The Last Page (56 page)

Several others like the leader watch the machine. They pamper it and make adjustments as it edges relentlessly north. Due to mechanisms that
lock the wheels in one direction and a great anchored tail off the back, the engine can only advance into the wall. The toothy maul dissolves inches of stone in minutes.

It takes only seven and a half hours to eat through ten feet of stone.

Finally the barrier between the castle sewers and the necropolis sewers burst in, caving slightly under a fine rain of debris. The thick stench of raw sewage gobbles hungrily at the dry cloud of dust.

Long-legged men in striped suit pants and overalls and other various occupational costumes clamber through, disregarding the fumes. They begin sniffing their way through the tangled pools, searching for a hint of cleaner air.

They have an inside man. Someone who knows they are coming. This has been prepared and rehearsed as carefully as the show Caliph and Sena sit watching.

From slick black tubes and catch basins, under baffles and hoods and around garbage-clogged weirs, the man-things hunt fresh air. Like Mr. Naylor they clamber through small spaces. They pass grinding pumps that move scum and sludge into deep containers that gel with slowly thickening sludge cake and lime. Walls, lumpy white and griseous with coagulated fat from the castle’s kitchen seep into chunky waste below.

They pass a grit chamber thronging with mycophagous creatures that pause in their filthy reverie to listen to the man-things clamber through. The creatures twist back and forth like grubs rooted in fecal chowder, wavering blindly at the intruders.

The man-things ignore them. They stalk onward through the pitch black, now and then banging their heads or shins on odd projections or hidden chunks of fallen stone. They seem oblivious to pain. Their eyes are no better than Mr. Naylor’s but they can decipher vague radiations.

Without a trace of light, they are only partially blind. They catch a hint, a whiff. Lose it. Search in repetitive back and forth swathes; sniff and catch it again.

Finally.

The faint sweet smell of blossoms trickles on a downward draft, sifting pollen through circular grates overhead. The lead man claws upward. He fumbles at the grate. It has already been unlocked. He eases it up and sets it aside.

A short vertical culvert above the first grate supports a secondary grate just a few feet overhead. It too is unlocked. With a faint creak and muted thud the grate opens trapdoor style onto a plush crop of perfectly manicured grass.

The sheltering arms of a black mulberry normally help conceal the
grate in the sumptuous gardens. Now they cloak creatures hauling themselves up into the courtyard as across town Caliph and Sena leap into the carriage, making good their escape.

The man-things spread out quickly and quietly. One lurks at an adit until a pair of sentinels walk past.

The creature waits, biding its time, emotionally detached from its goal. Then, at precisely the most favorable moment it casts its long sinuous arms out and pulls both men deep into shadow. Before they can scream, iron-like fingers burke them with savage efficiency.

The strangled corpses are pulled into corners behind bushes and sculpted shrubs.

While their fellows at the opera are bent on putting an end to the Sslî
they fear, those at the castle advance relentlessly through the courtyard, searching for the book and putting an end to any sentry in their path.

Caliph and Sena had gone slack in the aftermath.

The carriage rumbled past Gilnaroth through Barrow Hill to King’s Road and turned north into the Hold. By the time they reached the castle gate, the terror at the opera house had been replaced with nausea and exhaustion.

As usual, huge gears began to turn the instant the High King was inside, pulling up the drawbridge, locking the castle down on its island for the night.

Vhortghast leapt from the back of the carriage before it had fully stopped. Since the metholinate lamps had been shut off, torchlight licked the edges of the vast court where governmental buildings crowded. He opened the door and helped Sena and Caliph clamber out.

A quad of soldiers crossed the yard heading in formation toward the east gardens. Their leather cuirasses and barbuts glared as facets of the armor turned in unison from the light. Despite their presence, something felt strangely wrong.

The carriage driver was quick to bid everyone good night. He had not asked what had gone on inside the opera. With a curt tip of the hat, his nervous meaty hands whipped the horses toward the livery.

Caliph glanced back in the direction of the gates. It was three hundred yards to the drawbridge from the center of the south bailey. He felt strangely isolated.

A courthouse and a row of statues shone green in the sultry night. Crickets chirped. The last queelub of the season flickered in a stately stand of maples to the west. After dusk, when the visitors had signed out, the small village of governmental edifices became austere and chilly, like
monuments in a park. Even with all the night noises, the humidity seemed to stifle sound.

“Why are the lights out in the kitchen?” asked Caliph. The bank of mullioned panes west of the foyer usually glowed all night.

The spymaster scowled. “I don’t know.”

