The Last Page (58 page)

Another blow landed on the man-thing’s hide and Caliph watched again in horror as the strange mechanism of its armor swept the stroke aside.

It was miraculous to see all the strength and momentum of the guard, focused in a falling edge of steel. It bore down on the creature’s unprotected flesh, intent on parting skin from bone. But the thin tissue did not resist. It gave to the blow like limp sausage casings filled with barely enough water to make them buttery along internal surfaces. As though fluid rather than muscle lurked just below the epidermis. The skin sank and traveled in a ripple along the bone.

The force carried laterally, following the length of the creature’s arm. When the sword had moved a foot or more along the skeletal frame of the monster it must have met the smooth ramp of an inhuman condyle like a toboggan going off a jump. The weapon went flying back out harmlessly into space. Caliph sat where he had fallen, stunned.

His fascination was broken by the thing on the floor flinging itself around on powerful arms. It was trying to attack him.

Caliph snarled and adjusted to his new understanding of the creature’s anatomy. He stabbed instead of slashed. The sharp point punctured the creature’s chest, darting between ribs, deep into a lung. The thing gasped and recoiled.

“Stab them!”

His men, grappling with faint understanding, obeyed. They brought one to its knees almost immediately with concerted thrusts.

Zane Vhortghast had finally appeared. In actuality, he was less than twenty seconds on the High King’s heels but much had happened in the intervening moments of melee.

He fell on the back of one of the creatures, driving his knife down with anatomically educated precision. Despite the violent thrashing of the creature he managed to bury the weapon in the thing’s heart on his second attempt.

There was one left. Caliph met its eyes and pulled his sword across his own hand, using his blood to power something raw and brutal he had heard long ago in his uncle’s house. The Unknown Tongue gurgled in Caliph’s throat as the monster fell toward him, murderous fingers spread.

The creature hit Caliph with force. It plowed into the High King and sent him sliding back across the marble floor, skidding on guardsman’s blood. His men looked on in horror, certain that the creature’s fingers had torn through Caliph’s body like steel cables.

Slowly, friction took hold in the stiffening smear of gore and the two bodies agglutinated, coming to a viscid stop.

Everything was still. The creature moved slightly but very strangely as though something were inside it. A bulge moved around like a large mole burrowing just below its skin. With shock, the bewildered guards realized it was Caliph’s fist, pushing up from below as against a flimsy membrane.

The creature gave a gurgling scream and seemed to roll sideways like a bag of jelly, slipping off Caliph to flatten against the floor.

Caliph stood up and stabbed it with his sword. The sack of skin popped with a liquescent slurp. The sudden abruption of tissue spilled a tide of gray-and-red fluid out from the amoeba-like blob, issuing liquefied bones and body fluids all across the ghastly floor.

Zane wiped his blade off and looked around, barking orders to whoever was still alive. Outside, alarm bells were finally ringing, calling scores of sleeping guards into the fray.

Lights blazed in the south bailey. Caliph stood up, slightly stunned. His formula wasn’t supposed to do that. Something had gone wrong with the math. New sounds turned his attention from the holomorphic aberration.
He didn’t have time to think about mutated spells. Glancing out a window he could see hordes of armed men pouring from virtually every direction. Some were still pulling on armor.

Green chemiostatic torch beams cut the dark. Tall man-things lurched from crevices in the architecture of the castle, hopelessly outnumbered. They went down under the merciless onslaught of dozens of men.

Trumpets blared. The parapets swelled with running soldiers. Archers with gas-powered crossbows riddled indistinct fleeing forms with enough bolts to add many pounds of weight.

The corpses of the enemy landed in ponderous piles of ruination, splashing into fountains and beds of blue petunias.

Caliph headed downstairs and back out to the courtyard in an effort to help.

The powerful beams of the magnesium lights on the zeppelin deck were turned down into the east gardens. All the gas lamps on the castle grounds burst into hissing blossoms of life.

Suddenly, an army had appeared. They ransacked every shadow, pitiless and angry.

Search parties were organized. Staff sergeants barked commands to their squads. Out came the knights.

They had taken time enough to put their armor on. They stalked into the yard, hackles up, seized chemical torches from the hands of confused and sleepy servants and conducted grumpy solitary investigations of the castle grounds.

They asked statistical questions while they rummaged in bushes and flower beds. “Who fucked this up?” “How many dead?” “How many expectants?”

Groups of guards followed in their wake, feeling virtually invulnerable.

A man-thing made the mistake of leaping out at one knight who then proceeded to blast the creature with a chemiostatic flail the heavy spiked ball of which, being tipped with beryllium, delivered an awesome blaze of light as it turned the creature’s skin to ash with a jolting explosion of electricity. The knight stepped on the creature’s twitching body and walked on.

It took less than four hours to completely scour the castle and the grounds. Altogether, the sentries and knights found and dispatched thirty-seven intruders, half of which were noticeably more human than the tall thin creatures with the slippery skin.

They laid them out in the south bailey in a long row. The losses to the castle garrison unfortunately surpassed those of the enemy.

Forty-two soldiers had been killed. Mostly by strangulation and mostly
by surprise. Caliph got word while he was in the south bailey that Sena was safe but (for reasons lost in the relay of information) utterly inconsolable. He would go to her soon. For now, the fact that she was safe was enough.

They had turned off the magnesium lights after the grounds had been declared clean but Caliph decided to make one last circuit of the gardens before going inside. While men began tossing bodies in the beds of steam wagons and making trips to the gate, Caliph walked into the darkened easterly courtyard.

