A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  And as the Disciples shoved him down a long, electric-lit hall toward a black window on Maia 12, Crispin would just as soon have died himself.

  They thrust him into a small office with a linoleum floor and brick walls the same red as the outside of the headquarters (an edifice less ancient than the palaces but scaled to compete with them), and slammed the door on him.

  “I would not want you to suppose this was my place of work,” said the man standing behind the trestle desk, in front of the black windows. The black, Crispin realized, meant it was night outside. He’d thought it was early afternoon. Voices calling back and forth elsewhere in the building had that cheerful note that means going off duty.

  “My office is in the Old Fortress, on the second tier down, and it’s much nicer than this. This is…” The man, a small nondescript Kirekuni, perhaps fifty, put down the cup of black tea he’d been drinking and stooped to take a crumpled piece of stationery out of the wastebasket beside the desk. “This is now the office of Disciple Corporal Hamachi S. Hata. And it was originally”—he peered at the desk itself—“if I read these scratches right, it belonged once upon a time to Mark P. Wildwick, DI. Neither of them seems to have had much of a flair for interior decoration, do they? Or perhaps it’s against the rules here.”

  Crispin dropped to his knees. The linoleum had a pattern of flowers in red and blue lines.

  “No, I don’t really have time for the rank and file either,” said the legs coming around the desk. They wore absurdly loose, long trousers that dragged clownishly on the floor. “Puffy fools and stuffy rules, as I seem to remember my friend Burns saying once. By the way, Burns is my agent—he’s one of my field prosecutors, what you might call my gun-dogs. I’m the General Prosecutor for the Bureau of War Crimes, and let me assure you, we investigate only the most interesting cases on the books. If we did it any other way, we wouldn’t get through the backlog in our lifetimes. I’m Hideo Azekawa.”

  The legs stopped. Crispin could have spat on the shoes peeking from under the folds of the baggy trousers, Ferupian-made imitation brogues that needed a polish.

  “Oh, dear,” the voice said. “All right, I’m not really. I’m Palmer. Remember me? Palmer Tallwood? Friend of Devi’s? He’s spent so much money chasing you I wouldn’t be surprised if he decided you weren’t worth it. But that would be a waste, wouldn’t it, now he’s got you. I’m sure you remember how much Devi hates waste. Almost as much as he hated Tomichi Minami.” Hideo Azekawa chuckled.

  “Tomichi…Minami?” Crispin coughed. “He’s dead.”

  “Indeed. But you aren’t. And Devi doesn’t want you to be.”

  There followed a long pause during which Crispin thought about nothing except the throbbing in his ribs, and his dry mouth, and how interesting it was that they patterned the linoleum in squares to make it look like tiles when any idiot could see it wasn’t. Then the Kirekuni said in a rather different voice: “Will you get up off the floor, Kateralbin, or am I going to have to kick you?”

  Crispin raised his head—

  —and passed out.

  When he opened his eyes next, it felt as though his eyelids scraped up over gritty granite orbs. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes. He was slumped in a chair with no arms, staring at the crotch of a large, pudgy person standing between him and the desk. Funny, this person wore trousers of exactly the same herringbone fabric as the lizard who’d been here last time. Only, on this man, the trousers strained in tight horizontal wrinkles around muttony thighs. Crispin’s gaze traveled upward and met the cold green eyes of Palmer Tallwood. Tallwood put down his teacup. “I thought I’d lost you for a moment there.”

  “Give me…a drink,” Crispin croaked.

  “That’s reassuring. You haven’t changed much.” Tallwood forced his hand inside his suit jacket—again, a garment that had hung loose on Azekawa was tight on him—and, to the sound of ripping seams, produced a pint of imported Scotch. “No cognac today, I’m afraid.”

  “Doesn’t matter. My favorite,” Crispin croaked, uncapping it. “Cheers.”

  He drank. It was like being slapped to life. Fire uncoiled like a whipcrack up his spine. He consecrated a quick prayer to Black Label and straightened up in the chair, regarding Tallwood with hate. “What do you have to do with Minami?”

