A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  Of course, that didn’t mean Millsy hadn’t lured Crispin into a trap. Liars and traitors did do that sort of thing.

  But from now on he was out of the picture. Literally, for good.

  There’d been one autumn morning, in Thrazen it had been, a domain of steep hills and verdant glades for example, the copper- and gold-leaf largesse of the trees collecting along the edges of tent roofs, a mile or so outside one of the little purpose-built towns along the war road from Thrandon where tonight a battalion on its way to the front was billeted. “We’ll all give of our best, won’t we?” Saul said. “Take those poor boys’ minds off what lies in store for them, eh?” He rubbed his hands, patriotism mixed with gleeful anticipation of a sold-out performance: these were the days long before shrikouto, and as often as not the performers had to scavenge or do odd jobs to fill Mary May, the big stewpot. Today there was a lunch deficit, and Crispin, aged fifteen, was discussing how best to mend Poppy 9’s engine without any silver wire when Prettie Valenta ran up to beg him to come rehearse instead of messing about with that daemon that could take his hand off if he wasn’t careful. She looked so heartbreakingly cute in her man’s hose and shirt that he turned around to flirt with her (these were the days before they started sleeping and fighting with each other), and it was only a little voice in the back of his head telling him to stop wasting time and get the engine fixed. It wasn’t Millsy. Because there was no one else there.

  There was no one there at all.

  Unlike the future as composed, orchestrated, and conducted by Mr. Nakunatta, the past was mercifully, eternally open to reinterpretation. You could go back either in your head or in person and set things to rights.

  A scowling Kirekuni in Significant robes confronted him as he rounded a corner and he had his gun out before he realized it was a painting hung on the wall of the stairwell. So far he’d seen no one, but that couldn’t last. His best chance was obviously to escape before Millsy’s friends arrived. If they’d caught him upstairs, the jig would have been up, but if he got outside, they mightn’t be able to spot what they were looking for amid the hubbub of the streets. They mightn’t know what they were looking for.

  Mickey—

  “Oh, Significance,” he groaned, and speeded up, catapulting around the newel posts. A liveried footman loomed, mouth open, and Crispin breathed in a gust of cologne. The next moment he found himself in the high front hall where so many visitors, officials, and domestics got in his way that he felt as if he were on an obstacle course. Walking rather than running might have made him less conspicuous, but he didn’t slow down, and he still had his revolver out; that was why everyone was gaping and recoiling.

  Mick—there’s someone else I have to set things to rights with. The sacrifices I’ve been asking of him, and the way I’ve been paying him—it’s not right. That’s all got to stop. Got to set things to rights.

  Crispin avoided a paunchy, jaundiced Kirekuni government official at the last moment and nearly bumped into an oncoming Disciple with a semiautomatic rifle. Two boys in livery guarded the front door, Kirekunis no older than Hikushi. The stained-glass windows on either side of the door cast jagged stripes of red and yellow over their faces, turning them into colorful humanoids, Boone Skinner’s men from head to toe. They goggled as Crispin came on. “Sorry I couldn’t stay! Regards to the comptroller, eh?” Someone tried to grab Crispin from behind as he yanked the door open. Like all entrances of great houses it opened inward, a terrible fire hazard. The breeze and the sunlight and the rancid, rotten-royal odor of the city washed over him, momentarily blinding him.

  10 Maia 1900 A.D. 1:12 P.M.

  Ferupe (“New Kirekune”): KingAnirg (“Ataramacbi”): the Burg

  Mickey pushed himself up off the wall of the Stock Exchange as Crispin burst out of the Comptroller’s Palace, staggering. The great door swung open behind him and stayed that way. At the same time, oddly enough, the Ferupian drunkard on the other side of the street lurched to his feet, letting his booze jar bounce down the steps, spilling clear liquid. Crispin! Mickey dodged a pair of Ferupian peers and their entourage and skidded to a halt as an open-topped car chugged past in front of him. Disciples festooned the running boards. He jumped, tail flailing, to see where Crispin had gone. The fool still stood on the broad top step, turning from side to side, shading his eyes. He’s looking for me! Mickey hopped up and down in agony. He didn’t dare shout, and Crispin would never have heard him anyway—a whole string of black state cars was coughing past in first gear, bumper to bumper, slower than walking pace, each one so burdened with soldiers the occupants couldn’t be seen, and all the blackcoats were shouting commands and countermands back and forth along the line.

