The Last Page

that isolated the room from the rest of the boiler’s circulatory system.

Her eyes!

Caliph walked toward the tub, speechless.

They were dazzling and awful. Ringed with bruises and glowing in shadow: molten blue. The closer he got the more he saw, little flashes, tiny engravings that caught the light. They were exquisite, without a pupil. Pure blue. The iris had grown shut. Caliph was horrified. Her eyes looked like jewels.

Sena stumbled from the tub. She nearly fell but Caliph caught her by the arm. Her towel hung from a nearby chair. He jerked it free and draped it over her shoulders.

She bit her lip as if in concentration and made it to the bed.

Her body smelled of perfume, soap and wine, glossy with the creamy lace of bubbles gathered on her skin. Her form unrolled, escaped the towel’s rubric. Caliph gazed at the gleaming provocative compilation of her parts. He felt disjunct, as if part of him was still standing on the Byun-Ghala staring at war charts. But her topography mapped a place far removed from anything that reeked of war. A rolling golden landscape. Left shoulder dipping sleekly into waist. The supple hollow where her skin grew taut across the pelvic arch.

Caliph ran his fingers over her. She stretched at his attention, slid her legs along each other with the soft whisper of skin.

Maybe in the morning she wouldn’t remember him kissing her like he was starving for her mouth. Maybe in the morning they would talk and sort things out. She wouldn’t be drunk. She would explain her eyes. He would apologize for leaving her without good-bye. Maybe she would forgive him and he would forgive her and she would tell him, finally, that their love wasn’t something base; that they weren’t just a pair of junkies whipped by what they craved or a set of people using one another for comfort or power or anything else.

Caliph trembled and held her like something on the verge of being lost, like something irreplaceable that he couldn’t save or hold onto tightly enough. Afterward he cried.

CHAPTER 39

Sena woke up alone. Meetings and war formed her primary suspects. She didn’t bother getting out of bed.

Last night remained a blur. She smiled, pulled a heavy shadow toward her and opened the Csrym T. The day passed quietly with the knowledge that she had sent an ancient ball of blackened numbers like a meteor into Skellum Hall. If Megan couldn’t or wouldn’t do it, she knew the Eighth House would soon dispatch a qloin. Retribution was inevitable.

During the past few days, Sena had killed things, used a vast amount of holojoules to drape the castle in a veil. Her eyes could not penetrate the Eighth House and she hoped the inverse was also true. She kept the shylock close at hand.

In the evening, a servant brought her dinner and a bottle of ridiculously expensive sherry. She hardly touched the meat. She took the bottle to the window and stood looking at the distant west. Since she had been in Lewis’ head, tenuous loyalties had begun to blossom in her chest, something she had never felt before, a weak and unfounded brand of nationalism. It seemed ridiculous. Her allegiance had always been to no one but herself.

She flicked her kyru out, cut the foil below the lip and popped the cork. The smell of Stonehold wafted from the bottle’s throat. She wiped the top and poured a taste of her new country, her new home.

Her eyes clawed through the mountains—past the war, but parliament, all of Skellum, remained dark. She could sense the chaos, sense the Sisterhood changing hands. She guessed her proof had been a raging success. Now all that remained was to find a way to use what she had learned to help Caliph win this war!

Sena swallowed two ounces and poured herself another glass. Stonehold will be my home, she thought.

A shadow in the room whispered to her, urging her to lug the Csrym T from its perch, open it and begin to read.

That night, winter fell like an anvil. From Kjnardag’s glittering slopes a cold snap stabbed south and crackled in the Iscan Bay. Snow descended. A parasitic host bedaubed the north with grotesque white.

Cold inveigled every cranny of the city. Steeples, bathrooms and bedrooms of the poor became its nests. Buckets of frozen night soil were tossed from door stoops of tenements devoid of plumbing. They bobbed, half cones of solid filthy ice, thudding dully along fouled concrete tunnels. The watch dumped chemicals in the sewer to keep them mostly liquid.

Caliph looked out from his study windowsill that had draped impossibly during the night. All across the skyline surreal sculptures drooled, white as frosting, defying gravity in a bake shop of the mad.

As predicted, when Isca’s stench had been dulled by snow, when things seemed almost sanctified and suddenly still, all-out war erupted on the western plains.

Word reached Caliph for the second time, a correction from Alani confirming that airships were lifting out of hangars in the border keeps far away: one day early. Irony of ironies, he attended one last meeting. Then, by hawk and word of mouth, he disseminated to his generals the signal that would finally put his plan in motion.

He felt numb.

Vaguely, he became aware of transitions taking place in the streets below the castle.

People couldn’t flee. Instead, they braced themselves and hunkered down, cracking un-laughed-at jokes in order to distance themselves from outright hysteria. He could see Octul Box from the parapet, where grocers’ shelves sold bare by half past six and storefronts closed as owners hurried home.

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 Dmlt Hall. Terror and destruction would mar the ancient statues at Shaerzac University and kill the helpless in the slums of Gorbur Dyn.

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 Mortrm 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.