  “Nothing at all.” Tallwood wrestled with his waistband, which was on the verge of yielding before his surging belly. Clean-shaven (as Azekawa had been clean-shaven) he looked less of a scurvy knave than Crispin remembered. In Naftha his face had invariably been pocked with scabs, as if he hadn’t succeeded in shaving at all, only in nicking himself; now even the smallpox pits, formerly hidden under Tallwood’s stubble, looked less like the markings of a predaceous animal than the battle scars of a difficult childhood. If he was a potato, he was a painstakingly peeled and washed one.

  But the eyes—like green peas bubbled in glass—hadn’t changed.

  Nor had the uniquely strange, pleading, threatening tone of his voice.

  “I can’t work out why you’re Devi’s favorite, though.”

  “I didn’t know I was.” Crispin took another rejuvenating swig of Scotch. Mickey was dead. Crispin had nothing left to protect, nothing left to hide. “As far as I know, he’s been hunting me—or rather, his assassins, who by the way are your compatriots, have been hunting me—all across Cype and Ferupe for months. He hired a bunch of thugs to hit me and my friend in Kherouge. He had my room in Kherouge ransacked.”

  “He—eh-heh—what?”

  “Can you blame me for concluding that he wants me dead? Have you got a cigarette?”

  Tallwood bulged forward. Spittle beads popped from his lips like drops of juice from a cracked orange. “I know nothing about any thugs. Or any ransacking. If Devi caused those incidents, I was not informed. And he took me into his confidence almost as soon as you disappeared. He was extremely upset not to be able to find you. His letter communicated the utmost urgency.”

  “I should think so,” Crispin said. “And what do you mean he couldn’t find me? He sicced a posse of—oh—oh, shit.”

  He sat bolt upright, the truth dawning on him. Realization was more electrifying than any alcohol. “It wasn’t Yamauchi! It was Minami’s friends! They—oh, shit!”

  He’d been so desperate to predict his pursuers’ next move that he’d conflated two or three different sets of enemies into one. Minami’s surviving associates—the Lamaroon faction, not the Japanese—had vast reserves of hate and practically no cash. It had all gone on their ringleader’s last attempt to buy off the judge officiating at his trial. The judge had simply coined a new by-rule, Pocket and Convict. “They were after me. But they fucked up.” They must not have been able to hire any more competent a hit man than an ordinary Cypean lowlife. The latter must have learned Crispin was staying at the Old Tyme Hospitality, and gone there to kill him—but Crispin had been out late, sitting in a cafe with Rae. The hitman (probably young, probably poor) had taken out his frustration on the room itself. A few nights later he’d been hanging around the Abbatoir Fairgrounds with his mates, too poor to gamble, brooding over his lost assassin’s fee, when—lo and behold! There was Crispin queueing for the circus!

  It was too good an opportunity to miss. The boy must have got his mates together—probably promising them a cut—and when Crispin and Mickey left Smithrebel’s late at night, the gang followed them at a distance until they reached the loneliest stretch of the highway.

  “They tried. But they didn’t know I had a gun.”

  “Your foresight does you credit.” Azekawa watched Crispin feeling the place where his holster had been. “I regret that it was necessary to disarm you. Your firearm will be returned in due course.”

  “You mean you’ll bury me with it?” Crispin said skeptically. “That still leaves the other Mimes. At least one in Kherouge, and two on the Joy of Okimachi. Don’t try to tell me Yamauchi had nothing to do with them.” He rubbed his fingertips together, craving tobacco. The ai
r in the room tasted salty: dried blood and tears, perhaps, from bygone interrogations. Right now he wasn’t sure who was interrogating whom. But that was Tallwood’s way, he remembered, and possibly the way of all Mimes: Tallwood didn’t mind the contempt his bulbous physique and ineffectual manner engendered in you, he didn’t even mind your getting the upper hand in an argument (as long as there was no physical violence involved), he didn’t mind that his habit of pleading one minute and threatening the next made him look weak, because underneath the flab lurked an outrageously oversize ego. Tallwood, this snobbish, overgrown maggot, was so deeply convinced of his own superiority that he felt no need to prove himself.

  And maybe his self-congratulation was justified. For Crispin had escaped Minami’s thugs, taken off in a madcap flight across two countries, got his best friend killed, and all for what, all to end up here in this grim little office, Tallwood’s prisoner.