A lone cicada screamed from nearby.

“Everything is fine,” Caliph soothed.

Even so, Sena felt her skin prickle.

Zane led them toward the front door, up a steep staircase, across another miniature drawbridge to the lavish foyer decorated with tile and statuary and lit by gas. Vhortghast rapped. The glazed door was unlocked.

They stepped inside.

A short extravagant hallway flickered with amber glass on either wall. Lit by candles in hidden guardrooms, the narrow colorful panes covered arrow slits; the paneled ceiling: murder holes. Isca Castle had not been in danger of siege for so long that its defensive architecture had been concealed with more aesthetically pleasing fixtures.

At the top of a second staircase, the grand foyer engulfed them like bits of food under domed glass. To the north, the great staircase curled down from the second story, ending at the foot of one of several pillars that framed a series of four lofty arches to the grand hall: a room that currently glowered in darkness. Other doors led to guardrooms, the kitchen and the east wing.

The silence was interminable. Sena’s thoughts reduced to the book hidden in Caliph’s bedroom. The emotional impact of the orchestrated ambush at the theater and now the empty abandoned corridors of the castle were sinking in, fomenting into panic.

Vhortghast said something soft and unintelligible, probably because the wrongness of their surroundings was also affecting him.

“I’m going to have a look,” said Sena.

Zane hushed her savagely but she ignored him. They had made enough noise coming up the stairs that any unfriendly ears in the nearby rooms would certainly have heard. Caliph looked at her apprehensively.

“I’ll be fine. Trust me.” She pinched him and slipped away, moving up the stairs.

Caliph nearly cried out, almost pleaded with her to come back, but he didn’t. The oppressive quiet in the castle seemed to crush his ability to shout.

Zane had drawn a long knife from his belt. It curved away from his forearm like a claw. He was circuiting the foyer. Checking doors. Peering into various rooms. He let Sena go without a word and Caliph realized
suddenly that the spymaster’s only responsibility was to the High King’s safety.

Caliph swore and headed for the grand hall, determined to turn on some lights.

“Your majesty—?”

Caliph didn’t answer. Like at the opera house, he had had enough. He strode into the darkness and immediately fell over a large obstacle. Three bodies lay in a low pile, obscured by the darkness of the archway. Caliph scrambled up, stifling a shriek. His fine suit was smudged with blood. Zane pulled him back, picked up a sword from the fallen guards and handed it to him.

Caliph’s terror was burning off as his anger mounted. He would find whoever had done this.

Sena had always lacked confidence in her abilities as a Sister of the Seventh House. Her accelerated ascension and keen awareness of her unfair promotions had resulted in timidity and self-doubt.

In crisis, she often choked.

But the dangers she had faced since spring had begun to chip away at her insecurity. She had survived two, possibly three attempts on her life if she counted tonight—though that was a bit premature. She had moved the
C
srym T
through Skellum under Megan’s nose.

Her diffidence had begun to crumble.

Without shoes, without a weapon, she slid from the great staircase into the blackness of the upper hall. To the west, the white marble and tall windows of the grand hall’s second story chilled the air like a solid cube of ointment. Leaf shadows twirled and danced in swaying rhythms across the floor. She headed east toward the High King’s bedroom, up another set of marble stairs.

When she reached the fourth floor, she had yet to see a guard. A post, flooded with yellow lamplight, revealed a game of cards left in midplay. One chair rested on its side. There were no other signs of struggle. Coins still stood in little stacks or lay in piles indicating ownership and the unclaimed pot. A switchblade had been left beside one man’s winnings. Sena snapped it up in passing and drifted down the lofty passage to the west.

By now, her evening gown was in shreds. The kick pleat had continued to tear. What few diamonds were left hung from threads. Her movements were fluid, unrestricted.

The paneled walls marched west.

Great vases and indistinct statues twisted up in menacing shapes.
Dozens of candles petaled the walls with daylily orange while orchid-colored shadows leapt from side tables and potted trees.

Sena slid below a bank of mullioned palladian glass, keeping to the darkest part of the passageway. Not even twenty feet in front of her, the High King’s bedroom doors hung open. Narrow, ornate and twelve feet tall. Like most doors in the castle, they swung on four hinges: a moving piece of wall.

A gruesome splatter on the wood paneling beside the doors looked purple in the light from the window, like someone had hurled a bottle of milk at the wall, bursting its contents explosively—only the liquid wasn’t white.

Sena could smell the faint cloying reek of bungled wetwork. Like a slaughterhouse. The gagging stink of burst entrails.