The Last Page (96 page)

From launch decks and skyhooks, one-man gliders slipped into the air. They leapt from massive leviathans like a swarm of papery bees. Powered by a single cell and one propeller that its pilot engaged only occasionally to gain speed, the agile gliders dominated the sky around their hives.

They wheeled and banked in helical twists, swooped and darted, serving up high-velocity dismemberment with trundle guns. A frenzy of sawtoothed blades crisscrossed the sky and unfurled bloody, seemingly random paths.

The Iscan zeppelins scattered as Saergaeth’s massive fleet pounded east.

Caliph’s legs felt numb as he watched. It was a dreadful, graceful and utterly ferocious aerial ballet. Steel balls hissed past the observation deck, fired from a host of giant tubes.

Caught in the sights of an oncoming sky shark, the
Byun-Ghala
pitched suddenly, evasive maneuvers executed without warning from the pilot.

Bottles of single malt slid from a buffet in one of the staterooms and shattered on the floor. One man, not hooked to his tether, fell, slid across the deck and slipped through the railing.

Caliph looked to where he had vanished with a horrified expression.

There wasn’t time to scream.

Caliph turned away mechanically. He helped his men reload the Pplarian gun. He checked his tether, tugged it several times just to be sure and donned a pair of leather-clad earmuffs that would help muffle the sound.

The gunner made hand signals, scrutinized his sights and then pulled an enormous floor lever. Pumps began repressurizing the tanks even as the cannon fired.

The gas that propelled the bullet produced enough recoil to rock the entire airship hard to port. A faint purple glow traced the shell’s wake as if some kind of plating on the bullet was burning off from friction with the barrel or the air.

Caliph coughed on a dozen odious chemicals.

A rolling boom filled the sky as the Pplarian shell went supersonic seemingly after the fact. Caliph watched the purple trail until the bullet found its mark. As designed, it broke in two releasing its unique orgonomic power. Charged ions and orgone manipulated through holomorphy filled the air.

A sudden electrical impulse found its way over one hundred fifty footsteps toward the fields below. It traveled at thirty-eight miles per second.

From the ground a streamer rose to meet it.

Purple lightning stuttered. One hundred sixty thousand amperes channeled into the zeppelin Caliph’s men had fired on. The airship’s chemiostatic batteries exploded with an impressive green pyrotechnic display.

Billowing black smoke, the stricken ship folded like wax paper, metal ribs tearing through its crimson skin, and plunged, irrevocable calamity waiting below.

Still, another sky shark was coming.

Caliph braced himself as the
Byun-Ghala
continued its precipitous dive. He imagined the pilot pulling certain knobs, telescoping long metal shafts from his control panel. Caliph felt the airship bank as tightly as it could to port. Overhead, a flock of white balloons lifted from compartments along the
Byun-Ghala
’s dorsum. They floated swiftly up into the face of the oncoming sky shark, each one encumbered with a miniature chemical grenade.

The sky shark wrenched its engines but the wall of white balloons enveloped it. They bounced along its skin. Popped as tiny detonator spines collided with the body of the ship. Several airmen in gliders were similarly overwhelmed. Acid-based fires engulfed them and sent them on a mile-long funerary procession toward the ground.

It was spare joy. Caliph’s men reloaded the Pplarian gun and waited stonily for another target to enter medium range.

All around, bizarre colors and fires arced and streaked and burned. Radio-active orange and red and green. Hot purples and blues and saffron yellows. Spreading oily smoke and sporadic showers of blood added horrific authenticity to an otherwise shockingly beautiful display.

The blue lions of the High King were on the run, harried and dogged by Saergaeth’s scarlet ships.

Then, disaster.

One of the Iscan leviathans exploded. Two thousand seven hundred feet of airframe twisted, melted and mushroomed: black and searing. Orange butterfly tints melted inside a mephitic and enormous cloud. Some chemical shell capable of reacting with the denatured gas in the airbags had produced unthinkable results, uncasing holocaust.

The inferno ballooned in every direction, engulfing scores of gliders on both sides of the conflict. They dropped like singed moths around a popping gas lamp.

Caliph felt the blast from several hundred yards away. A swell of scorching air rolled over him, hit him squarely in the face. His eyeballs dried instantly. Sticky and hot. It hurt to blink. He gagged and clutched the railing.

When he looked down he saw more calamity, Iscan engines unraveling to enormous canisters of gas. Puffs of noxious toxins gloated over the hills and meandered with prevailing winds, killing everything they brushed.

Airship cannons powered by enormous compression hoses fired stone
and metal balls inscribed with Naneman battle runes. War engines a mile below suffered devastating trauma.

Occasionally, gun-stones would shatter or bounce off thick choratium plates but more often than not, the high velocity of the missile would turn an engine’s boiler inside out or render tracks snarled piles of useless grinding scrap.

Paralyzed and broken or pierced with ragged puncture wounds that rent from top to bottom, the smaller engines were abandoned by their crews. Canisters of deadly fumes burst nearby and sealed the crewmen’s fate.

With miserable fascination Caliph watched the impotent retaliation of his lights. They fired shells of hardened clay packed with incendiary pellets, shot from powerful ballistae. They traveled interminable arcs and sometimes splashed through rigid zeppelin skins, adding to a paltry tally of influential blows. Unlike Saergaeth, the High King did not have shells capable of reacting with what everyone had thought to be inert zeppelin gas.

