The Last Page

dropped like singed moths around a popping gas lamp.

Caliph felt the blast from several hundred yards away. A swell of scorching air rolled over him, hit him squarely in the face. His eyeballs dried instantly. Sticky and hot. It hurt to blink. He gagged and clutched the railing.

When he looked down he saw more calamity, Iscan engines unraveling to enormous canisters of gas. Puffs of noxious toxins gloated over the hills and meandered with prevailing winds, killing everything they brushed.

Airship cannons powered by enormous compression hoses fired stone and metal balls inscribed with Naneman battle runes. War engines a mile below suffered devastating trauma.

Occasionally, gun-stones would shatter or bounce off thick choratium plates but more often than not, the high velocity of the missile would turn an engine’s boiler inside out or render tracks snarled piles of useless grinding scrap.

Paralyzed and broken or pierced with ragged puncture wounds that rent from top to bottom, the smaller engines were abandoned by their crews. Canisters of deadly fumes burst nearby and sealed the crewmen’s fate.

With miserable fascination Caliph watched the impotent retaliation of his lights. They fired shells of hardened clay packed with incendiary pellets, shot from powerful ballistae. They traveled interminable arcs and sometimes splashed through rigid zeppelin skins, adding to a paltry tally of influential blows. Unlike Saergaeth, the High King did not have shells capable of reacting with what everyone had thought to be inert zeppelin gas.

Even one or two direct hits often failed to bring Saergaeth’s airships down.

The relentless front swept east.

Since the Orison’s “crash” Caliph’s only communication with Alani or his spies had been the two hasty notes.

He couldn’t tell if something had gone wrong, if his elaborate plan would meet with even marginal success, but he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. Saergaeth was tearing him apart. From the back of the Byun-Ghala a battery of metal tubes had been bolted to flashing on the deck. Caliph gave a signal and one of the airmen flipped a switch. Current from the airship’s giant cells coursed down a length of wire to where the strange artillery piece pointed astern at seventeen degrees.

Half a dozen chemical rockets thumped from the tubes and hissed into the air. Nondescript streamers of smoke mixing with the more breathtaking violence that choked the sky. The rockets traveled only a hundred yards before bursting into glittering multicolored flares.

Fireworks.

They were the signal.

Isca’s heavy engines crawled out of Glumwood like unreal castles cobbled from choratium and steel. Each of their eight cleated tracks were ten feet tall, thirty feet across and twice again as long. One track: a single belt of bladed metal churned through elaborate sequences of toothy wheels. One tread could individually crush a two-story house of mortared stone.

Eight such belts comprised the clangorous foundations of the heavy engines whose stacks spewed a soup of brimstone and inky grit.

They defied and boggled the mind. Moveable fortresses, tactical strongholds that could be positioned as defiles or inching juggernauts, the foes of which had but one realistic maneuver: a slow relentless rout.

But against the comparative agility of zeppelins, the cumbersome heavies could only wait, hoping an airship would blunder within range—something not likely to happen even if a zeppelin captain showed gross incompetence and total disregard for all things sane. The crew would mutiny long before coming within a mile of such a monster’s reach.

But when the gold and blue fireworks discharged behind the Byun-Ghala the Iscan heavies stopped launching conventional missiles of steel and stone.

They filled their guns with tunsia-reinforced holomorphic glass.

Cannonballs filled with souls.

Brobdingnagian compression units sent a volley of solvitriol bombs into the air. They were rudimentary. Untested. Caliph saw the heavies fire but lost track of their supersonic ammunition.

His stomach twisted three directions at once. His bowels needed sudden emptying. Everything depended on this moment.

Had Alani really done his job?

Caliph sweat profusely.

For unbearable moments nothing seemed to happen. He scanned the sky for any trace of success. His eyes moved from one dirigible to the next. Keenly attentive despite agonizing discomfort.

The Iscan heavies gave another volley, compression cannons rolling like thunder across the hills.

No visible effect.

So that’s it? Nothing?

“Fuck thunder!” It was not a curse of rage. Fear filled Caliph from the boots up. Isca was doomed. The worm gang youths had truly died in vain!

His flesh went clammy. He felt himself surrender to prickles, uncontrollable convulsions and finally retching fits. His head would decorate the walls at West Gate: a distinctly irritating but not entirely inconvenient method of escape.

But he wasn’t being honest. After all, he did care. Not for himself. He still had to pay for the worm gang murders. Sigmund had lied, but the High King had authorized the project. No. Caliph didn’t have much hope for himself, but he did wish the unaffected best for Isca.

He didn’t really care that he was about to become a piece of history except that many hundreds of loyal men and women were dying on his behalf.

He chuckled at what he guessed would be tomorrow’s headline:

Saergaeth Puts End to War!

And then:

High King Saergaeth Brindlestr

m restores order to the Duchy of Stonehold after months of conflict and scandal. Caliph Howl, whose family name had suffered a history of alleged political impropriety and corruption was arrested sometime this morning and taken into custody on charges of treason and witchcraft.

Caliph’s execution would take place in Nevergreen along with the other traitors. Caliph felt torturously ashamed of that.

People are going to die because they followed me.

Who am I? Some misanthrope out of Greymoor? Incapable of planning any kind of war or strategy that works!

Caliph was gagging.

Three of the airmen unlatched his tether and dragged him into the stateroom. Warm lights fluttered on the walls. The piano stood silent. Outside, detonations filled the air with a pungent biting stench.

Caliph unzipped his flight jacket, tossed his earmuffs and goggles aside and stumbled into a cramped closet outfitted with plumbing and a tastefully decorated stool.

He jerked his leather pants down between his ankles and dropped onto the seat, colon exploding with pent- up anxiety. His guts tightened, struggling to wring out every drop of stress.

Klaxons sounded.

Caliph laid his head in his lap, exhausted. He focused on purging himself of any residual disquiet.

Again the horns. Urgent. Sequacious. Unremitting.

Detonated wood paneling and a sudden spray of splinters suffused the air. Winter wind howled through the tiny bathroom.

A ragged opening just above Caliph’s head yawned brightly, somehow comical and grotesque.

A gun-stone must have torn through the Byun-Ghala’s hull leaving a trail of like- sized holes. The opposite wall was similarly destroyed. Beyond it, the floor. Strake smashed. Planks flinderized.