The Last Page (55 page)

Its ankle ruptured. The tibia burst through like a whitened spike. Still the thing came, walking on the knife-like point of its destroyed leg, dragging its foot behind.

The guard tried to power up his sword again but the superhuman hands were upon him, long thick fingers lifting him in a vise-like grip. The creature tossed him aside, searching for Sena.

Zane Vhortghast took one last look at the fearless almost-human-thing behind him before following Sena out the window. A fire escape clattered down in switchback fashion to a small wooden dock where Caliph, having been dragged off against all effort, stood furious but relieved to see her safe outside.

More men had pulled up in thin slender gondolas at the rear of the theater. They hauled Sena and Caliph on board as something thin and powerful emerged on the fire escape above. Crossbows thumped and a cloud of bolts converged on the creature, filling it like a pincushion. It fell from the metal stairs and landed brokenly at Mr. Vhortghast’s feet.

Sena thought she saw something pale and large jackknife with lethargic grace below the dark water as she passed from the dock into the boat. It vanished before she could get a proper look.

“There’s something down there! There’s something in the water!”

As she spoke the second gondola jerked sideways, throwing men in flailing profusion and great splashing blossoms of foam. The boat capsized and promptly began to sink.

“Out! Out! Out!” shouted the spymaster. He grabbed Sena’s wrist and pulled.

Caliph made a dangerous leap and hit the dock. Awkward. Bashing his shins against the planked edge. He yelped and cursed. Someone pulled him to his feet and shoved him toward a two-foot cornice.

The tremendous foundation from which the building sprung poked above the waterline, a vast slab that extended just beyond the dimensions of the opera house proper. It formed a ledge all the way around the lower extremities of the structure and allowed Vhortghast to goad Caliph through the darkness around the north side.

Caliph would have none of it. He was fed up with being steered around. He turned and shoved his way powerfully back to the dock, taking hold of Sena’s hand. By what dim light there was, she looked remarkably collected. Her face was unafraid.

Together they stepped out onto the lip of the foundation, following an impatient spymaster north then west to the building’s front.

A retinue of operatives had pulled the royal carriage up to the waterfront. Unfortunately, there were now so many people milling around that they had little hope of using it to get away.

On seeing the spymaster and the High King picking their way along the north face, big men with cudgels began to clear a path. They gave a mighty push and when they met resistance they swung away. People went down in rows, crawling and scrambling to escape the very determined, excessively short-tempered royal guards.

The High King and his beleaguered party stumbled into a small clearing made by their brutality.

“Get inside,” said Vhortghast. It was not a kind request.

Caliph piled in with Sena, growing more and more frustrated. He hadn’t had time to think since the commotion erupted in the theater.

He had been sitting, glossing over the remaining acts, estimating time on his pocket watch.

When he looked up, a tall thin man had somehow appeared in front of his chair. He must have dropped from the box above, Caliph thought with amazement. The two men lurking in the shadows had burst forth, grappling the intruder as Caliph’s seat overturned. A chorus of shouts had gone up from the audience below, a sea of fingers pointing toward the tumult.

What is happening?
Caliph had thought.
Where is Sena?
Vhortghast had appeared suddenly, without coffee. He had dragged the High King from the box while other menacing shapes were closing in.

It had been a blur.

Caliph had gone out the window only after Vhortghast’s insistence that Sena was already safe.

The spymaster had lied to get him moving.

Outside, men had encircled the carriage with swords and nightsticks. The carriage was rolling. The men were forcing a path through the mob. The carriage creaked on its springs. Its wheels clattered on the cobbles as they picked up speed.

Something hit the backside of the compartment and Caliph held his breath. There were shouts. Violent sounds. Caliph wondered if at any moment another of the thin men would reach around and scrabble at the window. He waited—but it never happened.

Caliph reached out, held Sena closely as the horses gained momentum, pulling them out of Murkbell, into the terrifying geometry of Thief Town, toward the hopeful safety of Isca Castle.

Fenwick Bengello is found amalgamated with the drive assembly of an engine smuggled out of the Cro
state Brickyard near the middle of Hl
im. His flesh is fused so completely with the output shaft that tendrils of muscle and skin have slithered through the lube passages, wrapped around the drive pinions and gears like roots. After a single failed attempt to cut him free (when their saws hit bones like steel) the city watch decides to bury Mr. Bengello’s remains in a criminal cemetery south of town.

The only way they can finagle him into the coffin is to lay him facedown, twisted around and clutching the shaft. No one comes to see him anyway.

His business partner, Jacob Vindai, who until recently held the deed to the abandoned brewery, turns up in a repair shop on Vhodâsh Street, decapitated, mouth filled with nuts and bolts, head sunk in a barrel of used oil.

The city watch is dumbfounded. Recent attempts to steal machinery have left a trail of curious murders seemingly without motive.

Investigators from the watch add it to ledgers crammed with unsolved crimes waiting for a lead.

