The Last Page (64 page)

“Tell that to the ghosts of Fallow Down.”

Cameron picked his cup back up. “Tell me, do you think you could have saved them?”

“I had no idea such a thing could even happen. It’s completely beyond anyone how or why—”

“That’s right. This kingdom will go on living and dying with or without you. Those farmers beyond the city wall are just as much alive as you are and they have their own ideas. They don’t sit around hanging on every word the High King speaks. A country is made up of millions of people who do what they please. They can manage. Buying. Trading. Feeding themselves.”

“They depend on me for protection.”

“They depend on the king—whoever he is,” Cameron said bluntly. “Not you. If you left tomorrow there would be a new king. This kingdom will not fold up and blow away if you walk out that gate. These people are too stubborn for that.”

“You think I should go?”

“I am telling you that nothing in this life is big enough to imprison you. You decide.” He downed the rest of his milk. “Who’s the girl?”

The shadow in the doorway drew back, then paused.

Caliph did not see it and asked, “A servant didn’t see you in?”

Cameron poured himself another half-cup. “An armed squad of soldiers saw me in. The woman I met in the hall was no servant.”

Caliph sank back into the cushions with a faint sound.

Cameron cleared his throat. “Never mind. The High King’s business is his own.”

“No, it’s all right. The whole city’s gossiping. They think I’m as bad as my uncle. According to rumor we prowl the graveyards at night and mate in the mausoleums when Lewlym is full.”

Cameron smiled and nodded as if this too were news he had already heard. Caliph wondered if Cameron had taken his time coming to the castle so that he might arrive armed with every bit of gossip, already informed of how the Duchy squared.

“She seems . . . pleasant.”

Caliph picked up his goblet and took a sip. “Her name is Sena. She’s dangerous. And I love her.” He tilted his goblet all the way back.

Cameron smiled faintly. “Love asks no questions. But a king should. If you decide you want to be king.”

“Gadriel would like you,” Caliph mused. “The seneschal,” he explained. He pressed the cork into the bottle.

“He must like balding goatherds.” Cameron grinned.

The shadow in the doorway slipped away.

One of those interminable midsummer months without holiday, Streale came in swullocking and threatened more heat before autumn finally drained it like an insatiable leech.

Beneath smazy yellow skies, the city continued to seep fermenting juices from its cracked and crusted hide. Strange urban smells lifted with the trill of popple bugs from city parks crammed under aqueducts or wedged between museums and tattoo parlors.

The economy crawled along like a half-butchered thing, cowed and wounded by the encroaching war. Grocers ran out of canned meat and powdered milk and chemiostatic torches. Construction workers abandoned the skeletons of new buildings whose funding had gone slack.

Despite the unrest, Sena needed to get out of the castle. The Hold was still relatively safe. She dressed in simple clothes and took a full purse of money.

Accompanied by two watchmen in casual attire she sampled fruits, pawed through racks of outlandish clothing and drank coffee at a chocolate house on King’s Road.

On a whim, maybe to spite Megan, she decided to try one of the bright dyes she had seen in cafés and bookshops in Octul Box.

There were pinks and flame orange-reds and deep purples to choose from.

After a stylish cut she settled on blue, just a stripe. When the beautician was done a single whip the color of sky lashed from Sena’s crown down along the side of her cheek. It matched her eyes perfectly.

Just a few more weeks,
she promised herself.
Then I’ll put away this nonsense and open the
C
srym T
.

She couldn’t explain how it had disappeared and reappeared any more than she could explain how the W
llin Droul knew she had it. Everyone assumed the attack on Isca Castle had been an attempt on the High King’s life, an effort at a coup. But Sena knew the real motive behind the onslaught and her knowledge made her danger and her fear hugely personal and close.

If she hadn’t been unbearably weary of the castle she wouldn’t have risked the outing in Octul Box. But she
was
weary. She needed this.

Humid warm and strangely sweet, the smells of pollution cloyed in alleys trickling away through the Hold where fourteen-year-olds bragged about theft, sex, violence and their evasion of the law. They carved at their egos with knives, whittled heroic icons of themselves from the flesh of their rivals.

