The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  “Watch your step,” warned Vhortghast.

  They passed through several well-manned checkpoints before the staircase dumped them into a small dingy tiled foyer with the number six painted in red, barely visible through layers of grime.

  They stepped out into a half tube that tunneled north and south. Over one hundred fifty feet wide and seventy-five floor to ceiling, the black-green tunnel burrowed out of sight in both directions, obscured slightly by steam and questionable vapors that drifted aimlessly over the floor. The space was lit by sustained magnesium lights suspended far overhead.

  Cones of intense white revealed patches of crud-caked block work, walls befouled in a way that suggested black frosting dripping down the sides of a moldy cake. Echoing reverberations and random mechanical clicking filled the quiet vault with ominous background noise.

  Vhortghast pulled a breaker switch. It snapped down with a faint sizzle. From the south, a pinpoint of yellow light flared up in the curtain of blackness and a clattering racket chugged slowly toward them. The yellow light drew closer every moment, seeming to gain momentum until its awkward truth was revealed.

  It passed through a harsh white pool thrown across the tracks, taking the shape of a strange mechanized engine with a small front cabin and an enormous swollen canister lying behind it. Like a queen termite it rolled into view. The light on its nose revealed it was number six in some unknown series of stations or contraptions or both. Below its bolted numeral, a heavy framework of ornate wheels, six on each side, connected it to the tunnel’s rails.

  Behind the front cabin, which was choked with levers and rods, eight additional wheels supported the long iron canister whose paint bubbled with corrosion. Small chemiostatic lights glowed limey and pale in the dark.

  The vehicle seized suddenly, squeaking on the rails, disturbing the low waft of steam across the floor. A sour smell filled the air.

  Vhortghast motioned Caliph in and threw several indistinguishable rods.

  The grotesque contraption lurched, plunging forward into the dark.

  “We’re under Thief Town now,” mentioned Vhortghast. “Headed toward the docks.”

  Caliph had said nothing during their entire time down the staircase. He didn’t know what to say. Finally he tried, “I take it these aren’t the normal subway tunnels?”

  Vhortghast’s reaction couldn’t be seen in the dark.

  “No. There are the sewers. Then there are the streetcar tunnels. And then there are these. No one knows about these except myself, the dissolved Council, the men who work in them and now you.”

  “What about the Blue General?”

  “Clueless.”

  “Where in Emolus’ name are we going?” The canister-bearing engine was hissing along at a clip faster than a galloping horse. The magnesium lights passed by overhead. Stripes of light and dark flashing. They made Caliph’s head throb.

  Soon they passed another alcove with the number five stenciled in red paint.

  “Have you ever wondered where a city of two million people gets all its food?” Vhortghast’s question brought an irrational hysteria to Caliph’s mind. “I mean the Duchy of Stonehold isn’t exactly huge yet we’ve got Vale Briar with close to three hundred thousand. Tentinil with another hundred thousand. Miskatoll is what? About four hundred thousand? And then Mortrm weighs in at sixty-two thousand. In the shadow of Kjnardag that’s a lot of people to feed off a landscape too cold to grow decent crops. And those are just the capital cities. Add the smaller towns and villages from Gadramere to Tairgreen and this is a damned densely populated country with some rocky fields and a deep dark sea that’s been heavily fished for half a thousand years. If we didn’t supplement what our hard-working cotters produce, and what our sleepless fishermen bring in, we’d have hardly enough to feed ourselves—maybe not enough at all—let alone any caviar or isinglass to export.”

  Caliph’s mind tried to guess at whatever Vhortghast was teasing him with, searching for some logical alternative to the spymaster’s compelling evidence for starvation.

  He’s going to tell me we’re all eating rats and fungus, thought Caliph.

  They passed another empty darkened station with the number two painted on dingy tiles. It flashed in the magnesium lights and disappeared unsettlingly, swallowed up by surroundings unimaginably contaminated and unclean. Not the place to be discussing creative food sources.

  Vhortghast threw one of the engine levers and the grease dripping machine began to slow.

