A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  “You look like an absolute vision.” He got up and moved to the window.

  “I’m immune to flattery, Yoshi.”

  “You’re beautiful, and that’s another point in your favor. Even Significance is much more susceptible to a charming woman than to a crooked flamingo. As a matter of fact, if you weren’t related to me, you’d have everything going for you.”

  “Flamingo indeed,” she reproved him with sisterly affection.

  He touched the window. It was freezing cold. He wanted to rest his face against it, but settled for pressing his palm to the smooth icy surface. Outside, above the irregular topography of roofs, river gulls glided down the slides and climbed the air ladders of a gigantic, invisible sky playground. Dawn showed light and streaky over the far bank of the Yellow. Flying to Okimachi today would be a battle of skill against nature, as difficult a test as any he’d faced during the war. He hoped the Englishmen weren’t too hung over. Listening to one’s passengers vomiting in the back did nothing for one’s concentration—it was just as well, really, that diesel-powered planes demanded so little concentration in the first place.

  “It’s eight o’clock in the morning!” Ashie shrieked. Mickey whirled around. She was jumping up and down in front of the door, trying to push it closed. After a minute she gave up and stumbled back, emitting hysterical caws. A young man in soiled white shoved into the parlor, followed by an entourage of revelers. Ashie, recovering her poise, flung a graceful arm out toward Mickey. “Hake, Michy, everyone, meet my brother! This is Yoshi! He’s crooked, Ryu, are you interested? Too bad, he’s taken!”

  “Yoshitaro Achino?” the man in white shrilled. “I’ve heard of you! You’re famous!”

  “Notorious!” someone said, and for some reason they all found this a wonderful joke. Painted mouths opened to reveal teeth stained with undisguisable records of self-abuse. Ashie screamed faintly and clutched at Mickey’s sleeve as he strode between them, out of the parlor; but her grip lacked dedication. Empty wineglasses and snoring bodies cluttered the dank, twisted stairwell. He stumbled several times on the way down.

  15 Jevanary 1900 A.D.

  The Significant Empire of Kirekune: Okimachi: the new city

  Mickey got back to Dragyonne Street just before midnight. He would have liked to walk from the old city, to work off the effects of Cyril Wigglesworth and Bernard Blythe-Frye, but after dark it was too dangerous. Compromising, he paid off his rickey at the bottom of Radiant Way 15 and leaned into the wind, climbing the hill. As usual after a visit to Swirling, where the centuries-old tenements jostled down to the river, boggling the sense of direction with their grimy, organic complexity, the ruin of the new city struck him as an execration. Greater Significance was funding a great deal of large-scale reconstruction in Okimachi, a civic-spirited maneuver designed to ensure the city looked as modern as Their ambitions, but They were concentrating on the old city and the south side of the mountain. He’d brought the KE in just at dusk, and it had still been light enough to see the raw wood scaffoldings dotting the south side of the mountain like smallpox scars. Limelights as bright as fallen stars ringed projects judged top priority, and in those pools of brilliance, workmen scrambled over the skeletons of future masterpieces of the New Architecture. From the air they looked as tiny as ants. Mickey had put off Wigglesworth’s awestruck questions absently, assuring him that yes, work continued around the clock.

  By contrast, the north new city was a wasteland. Last spring, inspired by Mickey’s own example, various other opportunists had started rebuilding in the Dragyonne Street area; but Significance’s revoking the quarter’s license had deterred many, and few of the rest had won the race with winter, so settled for weatherproofing one or two rooms in which they lived as squatters. Occasional glimmers of light found their way out of these curtained dens to the cobbles. No one was about. Last week, the Disciplinarians had yet again flushed paupers and fly-by-night shopkeepers out of the ruins. A fully detailed map of stars arched overhead. Twisted iron poles stood as memorials to the famous Okimachi gas lamps.

  Achino-uchi bulked skyward, visible from halfway down the street between shells of sooty brick.

  Mickey stood, teeth chattering, in front of the monolith he’d designed. Its street front was four stories high and a hundred feet long. Its three-foot stone foundation anchored it on the ground, and its corner spires anchored it in the Milky Way. No lights showed here either. Only the glint of starlight on the windows revealed that this wasn’t just another husk. He’d built it as a gamble, certain in his heart (like all gamblers) that he was onto a winner. He’d laid out his every penny like bait to lure his vision of the future into reality. And the future, usually such a coy beast, had bitten. He’d hooked his cloud castle and reeled it down to the ground. How many people could say that?

