“Kateralbin?” Crispin said with a sinking heart. “Anuei’s son?”
“Ka—a—a—my boy!” Saul yelped, flung the door wide, and dragged Crispin into an embrace. Crispin had all he could do not to recoil. Saul reeked as if he’d been living in his costume for months and substituting medicinal talc for soap and water. His ruffled shirtfront was dingy, and the back of his jacket collar shone with hair grease, though he had practically no hair left to grease down. His eyes were so rheumy he must be almost blind. No wonder he hadn’t recognized Crispin straightaway.
“I thought you would never come!” he sobbed as he finally released him. “I could have contacted you directly, of course—but I wanted to leave the choice up to you. Believe me, it was the hardest thing I ever did.” He turned his cataracted eyes piously to the ceiling. “Thanks be to our dear, dead Queen that your better instincts prevailed! Or perhaps it was just curiosity! Did you like the invitation I sent you, eh? I coud hardly sleep for imagining your surprise!” He chortled.
“So it was only you,” Crispin muttered under his breath. He felt nauseated with disappointment. The room on the second floor of the roadhouse was as bare and dusty as it must have been before Saul took over. The huge old desk had been transferred here from Poppy 1, complete with fossilized cascades of paper that looked the same as they had six years ago. Mickey sat down quietly on the camp bed against the wall. Crispin marshaled his thoughts. Saul wasn’t his real problem. The only power the Old Gentleman wielded over him was that of the employer, and that was long ago. “So it was you—you had someone put that showbill under my door at the Old Tyme Hospitality?”
“Indeed not! I did it with my own two hands!” Saul laughed so hard he succumbed to a fit of coughing. “Were you surprised?”
“Could have knocked me down with a feather.” Especially when I saw what else had happened while I was gone. “Did you—ah—did you find what you were looking for?”
“Looking for?” Saul stuck out his lower lip. “I was only looking for you. You were not there, and so I departed. Truth be told, I was relieved. As I mentioned, I wanted you to seek us out of your own free will.”
Crispin closed his eyes for a second. He sensed that the decrepit old ringmaster was telling the truth. The vandals who’d demolished Crispin’s rented room (looking for something they believed he had? or just making a point?) weren’t connected to the circus—they’d just chosen the same night to show their hand.
“Did you meet anyone on the stairs?” he asked carefully.
“Eh? No one except your landlady; when I explained I was distributing temperance-society leaflets—ha, ha!—she allowed me to pass.”
Who else had the unsuspecting landlady of the Old Tyme Hospitality allowed in that night? Crispin’s mind boggled. It could have been assassins dispatched by Yamauchi or by Scaamediin Ltd. But would professionals have made such a mess? It made more sense to suspect the late Tomichi Minami’s friends, working in some form of alliance (Crispin felt irrationally certain) with the repulsive, elusive Mime, Acanaguan alias Tallwood. Of Crispin’s pursuers one at least was a Mime. And a Mime could disguise himself to enter where a Lamaroon or Kirekuni wouldn’t be able to help exciting notice. Besides, none of the assassins Crispin knew made a habit of toying with their prey for weeks before closing in. He had to act as though his enemies were Mimes. That just made it all the more vital that he find Millsy.
He opened his mouth to ask after the old trickster, but Saul got in first. “And who is your friend? Shame on you, Crispin, I believe I taught you always to make introductions!” he cried artfully.
“Mickey Ash,” Crispin said. “Saul Smithrebel.”
“Ah! Another of my fellow exiles!” Saul switched without warning to Ferupian. “We all weep for our poor, conquered land, do we not, Mr. Ash? As a man born on the open road, I was at home anywhere in Ferupe; but which fair domain do you hail from?”
Fucking hell! Saul couldn’t even see Mickey’s tail. Crispin made a face at Mickey, who shifted uneasily on the camp bed. “I grieve in particular for the west…”
His attempt to hide his accent was unsuccessful. Saul’s face turned poppy red. “A Kirekuni, eh? Your name is not typical,” he whispered.
Crispin said in exasperation and pity, “Saul, the show was fascinating, but I came here principally in the hope of finding—”
“Ah, yes, the show!” Saul screamed in relief. “Shrikouto!”
He clasped his hands and executed a stumbling pirouette.
