The Last Page

Wind screaming underneath.

Caliph swabbed himself, agony devitalized by fresh crisis. He buckled his belt and crawled out of his ruined water closet.

The hole in the stateroom floor showed a jagged picture of war-torn landscape several thousand feet below.

Caliph gritted his teeth, donned his gear and marched back out to the observation deck. He reattached his tether and got to work on the Pplarian gun.

No, he told himself.

You conceited prickish ass! They aren’t fighting for you. They’re fighting for Stonehold . . . for themselves . . . for the place they want to live. And you, as the High King, owe it to them not to give up before it’s through.

Every firing shook the cannon’s inner mechanisms so that after three such volleys certain bolts had to be readjusted.

Off the starboard side, one of Saergaeth’s airships listed oddly. As Caliph worked he noticed its decks devoid of movement. The flaps in the tail were banked hard. The bloated bloodred thing was going in vast protracted circles.

The Iscan heavies fired again.

Caliph saw the shot this time by virtue of the obscene chance that the propelled tunsia sphere actually impacted one of Saergaeth’s gliders. Caliph’s attention was drawn to the missile’s arc just after impact.

The glider had turned to fragments of wood, metal, leather and gore and the faint orb that had destroyed it had left a visible wake of fumes from the glider’s cell. It had also slowed tremendously. Caliph could tell it was about to begin its return trip, plummeting through clouds to lodge deeply in the frozen fields.

But something astonishing happened instead.

It did not fall.

Its velocity increased. It changed direction. It swooped like a gumball on a string. Swung in a smooth arc, impacted an Iscan airship, tore relentlessly through and accelerated toward an invisible gravitational pull. It hit another of Saergaeth’s gliders, disintegrating the aeronaut and his lighter-than-air craft into a spray of tiny bits.

Caliph could follow it with his eye because its track was faintly visible. Not a trail behind, but its path ahead. And it was growing clearer every fraction of every second. Like the negative image the Pplarian lightning left on his brain when he closed his eyes, a dark line, a blackish foreshadower materialized, showing where the ball would go.

Then Caliph lost track of it amid the chaos and the noise.

What could it mean?

At least some mechanic of his plan must have succeeded. Alani must have installed the devices on a portion, no matter how small, of Saergaeth’s fleet.

Hope returned as the heavies fired again. Roaring lions. Angry personifications of some overused political symbolism.

“Tell the captain to board that ship!” shouted Caliph.

He pointed to the derelict zeppelin cutting mindless circles in the sky.

“Yes, sir!”

The Pplarian gun concussed the air and another gout of lightning split the sky.

Fifteen minutes later, they were docked above the Mademoiselle. The coupling was tricky. A set of additional controls existed in a kind of inverted crow’s nest below the Byun- Ghala’s observation deck. The copilot had climbed down via an exposed spiral staircase.

He used the secondary controls to put the upside-down steeple into a coupling dead center on the other zeppelin’s crown.

They stacked on top of each other, floating like fat cacti in air.

It was extremely difficult not only because of the ongoing battle but because the captain had to fly the Byun-Ghala at exactly the same speed and direction as the other ship. If he did not, the coupling might snap.

Caliph and several other airmen descended the stairs, gripping the freezing iron tightly against the wind. They made it to the dorsum of the other airship by way of metal rungs.

Above, the Byun-Ghala billowed, obstructing much of the sky. Below, the great airbag of Saergaeth’s ship stretched pincushion-like. A floating red island covered with petulant limbless trees.

Near the coupling, a hatch opened into the hull. Caliph spun the handle and pulled up. Narrow dark steps descended through a slender cavity between the gasbags. They slithered down several flights.

Finally they emerged on the ship’s bridge.

The pilot of the enemy craft was slumped at the helm, an arm hanging through the wheel like a crowbar. His dead weight had jammed the flaps, caused the propellers to beat against fins laid perpetually to the right.

The airmen drew swords and spread out.

Caliph checked the pilot for wounds.

Nothing.

There was minor trauma to the ship, easily visible. A cannonball had entered on the port side, strafed through every intervening structure and cut through heavy reinforced stanchions as if they had been bundled straw. The missile’s velocity must have been unreal at the time of impact.

Its remains were found after several minutes, lodged deep inside the zeppelin’s belly. Wholly melded with another object. A twisted mass of tunsia and shattered glass. Both objects had been driven up the middle of a support wall, wedged between duralumin beams, stopped at last in their catastrophic path.

“Everyone’s dead, your majesty.”

The analysis came back after a three-minute survey of the ship.

“No signs of struggle. It’s like they all just fell over.”

“It’s not right,” said another man. “Creepy as a night on Knife and Heath.”

But Caliph’s fear had dissolved. He ushered his men back toward the Byun-Ghala. When they reached the top of the Mademoiselle’s hull he took a moment to gaze in panorama at the battle that compassed them on every side.

Many of Saergaeth’s airships were now doing strange things. Going in circles like the Mademoiselle. Others were ascending or descending without apparent reason. One made a spectacle of dragging through Glumwood’s upper fingers, ravaged by the forest’s claws.

Caliph suppressed a cheer.

Back on the Byun-Ghala he heard another salvo assault the sky. The Iscan heavies were firing again.

As the sun went down, Alani watched the war from the ground.

He felt the wind; it walked restlessly up and down the cheerless hills.

His men had installed nearly fifty cells.

Split souls. Half-damned creatures.

They were separate from the real solvitriol cells Saergaeth had found on the Orison. Half-souls couldn’t power engines. At least not conventionally. Their only force lay in the path of attraction.

Alani’s men had carried tiny cells, barely the size of chicken eggs. They had used tunsia bolts, securing them to the frames of as many zeppelins and engines as they could. They chose places where even if the bolts gave way or the material of the frame twisted and tore under the strain of mutual attraction, the damage would be catastrophic.

When the Iscan heavies started firing, the other half of each of Sigmund’s bisected human souls overcame whatever plasma diversion had temporarily negated their collective pull. Both halves sought each other out.

The bullets homed in, finding the one and only target they had been made unerringly to strike.

Unheard collisions rocked the ether, ripped bodies and souls apart while every inanimate thing remained unfazed. But it was intrinsically unpredictable.

The Iscan heavies were firing blind, not knowing which zeppelins housed which targets or what paths their