The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  Roric kicked in the dust, heedless of the choking stench. His rage did not diminish when the vapors overcame him, and he began to gag and heave. He crouched, gasping, spewing vomit from his nose and mouth.

  Garen and the commander had donned their gas masks. They seized Roric and dragged him, despite his spastic kicking, from the field of dull glittering beads.

  Back near the relative safety of the idling machine where the air was less toxic and infused only with engine smoke, they laid Roric out on the deck. His eyes were weeping clear mucosa and slimy bile dribbled from his chin and nose—but he was breathing.

  “You dumb fuck!” whispered the commander. He turned his attention to Garen. “Next time he tries a stunt like that, I leave both of you behind.”

  Garen nodded and snapped his fingers in front of Roric’s clouded eyes. The commander went inside and ordered the engine to back up and head for the bridge.

  When Garen looked at Roric, his face took on a barely discernable expression of compassion.

  Back on the other side of the bridge, the commander joined the other two engine crews at the HQ pavilion and met the lieutenant colonel of the battalion overseeing the bridge, the five-man demolition team that had wired it and the two knights serving mostly as military advisors.

  By the time Roric was breathing well enough to sit up and look around, a fierce argument was already underway.

  “We do not, repeat, do not blow the bridge without imminent threat,” the lieutenant colonel was saying. His face flushed and strained and his eyes flashed from one man to another as he tried to bring the others under control. All of them were formidable professionals.

  “That’s not imminent enough for you?” One of the knights threw his arm in the direction of the disturbance. That’s what they were calling it. A disturbance.

  “Imminent threat of enemy crossing,” finished the lieutenant colonel. “We have orders. And that wasn’t the enemy. We don’t know what that was!”

  He was shouting in the knight’s face, a brave and rash thing to do. Spittle was flying. He flung his hand toward the sky. “You think blowing the bridge will stop that if it comes back?”

  The knight did not back down. “Do I look like I give a fuck? We have mass casualties. You’ve got less than a thousand men left. Our zeppelin’s gone. Most of our supplies were in that town. This just became an indefensible, tactically dead position. What good is the bridge without Fallow Down?”

  “You’re not authorized to make that decision!”

  “Whore-shit!” fired the knight. “Decisions like this are why I’m fucking here. We aren’t FNG. Our orders were to protect Fallow Down which—by the fucking way—is gone!”

  Knight was a throwback term to the days when there was no such thing as chemiostatic power. They were outfitted for the severest kind of contingencies, trained to deal with being cut off, outnumbered and surrounded in hostile territory. Knights were more than one-man war engines. They were seasoned veterans and this one’s name was Stroud; he impressed Roric Feldman. He wore heavy brown armor that lifted from his shoulders, arms and back in gracile stingray spines. Despite being made of heavy metal, the armor looked anatomically like plates of bone.

  Roric had never seen a suit of it up close. Holomorphically tempered glass bulbs filled with luminescent green liquid squeezed between disks in a virtual spinal column of chortium. He knew the metal was tough as steel but slightly lighter in weight. It oxidized like aluminum; the film that covered it protected it from further corrosion even though it looked identical to iron rust.

  Roric’s eyes followed flexible metal hoses with glass couplings. Chemiostatic fluid flowed to certain regions of the armor: powering shoulder joints, heating or cooling abdominal plates below the cuirass and the fauld.

  Stroud towered over the lieutenant colonel as he argued about the bridge. Roric held his tongue. He knew the lieutenant colonel’s rank still gave him the edge.

  “I’m about ready to kick your ass, soldier! Your position here as tactical liaison is finished! Are we clear?”

  It was a dangerous line to go but Roric saw the knight nod. “Yes, sir.”

  The lieutenant colonel’s face was splotchy—mostly from fear. It had taken every ounce of his authority to regain control under the extraordinary circumstances.

  “We don’t know what happened out there,” the lieutenant colonel shouted again, this time to everyone present. “Whatever it was, it happened to Miskatoll’s engines and troops as much as it did our own. Odds are it was some neutral force. It could be weather for all we know.”

