The Last Page

the lotion that smelled like Tebeshian coffee. On his second turn at the slide, when he had reached for the monocular, she had pivoted instead of stepping aside. His hand had gone through the loop of her arm, brushing past her body. They were the same height. She had stared him down, bitten her lower lip and refused to move.

Finally . . . finally, he had pushed her up against the counter. She remembered him fumbling with her skirt, lifting it up around her waist. She had pulled his belt away like a snake, gripping it by the head before letting it clatter dramatically to the floor. The cool laboratory air had shocked them both, forced them together for warmth, a catalyst, carrying them into the next stage of their relationship.

It took a month, but Sena realized slowly that Caliph was becoming part of the recipe. She found his affections refreshingly devoid of the bravado and lachrymose fawning she thought of as the two schoolboy extremes. His attention to her was crystalline, immediately clear yet full of cunning. She saw it in the way he ignored her during class, focusing intently on the lecture. Then a note would suddenly arrive in her hand, written in acrostic code. She would read it with amazement and look at him but he would never look back.

As the weeks passed, she returned to her project: something she concealed carefully from Caliph for several reasons . . . collecting every reference she could until suddenly the Csrym T vanished, seemingly for good.

The last trace was a holomorph, almost two decades ago in the Duchy of Stonehold. She read that his rise to power had gone sideways. Body surfaced at the base of the sea wall in Isca in the fall of ?45. Only his mansion, auctioned and hollow, was left crumbling in the foothills of the Healean Range.

The Csrym T must have been auctioned with the rest of the estate amid vast lots of books. It frightened her to think that she had reached the end of what she could read. Her graduation was approaching. If this was what she wanted, she knew she had to shift from thinking to doing. It made her nervous, but Caliph had taught her, in the way he had orchestrated their relationship, how to execute on a plan.

He hadn’t wanted the situation they began in: risking expulsion every night, sneaking behind Brie House. But once he had chosen it, he showed no regret. When it came to the code and motto, he had adjusted smoothly from rigid obedience to deft evasion.

During the day, they went to class in Githum Hall and the Woodmarsh Building, vaguely listening to lectures while composing notes that promised, in code, what they would do to each other later that night. Caliph devised ways to meet in the machine shed, the stable, the shadows of the mill. They risked disaster by sneaking into Desdae Hall and altering chore assignments on the chancellor’s ledger, ensuring they shared custodial duties in same buildings at like times.

One afternoon, while Professor Blynsk was droning at the blackboard and Sena was watching leaves tantalize window glass, a note poked into her palm written in the usual code. It said simply:

If the haberdasher alters seven threads, only evens need dye.

Her fingers went numb and her stomach turned. Something had gone wrong. The translation was brutally succinct: It has to end.

It has to end? Why was he saying this? She looked across the room. For the first time, he looked back. He smiled faintly from his desk near the door, winked at her; then got up and left the room.

Forty minutes later it had spread across campus that Caliph Howl was in the chancellor’s office for stealing.

The theft was remarkable. He had taken the clurichaun from Desdae Hall and it was still missing.

“Night watch for sure if he doesn’t get expelled . . .”

“He’ll get expelled.”

“No he won’t. He’s fucking heir-apparent to the Iscan High Throne. He’ll get night watch.”

“Why do you think he took it?”

“Attention.”

Sena listened to gossip flickering over the lawn. One of her dorm sisters passed her with a sadistic smile. “Looks like no more fun for you . . .”

Sena went to lunch. She went to class. When evening settled, the lights in the Administration Building still burnt. Caliph had not come out.

It had leaked that a sentence was coming down and it would not be expulsion. Bets on the lawn now began circulating as to the duration of Caliph’s punishment.

“Nine months. Night watch.”

“A year.”

“If the clurichaun stays missing, he’ll be watchman ’til he graduates . . .”

Students speculated and smoked and drank coffee outside Desdae Hall. Sena loitered, mingling with them, repeatedly denying any knowledge of why her “friend” had stolen the intricate southern mechanism.

Night watch required the student so sentenced to sleep not in the comfort of the dorms, but to stalk the drafty expanse of the library until eighteen o’clock. At midnight, the student could bed down on the floor near one of the radiators. No cots were allowed. A campus watchman checked in on the prisoner once at fifteen and again at two in the morning. If, during his shift, anything was damaged or stolen, the student was expelled without further delay.

At seven, from the Administration Building, the sound of a caning began, which meant—according to popular opinion—that Caliph had yet to divulge the location of the missing clurichaun.

Silence settled over the lawn, partially out of awe for Caliph’s cries, which floated through an open window, and partially so the number of strokes could be counted.

Sena winced, marveling at his stupidity.

At seven-o-five the caning was complete. Twenty strokes had been administered, just shy of the maximum.

The Administration Building’s doors finally opened at twenty past and a lone figure appeared, a shade in the darkness that dragged over the threshold, stooped and stiff like an old man. It plodded down the steps and across the lawn. Going to him now would lacquer another layer onto the already lustrous veneer of rumors that surrounded the two of them; so Sena stayed with the others, watching as he crossed the empty campus alone, headed directly for the library, a ring of keys in his hand. At the doors, he jingled softly without looking back and disappeared inside.

The knot of students broke up. Sena went home and slept fitfully.

The entire next day, she anticipated her own meeting with the chancellor. It was common talk that she and Caliph were possibly more than friends. It made sense that the chancellor would question her. But surprisingly, no summons ever came. Caliph met her between classes near Nasril Hall, under the shade of an enormous tree. He was disheveled and grim, hollow-eyed and somewhat pale. She had watched him stand rather than sit during class and he was still walking with a limp.

“Everything’s set,” he said simply. “You can come to the library any night you want.”

Sena’s jaw dropped. This had been his plan?

“Are you crazy?”

“I’ve minimized our risk. No more stables or closets.”

“You didn’t do this for me.”

“Ever since you crept up on me in the library, I figured you’re a damn good sneak. All you have to do is make it to the cellar doors without being seen. Think about it, we’re inside a locked building, alone.”

“You are crazy.” Sena pointed at the brick-gabled windows of the chancellor’s house. They faced the library directly.

Caliph responded without agitation. “Do you really think he will be watching? He knows I’m too smart to risk getting caught. Besides,” he jingled the ring of keys, “we can go anywhere in the library! Think of the private book collections!”

Sena looked at them. Each had been wired with stiff white paper and labeled with the names of various rooms.

“I know you’ve had a brush with the chancellor and can’t afford another office visit. But I can. He’s never going to expel me.” Caliph looked at her directly. “He can’t afford to expel me.”

“Yella byn,² Caliph! Are you telling me you made a deal with