The Last Page ch-1

by Anthony Huso

  He took Sena’s hand and dragged her like a child through the crowd. Frankly, she felt like a child. She allowed herself to be led. She didn’t have a weapon. She didn’t want to be a Shrdnae operative. Since the Halls in Sandren, she didn’t dare to trust herself. No! Caliph’s bodyguards were well trained. She would let them take charge. As the huge man pulled her forward, her legs couldn’t keep up and she heard the narrow dress rip. Instead of coming free she stumbled. Tangled in the tube of satin.

  Vexed by the slowdown, the guard noticed her dilemma and paused to reach down. He tried to tear out the kick pleat. It was an error.

  When he crouched and turned his back on the mass of people something struck him from behind. He dropped to his knees with a chilling look of surprise.

  Sena saw a tall thin man behind the guard, a slender stiletto in his hand, ugly pink eyes intent on her face. The guard had dropped his sword, slumped forward, sprawled out in the hall.

  A sudden chunk sound, followed by the pink-eyed man’s head doing an abrupt forward nod, jarred Sena from her trance.

  A crossbow bolt had entered Mr. Naylor’s head from behind and ruptured his forehead. He looked like an apple on a skewer. Sena followed the trajectory back to the box where one of the other guards cradled a light metal crossbow in his hands.

  The truly horrifying part of it was that Mr. Naylor did not go down. His head popped back up and he looked around despite the gruesome trauma.

  His distraction was momentary. The hand with the stiletto lunged for Sena. She launched backward off her toes, avoiding the knife but impacting an elderly man with a cane who had been shuffling in bewildered circles right behind her. The codger tipped over like a chair and Sena tumbled over top, landing on her back with her buttocks on his head and her shoulders on the floor.

  It was too crowded to be graceful and her clothing was still an obstacle. By the time she had gotten to her feet, she had managed to pull off her high-heeled shoes. She looked up at the pink-eyed man just as a second guard tackled him from behind.

  Mr. Naylor went down like a sled under the momentum of the flying guard. He slid across the carpet, crushed down and howling with rage. It looked so painful that Sena nearly screamed with disbelief when the guard was lifted up on the back of the rail-thin man like an enormous pack.

  Mr. Naylor turned around, his head transfixed with metal, his arms pinned at his sides, a great pink rug burn trawling down the middle of his face. Despite the man encumbering his back, his powerful grasshopper legs moved him with ease over the fallen bodies toward Sena.

  A second crossbow quarrel struck the opera house manager in the chest. This one took him to his knees. But the guards had no interest in anything other than getting the High King’s mistress out of the opera house unharmed.

  The man riding Mr. Naylor’s back let go, grabbed Sena and pulled her toward the spot where Zane Vhortghast was motioning to a window.

  The stairs were choked with people. But there was more to it than that. Sena saw why the spymaster had herded them toward the casement. Two other tall thin men with glassy strange-colored eyes were closing in on their position. The newcomers had bald heads and open mouths and seemed by their strange exaggerated motions to be climbing across the level floor, clawing at the air with arms in a bizarre mantis-like posture.

  One of the guards pulled his trigger and a crossbow bolt plunged into the lead creature’s shoulder. Another bolt from the second guard pierced its head. Neither one slowed the thing down.

  Like in a nightmare, the monster took hold of the quarrel in its face and pulled it out, tossing it aside carelessly.

  Zane Vhortghast was shoving Sena through the window while his men drew their swords and engaged the seven-foot scarecrows in desperate melee. One had powered up his chemiostatic sword and touched the enemy with a vital thrust. There was a flash. The creature shivered as fire darted from its skin both where the electricity entered and from the explosive wound that appeared instantaneously on its foot.

  Its ankle ruptured. The tibia burst through like a whitened spike. Still the thing came, walking on the knife-like point of its destroyed leg, dragging its foot behind.

  The guard tried to power up his sword again but the superhuman hands were upon him, long thick fingers lifting him in a vise-like grip. The creature tossed him aside, searching for Sena.

