The Last Page (3 page)

On the far side, he finds his clothing gone. His key to the dormitory is gone.
Fooled after all!

He darts up the hill toward the unsympathetic edifice of Nasril Hall,
looking for available windows. Halfway up one of the metholinate pipes that siphons gas into the boy’s dormitory, the pallid cast of a lantern strikes his nakedness and a commanding voice bellows for him to get down.

In the morning, Caliph is locked in the pillory with the other seven, each of them bearing bright red welts that run horizontally across their backsides. Expulsion could have been the penalty, but seeing as how no felonies had been committed, the chancellor’s cane and a dose of public humiliation have sufficed.

Roric Feldman, master of the deception, gathers with the rest of the student body in front of the Woodmarsh Building to stand and sit and watch and laugh.

Of course, the chancellor knows there has been treachery. Nothing of consequence that transpires on Desdae’s lawns escapes Darsey Eaton.

He hears the boys’ complaints individually in his office. But the initiation serves his purpose—so he allows it to pass. These freshmen have learned a code behind the code: violators will be caught and they
will
be punished.

Caliph’s painful memory of the event was offset by knowledge that Roric’s exam was comprised entirely of essay. Caliph had taken it upon himself to rewrite all the tactics and all of the figures and many of the names and dates in
The Fall of Bendain.
It remained a very readable book, he mused smugly. Very official sounding.

Quietly, he unwrapped the package he had carried into the library and looked briefly at his handiwork. So much effort had gone into it that it pained him to leave it here. The exchange took place quickly. A book sliding off a shelf, a book sliding onto a shelf—a completely normal occurrence that would destroy Roric Feldman.

When the book came back, as they all must the night before final exams, the exchange would take place again and there would be no trace and no proof to support Roric’s distressed complaint.

Caliph stiffened suddenly and turned around. Someone had been watching.

She had just started up the spiral staircase that rose to the balconies. Caliph had only a vague notion of how her body moved as she went up the steps one at a time, carrying a small leather pack over her shoulder. Her jawline bowed, smooth and proud, tracing from gem-studded lobes; her curls were short for the helmets she wore in fencing class. She passed through a stray lance of window light and her eyes flared molten blue.
She looked directly at him, lips flickering with a wry vanishing smile, face perfectly illuminated. Then she was gone, radiant head disappearing above the second story floor, soft booted feet lifting her out of sight.

The crocus-blue glare had etched itself into Caliph’s mind. For a moment he felt like he had stared straight into the sun. Then he cursed. He knew her. She was in her sixth year but shared some of his classes, probably as audits.

“By
n, by
n, by
n,” he whispered the Old Speech vulgarity for excrement.

Carefully, he wrapped
The Fall of Bendain
in the paper his forgery had been in and slid it into his pack.

Odds were she had not understood what he was doing. Still, Desdae was a tiny campus; if Roric complained loudly enough, she might remember seeing him here and put the two together. He walked quickly to the wrought-iron stairs and spun up them, looking both ways down the third story balcony.

Dark curls and skin that stayed tan regardless of weather, Caliph felt confident despite his size. His torso had hardened from swordplay and his face was already chiseled with the pessimism of higher learning. He might be quiet but he wasn’t shy. A subtle nuance that had often worked in his favor.

He saw her down the right, hand on the balcony railing, headed for the holomorph shelves. He caught up with her and followed her into an ogive marked with the bust of Tanara Mae.

When he cleared his throat, her eyes turned toward him more than her body.

“Hello.” He kept it simple and upbeat.

“Yes?”

“Are you seeing anyone?”

“Quite direct, are you?” She sauntered down the aisle, slender as an aerialist, fingertips running over unread names. “Yes, I am . . . he doesn’t go to school at Desdae though.”

Her smell amid the dust was warm and creamy like some whipped confection, sweet as Tebeshian coffee. In the ascetic setting of the library it made him stumble.

“So if we went to Grume’s . . . or a play?”

“I like plays.” Her eyes seized him. Bright. Not friendly. Caliph had to remind himself that he had no personal interest in her. “There’s a new play in town,” she was saying. “Some urban gauche piece out of Bablemum. Probably atrocious.”

Caliph tapped his lower lip. “I heard about it. What’s the writer’s name?”

“I don’t know. It’s called
Rape the Heart.”
She drifted farther down the aisle.

“Tragedy?” Caliph pressed after, trying to corner her in a casuistic way.

She slipped between the shelves like liquid. “Depends on your point of view I suppose.”

“And you’d like to see it?”

“I’m seeing a boy,” she murmured, twisting the knife.

“But he doesn’t go to school here . . .” Caliph whispered.

