A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  Icy sweat broke out on Crispin’s back.

  “And how could I act in flagrant defiance of her wishes? She was the love of my life.” Saul looked down at his own spotted, clenched fists. “The love of my life. We stopped over in Kherouge before taking ship for Naftha, where my father was wintering with the circus: in those days we did not travel all year. It was the first time she had left the islands. Of course Kherouge was very different then. Yet I remember how fascinated she was by the red stone buildings, and the wide streets. She helped me become fascinated with life all over again. She was my salvation when I had believed myself disillusioned.” Saul met Crispin’s gaze. “And when my son was born, I knew I would never again fall prey to that insidious modern disease of disillusionment. I saw in your baby face the reason we are all born, the reason we all die, and the reason we keep stupidly struggling in the interim. It is not for ourselves, as the cynics, most of them childless, believe; it is for our progeny. She always wanted you to inherit the circus eventually.”

  The turmoil of disbelief and rage in Crispin’s mind coalesced for a second into paranoia. This is no fucking shrikouto arena. This is pure circus. It’s rigged. Mr. Nakunatta’s tangible presence paralyzed him. The fatester’s machinations reached even deeper, and farther back into the past, than he’d guessed. Mickey grimaced and jerked his chin at the door. Crispin tried to speak, cleared his throat, and tried again. “A pity, then, Sau—Father, ought 1 to say?—that you didn’t send me off on a tour of the islands, as your father did you, instead of a tour of the war front. That changed my life, I’m afraid. It’s a bit late now for me to learn what could have been.”

  “You were conscripted! Oh, my boy! I knew something unspeakable would happen if I let you go!” Saul was all sympathy.

  “In a manner of speaking. In another manner of speaking, no. I enlisted of my own free will because I didn’t care for the alternative.”

  Perhaps aware of the irony in what Crispin had intended as an insult, Saul cackled helplessly.

  3 Marout 1900 A.D.

  1:04 A.M.

  Cype: Kherouge: the Abbatoir Road

  It seemed to Crispin that they’d been walking back toward Kherouge for hours. The Abbatoir Road was practically deserted. Rain and shadows transmogrified the slaughterhouses strung out along the highway into glittering hulks like ships beached on the barren land. In distant stockyards, sou’westered sentries loitered between pens of meat on the hoof. Rats scuttered in the drains. Snakes slithered underfoot. Sandfish hopped in the puddles. Crispin couldn’t stop talking. He was trying to force himself to accept the truth of Saul’s revelation by going over and over the corroborating evidence memory provided. He should have guessed all along. He should have guessed long ago. Mickey made no comment on his monologue; but maybe (Crispin thought later) he’d been absorbed just the same, intrigued by the oddities of the childhood Crispin had never previously described to him, because neither of them heard the assassins coming until it was nearly too late.

  Mickey was half a pace behind and they fell on him first. That gave Crispin a split second’s warning, just long enough to spin around, wrench out the Browning, and fire at his own would-be attacker, then at the man whose garrotte was choking Mickey. Both assassins dropped, flailing, screaming. They wore no hoods. They were Cypeans. Mickey retched and clawed at the wire noose on his neck. Crispin stooped to free him, but when he heard war cries, he whirled around to confront three more attackers. They’d thrown caution to the winds. It was the saving of him. He had four .44 rounds left in the Browning and they only had knives that they handled gracelessly, street style. It was close quarters and a dodging, sidestepping dance in the mud. They weren’t professionals: they were poorly armed, and instead of teaming up on him, they deferred to each other. It was this quaint hierarchy they preserved among themselves even in the heat of the fight that gave him a chance to blow their champion’s face off.