“Shrikouto! The only thing that has ameliorated my misery at having been compelled to leave my homeland! My boys, shrikouto is to me as a religion.” His cloudy eyes glowed with moisture. “Or perhaps in the present company—ha, ha—I should say that my shrikoutanis, my Human Knives, are to me as Significants. I worship them. My quest was always to find the perfect performance art, which is defined by the existence of perfect practitioners of it. How ironic, then, was my discovery that here in the east, such an art has existed all along! Professional shrikoutanis are the continent’s most dedicated performers. They live for the arena. Shrikouto is to them, quite literally, life and death.”
Crispin searched vainly for cigarettes. He made a begging gesture behind his back; Mickey put several cheap paperweeds in his hand. He lit one, fumbling. Saul wrinkled his nose at the smell but didn’t stop haranguing them.
“However, shrikouto has traditionally been practiced as a mere folk sport. Championships, tours—such things were unheard of. My task in Cype, as I perceive it, is to create a national shrikouto—perhaps even, the vagaries of politics permitting, a continental shrikouto—by bringing the art of the circus to the game, and making it more than a game. I am making shrikouto into an entertainment! My Knives are Cype’s best—and province by province, year by year, they are proving it! What you saw tonight is only the beginning!” He did a shuffling two-step of ecstasy. “The plan of promotion I mean to follow—”
Crispin twisted and mouthed, Just wait until he talks himself out. Mickey grimaced. He was clearly on edge. He’d offered to wait outside, but Crispin had pretended not to hear—he’d been on tenterhooks, wondering if Saul was in fact the Mime who’d been stalking him. A Mime! I must have been out of my mind! As the Old Gentleman extolled the glories of a blood sport that not all the advance papering in the world could transform into an “entertainment” in any sense other than the Cypean, Crispin started to feel almost panicky with embarrassment. He’d given Mickey to believe that they were going to find answers, and instead they’d come up against a blank wall. And what could be more depressing than belling the cat of your childhood, only to find the once-dreadful feline capable of no more than wagging its tail like a dog?
Saul had no right to be glad to see Crispin! Seven years ago, he’d fired him for the good of the circus, implying that he, like everyone else, believed Crispin guilty of a crime of passion. Had he realized Crispin was innocent? Had his conscience been plaguing him all this time? The possibility that the Old Gentleman even had a conscience had never crossed Crispin’s mind.
When Saul ran out of breath he seized his chance. “I understand you’ve replaced most of your former employees—”
“By necessity, not by choice, my boy!”
“But do you remember Mill—”
“What am 1 thinking of!” Saul affected a hangdog expression. He looked guiltily up at Crispin. “I haven’t even offered you a chair! A fine one 1 am to lecture on manners, eh?” Shaking his head, he tottered around his desk, dragged a rickety wooden armchair forward, and plopped down as if his strength had suddenly given out.
“Truly, ol—Saul, it’s all right. But I have to know, is Millsy—Gift Mills—still in your employ?” Crispin crossed his fingers. “Do you remember who I’m talking about?”
“Yes, yes, of course I remember.” Saul placed two fingers between his eyebrows and rubbed the spot. “Millsy and 1 traveled together for many years.”
“He taught me daemon handling, if you recall. That
’s why I’m interested in finding him. In the old days—”
“Ah, the old days!” Saul shrieked in relief, starting upright in his chair. “What an idyll we lived, and knew it not! How generously the green, the white, and the brown domains of Ferupe supported our humble enterprise! It was a respite, a few hours of self-forgetfulness, that we offered to those who lived only to toil; and how gladly they flocked to the big top! How—”
“Saul, please—if we were living an idyll, you’re quite right that we didn’t know it at the time, so why indulge in nostalgia?” As he said it, he realized his own nostalgia for the old circus arts was no more than that, a self-indulgence. “And your focus on shrikouto seems to have put a shine on the profits and the circus’s reputation, which is what it was all about from day one, so you’ve got nothing to—”
Saul interrupted him. “It is blood money!”
“I thought you said shrikouto was the perfect performance art.”
“If art is defined in terms of passion evinced by the audience—”
“You said yourself it was all about the performers!”
