A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  What Crispin couldn’t figure out was whether Rae had become halfway a cultie—well, she’d always been that—or halfway Cypean.

  And he couldn’t figure out what message he was supposed to be getting from today’s elegantly vampiric ensemble. Her black lace cuffs came halfway down her hands; they trailed delicately in the pastry plate as she sorted through the sweetmeats, and he dared to hope, until she answered the question he hadn’t asked. “I’m in mourning,” she said, selecting a meringue in the form of a seashell.

  “It suits you.”

  She bit into the meringue and swallowed hard. “For one of my Sisters. She died yesterday.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. What was her name?”

  “Breeze.” Their eyes met for a second. Rae looked down at her plate. “She was two years younger than me. She had a daughter. Annabedette. Two and a half years old.”

  “That really is horrible!” Crispin said. He meant it, so why couldn’t he manage to sound sincere? “I’m surprised that you—no, of course, I’m glad, but—what I mean is, well, thank you for coming anyhow,” he finished helplessly.

  “I couldn’t have not showed up, could 1? What would you have thought?”

  He wouldn’t have put it past her.

  “I mean, you might have got worried enough to come looking for me, in spite of what I told you, and this time”—she emphasized the words to tell him she knew he’d trailed her before—“this time you might have found me, and then where would I be? I’d be in disgrace, or—or worse, and then what about ‘Stell and Jonny? What about Annabee? What about…” She checked herself and flashed her artificial smile. “Anyway, it’s not as though I was frantically busy. Once a person’s dead, they don’t need you anymore. And having nothing to do all of a sudden…it can be quite…depressing. So I’m delighted to have a diversion.”

  “Did Breeze mean a lot to you?” Crispin had heard a note in her voice that both worried and excited him.

  Rae didn’t answer immediately, her hands immobile on the table. When she did speak she seemed to be in some kind of trance. “The funeral isn’t for a week. She’s lying in state in the chapel.”

  “I feel terrible for her daughter,” Crispin volunteered after a moment.

  “Annabee?” Rae shook her head, snapping out of it. “She hardly remembers her mother anyway. Breeze was sick for months before she died. And—and—offspring—children—they forget easily. They’re self-adjusting.”

  “It sounds as though she’s going to be well taken care of, anyway.” Crispin gathered Rae had assumed responsibility for her friend’s daughter. She seemed to have developed a predilection for assuming responsibility. Despite what she’d said about not being busy, her alternating bouts of fidgeting and immobility suggested to him a mother fretting to get back to her household, a schoolteacher with next day’s class on her mind. Where had her serenity gone? Had the death of her friend changed things for her at home? Had she found herself stuck with more responsibility even than she wanted, more than she could handle?

  “Consecrated, my offspring,” she whispered to herself, and then, “Annabee was a child of the Enclave before, and she still is now. It’s not the way you think it is. And I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about Breeze or anyone.”

  “Why not? Because I don’t understand the Enclave, and so it’s no use trying to talk to me about it?”

  He saw to his surprise that she was half laughing, shaking her head. “All I want is to have my mind taken off things, Crispin! Is that so awful? Tell me about you! I want to know about you! You accuse me of reticence and yet you’re the mystery man! Bottomless pockets, foreigner’s clothes, you won’t tell me where you’re staying, you won’t tell me who else you know in Kherouge, I haven’t any idea what your real business is here: you tell me some half-fleshed-out story about the law in Lamaroon and for all I know it could be cock-and-bull from start to finish! You tell me you’re married, but in that case where’s your wife? I don’t even know her name!” Her words dissolved into laughter. Undecided whether to laugh with her or lose his patience, Crispin resorted to a close-lipped smile. He picked up the pierced metal teapot and poured scalding green liquid for her and himself. She stopped laughing and drank thirstily, undeterred by the heat. Green tea. Two years ago it would have been black. Perhaps that was the secret of Cype’s survival as an entity, a culture, a mystery, Crispin thought: the meticulous vigilance with which it accommodated its alternating overlords. She watched him, crunching on her meringue. “Have you any children, Crispin?”

