The Last Page

“You were ranked second best swordsman last year,” she was saying.

Caliph couldn’t tell if she was being serious.

“You’re not even supposed to know that legerdemain. That’s way beyond sixth year holo . . .”

“Thanks,” Caliph interrupted, “for the documentary. But I’m not your fool.”

“I didn’t say you were . . . yet.”

“Go piss up a rope.”

“I’d get wet. And besides, holomorphy is my first discipline. I think we should study together.”

Caliph snorted.

“You think I need you? Just because every boy here follows you around like a trained sledge newt . . . I’m well ahead in my studies. I don’t need a . . .” He didn’t know what to classify her as and classifying her as a distraction would betray the what? Infatuation? Lust? . . . that was rapidly thickening inside him.

“Co-conspirator?” Her suggestion startled him. “Look,” she said, “I know you don’t want to wind up teaching here like everybody else. I know who you are.” She floated from the railing and sank down in front of him.

“I’m Caliph Howl,” he said directly into her face as though it were the most ordinary name in the world.

She grinned.

“I’ve got myself a king.”

Her face was uncomfortably close, her breath sweet and startling as black licorice. Caliph could barely keep from kissing her lips despite the arrogance that snarled behind them.

“I thought you were seeing a lad,” he mumbled.

“I was,” Sena deadpanned. “Did you get the tickets?”

Caliph made the southern hand sign for yes.

“Then come on, we’re going to be late for the play.”

CHAPTER 3

It hits Sena on her second visit that Morgan Gullows’ office is not on the brink of relocating to one of Githum Hall’s sunny upstairs chambers. The pile of laundry, the lopsided stacks of cardboard boxes, the books, the coffee mugs: none of it has moved.

The mushy darkness is riddled with pipes and objects shrouded in deeper gloom. Sena is familiar with the smell, a previously unidentifiable mustiness she recognizes from all face-to-face encounters with her employer.

Teacher’s aide. Hmphf. Teacher’s maid is what he needs!

Sena wrinkles her nose. There is a leather chair behind the desk, crippled from years of supporting the professor’s enormous carcass. It leans heavily to one side, seams burst, stuffing quite literally pressed out of it.

Sena gets straight to her task, following the bizarre instructions Morgan has given her for locating Brunts’ A Dictum of Calculating Light in the office-shaped waste bin.

She hoists a pair of soiled trousers and discovers a crumb-covered saucer and a foil wrapper whose yellow oil has drained down half a sheaf of midterms. These, she pushes aside. Below, are a stack of books whose weight has caved in the top of a cardboard box. Under the box is Brunts’ work, which she jerks free. Coming with it into her hand is a careless half-sheet, brown with dry spillage. It is written in Morgan’s handwriting and she can’t help glancing it over.

Csrym T?

The little sheet contains two references to Bode Royal wherein a codex is described, bound in clshydra hide. The references sound amusingly theosophic but after delivering Brunts’ work to the professor, Sena goes to the library on a whim and fills out a form that grants her twenty minutes with Bode Royal.

The references are real.

She gets a twinge in her stomach and decides to start chipping at the legend of the Csrym T. The more she chips the harder it becomes to dig out new leads. After several semesters, the amount of information she’s gleaned fills only two and a half pages. The legend jumps between books, like a bird darting through trees, tracing its history across millennia, in and out of obscurity. She chases it relentlessly. One of the most outlandish rumors linked to it concerns the lock and a corresponding recipe supposedly needed to open it. No key. Just a list of ingredients. The formula makes her stomach turn.

She spends two weeks cross-checking the recipe’s veracity on the top floor of the library, coming to the conclusion that it has been translated exactly in four different languages when, out of a glaring white ogive, Caliph Howl invites her to a play.

When she learned about Caliph’s plot against Roric Feldman, she took a hiatus from her pet project in order to analyze the heir.

But getting inside his head, she realized, would require a seduction. She baited him, employed several previously infallible methods to which he maddeningly did not succumb. She could tell that he viewed the school code as a narrow ledge and her as a liability. Getting him to crack became a game . . . there was a certain purity to him that poured warmth into her stomach. But his crush on her was growing.

It happened later in the Woodmarsh Building, against a backdrop of gray paint and bloodless creatures floating in jars. They had been alone, doing labs, looking through the monocular at slides and taking notes.

She was intentionally unbuttoned, just enough to reveal the ruffle of lace cupping her breasts. She had worn the lotion that smelled like Tebeshian coffee. On his second turn at the slide, when he had reached for the monocular, she had pivoted instead of stepping aside. His hand had gone through the loop of her arm, brushing past her body. They were the same height. She had stared him down, bitten her lower lip and refused to move.

Finally . . . finally, he had pushed her up against the counter. She remembered him fumbling with her skirt, lifting it up around her waist. She had pulled his belt away like a snake, gripping it by the head before letting it clatter dramatically to the floor. The cool laboratory air had shocked them both, forced them together for warmth, a catalyst, carrying them into the next stage of their relationship.

It took a month, but Sena realized slowly that Caliph was becoming part of the recipe. She found his affections refreshingly devoid of the bravado and lachrymose fawning she thought of as the two schoolboy extremes. His attention to her was crystalline, immediately clear yet full of cunning. She saw it in the way he ignored her during class, focusing intently on the lecture. Then a note would suddenly arrive in her hand, written in acrostic code. She would read it with amazement and look at him but he would never look back.

As the weeks passed, she returned to her project: something she concealed carefully from Caliph for several reasons . . . collecting every reference she could until suddenly the Csrym T vanished, seemingly for good.

The last trace was a holomorph, almost two decades ago in the Duchy of Stonehold. She read that his rise to power had gone sideways. Body surfaced at the base of the sea wall in Isca in the fall of ′45. Only his mansion, auctioned and hollow, was left crumbling in the foothills of the Healean Range.

The Csrym T must have been auctioned with the rest of the estate amid vast lots of books. It frightened her to think that she had reached the end of what she could read. Her graduation was approaching. If this was what she wanted, she knew she had to shift from thinking to doing. It made her nervous, but Caliph had taught her, in the way he had orchestrated their relationship, how to execute on a plan.