  Zane Vhortghast took one last look at the fearless almost-human-thing behind him before following Sena out the window. A fire escape clattered down in switchback fashion to a small wooden dock where Caliph, having been dragged off against all effort, stood furious but relieved to see her safe outside.

  More men had pulled up in thin slender gondolas at the rear of the theater. They hauled Sena and Caliph on board as something thin and powerful emerged on the fire escape above. Crossbows thumped and a cloud of bolts converged on the creature, filling it like a pincushion. It fell from the metal stairs and landed brokenly at Mr. Vhortghast’s feet.

  Sena thought she saw something pale and large jackknife with lethargic grace below the dark water as she passed from the dock into the boat. It vanished before she could get a proper look.

  “There’s something down there! There’s something in the water!”

  As she spoke the second gondola jerked sideways, throwing men in flailing profusion and great splashing blossoms of foam. The boat capsized and promptly began to sink.

  “Out! Out! Out!” shouted the spymaster. He grabbed Sena’s wrist and pulled.

  Caliph made a dangerous leap and hit the dock. Awkward. Bashing his shins against the planked edge. He yelped and cursed. Someone pulled him to his feet and shoved him toward a two-foot cornice.

  The tremendous foundation from which the building sprung poked above the waterline, a vast slab that extended just beyond the dimensions of the opera house proper. It formed a ledge all the way around the lower extremities of the structure and allowed Vhortghast to goad Caliph through the darkness around the north side.

  Caliph would have none of it. He was fed up with being steered around. He turned and shoved his way powerfully back to the dock, taking hold of Sena’s hand. By what dim light there was, she looked remarkably collected. Her face was unafraid.

  Together they stepped out onto the lip of the foundation, following an impatient spymaster north then west to the building’s front.

  A retinue of operatives had pulled the royal carriage up to the waterfront. Unfortunately, there were now so many people milling around that they had little hope of using it to get away.

  On seeing the spymaster and the High King picking their way along the north face, big men with cudgels began to clear a path. They gave a mighty push and when they met resistance they swung away. People went down in rows, crawling and scrambling to escape the very determined, excessively short-tempered royal guards.

  The High King and his beleaguered party stumbled into a small clearing made by their brutality.

  “Get inside,” said Vhortghast. It was not a kind request.

  Caliph piled in with Sena, growing more and more frustrated. He hadn’t had time to think since the commotion erupted in the theater.

  He had been sitting, glossing over the remaining acts, estimating time on his pocket watch.

  When he looked up, a tall thin man had somehow appeared in front of his chair. He must have dropped from the box above, Caliph thought with amazement. The two men lurking in the shadows had burst forth, grappling the intruder as Caliph’s seat overturned. A chorus of shouts had gone up from the audience below, a sea of fingers pointing toward the tumult.

  What is happening? Caliph had thought. Where is Sena? Vhortghast had appeared suddenly, without coffee. He had dragged the High King from the box while other menacing shapes were closing in.

  It had been a blur.

  Caliph had gone out the window only after Vhortghast’s insistence that Sena was already safe.

  The spymaster had lied to get him moving.

  Outside, men had encircled the carriag
e with swords and nightsticks. The carriage was rolling. The men were forcing a path through the mob. The carriage creaked on its springs. Its wheels clattered on the cobbles as they picked up speed.

  Something hit the backside of the compartment and Caliph held his breath. There were shouts. Violent sounds. Caliph wondered if at any moment another of the thin men would reach around and scrabble at the window. He waited—but it never happened.

  Caliph reached out, held Sena closely as the horses gained momentum, pulling them out of Murkbell, into the terrifying geometry of Thief Town, toward the hopeful safety of Isca Castle.

  CHAPTER 20

  Fenwick Bengello is found amalgamated with the drive assembly of an engine smuggled out of the Crostate Brickyard near the middle of Hlim. His flesh is fused so completely with the output shaft that tendrils of muscle and skin have slithered through the lube passages, wrapped around the drive pinions and gears like roots. After a single failed attempt to cut him free (when their saws hit bones like steel) the city watch decides to bury Mr. Bengello’s remains in a criminal cemetery south of town.

  The only way they can finagle him into the coffin is to lay him facedown, twisted around and clutching the shaft. No one comes to see him anyway.

