A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  It was, he thought, a measure of his vulnerability to Crispin’s extremism and flair for drama that only now Crispin wasn’t here did he realize how far they’d come into total displacement.

  Oh, my long tail, my amputated hand (thanks, as usual, to you, my darling man) !

  Of course, their folie à deux and their madcap flight across Ferupe hadn’t been complete wastes of time: one of the things Mickey had learned was how to stump along like a Ferupian, not balancing himself with his tail, and as long as he had his overcoat, it had worked—people really did see what they expected to. He’d thought he would die laughing at the sight of the Salmesthwarth Disciples’ faces when he stood forth in his lizard glory and demanded they sell him a gun. And here, an occasional businessman was glancing at him in puzzlement—not so much as if he wondered what Mickey was doing here, but as if something about Mickey bothered him. If only he hadn’t been such a damned fool as to leave his coat at the bathhouse! Better to be a Ferupian without a clue than a Kirekuni without the right accessories!

  He considered leaving the Stock Exchange and walking around the streets, but although the idea had an enticing connotation of escape, it also terrified him. His instincts told him to hide. And he didn’t fancy walking out under the noses of those Disciples. The number of times he could leave and come back was limited. What if he left, then found he had to duck back inside for safety? What if Crispin came out, and he was missing?

  That was an insidious refrain that played in his mind whenever resentment threatened to triumph over loyalty—the audible articulation of cowardice.

  He clenched his fists and started back down the corridor, remembering to walk fast and glance inside his lapel from time to time, as if checking a watch. The din of voices and abacuses followed him up the stairs, one flight after another. He grew short of breath. Fear ebbed and surged every time someone passed him; his palms sweated. Worst of all, he recognized his weakness as the result of simple hunger and thirst. Yet another risk that could have been avoided. Why hadn’t they thought of that? Why hadn’t they got haircuts as well as shaves at the bathhouse? Why hadn’t they bought hats or gladstone bags?

  Winded, he arrived on the top floor, in the rotunda of a restaurant-cum-clubhouse. The scent of rich, foreign food watered his mouth. The burble of well-bred Kirekuni voices soothed his ears. As always, far above the hubbub of the hoi polloi, the crème de la crème concluded deals on which many more lives depended, with much less fanfare. A bar counter curved out from the left wall of the rotunda. Clerks perched on stools sipping pints, comparing notes in whispers. Beyond a gargoyled stone arch (daemons again!) groups of traders and bankers plied their knives and forks, talking a mile a minute as if they had to keep expelling words from their bodies to make room for the food. Beyond the dining room (Mickey guessed, knowing something of the way these places were set up) there would be a library—the source of the old-books scent that pervaded the building, but not a place for reading, except perhaps the newssheets from Okimachi and Kherouge and Tokyo and London and San Francisco. From their position on the far side of an Izte Kchebuk’aran carpet, a firing squad of Ferupian waitresses were giving him the walleye. He marched up to them and said, “Brunch!”

  “Bien sûr, m’sieu. Le dejeuner d’aujourd’hui est vraiment delicieux, et c’est jusque prêt.” The shortest girl, the only redhead in the string of brunettes, reeled off the dishes in French. All the waitresses wore long black dresses of clingy gauze and aprons with tempestuously frilled décolletage. “How many are to partake?”

  “I’ll be meeting one person.” Mickey tried to manage his dizziness as he followed her into the dining room. When he realized they were heading for a table by the wall, he touched her arm. She jumped, whirling, her tail flaring—a reaction out of all proportion to his importunement, and certainly out of accord with the humiliating realities of a waitress’s job, and in the daylight she looked younger than he’d thought. Maybe she’d just started. He knew all about first-timers’ nerves, he’d nursed enough girls through them. “The usual table by the window, s’il vous plaît, mademoiselle,” he chided her gently. She wasn’t Kirekuni, she had little or no chance of seeing through him. “I do not believe you have forgotten how much I enjoy the view of the Comptroller’s Palace? The architecture is so inspiring.”

  He sat down limply and stared out at the nearest daemon steeple. Its face, not so distant across the street, gaped in lovingly detailed stone agonies. The maw was an oddly shaped window.