  “Weather my ass. That was witchcraft.”

  Stroud’s opinion was popular. Echoed mutters of “holomorphy” flapped around the open tent. No one wanted to stay and guard a haunted bridge much less a place where they had seen the fiber of reality twist and snap like a shaken rug.

  The sudden stillness north of the river and the faint gray plain that most of the men had seen only from a distance had demonized the region.

  Less than an hour ago everything was normal: as normal as ordnance exchange on the front line could be. The danger, though extreme, had been categorical, comprehensible, able to be planned for.

  But now, even though no trace of the enemy force remained, a host of unclear suspicions beset the men. Everyone wanted out. Now.

  “FB!” shouted the lieutenant colonel.

  A thin man in light leather armor whose straps flapped from tightly cinched buckles and who still wore his gas mask pushed up like a bizarre hat on the top of his head had been waiting for the call.

  He had pulled a hooded bird from one of several cages. It perched on a stand at the ready. The falconer’s hand was poised, clutching a pen, ready to scribble the words on a tiny roll of paper.

  As the officer dictated, the falconer wrote. When he was finished a cruestone was snapped into the hawk’s exposed skull through a hole in its hood. The FB then removed the hood and turned the bird loose. It flapped madly for the Iscan High Command, blind, driving powerful muscles toward release from the fire that filled its brain.

  The lieutenant colonel had made his decision. Roric hoped secretly that it was the wrong one, that Saergaeth’s tactics would not be hampered.

  “Fire the bridge!”

  It was the decision everyone wanted. But the lieutenant colonel had made his point. He could have had it either way. He had not caved in to pressure. He had not buckled under Stroud’s verbal barrage. It was his decision alone. He had considered the pros and cons, measured the tactical advantages of a bridge versus a barrier. He had removed his ego from the scales and everyone in the pavilion knew it.

  The demolitionists turned and headed for the bank.

  Roric watched them go with mute nausea. His eyes burned. His stomach felt like it had turned to slime, liquefied by the caustic stench of the wasteland. He held his head in one hand and sobbed brokenly.

  The lieutenant colonel ignored it.

  “All right soldiers, saddle up! SOP! We move for the Noose in under twenty!” He began barking.

  Everyone moved but Roric Feldman. He sat on a field trunk holding his head.

  Garen stood beside him with his hand on his shoulder. He had already called for a medic twice. No one was coming. Roric’s tears were diminishing slightly. He was clutching, pulling himself together.

  “I remember when I was a boy,” he hissed. “My father talked about the blight.” He wiped his nose and eyes on his sleeve. “Do you remember it?”

  Garen nodded. “King’s Rot,” he said stiffly.

  “King’s Rot,” said Roric. “Only seen during Nathaniel Howl’s reign.”

  “That was different,” said Garen softly. “White mold on the ground . . . smut in the fields—”

  “Was it?” Roric hissed. “Was it different? Maybe it’s the same only worse. Maybe this is Howl Rot.”

  Garen seemed to swallow with difficulty.

  “What are you going to do?”

  Roric rose shakily to his feet.
“I’m going back to Kennan Keep,” he whispered. “I’m going to ensure Bendain’s Keep falls to Saergaeth. I’m going to make sure this war turns out right. I’m telling you so you can transfer your fealty to another house,” said Roric. He looked away.

  It was an outdated rubric, a formality extended to an honored member of one’s personal guard. It had been done in days of old as a way of allowing the warrior class to disentangle themselves from political crisis—leave before the assassins arrived, disavow any ties to a doomed line. It was a courtesy. A final charitable act.

  Garen looked toward the bridge just as the wires went live. Heavy steel charges filled with hülilyddite flowered, as yellow and bitter and poisonous in their eruption as the acid that gave them life.

  Blocks of white stone cartwheeled amid catastrophic debris made weightless by the transcendent moment of concussion. Small bits of mortar and chunks of broken rock turned into deadly projectiles. Nuggets of bridge fell like hail in profusion.

  An amber-gray cloud drifted west with the wind, a haze that once connected two sides of a river.

