The Last Page

spastic kicking, from the field of dull glittering beads.

Back near the relative safety of the idling machine where the air was less toxic and infused only with engine smoke, they laid Roric out on the deck. His eyes were weeping clear mucosa and slimy bile dribbled from his chin and nose—but he was breathing.

“You dumb fuck!” whispered the commander. He turned his attention to Garen. “Next time he tries a stunt like that, I leave both of you behind.”

Garen nodded and snapped his fingers in front of Roric’s clouded eyes. The commander went inside and ordered the engine to back up and head for the bridge.

When Garen looked at Roric, his face took on a barely discernable expression of compassion.

Back on the other side of the bridge, the commander joined the other two engine crews at the HQ pavilion and met the lieutenant colonel of the battalion overseeing the bridge, the five-man demolition team that had wired it and the two knights serving mostly as military advisors.

By the time Roric was breathing well enough to sit up and look around, a fierce argument was already underway.

“We do not, repeat, do not blow the bridge without imminent threat,” the lieutenant colonel was saying. His face flushed and strained and his eyes flashed from one man to another as he tried to bring the others under control. All of them were formidable professionals.

“That’s not imminent enough for you?” One of the knights threw his arm in the direction of the disturbance. That’s what they were calling it. A disturbance.

“Imminent threat of enemy crossing,” finished the lieutenant colonel. “We have orders. And that wasn’t the enemy. We don’t know what that was!”

He was shouting in the knight’s face, a brave and rash thing to do. Spittle was flying. He flung his hand toward the sky. “You think blowing the bridge will stop that if it comes back?”

The knight did not back down. “Do I look like I give a fuck? We have mass casualties. You’ve got less than a thousand men left. Our zeppelin’s gone. Most of our supplies were in that town. This just became an indefensible, tactically dead position. What good is the bridge without Fallow Down?”

“You’re not authorized to make that decision!”

“Whore-shit!” fired the knight. “Decisions like this are why I’m fucking here. We aren’t FNG. Our orders were to protect Fallow Down which—by the fucking way—is gone!”

Knight was a throwback term to the days when there was no such thing as chemiostatic power. They were outfitted for the severest kind of contingencies, trained to deal with being cut off, outnumbered and surrounded in hostile territory. Knights were more than one-man war engines. They were seasoned veterans and this one’s name was Stroud; he impressed Roric Feldman. He wore heavy brown armor that lifted from his shoulders, arms and back in gracile stingray spines. Despite being made of heavy metal, the armor looked anatomically like plates of bone.

Roric had never seen a suit of it up close. Holomorphically tempered glass bulbs filled with luminescent green liquid squeezed between disks in a virtual spinal column of chortium. He knew the metal was tough as steel but slightly lighter in weight. It oxidized like aluminum; the film that covered it protected it from further corrosion even though it looked identical to iron rust.

Roric’s eyes followed flexible metal hoses with glass couplings. Chemiostatic fluid flowed to certain regions of the armor: powering shoulder joints, heating or cooling abdominal plates below the cuirass and the fauld.

Stroud towered over the lieutenant colonel as he argued about the bridge. Roric held his tongue. He knew the lieutenant colonel’s rank still gave him the edge.

“I’m about ready to kick your ass, soldier! Your position here as tactical liaison is finished! Are we clear?”

It was a dangerous line to go but Roric saw the knight nod. “Yes, sir.”

The lieutenant colonel’s face was splotchy—mostly from fear. It had taken every ounce of his authority to regain control under the extraordinary circumstances.

“We don’t know what happened out there,” the lieutenant colonel shouted again, this time to everyone present. “Whatever it was, it happened to Miskatoll’s engines and troops as much as it did our own. Odds are it was some neutral force. It could be weather for all we know.”

“Weather my ass. That was witchcraft.”

Stroud’s opinion was popular. Echoed mutters of “holomorphy” flapped around the open tent. No one wanted to stay and guard a haunted bridge much less a place where they had seen the fiber of reality twist and snap like a shaken rug.

The sudden stillness north of the river and the faint gray plain that most of the men had seen only from a distance had demonized the region.

Less than an hour ago everything was normal: as normal as ordnance exchange on the front line could be. The danger, though extreme, had been categorical, comprehensible, able to be planned for.

But now, even though no trace of the enemy force remained, a host of unclear suspicions beset the men. Everyone wanted out. Now.

“FB!” shouted the lieutenant colonel.

A thin man in light leather armor whose straps flapped from tightly cinched buckles and who still wore his gas mask pushed up like a bizarre hat on the top of his head had been waiting for the call.

He had pulled a hooded bird from one of several cages. It perched on a stand at the ready. The falconer’s hand was poised, clutching a pen, ready to scribble the words on a tiny roll of paper.

As the officer dictated, the falconer wrote. When he was finished a cruestone was snapped into the hawk’s exposed skull through a hole in its hood. The FB then removed the hood and turned the bird loose. It flapped madly for the Iscan High Command, blind, driving powerful muscles toward release from the fire that filled its brain.

The lieutenant colonel had made his decision. Roric hoped secretly that it was the wrong one, that Saergaeth’s tactics would not be hampered.

“Fire the bridge!”

It was the decision everyone wanted. But the lieutenant colonel had made his point. He could have had it either way. He had not caved in to pressure. He had not buckled under Stroud’s verbal barrage. It was his decision alone. He had considered the pros and cons, measured the tactical advantages of a bridge versus a barrier. He had removed his ego from the scales and everyone in the pavilion knew it.

The demolitionists turned and headed for the bank.

Roric watched them go with mute nausea. His eyes burned. His stomach felt like it had turned to slime, liquefied by the caustic stench of the wasteland. He held his head in one hand and sobbed brokenly.

The lieutenant colonel ignored it.

“All right soldiers, saddle up! SOP! We move for the Noose in under twenty!” He began barking.

Everyone moved but Roric Feldman. He sat on a field trunk holding his head.

Garen stood beside him with his hand on his shoulder. He had already called for a medic twice. No one was coming. Roric’s tears were diminishing slightly. He was clutching, pulling himself together.

“I remember when I was a boy,” he hissed. “My father talked about the blight.” He wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve. “Do you remember it?”

Garen nodded. “King’s Rot,” he said stiffly.

“King’s Rot,” said Roric. “Only seen during Nathaniel Howl’s reign.”

“That was different,” said Garen softly. “White mold on the ground . . . smut in the fields—”

“Was it?” Roric hissed. “Was it different? Maybe it’s the same only worse. Maybe this is Howl Rot.”

Garen seemed to swallow with difficulty.

“What are you going to do?”

Roric rose shakily to his feet. “I’m going back to Kennan Keep,” he whispered. “I’m going to ensure Bendain’s Keep falls to Saergaeth. I’m going to make sure this war turns out right. I’m telling you so you can transfer your fealty to another house,” said Roric. He looked away.

It was an outdated rubric, a formality extended to an honored member of one’s personal guard. It had been done in days of old as a way of allowing the warrior class to disentangle themselves from political crisis—leave before the assassins arrived, disavow any ties to a doomed line. It was a courtesy. A final charitable act.

Garen looked toward the bridge just as the wires went live. Heavy steel charges filled with hulilyddite