“No. He doesn’t.”

“And I don’t mind.” His voice couched what he hoped was a satisfactory blend of confidence and innuendo.

“Final exams?” She seemed to maintain a constant distance as though the air were slippery between them. “Aren’t you busy or worried—or both?”

Caliph shrugged. “I don’t study much.” It was a blatant lie.

She frowned. “And you have money for a play?”

“I don’t pay anyone for notes. Actually I charge—expedition fees—you know?” His slender fingers gestured to the books all around. “I come into a good deal of money this time of year, but I usually get my tickets for free.”

“Rape the Heart
then?” She didn’t ask how he managed free tickets. “Tomorrow. I’ll meet you here before evening bells.”

Caliph tossed her a wan smile. This was not a date of passion. “I’ll be here. What’s your name?”

She shook her head derisively. “It matters to you?”

“I’m not like other men.”

“Boys,” she suggested. “If I were you and didn’t want to sound pretentious, I’d say, I’m not like other boys.”

“Right.” Caliph’s eyes narrowed, then he feigned a sudden recollection. “It’s Sena, isn’t it?”

Her lips curled at one corner.

He tipped his head. “Tomorrow evening . . .”

She stopped him just as he turned to go. “I’ll see you then . . . Caliph Howl.”

Caliph smirked and disappeared.

Sena stood in the dark alcove looking where he had vanished into the white glare of the balcony.

“Caliph Howl,” she mused with mild asperity. “Why now? Why here, after four years, do you suddenly decide to give me the time of day?”

Tynan Brakest was the
other
boy. He was sweet. He had been the one to pay her way at college. His father’s money ensured their relationship slipped easily from one moment to the next. The coins had purchased Tynan hours, weeks and months until the accumulated stockpile of familiarity had evolved into a kind of watered down love.

But Caliph Howl? Her stomach warmed.
This could be exactly what I am looking for.

A storm was coming. Caliph lay in wait at the top of the library, surveying the campus through a great circular pane of glass. The black plash of leaves perpetuated through the trees to the west where Naobi drizzled syrupy light on lilacs bobbing near the lake.

The universe snapped ineffectually at the dark silhouettes of students and teachers, human forms distorted by the warm gush of light spilling from the chapel across the lawn. Caliph felt superior to the herd migrating slowly toward Day of Sands vespers.

It was difficult for him to imagine being king. The fact that he was an heir did not present itself at Desdae. Here he found himself treated like any other student, disciplined and cowed under the stern rules of the chancellor. But his father assured him it was for the best.

It’s a time of unrest in the Duchy,
read one of Jacob’s few letters.
Men aspire to the High King’s throne. You’re safer at Desdae.

In the belfry, like lonesome beasts, the bells began to toll.

Caliph turned from the window and gazed on the dusty abyss of the library’s interior. Eight centuries’ worth of interred paper bodies infused the air with spoor. The pages were holomorphically preserved, mummified within this vast sepulcher. It was a temple to the dead, to thought, to maxims and poetry, to plays and battles and vagaries gouged out of antiquity. But it wasn’t Caliph’s temple.

The bells ceased and a pleasant loneliness poured in with the moonlight, varnishing the railings, tranquilizing every board.

He mouthed the words he planned to use tonight if Sena actually showed up. They were old words, bleak as the air that sighed around Desdae’s gables.

Forbidden by most governments, silenced through flames that had once danced on great piles of holomorphic lore, slowly, very slowly, holomorphy was being practiced again. Opportunists seeking an edge in business, politics—they had begun drawing blood.

At Desdae, the focus stayed safely on lethargy crucibles, thaumaturgie reactors that ran off planetary rotation and cow blood, that sort of thing.
The professors never openly admitted that other types of holomorphy were also catalogued in obscure sections of the library. But in the teeth of their frantic scramble to gain tenure, the faculty often followed a much older motto than Truth, Light, Chastity and Hard Work. Theirs was: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Caliph used a tiny knife to prick his finger. As any holomorph, he needed something to start with, an essential ingredient to begin the chain reaction where matter, memories, reality could be extruded and controlled.

Caliph could still remember the banal demonstration Morgan Gullows had put on for his freshman class: the way he had dropped that book. It had hit the ancient desk with a dusty thud and at that moment he had revealed a simple yet extraordinary idea to his young students: the book must travel half the distance to the desk and then half of that distance and so on, somehow going through an infinite number of divisive repetitions in a finite period of time. Although he had solved this mystery for them with simple mathematics, holomorphy, the Unknown Tongue, was the key to understanding the endless repetition of the spiral, the key to the ancient problem of the circle, the key to unlocking the universe.