A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  Burns was the reason The Dolphin made money. Dolph, his partner, was why the workingmen kept coming all the same. He was a local character. He walked with a sea dog’s roll, which was misleading because he’d never been anywhere near the sea, having spent five years as a sergeant of infantry in the Galashire Parallel, where he’d got his limp. He looked exactly like his namesake, only hairy. But if he’d been a real dolphin, he would have been outcast from the school—he had a quicker temper than Burns, a fouler vocabulary, and none of Burns’s wit. In his partner’s presence, Dolph was perpetually dumbstruck with awe; when Burns was away, nothing short of a knockout blow—which Crispin often came close to delivering—would stop the big man running his mouth. Mercifully, every Minday, after the weekend’s returns came in and the breakages were deducted, Dolph pocketed his share and took himself off to visit one or more of his “kiddies.” He had six small sons and two daughters by four different war widows. He’d written a rotating schedule of the children’s names and pasted it on the wall of the saloon; if a splash of ale or a drop of blood touched that schedule, Dolph went on the rampage.

  In his absence, Burns and Crispin existed in perfect harmony.

  Crispin longed to bring Mickey to Xerenoche to see if he, too, would pick up on the reason Burns lived here. The bloody heart of Kingsburg, pulsing in the Disciples’ grip, shared more than just an ambience with Cerelon’s Shadowtown.

  But even more than Mickey, the thought of whom already made him feel vaguely uneasy, Crispin couldn’t stop thinking about Yamauchi.

  Now the letter had finally come. But before he had a chance to open it, the bell tinkled for lunch—a meal imbued with fateful associations, when Crispin and Mickey both frequently saw the past arriving at the table, tucked like a misty oversight under the tureens.

  6 June 1900 A.D. 1:48 P.M. Kingsburg: Rotterys

  “I can’t countenance this,” Belinda Tausseroy said, dropping her fork with a clink on her plate. “I really can’t! Whatever would the good Dr. Cowles say! And in my house! I should be responsible!” She had been rephrasing this sentiment at shorter and shorter intervals throughout lunch; in between, she’d scarcely taken her eyes off Mickey, who sat on her left, calmly finishing off his fruit tart. She seemed to expect him to collapse into the cutlery at any moment. In fact, Mickey had eaten every bite set before him and joined in the general conversation, though infrequently as had become his habit. Crispin had been watching him, too, and he’d decided that a good deal of Mickey’s weakness up until today had been faked. What was Mickey planning?

  It probably conflicted with Azekawa’s as-yet-undivulged plan to pacify, or failing that to elude, Governor-General Kuroi. Crispin only hoped Mickey wasn’t planning to throw a spanner in the works. He didn’t know how much of a dent, if any, the Tausseroys’ hospitality had put in Mickey’s principled opposition to illegal behavior like the Mimes’ very way of life.

  “I simply must ask you to go back to bed.” Belinda expanded her theme. “Or else, I shall have to ask Crispin and David to take you there willy-nilly.”

  “Madame T., your concern is most appreciated,” Mickey started wearily.

  But Belinda hadn’t finished. She shot a challenging glance at Azekawa, who sat at the head of the table. “I cannot bear such imbecilic willfulness. I shall have a temper tantrum! I can feel it coming on! One—I shall send for the doctor—two—”

  Crispin, seated between Mickey and Azekawa, saw the latter close his eyes and sag a little. Sometimes, when Belinda or Emily mounted their subtle challenges to Azekawa’s privilege of the last word (and without fail when the women combined forces, though that was rare: at home, the Tausseroys demonstrated a refreshing lack of the affection they sopped each other with in public) Azekawa really could have been the elderly, weary, devious and yet fearful intelligence officer he impersonated. A man at home only in war rooms, worn down by too many victories. Not a family man.

  Azekawa pushed back his chair and rose sharply, leaving his dessert virtually untouched. “Belinda, be quiet! Has it dawned on you that Dr. Cowles is not the arbiter of life and death in this city?”

  Both Burns and Mickey stopped eating.

  “Dr. Cowles is a foreigner! An insignificant physician!”

  The presence of Kuroi, who though he might be Lesser was indubitably Significant, hovered shadowlike over the table. In the Kirekuni language, Kuroi meant darkness. The other side of the air, the black crack you could see if you squinted sideways, a leak running horizontally.

