The Last Page (80 page)

The
Herald
published several arguably autarchic paragraphs that labeled Ghoul Court the disease’s epicenter. Caliph had composed them and given them to the press.

All necessary force will be used to protect legitimate city boroughs not only from disease but from Ghoul Court’s long unchecked criminal element.

The
Herald
(and several other newspapers still cowed by the memory of Mr. Vhortghast’s visits) published the High King’s words without commentary on the morning of the operation.

The notion of contagion had such an effect on the populace that Caliph’s outré response surprisingly rallied opinion polls at Gunnymead Square.

There were many annoyed citizens who had walked or ridden streetcars for years in order to avoid the Court. They would have supported even harsher measures while dissentients lined up against them like charged particles—pluses against minuses—some cosmic example of ineluctable binary: a natural array of checks and balances that maintained uneasy equilibrium.

A scant hour before dawn, when the onslaught trampled out of Daoud’s Bend, Lampfire and Maruchine, word had leaked that troops were on their way and students from Shaerzac University had shown up across the end of Seething Lane to protest.

They waited in the predawn; drinking, smoking and singing songs, linked together arm in arm across the street. They expected their demonstration to have an impact when the troops arrived.

But unlike the city watch, the knights had little patience for civil disobedience. Their objectives had been given by the High King and they did not understand the concept of failure. Because the demonstration interfered with tactical surprise they plowed through the ranks of barking students as if they had been tissue.

Startled when their lines were sundered and their antigovernment banners burst into flame, most of the activists fled. Some were struck with goads or the metal-shod bottoms of rubber shields. Many were arrested. A handful became casualties of the raid.

A sophomoric face screamed loudly that “
Violence will never win!
” His attempt to tackle one of the knights met with a gleaming bar of
chromium steel. His crazed expression and vicious scrabbling with the knight’s gas mask ended instantly when the goad swung out, smooth and unstoppable like a girder on chains. Its electrically charged body busted several of the student’s ribs and abrogated the luxury of many presupposed civil rights.

Placards showing Caliph Howl holding a gory sword and flaunting a malefic grin were abandoned on the street.

The knights and watchmen burst through veils of whipped-cream air. Their gloves aimed billowing hoses that vomited massive canopies of smoke. Waves of men and women held rubber shields and chrome batons and wands that outpoured flame. Heavy cleated boots crashed through barricaded doors and windows. A variety of lives were crushed and mangled in their wake.

It was not a gentle raid.

The police roared into Ghoul Court with halgrin on thick chains.

Vast porcine beasts, seven feet at the shoulder, the halgrins’ skeletons supported nearly a ton of mottled flesh and bone. Black and pink and hairless except for wiry strands that bristled on their humps, the halgrin mauled and shredded anything that scrambled or fell within their jaws.

Like a warthog, stipular tuberosities depended in grotesque array from jowly skulls. Their cloven hooves flinderized crates and wooden carts, pulverized bottles discarded by winos into glassy dust and thundered on the paving stones.

There were less than ten of the daemon swine, taken out of Tibi
n and trained from sucklings. Beyond what they could physically savage, they impacted the battle mostly through morale.

Hackles raised, the monsters’ tusks splayed from mouths like overeager claws. Ropy turbid saliva draped like molasses toward the ground.

The beating Ghoul Court’s occupants received was utterly severe and in many people’s minds, condign.

Knights trod like heavy metal bulls through dreary tenements and filthy dens, overturning tables and beds strewn with the clutter of a hundred messy sins. Locked attics, occupied by smuggled contraband or shivering catamites, shed ugly secrets under the brutal use of rams.

Those that surrendered or welcomed the police as saviors were stabbed with bulbous hypodermics and popped with enough arcane demulcent to cure a horse. Most were summarily herded into steam-driven wagons that sputtered in the rear. If they survived the treatment and whatever sentence awaited them at West Gate, they would be released into the populace again.

Anyone found with an advanced case of the nameless malady was
ushered into quarantine wagons already packed with mounds of ulcerated flesh.

The sick were driven off by men in long red trenches and insectile masks with iridescent eyes. Though they seemed to head toward Tin Crow and the dubious resources of Bloodsump Lane, many of the inhabitants of Ghoul Court were lost even by the press. It was easy for them to simply disappear.

Gleaming copper canisters that sloshed with acid burdened the backs of enormous men who pumped liquid fire from their wands. The stones and bricks, the very masonry seemed to burn.

Men and women in rags erupted from the drains, dislodging dozens of thick metal lids. A grisly but euphoric effluence, like a cadence of champagne bottles. They clambered out of sewers and tunnels made for gas lines. They danced ferociously on cobblestones that their bodies quickly irrigated with endless rivulets of blood.

Their weapons were rude and freakish. Built of twisted nails that leapt from boards and crudely welded pipe. The reflective pink and amber orbs of their sunken eyes flared with intractable hatred—organic mirrors of the gas mask eyelets that floated in the haze while subhuman bodies were bludgeoned to the ground.