D
URING
the hot midsummer evenings, while the city ciders, strange ragmen carry bundles out of Maruchine, out of South Fell, sticking to the backstreets of North Fell, crossing into Barrow Hill. Some pull handcarts. Some carry baskets. They blend, cryptonymous, brown and overlooked. They tote washers and piston rings in their pockets, lug pulleys, chains and valves in canvas sacks. Connecting rods are hidden in flowers and withered potted plants. Their pilgrimage is sedulous. They do not relent. They go to Gilnaroth.

The ruinous multitiered cemetery dubbed the Citizens’ Necropolis chokes on its own brickwork. Dense and barren and inconceivably decayed, the bewildering monuments thrust aberrantly above hard-packed clay.

The mausoleums of the poor are dead slums, crowded just like the tenements of the living. Some are broken open and spilling apart. Raised yards of cement are fenced with wrought iron as if there are feuds, disputes and challenged boundaries: placed there to keep the neighbor’s dead children out.

The ragmen pick their way over the course of many days, going back and forth, bearing engine parts like holy relics through a menagerie of absurd stone. They are not frightened by the awful maws of open charnel houses or the low piles nesting just inside. They are familiar with death and blend in, even here, where stacks of crumbling tombs fill the sky with colors like rust and urine streaking bone.

The ragmen drift north toward the crest of the cemetery, wading through patchy ugly weeds that flourish like pubic hair. The crypts around them fairly rocket skyward, visible above the walls of the Hold as enormous charred leg bones overspread with renegade tuberosities, held together purely by virtue of their weight.

The ragmen ignore them.

A low crouched tomb of blebby moldy-white, cracked and peeling and filthy in its mortarless crannies draws them like a magnet.

They come at odd hours, make counterfeit gestures of reverence or grief. A ludicrous display. No tomb so old has such devoted visitors let alone ones capable of remembering the deceased.

The ragmen place their flowers then shove bags into the open hole, ripped open by grave robbers long ago.

Deep inside the black corruption of the body niche, a shaft opens and drops straight down through the hillside. A rope and pulley installed in the middle of the night allows for bundles to be lowered through the shaft. The ragmen come and go from the tomb, passing engine parts to cohorts deep below.

Then, just as silently, they leave Barrow Hill, avoiding the trendy cafés and chocolate houses along King’s Road where people sing late into the night, bohemian music bubbling and tinkling from saxophones and plucked or hammered strings. The ragmen hear the gaiety and shrink from it, fading away from crowds of people whose hair glows obscene colors under paper lanterns and colorful bulbs: purple, orange and incandescent pink.

Back through North Fell, through South Fell, plotting a course through the tangled shadows of Hullmallow Cathedral into Maruchine, the ragmen return home. They dissolve like fog into the arched mélange of Ghoul Court.

By the twentieth of Lüme, the Cabal of Wights has rebuilt the engine
and swapped new parts for the drive assembly the city watch laid to rest. They are ready.

There are good reasons for the elaborate plan. The sewers of Isca Castle are detached from the sewers of Isca City except for very slender culverts barely large enough to admit rats. One main line extends east out of the castle grounds, burrowing under Incense Street and the military yards of Ironside.

Countless grates and guard posts secure it, make the High King’s toilets virtually impregnable.

But when the foundations of the city were first laid, Isca Castle was planned on what is now Barrow Hill and a gigantic septic pit was dug and later covered over when the surveyors changed their minds.

The empty tank remains far below the graveyard. A drain field additionally helps to suck excessive water away—preventing the kinds of grisly landslides that occasionally plague Marbolia, the cemetery of the rich.

A lateral tunnel from the Barrow Hill septic tank runs north, pouring into what would have been the Barrow Hill castle’s main line to the sea. When the site was abandoned, this second vault was sealed off except to the east where water collects under the graves, sluiced down through narrow pipes into the labyrinthine channels under Temple Hill.

Thus there are two sewer systems sequestered and forsaken from the rest of Isca’s gurgling conduits. They are entangled and fight for space like two tarantulas below the hills but at no place do they ever intersect or intersect the rest of the city sewers.

A thieves guild once toyed with the idea of a base of operations in the Barrow Hill tunnels. But they are so inaccessible and so prone to sudden flooding that the guild reconsidered and settled Thief Town instead.

The powers in Ghoul Court rediscover them and fathom a use.

A tall gaunt man oversees operations in the dark. He has pink eyes like Mr. Naylor. On the morning of the twenty-fourth, long before the
Byun-Ghala
is set to leave Isca Castle for the spindle in Murkbell, the engine sparks to life.

A maul, head covered every inch with teeth, begins chewing methodically at the north end of the tunnel, pumping up and down. It rips chunks of rock away and kicks up heavy dust.

The gaunt man seems capable of ignoring the choking haze. His associates, who are crawlers—more like Fenwick Bengello—are forced to retreat up the southern tunnel toward Gilnaroth.