A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  He could only be grateful he wasn’t down there in the queue.

  Instead, the stocky, black-swathed figure of Founding Sister Cloud progressed slowly toward the desk.

  Thank Significance for projectile guns! Thank Significance for women!

  She’d almost reached the desk. Five people ahead of her; four; now three.

  The Founding Sister radiated self-possession. Crispin couldn’t imagine any Disciple denying her what she wanted, unless it was as much as his job was worth.

  He himself had been badly intimidated when Rae, gabbling tearfully that he’d betrayed her, led him into the dining room, and Cloud turned from the array of account books and balance sheets spread before her on the table. Crispin knew the Enclave patronized Kherouge’s best solicitors; it unnerved him that Cloud deemed it necessary to recheck their calculations. Such cynicism was unfeminine. But the Founding Sister exuded a femininity like the bouquet of mature wine. Eyes like black stars above pebbled, slablike cheeks; cascading black hair with moonlight gleams of silver. She fitted more nearly the stereotype of the inscrutable lizard than any Kirekuni Crispin had ever met. He put her first at forty-five, then sixty, then thirty. He knew that like Breeze Enkhoupista, she came from old Cypean money, but unlike Breeze, she’d managed to fly the coop without enraging her family. At any rate they hadn’t cut off her income. That could have been due to the solicitors, but he suspected otherwise. Cloud had the sort of persuasive ability that stemmed from absolute confidence in one’s own convictions. At the behest of her revelations—so the Enclave legend went—she and three equally young, equally privileged friends had started the Most Patriotic Sisters. The other three were dead now. So were six of Cloud’s seven children. All she had left was the cumbersome cult she’d founded—and her wealth.

  “Founding Sister,” Crispin said in Ferupian, “I beg your forgiveness for barging in like this. But she says you’re the one I have to speak to.”

  “We do not permit men to enter this house,” Cloud pronounced.

  Crispin swallowed, and tried to sound humble as he lied. “I was not aware of that. I am an old acquaintance of Rae’s; I had heard she was living at this address; I am a stranger to Kherouge, and when disaster befell me, I could not think where else to turn for help.”

  Rae stood at the far end of the table, biting her lip and wringing her hands. Cloud said to her without turning, “He knows your worldly name.”

  “It’s all true,” Rae exclaimed. “Everything he says.” She shot Crispin a venomous look. “If I’d had any previous contact with him, which I wouldn’t have dreamed of, I would naturally have told him not to come here. But he—he walked into the middle of my rehearsal, Cloud—what else was I to do but bring him to you?”

  Cloud appraised Crispin, taking in his greatcoat, his three-piece suit, his watch and chain. “I descry that you are in business, sir,” she said at length. “What need can you have of our help?”

  The truth seemed all at once toweringly implausible. Why should Cloud believe his story? But the specter of Mickey in jail loomed before him, and he had to make it sound good. “My business partner has been arrested. He didn’t do it. A—a prominent member of the Kherouge aristocracy—is using him. It was a dirty trick. I have to—”

  “The aristocrats of this country are snakes in the form of humans.”

  “Founding Sister, you never said a truer word! I have to foil them! I have to bail him out before the paperwork goes through, before they bring charges! I still have time—it only happened a few hours ago—I hear the blackcoat clerks hold office hours at night, and if 1 go now—”

  “You mean that you wish to save money by bribing the clerks now, rather than the executioner a month or two on.”

  “Founding Sister, money would be no object, if I had any! I’m in a desperate situation!” Crispin pulled out the pockets of his trousers. Cloud and Rae both laughed. Crispin’s face heated because he’d told the truth: he was absolutely penniless. Whatever cash he had left after weeks of profligate hotel life, he’d left it at the Sibelye-Enkhoupistas’. “Believe me when I say that I’m not acquainted with the conventions of bribery! If that is what’s required, I’m willing, but I—I just don’t have the necessary resources! It shames me—you don’t know how deeply—to have to ask a stranger for a loan—I suppose I could have gone to the money sharks—but Rae and I were once close friends, and although years have passed, it—it seemed natural in my hour of need to apply to her…”

  Your face has been ever before me.