  Why, then, did the monolith look to him—now as always—like a relic of the past, a piece of the old Okimachi that had somehow come through untouched?

  The cannibalized frame of the house where he’d been born teetered a half step behind like a tenacious ghost.

  Fumie appeared on Achino-uchi’s threshold in a flood of brightness, looking out into the night, looking like nothing human. She always knew when he was coming home. “Halloo!” Her voice reached him faintly, blown like a rag on the wind.

  “Get inside, it’s freezing.” He hustled her inside ahead of him. In fact it wasn’t much warmer in the hall than outside. “What on earth are you wearing?”

  She danced away. “Do you like it?”

  Even in the candlelight (they had to rely on candles since the gas mains, wrecked in the fire, had never been repaired: Significance had been promising citywide electrification for months) her gown gleamed with the conscious ostentation of the new age. Its color could be described as lavender. Standaway points like the petals of a tulip cupped her goose-pimpled shoulders, and laces cinched her waist, whence skirts descended in folds to the floor. She struck a pose, arms extended, and Mickey was reminded for an instant of Ashie. But Fumie’s eyes were squinched closed, and in the vertical gathers between her brows he saw the beginnings of a grimace.

  He strode up to her and grabbed her, pushing her back against the black-and-cream-striped wallpaper. “Where’s Rumika?”

  She pouted, eyes still closed, and turned her head aside. She smelled as though she’d bathed in expensive perfume. Her fingers rose and fluttered around his face: she wore purple lace gloves to her elbows.

  “Is everyone asleep?”

  “Yoshi, darling!” she murmured reprovingly. “What do you think?”

  “You look like an absolute vision.” And it was as true of her as it had been of Ashie. “You haven’t been waiting up alone, have you?” If so, Significance knows what she’s got up to—

  He caught a movement in the corner of his eye and let go of Fumie, abruptly abashed. He turned to see Rumika standing in the doorway of the foyer, beyond the foot of the stairs. The tall northern geisha beckoned, swaying from the waist like a rooted seaweed. Mickey’s boots rang on the checkerboard tiles as he went toward her. Behind him, Fumie hummed a tune amplified by the acoustics into opera. It emphasized the morgue-silence that filled the house: no clients, ergo no music, no laughter, no conversation. Whenever they could, the geishas went to bed early.

  “I had to lend her the money!” Rumika hissed excitedly. “She would’ve cried all day otherwise. You’d still be able to see it on her face, but she wanted to doll herself up before you got back, so I lent her a hand with her powder and rouge, and if I do say so myself, I think if we got a walk-in right now you’d have to warn him off!” She laughed. She was nearly as tall as Mickey, and as thin. She would have had an air of elegance were she not round-shouldered. However, in bed this reportedly didn’t matter, nor did her somewhat too-small face. Mickey had received praise of her skills he found difficult to credit. He knew she was a treasure; the only trouble was that so did she. She had come to Okimachi on the heels of the Fire “to take advantage of the opp
ortunities,” and she had warned him of this repeatedly—but not until Fumie began using nizhny on a regular basis had he properly appreciated Rumika’s enterprising soul.

  “Did she go to the Uriba on her own?” he asked, hoping against hope. He was wondering how much money, exactly, Rumika had lent Fumie. From past experience he guessed it would be as much as she had been able to borrow from the other geishas on short notice; he knew he’d be reminded of the sum at intervals until he’d paid it all back, with interest.

  “Do you think I would have let her go out on her own, the state she’s in?” Rumika pursed her lips. “The boy took her.”

  “Gaise?”

  Rumika’s mouth resembled a puckered stitch. In her home province, deviant proclivities were disapproved of, and what she was required by Mickey to tolerate she didn’t necessarily countenance. She refused on principle to enunciate Gaise’s name. She nodded grudgingly. “It was all his fault to begin with. She would never have missed you if he hadn’t told her you’d gone to Swirling. So then she sets up keening and the next thing, he says ‘why don’t we go to the dressmakers’ showrooms in the Free Zone and we’ll take the car, we’ll play at being nobles, wouldn’t you like that?’ That was a display piece.” She gestured at Fumie. “She tried it for size, and nothing would do but she had to have it, straight off the form.”