  On the other side of the street, the front door of the Comptroller’s Palace slammed soundlessly closed. The drunkard lunged at Crispin, shoving him in the chest to get his attention, and danced back like a boxer. Crispin whirled, leveling his gun, and Mickey winced, but the report never came and that was because the drunkard had drawn a bead on Crispin at practically the same instant, wrenching a large, heavy pistol from his clothing. The two men leveled their firearms at each other, alone on the top of the steps, scarcely fifteen feet apart. The sun broke in blinding fragments as it hit the gun barrels. It was an incredible spectacle, but no one in the automobile convoy, nor any of the pedestrians squeezing past, cursing, on either side of the cars, seemed to notice. Crispin shouted something—Mickey would have recognized the particular tenor of his voice anywhere, though he couldn’t make out the words—and an instant later, as if in response though it couldn’t have been, two Disciples broke from the entrance of the palace. Three men in civilian dress dashed up the steps from different posts along the street. Only one was a Kirekuni.

  They had Crispin surrounded. They all had guns. Still no one’s had gone off.

  1:14 P.M.

  The red beast had died long ago. It had breathed its last, thinking its work done, when Commandant Anthony Vichuisse’s Cerdres 500 fluttered like a swatted insect down to the Raw. After that Crispin’s faith in his own impulses had turned sour and skeptical, and he thought it all to the good. But when the layabout shoved him in the neck and Crispin shoved him back and the man skittered away, laughing breathlessly, tugging a big ugly repeat revolver out of his rags, and Crispin saw Captain David Burns whom he’d thought long gone to his good riddance grinning under an unsoldierly thatch of dark hair, a rage rose up in him that would have made the red beast put its paws over its ears. It was a monster of rage. A rage that would set the world to rights once and for all. It would brook no more half-truths, no more omissions, no more falseness. “Traitor!” he shouted. “Liar! David!”

  “Drop it, Cris!” Burns panted. “Fucking put it up!”

  “Oh, so you’ve turned pacifist?”

  “Just like you, apparently!” gasped the smile, charming as ever. “If I hadn’t about five hundred better charges, I could collar you for illegal possession!” The eyes remained level, and the little black third eye of the revolver held steady. “Drop it, don’t be a fool, you haven’t a chance! There’s nothing I’d like better than to shoot you dead, to be honest, but my superiors have other ideas.”

  The monster would have liked nothing better than to shoot Burns dead. Afterward it wouldn’t matter what happened, full circle would have been achieved. But the years of low-profiling and backdoor business and hiding in plain sight, the years of Yamauchi, stayed Crispin’s hand, and that was the crucial instant. The next thing he knew, men in suits jostled around him, getting between him and Burns—and that the monster couldn’t tolerate. Their grasping hands might as well have been low branches, their guns might as well have been twigs. Crispin tore loose and bounded across fifteen feet in half a heartbeat. He ducked a shot, he knocked Burns’s gun out of his hand before the Wraith-blooded captain could fire again, he rushed Burns back against the wall of the Comptroller’s Palace and pinned him. Cordite seared his nostrils as he sank his fingers into the soft, delectable
flesh of Burns’s throat. It was time to stoop to strangling. “Thought you saw the last of me?” Squeeze. “Thought you finished me off ’long with my career?” Nails in veins. “Well, hello!”