He wasn’t really looking for foes. He was simply trying to sort out the madness of the evening.

Who or what were these gruesome creatures? How had they gotten inside the castle grounds? What had they come searching for?

He turned off the path, brooding over the unanswerable questions. He had told his men to haul the bodies to West Gate for autopsy by government physicians first thing tomorrow morning. He wanted to know, from a dissector’s point of view, everything there was to know about their physiology.

As he walked along the courtyard wall he noticed a sudden movement in the dark. His heart froze. He opened his mouth to yell for help, but stopped when he realized the figure was not tall and thin but bulky like a bear on its hind legs. Nor did the figure appear intent on escape. Rather it picked its way carefully across the garden, glancing furtively over its meaty shoulders.

Apparently it had not seen Caliph. Caliph stopped, fearful to watch, fearful to look away.

The figure held a key in its hand, the key that had unlocked the double grated entrance to the sewers under the mulberry shrubs.

The figure fumbled, glancing around as it bent to secure the portals it must have opened earlier that day—the portal through which Caliph realized the enemies must have come.

Caliph flattened himself against the courtyard wall, breathing slow and quiet. He heard the key turn in the lock, leaves rustle. After another moment, the figure appeared on the courtyard path, still nervous, smoothing down its clothing, checking over its shoulder time and again.

It headed for the torch-lit archway beside which Caliph was pressed. Caliph held his breath.

As it walked, the figure’s fretful manner dissipated quickly. It whistled, thrusting its hands into deep pockets, moving into the cone of light.

Caliph gasped. It was all he could do to stay silent and hidden as the
traitor, whose face was plainly visible, strode smugly toward the castle entrance, confident his actions had gone unobserved.

After the footsteps had echoed into silence, Caliph waited another five minutes before moving.

Finally, muscles aching with tension and stress brought on by heartbroken disbelief, he crept counterclockwise through the courtyards, stealing through the tumid darkness with fumbling uncertain steps, taking pains to approach the castle doors from a direction seemingly disconnected with the place and moment of the crime.

Caliph sat in the dark of his bedroom despising David Thacker. He still couldn’t choke it down, that his old friend from Desdae had sold him out. His anger was rogue, displaced, confused. Had he done something to earn this perfidious crime? Could he have somehow slighted the quiet writer who studied composition and novels and diverse fields of criticism? Had he made some trespass against David that his own calluses made invisible?

He thought back to their afternoon in Grume’s, where they had seemingly drunk to the camaraderie between them. Had it all been a façade? Had there ever been any true friendship at all?

Caliph had no answers. All he had were questions and the feeling that reality had somehow changed for him more drastically than any holomorph could ever manage with all the holojoules in the world.

One thing was certain. David Thacker had plans of his own.

Caliph had returned from the courtyard to find Sena soulsick and wretched. She equivocated on telling him the reason but eventually it came out that her book, Caliph’s uncle’s book, had disappeared.

Caliph repressed an intransigent impulse to scold her. He paused and his face tightened. He wanted to shout that soldiers had died tonight—a great many men and women had died tonight and would not be going home to their families, to their friends. He wanted to rouse her, tell her it was common sense that people’s lives were far more important than any book. He wanted to ask her where her head was at, that all she could think about was some worm-eaten incunabulum.

Instead, his face relaxed. “Are you sure it’s missing?”

“Of course I’m sure.” Sena looked insulted.

“Let’s have a look.”

Sena sighed. She followed him to the fourth floor. With the gas lamps on, the room looked even worse than it had in the dark. Investigators from the watch had come and gone.

They had jotted down clues before letting the servants in to clean. The
dead guards had been wrapped up and taken away. All that was left was to sort through the jumble of annihilated objects.

Wheeled bins of feathers (some white, some red and sticky) mingled with splintered wood and ceramic shards. The bins overflowed, waiting to be carted away while men and women on the night shift sorted through the rubbish.

Unfortunately, most of it had already been consigned to the trash.

“Where did you last have it?” asked Caliph.

“I put it in the rolltop,” said Sena, “right the—”

Her words died.

The desk was broken open and emptied but on its top, under the array of tiny useless drawers and slots, below the arced groove that until recently had held the interlocking slats that made its clutter presentably discreet, sat the red book.

Sena’s stomach flipped, then twisted like a wrung-out rag.

“Looks like it’s here,” Caliph deadpanned. “Maybe you missed it?”

Sena mumbled something barely intelligible.

“Yeah. I guess I did.” Her bloodless lips parted in astonishment. But she didn’t believe her own admission. She knew what she had seen even in the dim light.

Maybe one of the servants had found it under the bed or in a corner and replaced it. But how could they have known where it came from? How could they have known where it belonged?

She looked around. They were stacking everything worth salvaging in neat piles by the hearth.

When she asked, they affirmed that none of them had touched it.

“That’s where it was when I came in,” said a young man.

“Are you sure?”

“I guess so. I was the first in after the inspectors left.”

Somehow the news did not surprise her. She picked it up with nerveless fingers and took it with her as Caliph tugged her from the room.

They went to one of the guest bedrooms for the night. Caliph couldn’t sleep. He sat on the edge of the mattress in the dark.

Sena locked the
C
srym T
in a chest at the foot of the bed. Despite the evening’s events, now that it was safe, she felt almost totally relaxed. She sidled up to him in the dark and wrapped her arms around him from behind. She could feel the heavy hot incubation of his thoughts, the sullen plotting going on inside.