  The demolition team knew their business.

  “Lord,” said Garen softly. “There are no other houses to go to.”

  Roric looked at the captain, startled, suspicious.

  “You mean to—?”

  “I mean to serve the Duchy of Stonehold,” said Garen with simple candor. “And the Feldman House . . . to its end.”

  A ripple of doubt clouded Roric’s face for a moment, then disappeared as he saw that Garen meant what he said. He felt like weeping anew but didn’t.

  “All right . . . all right.” He looked at his shoes, nodding ridiculously as a father might nod to his son, allowing him to accompany him somewhere dangerous despite his better judgment. “If that’s what you want.” He cleared his throat of the last trace of the burning fumes. “If that’s what you want . . .”

  CHAPTER 19

  Some claimed Ghoul Court was a pornocracy without the reach of Isca’s city watch. It was the lair of people who made their living off atrocities: parnels, hippospadians and magsmen. Blink-fencers hawked stolen eyeglasses in the street while small-time crooks distributed cigarettes loaded with powdered aspirin.

  Pavement nymphs performed services up against the moldering foundations of huge brick warehouses or in congested alleys where flying buttresses provided shelter from the rain. They painted their faces with colorful designs meant to ward off the bortghast rumored to haunt the corner of Knife and Heath.

  Flesh-tailors from Bloodsump Lane arrived promptly for abuse at the hands of their masters. They lolled in green-lit second-story dens, staring from odd angled positions where they had fallen into chairs and filthy beds. For hours they would look at grungy plaster surfaces where flies and roaches outmaneuvered gravity, tasting the walls for flecks of organic spew.

  Zane Vhortghast was a common specter here though no one called him Zane. In the Court he went by Peter Lark, a minor manipulator of the threads. He led a charmed life despite his disconcerting connections to thugs and underworld guilds. If anyone paid him enough it was known that he could produce a body like magic, floating in the Bragget Canal before dawn the next day.

  He wasn’t a big fish but he wasn’t a guppy either. He passed with disturbing anonymity through the Court. Only those that knew him classed him as a dangerous man. But that was the spymaster’s desire, to go unnoticed while still being “plugged in.”

  Zane kept a small apartment in the Court for show. He never slept there but took some time every month to embellish the charade.

  He kept a pile of rumpled sheets on an iron bed frame and a partially dissolved bar of soap in his shower. The soap had cemented itself to the tray and seemed morose, surrounded by exposed pipes and tiles the color of toilet bowl stains.

  A half-drained bottle of Pplarian whiskey sat on the floor by the bed.

  There were some fake time cards from one of the factories in Growl Mort, a change of clothes, a worn-out toothbrush and a knife that looked like it might have once been used for murder.

  Zane looked out from his balcony. It was barely large enough to accommodate him standing.

  The sun was just slipping into a drunken red-faced coma behind heavily decayed buildings to the east. The sky was pink as nockstress flesh by the time little orange squares began to flicker in the darkening walls and edifices that pressed the street. People lit candles and oil lamps, moving light from room to room.

  The streetlamps remained ornate blackened scepters. Metholinate to Ghoul Court had been rationed, said the papers. In reality it had been turned off.

  Zane felt the indignation boiling just under the surface. The population wouldn’t stand for it much longer.

  Just the previous week, a man had tried to tap in under the street to siphon his own supply. He was smoking at the time and the explosion had thrown him through the bricks. He came out of the tunnel, through the street and into the open air, popping up like toast.

  A team of city engineers had come in to fix the damage, guarded by a squad of five knights in full battle gear. That was something new. Not even the hardest criminals thought about tangling with the knights. They were quite possibly the first outsiders not to leave in fear.

  Zane Vhortghast knew they wouldn’t be the last.

  Caliph’s plan for cleansing the Court would see action soon and it would not be a gentle clean.

  Part of Zane bemoaned the time he had sunk into the Court. He would lose most of his contacts to prison or they would become casualties of the raid. On the other hand, if it worked, it meant he would not have to invest any more time chasing phantoms.