  “Don’t shoot!” Burns gurgled, tearing at Crispin’s arms. Crispin reared back so the smaller man couldn’t reach his face. Burns’s smile had vanished—he was gulping like a landed fish. “Don’t shoot!” he gargled to his men. “We gotta keep it quiet—I can handle him—”

  “Hah! You could never handle a fair fight,” Crispin sneered. “Always had to cheat. Well this time you’re’nt gon’ get the chance to cheat and you can’t handle it, you’re wrong—” squeeze—“wrong—”

  A gun stock crunched into the side of his head. Someone kicked him in the kidneys. Fuck, it hurt, but like a werewolf the monster had an unbreakable grip, it would hold on until either its prey died or it did, and they’d have to cut David Burns’s head off to free him or else they’d have to cut Crispin’s hands off and make him an amputee to even the score for what he’d done to Mickey, which was something else he’d never paid for, and he winced every time he saw Mickey’s naked stump even though Mickey had had it neatened up in Okimachi. Ugh— a blow to the other side of his head—oh, blessed Queen—

  He crumpled to his knees. The stone-solid caps of Disciple boots and the pointed toes of dress shoes thudded into his ribs. Fighting to get up, frantic with denied murder-lust, he heard bones cracking that had never before even been fractured. Always he’d escaped without a scratch in relative terms, even after his trip down the Dynasty’s garbage chute in Okimachi, but this time it seemed his number was up and blinking. Through wheeling galaxies of pain he saw Burns yanking at the other men, coughing, “Are you all fucking mad? Leave off! That’s an order! Significance, why am I always landed with such hotheads! This is supposed to be an undercover arrest! Look at me! I’m all right! That’s a fucking order!”

  The monster moaned silently, thwarted.

  But Crispin’s cheek rested on warm stone and tears trickled from his eyes because the respite from being kicked was the best news he’d ever had.

  A moment later another shot startled him out of unconsciousness. Drowsily, he identified the weapon as a Disciple pistol, probably a Karanda.

  1:15 P.M.

  Mickey watched in a stupor as Crispin launched himself at the drunkard whose quick reflexes betrayed that he was not a drunkard but stone-cold sober and military-trained. A shot passed over Crispin’s head, and Crispin pinned the man against the wall. Now the rest of the men had pulled Crispin off. They had him on the ground, kicking him viciously.

  I’m a coward.

  The convoy of cars had passed and even when the shot sounded, only a few of the chattering flock of pedestrians stopped to watch. Most glanced up at the Comptroller’s Palace, then hurried on faster than before: after all, their business was compelling! Mickey stood openmouthed, fists clenched, paralyzed. He’d never in his life been so perfectly pinned between two repugnant alternatives.

  I’m a coward.

  The man Crispin had attacked waded into his fellows, trying to pull them off. He was a neatly built Ferupian of average height whose tramp’s hood had fallen back from a deeply tanned face and unkempt black hair. Amazing how, though no more than thirty feet of crowded cobbles separated them, Mickey couldn’t hear what he was saying. Crispin folded to the ground. Mickey went rigid. The Karanda prodded his abdomen. He remembered about it then.

  Thank Significance for firearms, the third alternative—

  In one movement, as he’d practiced in secret ever since he bought the gun from those poor gullible Disciples with the money he stole from Crispin, he drew, sighted and fired. One of the men in civilian clothes spun around roaring uncivilly. Five chambers left. Crispin hadn’t moved. Calmly, Mickey sidled into the center of the street where the crowd afforded him cover. He was tall enough to see to aim over people’s heads. He fired and the same man dropped. In his stance now, he straddled the central gutter, which here in the Burg held only a little dirty water, not garbage and potato peelings and dead rats as in Xerenoche. The people around him were finally, reluctantly deciding the situation warranted flight, and acting on their decision. Mickey fired again. One of the Disciples grabbed his thigh, doubling over as blood spurted. All the others except the dark man dived down the steps, looking frantically for safe hides from which to return Mickey’s fire. One of them squeezed off a shot as he ran and someone near Mickey howled. “Mon Dieu, it’s a damned countercoup!” a man shouted in French. “Quick, make for the legation!”

  Mickey breathed deeply. Now the morning air tasted of gunpowder. That cloudless state of being he had longed so desperately to achieve had come unsummoned, a gift of the significance of long-distance killing power. He had, of course, to shoot one-handed, but the gun seemed an extension of his arm, and neither the recoil nor the reports affected his aim. Exalted, exulting, he fired again—

  And missed. A window on the ground floor of the Comptroller’s Palace vanished in a miniexplosion of glass.

