Free The Last Page by Anthony Huso

gloom. Caliph swung the hood around and the light lapped over a bookcase filled with volumes, a table cluttered with powders, charcoal drawing sticks and dried roots.
    “Witch.”
    The word came softly to his lips.
    Upstairs, the hinges on the kitchen door creaked in the wind. Caliph paused, listening, but nothing stirred. When he turned his attention back to the table of powdered roots, he noticed
The Fall of Bendain
sitting in the middle of the workspace with a fingerprint inked in blood in the center of its cover.
    It wasn’t the real thing. She had asked for his forgery of
The Fall of Bendain
after Roric had left school.
    He picked it up. The blood stopped here. There was a bookmark. He opened to it and discovered that it was actually a note addressed to him.
    He scowled. It was dated nearly a year ago and everything about it was wrong.
    Tes 13, Year of the Search

     

Caliph,

I’m not paranoid, really. This is just in case something goes wrong, which of course it won’t because if it does I’ll probably wind up dead
. . .
so this is really pointless anyway.

Sick, I know. Still, there’s a bit of time to kill out here on the edge of the world especially when it’s been snowing for four days.

Long waits can kill you.

I wish it was just the two of us again, battling the brigade of books, picking up the splinters of broken stone noses. For a kiss I’d give my soul.

Anyway, I’ll probably show this to you and we’ll both laugh. Ijust thought I should let you know how much I loved you—since I never told you.

Things slip by unsaid and you regret it later. “Opportunities are the blossoms of seconds,” Belman used to say and “Eternal love orders the heart.” I say: love is the origin of theft.
    —Hynnsll

    Sena had never been sloppy in love.
For a kiss I’d give my soul?
    Caliph wrinkled his nose.
    And the Old Speech farewell had been misspelled.llshould have been left uncapitalized to infer you as the person addressed.
    She was fluent in Old Speech and couldn’t have made the mistake unintentionally. She also knew that he had memorized every word in
The Fall of Bendain
and in the original there had been a paragraph about snow.
    The author, Timmon Barbas had been a general and he had written that long waits will kill a city cut off from its supplies. It was snowing. For four weeks Bendain remained without its provisions. Not four days but four weeks.
    Caliph did not have to second-guess whether she was being clever. This was code specifically for his eyes and it seemed her reason for writing it had been justified. If she had the foresight to write it nearly a year ago she must have foreseen her danger; their last conversation in the attic came back to him.
    What had she been after? A book?
The lines in the note were taking form now.
    Just the two of us, battling the brigade of books, picking up
. . .
    In the original copy Caliph had quoted Timmon Barbas.
    I wish it was I alone, entrenched in this sorrow, battling the brigade of foes, but alas I cannot do it alone. I am left picking up the splinters of broken bodies and shattered plans of war. For a hiding place I’d give my soul.
    Caliph found the passage on page thirty-one. The words
“you clever boy”
had been written in the margin and they bracketed a paragraph that Caliph had composed himself.
    In desperate times you must flee and we fled and hid ourselves where none would think—amid the buried dead in the hills. And we ate amongthe graves and slept amid the sepulchers, regaining what strength we could. And I had but two thousand men left in my army. Two thousand that lived in the hills like dead men. And we were four weeks from home.
    There was the time frame of four weeks again. Caliph riffled through the shelves and pulled down a thin atlas of sorts with crude maps of the Hinterlands.
    Four weeks from home, hiding with the dead . . .
    His eyes ran over the map. There had to be hundreds of cemeteries within four weeks’ travel from