The Last Page

The Porch of Sth, connecting to her home like a tension snare, had finally sprung. An invisible force grappled the rag-thing with a vengeance, flinging the enormous grub body with careless childlike violence, repeatedly against the floor.

Sena held her wound together and fumbled for a hidden latch beneath the stairs.

From the front of the house something large struck the door. Boards splintered. The sound of talons sunk into wood with a squeak. Then, just as quickly, everything went quiet.

Sena felt nauseous. She drew up on her knees and looked around the shaken room. Her connection to the Porch was broken. But she could feel again. She pulled the hidden door to her study open and went wobbly and clumsy down a set of uneven steps. The room below reeked of mice.

It was getting hard to think.

Sena groaned. Five staggering steps. She touched the lanthorn above her worktable and flooded the cellar with light. There was a medical kit. She cracked it, rifled through and doused herself in antiseptic, yelping at the pain. She irrigated with a bottle of saline solution and realized she needed sutures. Hand quivering, she took the needle driver from the box and did the best she could, pulling her flesh together, forcing the bleeding to stop.

It was makeshift and ugly. She knew she needed help. She wrapped a bandage around her waist and jammed the Csrym T and a few other objects into her pack.

She hesitated a moment, weighing the odds, wondering if it was worth the energy. Then, finally committing to the task, she reached for her bookcase and pulled a thin book from the shelves. She set it in the middle of her worktable like a centerpiece, then turned and left the room.

In her kitchen, she took a moment to scrawl a note and tack it to her corkboard. Then she set out on the two-minute walk that took her to the Stones.

The Porch of Sth gathered starlines from all across the world, angles, lines through the Ncrpa. The Shrdnae Sisterhood used them for navigation and connecting space. Megan claimed no one outside the Sisterhood knew how to use them, that they were forgotten like the very monuments that marked them.

But the Porch of Sth was different. Its numerology was skewed. Routes taken to the Stones from other places did not always have reciprocal lines. And lines taken away from Tue were often difficult to retrace.

But there was one place she could go and return from and she had planned it from the beginning.

At the Stones, Sena’s body shimmered and unwound, a two-dimensional cicatrix, a spool of black ribbon thrown from the mile-high cliff by holomorphy, fading north into nothingness.

Where she went, she hoped, would be impossible for anyone except Caliph Howl to deduce.

⁴ D.W.: Witch’s pupil.

⁵ Parn and farn are respectively “The Duty” and “The Betrayal”. Parn specifically is sex work to advance the Sisterhood’s political agenda. Farn is sex for personal reasons and seen as jeopardizing the Sisterhood’s veil of secrecy.

CHAPTER 6

The train crawled between the Spine Mountains and howled over the Medysan Bog. Caliph got off at Crow’s Eye. Even stopped, the great hideous thing flickered with people: bodies adjusting behind three stories of slotted white windows. The obscene black cars repeated like segments of a myriapede, fading back along the Vaubacour Line.

Caliph dispersed with the rest of the passengers, fading from the platform like engine steam.

In the east, the sun had left ruins in the clouds. He found the toilets locked and crouched behind the station. Far away, the horizon crumpled with distant humidity. A glimmer that might have been an airship floated south. Caliph finished up. There was no shortage of waste paper. He wrinkled his nose and made due.

Just then, a man’s cough startled him. A slender silhouette emerged from the deserted platform, utterly featureless in the dark. Caliph buckled his belt. He watched the man, who didn’t seem to notice him, take a set of cement stairs down behind a fence that was alive with spectral bits of paper.

Caliph took one step and his foot hit a can. It sang mournfully off the gravel. The man stopped and turned in Caliph’s direction. He stood there, too long, staring directly into the blackness. Maybe he was frightened. Maybe he was a thug.

“It’s just me,” Caliph finally said, feeling stupid. “The toilets were locked.”

The man said nothing. He continued to stare.

Caliph stepped out into a gray tangent of streetlight. When he did, he thought he heard the other man gasp.

Caliph tried again. “I didn’t mean to startle you . . . nowhere else for me go—”

“You rode from Greymoor?” The other man’s voice was older, slightly stretched and tinged with emotion: anxiety or perhaps disbelief. Caliph felt trapped, uncertain how to answer. Certainly people were looking for him, probably a great many people by now. Maybe this man worked for the Stonehavian government.

“I’m a butcher,” said the man. There was no further explanation but his accent indicated a degree of education. His vowels sounded vaguely like he usually spoke Gnah Lug Lam or maybe High Mlk. “Name’s Alani.”

Do I dare use my name? “I’m Caliph.”

“There’s a pushing school on the south side of town,” said Alani. “But you’re not going there, are you?”

Caliph wished he could see the man’s face.

“I don’t know . . . I . . .”

“No. You’re headed for that little skirt’s place on the lip of the plateau.”

“Who are you?”

Alani stepped back; lamplight caked his face suddenly like butter. Caliph recognized him. He couldn’t find the circumstance but he had definitely seen him before, wearing different clothes . . . a uniform.

“Turn around. Go to Stonehold.” Then the man shifted position and abruptly walked away.

Caliph let him go. He was too frightened to run after him. He was still trying to find a setting to pair with the bald head, pocked cheeks and well-kept goatee.

A thin man in his fifties.

It had to have been at college. Mentally, Caliph dressed him in baggy pants and a shirt. No. He imagined Alani in Desdae Hall selling books. A professor? A cook? Maybe in town at the theater or Grume’s . . . No. He tried a different angle: who could have known he was going to see Sena? Who would have had access to the letter? Who could have seen the map?

Caliph searched his mind, trying to remember the faces at the campus post office. All he found were the pouts and freckles of two or three sullen women.

It seemed useless. Whoever Alani was, he obviously knew both where Caliph Howl was supposed to be and where he was going. Maybe I should turn around . . .

Caliph stood in the dark for a long time, wondering, doubting.

Finally he decided. On his first step he rebuked the can that had given him away, kicking it fiercely. It seemed to float rather than fly, barely scraping the bricks before vanishing into the dark. On his second step he set his feet toward the cement steps that led down into Crow’s Eye. He was not going back.

At a point just north of the barren arches of Tibin, Caliph could see the Walls of Tue, black and misty through miles of humid sky. It was the eleventh of Psh and he had reached the crossroads.

Sena would have no way of knowing he had stayed another semester. Maybe her invitation had expired. She might even be with someone else by now. The thought thickened the back of his throat.

Caliph wished he had brought a friend, someone to make it less obvious that he had traveled all this way just to see her. The thought of knocking on her door alone terrified him.