  He moved a couple of paces toward the steps, holding the Karanda low by his side, still masquerading as just another Kirekuni. Enough people were still hurrying away—and newcomers arriving, going obliviously about their business—that the dark man, who crouched behind the bulky body of the Disciple Mickey had shot, his gun up by his ear, couldn’t spot the source of the shots. Mickey crossed the rest of the street. Standing at the bottom of the steps, taking his time (almost, screamed the cowering, hands-upping part of him, as if you WANT him to notice you—all that received garbage about fighting fair—just BLOW THE BASTARD’S HEAD OFF), he aimed and fired.

  Chips flew off the top step.

  The dark man saw him, and for an instant their eyes locked, and Mickey knew he’d seen him before. Then, in a weird slow-motion race of reflexes, Mickey aimed again as the dark man flung himself flat and rolled, and their guns blarted at almost exactly the same time. Mickey threw himself up the steps, unaware if he’d been hit or not, not caring, wanting that man more than anything else in the world. On the top step Crispin pushed himself up on his arms, trying to speak. Mickey’s attention wavered, and for a second he stared. He’d thought, no assumed, taken for granted that Crispin was dead—

  —and it seemed he didn’t hear the semiautomatic go off until after the hot hornet of agony buried itself in his right shoulder. Simultaneously a giant invisible hand, a wall of air, pushed him forward and he stumbled on the next step, but as he fell he remembered what he wanted and emptied the Karanda’s last chamber at the dark man. He couldn’t let go of the gun, and so he couldn’t break his fall; he hit the steps in a full-tilt belly flop. His shoulder flared a nauseous red nova of agony. He opened his eyes and saw the dark man above him, clearly outlined against the sky, baring his teeth in a badgerlike mirthless grimace. The man gripped his gun with both hands at arm’s length and aimed downward. The black hole of the muzzle swam like an impression of the sun on the red fog that had become the sky.

  Mickey couldn’t have closed his eyes even if he’d wanted to.

  Another silhouette, bearlike, appeared staggering in the distance, in the fog. Someone shouted hoarsely, in between teeth-clenched yelps, “David, that’s Mickey! Stop! Leave off!”

  “Mickey fucking who?” The sun faltered in its path.

  “Ash! It’s Mickey Ash from my squadron! He tallied forty-seven for six and a half! Don’t you remember?”

  But it was only just after one in the middle of the day, and of course Crispin couldn’t single-handedly rip that high-riding black sun out of the red sky, and then it exploded.

  Who’s the man with the matter plan?

  A nigga with a motherfucking gun.

  —Dr. Dre

  Never an Enemy

  6 June 1900 A.D.

  Kingsburg: Rotterys

  Crispin and Burns pulled chairs close to the head of Mickey’s chaise longue and began to chat, trying as always to draw Mickey out. The maid Nadine arrived
with a midmorning tray and a folding table on which she laid out the tea things. She was a plump, attractive little brunette and underneath her dowdy costume lurked excellent legs; or so Burns had intimated to Crispin. Scarcely had she left when she returned to announce the middle-aged lizard, who entered fanning himself with a folded paper. Outside, the summer heat had set in, and the thermometer was moving up faster than the clock. Crispin and Burns started to rise, but the lizard flapped his fan at them, smiling as if the very idea of formality were absurd.

  “My my my, what a banged-up lot you are,” he said cheerily. “You make quite a picture, all three of you together! You ought to go on the halls—The Vamping Veterans—you could do song-and-dance numbers. Though perhaps not quite yet.” He came, bringing his spicy cologne with him, over to the chaise longue where Mickey sat, his legs bathed in sunlight from the window, his head in shadow. Crispin watched him peer at the bulky dressing strapped around Mickey’s torso, cock his head as if to ask Can I touch? and frown like a sad parent when Mickey covered the dressing with his hand. He drew a chair into the patch of sunlight and sat down, curling his tail up over his shoulder, sighing. “I would have been here sooner, but Kuroi called me to his side.” He lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “He fears his lovely little Ferupian dancer is playing him false.”

  “The blonde or the one with big tits?” Burns wondered.

  “She of the—ahem—substantial bosom. Charlotte Goldtoes, as she titles herself. Her residence is now under surveillance. He wanted me to go out on the job myself, but 1 pleaded prior engagements.”