  But Belinda apparently couldn’t feel their solidarity seeping away through that leak. With her white bun and creased face she looked sixty; Crispin had never seen her Mime self, but he suspected she was really as young as her absent “daughter,” because she rose to her feet, as always, with all the verve of a fountain turned on. “How dare—”

  “—you speak to me like that, Harrish,” Crispin intoned for her, softly, “at my table!”

  She turned her fury on him. He shrugged and stood up. If Azekawa’s fears were justified, they would soon see the backs of the Tausseroys. His mind was on Yamauchi’s letter. The envelope was so thin it couldn’t contain more than one sheet.

  “Gentlemen, I think it is time to leave the lady to her chatter,” Azekawa said imperiously, and strode out. Crispin, Burns, and Mickey piled after him into the parlor at the back of the house that doubled as the smoking room. Mickey pointed at the bolts. Every room in the house could be triple-bolted if necessary—one of the few ways Belinda and Emily had altered their predecessors’ decor. “No,” Azekawa breathed, slumping into his favorite chair. It was as big as a pauper’s hovel and upholstered in Lamaroon daemonskin. The original Belinda and Emily had been profligate speculators in the museum-piece market. Belinda’s long stride came down the hall; Azekawa scratched the arm of the chair irritably with his fingernails. “Leave it be.” He looked up pleadingly at Belinda as she thrust the door open. “You’re not yourself, Bel.”

  Mickey, Crispin, and Burns subsided onto a velvet sofa: they knew a scene was coming.

  “On the contrary, I am. And I refuse to be treated like a lady,” the tall, elegant old woman snapped. “Obviously something’s happened. He’s out of his bed, and the rest of you look like cats who swallowed the cream and then realized it was the paint thinner. Harrish, you’re going to be caught, aren’t you? I knew this would happen. I knew it the very day you came whining and smiling to my door. Emily and I have put years of work into this cover. We’re living better than we ever have in our lives. You’ve already endangered us over and over, and if so far we’ve managed to preserve our credibility within our circle, it’s no thanks to you. We are the Tausseroys, and that”—she stalked up to Azekawa—“is how”—she tapped him in the chest—“we intend”—tap—“to keep it. So you are going to tell me exactly what’s happened and how soon you expect your reptilian muckety-muck to put a price on your head. And then you are going to leave this house for the last time, Harrish, the last, and you can take all three of your one-dimensional young friends with you—I don’t give a fig how sick they are!”

  Having delivered her challenge in complete detail, she remained standing, arms folded over her bodice. This was a Belinda Crispin had glimpsed just once before, on the road where the stagecoach had broken down. Mickey leaned carefully toward Crispin and whispered, “Remember the time she came after us, out in the country?” It was as if he could read Crispin’s thoughts, the way he’d used to do. “We were right to run for our lives, weren’t we!”

  Crispin smiled.

  “Can we start drinking yet?” Burns asked of the air. “We’re gonna need something to keep our spirits up.”

  “It’s much too early,” Mickey said regretfully—as if, Crispin thought, he’d forgotten about his own midmorning whiskey. “But I do want a cigarette. I haven’t had one in weeks. I tried once, but Nadine caught me in the act.”

  “We can do you better than that,” Crispin said. “There’s a box of cigars here somewhere. S
tay put, I’ll look.” He went to the Chinese cabinet against the wall behind the sofa and started to search for the Havanas an American admirer had given Emily. The cabinet had at least three dozen drawers and none of them had handles.

  “What did Nadine do to you?” Burns was asking behind him.

  “Oh, I tried to hide the cursed thing under the sheets. She smelled it, though, and then it burned a hole in the coverlet. She flung herself on top of me to put the fire out like a SAPper diving for cover. I was quite impressed.”

  “I’d have grabbed her,” Burns commented. “You’ll never have as good a chance again.”

  Mickey laughed. It turned into a gasp of pain. “I’d rather have Denton. Footmen always have such beautiful legs!”

