The Last Page (9 page)

The cracked sink grimaced at him like a chrome-eyed creature backed against the wall. The place where the plaster had given out; the small pencil marks near his bed where he had written Sena’s name seemed sullen at being left behind.

A pillar of antiseptic sunlight fell through the window, whitewashing his sheets.

This morning, the Council was coming.

Outside, silken banners curled softly in the early summer air, barely moving in a shady breeze from the west.

Caliph had no energy. The final class had sucked him dry. His husk
fell back into bed. Rather than face another day, another hour, he chose the oblivion of sleep.

Twighlight arrived. Still no Council. Word came by pigeon that there had been a storm, heavy snow and wind that prevented any navigation of the narrow crack through the Healean Range.

Caliph couldn’t breathe. He paced, watched the sun choke on sky as thick and bright as peach jelly. He walked to Karth
l Hall and found Nihc Pag smoking in the shadows of the pitted front steps.

Nihc was a Pandragon but had lost most of his accent during eight years of school. He had gone through graduation and stayed for spring. Unlike Caliph, he had good reason. A two-focus degree in bioscience and exotic ecologies demanded additional time in the labs of the Woodmarsh Building. Soon, he too would vanish.

“Hey, Caph.”

Caliph sat down. Nihc stubbed his smoke against the wall and joined him. The sun was totally gone. Naobi had crawled out of the glutinous shadows like a white beetle that had been feeding on the day. She was in her waning half-phase: slender, livid and cadaverous. From the steps they could see the lake. Blue fireflies flickered sporadically, casting double images in the water, occasionally vanishing forever in the mouth of a leaping fish.

They said nothing for a long time. The splishing fish and the leaves that pitched and moaned around Desdae’s blackened gables were enough to keep the silence comfortable.

Finally Nihc made the first real effort at conversation. “Thought you were leaving today.”

Caliph envisioned the Council, the uniforms, the offices waiting for him in Stonehold. “Yeah. I am.”

Nihc plucked a killimore weed from beside the step and chewed it. “Not much of today left.”

“There’s enough. What about you?”

Nihc spat. “Headed out next week. Down south. Something lined up for me in the Empire, Pandragonian, of course. I wouldn’t serve Iycestoke if it killed me.”

“Really? What’ll you be doing?”

“There’s hunters in Pandragor that go out and trap all kinds of things so they can entertain the Emperor—or so they’ve got something to feed criminals to.”

Caliph mused sardonically, “Must cut long-term prison costs.”

Nihc shrugged. “I’m not a politician. I’m just going to advise the
hunters on care and feeding. Think of it! Catch me a
hlohtian ground sloth or a sintrosa—one of them ax-beaks, you know? Or—biggest damn thing to walk on four legs—a norkocis!”

“Sounds dangerous.”

Caliph glanced beyond the library at the dark shadows of the north woods. “I got a letter from Sena back in Tarsh. I think I’m going to see her.”

Nihc stood up, indicating that good-byes would soon be in order. “Must be excited. Over half the campus was in love with her.”

Caliph yawned and rubbed his eyes.

“She’s different.” He doubted
love
was the word Nihc should have used.

“Nobody could understand how you two never got caught . . . you know . . . together.”

Caliph pulled the key from his pocket and clenched it until its teeth bit into his palm.

“Anyway,” said Nihc. “If I was you, I’d be glad. A girl like that you hold on to.”

The Council arrived at the High College the following morning. Two official representatives touched down in a zeppelin bristling with armed men and women. Caliph imagined them scouring the town, the buildings and the forest to the north, thinking immediately of abduction, ransom, assassination. It would never occur to any of them that the rational, notoriously reclusive heir might simply walk away.

He had left shortly after wishing Nihc Pag good luck, used a black cotton shirt to cover his escape and crawled through the attic of Nasril Hall. From there, he’d gotten onto the roof and into the branches of a danson whose limbs tore savagely at the shingles every time there was a storm.

Down the trunk and through the shadow-painted lawn, behind the lilacs and south along the pond.

He’d gone between the chapel and the mill, feeling giddy, and crossed the stream connecting the tiny lake and Ilnfarne-lascue to the cattail marshes southeast of the village.

At the fork a quarter mile down Grey Road he had headed through the village, passing Mim’s Grocer, the Whippoorwill and Grume’s Café.

By morning, Caliph had left the High College of Desdae far behind. He was free.

A tractor headed for South Oast passed him, flappered stack retching a mixture of blackness and motes of colored light. It lurched over the hill like a sick tippler and disappeared.

