The Last Page

“How many men does it take to pilot a zeppelin?” asked Caliph, turning to the Blue General.

It sounded like the beginning of a joke.

“Depends on the size, your majesty. This one here is the smallest of three basic designs. We call this a lion. It’s small, agile, but not as powerful as sky sharks or the largest: leviathans.”

“And crew size?”

“Sorry. Yes. A ship like this could run with anywhere from nine up to a dozen or so men. The larger ones range from eighteen to fifty.”

“How does it run?”

“The engines? They’re electric. Off monster chemiostatic cells toward the aft. They funnel air in different directions, over the fins and such. This one has a range of over a thousand miles but the big ones can go several times that. We’d like to get our hands on solvitriol or the coriolistic technology they have in the south. But so far no luck.” Yrisl looked at Vhortghast who seemed not to be listening.

“We’re lagging behind,” said Vhortghast with thin cynicism. “Shouldn’t we be out with the others? Mingling?”

“Absolutely,” said Caliph with underscored conformity. Mentally he tacked you shit onto the end. Caliph walked out onto the wide balcony that overlooked the sprawl.

Light from the enormous chemiostatic cells could be seen faintly, reflecting off the spines.

Behind and to the west, West Gate formed a swollen rupture in the city wall, spewing buildings out toward the farmlands and hills like the contents of an overripe blackhead. “That’s West Fen,” said Vhortghast.

Caliph allowed his annoyance to show. “Thank you, Zane. Isn’t that one of Isca’s two external boroughs?”

“My apologies,” said the spymaster.

Eastward, the sky moved with a grisly ivory color. Between the zeppelin and the indistinct haze of the dockside boroughs rose and fell the undulant jumble of Maruchine, Grue Hill and Os Sacrum. To the south, the long squamous blocks of Candleshine knitted together like cells under a monolcular.

Caliph remembered Sena standing beside him in the musty lab, her perfume purling up into his face as he leaned forward, pretending to look at pig muscle on the slide.

“There’s Cripple Gate!” shouted the woman in black, still clinging to her enslaved husband. She pointed at a pentagonal structure below and fore of the airship. “Where all the beggars go to panhandle. I do hope you plan to do something about them, King Howl. The Herald says they’re the main cause of disease.”

“I find that unlikely,” said Caliph.

The woman’s mouth opened in mute shock. “Well! The papers are written by scientists, your majesty. And they’re poor.” She said the word poor like she might have said the word evil.

Vhortghast’s eyes flicked to Caliph, scrutinizing him suddenly for any reaction.

“Actually I believe the papers are written by journalists,” said Caliph.

The spymaster smiled wanly and tossed back his brandy.

“Disease or no,” said Travis Whittle, the burgomaster of Lampfire Hills, “most of our expenditures go to mopping up after them. That’s just the way it is. We have eight thousand city police to pay!”

“And Ghoul Court should pay for seventy-five percent of them,” said Clayton Redfield. He was the burgomaster of Blkton.

Everyone laughed except Caliph and Zane Vhortghast.

The unpleasant woman was clearly drunk. “I think we should sell them as slaves to the Pplarians or collect them for the physicians to experiment on, not the police I mean but the poor. If we get some useful medicine out of them, it will be absolutely ticky.”

“Ticky?” whispered Caliph.

Vhortghast smiled. “Means clever or novel. That dress she’s wearing is ticky.”

“I see.”

The Byun-Ghala was churning east and Caliph could see the terrifying black splendor of Hullmallow Cathedral erupting from the chimneys of Grue Hill. The enormous structure utterly dwarfed every other building in sight. Like a diffuse nightmare, the ornamented spires and flying buttresses gave the appearance of a grossly fat, daemonic spider with sky bent legs and a horrid horn-encrusted head.

Caliph endured another hour as they sailed over Lampfire Hills, where Travis Whittle pointed out all the peculiar wonders of his domain but snubbed questions about Winter Fen and Daoud’s Bend, the boroughs abutting his south and east borders.

When the zeppelin turned north, Caliph noticed how the pilot avoided the sky above Ghoul Court and churned instead into Maruchine.

Up ahead, rising from what by now had become a monotonous clutter of peaked roofs, six enormous zeppelin towers fumbled like partially exhumed claws toward the stratosphere. An array of other airships could now be seen drifting over Thief Town and Murkbell. They carried huge industrial parts through the dirt-smeared skies.

Malgor Hangar, however, was a strictly military installation. Built lower to the ground than Hullmallow Cathedral, it was less visible but still ten times the size. It housed most of Isca’s zeppelin fleet at the very heart of the city on the border between Maruchine and Thief Town.

Caliph’s zeppelin ride had come to an end.

The ship slowed and eased toward one of the six towers. They docked with a disconcerting lurch as somewhere far below ropes were quickly tightened.

Enormous gears and pistons like titanic tree trunks adjusted the dock’s elevation, pulling the airship down.

“We’ll be bidding Mrs. Din farewell here,” whispered Zane.

“Is that her name?” remarked Caliph, watching the woman gather her dress as she prepared to disembark.

“Freja Din and Salmalin Mywr aren’t natives,” said Vhortghast lowly, “they have strong ties to Greymoor and the Pandragonian Empire—respectively. Both of them would probably like nothing better than to see Stonehold and especially Isca annexed by a southern power.”

“They’re harmless gadabouts,” muttered Yrisl. “Don’t let him spook you. They spend too much time at the opera to plan a coup.”

Vhortghast curled his lip at the Blue General as though catching wind of something foul.

Caliph’s head hurt from trying to see the entire city from the air. He stepped up to a spyglass and peered through its lens at a distant clock tower. Eight-sixteen. Nearly noon. His stomach grumbled.

“Right this way, your majesty.”

Caliph didn’t even look at who was talking to him. He turned and headed back through the stateroom, stale with the smell of cigar butts, spilled brandy and sweating bodies.

A bridge led to solid ground and a windswept battlement behind which the sky glowered with wisps of dirty rain already falling over Tin Crow and Nevergreen.

Freja Din guided her husband directly toward the shelter of the tower as though frightened by the wind.

“The opera house is just there,” pointed Vhortghast, “across the canal in Murkbell. We’ll meet them again this evening for the premier of Er Krue Alteirz. The High Seneschal will be coming.”

“Do we have tickets?”

Vhortghast grinned like a ruined fence.

“The High King donates a sizable sum to the opera. You have the best seats in the house. We don’t need tickets.”

Caliph was beginning to understand that ordinary rules did not apply to him. He could do virtually whatever he wanted and all but the most outlandish would accommodate him without question.

“I’m hungry.”

“You’ll want to save your appetite for this evening,” said Vhortghast.

Caliph scowled visibly. “Actually I’m starving.” The eggs and strudel had been wonderful but hadn’t stuck with him past an hour ago.

Vhortghast shrugged.

“We can eat, but you may lose whatever you put down.”