  “Oh, that’s right, I’d forgotten about you. Me, I don’t give a damn what you wanna fuck, Achino: it’s rhetorical anyway; you won’t be fucking anything for months. But my partner, Dolph, he’d have something to say to you.” He chuckled, presumably at the thought of what Dolph might say and do to Mickey. Crispin found the Havanas. He turned around with the box in his hand—

  —and saw with the familiar sense of having been cheated that, while their attention had been deflected, Belinda had changed. She—she?—stood between Azekawa and the window, a tall salt-and-peppered man somewhere between fifty and seventy, with long, spidery limbs and an incongruous potbelly as round as his shoulders. Crispin could only think of his face as rancid: it could have passed for a walnut, if walnuts were capable of folding in on themselves like hand puppets.

  Mickey’s face wore an expression of naked dismay. Crispin sympathized. If “Belinda” were the first Mime he’d seen undisguised, he wouldn’t have wanted anything more to do with the race, either.

  Of course Mickey might already feel that way.

  Best friend, alter ego, lover, co-conspirator, inspiration, you name it and Mickey had been that to Crispin, but Crispin had very little idea what Mickey was thinking these days.

  In a rasp completely unlike his/her usual fluting tones, “Belinda” said, “I mean what I say, Harrish. Perhaps now you believe it.” He/she spidered to the nearest chair and drew up his/her limbs. Azekawa knelt up on the seat of the daemonskin throne and faced them all, gripping the arm like a railing. “David, Crispin, Mickey, this is Sluizhe.”

  “With a penultimate ‘h’ as in ‘happy,’ as they say to telegraph operators,” clarified the repugnant creature with a cackle.

  “A pleasure to meet you,” Crispin said without bothering to smile.

  Azekawa was gazing somewhere over their heads. The sun from the window fell on his heels. He wore such poor-quality shoes; Crispin deplored the habit, but he understood now that nondescript style must have been part of the original Azekawa’s recipe for anonymity—and, of course, Tallwood/Acanaguan would never dream of altering any of the habits he’d observed while he stalked his prey, watching and learning. From the moment the Mime closed in for the kill, the impersonation had to be flawless. Only now, Azekawa was confessing to the worst mistake a Mime could make—an impersonation somehow so flawed that General Kuroi had noticed the difference.

  Crispin drew the letter from Yamauchi out of his pocket and slit the seal with his thumbnail.

  “All that’s important I’ve already told the boys. I’m suspected of duplicity. I’m suspected of deliberately fouling up arrests,” Azekawa said. Burns growled softly in his throat. “But the real reason he wants to get rid of me is because he considers himself an acute judge of character. He promotes, fires, and executes on the basis of personal compatibility with himself. He sees himself as a jackbooted tyrant with good taste.”

  “Then I wouldn’t want him anywhere near my national borders or my herbaceous borders,” Mickey whispered, making a rare joke. Neither Crispin nor Burns smiled.

  “To him, ‘character’ is dependent on achievements. His philosophy is—”

  “The same as that of every officer in the Significant army,” Sluizhe cut in raspily. It was just what Crispin had been thinking. “Harrish, I find it difficult to believe you have so little understanding of the military mind.”

  Azekawa reddened. Crispin had a memory of Tomichi Minami on the witness stand. But that day, the sky had been aflock with winter clouds and everyone in the courtroom, including Minami himself, knew his statement was an audacious fiction. Azekawa wasn’t lying; at least, Crispin couldn’t imagine what he would gain from it. He reminded Crispin of Minami because he, too, had the secretary of the interior’s inability to rise to cross-questioning, the same sulky, rigid attitude that said more eloquently than words, I defy you. “There was never a man named Hideo Azekawa,” he announced in a high voice.

  “Oh, spare me the old-fashioned moralizing,” Sluizhe snapped.

  “Will you let me speak? The man I am impersonating was born Quarro Hosoke in the deep north of Kirekune, in a small mining town. Azekawa was one of his cover names. Do you see now why I was drawn to him?”

  “You always were a romantic, Harrish!”

  Crispin unfolded Yamauchi’s letter—just one sheet—and cast his eyes down it. The Little Governor had written his sentiments large without bothering to make a clean copy. Fuzzy ink drops clustered here and there like butterflies. The signature cavorted euphorically, like a leap of faith, taking up half the page.

  Yleini had “pined away” and died about a month ago.