Caliph glanced at his compass and kept on. He traveled marshland to canebrake, canebrake to holt; over smooth drumlins left from Kjnardag’s glacial reign. He saw the world as a series of textbook illustrations.

He crossed geography he had learned in class, the Grey River by thirteen o’clock on his second day while dusk piled clouds like blue ashes on a white marble floor.

An old stone barn with an empty loft served as a hostel for the night. In the morning he ate some of his provisions and headed west.

The third day put him through a wide forest of danson trees and planted him on the steam rail platform at Maiden Heart. He had enough money for a ticket to Crow’s Eye, which he bought at a window fitted with brown iron bars and a bizarre perforated funnel on a flexile pipe for speaking to the hidden seller inside.

The platform was ugly and myriad. Horses in strange barding lashed the air with their complex tails. Chickens hacked into millet bags with sawtooth beaks and forked tongues. Their bloodred eyes glared ferociously at children who stepped too close. Hairless purple dogs pulled two amputees in a pair of rolling midget thrones. Flowered hats, pipe smoke, stale booze and shit of all kinds stunk together on the platform. Bodies pressed into queues like hülilyddite waiting to explode. There were scuffles. Eventually men in uniform started getting the animals sorted.

Steam and sound shrieked from whistles and pistons as Caliph handed a thin man his ticket and climbed aboard. Inside, the air was so close it felt infected. One couple kissed obliviously despite their proximity to a woman shaped like piled trash and a reading man who snorted every thirty seconds.

The Vaubacour Line ran west to Woonsocket and from there to Mir
yhr or south a thousand miles into the Theocracy of the Stargazers.

Sena’s map would be of no use until he reached the Highlands of Tue. It showed only a small section of country and did even that poorly.

Caliph found room as the engines screamed. He sank into a red leather seat whose springs and stuffing erupted like fungi.
Maybe I want to get lost,
he thought.
Maybe I want to get lost and I’m never coming back.

Tynan doesn’t come to her graduation. He has never seen her time at Desdae as important.

Commencement goes off, bitter, solitary and anticlimactic, concluding with rain.

It doesn’t matter,
she tells herself.
I did this for me.
But she feels desolate.
Fuck Tynan Brakest. Fuck Caliph Howl too for not showing up.

Then
they
arrive.

Women in rain-dark storm cloaks looking bizarre, so pragmatically dressed amid the throng of suit coats and corsets. As parasols pop open and people bustle into Desdae Hall, the three women move against the current, directly toward her.

Sena’s heart stammers as though she is losing her balance on a ledge. She considers running but then, paradoxically heroic and at the same time alarming, Darsey Eaton swoops in.

The undisputed master of his domain, Chancellor Eaton faces the three women uncowed and unaware of his peril. Sena finds a touch of comedy in watching him bring them up short. He towers, pear-shaped, leaning forward, hands behind his back, the welcoming smile on his face in perfect counterpoint to the deep-set eyes that wield disdain like a pair of clubs. Sena sees it in third person: the whole uncomfortable little crowd grazing the lip of satire, smiling thinly over introductions and regarding one another with cordial skepticism.

Shucking fear, Sena makes her way to Darsey’s side and joins the conversation. She can tell that the chancellor doesn’t believe any of it: neither that Megan is her grandmother nor that the other two are her cousins. He offers to escort all of them to Desdae Hall where refreshments are already being served.

Megan returns his invitation with procuress-arrogance. “Thank you but we’ll be along. No need to wait.”

Sena watches the cords in Darsey’s neck stretch; he smiles and glances sideways into her face. It happens so quickly that Sena barely has time to understand he is checking with her, making certain everything is fine. It
shocks her to realize that, in a cool and businesslike way, he is genuinely concerned.

When Sena nods faintly he immediately looks elsewhere, scanning the lawn, overseeing the mass of people. Then the chancellor bows, rainwater dribbling from his hat, turns squarely and abandons her, striding purposefully toward the bright open doors of the cultural hall.

“So good to see you, Sienae,” Megan chirps after he is gone. Sena listens for irony but detects none. She still wonders if she is in trouble. The Shr
dnae Mother never ventures outside of Mir
yhr and her presence at Desdae is bizarre. The ancillas seem tense. They stare at Sena, all business. Maybe they know about Caliph . . . or Tynan. But Darsey is gone. There is no one on the lawn anymore and they would have taken her by now, in the Shr
dnae grip, hauling her off to a fiery end.