  The other two fled. They had the sense at least to run in different directions. Crispin didn’t waste bullets on moving targets. He waited for several interminable heartbeats, half-hearing the moans of the men he’d wounded, then turned to Mickey, who’d managed to free himself from the garrotte. He’d been so badly choked he couldn’t talk and he was half fainting, able to stand only with Crispin’s help. Wrestling him to his feet, Crispin hauled his arm across his shoulders and wrapped his own arm around Mickey’s back, under his coat, gripping the end of his stump for purchase. If they come back now we’re done for. Adrenaline surged through his veins. He snarled and yanked Mickey along at a stumbling run, leaving the three wounded men behind. If their friends didn’t come back for them, they’d be discovered dead tomorrow—he’d shot the first two in the upper body, and maybe already killed the third—but with any luck they’d be run over by some half-asleep trucker first, and written off as casualties of diesel-powered traffic. Thank Significance there’s no one about! But if there had been, it wouldn’t have happened—but who am I kidding? We were targeted! Mickey’s head bounced on his shoulder. And how dare they involve him, too* * *

  Dawn had broken, and Mickey had regained a measure of his strength, by the time they staggered up to the Sibelye-Enkhoupistas’ back door. The old housemaid who answered their knocks didn’t so much as blink; given her employer’s source of income, Crispin thought, and the company Sibelye-Enkhoupista had perforce to keep on occasion, she’d probably seen guests return not just muddy and bloody, but with mortal wounds. She’d probably seen them come home in shrouds! She summoned a valet, who assured Crispin that hot water and clean clothes would be provided. They dragged themselves up the back stairs. Domestics tactfully ignored them at every landing. “Thank Significance for Western guns,” Mickey croaked. The warmth inside the house had restored his voice. He smiled painfully through the mud encrusting his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Crispin said. “I’m sorry.”

  “No need. I look at it like this. We’ve had the worst luck we possibly can, and we’re still alive. What else can happen?”

  “I’d rather not know.” Crispin was inclined to feel the same way but he didn’t want to give Mr. Nakunatta any ideas. He rapped his knuckles on the wall for good measure.

  “That piece of yours is European, isn’t it? Shit. That was loud. Blew the bastards away. You’re a good shot.” Mickey coughed. “Fuck. Did you buy it around here? I want to get my hands on one of those. Just in case, you know.”

  Give us grace for today; feed the famisbed affections. And Love is reflected in love.

  —Mary Baker Eddy

  Skyline

  3 Marout 1900 A.D.

  Cype: Kherouge: the residence of the

  Honorable and Mrs. Jice Sibelye-Enkbouputa

  But Mickey hadn’t had the opportunity to buy a gun before the Disciplinarians came to arrest him in the middle of lunch, just as the first serving of blowfish was flopping steaming and buttery from the butler’s slice onto the plate of the wife of Baronet Salxeme, Chancellor of Roadways for the Protectorate.

  Everyone at the table had joined in a reverent hush, the better to follow the delicacy’s progression from platter to table. Crispin, taking advantage of the respite from conversation to glance around, saw the blackcoats enter unannounced through the far door of the dining room. They approached Jice Sibelye-Enkhoupista apologetically, like waiters. But they were bringing a warrant signed in triplicate by their commissioner for the arrest of Yoshitaro Achino, alias Mickey Ash.

  It was a boorish, supererogatory display of Significant power. Later, over liqueurs, all the luncheon guests agreed on that. Disciplinarians in the private home of one of Kherouge’s most upstanding citizens! Tromping (as Baronetess Salxeme put it) all over the Izte Kchebuk’aras! (Crispin understood her to mean the carpets.) Making extra work for the servants with their muddy boots and the spikes of their horrible umbrellas!

  But of course (as the Disciplinarian sergeant, a Kirekuni, put it, after Mickey had been yanked up from the table, apologizing helplessly) t
he criminal was a dangerous man, liable to go on a spree of fraudulence at any time. Just look at him, sirs and ladies! It’s quite clear he hasn’t been behaving himself, or where would he have got this? (Jabbing at the livid bruise that Mickey’s cravat didn’t entirely conceal.) We wouldn’t want you to host such a miscreant all unknowing, Mr. Sibelye-Enkhoupista, sir, and put your honorable lady wife at risk of being frauded in her bed, not for one minute longer than necessary. (The sergeant, with remarkable subtlety, justified his intrusion while simultaneously declaring his license to interrupt the lunch of whomsoever he damn well pleased.) We came as soon as we’d verified our information, you can rest assured.

  His gaze drifted speculatively over Crispin. All the lunch guests looked at Crispin’s split, scabbed lip and black eye, and the cut near his hairline he’d sustained last night. In the silence he heard himself say, “I didn’t know they’d invented supersonic pigeons.”