  Tallwood offered a box of cigarettes. Waving aside Crispin’s thanks, he said conversationally, “You appear to have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.”

  “With regard to?” Crispin blinked away tears of self-pity as he inhaled. Inside he was still fuming, condemning all egomaniacs.

  The potato face receded as Tallwood hitched himself onto the edge of the desk. Little more than veneer and planks, it creaked an alarm. Tallwood settled himself, hooking one knee over the other. “Devi loves you as a son. He thinks of you, in his words, as ‘the boy Jionna never gave me.’ I confess I do not understand it. But the fact remains, he wants you back in the network.”

  Crispin laughed disbelievingly. Tallwood lunged, like a toad shooting out its tongue for a fly, and gripped his wrist so suddenly that Crispin dropped his cigarette. “Wait!” he begged, his eyes hard as stars. “Hear me out! Did any Mime ever threaten you?”

  Crispin couldn’t struggle. His ribs hurt too much. If he didn’t hold still, splinters of agony pierced his innards when he breathed.

  “Did they?”

  “Let go,” Crispin sobbed. “No. You win. They didn’t.” The pain in his sides was nothing compared to his humiliation. He tipped his mummified torso forward and picked the lit cigarette up off the floor. How dare he be right? raged the monster, and it couldn’t move, the jail nurse had bound it effectively. “They never once threatened me. Or Mick. I was shying at shadows. But can you blame me? Can you blame me?”

  Tallwood clearly wasn’t going to let his moment of victory slip by so quickly. He grinned, displaying what looked like several rows of tiny, crooked teeth. “Poor Cordhe—my friend, he lives in Kherouge…he tried to speak to you at the, where did he say it was, at the fairgrounds! He’s an extremely sensitive sort, very artistic—he was quite hurt by your want of courtesy! And perhaps if you had spared him a moment, you would not have had to do battle with the late secretary of the interior’s avengers! Cordhe would find that irony amusing…”

  Crispin smoked hard, fighting not to listen to Tallwood’s narrative of poor Cordhe’s woe (and Cordhe’s nascent steppe-selling business, and his masterpieces of paint and poesy, and the life histories of the strange foreigners he met while hawking nonexistent oil on the Kherouge stock market). At the same time he fought a losing battle against self-hatred. If only * * * if only * * * In between puffs, he finished Tallwood’s pint of Black Label. By the time he reached to take a fourth cigarette from the box on the desk, his fingers looked like a school of crooked shadows swimming in a hazy void. He fumbled.

  “…seven times, if you can believe it, in seven different cities! Yet he is not a polygamist, because each time he was a different man! He says he has settled down now, but our Cord used to be quite a devil, oh, yes he did…of course, he is the soul of fidelity compared to Belinda. I haven’t even started to tell you about Belinda and Emily—as we call them now, and as I believe they were calling themselves when they traveled with you on the Joy of Okimachi. Bel is not as young as she was—she says Emily is all she needs in this life, for the rest of her life, though I’ve heard that before, as I tell her over and over. But when I was just a shrimp, tales of her exploits were already…I am afraid you’re tipsy! Watch out!”

  In his single-minded attempt to get hold of the cigarettes, Crispin had levered himself to his feet and rested his weight on the desk. It was too much for the flimsy trestle. The next thing he knew he was sprawling on the floor amid glassy fragments of veneer, half-buried under a volcano in fancy dress. His ribs hurt so much he couldn’t even gasp, couldn’t cry out. He was horribly reminded of the dungeons under the Enclave. This time, as before, the weight vanished off his back. Where was Mickey?

  “Mick?” Crispin tried to sit up and failed. “Rae?”

  The door flew open. Afterward he would remember this: Emily Tausseroy posing in the electric light from the hall like a weeping willow in haute couture, hand on hip, curls in flight, surveying the wreckage with sorrow brimming from her green eyes. She was the very antithesis of the volcano erupting in nervous laughter to its feet. And yet somehow she was kin to it. But he had been so disgustingly drunk at the time, and he remembered perceiving her with such clarity that he suspected it was really a composite image. He saw her like that so many times after, bursting in late on a mismanaged scene because she’d taken longer than she meant to do her hair and face.

