The Last Page

Sena swallowed two ounces and poured herself another glass. Stonehold will be my home, she thought.

A shadow in the room whispered to her, urging her to lug the Csrym T from its perch, open it and begin to read.

That night, winter fell like an anvil. From Kjnardag’s glittering slopes a cold snap stabbed south and crackled in the Iscan Bay. Snow descended. A parasitic host bedaubed the north with grotesque white.

Cold inveigled every cranny of the city. Steeples, bathrooms and bedrooms of the poor became its nests. Buckets of frozen night soil were tossed from door stoops of tenements devoid of plumbing. They bobbed, half cones of solid filthy ice, thudding dully along fouled concrete tunnels. The watch dumped chemicals in the sewer to keep them mostly liquid.

Caliph looked out from his study windowsill that had draped impossibly during the night. All across the skyline surreal sculptures drooled, white as frosting, defying gravity in a bake shop of the mad.

As predicted, when Isca’s stench had been dulled by snow, when things seemed almost sanctified and suddenly still, all-out war erupted on the western plains.

Word reached Caliph for the second time, a correction from Alani confirming that airships were lifting out of hangars in the border keeps far away: one day early. Irony of ironies, he attended one last meeting. Then, by hawk and word of mouth, he disseminated to his generals the signal that would finally put his plan in motion.

He felt numb.

Vaguely, he became aware of transitions taking place in the streets below the castle.

People couldn’t flee. Instead, they braced themselves and hunkered down, cracking un-laughed-at jokes in order to distance themselves from outright hysteria. He could see Octul Box from the parapet, where grocers’ shelves sold bare by half past six and storefronts closed as owners hurried home.

People changed. Priorities about-faced. There were no demonstrations at Shaerzac University, no more antiwar sentiment in the major press. Zeppelins. A countless host of zeppelins was coming and everybody knew it. Chemical bombs would fall on the capital of Stonehold, on Hullmallow Cathedral, on Cripple Gate, and Dmlt Hall. Terror and destruction would mar the ancient statues at Shaerzac University and kill the helpless in the slums of Gorbür Dyn.

Of course there were factions that still insisted a peaceful transfer of power could be achieved through several rather optimistic channels. They published rushed articles in flyers and held rallies in tiny bistros with an attendance of half a dozen souls. But their rhetoric had become the lunatic fringe and it drowned quickly in the tumult of a rising indignant mass. People were incensed by Saergaeth’s attack.

How dare he? How dare he attack Isca! The capital of Stonehold?

While the citizenry of Isca voiced their outrage, the military turned abstract anger into tangible force.

Caliph left Isca by zeppelin at seven fifty-six on the morning of the advance. He and a crew of twenty airmen headed west.

Boys in black flight uniforms tumbled across the decks, winding up the nickel-plated Pplarian guns. They adjusted slides, bolts, and loosened various clamps with ratchets, pulled safety pins that prevented rotation and fine-tuned a variety of other obscure settings on the clawlike turrets.

Caliph had sent word to Kl, thanking him.

Kl had sent eight strange cannon that Caliph divided judiciously among Isca’s fleet of forty. One he had harnessed to the Byun-Ghala. The rest he placed on his fastest ships.

Their long slender barrels gleamed with alien elegance, vaguely phallic. Glittering hoses coupled compression units to six-inch bores that conducted a unique shell down the weapon’s length.

Ammunition was limited.

Twenty shots per gun. The shells, like strange silvery seeds nested in racks to the loader’s right flank. Pointed at both ends and screwed together at their meridian, the shells were designed to break in halves after launch. Once the twentieth shot was fired, the cannon would be reduced to decoration, worthless until more of the special ordnance arrived.

Unfortunately, brigs from Mortrm had sunk a Pplarian frigate carrying just such a load. A second shipment was not likely to arrive until the war with Saergaeth had become a matter of historical debate.

Caliph gazed at the twenty alien bullets with a sinking feeling. He wasn’t counting on one hundred sixty Pplarian shells winning this war.

The Byun-Ghala slid west, following the Trill Hills that separated the mud pots to the north from the village of Burt. A thousand feet below and receding fast, brown lanes chugged with gray shapes. Steam engines, horses and carriages. Small platoons of local men stood in formation in the village square.

Caliph aimed one of the railing-mounted spyglasses and discovered they were armed with swords, pitchforks and probably a handful of chemical grenades. They were local militia lacking uniforms or armor. Some of their fellows loped along trails presumably hidden at ground level, darting under leafless trees that hardly camouflaged them from the sky.

They were getting ready.

But Brt cowered in the folded hills eight miles west of Isca. And if Saergaeth made it to Burt, Caliph knew nothing else would stop him.

In the cold air over Glmwood, Caliph squinted, checked charts and finally made out at nearly twenty-five miles just exactly what he was up against. Tiny flecks of red had begun to resolve against the hazy western chalkboard of the sky. Saergaeth’s zeppelin fleet numbered one hundred thirty-four according to the latest intelligence.

As the intervening miles shortened, the young soldiers on the deck looked solemnly west. Saergaeth’s cloud of measles swelled to the size of ruby-bellied reed flies, then cherries and, finally, they looked like great crimson balloons filled with blood.

Saergaeth had dyed his entire fleet red.

The crew began to take turns looking through the spyglass. They smoked nervously and peered into the lens.

One of the men cursed and grinned. He read the numbers painted on the taut skins and started calling them out. Caliph was looking too. He could see the enemy airmen walk across somehow hostile decks, smoke and look east through similar spyglasses. Caliph felt awed by the resolve. All around him, his men were ready to die and Saergaeth’s aeronauts were strange mirrors or doppelgangers.

The landscape below drifted in pastel grays, surreal and quiet except for five choratium horrors plowing through the snow. The Iscan heavies were heading west, ordered to provide ground support for the High King’s tiny fleet.

The Byun-Ghala had caught up with the rest of the airships. It slid between a pair of leviathans, a spiny minnow between goliath pike. Airmen on the other ships flashed signal lights in salute as the High King’s tiny dirigible sped past.

A condensation trail arced suddenly into the sky, launched from one of the Iscan heavies. Like a crayfish darting in clear water, it left an organic muddy-looking trail. The projectile reached its zenith over a cavalry of light Iscan engines and plummeted past them into Saergaeth’s ranks of heavy foot. It detonated remote catastrophe. Orange smoke surged like a sudden mushroom. An exclamation point above imperceptible carnage that served to mark the beginning.

Saergaeth’s array was highly visible now. Floating from the Greencap Mountains with a kind of fatuous malignancy. Perhaps Miskatoll had built more. By Caliph’s estimate, nearly two hundred zeppelins darkened the sky, many nearly half a mile long.