The Last Page

bullets would take. Some struck ships already engaged with Iscan ships. The result was indiscriminate slaughter.

Just outside the radius of ethereal disturbance, Alani had heard other aeronauts complain of queasiness and acute unrest. Alani himself had felt the diminishing ripples, disturbing something he had never felt before, threatening to dislodge him from his fleshy shell.

That was when Alani had taken a glider to the ground. Most of his men were dead. Despite his best efforts, extortion could only last until his psychological hostages lost hope, decided it no longer mattered whether any of them lived or died. Their beliefs were at stake. And one or two had talked, risking themselves and their fellow crewmen to the surgically implanted beads behind their eyes. The jig was up.

Six of Alani’s men had been discovered and killed.

Alani had fled. His men had been able to install only fifty units.

Fifty! Less than thirty percent of what they were supposed to have done.

Alani cursed and smoked his pipe from his hidden vantage south of Clefthollow. That meant that if every missile fired from Caliph’s heavy engines found its mark, Saergaeth’s zeppelin fleet would still be double that of the High King’s.

Somewhere in the skies, the spymaster of Isca knew that Caliph Howl was already dead.

More snow brought the zeppelin battle to an eerie standstill during the night. The flakes were thick and the ships stopped for fear of colliding with other vessels.

But early in the morning, from the west, the snow was replaced by defeat: falling silently out of the clouds. Caliph couldn’t help but notice it from his dizzying position on the starboard deck. He watched mutely as the massive red bellies shredded tendrils of vapor. It had to be a dream. A nightmare. The rail became his only connection to reality. No ship. No deck. No crewmen running. Just a shaft of cold, pushed hard into both hands, solid and immovable. He gripped it tightly as the Byun-Ghala tilted in the sky.

The directionless sense of perspective afforded by vertigo made the vast crimson skins bursting out of the clouds look like a pod of red leviathans breaching in an ocean of white. Except that it was upside down. All of it. The clouds above the battle had created a false ceiling over the entire war. Now they ruptured, spilling a second armada, scores of dark red fruit popping into existence, falling on the remnants of Caliph’s ragged fleet.

How could Saergaeth have hidden them? Holomorphy? Caliph watched the red ships’ bays open and vomit a host of chemical bombs. The storm of canisters passed through the aerial battlefield and plummeted toward the ground. The bombardment brought even the Iscan heavies, trundling through the snow, to a creaking stop that Caliph felt physically against his heart.

So cold, at the very center of his chest, it was like the weight of all those zeppelins had come crushing down on him. He couldn’t breathe. Saergaeth had outwitted him after all. Stonehold’s old hero had pulled together a battle plan that a boy from Desdae hadn’t been able to overcome. It had been ruthless. It had depended on superior numbers. And just when Caliph thought he had seen the full force of Miskatol brought to bear, Saergaeth had pulled back the curtain and said, Look: I have more.

Someone was talking to him. But all he could hear was the faint explosions in the fields below.

“Your majesty! Your majesty!”

Caliph turned his head slowly. One of the deckhands was shouting at him, tears gushing from his eyes. Why was he crying? Men were yelling incoherently. The Byun-Ghala tilted again, sharply, engines revving. The captain was turning her away from the battle.

“Where are we going?” asked Caliph. He felt so out of breath. “We can’t run . . .”

The deckhand was close, right in his face. Why was he so close? He was younger than Caliph, tears streaming down his cheeks, “It’s going to be all right . . .”

“I think I need to sit down,” Caliph whispered. But he could not move. He tried again.

Strange.

He looked toward his feet and suddenly saw that the deck had been blown apart right in front of him, metal bent into crazy branch-like fingers. Wood had been blasted away.

Part of the railing, or maybe a support beam, was projecting through the center of his chest. He felt embarrassed, as if he had made a terrible mistake. He wanted to apologize to the deckhand for not realizing what had happened.

“Oh,” said Caliph. “Oh . . .” The clouds swept by, beautiful and gloomy; the wind was cold.

“We’re going to get you home.” The deckhand was bawling. “Hold on . . . hold on!”

CHAPTER 40

The tailors presented Sena with a dozen options. She settled on a pale suede jacket, trimmed with white fur. It fit her torso like a glove, buttoning up the front with wooden toggles, cosseting her neck in a stiff fur-lined collar similar to those worn by monks in the western hills. Gorgeous wine and rose-colored embroidery flourished up and down the suede. She put it on, checked herself in the mirror and went down to deal with the commotion in the great hall.

Even though it was practically the middle of the night, the royal huntsman had come, accompanied by the taxidermist and a group of other men.

They had brought the creature down.

The patio doors were opened to admit the massive head. Gadriel had balked at first but Sena was back in power (Caliph had left specific instructions) and she ordered him around with satisfaction in exchange for his treatment of her the week before. She had them haul the specimen in and hang it in the great hall.

It was a terrifying thing. The head was small only in comparison to her memory of that night, being roughly the size and shape of a giant pumpkin.

“Incredible specimen, my lady. An aberration perhaps never to be catalogued again.” The taxidermist held a repugnant kind of reverence for the thing.

Sena looked at it closely. It was no less odious under the castle’s metholinate lights.

From a distance, it might have passed as a hideous human head infected with gigantism. But closer up its brow curved too sharply back in a drastic ovoid dome stippled with dark occasional hair. The ears were tall, multipointed and labyrinthine beyond the folds of subterrestrial echolocators. Once soft and sallow, the flesh was now hard and speckled like the eggs of feral birds.

Its nose was snubbed despite the bestial protrusion of its snout. The lips were broad, thin and indescribably cruel.

“Took a dozen chemiostatic spears to bring it down,” said the huntsman.

Sena felt herself grow cold as she looked at the eyes, placed by the taxidermist beneath drowsy alien lids. Their smooth black surface glistened. Midnight waters without whites. A nictating membrane slipped up at an angle, forming a milky sheath that clung laconically across the glass’s bathyal deeps.

In the reproduction, Sena could only imagine the cosmic blackness of the originals. The replicas had been flecked by the taxidermist’s hand with ever deepening layers of tiny golden motes that glittered in the great hall’s light like twin galaxies.

“The body is being sliced into cross sections and inserted into panes at Grouselich Hospital. It will be pickled. No doubt to be a key attraction at the Ketch Museum.” The taxidermist spoke as if everything were bright.

Sena paged through the report that said ten men had lost their lives during the hunt, victims of the creature’s teeth and claws.

She examined the jaws, protruding hinges that exposed multiple rows of fangs. She shivered before the trophy’s insensible gaze and defiantly extended her finger. Something compelled her to touch it. She needed to know, on a visceral level, that it was real.

But feeling its death did little to reassure her. On the contrary, it made what she had read in the Csrym T all the more frightening because something was happening.

For several nights, since she had hurled her formula at Skellum, she had felt Them . . . primordial bodies stirring, churning through lurid ghastly throes.

Horrors far richer and more rarefied than the whose head was being hung in