  His business partner, Jacob Vindai, who until recently held the deed to the abandoned brewery, turns up in a repair shop on Vhodâsh Street, decapitated, mouth filled with nuts and bolts, head sunk in a barrel of used oil.

  The city watch is dumbfounded. Recent attempts to steal machinery have left a trail of curious murders seemingly without motive.

  Investigators from the watch add it to ledgers crammed with unsolved crimes waiting for a lead.

  DURING the hot midsummer evenings, while the city ciders, strange ragmen carry bundles out of Maruchine, out of South Fell, sticking to the backstreets of North Fell, crossing into Barrow Hill. Some pull handcarts. Some carry baskets. They blend, cryptonymous, brown and overlooked. They tote washers and piston rings in their pockets, lug pulleys, chains and valves in canvas sacks. Connecting rods are hidden in flowers and withered potted plants. Their pilgrimage is sedulous. They do not relent. They go to Gilnaroth.

  The ruinous multitiered cemetery dubbed the Citizens’ Necropolis chokes on its own brickwork. Dense and barren and inconceivably decayed, the bewildering monuments thrust aberrantly above hard-packed clay.

  The mausoleums of the poor are dead slums, crowded just like the tenements of the living. Some are broken open and spilling apart. Raised yards of cement are fenced with wrought iron as if there are feuds, disputes and challenged boundaries: placed there to keep the neighbor’s dead children out.

  The ragmen pick their way over the course of many days, going back and forth, bearing engine parts like holy relics through a menagerie of absurd stone. They are not frightened by the awful maws of open charnel houses or the low piles nesting just inside. They are familiar with death and blend in, even here, where stacks of crumbling tombs fill the sky with colors like rust and urine streaking bone.

  The ragmen drift north toward the crest of the cemetery, wading through patchy ugly weeds that flourish like pubic hair. The crypts around them fairly rocket skyward, visible above the walls of the Hold as enormous charred leg bones overspread with renegade tuberosities, held together purely by virtue of their weight.

  The ragmen ignore them.

  A low crouched tomb of blebby moldy-white, cracked and peeling and filthy in its mortarless crannies draws them like a magnet.

  They come at odd hours, make counterfeit gestures of reverence or grief. A ludicrous display. No tomb so old has such devoted visitors let alone ones capable of remembering the deceased.

  The ragmen place their flowers then shove bags into the open hole, ripped open by grave robbers long ago.

  Deep inside the black corruption of the body niche, a shaft opens and drops straight down through the hillside. A rope and pulley installed in the middle of the night allows for bundles to be lowered through the shaft. The ragmen come and go from the tomb, passing engine parts to cohorts deep below.

  Then, just as silently, they leave Barrow Hill, avoiding the trendy cafés and chocolate houses along King’s Road where people sing late into the night, bohemian music bubbling and tinkling from saxophones and plucked or hammered strings. The ragmen hear the gaiety and shrink from it, fading away from crowds of people whose hair glows obscene colors under paper lanterns and colorful bulbs: purple, orange and incandescent pink.

  Back through North Fell, through South Fell, plotting a course through the tangled shadows of Hullmallow Cathedral into Maruchine, the ragmen return home. They dissolve like fog into the arched mélange of Ghoul Court.

  By the twentieth of Lüme, the Cabal of Wights has rebuilt the engine and swapped new parts for the drive assembly the city watch laid to rest. They are ready.

  There are good reasons for the elaborate plan. The sewers of Isca Castle are detached from the sewers of Isca City except for very slender culverts barely large enough to admit rats. One main line extends east out of the castle grounds, burrowing under Incense Street and the military yards of Ironside.

  Countless grates and guard posts secure it, make the High King’s toilets virtually impregnable.

  But when the foundations of the city were first laid, Isca Castle was planned on what is now Barrow Hill and a gigantic septic pit was dug and later covered over when the surveyors changed their minds.

  The empty tank remains far below the graveyard. A drain field additionally helps to suck excessive water away—preventing the kinds of grisly landslides that occasionally plague Marbolia, the cemetery of the rich.

