The Last Page (6 page)

Sena went to lunch. She went to class. When evening settled, the lights in the Administration Building still burnt. Caliph had not come out.

It had leaked that a sentence was coming down and it would not be expulsion. Bets on the lawn now began circulating as to the duration of Caliph’s punishment.

“Nine months. Night watch.”

“A year.”

“If the clurichaun stays missing, he’ll be watchman ’til he graduates . . .”

Students speculated and smoked and drank coffee outside Desdae Hall. Sena loitered, mingling with them, repeatedly denying any knowledge of why her “friend” had stolen the intricate southern mechanism.

Night watch required the student so sentenced to sleep not in the comfort of the dorms, but to stalk the drafty expanse of the library until eighteen o’clock. At midnight, the student could bed down on the floor near one of the radiators. No cots were allowed. A campus watchman checked in on the prisoner once at fifteen and again at two in the morning. If, during his shift, anything was damaged or stolen, the student was expelled without further delay.

At seven, from the Administration Building, the sound of a caning began, which meant—according to popular opinion—that Caliph had yet to divulge the location of the missing clurichaun.

Silence settled over the lawn, partially out of awe for Caliph’s cries, which floated through an open window, and partially so the number of strokes could be counted.

Sena winced, marveling at his stupidity.

At seven-o-five the caning was complete. Twenty strokes had been administered, just shy of the maximum.

The Administration Building’s doors finally opened at twenty past and a lone figure appeared, a shade in the darkness that dragged over the threshold, stooped and stiff like an old man. It plodded down the steps and across the lawn. Going to him now would lacquer another layer onto the already lustrous veneer of rumors that surrounded the two of them; so Sena stayed with the others, watching as he crossed the empty campus alone,
headed directly for the library, a ring of keys in his hand. At the doors, he jingled softly without looking back and disappeared inside.

The knot of students broke up. Sena went home and slept fitfully.

The entire next day, she anticipated her own meeting with the chancellor. It was common talk that she and Caliph were possibly more than friends. It made sense that the chancellor would question her. But surprisingly, no summons ever came. Caliph met her between classes near Nasril Hall, under the shade of an enormous tree. He was disheveled and grim, hollow-eyed and somewhat pale. She had watched him stand rather than sit during class and he was still walking with a limp.

“Everything’s set,” he said simply. “You can come to the library any night you want.”

Sena’s jaw dropped.
This had been his plan?

“Are you crazy?”

“I’ve minimized our risk. No more stables or closets.”

“You didn’t do this for me.”

“Ever since you crept up on me in the library, I figured you’re a damn good sneak. All you have to do is make it to the cellar doors without being seen. Think about it, we’re inside a locked building, alone.”

“You are crazy.” Sena pointed at the brick-gabled windows of the chancellor’s house. They faced the library directly.

Caliph responded without agitation. “Do you really think he will be watching? He knows I’m too smart to risk getting caught. Besides,” he jingled the ring of keys, “we can go anywhere in the library! Think of the private book collections!”

Sena looked at them. Each had been wired with stiff white paper and labeled with the names of various rooms.

“I know you’ve had a brush with the chancellor and can’t afford another office visit. But I can. He’s never going to expel me.” Caliph looked at her directly. “He can’t afford to expel me.”

“Yella by
n,
²
Caliph! Are you telling me you made a deal with him?”

For a moment his dark eyes burrowed into her face. Finally he said, “No one’s going to bother us.”

Her stomach soured. She felt queasy-sick inside, but he had not done this extraordinary thing to generate pity. He had done it with the single goal of moving their relationship beyond the reach of the school motto, facilitating something stable and private. She decided not to dwell on the horror of the caning. Instead, she gave him what he wanted, a smile.

“Can I at least get in by myself?”

“This isn’t about picking locks. This is about keeping quiet. Staying hidden.”

She played along. “Ooh—an esoteric society. Just the two of us?” Her knuckles rapped an imaginary door. “Will there be secret knocks?”

Caliph grinned despite his obvious pain.

He had taught her how to execute on a plan regardless of personal cost.

Since then, there had been wine, books and plenty of sex. The library had remained bearable even as Kam faded into Thay, Shem and Oak, reducing the wooded campus to lifeless brown and frosty white.

Sometimes they used the fireplaces. Sometimes they just listened to the coal boiler in the basement, indigestion flushing through its pipes. The night watchman scheduled to check up on Caliph twice a night never came.

Her stomach warmed. Maybe it was love.

But it wasn’t Caliph that elicited her strongest emotions. That still came from the scrap of paper she had found in Githum Hall, burning like a cruestone in her brain. Its black sparkle steered her toward a course of actions on which she was now utterly resolved.

Caliph wouldn’t understand even if she had been able to tell him. He had steeped himself in the modern cauldron of business and government. For him, holomorphy was quaint. And besides, the recipe was clear. She couldn’t tell him.

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 Mir
yhr.”

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

She regretted that Mir
yhr 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 Mir
yhric farmers wake up to find a third eye grown in the top of their dogs’ heads? Is that true? Did the Shr
dnae Sisterhood really do that?”