The Last Page

Caliph did not have to second-guess whether she was being clever. This was code specifically for his eyes and it seemed her reason for writing it had been justified. If she had the foresight to write it nearly a year ago she must have foreseen her danger; their last conversation in the attic came back to him.

What had she been after? A book? The lines in the note were taking form now.

Just the two of us, battling the brigade of books, picking up . . .

In the original copy Caliph had quoted Timmon Barbas.

I wish it was I alone, entrenched in this sorrow, battling the brigade of foes, but alas I cannot do it alone. I am left picking up the splinters of broken bodies and shattered plans of war. For a hiding place I’d give my soul.

Caliph found the passage on page thirty-one. The words “you clever boy” had been written in the margin and they bracketed a paragraph that Caliph had composed himself.

In desperate times you must flee and we fled and hid ourselves where none would think—amid the buried dead in the hills. And we ate among the graves and slept amid the sepulchers, regaining what strength we could. And I had but two thousand men left in my army. Two thousand that lived in the hills like dead men. And we were four weeks from home.

There was the time frame of four weeks again. Caliph riffled through the shelves and pulled down a thin atlas of sorts with crude maps of the Hinterlands.

Four weeks from home, hiding with the dead . . .

His eyes ran over the map. There had to be hundreds of cemeteries within four weeks’ travel from here.

Wait!

Eternal love orders the heart?

Belman had said nothing of the sort. His eyes went from the words to the map and back again.

Eternal love orders the heart . . .

E-l-o-t-h.

The Valley of Eloth, otherwise known as the Lost Dale.

The ruins of Esma lay at the far northern end of the valley. A mortuary temple resting above a small lake in the middle of thickly wooded mountains.

Hynnsll: shade and sweet water. Not a farewell addressed to anyone, left capitalized it formed a description of a literal place: the lake in the woods below Esma. She was alive. That much seemed obvious.

Caliph felt pleased with himself, pleased with Sena for being so clever and with himself for being equally clever. He had his heading. In the morning, he would set out for Eloth.

He went back upstairs, pushed the table against the front door and took off his clothes. He hung them over the thermal crank where they dribbled and hissed.

The dark house, strange as it was, did not threaten him. It was Sena’s house, with Sena’s things, infused with a faint but familiar blend of intoxicating smells.

Sleeping in her bed, the man’s face mocked him. The one from the train platform; it was supported by the official vest of a courier, the scarlet coat of a doctor. The man wore priest’s clothing, a gardener’s smock. He held a paintbrush, knives, files full of paper. Nothing fit.

Slowly, Caliph’s dreams shifted, moving from the man on the platform to the soot-covered walls, the brown fans and the running shadows. Once again, the police sabers glittered and the dream man plucked him from the chaos. Then, in dreamlike fashion, Caliph found himself running through the halls of his uncle’s mansion where blood had been so common.

He woke late, twisted in her sheets, cock stiff, smelling her smell in the linens. He had chased vague dreams of her toward morning.

Caliph left the loft and found a bite to eat. There was a tin of biscuits in the pantry with a label showing a clown holding a magic wand. A Sandrenese brand he didn’t recognize. More searching produced fruit preserves sealed in wax. He dug into them while songbirds rummaged outside, making music discordant with his thoughts. The cat slept in a patch of sunlight on the floor, its snubbed nose and batlike ears twitched with dreams.

When he finished, he cleaned up and looked at the map he had torn from one of Sena’s atlases. Eloth was four weeks away if he walked, but he had found some money in her desk to help with train fare and there was a horse stabled out back that he could ride to Crow’s Eye.

What am I doing? I should go to Stonehold . . .

Outside, the late morning sun steamed dew into a sultry fog around the house. Insects were crooning but the songbirds had vanished. Caliph picked up Sena’s cat and stepped through the back door, not looking at the gruesome stains on the threshold.

“You’re thin as a stick,” Caliph whispered to the animal. “I can’t very well leave you here to starve.” The garden behind the house had grown into a jungle. Enormous pink and orange speckled blooms hung in the tangled foliage, humming with blue bees. Caliph fought his way to the fence line where a solitary horse grazed near a steaming pond. There was a shed nearby with tack and harness. He set the cat down on the split-rail fence and opened the door.

“Horse thief.”

Caliph stumbled backward. Crouched on her haunches atop the shed’s small peak was a woman in dark clothing.

The soft impact of another woman embraced him from behind. Her body was close, her arms cradled him strangely. There was a knife, curved perfectly against his throat, a razor choker that warned him not to move.

From the flowers another woman appeared. She too had dark clothes and like the one on the roof, there was something strange about her eyes. They glittered profoundly, as if faceted by a jeweler’s chisel, liquid flickers of light scintillating while they watched him.

For a moment, only the insects trilled across the breezy green shapes of the forest. Caliph blew a mosquito from his lips but couldn’t speak. The knife around his neck was too tight.

“He doesn’t look like he belongs out here,” said the second woman. Then a voice behind his head said, “I’ll bet he knows her.” She was talking into his ear now. “You came out here for some fun, didn’t you?”

Caliph still couldn’t answer. He held these women up to the memory of those he had seen at Sena’s graduation.

“What are you doing here?” asked the one on the roof. Then she spoke in a language Caliph couldn’t understand. Instantly the pressure on his throat lessened.

“That’s the important question.” Her voice was calm and pleasant as it shifted back to Trade. “What are you doing here?”

Shrdnae Witches . . . do they know I’m the future king of Stonehold? If they do I’m dead . . . And then another realization.

Sena is one of them . . .

It kept going through his head, combined with all the occasions he had pressed Sena for information about the Shrdnae Witches based solely on the fact that she had grown up in the Country of Miryhr, when in fact she had been one.

“I’m not going to ask again,” said the woman on the shed. She was beautiful. The sunlight trickling across her nose; her smile, a pleasant disguise for the threat she represented.

Caliph knew he had to answer and that the more truth he injected into the conversation, the less likely he was to wind up dead.

“I came to see Sena.”

“Boyfriend?”

Caliph had been briefed at school. As the future ruler of Stonehold, he had been given access to certain antiseptic details about who the Shrdnae Witches were and how they worked. Shrdnae field agents were forbidden from any kind of relationship that could compromise them: pregnancy in the all-female organization was strictly regulated. For Shrdnae operatives, sex was part of their training. It was an art form they perfected just like assassination and like their trademark knife sheaths, their legs didn’t open unless it was part of the job.