  She had an amazing knack for arriving just when things had broken down. That was why he had to remember her arriving at the KPD HQ, because if he’d lost consciousness, as he suspected he had done, before she got there, the memory of the hours before her arrival (especially the last two) would have been too much for mere memory to contain. The dark pencil scribbles straight through the paper, ripping it. The tar drowns the baby. But even the pitchest blackness cannot be seen unless, at the end, some ray of light shines in to create a contrast.

  And the life work of Emily Tausseroy, otherwise known as Guerla Webbe, was to create a contrast with her surroundings. She could be most pitying, most goddesslike, when she knew she was the most beautiful thing around. Always newly arrived, she somehow escaped the taint of the common calamities that leave most people sour paralytics, spitting out broken teeth along with the seawater. She came into Crispin’s life at the very moment when the rapidly concatenating losses of everything from his first girlfriend to his memories to his best friend to his hopes of genius to the shirt off his back might otherwise have deafened and immobilized him as Millsy had been immobilized.

  She and Tallwood got Crispin out of KPD HQ, put him in the Tausseroy horse carriage, and took him to the town house in Rotterys. Emily’s soft voice whispered to Crispin that they were taking him to see his “poor, hurt friend.” His world didn’t turn upside down then. That happened next morning, when Belinda allowed him into Mickey’s sickroom (one of several spare bedrooms they kept aired “for such purposes”) where Mickey lay on pillows the same bloodless white as his face. He wasn’t moving or talking. He scarcely seemed to be breathing. His hand lay folded under the coverlet, his stump on top of it: it seemed a deliberate choice on the part of the Tausseroys to have arranged him that way, a deliberate insult. Crispin rearranged the sheets, crying into his sleeve.

  He stayed with Belinda and Emily two more nights before he realized he couldn’t stand it. By then Burns had come to visit, bringing stronger booze than anything the Tausseroys kept in the house, and bringing as well his own opinion of the Mimes. Though detoxified, this was so much funnier than the Mimes’ opinion of themselves that Crispin nearly burst his bandages laughing. Burns admired Azekawa, Belinda, and Emily for their sheer cheek. He didn’t see the point of giving over one’s life to games of deception—there were easier ways to gain wealth and power—but he respected the Mimes’ undeniable achievements in that field, traditionally the playground of the blueblooded.

  Burns himself lived in the Xerenoche catacombs, halfway up the hill. When he wasn’t out in the field, prosecuting for Azekawa, he ran a gambling saloon in partnership with a friend. (Burns boasted that Azekawa didn’t know about The Dolphin
.) Burns had once, long ago, made a frantic, complex, protracted play for Azekawa’s position. He’d used the same tactics that had gained him Commandant Vichuisse’s position, and come within a hair of scoring a similar success. That was when Azekawa had let him into his secret.

  Crispin recognized the confidence trick Acanaguan had used on him, two years ago. Burns shrugged and said he’d known what Azekawa was up to as soon as he “shifted,” but he didn’t care because by then he’d had a taste of what it was like to work for the Governor-General Kuroi Significant Himself—and Azekawa could have it. “Keeping up with the Lesser Significant is like eating knives. Fuck. Walking on them, too. Me and Dolph had all the windows in the joint smashed once, and I had to walk through to get my boots out of the back…that’s what it was like. With Dolph cackling his ugly knob off. We got our money out of the fellow who’d put the windows in, though. He ought to’ve known what he was letting us in for.”

  Crispin went to stay with Burns. It wasn’t that Burns had softened. He was just as vicious, and potentially as much of a backstabber, as he had been four years ago when they conspired to murder Anthony Vichuisse. But somehow the upshot of Crispin’s having tried to kill Burns on the steps of the Comptroller’s Palace, combined with Burns’s perverse refusal to hold a grudge, was that Crispin no longer hated him. The score was even.

  On Freedays, it seemed every factory worker in Xerenoche packed into The Dolphin to spend what little they’d earned over the week. Fights followed breakages at the rate of approximately one a minute. Even in that hilly, teeming slum, whose Tilly Godown Square sounded like a sea lion feeding tank on any given evening, you could hear the noise from the saloon several streets away.