  With death staring him in the face he knew adrenaline would come. Terror would clear his head. His nerves would go as cool as steel forged long ago in some furnace his memories refused to identify. He would either escape or take a few of his enemies down with him. He’d done it before. It was this passive infiltration of the enemy’s waiting rooms he couldn’t stand. This kind of maneuver required bravado, and bravado was something he lacked. It seemed his fate to be cast in the role of the traitor. The redheaded waitress returned with a hopeful smile; she looked as nervous as a child, but she, too, was an instrument of the forces that had never really lost Their grip on Mickey, Whose aim seemed to be to crush him to death without ever forcing a showdown. And he (unlike Crispin) was too cowardly to seek a confrontation on his own, because (unlike Crispin) he knew his enemies too well to deceive himself into underestimating them.

  He ordered filet du cochon avec champignons, with bouillabaisse for a starter.

  10 Maia 1900 A.D. 12:30 P.M. Ferupe (“New Kirekune”):

  Kingsburg (“Ataramacbi”): the Burg: the Comptroller’s Palace

  It astonished Crispin how much sense Millsy was making. It was as if, inside the feckless lecher, there still lived the trickster’s ghost—and Crispin had somehow enticed the ghost to speak. He’d struck a chord, hit a nerve, stumbled on a password. Or maybe his presence alone had done it, like bad weather producing twinges in an amputated limb. Memories of pain resonating automatically into echoes of wisdom, as the real thing had once produced the real thing.

  “Others died knowing, at least, that their friends were true. I live, but I have reaped what I sowed: perfidy and perjury.” Millsy’s eyes were wild but his voice quiet: he could have been talking to himself. “I learned late in life to walk the high wire. Others, who had known nothing else since childhood, died on stage, in the act, high up. Treachery never occurred to them. But I—craven creature—I jumped off the tightrope! Once 1 reached Kingsburg I was occupied night and day with secret meetings, negotiations, and debates. I had no time to contemplate the inevitable consequences of what we were doing. I knew it was likely the Queen would be either assassinated or taken hostage, for the mood in the besieged city had grown ugly. But I did nothing. Early one morning, we were wakened with the news. I did not need to be told that the worst had happened. When I awoke from the first deep sleep I had had in months; nay, years; when I awoke breathing easily, without daemonic hairs clinging to my coverlet and daemonic scales speckling my face, I knew things had changed.” He laughed softly, recalling. “I gave thanks. Now, of course, I know I was a fool. For I am tumbling into a bottomless abyss of—of humanity!” He gestured around him, then clutched his beard with both hands as if he meant to tear it out. “I am falling helplessly into a future in which I do not belong. All the strings have been cut.”

  “That sounds an awful lot like something my—a girl who belonged to a cult—once told me,” Crispin said mistrustfully.

  “Your wife is a cultie?” Millsy met his gaze, smiling without malice—as if he were really interested, as if he cared. Crispin had never realized that ghosts can have more compassion than the living: they have no future and so no vested interests. “You did not tell me that. Ah, the mysteries of Kateralbin are manifold!”

  Crispin didn’t remember telling Millsy he was married at all. “Another girl. My—my first love. She was a cultie.”

  “Ah. That explains it,” Millsy said obscurely. “My dear boy, the culties were both right and wrong. They resurrected, w
isely though too late, the ancient belief that Ferupian monarchs ruled not just by law, but by blood. They knew, though they could not convince others of it, that everyone on our continent and the islands was related to the Queen.”

  “In the blood,” Crispin whispered.

  “But their prophecies of what would happen when the blood knot came undone were…” Millsy tch-tch’ed. “All wrong. They succumbed, one and all, to the allure of visions of apocalypse. In fact, there was an apocalypse, but it occurred silently, in a void. When she who existed in the void ceased to exist, all the bonds came undone. What bonds? Why, those that bound daemonkind to humanity.” He sighed. “And so the Crowd dispersed. And I was left alone”

  All except those who’d established other bonds of blood with humanity already, Crispin thought He remembered, he would never forget: rusty claws, corrupted breath, an ardent living weight on his back, knocking him flat on the slimy floor of the dungeon below the Enclave of the Most Patriotic Sisters.

  “They lost their bodies.” He tried to clarify what Millsy was saying, acutely aware of how careful he had to be if Millsy were not to clam up, or spiral off again into the safety of nostalgia. “And I’d guess that when that happened, they also lost their affection for us.” They’re malign now, even if they weren’t before. Occult chaos can’t help but be dangerous! Oh, Significance help us all.