  After an instant Jice started a burst of general laughter. Even the Disciple sergeant permitted himself to join in with a skeptical “Ha, ha, ha, sir!”

  “I hear, however, Kateralbin,” Jice called jovially, “that in the Far West they have come up with a thing called a telephone! It permits instantaneous speech across distances of miles! An invention with great potential, think you not? Soon we will have no need of your fabulous, postulated pigeons!”

  Crispin knew right then that it was Jice who’d engineered Mickey’s arrest. How else could the aristocrat have understood intuitively what Crispin meant—that in order for the Disciplinarians to have verified Mickey’s identity, they would have needed to contact Okimachi literally overnight? Nothing had been verified! Jice’s joke was enough to tell Crispin that he had this squad of Disciplinarians, and at least some of their superiors, in his pocket. The same arrangement Yamauchi has with the Redeuiina blackcoats. I should have guessed! And Crispin knew from experience how it had gone. Jice, who was probably privy to Significance’s master blacklist, had informed the commissioner that Mickey was a wanted man and called in a favor to get the warrant signed without verification. He might even have ordered the arrest for lunchtime in order to milk the greatest private pleasure from the scene. Crispin had known for a long time that unlike Yamauchi—who fetishized alibis, clean hands, and letter-of-the-law—Sibelye-Enkhoupista fancied himself an assistant playwright of the human tragicomedy. He loved nothing better than manipulating his friends.

  What does he get out of having Mickey locked up?

  Again, the same as Yamauchi. “I make you look good in Okimachi, and in return you make me look good in Okimachi, otherwise you can forget about your job—your promotion—the new uniforms for your men—your wife’s supply of opium—”

  Speculation faded from Crispin’s mind as he saw Mickey standing with one arm twisted behind his back, his tail cuffed to his wrist, his half-empty sleeve dangling unpinned. In his wine velvet he looked like a martyred prince. The Cypean constables were sallow little rats by comparison. Mickey was so pale, in fact, that Crispin wondered if he was going to faint. He still hadn’t recovered from last night; besides, etiquette was the very air he breathed, and maybe he simply couldn’t handle this inversion of the rules of society.

  But when the Cypean constables escorted him out, he walked steadily enough. Perhaps the necessity of transcending his own humiliation trumped the sheer shock of the arrest. The Kirekuni sergeant remained behind to pacify the guests. He lectured for several minutes on Mickey’s crimes against Significance, promised swift and fair punishment, and discoursed on the Disciples’ philosophy of justice until not even lice Sibelye-Enkhoupista’s humorous interjections could mitigate his friends’ impatience. As soon as the sergeant took himself off, they burst into angry criticism of him. An impossible man! A prig! A jumped-up lizard peeler who considered himself better than scions of an ancient aristocracy he knew nothing about! Like a musichall duo, Jice and the sergeant together had taken their audience’s minds off reality.

  Only at length, after ruffled dignities had been soothed by the rest of the lunch, did the talk turn to Mickey.

  Crispin didn’t know how he managed to play his part. He knew nothing at all until he found himself outside in the dusk, carrying a borrowed umbrella, walking through Ghixtown toward Center City.

  3 Marout 1900 A.D. 8:56 P.M.

  Cype: Kberouge: the Disciplinarian Headquarters

  Crispin glanced uneasily at the blue-faced girl as she nudged Rae and murmured in her ear. He couldn’t get rid of the suspicion that they were talking about him. “What are you two confabbing about?”

  “Oh! Fanny has decided she wants to marry a Disciple!” Rae beamed artificially. “Isn’t that nice?”

  “Not just any Disciple,” the girl, Fanny, insisted. “That tall Kirekuni one.” She pointed down at the center of the courtroom.

  Crispin nodded, wondering what to say. Rae’s son, whom he’d met for the first time the day before yesterday, had unnerved him badly enough; the cluster of bird-boned, pastel-faced ten-year-olds who’d swarmed him when he penetrated the Enclave this evening had almost overcome his resolve with their high-pitched volleys of questions; and this Fantinora, whose typically adolescent mixture of shyness and strong opinions continually tricked him into thinking of her as human, flummoxed him to the point of speechlessness. But he had to play up to her. She was Cloud’s daughter, and clearly a favorite of Rae’s. “So you think he’s the most handsome man you’ve ever seen?”

