The Last Page (5 page)

The little sheet contains two references to
Bode Royal
wherein a codex is described, bound in c
lshydra hide. The references sound amusingly theosophic but after delivering Brunt
s’ work to the professor, Sena goes to the library on a whim and fills out a form that grants her twenty minutes with
Bode Royal.

The references are real.

She gets a twinge in her stomach and decides to start chipping at the legend of the
C
srym T
.
The more she chips the harder it becomes to dig out new leads. After several semesters, the amount of information she’s
gleaned fills only two and a half pages. The legend jumps between books, like a bird darting through trees, tracing its history across millennia, in and out of obscurity. She chases it relentlessly. One of the most outlandish rumors linked to it concerns the lock and a corresponding recipe supposedly needed to open it. No key. Just a list of ingredients. The formula makes her stomach turn.

She spends two weeks cross-checking the recipe’s veracity on the top floor of the library, coming to the conclusion that it has been translated exactly in four different languages when, out of a glaring white ogive, Caliph Howl invites her to a play.

When she learned about Caliph’s plot against Roric Feldman, she took a hiatus from her pet project in order to analyze the heir.

But getting inside his head, she realized, would require a seduction. She baited him, employed several previously infallible methods to which he maddeningly did not succumb. She could tell that he viewed the school code as a narrow ledge and her as a liability. Getting him to crack became a game . . . there was a certain purity to him that poured warmth into her stomach. But his crush on her was growing.

It happened later in the Woodmarsh Building, against a backdrop of gray paint and bloodless creatures floating in jars. They had been alone, doing labs, looking through the monocular at slides and taking notes.

She was intentionally unbuttoned, just enough to reveal the ruffle of lace cupping her breasts. She had worn 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
C
srym 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
C
srym 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 . . .”