A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  They’d done a good job of it this time.

  Long, skinny, clever fingers sank into Mickey’s neck from behind, digging out tension after tension.

  “It’s all your fault anyway,” Mickey heard in his ear, just as he started to relax. “Catch me giving anybody nizhny, not even my worst enemy I wouldn’t give it them. Fucking cultie drug.”

  Don’t remind me! “You haven’t told anyone, have you?” Mickey said sharply, twisting around. “Not—not—” Daisuke—

  “Why the fuck don’t you trust me then?” Beads of sweat stood on Gaise’s temples. But his voice rang with outraged honesty, so rare Mickey identified it immediately. “You must think I want to ruin you. You must think I want to ruin Achino-uchi! Significant—I know what would happen if Significance found out about her! They’re scareder of culties than they are of the whole fucking Far West put together! We’d go from A-list to the blacklist!” He was breathing hard. Mickey bit his lip. Intimately, though not from analogous experience, he knew the anxiety flaring through Gaise’s mind—the anxiety of the traitor to both sides, the secret agent who has become a double agent with a stake in keeping both masters hungry for more. Gaise had a cushy billet at Achino-uchi. This was likely the closest he had ever come to achieving the life of luxury he craved. So as not to be snatched from this tailored, upholstered paradise and dropped back into the Fugue, he regularly betrayed both Significance, to whom he’d sold his soul, and Mickey, who’d sold it back to him.

  But—and again, Mickey knew it deep in his heart—walking such a tightrope required isolation. And that kind of isolation, that glass helmet of secrets, conferred an acute perception of the gulf beneath, the gulf of Being Found Out. With a certain curiosity Mickey had watched Gaise’s fear of falling grow to phobic proportions. Over the last months his mood swings had become ever more jarring. As he became the role he was playing, that of Mickey’s lover and coconspirator, the stresses of concealment had started to tell. It could end with his losing his finer judgment—committing himself once and for all to one side or the other, just for the sake of resolution. Mickey was waiting for that to happen.

  At the same time he’d had to prevent himself from falling in love.

  I empathize too deeply with the role of the tortured puppet.

  He turned around, kneeling, and faced Gaise in the lurid light. You know which side your bread is buttered on, don’t you? I hope for both our sakes you do. “Your features are truly exquisite.”

  Gaise started to toss his head in impatience, and turned it into a coy hair flip. He grinned. Mickey saw the effort it took. “What are you going to do about it?” He pouted, doing an impression of an affected geisha.

  “I just want to look at you.”

  “I can think of better things to do.”

  Mickey felt a sudden, impish pressure on his inner thighs and saw Gaise’s fingers walking upward toward his groin. The sight and the caress had the effect of arousing him to instant, raging lust. He reached out and grabbed Gaise by the shoulders and kissed him. Their bodies met; Gaise’s knee moved between his, and the boy’s hard, muscular thigh ground against his crotch. Gaise’s hot, thick tongue dived deep into Mickey’s mouth, seeking his throat like a safe hiding place. The fingers of his right hand picked at the back of Mickey’s trousers, trying to get inside, and with his left hand he seized Mickey’s tail, rubbing its tip over his groin, using it to massage his stiffly outlined penis. Gaise’s cock was hard to the touch, ramming against his tight trousers, trying to rise up off his balls. Desire surged through Mickey’s brain, threatening his resolve. He reached for Gaise and cupped his penis, squeezing it through the fabric, remembering with a confusing sense of irony that the reason Significance had sent the chauffeur to him was, after all, the reason they sent their foreign guests to Achino-uchi. The reason was pillow talk.

  And he no longer had any clear idea how much of their pillow talk Gaise was reporting to Daisuke, how truthfully. He didn’t know on any given day or night which way Gaise’s balanced loyalties were tipping. This uncertainty made it difficult for him to hold back from confidences.

  He wrenched his mouth free, pushing the boy away a few inches. Gaise licked his lips. His face shone with sweat and exhilaration, and he was still moving, grinding himself against Mickey. “Oooh,” he said, his voice high and clear. “Yoshi, darling! My, my! As I always say, if you want the best, apply to a professional!”