  “Thank Significance, no!”

  They’d been speaking Ferupian—it was still all right, since not even Kherouge’s zealous new lords could teach seventy thousand people a new language in a year—but the catch phrase popped out in Kirekuni, juxtaposing oddly with the Ferupian negative. Rae gave him a look of amused censure but didn’t comment.

  “Yleini would like to have a child, though,” Crispin said in Ferupian. “She castigates herself for our—our failure in that department. There’s no way of knowing whose fault it is, though, is there?” He shrugged. “In my opinion it’s all for the best. I wouldn’t want to live in the world that children of mine would inherit.”

  “That’s her name—Yleini?” Rae pronounced it awkwardly.

  “Yes.” There really was no way of knowing whose fault it was. It could be hers, since after all she’d been fucking Yamauchi (he could think that now without a wince) and Yamauchi was hardly sterile, he had two grown daughters…then again, knowing Yamauchi’s wife Jionna, the daughters might be someone else’s…then again, for all Crispin knew, Yleini had been fucking half the men in Redeuiina every time he went on a business trip. But it was probably his fault. When genius had been reamed, sucked, scoured out of his body, that stormy day in the middle of the Likreky Sea, he’d vomited something else up too and lost it, something he had trouble defining but whose absence had allowed him to subside into his role of Yamauchi’s backdoor break-and-entry man with hardly a twinge of conscience, and would have allowed him to continue indefinitely, his life reduced to a grind of nuts and bolts and confrontations and compensations, had Tomichi Minami not taken precedence. So he had no trouble believing that he’d lost his virility as well, that day on the Parrot Girl.

  “My children are my life,” Rae said.

  “How old are they?” They’d never exchanged workaday particulars like this.

  “Jonny’s three. Estellesme isn’t yet one.”

  But on second thought he’d hold off on the gratitude for a while. If he was stabbed tonight, he would still curse Minami with his last breath. It was probably Minami’s friends who were closing in on him even as he sat in this pastryhouse. But it might not be. But it probably was. Damn Minami. Because of him, and his Japanese friends and his shortsighted raising of the stakes to homicide vs. market share, Crispin was in danger, and he was alone, and he didn’t yet know whether he’d been reborn or sent on another trip down the garbage chute.

  Rae held her teacup in both hands. She wrinkled up her nose. “How long have you been married?”

  “Significant”—there he went again—“three years—yes, three years almost to the day. We were married in the spring. She wore red.”

  “Is that a tradition in the islands?”

  “Nope. You could stock a dress shop with Lamaroon wedding gowns, and you wouldn’t have two the same. Likrekians tend to make up their traditions as they go along.”

  “It’s the opposite here.”

  What was it in her eyes? Sadness? Regret? His heart leapt into his throat. “Rae—”

  “How long—” she said simultaneously, and they both stopped, and laughed. “You first—”

  “Go ahe—”

  He found himself holding her gaze. His hand hovered in the pastry plate, but he didn’t know how long it had been there, didn’t know whether he’d wanted a sweetmeat or whether he’d reached for her hand and lost his way mid-impulse, caught off guard by the luminosi
ty of her dark eyes. The moment seemed to stretch forever: he was vaguely aware of the conversation at the tables around them, Kirekuni and Ferupian voices mingling in an oddly mellifluous counterpoint—the only place in the world where you’re likely to hear that—and the clatter from the kitchen at the back. The rain had become heavier, and the wood trim on the open French windows glistened. The wet street rolled all the way up to their feet. Under the table, the toe of her black high heel rested on his shoe. Even through double layers of leather he could feel the contact, and it excited him ridiculously, and he must have been grinning like a fool because a nervous half smile formed on her lips, and her eyes flickered from side to side, and he knew she was trying to think of a way to segue out of the moment without embarrassment.

  He looked down. His cheeks ached. He was clutching a cake so tightly it had crumbled. He scooped up fragments and tipped them into his mouth.

