The Last Page Read Online Free PDF

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