The Last Page (7 page)

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 Shr
dnae 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.”

“Sounds like something made up.”

“It’s real. I’m going to find it.”

Caliph sat up. “Then it’s a sure candidate for the printing press—”

“Listen, you fool. Stop joking. I need you. You have to find me after you graduate. It’s important. I love you Caliph.”

His eyes narrowed. She had never said it before.

“You love me?”

She smiled and leaned in to kiss him.

Caliph stopped her.

“There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“So single-minded—” She tousled his hair. “I love that about you.”
She bent forward, plucked at his mouth with her lips; moved her leg slowly over his waist and brushed her warmth against him.

“What aren’t you telling me?” He pushed her gently away.

“Nothing,” she whispered. “But I’ll tell you this . . . I know a secret about you . . . something nobody else at Desdae knows.” She made the southern hand sign for yes. “You’re Hjolk-trull. Like me.”

Caliph frowned. “What? What does that matter? How . . .” He raised his hand.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” she whispered. “You know I mean it. I wouldn’t have dragged you up here so often if it weren’t true. Think, Caliph. You and I—we don’t even belong to a country. We belong to the stars. We can make things right . . .”

“Right? The only thing wrong is you just brought up—” He stopped, sighed. “I don’t belong to the stars.”

Sena tried to regroup. “Caliph, I didn’t mean . . . look-abrupt, tomorrow I’m gone . . . don’t . . . you love me?”

It was a mistake. She saw it in his eyes, black mirrors that reflected her lie.
He knows. He knows I wouldn’t have asked if it were true. Stupid. Stupid. But it is true! It is! I need this. For the recipe, I need this to be true.

Now what? Would he remember her like this? Framed in the groundwork of an agenda he couldn’t begin to understand? She could feel it, silly and stupid, how her few sentences had excavated a chasm between them. But she was smart enough to know that it was time to shut her mouth. Leave. Act hurt. Give him time to think and hope that the sex had been good enough to compensate for her last impression.

She stood up and pushed the toggles through the eyelets on her cloak.

The clurichaun, sensing that its duties were over, whirred off on a brave expedition through the clutter.

Yella by
n,
she thought and then out loud, “In two years, we’ll see. Hynns
ll
,
³
Caliph.”

The Old Speech formality left Caliph in the dark, listening to the sound of wind under the shingles and goatsuckers in the trees.

In the morning, Caliph watched from an obscure rain-flecked dormer as Sena went through the ritual in her scholar’s robe. He felt sour. He wanted her to come looking for him. The ceremony made his stomach hurt.

He hadn’t noticed her talking with anyone beforehand but immediately after the ceremony, a group of women in somber cloaks met her on
the lawn. Their cowls covered their heads and faces against the rain. He wished he could hear what they were saying.

Sena glanced over her shoulder as though trapped, looking for help. Maybe she could feel his eyes. Caliph jerked his face back from the glass. She did not look happy to see the women and Caliph wondered who they were. Sena didn’t talk about her family. It was a preclusion they shared.

For several minutes he deliberated. Finally he dashed, nearly falling down four flights of stairs. He struggled with the heavy door and burst out onto the lawn.

A light mist greeted him on the face, but Sena and the women were gone.

²
O.S.: Expletive: “Mother’s shit!”

³
O.S.: “Shade and sweet water.”

Two years later Caliph dreamt the dream.

It had been with him since memory, coming and going on subliminal cycles. In the dream, man-shaped shadows beaded and ran like black oil across machines and towers made semi-acrylic with soot. Police sabers glittered amid a chaos of searchlights and shouts.

As always, the dream man plucked him from the confusion and carried him away.

It was not a dream that needed interpretation, not a misty plunge into oneiromancy or egocentrism. The tatters of his childhood parted slowly, dragging like strips of heavy cloth off Caliph’s brain, releasing him to the waking world.

Spring filmed the dormitory air with an almost imperceptible fetor, a warm moist stink that evanesced from the wood around his windowpane. The High College graduated on the tenth but Caliph had opted to stay for spring semester. It was a decision he couldn’t explain adequately even to himself. He had amassed enough credit hours to graduate early, yet he remained.

The Council wouldn’t allow it to happen again. In P
sh they would come for him.