The Last Page

He’ll be fine, she thought. I need this. He has a whole country waiting for him. I just need him to open the book . . .

Breath sweetened through a filter of wanton bouquets, Sena tossed her flower-flavored chewing gum like the pin from a grenade. It landed in the dark, forgotten behind spider-infested bundles of spare pipe while the chemical reaction it had induced continued to swell.

Sena let it go. Her mouth opened; her pelvis flexed forward.

Even in the beginning, despite no history of his own, Caliph had been better than Tynan, better than several sophomoric fumblings she had endured for the sake of release. Tonight, they drew it out, seeming to understand the potential finality of this encounter.

Caliph’s breathing changed and Sena shifted her rhythm, calculating their trajectory, applying tension to the spring.

It was her private metaphor: the catapult. The sudden pitch in her stomach that signaled her body going numb. Like being launched into the air at the circus and floating . . . floating . . .

After that came the zoetrope. Warmth washing through her like sheet lightning. She had discovered it with Caliph. The pleasant spinning, her senses so overstimulated that her body stuttered like pictures in a little moving wheel, arching backward in a series of staccato animations.

Catapult then zoetrope. Only with Caliph.

“So soon—?” She uncoiled the playful whisper directly into his ear. “A little unexpected, huh?” She breathed hard, watched Caliph close his eyes and nod.

Her voice took on a whispered ecstasy.

“Wow—I’m kind of proud of myself.” And she was. She was happy.

Caliph pinched her earlobe with his lips and rested his forehead on her shoulder. She adjusted her body.

Blue light from the clurichaun bubbled across them. It stood politely all of six inches tall with its back to them. The glass bulb full of solvitriol fluid illuminated tiny sprockets and whirring, jewel-crusted gears that comprised its internal organs.

Caliph had hidden the object of inestimable worth in the library. Several professors of engineering had been able to replicate it (except for its esoteric power source) with variable results.

It had been two years since the play, two years since they had broken Tanara’s nose; two years since Roric Feldman had failed at school and gone home in shame.

After-sex hunger was making Sena’s stomach growl. Caliph put his ear to the hollow of her navel and listened.

“It’s talking,” he grinned, raising a finger. “Wait, wait . . .” He paused intently. “It says . . . we should eat!”

The muscles of her abdomen tightened under the tickle of his chin. “Mm—I want ice cream. I want to get fat as an airship.” She looked at him expectantly; blue clurichaun fire ghosting her eyes.

“I wouldn’t mind.”

His candor frightened her as she realized he meant a pregnancy. She turned it quickly into a joke. “Oh? You like ’em big? Huh?” She cupped her breasts and shook them at him. “Aren’t I broad enough for you to ride?” She laughed at her own pun. “Fat as a zeppelin, I swear!”

He tugged her toward him, kissed her skin. “Have you ever been on a zeppelin?”

“My mother didn’t have the money. We took a coal ship from Greenwick to the Coasts of Gath.”

“What were you on Greenwick for?”

“I was born there.”

“You told me you were from Miryhr.”

“I am. But I was born on Greenwick—I belong to the isles.”

She regretted that Miryhr had entered the conversation. She could see him thinking about it. He had pestered her only occasionally over the past two years for information about the Witchocracy.

“You know the cane-eyen legend?” he asked suddenly. “The one where all the Miryhric farmers wake up to find a third eye grown in the top of their dogs’ heads? Is that true? Did the Shrdnae Sisterhood really do that?”

Sena scowled but didn’t scold him for asking. It was only natural for him to be interested.

Widespread rumors trickled through the north, endorsed and disseminated by several watchful governments. They gave an accounting of what were said to be Shrdnae witches captured in Isca. Their beauty had been erased. They had no eyes, no legs and half a tongue; they pulled themselves through the slums of Ghoul Court in wheeled boxes inches off the ground. The High King put them there: broken, blind, stitched-up pets that wandered the streets until winter came and froze them in their wheeled crates.

By the end of Tes, their bodies became small humps of gray statuary that huddled under fire escapes. Eventually the street sweepers pulled them out into wintry light. They had to pry the bodies out with crowbars. Urine had frozen, grafted them to wood. They fell like bags of cement into Bragget Canal where virulent waters opened black steaming holes in the ice. Then the street sweepers watched without malice, smoking and talking as the legless forms went down, sinking in an undertow drawn by turbines in lower Murkbell, far beyond the opera house.

It was dramatic. Possibly embellished. But it was also at least partly true and the reason Sena kept her secret. Caliph could not know she was a witch.

Caliph’s eyes followed her lips as she answered the question. She remembered that he had once told her they were overly sensual, as if her lips could run away and fornicate with him behind her back. He had told her once that they were cheating lips.

Sena watched the clurichaun as it took two clicking steps and dispatched a black crawling shape with its tiny metal claw.

“I’ve got two more years,” Caliph mentioned. “I suppose you’re going to start forgetting me tomorrow.”

“Are you telling me what you want me to do?” She kept her smile lighthearted.

“Maybe. Maybe I don’t want to think about you after you’re gone.”

She laughed and looked into the rafters. She knew what he really meant—that the loneliness would be painful for him despite his best effort to keep these intimacies cordoned off.

The attic was so old it could not keep all the wind out and low oscillating moans gave voice to drafts with origins impossible to trace.

The clurichaun was stomping around, as much as a one-pound mechanism could stomp, casting weird blue halos from its power source. The light disturbed other creatures and somewhere below the rafters came the soft rustle of leathery shapes and the faint chitter of obscure winged things that posed no threat to humans or machines.

“I don’t think you’ll be able to help it,” Sena said.

“Sometimes . . .” Caliph paused. “I think you love me.”

“It’s only two years.” She curled into him, pressing for warmth as the air chilled her back. “I’ll visit you, or you can visit me after you get your degree.”

“Sounds too . . .”

“Trust me,” she whispered. “You make truth, and I’m making it so.”

Caliph sighed. “Eight years. Nothing seems simple anymore—”

A spring moon glowed in the transom they had cleaned. Sky the color of exotic olives moiled Naobi’s halo while fragile whiplike branches scraped the glass. Wind coming under the shingles made the attic sound too familiar. The smell, the darkness, the soft sounds; these secret nights in the guano-besmirched loft had become part of them. Tomorrow everything would change.

“Listen, Caliph. I’m going south. I’m headed for trouble.” She grinned and slid her finger over his mouth. “I’m looking for something special. Something Professor Gullows managed to leave out of his lessons.”

Caliph turned his head. “What is it?”

“It’s a book,” she whispered. “Every holomorph in the Hinterlands would die to get their hands on it . . . if they knew about it.”