  “That is right.” Millsy nodded.

  “But why—” Crispin was unable to help trying to capitalize on Millsy’s loquacity. “I never understood why they wanted to be our friends in the first place.”

  “Crispin, what you do not understand, or do not remember, is that there was a difference between handling daemons and tricking them,” Millsy said, with a flash in his eyes. “And clearly neither, despite all I have said, do you understand about blood. It is in the present tense, but its significance is past. Because we are all related to the Queen, our blood is mixed with theirs—a drop in some cases, a pint in others (in mine, for example: a mere coincidence of genealogy). Once humans and daemons were two races. Out of the mingling came the Wraiths. And then, inexorably, the balance tipped—and first the Wraiths, then the pale barbarians they conquered and mingled with, became the masters of the purebred daemons. Like traitors all over the world, they capitalized on the ancient bonds to betray their cousins and then enslave them. Soon, demoralized, daemonkind dwindled into ‘beasts’ and ‘gorgons.’ That was what later came to be known as trickery. Handling, now…though despised by tricksters as a poor substitute for communion, it was unique in that it was the product of pure mechanical ingenuity. Did you know that handling, in comparison to trickery (or genius playing, as it was called in the southern islands, where it evolved indigenously), is a thing of recent years?”

  Crispin shook his head. “You’re the professor of daemonology.” Instantly he was afraid he might have recalled Millsy to the present; but the trickster merely gave a crackling laugh.

  “And all my reading has not gone to waste, has it? At last I have a student…Well, my boy, like all successful human inventions, handling was purposed to empower the talentless. Silver mesh, oak slats, wire cord. Where is the blood in the mechanism of the transformation engine? Even a European could have used one.” He paused. “Of course, all the holding cells in the world are useless if there is nothing to hold…” He brought one spotted, gray-skinned hand from behind his back and closed it on nothing. Crispin stared at the fist. Millsy said at length, “Since the apocalypse, they have been free. We have been free. And who knows what they are thinking, liberated from their imprisonment in the Wraithwaste and in flesh and fur and skin and in silver and oak, liberated from the need to eat and mate and sleep and defecate?”

  “Oh, Significance, Rae had it right all along,” Crispin murmured, his mind working furiously. “1 should have listened to her!”

  Now, in comparison to everyone else Crispin had come in contact with since Smithrebel’s, Rae seemed to stand out, vindicated, as a paragon of incorruptibility. Perhaps thanks to her religious upbringing, she’d been one of that rare sort for whom belief isn’t just a function of longing. She’d never taken her eyes off the concept of destiny she called “the razor-pinioned bird.” And her beliefs—unlike Crispin’s—had been consistent with reality! She might not know it—it might have been no more than a subconscious sense of belonging that kept her in the Enclave—but to this day, she was living out her beliefs. The children of the Enclave, to whose welfare she’d dedicated herself, were the last living products of the old order; the Enclave itself was a redoubt whose keepers had managed, through sacrifice, to stave off the apocalypse at least for a while longer. The world might have zoomed off on a tangent, but the Patriotic Sisters hadn’t wavered.

  Probably the best thing I ever did for Rae was not acting on my love for her, even at the end, even when she might just have said yes—

  —and anyway, where would that have left Mick? And where’d I be now without him?

  (please, Significance, let him be there)

  If I’d only had the sense to believe her in the first place, so much trouble could have been saved! But where’d I be now if I had—in some all-male version of the Enclave? And anyway, back then I didn’t know about interconnection—I was still trusting the future to explain everything eventually—

  But what had happened eventually was that he’d realized the Likrekian half of his heritage wasn’t any better an explanation than Anuei’s fables of an Eastern-born truck driver. Then he’d tried to reinvent the present, to make it explain itself on its own terms. But at Scaamediin, the genius players Vo and Urzhii had given Crispin his first confirmed glimpse of interconnection—not just between man and daemon, but between adult and child, the interconnection of tutelage and pain. Not long after, Crispin had understood the futility of his attempts to forge a brand-new life out of wishful thinking. He understood consciously now what he’d sensed before as desperation—that there was no such thing as the present, only a void into which one tumbles endlessly. And so, rather than tumble, he’d begun instead to reexamine his past for fallacies, for clues.