  Mickey ducked his kiss and said with sudden bitterness, “But you’re a professional, too, aren’t you? That makes for a bit of overkill, wouldn’t you say?”

  Fear flashed through the eyes that were incongruously light in the tanned face. Mickey suspected Gaise had a bit of Eo Iorian or perhaps Mime blood in him, which would explain both his trickiness and his tan. Suspected was the key word: he didn’t know. He didn’t know anything for sure about the undependable, self-centered, hellishly handsome boy who was the first lover he’d had in years. “Amateur,” Gaise purred. “One hundred percent amateur—professional under the table man, if you want!” He laughed, his breath catching, and seized Mickey close, forcing his lips apart with the fat, snaky tongue that was a professional all on its own, and both his hands found their way inside the waist of Mickey’s trousers, squeezing Mickey’s buttocks, index fingers jabbing deep, and Mickey wanted to say, Oh, you think you’re clever! but by the time they next broke apart again, desire had got hold of him properly, and all he could do was tug at Gaise’s shirt. After they made love he sobbed with his face in Gaise’s lap. Gaise sat against the head of the bed and stroked his hair absently, thinking Significant knew what; probably thinking nothing at all—he was satiated and, therefore, tolerant. And Mickey, satiated but unsatisfied, cried in a most unprofessional fashion, remembering:

  that the handover hadn’t gone as usual; that no matter what he pretended, nothing was as usual; that it had all gone wrong, and only an accident allowed him to be here instead of in an interrogation room. Worst of all, he wouldn’t even be able to pretend for much longer. You know Daisuke as well as I do, Gaise! In a flood of tears, he recalled the rest of what he’d been going to say. Disobedience enrages him like nothing else. He chases offenders the way a dog chases scent, and he won’t rest until he’s run his quarry into the ground. Gaise, I’m cornered.

  Daisuke had been waiting in the center of the palace courtyard, greatcoated and mufflered to the teeth, the tip of his nose the color of a rotten strawberry. He greeted the Englishmen as jovially as if it had been a fine spring morning in London. He made, of course, no mention of the fact that it was long past sundown—one of his unspoken rules was to criticize only in Kirekuni. As far as Mickey could tell the pressures of his job had whittled his vocabulary in his native tongue down to hostilities. He was fluent in English, German, Japanese, Dutch, Ferupian, Eo Iorian, and Mimetic; he had a fair bit of Chinese and some French. Ironically, his facility for language wasn’t accompanied by a facility for social situations—his preferred medium was ultimatums, not the ambiguities of small talk. But the mere fact of a Kirekuni who spoke their language well often served to boost foreigners’ spirits. Blythe-Frye would not be coaxed out of his broody silence, but after a few minutes, Wigglesworth regained all his ebullience. He was tousled and terrifyingly voluble as he ranted about the efficience with which Okimachi was being rebuilt.

  “Never seen anything like it!” he shouted, arms waving. “I visited Paris while la Tour d’Eiffel was being built, and that, as you may know, is the tallest building in Europe. But everything in this country is on a bigger scale than anything at home! Lord, how I wish I’d been here to see it before! Dear old Blythe-Frye is unimaginably privileged to have done so! What did you say it was, Achino, that monument-inprogress on the south side near the top, a police station of some sort—that takes the cake! It’s like Eiffel’s Tower in a dozen different places all over the bloody city!”

  When they approached Okimachi in the KE, Mickey had been concentrating on maneuvering the kite down to the airstri
p and hadn’t really seen what a deep impression the view was making on Wigglesworth. Now he wondered frantically how to stop him letting the cat out of the bag.

  “I’m a student of architecture, as a matter of fact! Purely on an amateur basis—but since I’ve been in Oceania, I’ve begun seriously to consider sitting down and writing my book. The contrasts between East and West, you know. It was my posting to Shanghai that inspired me. Of course it’s a broad subject; I haven’t quite found my angle yet, but in the last few days I’ve been besieged with ideas!”

  Mickey winced. Airplanes were just starting to gain aficionados in the West and, according to reports, most European engineers weren’t yet convinced they even worked—the British, especially, were so enamored of their railways they wouldn’t concede that inventors halfway across the world had come up, a century earlier, with an even faster sort of machine. But at the rate Wigglesworth was going, the KE and the airstrip would logically figure in his paean.

