The Last Page (97 page)

Caliph gritted his teeth, donned his gear and marched back out to the observation deck. He reattached his tether and got to work on the Pplarian gun.

No,
he told himself.

You conceited prickish ass! They aren’t fighting for you. They’re fighting for Stonehold . . . for themselves . . . for the place they want to live. And you, as the High King, owe it to them not to give up before it’s through.

Every firing shook the cannon’s inner mechanisms so that after three such volleys certain bolts had to be readjusted.

Off the starboard side, one of Saergaeth’s airships listed oddly. As Caliph worked he noticed its decks devoid of movement. The flaps in the tail were banked hard. The bloated bloodred thing was going in vast protracted circles.

The Iscan heavies fired again.

Caliph saw the shot this time by virtue of the obscene chance that the propelled tunsia sphere actually impacted one of Saergaeth’s gliders. Caliph’s attention was drawn to the missile’s arc just after impact.

The glider had turned to fragments of wood, metal, leather and gore and the faint orb that had destroyed it had left a visible wake of fumes from the glider’s cell. It had also slowed tremendously. Caliph could tell it was about to begin its return trip, plummeting through clouds to lodge deeply in the frozen fields.

But something astonishing happened instead.

It did not fall.

Its velocity increased. It changed direction. It swooped like a gumball on a string. Swung in a smooth arc, impacted an Iscan airship, tore relentlessly through and accelerated toward an invisible gravitational pull. It hit another of Saergaeth’s gliders, disintegrating the aeronaut and his lighter-than-air craft into a spray of tiny bits.

Caliph could follow it with his eye because its track was faintly visible. Not a trail behind, but its path ahead. And it was growing clearer every fraction of every second. Like the negative image the Pplarian lightning left on his brain when he closed his eyes, a dark line, a blackish foreshadower materialized, showing where the ball would go.

Then Caliph lost track of it amid the chaos and the noise.

What could it mean?

At least some mechanic of his plan must have succeeded. Alani must have installed the devices on a portion, no matter how small, of Saergaeth’s fleet.

Hope returned as the heavies fired again. Roaring lions. Angry personifications of some overused political symbolism.

“Tell the captain to board that ship!” shouted Caliph.

He pointed to the derelict zeppelin cutting mindless circles in the sky.

“Yes, sir!”

The Pplarian gun concussed the air and another gout of lightning split the sky.

Fifteen minutes later, they were docked above the
Mademoiselle
. The coupling was tricky. A set of additional controls existed in a kind of inverted crow’s nest below the
Byun-Ghala
’s observation deck. The copilot had climbed down via an exposed spiral staircase.

He used the secondary controls to put the upside-down steeple into a coupling dead center on the other zeppelin’s crown.

They stacked on top of each other, floating like fat cacti in air.

It was extremely difficult not only because of the ongoing battle but because the captain had to fly the
Byun-Ghala
at exactly the same speed and direction as the other ship. If he did not, the coupling might snap.

Caliph and several other airmen descended the stairs, gripping the freezing iron tightly against the wind. They made it to the dorsum of the other airship by way of metal rungs.

Above, the
Byun-Ghala
billowed, obstructing much of the sky. Below, the great airbag of Saergaeth’s ship stretched pincushion-like. A floating red island covered with petulant limbless trees.

Near the coupling, a hatch opened into the hull. Caliph spun the handle and pulled up. Narrow dark steps descended through a slender cavity between the gasbags. They slithered down several flights.

Finally they emerged on the ship’s bridge.

The pilot of the enemy craft was slumped at the helm, an arm hanging through the wheel like a crowbar. His dead weight had jammed the flaps, caused the propellers to beat against fins laid perpetually to the right.

The airmen drew swords and spread out.

Caliph checked the pilot for wounds.

Nothing.

There was minor trauma to the ship, easily visible. A cannonball had entered on the port side, strafed through every intervening structure and cut through heavy reinforced stanchions as if they had been bundled straw. The missile’s velocity must have been unreal at the time of impact.

Its remains were found after several minutes, lodged deep inside the zeppelin’s belly. Wholly melded with another object. A twisted mass of tunsia and shattered glass. Both objects had been driven up the middle of a support wall, wedged between duralumin beams, stopped at last in their catastrophic path.

“Everyone’s dead, your majesty.”

The analysis came back after a three-minute survey of the ship.

“No signs of struggle. It’s like they all just fell over.”

“It’s not right,” said another man. “Creepy as a night on Knife and Heath.”

But Caliph’s fear had dissolved. He ushered his men back toward the
Byun-Ghala
. When they reached the top of the
Mademoiselle
’s hull he took a moment to gaze in panorama at the battle that compassed them on every side.

Many of Saergaeth’s airships were now doing strange things. Going in circles like the
Mademoiselle
. Others were ascending or descending without apparent reason. One made a spectacle of dragging through Glumwood’s upper fingers, ravaged by the forest’s claws.

Caliph suppressed a cheer.

Back on the
Byun-Ghala
he heard another salvo assault the sky. The Iscan heavies were firing again.

As the sun went down, Alani watched the war from the ground.

He felt the wind; it walked restlessly up and down the cheerless hills.

His men had installed nearly fifty cells.

Split souls. Half-damned creatures.

They were separate from the real solvitriol cells Saergaeth had found on the
Orison
. Half-souls couldn’t power engines. At least not conventionally. Their only force lay in the path of attraction.

Alani’s men had carried tiny cells, barely the size of chicken eggs. They had used tunsia bolts, securing them to the frames of as many zeppelins and engines as they could. They chose places where even if the bolts gave way or the material of the frame twisted and tore under the strain of mutual attraction, the damage would be catastrophic.