But Ghoul Court’s militia was not composed of the man-things that had besieged the opera. They were mere half-things, crawlers. They were the shadow populace, come to defend whatever clandestine monstrosity governed them from below.

The knights surged in and mowed them down.

Great crowds of bodies went up in sudden flame. Yellow entrails and barely human organs splattered the streets. The stench of opened bodies and vomit ricocheted off grisly slippery stone.

Disinfectant fog shrouded everything in gray.

Fulgurant, emerald-bellied crossbows twittered in the alleys and polluted lanes.

The watch was organized and determined. They encircled their prey with sharp-edged formations, whipped them and drove them and beat them down.

Shackles came out, snapped over ankles and wrists. Dozens were led away.

But the government did not have an easy time.

One unit was overwhelmed. It disappeared under leaping, peculiar forms and arcing lead pipes lined with metal spines.

By the time two knights and a second unit came to the rescue there was nothing left to save.

Another knight was overwhelmed, cut off from his unit and ambushed in the hollow of a barbershop.

Exultant for a few minutes, the creatures tore off his armor and dragged his body through the streets. But their celebration was brief and costly and their defeat guaranteed.

With wrath kindled by the sight of a fallen knight, the watch charged, canisters of acid spreading a strangely ebullient conflagration across bricks and flesh.

In the end, the watch won.

Men and women in uniform heaved the charred remains, took them by the wrists and ankles and swung then onto rising gruesome piles.

Caliph (as usual) had been precise.

Every stone was overturned, every building searched. Ghoul Court would be remade—from scratch.

When Caliph got the report on the sixth, he was horrified. The top page had an antiseptic whiteness with several objectives typed and centered. All were labeled: complete.

It has to work,
he thought as he read the report.
My plan has to work. If it doesn’t . . . if all of this is for nothing
. . . He shook his head.
I suppose I’ll be paying another visit to Hazel Nantallium, taking her up on her offer
. But now that things were in motion, he wondered if all the votives in Hullmallow Cathedral could save his soul.

Caliph woke from a terrible dream that he couldn’t remember. The report rested on a chair near the bed. It had settled in disarray like a white bird that had struck a windowpane.

There was little time to regret or even think about the day before.

Information had leaked that an Iscan zeppelin had crashed near Bittern Moor along the White Leech—territory now controlled by Saergaeth. It was a massive supply ship called the
Orison
.

In addition to food, medicine and military correspondence, the
Orison
had carried weapons. Gas bows, chemiostatic swords and other controlled munitions. Potentially as bad as the loss of troop locations and timetables, government sources had muttered that undisclosed highly sensitive technology had also been on board.

The papers were quick to black extras with headlines that read,
ISCAN DISASTER MAY BE WATERSHED FOR MISKATOLL
. And:
HOW BAD IS IT? ISCAN WAR SECRETS IN SAERGAETH’S HANDS
. The news was so stunning that the previous day’s events in Ghoul Court were mostly overshadowed.

CREW OF FIFTY FEARED DEAD AFTER ZEPPELIN GOES DOWN!

Family members of the missing airmen were rounded up and taken to a secluded government estate in Octul Box where they awaited further developments.

By late afternoon, commanders of small arrowy spy dirigibles confirmed that despite the crash’s proximity to Fallow Down, light war engines marked with burgundy emblems had already converged.

Apparently Saergaeth had no fear of the haunted wasteland of Fallow Down. Conspiracy theorists were already speculating that the two disasters were somehow linked.

Saergaeth had an array of sky sharks patrolling the region within hours. The prospect of several tons of food alone would have been sufficient to catch Saergaeth’s attention. Yrisl guessed his troops were being fed from supplies seized at sea before the Iscan dreadnought and her escorts had plowed north to guard Tentinil’s harbors.

Like a beached whale, the downed leviathan was to the rebellion as a carcass laid before the happy bewilderment of gulls and crabs.

Saergaeth’s troops were giddy.

Spies brought Caliph the details: Saergaeth’s soldiers poking gingerly through the wreckage, looking for booby traps. There were corpses strewn everywhere. Blackened and burnt or terribly marked with posthumous bruising.

But nothing sprang from the shredded compartments. No hideous automatons or holomorphic hexes triggered when grunts lifted timbers or huge sections of the punctured gasbag’s drapery of skin.

The booty was tremendous.

Saergaeth’s ranking officer found the schematics, the charts and battlefield maps. Caliph’s spies confirmed that Saergaeth would have the locations of troops hidden in the hills east of Forgin’s Keep. On top of this, there were two dozen chemiostatic swords, fifty gas-powered crossbows, five suits of chor
tium armor and a coffer containing a dozen trade bars in gold.

And then there was the massive reinforced tank covered with pipes and chugging engines that still hummed despite the zeppelin’s violent landing. A circular door, sealed with a great wheel at its center, capped one end of the vaguely cylindrical tank.