  “Oh, Significance,” Mickey said. He swung around to have another look at Fumie’s dress, trying to see what made it a luxury item of foreign manufacture rather than a sleazy nomad-merchant rip-off. Her purple skirts rustled as she tripped toward them; candlelight ran off her like water. Mickey realized with a sinking of the heart that the material was Chinese silk.

  “She doesn’t care how much a thing costs as long as she thinks it’s pretty, she’d have been perfectly happy going to the Uriba, and so I told him. Gave him a piece of my mind I did. ‘Course she’d worn it out of the shop so there was no taking it back.”

  “Where’s Gaise?” Mickey said, his eyes still on Fumie. He could have taken the dress back, theoretically, but he would have had to go through both Rumika and Fumie to do so, and it didn’t seem worth the trouble. Fumie was walking in circles, beaming at him every time she came around. In her ceremonious placement of heel in front of toe he saw the effects of the nizhny.

  “Upstairs. Sulking.” Rumika snorted. “Took half the kitchen with him. The appetite on that child.”

  Mickey, stung, was about to tell her for the umpteenth time that Gaise at seventeen was only two years younger than Rumika herself, that all of them were of the same generation, and if Gaise were a child, then this was a house full of children—but before he could speak Fumie looked up from her circles and sang, “Yoshi! How is darling Ashie? I haven’t seen her in so long! Is she visiting friends? Swirling is such a frightfully dull city…even now, Okimachi is really the only place in the world! But she’s been away such a time—her Swirling friends must be very interesting!”

  “Oh, fascinating!” Mickey said grimly. “She’s having the time of her life. I doubt we’ll ever see her again, Fu, actually. You might as well stop hoping.”

  “Now look what you did!” Rumika hissed immediately. But in fact, Fumie only pouted.

  “But I miss her. And Zouy, too, and Mother. Where are they? I know you’ve told me, but I’m afraid I keep forgetting, my memory is just like cheesecloth…”

  She looked down at her dress, and smoothed it with lace-sheathed fingers. His all-too-intimate knowledge of the burnt bridges in her mental map told him that her train of thought had jumped its tracks. She looked up brightly. Rumika had done an expert job with her makeup. The northern girl fussed over her like a mother with a bride-to-be. “Yoshi, you don’t love me anymore!” Fumie announced.

  Mickey gritted his teeth in exasperation. “Sig-ni-fi-cance,” he growled under his breath. “You deal with her, Rumika; it’s what I pay you for,” and disregarding the geisha’s affronted intake of breath, he turned and started up the stairs. The paneling reflected a flailing stick figure at him as he climbed toward the landing. The wood had been polished to mirrorlike perfection—on Fumie’s bad days, when there were no clients to prepare for, when the geishas had tired of primping, they passed their time cleaning and dusting. They took more pleasure in Achino-uchi’s luxurious appointments than Mickey did.

  He thought: I tested the waters of self-sacrifice and I don’t feel any different. I suppose it’s too early to tell. I suppose I should take the plunge before I lose my nerve. But I—but I—

  From below he heard a plaintive wail: “Yoshi, darling…”

  On the top floor, a wave of dry heat hit him like a swoon as he let himself into his bedroom. “Oh, Yoshi darling, wherever were you?” Gaise sat on the bed, grinning, perfectly composed, in the middle of the remains of a feast of priceless meats, breads, and cheeses. He did an imitation of Fumie, fluttering his eyelashes and clasping his hands in front of his throat. “I’ve been waiting and waiting! What on earth took you so long?”

  “Headwind,” Mickey said. He stripped off his robe and after a moment pulled off his tunic, shirt, and undershirt, too. Gaise had stoked the fire into a roaring pyre that filled the hearth and tinted the whole room red. It looked like burning floorboards—Gaise must have made a foray down the city mountain to gather fuel. Like Rumika, he had an enterprising soul and wasn’t above taking risks in the course of his quest for the life of ease. No one who knew him could have described him as lazy although that was how he looked right now, supremely indolent, stretching out on his stomach oblivious of the dishes clinking together along the length of his body, propping his elbows on the edge of the bed, his black forelock falling down the center of his face as he regarded Mickey.

