The Last Page

Shrdnae field agents were forbidden from any kind of relationship that could compromise them: pregnancy in the all-female organization was strictly regulated. For Shrdnae operatives, sex was part of their training. It was an art form they perfected just like assassination and like their trademark knife sheaths, their legs didn’t open unless it was part of the job.

She knew I was going to be king . . . was she using me the whole time? Caliph’s brain froze around a new thought. Her letter! Just to lure me out where they could kill me? Ransom? He couldn’t help himself. He pitched forward on his hands and knees, retching; everything he’d just eaten turned out in the grass.

For a while he stared at the weeds, watching the slick amber liquid attract bugs. His torso convulsed again; he didn’t care what the women were doing.

“Sena’s always taken her men watered down.”

“Not her boyfriend,” Caliph managed to croak. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He felt dizzy from the heat, like he might pass out.

“You must know her well enough to walk through her house and take her horse.”

“I wish I was her boyfriend. I went to school with her.” He picked one of the Naked Eight at random. “Name’s David.”

“Get up, David . . .”

CHAPTER 7

Caliph stood up. As he did, the woman on the roof pitched forward like a gargoyle breaking loose from a building. She plummeted into the weeds at Caliph’s feet, landing with a simultaneous crunch-thud; she did not move again.

He turned around. The woman behind him was standing perfectly still with a shaft of gleaming metal sticking out of her cheek. She fell forward into the flowers, brushing Caliph’s shoulder on her way down.

Caliph ran.

He vaulted the split-rail fence and landed in the pasture, heading for the horse. He saw its tentacle tails flipping gently like a fistful of snakes, its slab teeth shearing contentedly through grass. It looked up, watched him for a moment, then roared. Its claws ripped massive clods of sod from the ground as it bolted away, racing for the far end of the pasture.

Caliph slipped and skidded in a patch of mud; the momentum flipped him onto his back like a turtle, speeding him over moss and horse shit down a gentle slope and finally depositing him near the edge of the pond.

When Caliph opened his eyes, the sun had gone behind a cloud and everything looked gray. There were men with duralumin wings and chemiostatic cells on their backs, landing in the pasture. They cradled gas-powered bows and huge compression guns in their arms. Their goggles were chrome blue. Their flight suits black.

Caliph heard heavy propellers and looked up. Not a cloud. A vast porcine airship blotted out the sun.

There were men surrounding him. They wore rapiers and made signals with their hands, telling each other what to do. So fast. Caliph couldn’t tell where they had come from but he assumed they too had dropped from the zeppelin.

“Caliph Howl?”

A man was shouting from slightly uphill. He reached down and pulled Caliph from the mud. “Caliph Howl?”

Dazed beyond speaking, Caliph could only nod.

“I’m Master Sergeant Timms.” He shook Caliph’s hand, seemingly unfazed by the thick muck covering almost every inch of Caliph’s body. “Trying to give us the slip there again, literally . . .” He smiled. His teeth were slightly crooked but very white.

Caliph looked around. It seemed obvious that Stonehold had found him. Snipers had killed the Shrdnae Witches and this man was now taking him north. Far north. Over the Country of Miryhr, east of Eloth, past Sena—wherever she was—beyond the Greencap Mountains and down into the Duchy of Stonehold.

Caliph knew he didn’t have a choice in this. He didn’t have a choice that the women were dead, or that he didn’t want to be king. He knew that now, suddenly. He didn’t want to be king. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to find Sena either. Everything between them must have been a lie. Or was it?

His mind was already toying with ways to suspend judgment. Maybe there had been a mistake.

He was walking, letting Master Sergeant Timms steer him like a cow toward a harness that hung from a cable like a tail trailing into the sky.

“Don’t worry, your majesty. You’re safe now. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Caliph felt the buckles snap around his chest, his groin, his legs. He looked across the pasture to where more men were corralling the horse, maneuvering it toward a horse-sized sling. Why would they do that? It’s not even my horse . . .

Master Sergeant Timms was grinning in Caliph’s face, white teeth and blue goggles reflecting Caliph’s sordid condition like a mirror. He jerked the cable several times and Caliph felt himself float up into cool air, away from the squalid heat of the pasture, reeled in like a fish by the hand of providence.

He moved from thoughts of Sena to thoughts of Stonehold. What will happen when I get there? Wretchedly submit to the tenure of public service? And then there was the other logical notion that being High King might not be so bad a thing.

Caliph vomited again from a hundred feet above the ground, hoping he missed Sergeant Timms. Landing on the deck was a blur. The winch stopped. There was a smell of hot machine grease. Then Caliph was in a small metal shower stall cleaning off, getting dressed, crawling into a bunk that smelled of bleach. He shivered from the trauma, the violence . . . but was soon asleep.

A change in engine pitch woke him. It was dark. He rubbed his eyes, trying to remember where he was. He pulled a robe from the back of the tiny room’s door, tied it on and stepped out into a gray corridor.

There was a man stationed outside his room who said nothing. Caliph looked both ways and arbitrarily chose right. The passage led him outside onto a deck that stared into the night. Flashing lights reflected on the railing from the overhead zeppelin skin.

Below, in the black abyss, green-lensed gas lamps erupted from turrets, hooded and massive like grotesque helmets. Their ornate leaded glass launched groaning beacons into the dark, lighting an aerial highway not just for this ship, but for pilots ferrying metholinate to the Independent Alliance of Wardale and the Free Mercantilism of Yorba.

Beyond the beacons, twinkling in the distance, a massive sprawl of lights smoldered beneath a pancake of brown clouds. Naobi burned, staring out from just beneath the cloud cover, turning the Dunatis Sea into a hypnotist’s cauldron flecked with light.

Master Sergeant Timms appeared at Caliph’s side, summoned suddenly by the look of it. His short ash-brown hair was slightly crimped and his eyes looked bleary. “Did you sleep, your majesty?”

Caliph made the hand sign for yes. “I guess so.”

“Not very luxurious,” Timms said, “but it’s the best we could do for you on this ship.” He looked out at the approaching landscape of lights. “They know we’re coming. Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day. Can I get you anything to eat?”

Three hours later, Caliph Howl landed in Isca.

Maps lay scattered across the old tactical table of the High King’s tower, rustling in a breeze from the window where Caliph stood staring out at the city.

He tried to follow the arcaded gutters that sluiced rain and night soil and anything else that oozed or floated but tracking them was impossible. His eyes drifted through the blackened spires of Temple Hill, down into Ironside where the Iscan navy bristled and the Dunatis shone like a colony of golden beetles.

Almost mythic, Caliph thought.

The Duchy of Stonehold had not been a true duchy since Donovan Blek liberated it from the Kingdom of Greymoor six hundred sixty-eight years ago and shortly thereafter choked on his own tongue.

As the years passed, a queer mongrelization of southern technology and northern hocus-pocus settled across