  Cloud’s black eyes gleamed with a mirth that made Crispin feel queasy. “So this, I take it, Rain, is your lost love.”

  “I wish he was dead,” Rae said. “Crispin, how could you!”

  “Is he trustworthy?”

  “No!” Rae snapped. Crispin could have strangled her.

  “Does it seem believable to you that he has run afoul of the snakes?”

  “Anything’s possible with him! I wouldn’t be surprised!”

  “Founding Sister, I’m telling the truth!” Crispin wiped his nose, then his eyes. He was crying. He fell on his knees before Cloud. She looked down at him without surprise. He seized a handful of her black drape and pressed his face into it. “If just for the sake of striking a blow against them—”

  “The Most Patriotic Sisters are not an activist organization,” came the voice above his head, heavy, purring.

  “But you are—aren’t you—a charitable organization? I’ve heard about your philanthropic works, education, and so on—” He heard himself babbling, and sat back on his heels, rubbing his eyes with his coat sleeve. “Sister, maybe you could send Rae with me to their headquarters—she’ll make sure I disburse only as much as necessary, and she’ll extract whatever collateral she thinks appropriate, won’t you, Rae? It’ll only be a loan, I’ll pay it back, I promise! I always keep the promises I make to her—she’ll vouch for that—”

  “He did promise he would come for me someday,” Rae admitted furiously. “If I’d known he would come with his hand out—”

  “Such are men, Sister!” Cloud interrupted her. She crooked her finger at Crispin. He rose stumbling to his feet. “I do not trust Rain as far as I can throw her,” Cloud told him. “That has nothing to do with you and she having been lovers. There are few among our Sisters who did not have lovers before they entered the Enclave. It is simply that I am a student of personalities, and over the years, I pride myself that my judgment has grown shrewd.” She paused. “My judgment in this case is that I, myself, am the only person who may be able to free your friend from the fangs of the snakes.”

  Rae let out an involuntary cry.

  “Oh, you can come, too, if you wish,” Cloud assured her absently. Her gaze rested on Crispin; her eyes seemed to be telling him something different. “For that matter, I shall take Fantinora. I have been hearing for months that I have stunted her development by forbidding her to go about as Omarhad does. Well, let us initiate her with a vengeance into the workings of our fair city, and then perhaps my prohibition will no longer be necessary.”

  The mirth Crispin had seen in her eyes bubbled over into her voice.

  “It will be at once charitable and educational.”

  Crispin, Rae, and Fanny craned downward, holding their breath, as Cloud loomed over the clerk at the desk. She waved the interpreter away. “I didn’t know she spoke Kirekuni,” Rae whispered. The spectators’ chitchat precluded the possibility of their hearing anything that was said. Crispin concentrated on the clerk dealing with Cloud: a gangly, juvenile Cypean whose uniform coat ended halfway down his bony wrists. At first he leaned back in his chair, arms folded, pen tapping his elbow; then he sat forward as if he were about to expostulate; then Cloud straightened, and the clerk had to look up into her face, and for a moment he didn’t seem like a Disciple facing a petitioner, but a recalcitrant schoolchild quivering before his teacher.

  Cloud turned away from the desk. She walked back along the queue. Her heavy tread took her
straight over the star-splotch of blood. She passed out of the courtroom along the deep-cut passage in the pews through which all the petitioners before her had left, through which defendants were escorted to their trials during court sessions, from which each month’s human sacrifice faced the jeers and missiles of the spectators. She didn’t look up.

  “They’re hardly going to set him free here in front of everybody,” Crispin said, his heart sinking. “Let’s go.”

  “Sit down!” Rae dragged at him. “Don’t make it obvious!”

  Each passing minute increased the likelihood that Jice Sibelye-Enkhoupista would guess Crispin’s intentions and arrive in time to thwart him. He knew he must already have been missed. How long would it take Sibelye-Enkhoupista to contact Yamauchi’s other agents in Kherouge, and find out the rest of the story, and add his own considerable resources to the Kateralbin-hunt? He vaulted over the back of the pew and started along the walkway that encircled the courtroom.