  “Did you get the Englishes back to the palace on time then?”

  “An hour late.”

  “What did Daisuke say?”

  You know him as well as I do, was on the tip of Mickey’s tongue, but since the fact of Gaise and Daisuke’s professional relationship wasn’t supposed to be common knowledge, he said only, “Don’t get crumbs in the bed, will you?”

  “Careful, you’re turning into an old woman.”

  Mickey wrestled with the knots in his boot laces. Even after more than three years of life as an amputee, he still got angry at the disproportionate length of time it took him to do simple tasks using his left hand and his tail—without a fifth limb he no longer qualified in pure terms as a member of the superior Kirekuni race: he was as inefficient as a Ferupian, a Cypean, a Likrekian, a foreigner. “Don’t provoke me.”

  “Ohhhh.” Gaise’s voice vibrated with sympathy, and despite himself Mickey looked up. The chauffeur was grinning. “Has it been a long hard day then? Come here and let me love it all better.”

  Mickey wrenched off his boots and sat down, staring across the room at the hearth. This palatial en suite sanctum, on the top floor next to Fumie’s room, gave him no sense of ease. Thick carpeting, genuine Kalahashi chairs and sofa, glass tables, a selection of easy-on-the-eye portraits of strangers (all the paintings of Achino ancestors had burned) and the centerpiece, a king-size bed covered with throw pillows and often, as now, with plates and crumbs—these were all very well, but the only personal touches could be traced to Gaise: the half-empty packets of cigarettes, the Significance-surplus chauffeur’s uniform strewn across the floor, the dirty plates, the pages from various pamphlets and books containing passages Gaise had liked long enough to rip them out. The boy wasn’t any more domestically inclined than Mickey was. His horrible childhood in the Fugue had given him the same conviction of impermanence that six years in the military had given Mickey. But Gaise was deliriously untidy and a hoarder to boot. Mickey couldn’t open a drawer or move a piece of furniture without finding a cache of ill-assorted, valueless rubbish. Since the SAF and the QAF had infected Mickey with a passion for neatness, this made for a conflict that showcased the incongruity of their characters.

  “Aren’t you in the mood then?” Gaise prodded. “I�
�ve been waiting. Nearly gave up on you and jerked off. Consider yourself lucky.”

  “I haven’t slept since this time the day before yesterday,” Mickey said, hating himself for whining at the same time as he craved sympathy. “Put yourself in my place for a moment: I surprised one of my sisters trying to cut her fingers off with chopsticks, flew three hundred miles in a kite that ought to be scrapped for parts, had an argument with my other sister, and nursed two blubbering New Worlders through hangovers, while you were gallivanting in the Free Zone. No, I’m not in the mood.”

  “I thought you always were,” Gaise purred, undeterred, and slithered farther off the bed. “Anyhow”—an edge of resentment entered his voice—“it was me who mostly had to look after Fumie. You had it easy by comparison, take my word for it.”

  “Looking after her by encouraging her to spend our profits for the next fiscal year? What a hard job.”

  “Well, what would you have done? You can’t cope with her when she smokes up. You go all to pieces. Me and Rumi end up dealing with her even when you’re here.”

  “And split the profits!”

  “What profits? Ain’t no profits!” Gaise sounded genuinely stung. “You couldn’t pay me enough to look after no nizhny addict not for nothing! I do it for you!” His body bucked, and he landed squatting on the floor, hands splayed in front of his ankles. Beautiful hands and feet, Mickey noticed not for the first time, as Gaise toad-hopped toward him across the carpet: disproportionately large, his toes almost as long as his fingers, brown with tan and ingrained dirt, and dexterous. One of the few details Gaise would divulge about his life before he had come to work at Achino-uchi was that he’d done a stint as a pickpocket, and another stint in jail. Maybe that was when he’d joined forces with Daisuke. Or maybe Greater Significance had just swooped him off the street when They were building their arsenal of things and people to use against Mickey. Their cast of potential puppets included almost everyone in Okimachi, so They took pride in matching the tool with the task.