The Last Page (53 page)

“Plenty.”

The man sneered and gave Zane/Peter the cage.

“Don’t spend it all on sweet red,” said Zane.

The man made an obscene gesture in reply and stumbled off into the dark.

Zane closed the door and locked it out of habit. He turned up the oil lamp on a small badly beaten desk and pulled off the cloth covering the cage.

He swore.

It was a pathetic sight. The pigeon was black from soot and badly torn as though it had been stuck in and then ripped out of a chimney pipe. The chirurgery had been preformed ruthlessly and recently. Blood still caked the feathers all around the excised flesh. The skull was pink and the bird cried piteously.

Heartless as he was, cruelty to animals was something Zane Vhortghast could not stomach—which was why he ate the insensible meat produced under Thief Town as opposed to beef, rationalizing that meat wasn’t really an animal. It was more like plant life that grew in the dark. More like fungus.

He swallowed a lump in his throat and set the cage aside in disgust. He wondered if the thing could even make the flight. It was a long way. Farther than he himself had ever traveled.

He had to hurry. He had been sweating it out waiting for the duffer.

Tonight was the twenty-fourth of Lüme, the night the High King was taking his tart to the opera. Zane had promised to be there when they arrived, overseeing the security detail assigned to the building.

He took the note he had composed earlier and opened the cage. The bird went hysterical. It didn’t have a hood. It thrashed about, terrified,
clawing and pecking at his gloved hand. He was forced to grab it by the head to cover its eyes. The duffer hadn’t even given him a tube.

Cursing violently, Zane struggled to get a tiny scroll case wired to its ankle. He then inserted his note and grimaced as he pressed a black cruestone into the metal clip screwed into the creature’s skull.

He took it to the balcony, hoping it could still fly.

Carefully, gently, with ridiculous indulgence, he set the thing on the floor. It took off at once, flapping back into the room, crashing into walls and lamps in its confusion.

Zane winced and swore. He leapt about, trying to corral it, waving his arms, herding it toward the open sky. For a moment, he wondered if the chirurgeon had been ripped on something when he performed the operation. But then the fire in the bird’s mind finally seemed to consume its confusion. It stopped its self-abuse and wheeled toward the balcony. It sped out, up and away into the skyline’s brown glow.

Heart pounding, Zane Vhortghast let out a long sigh, vowing to find the duffer and the chirurgeon when he had spare time.

With only twenty minutes to reach the opera, the spymaster leapt out his balcony window, landed deftly on a steel drum and hit the bricks running.

As the sky clotted with stray vapors and shadowy things, the
Byun-Ghala
departed Isca Castle. Its huge pulsating propellers powered it out across the striated murk. Miles of bruised atmosphere and city enmeshed, twisted together in a surreal tangle of deep maroon and deviant structural black. Lights twinkled far below, white-gold and tiny.

From the observation deck, the wind smelled clean and cool despite the humidity. Sena had never flown before. She was giddy with delight.

She wore a formal décolletage, indigo with tiny diamonds down the kick pleat. One of many choices given her by the army of tailors and dressmakers, it accentuated her movements by design. Her entire back was bare.

She had explored every cranny of the zeppelin, seen the huge bedroom and made a flirtatious joke before dragging Caliph quickly out onto the observation deck. It being her first ride, she was unwilling to miss a moment of the view.

The airship plugged east, great flaps of skin pivoting, guiding it out over Ironside, over water. It slipped into the darkness above the bay and turned south, providing a rare romantic view of the city, a deception caused by dusk.

Sena rested her head on Caliph’s shoulder and gazed at the distant lights and smoldering industrial stacks of Lower Murkbell. Growl Mort gave off a volcanic glow that turned the heavy vapors erratic orange. It came home to her again with considerable poignancy that the man who ruled the city, who ruled everything she could see was standing right beside her. The most powerful man in Stonehold.

She looked at Isca.

Caliph looked at her.

She felt a tremor in her resolve that frightened her but gave her hope at the same time. She had to wait for autumn. For the lock of a dead man’s hair. The book was breathing at the back of her head, at the back of her neck, even though she had locked it up in the rolltop desk in Caliph’s bedroom.

She shivered. Not from cold.

Tonight was the debut of a local writer’s opera that would run concurrently with
Er Krue Alteirz
, alternating weeks to finish out the season. The
Herald
had proclaimed it a stunning success for a first opera and avidly encouraged attendance. But then, the Murkbell Opera House owned part of the
Herald
and independent publications had been noticeably less flattering.

The
Byun-Ghala
headed inland, crossing Bragget Canal, mooring at an over-elegant spindle of steel and stone. The spindle poured down like molten slag into a nexus of canals where lamp-lit gondolas set out for a luxurious fifteen-minute cruise through the baroque darkness of Murkbell’s upper south side.

Discreet operatives, along with the High King’s elite personal guard, secured a moving perimeter around the king and his mistress.

Some were discreet.

The musclemen ruthlessly accosted or otherwise blocked pedestrians with chemiostatic nightsticks, giving no explanation when they either turned people away into side streets and detours or when they suddenly let them pass again as the perimeter moved on.

Caliph and Sena glided down the lapping black canals, passing buildings of fantastic age, sliding under fabulous bridges carved with winged things. Through inundated avenues and drowned forgotten alleys, the gondolier poled them. Floating. Lost amid a dizzying agglomeration of decayed fantasy in brick.

Square mooring columns jutted like blackened fingers from sloshing boulevards smeared with nighttime reflections of distant, multicolored lights. The blue and orange lanterns on the boat cast their halos over stone, blazoned cheerful glimmers along dreary piers and culverts.