  “Where are you going?” Fanny shrilled softly, and he turned to see her running after him, taking little steps in her high heels: a far cry from the beast of prey.

  “To find your mother.” He held out his hand. Her palm was soft. He could feel no suggestion of fur or chitin, and all things considered she seemed completely human, and he relinquished his conviction that she had some sort of innate empathy with the invisible masses. Yet what price her birthright if it didn’t at least grant her that? Was it merely a cosmetic curse, a malformation, as Rae believed? He hurried down the stairs so fast that Fanny lost her balance trying to keep up with him, and swung on his arm. He didn’t mind, it was childish and genuinely charming of her. When they reached the bottom, he lifted her off her feet and carried her giggling along the hallway that terminated in the door to the spectators’ waiting room. “Sssh now!” He set her down and peered through the high, barred window in the door. The waiting room was really a walled-in veranda that ran the length of the building’s facade. It looked deserted. Crispin slewed his eyes sideways and caught a flash of black just beside the door. When he led Fanny out, Cloud glared pointedly at their joined hands. Fanny wilted. She extracted her fingers from Crispin’s and slunk to her mother’s side, standing with head bowed and her arms twisted inside her wrap. The cold, foggy air glowed in the light of the gaslamps attached to the columns ascending the interior wall of the veranda, that had once been the building’s façade. The doors at the far end stood open. The flagstones between them gleamed with rain.

  Cloud said ironically, “I see, sir, that my daughter has indeed had an educational experience.”

  Crispin swallowed his irritation and smiled. “I wish we had been able to hear your exchange with the clerk. It might have been even more educational.”

  “That exchange,” Cloud said, “left me slightly less confident in my own bargaining powers, and poorer by some—”

  Steps rang on the stairs and the door flew open again, but it was only Rae, with her hair coming down. She looked at them; then, just as Fanny had done, she bowed her head and went without a word to Cloud’s side. “Sun-time, Sister,” Cloud said composedly.

  “Sun-time indeed,” Rae said in a low voice, and cast a glance at Crispin. Her face glowed so brightly from running down the stairs that he couldn’t read her expression.

  “As I was saying, sir, it does us all good to be humbled now and again,” Cloud continued.

  Crispin spread his palms. “If this night hasn’t seen me humbled—no man was ever so grateful to woman, nor rued so his own helplessness, as I. I pray only that you will accept my utmost thanks, and my word: as soon as I’m able, I’ll pay—”

  Hinges squealed halfway down the veranda. A Disciplinarian winced his way out of the grand doors nestled between two columns on the facade. He raised his finger to his lips in an exaggerated demand for silence. Crispin hastened toward him; he had no control over his own need to know; he stopped short only when Mickey emerged, grinning widely. “What ho, long-lost!” Mickey hailed him in Ferupian. “I knew all along it had to be a mistake!”

  They hadn’t even had time to make him change into prison rags. He still wore his dark red velvet smoking suit. He was pale and grimy and improbably cheerful.

  “No mistake,” Crispin said quietly, “unless you count your mistake in trusting our gracious host. I could have told you something like this might happen!”

  Mickey gave him a quick, fierce scowl.

  The Disciplinarian undulated forward. He was a stocky Cypean with greased-back hair and deep, burning eyes; his movements had an exaggerated dramatic quality. He raised himself on tiptoe and muttered in Crispin’s ear, in Ferupian, “Your boy was lily-white all along. The commish framed him.” His breath stank of alcohol. “We were never happier to have the opportunity to make a profit—and tha-hic-that’s straight from us.”

  “Us?” Crispin said, frowning.

  “The men on the streets. The squads. We’re for justice here in Kherouge, as you may know, sir”—he burped—“and we don’t take to being used as if we didn’t—hic—know they was just politicking.”