When the Iscan heavies started firing, the other half of each of Sigmund’s bisected human souls overcame whatever plasma diversion had temporarily negated their collective pull. Both halves sought each other out.

The bullets homed in, finding the one and only target they had been made unerringly to strike.

Unheard collisions rocked the ether, ripped bodies and souls apart while every inanimate thing remained unfazed. But it was intrinsically unpredictable.

The Iscan heavies were firing blind, not knowing which zeppelins housed which targets or what paths their bullets would take. Some struck ships already engaged with Iscan ships. The result was indiscriminate slaughter.

Just outside the radius of ethereal disturbance, Alani had heard other aeronauts complain of queasiness and acute unrest. Alani himself had felt the diminishing ripples, disturbing something he had never felt before, threatening to dislodge him from his fleshy shell.

That was when Alani had taken a glider to the ground. Most of his men were dead. Despite his best efforts, extortion could only last until his psychological hostages lost hope, decided it no longer mattered whether any of them lived or died. Their beliefs were at stake. And one or two had talked, risking themselves and their fellow crewmen to the surgically implanted beads behind their eyes. The jig was up.

Six of Alani’s men had been discovered and killed.

Alani had fled. His men had been able to install only fifty units.

Fifty! Less than thirty percent of what they were supposed to have done.

Alani cursed and smoked his pipe from his hidden vantage south of Clefthollow. That meant that if every missile fired from Caliph’s heavy engines found its mark, Saergaeth’s zeppelin fleet would still be double that of the High King’s.

Somewhere in the skies, the spymaster of Isca knew that Caliph Howl was already dead.

More snow brought the zeppelin battle to an eerie standstill during the night. The flakes were thick and the ships stopped for fear of colliding with other vessels.

But early in the morning, from the west, the snow was replaced by defeat: falling silently out of the clouds. Caliph couldn’t help but notice it from his dizzying position on the starboard deck. He watched mutely as the massive red bellies shredded tendrils of vapor. It had to be a dream. A nightmare. The rail became his only connection to reality. No ship. No deck. No crewmen running. Just a shaft of cold, pushed hard into both hands, solid and immovable. He gripped it tightly as the
Byun-Ghala
tilted in the sky.

The directionless sense of perspective afforded by vertigo made the vast crimson skins bursting out of the clouds look like a pod of red leviathans breaching in an ocean of white. Except that it was upside down. All of it. The clouds above the battle had created a false ceiling over the entire war. Now they ruptured, spilling a second armada, scores of dark red fruit popping into existence, falling on the remnants of Caliph’s ragged fleet.

How could Saergaeth have hidden them? Holomorphy? Caliph watched the red ships’ bays open and vomit a host of chemical bombs. The storm of canisters passed through the aerial battlefield and plummeted toward the ground.
The bombardment brought even the Iscan heavies, trundling through the snow, to a creaking stop that Caliph felt physically against his heart.

So cold, at the very center of his chest, it was like the weight of all those zeppelins had come crushing down on him. He couldn’t breathe. Saergaeth had outwitted him after all. Stonehold’s old hero had pulled together a battle plan that a boy from Desdae hadn’t been able to overcome. It had been ruthless. It had depended on superior numbers. And just when Caliph thought he had seen the full force of Miskatol brought to bear, Saergaeth had pulled back the curtain and said, Look: I have more.

Someone was talking to him. But all he could hear was the faint explosions in the fields below.

“Your majesty! Your majesty!”

Caliph turned his head slowly. One of the deckhands was shouting at him, tears gushing from his eyes. Why was he crying? Men were yelling incoherently. The
Byun-Ghala
tilted again, sharply, engines revving. The captain was turning her away from the battle.

“Where are we going?” asked Caliph. He felt so out of breath. “We can’t run . . .”

The deckhand was close, right in his face. Why was he so close? He was younger than Caliph, tears streaming down his cheeks, “It’s going to be all right . . .”

“I think I need to sit down,” Caliph whispered. But he could not move. He tried again.

Strange.

He looked toward his feet and suddenly saw that the deck had been blown apart right in front of him, metal bent into crazy branch-like fingers. Wood had been blasted away.

Part of the railing, or maybe a support beam, was projecting through the center of his chest. He felt embarrassed, as if he had made a terrible mistake. He wanted to apologize to the deckhand for not realizing what had happened.

“Oh,” said Caliph. “Oh . . .” The clouds swept by, beautiful and gloomy; the wind was cold.

“We’re going to get you home.” The deckhand was bawling. “Hold on . . . hold on!”

The tailors presented Sena with a dozen options. She settled on a pale suede jacket, trimmed with white fur. It fit her torso like a glove, buttoning up the front with wooden toggles, cosseting her neck in a stiff fur-lined collar similar to those worn by monks in the western hills. Gorgeous wine and rose-colored embroidery flourished up and down the suede. She put it on, checked herself in the mirror and went down to deal with the commotion in the great hall.

Even though it was practically the middle of the night, the royal huntsman had come, accompanied by the taxidermist and a group of other men.

They had brought the creature down.

The patio doors were opened to admit the massive head. Gadriel had balked at first but Sena was back in power (Caliph had left specific instructions) and she ordered him around with satisfaction in exchange for his treatment of her the week before. She had them haul the specimen in and hang it in the great hall.

It was a terrifying thing. The head was small only in comparison to her memory of that night, being roughly the size and shape of a giant pumpkin.

“Incredible specimen, my lady. An aberration perhaps never to be catalogued again.” The taxidermist held a repugnant kind of reverence for the thing.