  From his balcony, Fifth Street extended north like a latrine. Great peaked canisters, water towers and grinding engines squatted on rooftops like deformed metal goblins. They muffled the desultory moans emanating from windows with sashes thrown open to the night.

  The struggling cries of Ghoul Court’s diverse clientele issued lustily through the thick humid air. Zane imagined their sweating bodies for a moment wrestling in the dark, enduring the hot weather as they worked out anxieties linked to the encroaching war.

  A bottle broke in an alley and someone screamed. Three dark shapes trampled across the street, carrying clothes and other plunder.

  A knock sounded at the paper-thin door. Zane turned and crossed the room in four steps. He opened it, revealing a hallway that was darker than his room and smelled far worse.

  “Hey Peter.” A skeletal lad with mad black hair and deliberate scars up and down his arms stood wavering on the threshold. He had a birdcage in one hand. “Got yer tweet.”

  Zane jammed his hand into his pocket and pulled out a handful of coins. He squeezed them meticulously, pushing them out between his thumb and forefinger one at a time into his other palm.

  “Three gryphs is robbery.”

  The dizzy man smiled and loosely extended his hand.

  “Yeah, well, you know any other bird-duffers?”

  “Plenty.”

  The man sneered and gave Zane/Peter the cage.

  “Don’t spend it all on sweet red,” said Zane.

  The man made an obscene gesture in reply and stumbled off into the dark.

  Zane closed the door and locked it out of habit. He turned up the oil lamp on a small badly beaten desk and pulled off the cloth covering the cage.

  He swore.

  It was a pathetic sight. The pigeon was black from soot and badly torn as though it had been stuck in and then ripped out of a chimney pipe. The chirurgery had been preformed ruthlessly and recently. Blood still caked the feathers all around the excised flesh. The skull was pink and the bird cried piteously.

  Heartless as he was, cruelty to animals was something Zane Vhortghast could not stomach—which was why he ate the insensible meat produced under Thief Town as opposed to beef, rationalizing that meat wasn’t really an animal. It was more like plant life that grew in the dark. More like fungus.

  He swallowed a lump in his t
hroat and set the cage aside in disgust. He wondered if the thing could even make the flight. It was a long way. Farther than he himself had ever traveled.

  He had to hurry. He had been sweating it out waiting for the duffer.

  Tonight was the twenty-fourth of Lüme, the night the High King was taking his tart to the opera. Zane had promised to be there when they arrived, overseeing the security detail assigned to the building.

  He took the note he had composed earlier and opened the cage. The bird went hysterical. It didn’t have a hood. It thrashed about, terrified, clawing and pecking at his gloved hand. He was forced to grab it by the head to cover its eyes. The duffer hadn’t even given him a tube.

  Cursing violently, Zane struggled to get a tiny scroll case wired to its ankle. He then inserted his note and grimaced as he pressed a black cruestone into the metal clip screwed into the creature’s skull.

  He took it to the balcony, hoping it could still fly.

  Carefully, gently, with ridiculous indulgence, he set the thing on the floor. It took off at once, flapping back into the room, crashing into walls and lamps in its confusion.

  Zane winced and swore. He leapt about, trying to corral it, waving his arms, herding it toward the open sky. For a moment, he wondered if the chirurgeon had been ripped on something when he performed the operation. But then the fire in the bird’s mind finally seemed to consume its confusion. It stopped its self-abuse and wheeled toward the balcony. It sped out, up and away into the skyline’s brown glow.

  Heart pounding, Zane Vhortghast let out a long sigh, vowing to find the duffer and the chirurgeon when he had spare time.

  With only twenty minutes to reach the opera, the spymaster leapt out his balcony window, landed deftly on a steel drum and hit the bricks running.

  As the sky clotted with stray vapors and shadowy things, the Byun-Ghala departed Isca Castle. Its huge pulsating propellers powered it out across the striated murk. Miles of bruised atmosphere and city enmeshed, twisted together in a surreal tangle of deep maroon and deviant structural black. Lights twinkled far below, white-gold and tiny.