“The Knives are not performers!” Spittle flew from Saul’s lips with the intensity of his speech. “They are daemons! Daemonkind itself is no more; such is the fate of all species that inhabit this mortal coil; and I will always be thankful I had the foresight to purchase internal-combustion engines for the trucks before the Kirekunis drove the prices up—but the ancient, mindless daemonic malice toward humanity, itself an entity, a sentient mandate for the destruction of humanity, is not extinct! Rather, it has passed to those who are single-minded! For example, the shrikoutanis. I endorse them purely as a means of controlling the spread of postmonarchical vice. Do not dare to condemn me: I, at least, admit that that spread cannot be contained, only controlled!”
He folded his arms and glared defiantly, blindly. Crispin had no time for prophecies of apocalypse, new or old. “Saul, what happened to Millsy?”
Saul sagged. “It was after he left that I was inspired to buy the internal-combustion engines. They were hard to find at the time, but I had the good fortune to meet a black-market dealer in Gilye.” The white eyes took on a faraway look. “I was consumed by a presentiment. The circumstances attending Millsy’s departure seemed to me the beginning of the end. The beginning of the spread.”
“What circumstances?” Guessing wildly, Crispin imagined rogue daemons and illnesses such as he himself had experienced three years ago on board the Parrot Girl.
“We were in rural Cype, far enough from the war that we had nearly managed to forget it. Millsy received a letter from Kingsburg.”
“From the court?”
“I do not know.” Saul twisted in his chair and fumbled with the kerosene lamp on the desk. Mickey rose, crossed the room, turned the flame higher for him, and sat back down. Saul’s gaze drifted vaguely. Crispin wondered if it was the ringmaster’s pride that kept him from acknowledging Mickey’s gesture of kindness, or if he harbored a resentment for Kirekunis in general. He no longer appeared to employ any Kirekunis at all. “However, Millsy’s parting words gave me to understand that the letter contained intelligence on the subject of the war. I guessed the war was nearly over. Millsy’s precipitate departure confirmed my prediction—which I was far from the first to make—that it would end in defeat for Ferupe. And everyone knew that following a defeat, there would be a shortage of daemons. I prepared myself for the ultimate shortage.”
Crispin thought, If I hadn’t been so busy getting married and wandering about in the jungle while time was running out, I might have guessed it, too, and saved myself a lot of misery. There were certainly shortages enough when we got back to Redeuiina. “So Millsy returned to Kingsburg,” he prompted.
Saul shrugged. Crispin started to press for more information, but something told him to wait. He lit another cigarette and offered the third to Saul, who took it and inhaled hungrily. Crispin heard the intermittent cheers of the gambling crowds outside, roughnecks arguing downstairs, and steers mooing in the distance. His nerves jangled when the door opened; but it was only a spotty-faced young woman who stuck her head in. She wore the tutu-style skirt and stained apron of a midway vendor. “Mr. Smithrebel, sir!” She threw Crispin and Mickey hostile glances, entered, and deposited a tray on the desk. “Here’s your tea. Go easy now.” She departed with a wonderfully defiant shuffle.
It wasn’t tea, but a bottle of gin, with a single glass, a water siphon, and a sandwich on the side. Saul didn’t even glance at the tray. The reminder that he had current, as well as past, employees seemed to have galvanized him. “There are, of course, more reasons than one why I wished to see you, Kateralbin!” He fumbled in the inside pockets of his jacket, scattering the familiar debris of lint, string, receipts, IOUs, buttons, chalk, and medicine papers. Crispin stiffened. He isn’t going to offer me money? No, oh, no, he can’t. “Ah! I did not think I had lost it.” Saul extended a stained envelope.
Crispin had a horrible moment of déjà vu. Sitting with Rae in an overpriced Ghixtown pastryhouse, at the moment when Rae handed him a similarly travelworn envelope, a letter from Mickey that had presaged—though Crispin hoped otherwise at the time—the present fiasco of lost years and conflicting expectations. This could only be more of the same. Reluctantly, he lifted the flap to find a single piece of stationery with a printed letterhead, covered on both sides with tiny, crabbed writing. Only when he replaced it, puzzled, did he see that it was addressed to him. And the sender marked himself: THE COMPTROLLER’S PALACE, THE BURG, ATARAMACHI, NEW KIREKUNE.
“It found us last year. I never thought to have the chance to deliver it.”
