The Last Page

of her sleeve, leaves the inn, trudges north. She feels worse than miserable. She feels contemptible, despicable and vile.

It has been a long time since she cried. Normally she would try to stifle it, hold it in her throat like bile but today she does not care. She walks down the mountain, beaten and blubbering.

Bilious, dissimilar voices whisper in her head. Her vision blurs. The heavy book in her pack feels like solid stone.

For several hours she doesn’t have a plan.

She walks to Isca.

From West Gate, she follows Kink Street out of Gunnymead Square. The cotters have begun dragging in the grain tax and corpulent scurrying things shit and crawl and fuck contentedly between unattended sacks of barley and rye. A carriage driver takes pity on her and offers her a ride. He doesn’t recognize her. He is headed home, he says, and will drop her off along the way. She accepts though she doesn’t have a clue where she is going.

The driver leaves Three Cats on Sedge Way, turning north at Cripple Gate onto Isca Road. They trundle over streetcar rails into South Fell, rolling through the shadows of the Bindsh Ruins which have long been gated up but still offer weekend tours.

In Thief Town, sea-weathered towers thrust gray stoic forms above narrow ticking streets. Sena gets out and wanders aimlessly through the tepid late-afternoon air. From the mountain pass to the valley floor, she thinks the temperature difference must be at least fifty degrees.

She heads west, muddles back into South Fell where six stories of barred windows cast block- long shadows off the edifice of Teapetal Wax. She wears her hood up for disguise, but in the ebbing light her identity is already totally diffused.

Vague human shadows inside lamp-lit shops haggle over the last transactions of the day. Clustered vertical meadows of leaded glass ripple with autumn-colored light.

Reluctant but resolved, she hurries out of South Fell into Blkton, up through fading blossomed lanes.

The smoky light of the markets dissipates before her eyes as she travels quickly through the sparsely peopled blocks near Gilnaroth and into the Hold.

The castle gates will close at dusk. A sign of urgency: above the darkened rooftops the ancient mill has locked its sails for the day.

Although factories in Bilgeburg produce great dusty piles of flour and cereal, people who imagine themselves coinsurers spend stacks of extra money in the castle mill on flavored germades, coffee beans and jam.

Sena darts through the cobbled twilight, under chimney pots spewing madder-tinted air; their pleasant-smelling smut mixes with the warm fermenting odors of dwindling summer. Autumn smells are taking over: leather and shoe polish and chemical laundries that froth through vented pipes into the cold.

Just before the sun vanishes, she arrives.

Somehow it has snuck up on her and, for a moment, her determination falters.

In the last rays, the castle stones are orange. Long blue shadows, like banners, fall between the gates. Across the drawbridge, sparkling suits of armor shuffle in the gloom.

She bites her lip, clenches her nails into her palms and takes a final breath.

She storms the gate.

At first, the soldiers do not see her coming. They are mumbling over the smell of the moat, restless with the season. They scrape around their posts.

When she is halfway across, she sees them notice. They nudge each other. There are six of them and one of her but her title must still echo in their minds. The sight of her seems to freeze them.

Like the sun’s last ember trickling into dusk’s ash pan, she comes out of the slanting rays.

She crosses the bridge as orange light fades from the towers in an orchestrated west to east sequence. The sentries’ boots dull with cold; their ceremonial breastplates turn to tin. In her wake, the colorless ebb of day settles over the city. The sentries do not speak.

Sena levels her eyes and marches past.

She takes a carriage to the keep, dashes up the steps and into the foyer. Her feet echo down the hall, up more stairs, pulling a breeze with her that moves the tapestries.

A serving man opens a door into the passage, recognizes her and turns back, pretending to forget something. He shuts the portal with a click as the High King’s witch storms past.

She takes tertiary hallways to minimize the chance of being stopped.

Reddish bands of light from the arrow loops slash her face. The steam of her breath vaporizes in the halls she leaves behind.

With anxious rapidity, she moves up even more stairs and out onto the sun-raked parapet that encloses the massive roof.

Here, the sun still shines over the eastern mountains and gleams icily off slate and lead. Her feet jump the gutters. The gargoyles seem to watch.

She opens a small door to the high tower and goes up, forever turning to the right. When she reaches the top, she throws open the door.

The highest room in the city is empty.

A surprised bird lifts out a window as Sena steps cautiously inside.

Carefully rolled maps rest on the war table along with small wooden figures of men and horses. Eleven of the wooden figures are more painstakingly carved than the others. They sit by themselves in a little group.

There is a halgrin with picked-out wooden scales, and standing by itself, the figure of a king.

She picks it up, turns it over. On the base are crude hand-carved words: For Caliph.

The wind from the sea whines harshly over the sills. Up here, she can see beyond the low mountains of the peninsula to where the sun, in scalloped pink, drowns in a cloudy film of waves.

“Miss?”

Sena jerks her head to see a young woman in black and white. She is wiping her hands on a cloth and looking both shy and concerned.

“His majesty just left, though I haven’t any idea where. Would you like me to bring you something? Coffee?”

Sena shakes her head almost imperceptibly.

“We haven’t seen you for days,” the maid offers. “Welcome back.”

Alani helped his fellows escape their fleshy prisons: nine handpicked agents under his command. The refrigerated compartment had been fitted with a door that also opened from the inside.

His team removed the insulated suits and helmets, strapped on their gear and weapons and sprung the groaning metal door as softly as they knew how.

They gave hand signals in the blue-lit cargo hold and disappeared into the labyrinth of crates.

Quietly, the ship changed hands.

Alani’s men went through the berths. They examined papers, identification cards, diaries and personal effects. They isolated their captives, told each of them that all their mates were dead.

They asked bizarre questions.

Which of the crew were loners? Which hadn’t any family? Who had the fewest friends?

Some of the crew began to suspect the obvious deception. Truth remained irrelevant. They could coordinate no logical resistance. Even if they could, the bag of gear Alani clutched inside his frozen cyst contained (among other things) mostly superfluous implements of suppression.