  “All I’m saying is that we have to eat.”

  Up ahead a brightly lit station with a squad of armed Nanemen in full battle gear lit by pink and blue gas lamps waited unpropitiously. The engine drifted to a crawl and the Naneman soldiers saluted the High King as Caliph stepped onto the platform.

  The guards parted as Vhortghast guided Caliph up several steps to an open bay and into a wide hallway lit indiscriminately along its black esophagus with candles and torches and gas lamps and forgotten lanterns.

  They passed a wooden chair with a crusted and gruesome jacket hung from its back. Together with a gory hook laid at its feet, the chair composed a sort of mile marker on the interminable walk.

  Several metal doors evolved from the gloom but Zane Vhortghast pressed on. Caliph felt only too happy to bypass them. They had small barred windows and offered only darkness beyond.

  At the end of the hallway, Zane bid Caliph wait at a pair of double doors similar to the ones they had passed but devoid of peep slots.

  He approached a wooden cabinet mounted on the wall under a flickering lamp. Upon opening it he dragged a pair of strange objects out into the light. One he handed to Caliph.

  “You may want this,” he said without explanation.

  It was a leather mask with glass eyes and a strange canister that hung like a proboscis over the mouth and nose. It fit snugly by means of adjustable straps that netted over the back of the head.

  Caliph took it limply with a growing sense of unease. Vhortghast turned the handle on the doors and a dull echoing thud sounded as some metal pinion retracted. The doors swung in.

  Caliph stepped forward, hesitantly, eyes adjusting to the gloom. At first he could see nothing. Then the stench hit him in the face like a blacksmith’s hammer.

  The vile, overpowering fume of concentrated piss and sewage choked him as if a bottle of pure ammonia had splashed across his face. Caliph fumbled mindlessly for his gas mask, trying to pull it on before he convulsed.

  Vhortghast helped him unsympathetically, tightening the straps that hung off the back of Caliph’s head like drooping antennae.

  For a moment Caliph concentrated on breathing. He closed his eyes and rested his palms on his knees, sucking odorless air into the close leather funnel around his mouth. After a moment he felt better and stood up.

  The room seemed to sway before him. But it was not an illusion brought on by nausea. The room did in fact sway, or rather the contents of the room swayed.

  Caliph could see men in headgear similar to his own moving between row upon row of large caliginous shapes. They carried rods and wore seemingly one-piece uniforms and high top boots with cleats. Occasionally they reached out and touched one of the hanging shapes with their rods and the shapes jolted mindlessly in response, swaying on creaking chains.

  Caliph felt his gorge rise. A network of pipes along the ceiling knitted in perfect symmetry over the prodigious objects hung beneath them, elbows of black ribbed metal turning down at every cross section, thrusting into the top of huge breathing bulbs of meat.

  Like a cattle yard, where butchered animals were hung on hooks to drain. Only these great carcasses were alive and three times the size of a butchered cow. Three heavy chains hooked onto iron rings that pierced their upper portion and suspended each living meat several feet above the floor. They were vaguely the shape of a human heart and the iron rings that suspended them pulled the tissue into painful-looking triangles, like the masochists in Ghoul Court who pierced their nipples and
stretched their skin until it bled.

  The meat had no head or arms or legs. It had no skin but a translucent bluish white membrane that covered the dark maroon muscle tissue and bulging blue veins underneath. Lumpy patches of yellow adipose clustered in grooves and seams where the muscles joined in useless perfection.

  Cable-thick tubing ran from above, bundled together and coupled into various implanted sockets for reasons obviously associated with sustaining dubious life.

  Occasionally, muscles twitched or a sudden shudder went through the enormous cohesion of mindless flesh and sent the body swinging in the slow tight spiral allowed by the chains.

  At the bottom of the meat, near the more pointed but snubbed posterior, something like an anus spewed filth with peristaltic violence into a square depression in the floor. Urine dribbled or sprayed from some hidden hole proximal to the defecating sphincter, helping to wash soupy piles of shit and blood toward runnels in the floor.

