The Last Page

Like a warthog, stipular tuberosities depended in grotesque array from jowly skulls. Their cloven hooves flinderized crates and wooden carts, pulverized bottles discarded by winos into glassy dust and thundered on the paving stones.

There were less than ten of the daemon swine, taken out of Tibin and trained from sucklings. Beyond what they could physically savage, they impacted the battle mostly through morale.

Hackles raised, the monsters’ tusks splayed from mouths like overeager claws. Ropy turbid saliva draped like molasses toward the ground.

The beating Ghoul Court’s occupants received was utterly severe and in many people’s minds, condign.

Knights trod like heavy metal bulls through dreary tenements and filthy dens, overturning tables and beds strewn with the clutter of a hundred messy sins. Locked attics, occupied by smuggled contraband or shivering catamites, shed ugly secrets under the brutal use of rams.

Those that surrendered or welcomed the police as saviors were stabbed with bulbous hypodermics and popped with enough arcane demulcent to cure a horse. Most were summarily herded into steam-driven wagons that sputtered in the rear. If they survived the treatment and whatever sentence awaited them at West Gate, they would be released into the populace again.

Anyone found with an advanced case of the nameless malady was ushered into quarantine wagons already packed with mounds of ulcerated flesh.

The sick were driven off by men in long red trenches and insectile masks with iridescent eyes. Though they seemed to head toward Tin Crow and the dubious resources of Bloodsump Lane, many of the inhabitants of Ghoul Court were lost even by the press. It was easy for them to simply disappear.

Gleaming copper canisters that sloshed with acid burdened the backs of enormous men who pumped liquid fire from their wands. The stones and bricks, the very masonry seemed to burn.

Men and women in rags erupted from the drains, dislodging dozens of thick metal lids. A grisly but euphoric effluence, like a cadence of champagne bottles. They clambered out of sewers and tunnels made for gas lines. They danced ferociously on cobblestones that their bodies quickly irrigated with endless rivulets of blood.

Their weapons were rude and freakish. Built of twisted nails that leapt from boards and crudely welded pipe. The reflective pink and amber orbs of their sunken eyes flared with intractable hatred—organic mirrors of the gas mask eyelets that floated in the haze while subhuman bodies were bludgeoned to the ground.

But Ghoul Court’s militia was not composed of the man-things that had besieged the opera. They were mere half-things, crawlers. They were the shadow populace, come to defend whatever clandestine monstrosity governed them from below.

The knights surged in and mowed them down.

Great crowds of bodies went up in sudden flame. Yellow entrails and barely human organs splattered the streets. The stench of opened bodies and vomit ricocheted off grisly slippery stone.

Disinfectant fog shrouded everything in gray.

Fulgurant, emerald-bellied crossbows twittered in the alleys and polluted lanes.

The watch was organized and determined. They encircled their prey with sharp-edged formations, whipped them and drove them and beat them down.

Shackles came out, snapped over ankles and wrists. Dozens were led away.

But the government did not have an easy time.

One unit was overwhelmed. It disappeared under leaping, peculiar forms and arcing lead pipes lined with metal spines.

By the time two knights and a second unit came to the rescue there was nothing left to save.

Another knight was overwhelmed, cut off from his unit and ambushed in the hollow of a barbershop.

Exultant for a few minutes, the creatures tore off his armor and dragged his body through the streets. But their celebration was brief and costly and their defeat guaranteed.

With wrath kindled by the sight of a fallen knight, the watch charged, canisters of acid spreading a strangely ebullient conflagration across bricks and flesh.

In the end, the watch won.

Men and women in uniform heaved the charred remains, took them by the wrists and ankles and swung then onto rising gruesome piles.

Caliph (as usual) had been precise.

Every stone was overturned, every building searched. Ghoul Court would be remade—from scratch.

When Caliph got the report on the sixth, he was horrified. The top page had an antiseptic whiteness with several objectives typed and centered. All were labeled: complete.

It has to work, he thought as he read the report. My plan has to work. If it doesn’t . . . if all of this is for nothing . . . He shook his head. I suppose I’ll be paying another visit to Hazel Nantallium, taking her up on her offer. But now that things were in motion, he wondered if all the votives in Hullmallow Cathedral could save his soul.

CHAPTER 33

Caliph woke from a terrible dream that he couldn’t remember. The report rested on a chair near the bed. It had settled in disarray like a white bird that had struck a windowpane.

There was little time to regret or even think about the day before.

Information had leaked that an Iscan zeppelin had crashed near Bittern Moor along the White Leech— territory now controlled by Saergaeth. It was a massive supply ship called the Orison.

In addition to food, medicine and military correspondence, the Orison had carried weapons. Gas bows, chemiostatic swords and other controlled munitions. Potentially as bad as the loss of troop locations and timetables, government sources had muttered that undisclosed highly sensitive technology had also been on board.

The papers were quick to black extras with headlines that read, ISCAN DISASTER MAY BE WATERSHED FOR MISKATOLL. And: HOW BAD IS IT? ISCAN WAR SECRETS IN SAERGAETH’S HANDS. The news was so stunning that the previous day’s events in Ghoul Court were mostly overshadowed.

CREW OF FIFTY FEARED DEAD AFTER ZEPPELIN GOES DOWN!

Family members of the missing airmen were rounded up and taken to a secluded government estate in Octul Box where they awaited further developments.

By late afternoon, commanders of small arrowy spy dirigibles confirmed that despite the crash’s proximity to Fallow Down, light war engines marked with burgundy emblems had already converged.

Apparently Saergaeth had no fear of the haunted wasteland of Fallow Down. Conspiracy theorists were already speculating that the two disasters were somehow linked.

Saergaeth had an array of sky sharks patrolling the region within hours. The prospect of several tons of food alone would have been sufficient to catch Saergaeth’s attention. Yrisl guessed his troops were being fed from supplies seized at sea before the Iscan dreadnought and her escorts had plowed north to guard Tentinil’s harbors.

Like a beached whale, the downed leviathan was to the rebellion as a carcass laid before the happy bewilderment of gulls and crabs.

Saergaeth’s troops were giddy.

Spies brought Caliph the details: Saergaeth’s soldiers poking gingerly through the wreckage, looking for booby traps. There were corpses strewn everywhere. Blackened and burnt or terribly marked with posthumous bruising.

But nothing sprang from the shredded compartments. No hideous automatons or holomorphic hexes triggered when grunts lifted timbers or huge sections of the punctured gasbag’s drapery of skin.

The booty was tremendous.

Saergaeth’s ranking officer found the schematics, the charts and battlefield maps. Caliph’s spies confirmed that Saergaeth would have the locations of troops hidden in the hills east of Forgin’s Keep. On top of this, there were two dozen chemiostatic swords, fifty gas-powered crossbows, five suits of chor