  The news affected Crispin queerly. Once again, Mr. Nakunatta had worked his sleight of hand while he wasn’t looking. He didn’t feel any particular grief: like a shudder of nausea, his body reminded him of thirty-six hours in a redbrick void, and the mere recollection affected him worse than the idea of Yleini’s being no more. She, after all, had been in a void, too—trapped between a foolish marriage and an adultery that had begun as rape and kept recurring, like a nightmare. Could Crispin fairly grudge her the peace of sleep in earth?

  Her mother had come to fetch her body home to Scaamediin, Yamauchi wrote. Crispin remembered that that was where she’d always wanted to remain.

  The rest of the letter was one terse paragraph of commands and assurances.

  “What’s happened?” Mickey whispered.

  Crispin folded the letter and grinned at him. “Yamauchi wants me to stay up north. We’re expanding. He expects to contact me in person when he pays a state call on Kuroi this winter, and in the meantime he’ll send funds.” He paused. “And my wife’s died.”

  Mickey grimaced. “I’m sorry.”

  The platitude irritated Crispin. Mickey knew perfectly well that Crispin and Yleini’s marriage had been loveless. Had he forgotten? “Nonsense. I feel like yodeling.”

  “Significance, you’re callous!”

  Stung, Crispin turned away. Burns was smoking a cigar. Crispin had known his toddlerlike compulsion to put things in his mouth must manifest itself soon. Azekawa was still speaking Ferupian, but exclusively to Sluizhe. He was only now bringing his history of Quarro Hosoke up to date. His words tumbled over each other. “In 1897, Hosoke—or Azekawa as I shall call him—was fifty-four. He headed General Kuroi’s intelligence staff and held the title of Commander in Chief of Intelligence. He was also Kuroi’s personal confidant, insofar as Kuroi has personal confidants. He accompanied Kuroi’s battalions—which were then officially under the command of the late Lord Oseki—on the push through the Wraithwaste and the march to Kingsburg. Now bear with me, this is an important piece of history. Azekawa’s wife of thirty years, Koeko, had perished in the Fire of 1212. Since her death, Azekawa had been prone to self-doubt. He was in a position to know, as do we, that the Fire was set by Kirekuni nationals, and thus his maneuvers against Ferupe became the focus of an avenging fury all the more venomous because it was misplaced. It was Azekawa who arranged the assassination of the Queen. I learned this from David”—he made a tight gesture of acknowledgment—“whom I met for the first time when I came to Kingsburg that summer on a scouting trip. I was traveling as a fine-goods importer named Palmer Tallwood. David himsel
f had been the assassin hired by Azekawa, and, disgruntled at Azekawa’s subsequent reneging on his promises, he—”

  “Hey!” Burns thrust his cigar into Mickey’s hand and sprang to his feet. “You can’t tell them that!” He shot a quick, defiant look at Crispin. Crispin thought, stunned, It was him? He assassinated the Queen? The mind boggled. Burns was waving his hands in the air. Those capable, dark-skinned hands had tricked a Killer B-99 into acting like a KE-122; those hands wiped glasses and broke noses every weekend in The Dolphin; and they had also—“I didn’t assassinate her!” Burns roared. “She suffocated! And—” He paused and said in a different tone of voice, “Hideo! That fat fool of a textile merchant—he was you?”

  “Textile merchant, yes, ‘fat fool,’ well, I do not—”

  “You fucking skunk! You could have filled me in! I guessed you weren’t Azekawa all along, you know—if you’d really been him, I’d never have tried what I did try! But you think we’re just some kind of animals, don’t you? You don’t think you have to be fair to us!”

  A tiny smile played around Azekawa’s mouth. “I became personally interested in David, this former assassin living in obscurity. But I was professionally interested in the employer who had gone back on his word to him, this undercover agent who had engineered the death of a monarch. I returned to Kingsburg once more to extract everything I could from David—”

  “Shit-eating double-crosser!” Burns said.

  “And then I moved in for close surveillance. To maintain my unfortunately corpulent cover’s spatial integrity—I mean in order to eat—I kept working with Crispin, who then, as now again, many happy returns Crispin, was employed as a go-between for Devi Yamauchi in Lamaroon.” Another nod of acknowledgment. In Azekawa’s eyes, Crispin wondered, was Crispin’s way of making a living morally indistinguishable from Burns’s unimaginable deed? It appeared that Crispin had judged the Mime right from the start. Acanaguan had changed faces and occupations simply because he was bored.