  Caliph stood in stupefied horror, trying to digest the scene before him. Thousands of living meats hung in orderly rows throughout the darkened room. Caliph tried to speak through his mask but it was no use.

  Vhortghast beckoned him through a side door and then through a secondary door into an observation hall with large windows that looked out on the mindless herd. Caliph removed his mask. The air was tolerable and Vhortghast did the same.

  “How do they breathe?” asked Caliph. It was the first of many horrified questions that he raised.

  “The tubing supplies oxygen directly into the lungs and likewise removes spent air with every exhalation by means of one-way valves. I’m not sure what the other small cables do myself but I’m sure it’s important. The main pipes that run down into their throats carry a kind of nutrient sludge made of ground-up silage and grass and rainwater or whatever else it is in Emolus’ name that they put in it. I think some of the other cables help keep the meat healthy, taking the place of exercise. But those boys with the chemiostatic rods help too. They shock the meat all day long, stimulating whatever it is they stimulate.”

  “We eat that?”

  “Every day. You pay a pretty gryph for real beef these days. But not even the butchers know the difference. Only the major distribution points get whole carcasses. They cut it up from there and send it to the markets and meat stores. As the High King you get a choice very few people get: meat or beef.”

  “Does it . . .” Caliph struggled, “Does it feel?”

  “Seems to. But it doesn’t think as far as we know. All it’s got is a spinal column that runs involuntary muscles and the like. No brain. Think of it as one big chicken breast. No gizzard. No neck. No wings.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  Vhortghast shrugged with apathy Caliph was growing accustomed to. “Like I said . . . we have to eat. The alternative is grim. The upside is that when Freja Din orders a rare steak before the opera tonight only you and I know what she’s really getting.”

  Caliph found little humor in the truth. “So how long has this been going on? Does all this . . . meat . . . just feed Isca?”

  “Gods no. This is a huge operation. Why do you think the secret rail goes straight to Malgôr Hangar? We pack whole carcasses in refrigerated canisters and fly them to distribution points from Vale Briar to Mortrm. This has been happening for nearly twenty years now. Odds are you ate some meat when you were living in Candleshine.”

  Caliph nodded.

  “I suppose if it killed you it would defeat the purpose.”

  “Exactly. It’s actually pretty tasty. Lean, tender . . . I guess the downside is that Mrs. Din won’t even get a stomachache.”

  Caliph had an immediate gut instinct to terminate the whole clandestine industry. But obviously terminating the industry would mean catastrophic famine—if Vhortghast was telling the truth, which Caliph felt just as strongly, though unfoundedly, that he was.

  “So why show all of this to me?”

  “Because you’ll see the paperwork, even though it will be itemized as something else and it takes a lot of money to run this place. Now that you know what it is, you won’t throw a fit when the quarterly losses are deducted from the treasury.”

  “We lose money on this?” Caliph couldn’t believe the growing bad news.

  Vhortghast nodded. “Not as much as we would raising cattle in the mountains. But look at the technology! That’s not a low-maintenance operation on the other side of this glass.”

  “How . . . do they—er, multiply?”

  Vhortghast shook his head and made the southern hand sign for no all at the same time.

  “That my friend, you do not want to know.”

  It had been a day filled with surprises, just as Gadriel promised.

  After learning the disconcerting source of Stonehold’s protein Caliph had finally gone to dinner. Then had come the dark gaudy maelstrom of the Murkbell Opera House featuring a Pplarian love story about a four-armed sorcerer trying to seduce a young girl into his mansion on the moor.

  Following the show, Vhortghast rode silently in the carriage while Caliph stared out at the moving panorama of cubist patterns: shadows and pipes and sickly orange landings where lovers groped or children sat playing with dead things they had tortured during the day.

  A man with a lantern pushed his wheeled umbrella cart over the slick cobbles.

  Finally, they reached King’s Road and entered the Hold close to midnight. The drawbridge was still down, torches guttering brightly, waiting for the High King’s return.