  “The lizards put their collective foot in their mouth again, that’s all!” Mickey said cheerfully. “And thanks to Kisebe here, I’m none the worse for wear!” He turned to the Disciplinarian and clapped him on the back. “Your hospitality was much appreciated, and my laundress will thank, you, too! If I’d had to sit on the floor, my suit would have been ruined!”

  “It’s we who thank you, sir—and madam,” the Disciplinarian said fervently as Cloud came up behind Crispin. Rae and Fanny flanked her like bashful handmaidens. “Believe me, justice always finds its way to the just. And I never was one of those what said you ladies was lizard-lovers.” He burped again and staggered slighdy.

  “I’m sure,” Cloud said without expression. “But I think we had better go before justice, in the shape of the lizards, finds its way to us.”

  She led them toward the doors at the end of the hall. “Mind and give my love to your Sisters, ladies!” the Disciplinarian shouted. He waved them off fondly, dabbing the corners of his eyes, and reeled back inside the building. No one was out on the street: the Disciplinarian Headquarters, that stonemason’s nightmare, was the only building in use in a pocket of deterioration between Ghixtown and Center City drybones territory. Wet wind blew from the direction of the docks. The gaslamps along the makeshift outside wall of the veranda glowed streakily in the rain. The drops rolling into Crispin’s mouth tasted of salt.

  “They were all as drunk as fishes in the back room,” Mickey was saying. “I’ve never seen anything like it! For some reason they took a shine to me, dragged a table up to the bars of the holding cell—I was the only person inside after this other character got moved down to the dungeons—we were playing dead-man’s poker for buttons. Then all of a sudden it was, ‘It’s your lucky day, Kirekuni.’ I couldn’t imagine what they were talking about.” He bowed slightly to Cloud. “Madam, I thank you. I can only infer that you must have interceded on my behalf!”

  “To the tune of five hundred sen,” Cloud said. “And you can thank your business partner here—or rather his eloquence in despair.”

  Five hundred? Crispin’s mind dizzied. He had vaguely thought of getting another loan to pay Cloud back, but no collateral he or Mickey could produce would coax that sum out of any of the moneylenders who operated out of the dockside taverns.

  “Justice in Kherouge is expensive!” Mickey said.

  “For those whom the clerks are under special orders to hold until further notice from the commissioner, apparently, yes.” Cloud dismissed his stammered repetitions of thanks with a gesture. “But you are not in my debt. As I was saying, this has been an educational experience. I was ignorant of the extent to which rot has pervaded our city until I found I was able to put my hand through the wall of the very justice system.”

  “You didn’t expect to succeed,” Crispin said.

  Cloud purred. “Of course not. I was prepared to go to seven hundred sen
; I did not expect to be taken up even at that price.”

  “I don’t know how I can ever repay you,” Mickey said, but he was looking at Rae. She shook her head infinitesimally. Strands of wet hair clung to her face. Of course, Crispin thought, she couldn’t let Cloud know that she and Mickey were acquainted, far less related. The smallest sign of recognition might trigger Cloud’s memory—she had, after all, seen Crispin and Mickey at Breeze Enkhoupista’s funeral, though they’d been two among hundreds. If that happened, as far as Rae was concerned, the fat would be in the fire.

  “And now, Rain,” Cloud continued imperturbably, “I expect you would like to say farewell to…your old friend. Fanny and I will wait. But not here.” She pointed at a window lit dimly in the distance, where the sky dropped black and piebald with clouds to the roofs of the drybones hovels. “I believe that to be a tea shop. Stay a moment, young man,” she added as Crispin moved to take Rae’s arm.

  Out of the corner of his eye Crispin saw Mickey size up the situation, bow to Rae with courtly deference, and lead her away around the corner of the headquarters.

  Cloud said, “Rain is my best asset. I am only hard on her because she is my greatest hope. Do you understand? She, alone among my younger Sisters, has real dedication to our children, and her motives are pure.”

  Crispin had been under the impression that he was the only one who appreciated Rae’s commitment to the Enclave.

  “I tell you this, I who know her now. You knew her when?”

  “Six years ago—”

  “That is a long time in the lives of the young.”