Mickey hadn’t guessed even then. And he hadn’t dared to ask. Crispin’s manner was too strange. Since they woke, while they breakfasted on biscuit and water, he had been distracted and abrupt, as if during the night he’d remembered something important he had to do.
How could Mickey have guessed? No daemon handler who valued his life would risk a gambit like this.
Mickey stopped, facing the mouth of the canyon. The foothills seemed to stretch away forever, peak and valley, shimmering in the heat. Dust skirled across the slope at his feet. Nothing alive moved. In the QAF, some confusion persisted as to whether the Raw had got its name after the chopping down of the Wraithwaste began—or whether the Raw Marches had been called that to begin with, and lent their name to the battleground after it became appropriate. The latter has to be true, Mickey thought. These mountains are nothing if not raw. Surely even the snowlands, even the steppe of central Cype and the deserts of Izte Kchebuk’ara, even the unknown lands to the Far West could be no more desolate than this.
Crispin let out a weird, sobbing cry, and Mickey wheeled. The Blacheim cast a shadow as black as a tarred box. He couldn’t see what was happening. He forced himself not to run. Crispin had warned him not to make any sudden movements or noises. The cry came again, softly, like a moan of grief—or pleasure—as he got closer. Crispin and the daemon were still on the ground where they had been before, but now they were locked in a tight embrace. No—Crispin was embracing the daemon. It knelt with its head in his lap, its arms around his waist, and he was hugging it, his face pressed to its sallow naked back. As Mickey watched in horror, it stirred and cried out once more.
He blinked. Daemons couldn’t speak! Daemons...
It was jabbering now in a low voice. Some of the gibberish sounded like real words—Mickey could have sworn he caught “sir” several times. How could he have mistaken this voice for Crispin’s? It was low and harsh, rusty with disuse. Occasionally it broke octaves higher. Crispin stroked the vile creature, kissed its back, kissed the bright red weals on its neck. His every motion bespoke tenderness. Mickey nearly gagged. At one point Crispin raised his face; Mickey made shift to rearrange his expression before he saw that Crispin’s eyes were bright and blind.
A cold sweat broke out on his palms. Paranoia whispered that this must be some secret, extreme form of coercion that all Ferupian daemon handlers knew, that had been maliciously concealed from him all the time he was flying in the QAF. Maybe that was why he’d been so clumsy with Gorgonettes. But maybe even if he’d known of it, he couldn’t have done what Crispin was doing! Maybe it was alien to his very race? After all, Ferupe was the empire of the occult, the land of the pallid-faced people who lived side by side with the daemons that shimmered in copses and hovered around lakes. Everyone in Okimako believed that—and although Mickey knew intellectually that it was nonsense, not even flying in the Queen’s Air Force had entirely broken him of the myth. The sheer availability of daemons in the Ferupian Raw had in fact reinforced it. In Okimako, a daemon scarcely bigger than a screamer would fetch a hundred sigils—and the Ferupians’ casual neglect of their daemons, the profanity with which they spoke to them, when indeed they did speak to them, fascinated him. What did they know, that they could afford to treat priceless gorgons like field mules?
In all of the new city where Mickey had grown up, the hustling, bustling middle-class heart of Okimako where conspicuous luxury was the stamp of prestige and every last sigil was counted twice over, there were exactly three demogorgons: one in the gasworks, one in the waterworks, and one to power the climate control in the monolithic Disciplinarian Police Headquarters. Private daemon transportation was unheard of. Only the Disciples had the finances to operate daemon trucks, tanks, and jeeps. Everyone else relied either on dray beasts, rickeys, or (if they could afford it) the diesel-powered automobiles which had been invented in far-off Ixtara. The last Mickey had heard, a motion to outlaw these based on their smelliness and noisiness was on its way to the Significants. Kirekunis lived in a world they could see, taste, touch, and evaluate. What did they know of daemons?
At the same time Mickey’s brain told him this was nonsense, that what Crispin was doing, no other man in the Ferupian army had ever dreamed of. They were afraid of their daemons! That was why they cursed them and mistreated them! A pilot would have to be crazy to take his daemon out of his airplane—
and take off its collar—
Mickey sweated, gripping the revolver so hard that his wrist went numb from the screamers’ spikes of malice. He was afraid to draw it, afraid to move.