  “It’s ambitious, it’s impossible, it’s bloody monumental!” the young company man cried, and appeared to run temporarily out of adjectives.

  “This is not, of course, the first time in history that fire has ravaged Okimachi,” Daisuke said in English with a stiff half bow. “Yet after every disaster we have not just rebuilt, but reengineered, the city according to the most modern aesthetic standards. This time, since we have been exposed to the brilliant ideas of Far Western architects, we anticipate a true triumph of city planning. Within five years, the city is expected to have followed the example of London and Paris and converted from gas to electricity. Then, of course, you have seen the new Disciplinarian Headquarters. It is the brainchild of Fukubino, our most celebrated young architect. He has just returned from Berlin, and would I am sure be delighted to meet a Europhile with whom to share his impressions.”

  “Not a Europhile, a Kirekunophile!” Wigglesworth shouted.

  Daisuke smiled with closed lips. “I do not doubt a tour of the most interesting sites—old and new—can be arranged.” His gaze wandered between Wigglesworth’s and Blythe-Frye’s heads; Mick guessed he was watching for his relief to appear out of the palace. Usually these handovers only lasted long enough to ascertain that everyone had had a rare old time before a deletion of Significant Nobodies—as Mickey called the hangers-on who, dashing in all the hues of new grass, were doing their best to reclaim Significance from the military faction—appeared and swooped the foreigners off under their wings, to spend the remainder of their business trip being passed from one handler to the next, shown a succession of Okimachi-style good times guaranteed to keep their heads spinning and send them home raving. The treatment’s lavishness disguised its similarity to a package tour. Daisuke’s involvement ended here: that was why he’d never found out about Mickey’s occasional departures from procedure. Greater Significance might be the smoothest intelligence machine in all of Oceania, but it had so many cogs that some of them simply never connected.

  And tonight it seemed to have sustained a minor breakdown. Nobody came. Parties of Significant Nobodies flowed to and fro between the main doors and the gateway arch, shrieking about the wind, ignoring the foursome standing off the beaten path. From time to time a heavy black car disgorged a dignitary or a military official at the gates. Daisuke managed to glower in their direction and smile at Wigglesworth all at once.

  “Of course before tonight, the palace was all I’d seen of Okimachi,” Wigglesworth pursued expansively. “It’s simply stunning but let’s face it, all palaces have a certain sameness. And the rest of the city I’d seen only in the dark. Then, what’s its name, Achino? Swirling?”

  —that’s torn it—

  “A hole! It reminded me of Newcastle. I simply wasn’t prepared for the reality, do you know. Of course I’ve never seen London from the air, either—but the Okimachi mountain is a unique asset which I think lends a majesty to the whole city. I can’t think of another capital in the world that is such a—a pedestal for itself.” He radiated goodwill and excitement: the flip side of his sexual depravement, which had just as much potential to adversely affect those in his vicinity. Daisuke shot a glance at Mickey, his face resembling the carvings of the Significant that had reigned in front of all the best houses in the old city before the fire split and stained them and Greater Significance disappeared those that were left. Benevolence petrified in granite.

  Mickey knew he would see those hard orbs and that frozen gray smile every night until the end of his life. At the moment, that seemed imminent. His head was roaring and whirling, and he fought to maintain his expression of scholarly interest in Wigglesworth’s paean to Okimachi and airplanes. He glanced at Blythe-Frye. The older, fatter Englishman stared down at the cobbles between his feet, panting gently. If he had been Kirekuni, he would have had his tail tip gripped in his teeth. Mickey narrowed his eyes, failing for a moment to understand; then two and two added up, and alarms rang in his head, and he interrupted, “Daisuke! Something’s wrong with him!”