  Millsy, sitting serenely in his leather throne (could it be daemonhide?) looked like a wizened idol, an oracle, a mouthpiece for the secrets of interconnection. Crispin had thought that knowledge inaccessible by definition. It was almost too much to assimilate: it was intimidating. But according to Millsy, most of it was to be found in the archives of Kingsburg University’s daemonology department! The past and the present never stopped overlapping! The ghost and the lecher inhabited the same body!

  He couldn’t get the images of the Enclave out of his head. The flock of twittering, declaiming children, dramatizing their dreary little existences with a self-awareness that should have been beyond their years; the romantic, absurd ambitions that sparkled in the girl Fantinora’s eyes. Fantinora with the blue face, swinging on his arm, tottering in the high heels her mother made her wear. What if he’d pretended to stumble on the stairs, and she’d fallen and gashed her knee? What if he’d grabbed her leg and pressed his face to the cut, sucking her blood? What if he’d lured her out behind the Disciplinarian Headquarters, and cut her throat and made a slash on his wrist and mashed the wounds together so that her lifeblood pumped into his veins?

  He could have knowingly made her a second Orpaan, a sacrifice to knowledge rather than ignorance, and as such her death would have had more meaning. The knowledge of the missed opportunity to avenge Orpaan brought tears to his eyes. He’d thought Fanny had no awareness of her daemon kin—but he’d been wrong. She just hadn’t had anyone to tell her how to tap the power in her blood. Unlike Orpaan, who in his short life had been subjected to so many horrors, she’d grown up shielded from pain by all her mothers’ good intentions.

  “The absence of tutelage,” he said slowly, thinking aloud, “will lead to the predominance of—of—”

  “The superficial tactics of corporeality,” Millsy said instantly: as if he’d just been waiting for Crispin to figure i
t out.

  “The Tausseroys and Yamauchis of the world. They’ve redefined power to their advantage. To them, blood is to be spilled.” Although that’s nothing new, is it? It’s not so simple as that—

  “Who is Yamauchi?” Millsy said, nervously.

  10 Maia 1900 A.D. 12:45 P.M. Ferupe (“New Kirekune”):

  Kingsburg (“Ataramacbi”): the Burg: the Stock Exchange

  Mickey scraped his dessert spoon around the tarte flambée plate and savored the last sweet shavings. He eased his chair back, adjusted his holster for maximum comfort, lit a cigarette as he’d seen the bankers do after their meals, and smoked it to the butt, gazing out the window. Then he got up, winked at the redheaded waitress, and sauntered through the swinging doors of the library.

  Carrels of ancient tomes broke up the vast room. Mickey made for one of the low tables on which newssheets lay in fans, nodded to a man browsing with cigar in hand, picked up the London Times, and walked on down the length of the room, surreptitously scanning the corridors between the carrels. The library wasn’t silent: deal-making cliques gathered in armchairs near the windows, rowdy despite the early hour. Mickey felt reasonably sure no one saw or heard him try the first door he saw. It was open. He slipped through into a second hall, a disused, ravaged mirror copy of the first, its windows hidden by the bookshelves that had been shoved against them. A single electric bulb hung over the door he’d come in by. Books lay on the floor, on trolleys, in chaotic piles.

  He dropped the Times and searched through the rising yellow fog of dust and the shadows for another exit. For a terrible time he was afraid there wasn’t one. Then he found a small door with a rusty padlock. He prised the lock apart with a shelf support and escaped to a back staircase where dust lay as thick as moss on the treads and the banister and the sills of the arrow-slit windows. It was too broad and graciously designed to be a servants’ stair. He guessed that the original stock exchangers, the Ferupian landowners who pioneered heavy industry and then—to their eventual ruin—lost interest in it, had frequented both halls of the library. The books on the carrels in the first hall had had Kirekuni titles; Mickey hadn’t thought that odd; but now he felt repulsed by his countrymen’s high-handed yet insidious ways of spraying their territory. He made his way down the stairs, coughing and sneezing, and arrived at the bottom with his eyes watering. He was in the very front hall he’d first come in by. Bankers and clerks broke their stride, pausing as they took off their hats to stare curiously at him. He must look like a gray, walking corpse. Desperately, surreptitiously, he tried to brush off the dust. He was heading for the front entrance. He couldn’t stop sneezing.