The Last Page

Two would-be heroes were soothed with needles that out-flowed powerful tranquilizers. When they lulled into glassy stupors Alani’s men moved them to the galley.

The period of solitary confinement came to an end.

The unmarried, the orphaned and the misanthropic were stripped of their uniforms. Naked and terrified, they were held down and injected with hypodermics full of yellow drug. Their captors didn’t bother to sterilize the needles between injections.

In several minutes it would not matter.

Ten nude airmen were untied. They stumbled around the compartment in a narcotized trance while Alani’s men herded them toward a shuttered hatch.

Outside, the sky blew dark and torrential.

One by one, the men were hurled into space. They fell for several thousand feet before landing with unheard thumps and clatters like bags of broken sticks among the rocks or soggy moors west of the Somber Hills.

It was messy work.

The spies did not think about it. Their mission turned Saergaeth’s airmen into packages—each one nothing more than perfidious jetsam.

The remaining eight (that had not been drugged) were forced to watch. They screamed and clenched their teeth and eyes and tried to look away.

“Sorry mates,” Alani whispered when all the doomed were gone. “That’s the sentence for traitors to Stonehold.”

His men put on the defenestrated crewmen’s uniforms. They held them up, eyeballed fit like shoppers. They traded. Mixed and matched.

Eventually even Alani resembled one of Saergaeth’s low rank flyboys.

One of his men had medical expertise.

He took the remaining crewmen and by means of a strange contraption forced back their upper and lower lids. Carefully he distended each man’s left eyeball and inserted a bead of holomorphic glass into the underlying socket. Then he popped the eye back in place.

After an hour, all the implants had been done.

Alani’s spies thoroughly explored every cranny of the ship. They gathered for the pep talk they knew was coming.

The eight remaining members of the crew were untied.

They sat nervously in wooden chairs listening to the thunder, eyeballs aching.

Alani looked ghastly in the fluttering weirdness of several lamps. At least he hoped he did. He had chosen this spot for the effect. His pocked cheeks and bristly dome would enhance his gaunt, sinister mien. He lit his pipe and puffed while resting his foot on the seat of a chair.

He could tell the crew was frightened. They paid sedulous attention to every word he spoke. They were men who ferried metholinate, not professional soldiers. Enamored with Saergaeth’s leadership, they made the easy, popular choice, siding against Caliph Howl—a man whom none of them had ever seen.

“You are traitors,” said Alani with slow congenial syllables. “But can still avoid a traitor’s fate.”

He began the propaganda he was an expert at delivering and explained that the bead in their eye was holomorphically linked to a single bead in his hand. If he crushed the one, the other eight would shatter. They were filled with toxin that would go directly to the brain.

“If any one of you should betray the High King again by compromising this mission, you will die. And you will have killed the other seven . . . your friends and crew . . . in addition to yourself.”

It was a lie. The beads of glass were totally innocuous.

“When we have finished this mission, I promise you . . . we will remove the implants. You will be granted clemency, free to return to your families and your jobs after swearing allegiance to the High King.

“After this war is over we will all be Stonehavians again.”

One of the men laughed even though he looked terribly afraid. “How can we possibly trust you?”

Alani didn’t smile.

“Trust? I don’t want your trust. As traitors to your country you are being coerced, gentlemen. Let us call it what it is.”

“We’re not traitors. We’re patriots,” said the zeppelin captain. “And you sir, are a murderous liar. The very kind we’re fighting against.”

Alani grinned. His teeth were yellow and crooked and he knew it. He looked the captain directly in the face for maximum effect.

“You’ll get no argument from me on your second point since lies and murder are my business, sir. But I will tell you, Captain . . .” he referenced a book in his claw of a hand, “Bayans . . . that your assessment of me, while true, is inconsequential.

“Patriotism is a vagary defined by your individual hopes. Whatever you perceive national interests to be . . . however jingoistic or expropriationist. I myself am a pacifist and loyal to the crown which is no doubt where your sanctimonious diatribe springs from and why we do not see eye to eye.

“Let me be clear, Mr. Bayans, and ask you one question. When orders eventually came . . . as they surely would have . . . from Miskatoll to drop ordnance on the capital of your own country . . . would you have obeyed them?”

The captain said nothing. Perhaps some of his men were beginning to realize that the moral high ground he was clinging to was just another smear. Alani hoped as much.

“No?” asked Alani. “Either way you answer, as the commander of this airship, it’s going to sound rather bad coming from those patriotic lips.

“Perhaps, Mr. Bayans, I have saved you from your sins. But I digress.” Alani waved his pipe. “I see from your diary that you have a young son and daughter and a wife at home. Which brings us back to your stunning lack of choice in the matter and the truth of my grip on everything you hold dear. Do we understand one another?”

It was overkill to threaten the man’s family and Alani knew it. But in the current situation he frankly didn’t care.

The captain looked stricken. His men were completely cowed.

Still, one last question had to be asked. If it hadn’t, Alani would have been fabulously surprised.

“How did you get on board?”

Alani ended his smoke and tapped the dottle into his palm. He had no intention of answering.

The question by itself was enough. Caliph’s plan had been chillingly neat. He had tabulated casualties as a prerequisite for any plausible charade, hence the timing of Ghoul Court’s violent raid.

There wasn’t any crash along the White Leech. No crew of fifty airmen had gone down. But there had been bodies . . . plenty of bodies to advance that illusion.

The men of the Orison had met their weeping, joyful families in Octul Box at the lavish government estate. The crew had told their wives and children the only thing they knew—that their deaths had been faked to advance some strategy in war and that, for now, all of them had to stay under lock and key until the High King signed their eventual release.

Caliph too had coldly envisioned the execution of half a sky shark’s crew and the psychological brutality required to ensure the loyalty of the rest. But it was only the beginning, thought Alani, only the first edge of a very complex and complicated plan.

Caliph returned with Roric Feldman in custody and watched the Precursor dock over West Gate. It floated in above the heavy leaded obelisks whose panes boiled with emerald light. The beacons’ gleam scintillated, created columns in the glittering rain.

After the other ships had moored, the Byun-Ghala pitched north across the gray- swept city. Caliph tried not to think about what Alani was doing. He tried not to think about what would happen to Roric Feldman. He supposed their paltry adolescent feud had finally ended. Caliph Howl had won. It didn’t feel good.

He thought about the fresco on his bedroom ceiling, about tossing and turning during the course of oncoming sleepless nights. Isca slid by underneath him, gliding like the mottled back of a deformed nocturnal beast. He looked out from the observation deck through the rain, at the towers of his castle. There were lights, dim warm lights in his bedroom window and for a moment he dared to dream.