  Daleuke whirled. Blythe-Frye did not move. “Woghouse, old man?” Wigglesworth said uncertainly—and as if conceding his point in an argument, Blythe-Frye dropped his case, his knees buckled, and he toppled heavily to the cobblestones. His head bounced with a sickening thwock. He lay still. They all stared at him for a second. Then Daisuke’s head jerked up and he glared murderously at Mickey. “Help! Somebody! He’s dead! Oh, God, he’s dead!” Wigglesworth screamed, and he, too, fell to his knees, shuddering away from Blythe-Frye, clutching his head between his hands. “Oh, God—what have I done—”

  Mickey stooped. With his fingers between the cold, stubbly wattles he could just detect a pulse. He worked one-handed to undo Blythe-Frye’s cravat. At the best of times it had been too tight, and now the gape-mouthed face resembled a blue tomato. “He’s not dead.” Mickey looked up at Daisuke. “He’s just unconscious—strained heart I expect—you should have seen him last night! But we have to get him inside—get him warm—”

  In belated response to Wigglesworth’s yell, a dozen Nobodies skidded up, chattering like squirrels with spring fever. Mickey found himself bowled backward by a phalanx of black coats who plowed through the Nobodies and shouldered around Blythe-Frye like a living wall. They picked him up and bore him bodily toward the palace, whose main doors were swinging open in readiness. Wigglesworth knelt rocking and screaming, his transformation from sophisticate to trauma victim pathetically complete; the Nobodies, seeing their job cut out for them, descended clucking and raised him up with half a dozen arms around his shoulders. The wind swooped down again behind them as they cast off in the black coats’ wake. This wasn’t the first time Mickey had seen Greater Significance reacting to an emergency, but the sheer smooth speed of it impressed him all over again. He hoped wildly that the rectification had been outright. It didn’t seem impossible that in removing Blythe-Frye and Wigglesworth the Nobodies and Disciples had somehow managed to remove the things Wigglesworth had said, too.

  Stiff with dread, he rolled over and sat up. Daisuke looked rather less elegant—in the scuffle he’d been deprived of his muffler and his greatcoat had been torn open—but the expression on his face put paid to every hope of impunity Mickey had ever entertained. “For fuck’s sake,” Mickey said tiredly, and got to his feet, narrowing his eyes.

  “I take it you do not share our foreign friend’s low opinion of Swirling?” Daisuke spoke in Kirekuni. It established an intimacy between them, a space in which Mickey had no room to defend himself.

  “My sister lives there.” He shrugged. “She loves it, but I think mostly because it’s not Okimachi. This is my home and always will be, but I’ve found that an occasional jaunt to the provinces makes one better appreciate the cosmopolitan breadth of society in the capital. You should try it.”

  Irony was lost on Daisuke. “I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you to wonder if the Okimachi Aviation Society would approve of your making use of their airplanes to pay calls to your family?”

  “It’
s all business,” Mickey corrected him. “And I pay my dues to the Society like everyone else. The hangars are staffed twenty-four hours a day specifically to ensure that we can take out the kites whenever we happen to be free. Flying is a leisure pursuit these days, after all.”

  “Not, apparently, for you.”

  “Yes, well,” Mickey conceded, and then, looking Daisuke in the eye: “It’s a pity. This would have been the last time.”

  Daisuke gestured impatiently. “It doesn’t become you to bargain. There can be no bargains between Significance and one such as you—I would have expected you to understand that.”

  “I thought we already had a bargain.”

  “And you have defaulted on it. Again. You were warned, yet—”

  “Omoke—please! I swear! This will be the last time!”

  “I’ll oblige you not to be familiar, Achino!”

  Was this to be his execution dock? Mickey wondered in the ensuing silence. The courtyard of the palace to which, for all his years-long entanglement with Significance, he had never once been granted entrance? None of the lights from gateway or doorway or walls reached into the center, where the intransigent pool of darkness made it look as though the cobblestones dipped. An appropriate enough setting for the downfall of an outsider. And Daisuke, too, for all his pretensions, was something of an outsider. As far as Mickey knew, the official had no tribal pedigree, not a modicum of originality, no war honors, no claims to Significance at all except a talent for foreign languages and a few New World-style suits. He might hold Mickey’s life and finances in the palm of his Italian-gloved hand, but he was merely the last link in one chain of command among thousands: a tiny, almost toothless cog with no power to shift the gears deep within Great Significance—a mere mechanism for passing down Their dictates. His chilly style of operating, while appropriate to his current rank, was no sort of qualification for advancement. In the final analysis Mickey wouldn’t have wanted to be in Daisuke’s brilliant white spats. A smile spread across his face. “Any words of wisdom for me to take to my death, then?”