  “Coconut paste.” He raised his eyebrows. “My, my, we are cosmopolitan here. I’m surprised they don’t flag each cake with its country of origin: like an international-goodwill exhibition where you can eat the ambassadors.”

  She laughed. “How long were you in Lamaroon altogether?”

  “Long enough to become nostalgic when I taste coconut. No; I met Yleini the day I arrived, and waited four months before marrying her. Mostly because I had to save up enough money for a ring. I should have waited longer.”

  “Why?”

  He looked at her and took a deep breath, nerving himself. “If I’d waited longer, perhaps I’d have realized I was making a mistake.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She was disappointed in him: she thought he was making a pathetically obvious play to gain her sympathy. A heat wave of anger made everything ripple in his vision, and he decided to confess nothing more. Nothing.

  “I thought you were out there—in the islands—longer than that.”

  “I told you, I didn’t leave Okimachi until after the Fire of 1212.”

  “No, it’s just that you’re so dark. I’d have taken you for a full-blood.”

  All that time spent out in the sun, chivvying the location crews handling this project of Yamauchi’s or that one—most recently the Redeuiina Airport—had taken its toll. The airport had been completed during Minami’s trial. Who was overseeing it now? Had anyone tried to reopen negotiations for an American terminus? “I’ll have to keep indoors for a while, then. I’m passing myself off as a Mime. Although I don’t suppose it matters. I haven’t told anyone that’s what I’m doing. Anyone else, I mean.” He shrugged. “But if this rain keeps up, we’ll all look as if we crawled out from under stones…”

  He trailed off, staring out at the street, wondering if twilight should be falling. Had they been here a few minutes or several hours? He wasn’t sure how much more he could take. She frustrated him beyond words, irritated the hell out of him, but he wanted her so badly so badly SO BADLY that he couldn’t imagine leaving while she was still willing to tolerate him. It was always she who left first. But now she was acting as though she’d be happy to sit here into the night, even as the rest of the customers turned over twice an hour, and their waiter hovered, not quite disrespectful enough to ask if they wanted anything. Crispin took pity on him and signaled for another pot of tea, thinking, there’s something she wants to tell me but she can’t work her way around to it—what could it—things have—something’s changed—

  The new electric streetlights came on and in their pallid pools umbrellas swam to and fro, multiplying, coats flapping under them like fins. Crispin rested his chin on his fist, content to let Rae fill the silences. He was still thinking about her “full-blood” comment and how he could have been a Mime even if he had red hair only she wouldn’t have known. He wondered if the truth about the men from the Mim was part of the larger truth, or just another sideshow, another black top into which he’d been allowed to peek. The trouble was that he’d got peeks into so many of Mr. Nakunatta’s sideshows. From that very first pseudo-vision seven years ago to bloody hell, to last night, he’d been allowed to get far closer than most people ever did to the big top where the originals of the advance billing strutted their stuff in the real and deadly show of whose existence he’d become convinced all over again. And so far he hadn’t paid a penny. He was waiting.

  Unless you counted Prettie, the trickster women, Orpaan, Jacithrew, a hundred nameless enemies, Saia and Zouy Achino, twenty thousand nameless Okimachians, Mickey, Yleini, oh, Significance—the point was he was still, inexplicably, alive.

  Half-formed images, memories of dreams: circuses; trucks; airplanes; daemons; demogorgons; screamers: survivor’s guilt.

  There was more than one way to look at it. He liked thinking of truth as a circus because that made it seem thrilling but harmless, see the tightrope walker land on the wire safe and sound with her feathered hat in place even after a triple somersault! But he didn’t feel thrilled. He felt hunted. Even sitting across from Rae, Rain, Bedroom Eyes, Light of my Life, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the truth was stalking him. Like a ravenous beast of prey it was circling him, lickylipped, fangs dripping, paddypaddling along the streets of Kherouge, closer and closer. He’d gone to ground, but he couldn’t hide. It was just a matter of time. “Just a matter of time!” Who’d said that? His heart flip-flopped into his stomach as he remembered it had been the Mime. The Mime who’d clued him into the game again. The Mime who came closer than anyone else Crispin had ever met, even Devi Yamauchi, to embodying the beast of prey’s sleek enigmatic mutability, its confidence in its now and future power.