  A lateral tunnel from the Barrow Hill septic tank runs north, pouring into what would have been the Barrow Hill castle’s main line to the sea. When the site was abandoned, this second vault was sealed off except to the east where water collects under the graves, sluiced down through narrow pipes into the labyrinthine channels under Temple Hill.

  Thus there are two sewer systems sequestered and forsaken from the rest of Isca’s gurgling conduits. They are entangled and fight for space like two tarantulas below the hills but at no place do they ever intersect or intersect the rest of the city sewers.

  A thieves guild once toyed with the idea of a base of operations in the Barrow Hill tunnels. But they are so inaccessible and so prone to sudden flooding that the guild reconsidered and settled Thief Town instead.

  The powers in Ghoul Court rediscover them and fathom a use.

  A tall gaunt man oversees operations in the dark. He has pink eyes like Mr. Naylor. On the morning of the twenty-fourth, long before the Byun-Ghala is set to leave Isca Castle for the spindle in Murkbell, the engine sparks to life.

  A maul, head covered every inch with teeth, begins chewing methodically at the north end of the tunnel, pumping up and down. It rips chunks of rock away and kicks up heavy dust.

  The gaunt man seems capable of ignoring the choking haze. His associates, who are crawlers—more like Fenwick Bengello—are forced to retreat up the southern tunnel toward Gilnaroth.

  Several others like the leader watch the machine. They pamper it and make adjustments as it edges relentlessly north. Due to mechanisms that lock the wheels in one direction and a great anchored tail off the back, the engine can only advance into the wall. The toothy maul dissolves inches of stone in minutes.

  It takes only seven and a half hours to eat through ten feet of stone.

  Finally the barrier between the castle sewers and the necropolis sewers burst in, caving slightly under a fine rain of debris. The thick stench of raw sewage gobbles hungrily at the dry cloud of dust.

  Long-legged men in striped suit pants and overalls and other various occupational costumes clamber through, disregarding the fumes. They begin sniffing their way through the tangled pools, searching for a hint of cleaner air.

  They have an inside man. Someone who knows they are coming. This has been prepared and rehearsed as carefully as the show Caliph and Sena sit
watching.

  From slick black tubes and catch basins, under baffles and hoods and around garbage-clogged weirs, the man-things hunt fresh air. Like Mr. Naylor they clamber through small spaces. They pass grinding pumps that move scum and sludge into deep containers that gel with slowly thickening sludge cake and lime. Walls, lumpy white and griseous with coagulated fat from the castle’s kitchen seep into chunky waste below.

  They pass a grit chamber thronging with mycophagous creatures that pause in their filthy reverie to listen to the man-things clamber through. The creatures twist back and forth like grubs rooted in fecal chowder, wavering blindly at the intruders.

  The man-things ignore them. They stalk onward through the pitch black, now and then banging their heads or shins on odd projections or hidden chunks of fallen stone. They seem oblivious to pain. Their eyes are no better than Mr. Naylor’s but they can decipher vague radiations.

  Without a trace of light, they are only partially blind. They catch a hint, a whiff. Lose it. Search in repetitive back and forth swathes; sniff and catch it again.

  Finally.

  The faint sweet smell of blossoms trickles on a downward draft, sifting pollen through circular grates overhead. The lead man claws upward. He fumbles at the grate. It has already been unlocked. He eases it up and sets it aside.

  A short vertical culvert above the first grate supports a secondary grate just a few feet overhead. It too is unlocked. With a faint creak and muted thud the grate opens trapdoor style onto a plush crop of perfectly manicured grass.

  The sheltering arms of a black mulberry normally help conceal the grate in the sumptuous gardens. Now they cloak creatures hauling themselves up into the courtyard as across town Caliph and Sena leap into the carriage, making good their escape.

  The man-things spread out quickly and quietly. One lurks at an adit until a pair of sentinels walk past.

  The creature waits, biding its time, emotionally detached from its goal. Then, at precisely the most favorable moment it casts its long sinuous arms out and pulls both men deep into shadow. Before they can scream, iron-like fingers burke them with savage efficiency.