Wind bothered them.

It rocked the lanterns and swung the light through tunnels, up massive pylons of stone and steel cladding. It illuminated brown monochromatic graffiti.

Suddenly they emerged from the extravagant squalor as from between artificial cliffs. The boat scudded spryly out of a flooded byway onto a lake behind the opera house.

The huge gabled building startled Sena. It loomed like some gray-caped hulk with orange-magenta eyes, lights on for elitist guests who gossiped and smoked and drank champagne in thickets by the doors.

Gas lamps and streetlamps clustered like magic wands, bundles of glass bulbs throwing abalone light across the cobbles, utterly defiant of the metholinate shortage.

Caliph grumbled when he saw the waste and made a mental note to bring management into line. As the gondola touched the pier, a body of guards was already waiting. They held the curious rich at bay. Vhortghast was among them, looking winded. His pale skin glistened. Caliph wondered where he had run from.

Political icons and others who routinely basked in the illustriousness afforded them by the High King’s sodality were of course let through. Clayton Redfield was among the few who strode confidently past the sour-faced wall of bodyguards.

Caliph intensely disliked the sense of profound segregation, the illusion of elevation—the utter pomposity. He wanted to call out to the ogling nobles,
What are you staring at? I shit just like you!

The guards moved as the High King moved, shifting the perimeter as if by smell. They were no less attuned to his movements than a cloud of flies circling the eyes and mouth of a cow. The wealthy parted in gleeful tides, calling out as he and Sena passed, complimenting his choice of apparel—the same mundane black he always wore—as if it had been the newest style.

Caliph waved graciously and made sure Sena managed the stairs in her heels. She smiled and pinched his arm.

The Murkbell Opera House enfolded them.

It was a sea of formal attire. Perfume and pomade. Awash with red lights and the smell of whipped coffee. Perfectly dim. The atmosphere exuded opulence and a frenzied exchange of erudite artistic sensibility.

Gorgeous paintings and draperies soaked in the costly incense of exotic tobacco while men exchanged brand names, prices and offered each other cigars.

After Clayton Redfield had finally agreed to enjoy the show for the
third time and summarily faded into the crowd, Zane Vhortghast led the High King to his private box.

A blushing young woman handed Sena a pair of opera glasses despite the box’s nearness to the stage. The girl informed her that she could use them to examine the superior craftsmanship of the costumes or the precise expressions on the actors’ faces as she chose.

Caliph raised his eyebrows incredulously and studied the program that had made its way into his hand.

As the mournful sounds of violins being tuned wafted from the orchestra pit, two huge men positioned themselves just without the High King’s box. They scrutinized and menaced the hall. Their twins lurked inside but hung discreetly back, watching the theater with mechanical attention. Vhortghast himself monitored surveillance from a straight-backed chair that gave him a wide view of the audience below as well as the boxes spaced around the elaborate walls.

Most of the women in the audience and not a few of the men used opera glasses to snatch better glimpses of the royal couple. Girls with fishnet pantyhose and feathered tails and bras distributed fanciful drinks in impossibly tall glasses or whisked empty ones away.

Below the royal box, in aisle three, a soused nobleman groped his friend’s wife and fell over a row of chairs, creating a small fracas. He promptly disappeared in the arms of three burly ushers and the tittering waves of conversation resumed as though nothing had happened.

“I liked the Minstrel’s Stage better,” whispered Caliph.

Sena smirked indulgently. The preceding weeks had been hard on both of them.

At first, Caliph had chuckled when he read the note drawn out of the hawk’s tiny canister. Then he had reread it. Then he had reread it again, disbelieving. Finally he had begun to shake and whisper and pace the floor and scowl. What could it mean? he thought.
Fallow Down has disappeared.

By fast horse and private zeppelin, the adventuresome had already gone out and returned with firsthand accounts of the devastation. There was no keeping it a secret.

The fickle papers had minted every kind of lie and theory they could dream up. Laws passed under the old Council ensuring freedom of the press remained unchallenged though barbs enough to fill a dozen quivers had been hurled at Caliph by several fearless periodicals offering special biweekly editions (or seditions as those loyal to the High King liked to call them).

Caliph had juggled all kinds of meetings with military personnel and
worried burgomasters and journalists who constantly overstepped their bounds.

He wanted to go out and see the thing for himself but his advisors forbade it. Round trip, it was nearly seventy-five miles out of the way, and those were precious hours to and from Tentinil better spent in Isca directing operations from a central seat of power.

Caliph had departed on the fifteenth for Queen Guerrian’s funeral (the prince’s mother had died in her sleep) and returned late the same night by zeppelin. He leapt off the
Byun-Ghala
, and dashed to a late-night meeting like the operator of a mad machine racing to throw switches in an effort to regain control.

Then came the second blow, more devastating on a personal level to Caliph’s reign and even more confusing to his supporters than the news that Fallow Down had disappeared. It brought the castle down to a deathly hushed still as the staff read the
Iscan Herald
with utter disbelief.

Some woman had come forward with details. She claimed to have known Sena for many years and felt it her duty to inform the Iscan people of the truth behind the High King’s new mistress.

Sena could still remember the headline and the opening paragraph of a two-page story.

High King Court’s Witch

by Nick Glugh, Journalist

As if the Iscan people needed more bizarre news another report rocked the foundations of King Howl’s fledgling reign when a woman identifying herself as Miriam Yeats came forward with an accusation that the new High King’s mistress is a Shr
dnae operative. This, just scant days after the tragedy at Fallow Down, an event critics are calling a holomorphic holocaust, once again casts the specter of suspicion over the Iscan Crown . . .