They ogled Sena like meat.

Sena’s Hjolk-trull heritage kept her physically analogous to their age. Somewhere between nineteen and twenty-three. Not that it mattered. She turned plenty of heads regardless of age.

The boys followed her all day, slipping over walls, staying a safe distance from her bodyguards.

She watched them furtively as she went about her shopping. The papers had brought them to her attention. Some called them lice; Sena could tell from their bold propositioning stares that they did not read the papers.

They sculpted their own myths from words taken out of each other’s mouths, fashioning from a crude alternative lifestyle something legendary and remarkable.
Worm gangs.
Their language was an arrogant gutter dialect of Hinter mixed with Trade. She could hear them making catcalls.

The stories in the papers were linked to her, which was why she had taken notice. They described how the worm gangs stalked the paths of the streetcars behind terminals servicing the District Line, where rails squeezed through dangerous territory.

By the end of Lüme their bodies had started to surface at an alarming rate. Behind sagging warehouses and fences, where fans spewed hot greasy exhaust from rathskellers and sleazy bistros on the Line, the bodies of Isca’s next crop of highbinders had begun to pile up.

The
Herald
also claimed that when the watch found them, they usually made no report. It was part of a conspiracy theory: letting the carcasses melt in with the rest of the city’s refuse, a kind of victory said the
Herald
; some vague proof of a self-destructive and deviant lifestyle.

These accusations against the watch pointed up through the food chain at Caliph Howl . . . and Sena. Professors of subcultural anthropology had reported their findings in a school-run, politically boisterous sheet published at Shaerzac University in Gas End. But the professors weren’t content with small scale distribution. They took their story to the
Herald
and cried murder: a distinction not endorsed by the city watch.

Now the
Herald
was labeling the homicides with bold letters at the top of the second page:
BARRAGE OF HATE CRIMES AGAINST INNER CITY
YOUTH
. There were demonstrations on campus that accused the High King’s witch.

NO WITCHCRAFT EXPERIMENTS!
shouted poster boards. The students and faculty compiled all kinds of debatable evidence that slithered loosely into one of several favored conspiracy theories.

Popular opinion in Gas End had begun to wane and chants of
No War!
and
Council or Saergaeth!
echoed across the south greens of Os Sacrum.

Sena finished her shopping and returned to Isca Castle troubled and tired.

Zane Vhortghast had suggested making an example of the loudest mouths, but Caliph adamantly refused any kind of censor. He knew the claims were baseless and therefore ignored them despite a growing host of accusations.

Mr. Vhortghast, however, would not let it rest.

He knew something had to be done. The city was getting out of hand and with war creeping south along the mountains, and a gathering of nervous burgomasters watching Isca Castle, the spymaster had taken matters into his own hands.

Dressed his best and brandishing a cane, the spymaster had paid a visit to each of the executive editors, publishers and chairmen of the six main papers . . . at their homes.

Zane Vhortghast knew them all on a sordid, personal or compromising level. Shame, avarice and fear were well-worn tools in his hands and knowing which ones to use when and on whom comprised the bulk of his considerable expertise.

“I’m not asking for complete censorship,” Mr. Vhortghast would say in a reasonable tone of voice as he poured himself a drink. “Just a bit of discrimination.”

And then, in the corner of the room, something would quiver and nod its head in lamentable deference.

Fanatics who refused to capitulate, like Dr. Frezden, had accidents that underscored, in red, the importance of adhering to new journalistic standards.

By the end of the first week of Streale the demonstrations in Os Sacrum hadn’t lost their pitch but papers citywide were suddenly casting Caliph Howl and Sena Iilool in a much more empathetic light.

Caliph, unaware of the circumstances responsible for the change in tone, read the
Herald
—utterly bemused.

Zane Vhortghast was a busy man that week. He closed up shop in Ghoul Court and let slip that Peter Lark had gone south, searching for greener pastures.

The apartment building he had lived in conveniently burned to the ground, taking the landlady (who had seen him without his disguise) with it to a stinking, smoldering grave. A bird-duffer and a half-slopped chirurgeon also met seemingly unrelated accidental ends.