After a long time, he couldn’t have said how long, Crispin disentangled himself from the daemon’s embrace and ducked out into the sunlight. The daemon followed him. Unfolded to its full height it towered over Crispin, even though its back was stooped and its legs bowed. It was a skeleton draped with sagging yellow skin. Its black hair tangled to its knees. Mickey was faintly shocked—he could not have said why—to see that it was male. It shaded its eyes against the sun with an appallingly human gesture.
Crispin reached up to pat it on the shoulder. He gestured toward the Blacheim. The daemon gibbered. Its voice lilted up at the end as if in a question. Crispin nodded. Mickey watched openmouthed as the daemon stooped voluntarily back under the airplane and poked its head up inside the engine cavity. It paused there in the shadow. Then there was a shimmer, as if it were turning into water, and it liquefied upward.
Crispin sprang for the plane and clambered into the engine cavity. Mickey heard him banging the hatch of the cell closed. Then he dropped to the ground and struggled to lift the belly flaps into position. Mickey hurried to help. Between them they secured the flaps and scrambled back as if they expected the Blacheim to explode.
Nothing happened.
Mickey wiped sweat out of his eyes.
It was like closing an egg back up on a monstrous infant who has cracked its shell and ventured out to view the world, not yet realizing its own capacity for destruction. The wind sang mournfully over the canyon. The sun hammered down. A soft groan came from the Blacheim. It was as if the aircraft itself had given voice.
Crispin sat down hard on a rock. Mickey nearly jumped out of his skin. “Water! I need water! Whiskey would be better, but I don’t suppose there’s much chance of that.”
Mickey went to the Blacheim for the canteen. Behind him he heard Crispin throw something away into the rocks with a grunt of effort. He turned in time to see it bouncing into a crack: a cracked circle of silver that could only have been the daemon’s collar. He handed over the canteen mutely. Crispin drank for several minutes, his teeth chattering against the wooden lip. Mickey didn’t dare to rebuke him. At last he put the canteen down and fumbled for a cigarette—one of their last. The moaning came again from the Blacheim, louder.
“Are we going to have to put up with that all the way to Okimako?” Mickey said. “Damned unnerving.”
“Fair exchange for getting the whore airworthy at all, I think!” Crispin said breathlessly. “Mick, light this for me!”
As Mickey handed over the lit cigarette, Crispin’s hand knocked against his. The half-breed captain was trembling, Mickey realized, like a man who has just returned from an engagement with the enemy—one that ended in catastrophe. He steeled himself to ask, “How did you do it?”
Crispin shook his head and frowned dazedly. He was looking sicker every minute. “I didn’t think I would be able to.”
“You took its collar off. I thought only trickster women could do that. I mean, not that they take their collars off; they put them on—” Even a Kirekuni knew that. “But—”
“You must’ve thought I had a death wish. I should have warned you. But I was afraid I’d jinx it. Besides, I didn’t want to get your hopes up if it was no go.”
“It would have been a lot less of a go if you’d got yourself killed.”
Crispin didn’t take offense. “I know it was a risk. But...I knew it was going to work. Sort of.”
“Is this the first time you’ve ever—”
Crispin laughed. His laugh sounded rusty, like the daemon’s. He turned his head aside and coughed wetly. Mickey expected the phlegm to sizzle, the sun was that hot on the bare red rocks. “And if I ever do it again, you can box me up and address me to the loony bin. It was sickening. Nauseating. Like climbing into a sewer and drinking. Whatever the essence of a daemon is, it’s...it went right through me. Like poison. Enough to make me nearly puke the very minute I touched him.”
Not it. Him.
“And the worst of it was after I knew I was going to go on with it—had to go on with it, or he would have killed me—I got used to it. You know how when there’s a horrible stench, after a while you stop noticing it or like mess grub, an acquired taste. Or like booze. You don’t like it, the first time you taste it when you’re a kid. Or maybe perverted sex—I don’t know personally, of course, but I imagine that when you do things that are unnatural, it feels good but you know it’s fucked-up, all at once...it was like that.” He shook his head. Lines that Mickey was sure had not been there before ran from his nose to his mouth.