Even one or two direct hits often failed to bring Saergaeth’s airships down.

The relentless front swept east.

Since the
Orison
’s “crash” Caliph’s only communication with Alani or his spies had been the two hasty notes.

He couldn’t tell if something had gone wrong, if his elaborate plan would meet with even marginal success, but he decided he couldn’t wait any longer. Saergaeth was tearing him apart. From the back of the
Byun-Ghala
a battery of metal tubes had been bolted to flashing on the deck. Caliph gave a signal and one of the airmen flipped a switch. Current from the airship’s giant cells coursed down a length of wire to where the strange artillery piece pointed astern at seventeen degrees.

Half a dozen chemical rockets thumped from the tubes and hissed into the air. Nondescript streamers of smoke mixing with the more breathtaking violence that choked the sky. The rockets traveled only a hundred yards before bursting into glittering multicolored flares.

Fireworks.

They were the signal.

Isca’s heavy engines crawled out of Glumwood like unreal castles cobbled from choratium and steel. Each of their eight cleated tracks were ten feet tall, thirty feet across and twice again as long. One track: a single belt of bladed metal churned through elaborate sequences of toothy wheels. One tread could individually crush a two-story house of mortared stone.

Eight such belts comprised the clangorous foundations of the heavy engines whose stacks spewed a soup of brimstone and inky grit.

They defied and boggled the mind. Moveable fortresses, tactical
strongholds that could be positioned as defiles or inching juggernauts, the foes of which had but one realistic maneuver: a slow relentless rout.

But against the comparative agility of zeppelins, the cumbersome heavies could only wait, hoping an airship would blunder within range—something not likely to happen even if a zeppelin captain showed gross incompetence and total disregard for all things sane. The crew would mutiny long before coming within a mile of such a monster’s reach.

But when the gold and blue fireworks discharged behind the
Byun-Ghala
the Iscan heavies stopped launching conventional missiles of steel and stone.

They filled their guns with tunsia-reinforced holomorphic glass.

Cannonballs filled with souls.

Brobdingnagian compression units sent a volley of solvitriol bombs into the air. They were rudimentary. Untested. Caliph saw the heavies fire but lost track of their supersonic ammunition.

His stomach twisted three directions at once. His bowels needed sudden emptying. Everything depended on this moment.

Had Alani really done his job?

Caliph sweat profusely.

For unbearable moments nothing seemed to happen. He scanned the sky for any trace of success. His eyes moved from one dirigible to the next. Keenly attentive despite agonizing discomfort.

The Iscan heavies gave another volley, compression cannons rolling like thunder across the hills.

No visible effect.

So that’s it? Nothing?

“Fuck thunder!” It was not a curse of rage. Fear filled Caliph from the boots up. Isca was doomed. The worm gang youths had truly died in vain!

His flesh went clammy. He felt himself surrender to prickles, uncontrollable convulsions and finally retching fits. His head would decorate the walls at West Gate: a distinctly irritating but not entirely inconvenient method of escape.

But he wasn’t being honest. After all, he did care. Not for himself. He still had to pay for the worm gang murders. Sigmund had lied, but the High King had authorized the project. No. Caliph didn’t have much hope for himself, but he did wish the unaffected best for Isca.

He didn’t really care that he was about to become a piece of history except that many hundreds of loyal men and women were dying on his behalf.

He chuckled at what he guessed would be tomorrow’s headline:

Saergaeth Puts End to War!

And then:

High King Saergaeth Brindlestr
m restores order to the Duchy of Stonehold after months of conflict and scandal. Caliph Howl, whose family name had suffered a history of alleged political impropriety and corruption was arrested sometime this morning and taken into custody on charges of treason and witchcraft.

Caliph’s execution would take place in Nevergreen along with the other traitors. Caliph felt torturously ashamed of that.

People are going to die because they followed me.

Who am I? Some misanthrope out of Greymoor? Incapable of planning any kind of war or strategy that works!

Caliph was gagging.

Three of the airmen unlatched his tether and dragged him into the stateroom. Warm lights fluttered on the walls. The piano stood silent. Outside, detonations filled the air with a pungent biting stench.

Caliph unzipped his flight jacket, tossed his earmuffs and goggles aside and stumbled into a cramped closet outfitted with plumbing and a tastefully decorated stool.

He jerked his leather pants down between his ankles and dropped onto the seat, colon exploding with pent-up anxiety. His guts tightened, struggling to wring out every drop of stress.

Klaxons sounded.

Caliph laid his head in his lap, exhausted. He focused on purging himself of any residual disquiet.

Again the horns. Urgent. Sequacious. Unremitting.

Detonated wood paneling and a sudden spray of splinters suffused the air. Winter wind howled through the tiny bathroom.

A ragged opening just above Caliph’s head yawned brightly, somehow comical and grotesque.

A gun-stone must have torn through the
Byun-Ghala
’s hull leaving a trail of like-sized holes. The opposite wall was similarly destroyed. Beyond it, the floor. Strake smashed. Planks flinderized. Wind screaming underneath.

Caliph swabbed himself, agony devitalized by fresh crisis. He buckled his belt and crawled out of his ruined water closet.

The hole in the stateroom floor showed a jagged picture of war-torn landscape several thousand feet below.