  As soon as the carriage rattled over, the huge wooden bridge groaned up behind them, securing the castle from anything not brave enough to enter the cold watchful waters of the moat. Amid the silt and spongy bones of former criminals, Vortghast assured him that multieyed creatures sulked and waited.

  When the carriage finally stopped, Vhortghast stepped out as Ngyumuh held the door. The Pandragonian watched closely as Caliph left the carriage.

  “I’ll see you early tomorrow morning,” said Vhortghast. We’ll be meeting the Blue General for tea in Ironside before touring the armada.”

  Caliph restrained a sigh. He waved halfheartedly as the spymaster departed. When he arrived in his room, he unbuckled the sword he had been given and let it clatter—unexamined—to the floor. He didn’t even undress but opened the west-facing windows that looked out on the hills and fields, letting in the slightly rural sounds of the distant moors.

  A fresh wind set his shirt rippling across his back. It made him smile weakly before he turned and fell face-first into bed, knowing this was only the beginning of a very long week.

  CHAPTER 10

  The wound goes bad. Sena’s breathing quickens; her heart is racing. Chills and fever come in tides. Her mind shuts down to protect her from the pain.

  She remembers night sweats and the constant taste of vomit. They say the bizarre wound is putting Megan to the test.

  The Shrdnae Mother comes and goes. Sena hears fragments through the snow of quasiconsciousness. “Septic shock.” “We have to move her.” “She’ll die in transit.” “Get the smell-feast . . .”

  Sena wants to scream at them to stop. Let me go! Let me die! But Megan cannot conceive defeat. She rips the stitches out, opens up the wound, intolerant of its insubordination. She fills the cavity with numbers and commands the flesh to mend.

  Sena passes from cognition back into the void.

  Toward the end of Psh, Sena woke slowly.

  Silver hoses hung like jewelry in the air. Black silk enrobed the room. It draped her, fell in valances all around. A ray of diamond-colored light struck her midriff, splashing wetly on the creature making love to her naked waist.

  The smell-feast’s corpulent red shape had no head. It looked like a scarlet oyster without a shell except for the tendril-like pseudopodia that clutched her abdomen in a hungry embrace. Its peristalsis was slow and hideously erotic.

  The silver hoses were for it, pumping in a warm cocktail of drugs and juice. Mindlessly, it fed on the p
erpetual flow and exosmotically released its waste slime into her blood. Her circulation coursed through the creature’s digestive tract, adding to its color. It was using her heart to pressurize its intestines, force the piped-in nutrients into receptacles in its gut.

  If the hoses were unplugged the slow horror would reverse several of its pumps. It would shift from regulation to suction and turn its insatiable hunger back on her. But the Sisterhood’s iatromathematiques were skilled. The creature’s biorhythm was perfectly controlled. Sena found herself both host and symbiote in the coupling of its stringy arms.

  The witches watching her with holomorphic eyes were silent as the smell-feast devoured everything diseased, even the bacteria in her blood. Slowly, over days, the creature filled her with medication it deemed waste, hydrating her with excess water from its food.

  Eventually, Megan and one of her iatromathematiques entered the room.

  “Shh. Be still.”

  With a needle, they introduced a virulent toxin into Sena’s veins. It was poison only for the smell-feast. The creature’s mucus reacted immediately, suturing her veins with a kind of rubber patch, a sealed valve that allowed it to withdraw safely from the pounding pressure of her heart.

  No more pain. She must have fallen asleep again.

  Megan stood over her with a bundle of scrolls under one arm: glowing, Sena realized, not with happiness but with the euphoria of victory.

  “It’s time you had something to do. Time you started preparing.”

  “Where am I?”

  But Sena recognized the carvings in the walls; the starry fresco smeared eight hundred years ago across the ceiling dome. With the dreamy nocturne playing on the gramophone Sena could be certain they were in parliament.

  She sat up, gathering the black silk bedclothes around her. Her head was still foggy and she squinted in the patchy sunlight. “Can I have some water?” Her mouth was dry and she wanted a bath.