“When you say perverted sex,” Mickey said, “what are you talking about? I’m trying to figure out what you mean.”
Crispin squinted at him. He opened his mouth and started to speak. Then he shook his head again, smiling faintly. “Making do, you mean? Like fags? Whatever gave you the idea I was talking about that? I mean really fucked-up stuff. Stuff neither you nor I have ever done.” He paused. “Well, I have, now. And I’d starve before I do it again. Or die of thirst. I don’t know how the fuck they do it.”
“How who does it?”
“The trickster women.”
He won’t tell me the truth about anything, Mickey thought. He sat cross-legged, gripping his knees. His head ached, and he wanted water, but they had to conserve it now that Crispin had drunk so much; because what if the daemon had a relapse, what if Crispin’s gambit had been a heroic failure?
Doesn’t he trust me in the least? Resentment throbbed in him like a furnace.
Crispin laughed mirthlessly. “I always told her they were coldhearted bitches! Anyone who could do that for a living. And they would have denied to the last gasp that they stole everything they knew from the Wraiths. I’d bet a double brandy they would. Lie between their teeth.”
“Let’s get you into the shade,” Mickey said, standing up. “You’re not in any condition for us to try taking off now.”
“Queen knows.” Crispin placed the palms of his hands against the rock, pushed, then sank back. Mickey helped him to his feet and led him down the canyon into the shade of an overhanging rock. He fetched a blanket and arranged it behind him. Crispin leaned back with a sigh. “Thanks. Now I know why Millsy looked the way he looked. He told me it was because of trickery. I took him at his word, but I never really understood.”
“That’s the third or fourth person you’ve mentioned I don’t know,” Mickey said. “Either you want me to know about them, in which case you can tell me your life story, I’m all ears, or you’re rambling. And if you’re rambling, it’s—it’s—you’re acting as if you’ve gone round the twist. I don’t know what you just did to the daemon; I don’t know what the daemon did to you. It’s a complete mystery, and you’re not putting my mind at ease talking like this.”
After a minute Crispin said, “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”
Mickey stared at his boots. A stone lizard scuttled out of a crack between his feet, and away into the sun.
“Do you remember what I told you about accidentally-on-purpose forgetting things? Well...when I remembered what I had to remember to—to trick Elektheris, a lot of other things came, too. I was bursting with it, that’s all. And I tend to forget you and I haven’t known each other for as long...well, for as long as weird shit’s been happening to me.” His tone had changed back to normal. “Tell you about it sometime.”
Mickey leaned back against the overhang. Gratitude suffused him, bringing tears to his eyes. At the same time he hated himself for being such a pushover.
“Well, I’m sorry,” Crispin said with a familiar touch of impatience.
The stripe of sky that Mickey could see beyond the overhang, over the other side of the canyon, glared as white and bright as a sheet of lightning fizzling low above the mountain. The air smelled of dust and crackled with static. The daemon—Elektheris—gave tongue again, loudly and despairingly.
Maia 1896 A.D. 9:20 P.M.
Kirekune: the western foothills of the Raw Marches
“It’s in the blood,” Crispin said later in the evening.
The sky glowed purple, and there was little wind. The air wrapped around Mickey like a hot, prickly blanket, scarcely breathable for its freight of electricity.
“In the blood.”
Mickey stared out into the twilight. They were standing at the mouth of the canyon, by unspoken consent keeping as far away from the Blacheim as possible. There would be no sleeping under the belly of the aircraft tonight.
“In whose blood?”
“Mine, evidently. I’ve half suspected for a good while now that it might have gotten in.”
“Gotten in?”
“Yes, well...” Crispin sighed. “D’you mind if I don’t go into detail?”
“If you’re worried that I’ll think worse of you,” Mickey said, “don’t. Whatever you did in the past, it doesn’t matter.” He stared out at the calm violet masses of the foothills, hearing his voice tremble with traitorous emotion. “I could never think badly of you.”
