming.

Caliph’s eyes wrestled with the crumpled hazy darkness of the western mountains at the limit of his sight. He took tablets from a red-coated physician on the Byun-Ghala who assured him they would moderate the pain. He chewed them like candy but his discomfort never flagged. His stomach gurgled with acid.

He was headed home.

After visiting his generals, ferrying the prince to Tentinil, completing a long schedule of meetings, Caliph was finally headed home. He had made every decision he could make.

He shredded the note from Alani in his palm and let it fall like the first snowflakes from the Byun-Ghala’s outer deck.

The zeppelin powered south, clearing a geothermic swamp and gliding over a jumbled pile of hills gone bald with autumn brown.

In the fast-moving zeppelin, the landscape never stayed the same. The drumlins that had just replaced the swamp receded in minutes like diseased gums, exposing the blackened incisors of Murkbell and Growl Mort, basking in their own slaver by the sea. The industrial districts offered drooling abscesses that outpoured spew as yellow as infected pus. Caliph could see the grime-encrusted seawall, the arches of the great arcade. Like a sleeping dark but restless thing, Isca seemed to slither into view. But Caliph didn’t wonder if it was worth saving.

The Byun-Ghala motored in quickly and moored on the deck at Isca Castle. He instructed Yrisl to deploy all remaining engines on the city’s western flank. Not the trundling lightweights . . . but the juggernauts. The big heavies.

As the airship docked, Yrisl jumped the gap, not waiting for the plank, and ran without pretense to obey.

Caliph did wait for the plank. He was exhausted and wanted only one thing: two hours. Two hours of sleep.

He headed to his room.

When he entered he found Sena looking wild.

She was draped in the tub, hair pulled up, covered with bubbles, cradling a bottle.

“You’re late,” she slurred.

“Really?” He pulled off his gloves and boots. “By whose clock?” He had already noticed her eyes.

“Mine.” Her voice was repugnantly wanton. “Come fuck me.” The bottle slipped, disgorged its blush into the bath.

The radiator was boiling and the bedroom felt like a roasting pit. Caliph pulled off his coat. He twisted a knob