  A blush darkened Fanny’s cheeks to periwinkle. Then she made a transparent effort to be charming. “Present company excluded!”

  Rae said quickly, “Did you know this is the first time Fanny’s ever been to Ghixtown?”

  “You’re very self-possessed, young lady.” Crispin revised his opinion of her yet again. “I never would have known.”

  Fanny grinned, then instantly became serious. “But do you know why I want to marry him? Not because he’s handsome. Looks aren’t everything. No one knows that better than me. You saw how people stared at me. They think I’m a monster. That’s why Mother won’t let me go out.” Crispin heard the faintest quiver in her voice. Rae tried to put an arm around her shoulders. She shrugged it off, staring at Crispin. “But if I were the wife of a Disciple, and a Kirekuni at that, they wouldn’t dare stare at me, would they! I could go wherever I pleased, whenever I wanted!”

  “Husbands generally like their wives to do what they please,” Crispin said. “Most of the time that means staying at home.”

  “I bet you don’t make your wife stay at home!”

  Crispin gaped.

  “Or aren’t you married?” Her eyes lit up.

  “Crispin, did you know that Fanny writes plays?” Rae said desperately.

  Fanny flung herself back in her seat, her eyes wide-open. Crispin turned away, and a second later he heard Fanny hissing to Rae: “Why did you tell him that? I didn’t want him to know!”

  “Why ever not?”

  Whisper, whisper—

  “Yes. Yes, he is. And, Fanny, don’t be ridiculous! Can’t you decide what you want, at the very least? You’re acting like a toddler let loose in a pastry shop!”

  Crispin had an idea what Rae meant. He was beyond taking offense. But it did cross his mind that Rae’s comparison of the cavernous courtroom with a pastry shop was most inapposite. According to Cloud, this had once been Kherouge’s premier shrikouto arena. The Disciples had ripped out the tile-mosaicked walls of the ring, leaving only the rising circles of spectator pews. On the last day of every month, public executions were held here, and the pews filled to overflowing. Crispin had been surprised to learn that the Cypeans hadn’t originated the idea of execution-as-entertainment. They’d adopted it as their own under Ferupian rule, and the Kirekunis had refrained from banning the institution for fear of public outcry: in fact, the Disciplinarian Commissioner continued to send murderers, adulteresses, and thieves to the block with punctilious regularity.

  Tonight, however, there was nothing to see ex
cept a queue of petitioners and fine-payers shuffling patiently across the arena. A scrubbed, faded splotch on the floor indicated the usual location of the block. The queue curved to avoid it. Sentries stood about, contemptuously inattentive. Three clerks manned a desk on the far side of the arena, and an interpreter darted back and forth behind them: while the laws of conquest demanded that all official business be conducted in Kirekuni, fewer than one in ten Cypeans spoke it. Here and there in the pews sat relatives, loiterers seeking to escape the rain, and groups of ancients who considered this as satisfactory a spectacle as any. Now and then a sentry shouted for silence, but the chattering inevitably swelled again; Crispin was glad of it. He slouched down, nearly sitting on his shoulders, every time one of the blackcoats swept his gaze upward. At his insistence they’d found seats high up in the back, but he was still nervous. Parallels between last night and tonight kept striking him, echoing into bleak absurdity. The circular arena far below; the blood-splotched floor; his own taut nerves. Saul’s shrikouto had progressed with the same interminable monotony as the show in the arena right now. The implications of life and death had been far plainer, but not half so grisly or so personal.

  If I don’t watch out, I’m going to turn into a theater critic!

  Last night the expedient of sitting in the back had worked. Neither the scene with Saul nor the near-fatal scuffle on the Abbatoir Road would have happened if he hadn’t let himself in for them. Tonight he didn’t plan to let himself in for anything. All he wanted was to escape unscathed. And to get Mickey away. But tonight the house hadn’t sold out, not by a long stretch, and the odds of being spotted were much greater. Disciplinarians worked twelve-hour stints, and one of those louts down there could have been on the squad that arrested Mickey earlier in the day. Crispin’s idiotic remark about pigeons had ensured they would all remember him.