  10 Maia 1898 A.D.

  Ferupe: Naftha: one year and eight months earlier

  “I am surprised that the Governor of Lamaroon, whom I have met in other circumstances, an extremely personable man, I am slightly surprised that he employs a non-Kirekuni?” The red-haired man’s tone pleaded: bear with me, I want to get down to business, too, but you must understand that in my position I have to be careful! And Crispin would have borne with him. Security worries when you met a new contact were natural and even healthy. But the light green eyes deep in the smallpox-scarred folds of Palmer Tallwood’s face held an unmistakable threat. Even as he oofed across his desk to hand Crispin a glass of cognac, his eyes sneered, I can’t fucking figure you out, and I don’t like you, and if I don’t like the way you explain yourself, you’ll be locked up somewhere highly unpleasant until I get in touch with someone who can give me a better explanation. In my position I have to be very, very careful!

  Crispin sipped the cognac. “Tallwood sounds like a heartland domains name,” he commented. “Do you have family there?”

  What did Devi want a new distributor for anyway? What markets could this carrottop fatso reach that Mr. J.S. Babbett, Wholesale Textiles & Other, couldn’t? Tallwood wore a fussy, extravagant robecut coat and hose that suggested his money was so new it still smelled like mint. But what really annoyed Crispin was that his other assignment in Naftha was to put Mr. J.S. Babbett out of business with the time-honored strategy of a knife in the dark. He quite liked Babbett and had been procrastinating, trying not to go anywhere he’d run into the jolly, elderly man and have to look him in the face beforehand.

  “No.” Tallwood left it at the monosyllable and his eyes got even nastier. Like lumps of jade stuck in his doughy, sweaty, scarred, smudged morass of a face, the eyes entranced Crispin so much he couldn’t remember what his question had been. He sighed and said:

  “Assassinations are pretty common in my line of work, Mr. Tallwood.”

  “I do hope that isn’t a threat!” Tallwood laughed, but his veneer of niceness was cracking.

  “I was about to continue: however, assassinations aren’t the worst part of the job. In fact, I usually delegate them. The worst part of my job is the eternal suspicion I have to face. Nothing’s good enough for you people: I could carry signed and sealed letters of introduction—I would, if it weren’t for the risk of getting searched on a bullshit charge—and you’d think I’d forged
them. Hell, Devi could come here in person, and you probably wouldn’t believe he was on the up-and-up.”

  “A rather inappropriate term, don’t you think?”

  Crispin shrugged. “On the up-and-up according to you and me, ripe for impeachment according to the Disciples: it comes to the same thing, trust. Why don’t you trust me? Because I’m not a Kirekuni. Now that’s slightly insulting, Mr. Tallwood.”

  Tallwood’s eyes were sheeny marbles of malice. His red curls, flattened in a ring from his hatband, jumped up and down. “I dislike ‘blowing my own horn,’ as they say,” he fumed, “but to make an exception, I may confide that I was given to understand that Governor Yamauchi in his secondary capacity as overseer of undeclared exports wishes to do business with me because, in his own words, he believes I have ‘a world-class nose for contacts.’ My network is the second largest in southern Ferupe. It is much newer than that of the competition. But I have been given to understand that that is, in fact, a selling point. To, for example—”

  “Persons whom it would be impolitic to name,” Crispin interjected angrily.

  “—certain old-timers, a reliable contact is a loyalist, even dare I say a patriot, with ground support. To me, a reliable contact is a Kirekuni.” He hurled the word across the desk at Crispin. “The Disciples will soon be in every corner of the United Domains; they are already everywhere that matters. The importance of ground support has been superseded by the importance of a contact’s having a satisfactory working relationship with the blackcoats. You, on the other hand, have been so kind as to inform me that you fear being pulled in on a ‘bullshit charge’ and body-searched. That is not what I term a satisfactory working relationship.”