The Last Page

Cripple Gate where he had donated a large sum to the Church of the Mourning Beggar that brooked homeless people from Three Cats and Candleshine.

It had been ten days of nonstop secular, religious and image-enhancing activity. And there was only one thing Caliph knew for sure.

The city stank.

Gadriel assured him that it would not last long. Only at the height of summer did the streets cider. That’s what Gadriel called it.

“The streets cider,” he said, “when the weather turns warm.”

Caliph couldn’t have picked a milder assessment if he had spent all day thinking. Gadriel’s euphemism was actually a total mollification of reality.

What really happened was that piles of garbage stacked between slum buildings generated spontaneous life as hot weather and their own weight started to liquefy discarded foods and mattresses and cans of varnish and bags of powdered paint.

Great heaps wedged in alleys began to ooze and seep. First- and second-story tenants could do nothing but draw their moth-eaten drapes and ignore the squirming refuse that threatened to break through their windowpanes.

The piles could only grow if people on the top floors tossed garbage out their casements or off the roof— which they frequently did. Great armies of flies stirred in the labyrinth of trash, a dual testament to people’s inordinate laziness and the fact that the wasteyard in Brindle Fenn was not large enough, even at nearly a hundred acres in size.

To say that the streets cidered was nearly as litotic as saying that sticking one’s head into the anus of a cow was not a very tempting thing to do. But what troubled Caliph most was that Gadriel’s description seemed less outlandish when it was said within the confines of the castle.

Not all of Isca City was ripe with festering piles of detritus and tatters and offal and sludge. There were enchanting canals in Murkbell, bewitching beauty in the endless arches of Candleshine and Lampfire Hills. Blkton fairly suffocated under the ambrosial pollen of variegated blossoms. There were hundreds of clean streets swept up by men with long-handled dustpans every night, places where (rain or shine) the bricks gleamed with polish. For the rich and fortunate and even for a great quantity of middle-classed citizens, saying that Isca cidered in the summer did not seem a cruel understatement of the truth.

But Caliph had seen the cesspools. They weighed on him as if their great piles of garbage had been stacked in his own bedroom.

While he pondered the slums, Caliph examined the sword given him on the zeppelin deck of West Gate.

It was a marvelous piece. Forged out of tunsia, the blade would actually float on water. It was impervious to the rust and corrosion of weather, which Mr. Vhortghast had joked was good fortune considering what Caliph’s previous blade had endured.

Light and quick and sharpened by holomorphic stones to an edge only tunsia could hold, the sword was broad and short and two-handed with a long handle filled by apple-green chemiostatic fluid. It represented the highest achievement in hand-to-hand combat possible north of the Great Cloud Rift.

The cell was good for two or three wallops before it had to be changed out. A beryllium circuit traveling down the center of the blade ended at a silvery point where even a glancing thrust enabled the charged sword to deliver the coulombs capable of deep tissue burns and the vaporization of flesh. A dark whimsical thing, Caliph’s chemiostatic sword could produce surreal open or comminuted bone fractures. Paralysis. Thrombosis. Death.

He had never flicked the switch on the pommel that charged the circuit from the cell. There was a safety ring that had to be unscrewed, loosening tension before the switch could move.

Determined not to grow soft and lethargic, Caliph practiced forty minutes a day. The tunsia edge removed the oak necks of practice dummies like a machete slicing through bamboo.

On the last day of Psh, as the city cidered and Caliph pondered the problem of the slums, he received word while taking tea in the high tower that he had visitors. Two young men by the names of David Thacker and Sigmund Dulgensen.

Caliph set his cup down so hard he chipped the saucer. He leapt up and sped down the many staircases to the grand hall. His elation and joy over hearing the familiar names was indisguisable.

As he approached the grand hall he slowed, forced himself to walk instead of run. When he reached the archway he paused. He peered into the vast room where a curtain of light fell from the windows, glittering with millions of dust motes.

There they were, two of the Naked Eight standing in conversant poses near the darkened fireplace. Two of the boys who had shared his misery in the pillory and his triumph when Roric Feldman had gone home in shame.

Caliph flew into the room and fairly danced around them, overjoyed by their visit. He bid them sit before the unlit hearth while they recounted certain professors and Chancellor Eaton and his cane.

Sigmund Dulgensen was a brilliant engineer. He had studied almost nothing else at school and he could tell any listener all the differences between stress and wear and flow meters and load cells and solenoids and calibration.

His hands never came clean.

The tiny grooves around his nails and the whorls of his fingerprints were impregnated with burnt oil, engine grease and other grime. He was a meaty man. Strong. And often sat with a strange humorless smile on his face caused by the emotionless contortion required to chew at the hair under his lower lip.

David Thacker was Sigmund’s antithesis even though they shared the same build. He was nearly as large but hopelessly docile. He had taken calligraphy and painting and all kinds of other classes that his friends called useless crap. Caliph wasn’t sure what degree David had actually graduated with.

The three talked about virtually everything they had done since graduation although Caliph shyly omitted many details of his journey to the Highlands of Tue.

Even when David asked him point blank if he had gone to see Sena after graduation, Caliph denied it, saying instead that he had almost forgotten about her—that with everything going on in Isca and Stonehold he had more important things to think about.

After an hour of catching up, Sigmund leaned back in his chair and put both hands behind his head, chewing at his beard.

“I can’t believe I’m in Isca Castle. How about a tour?”

Caliph chuckled, half embarrassed.

“Well,” he scratched his head, “we could do that but we might get lost. I’ve spent more time out of the castle than in.” He suddenly sensed that there was business at hand. “What really brought you all this way . . . through the Fort Line?”

“Jobs,” said Sigmund. “I’ll be honest, I headed down south a bit and didn’t like what I saw. Turned right around and came back up here. Dave and I traveled together.”

He pulled a pillow that had been wedged between his robust body and the arm of the chair and threw it at David Thacker. David caught it and grinned.

“Yeah that’s right.”

“Jobs?” Caliph smiled wanly. “I bet I could find plenty for you to do up here. What kinds of jobs?”

“Writing,” said David. “I want to sit around all day and write and get paid for it.”

“I want to go into the military,” said Sigmund. “Not swords and mines and hacking people up, mind you. I want to design war engines.”

Caliph stood up and paced around in a tiny circle.

“I’m pretty sure I can get you both in somewhere. I don’t even really know what jobs are out there, but I guess I’m the High King and if there’s not a writing job around I’ll make one up for you. You can be my scribe or write plays for all I care. I saw the treasury the other day and I think there’s enough there to support a couple more salaries.”

Sigmund shook his head.

“The Iscan Treasury. That’s some serious buying power. What’s it look like, Caph?”

“Kind of brown actually,” said Caliph, “on account of all the boxes. But inside the boxes there’s a lot of gold. Stacks and stacks of trade bars. There are collections of jewelry and gems. I don’t know. I guess it’s pretty