Crispin dragged the letter back out and tried to decipher the handwriting. After a second he realized he was looking at Kirekuni characters. He wrenched his mind into the appropriate mode but could only, frustratingly, read one word at a time: opportunity…regret…memory… Only the signature was readily legible. “It’s from Millsy.” He looked up.
“I have been thinking.” The ringmaster’s hesitant tone jarred with his eager expression. “Enough time has surely passed that a Ferupian tour would be feasible. All expenses would be my pleasure! On behalf of the entire company, 1 guarantee we would treat you and your friend, if he is also your traveling companion, as guests.” He cackled rather desperately. “What a pleasant way of meandering toward the capital, think you not? But of course my motive is not charity! I do own a business enterprise! And I have long been intrigued by the question of how shrikouto would be received in the capital…”
Crispin’s mind leapt from conclusion to conclusion. “You read my letter. You had it translated so you could read it.”
“How else should I have done?”
Crispin ground his teeth. “Saul, your punctilious delivery of my mail is appreciated. So, too, is what I understand to be your kind offer of a free ride to Kingsburg. I assume Millsy, herein”—he crumpled the envelope and stuffed it in his pocket—“invites me to Kingsburg. My gratitude for saving me the trouble of reading his invitation for myself.” Mickey cleared his throat and Crispin heard him stand up. “However, I have not decided whether I will even accept Millsy’s invitation, so I’m afraid I must defer my decision on yours until a later date. And I believe we have kept you from your”—he glanced pointedly at the gin on the tray—“your tea.”
Saul rose, a shrunken figure like a rag doll with the stuffing coming out the front of his red jacket. His voice trembled. “Kateralbin, there is no need to be so hasty! Nor did I indicate that you should leave! I have not yet imparted the information which was my third reason for hoping you would come to see me, in the light of which I hoped against hope that you would have grown up into a true son of the circus, not a rude ingrate dressed to ape the New Worlders!” His shoulders drooped; his chin sank into his dirty ruffles. “But I should have told you long ago. It is of no importance now. You may go.”
“Don’t let him trick you,” Mickey hissed in Crispin’s ear, and his finger
s dug into Crispin’s arm. “He’s baiting you. Let’s get out of here.”
Crispin shook him off. “What should you have told me?”
Saul raised one hand. With an odd dignity, he pinched the tears from the inside corners of his eyes. “We are engaged here until the twentieth, and after that we will be showing Gomenxe, a northern suburb, if you are familiar with it. All I ask is that, if you decide to go to Kingsburg, you come to see me again before you leave.”
“Stop fencing! Tell me what you know.”
A wearily triumphant smile played over the ringmaster’s features. “And you believe that to be?”
Crispin had seldom felt so certain that he and someone else were thinking along the same lines, hearing the same unspoken words. He remembered that this crumbling little tyrant of a circus owner was the only other person (besides Millsy) who’d known him all his life. And Saul had been one of Anuei’s many lovers; he must know her secrets. He thought he could see the truth shimmering in the air, like the haze that englamored the shrikoutanis. “That Millsy is my father?”
He hadn’t meant it to come out as a question.
Saul’s jaw dropped; he began to laugh in sheer astonishment.
“The old pervert!” The ringmaster cackled, hiccuping. “Is that what you have come to believe? Oh, Queen…oh, Queen, what a joke! I never heard a better, although it is on me!” He wiped his eyes with his red display handkerchief. “Millsy never touched a woman in his life. Were you too young to realize his proclivities? He befriended your poor, dead mother because she fascinated him—I understand his daemons had something to say about her resistance to gravity, of which, indeed, you inherited a portion—but Anuei was always wary of him, and rightfully so, considering that in later years he stole your loyalty quite immorally from her, and from me.”
“From you?” Crispin spluttered ungrammatically, “I never owed nothing to you!”
“True. In fact, the opposite was the case.” The Old Gentleman sobered. “I think if she had lived, she would consider it time at last for you to know your heritage. She insisted that I not tell you before she was ready for you to know; and she was never ready. Not yet Saul, not yet, he’s still a baby! Then lo and behold, she was dead! But I kept my promise to her. I listened to her ghost, and tried to do as that ghost bade me. You were her ghost; and always you told me without words that you did not want to hear what I had to say.”
A Trickster in the Ashes Page 24