Earlier in the evening, he’d started up the Blacheim. Just as Crispin had promised, the daemon was now cooperating. The transformation engine had purred, as sweetly as an orchestra of pan pipes. Mickey backed her up and turned her carefully around in readiness for takeoff at first light. This proof that Crispin had accomplished what no one should have been able to filled him with awe and with an intense yet timid curiosity.
Crispin laughed. “I can see I’d better clear things up a bit or you’ll be thinking I have a criminal record as long as the Raw! It’s nothing so terrible, really. Just that I let someone die. Or rather, he died, and I couldn’t do anything about it.” He sat on a tall boulder, gripping his ankles. It was a comical pose for a man so big. “After we got clear of the Wraithwaste.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Oh, Queen, never mind! It was me and—and this girl—and this kid, a Wraith. A Shadow, that is. About six years old. We were on the run, and we were bloody well starving to death. If I’d known then what I know now, I would have let us all die in there first. But I was just a kid myself. Somehow or other we made it to the western fringe and stumbled straight into Pilkinson’s Shadowtown. I had no idea where we were. I didn’t know jack shit about the war. I walked straight in there as if I owned the place.” Crispin shook his head at his youthful folly.
“Pilkinson’s Shadowtown. That’s only about twenty miles from Pilkinson’s Air Base II.” Mickey rubbed between his eyes. His head was aching again. “All this time I had the idea you came from... I don’t know... a long way away. Kingsburg... Naftha...”
“You thought I was recruit scum.” Crispin smiled. “It’s worse than that, my lad. We were arrested the minute we got into Shadowtown, of course. I was taken to Chressamo, and from there I was sort of decanted into the air force.”
“Chressamo!”
“Starting to change your mind now?”
Something in the way Crispin said this made Mickey think he actually cared what the answer was. He looked sharply at him. As night gradually swallowed the canyon it had become difficult to make things out, but he thought Crispin was smiling. “I was only—” He swallowed. “That’s where they took me, after I was captured. And told me, in a roundabout way, that I had the option of being put to death or changing sides.”
“Not a hard choice, was it?”
“For a real Disciple it would have been easy,” Mickey said, remembering Ju, who had
not even waited to be given the option of deserting. Ju had been haunting Mickey for more than three years now. In life he had been laughably arrogant and gullible; but death had transformed him into an immortal model of Disciplehood whose example Mickey resented because he could not live up to it.
“Mick, did you—when you were in Chressamo did you meet a man named Sostairs? A colonel?”
“I don’t think so. I may have. I wasn’t told any names.”
“Damn,” Crispin said slowly. “They must have been much surer of you than they were of me. I guessed it even at the time, but...Queen, my life must have been in the balance. Hanging by a thread.”
Mickey decided to ignore Crispin’s surely unintentional slur on his integrity. “But what happened to the—the girl and the Wraith?”
“Brrr.” Crispin shook himself. “It’s getting cold. I hate this fucking altitude. Well, I lost my head and started fighting the soldiers. Orphan—that was his name because he was one—he ran out into the street. There were some Shadow kids there, you know what nasty violent little bastards they—they’re just human rats. Orphan had these daemons. Big ones that followed him everywhere. One of them popped out of the air and started terrorizing the Shadow kids, and the brats ganged up on Orphan and banged his head on the ground. I thought he was dead when I got there, but he can’t have been, quite. I was...” Crispin paused. “The soldiers were all over me, or I would have chased those little assholes and taken it out of their hides. I had my—my face on Orphan’s face. There was blood.”
Mickey held his breath. He had a sense that the crux of the business was coming.
“On my mouth. Do you see what I mean? And besides, I was all bruised and cut...”
“I don’t understand.”
“You numbskull, it’s in the blood! Orphan had the ability to trick daemons. Wraiths do—men and women.” Crispin paused. “It’s the only explanation I can think of. I know I’m not a trickster. Someone tried to teach me when I was younger, and it was a total disaster. So all I can think is...a few drops of his blood getting mixed up in mine must have...done it. It can’t have been six months after that when I first started thinking of names when I was coercing daemons, soothing them and so forth. I hoped it was my imagination. But for a while now I’ve had the feeling that if I wanted it to be part of—of what I do anyway, all I had to do was reach out and—and take it.”
The War in the Waste Page 51
