The Daemon in the Machine
Page 1
EVER, PART TWO: THE DAEMON IN THE MACHINE
FELICITY SAVAGE
Fleeing the trap laid for them by the treacherous David Burns, Crispin and Mickey strike out for Okimako, where Mickey is reunited with the family he abandoned to join the Disciples. Crispin struggles to reconcile his apocryphal visions with the political realities of Okimako. Meanwhile, on the far side of the continent, Rae faces the appalling truth about the cult to which she has attached herself.
Kirekune is winning the war, but a Significant victory will have terrible consequences for humans and daemons alike.
Part Two of the EVER trilogy.
Originally Published by Harper Prism, a Division of Harper Collins Publishers
Copyright 1998 by Felicity Savage
First Digital Edition by Knights Hill Publishing, 2011
Copyright 2011 by Felicity Savage
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be sued or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Book Five: The Fall
A Handful of Dust
The Lower Air
It’s All about Survival
This Life So Free
Lost
Book Six: Fire
The Butcher and the Policeman
Leave the String Alone!
Be Patient. Your Future
Happy on the Streets
Fingers May Be Burned
Therefore
If I Live or If I Die
Picking up the Pieces
Book Seven: Roustabout
A Bird in the Clouds
Another Sky
Here We Are Again!
Little Stupid
Sacrament
Tom Tiddler’s Land
New Friends and Old
A String across a Gulf
The Falcon Full of Passionate Intensity
Have Their Bones
Treacherous Things, All
Preview: A TRICKSTER IN THE ASHES
Book Eight: Fin de Siècle Fever
Grey
Feel No Pain
Mere Babes in This Business
About the Author
Our Story So Far...
In The War in the Waste, we encountered Crispin Kateralbin, truck driver, daemon handler, and sometime aerialist in the traveling circus billed as Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show. Crispin is unaware that Saul Smithrebel, the owner of the circus, is his father. He is prone to visions which seem to depict the imminent end of the world, a cataclysm also prophesied by the religious cults proliferating across the continent. After Crispin caused an accident in which a fellow trapeze artist died, Saul fired him. He drifted into Valestock, a town on the western edge of Ferupe, and met a costume-maker’s assistant named Rae. They fled together into the Wraithwaste, the daemon-haunted forest that lies between Ferupe and the Significant Empire of Kirekune. The Wraithwaste is a source of valuable daemons and a bone of contention between the two powers, which have been warring for almost a century.
Reaching the far side of the Wraithwaste, Crispin was captured and recruited into the Queen’s Air Force. The child he rescued in the forest, one of the daemon-blooded natives known as Wraiths, was killed in the struggle. Rae, since she is a Kirekuni, was taken into custody under suspicion of spying for the Significants.
In the QAF, Crispin’s daemon-handling skills gave him an edge. He was rapidly promoted to lieutenant and then to captain. His commandant, Vichuisse, was an aristocrat whose connections compensated for his total inadequacy as a pilot. In the Salzeim Parallel Crispin became friendly with a fellow captain named David Burns. Burns persuaded him to join in a conspiracy to kill the universally hated Vichuisse. Crispin enlisted Mickey Ash, a Kirekuni deserter who joined the QAF to avoid execution, to help with the plot.
However, once Vichuisse was dead, Crispin realized Burns had double-crossed him: he meant Crispin to take the blame while he himself inherited Vichuisse’s commandancy. Crispin, acknowledging his own crime, was prepared to face a court-martial. But Mickey convinced him to flee. They resurrected a clapped-out old bomber and took off in the direction of Kirekune, escaping military justice by minutes.
Book Five: The Fall
A Handful of Dust
2 Maia 1896 A.D.
Kirekune: the western foothills of the Raw Marches
The old Blacheim clattered westward across the sunlit ridges and shadowed gorges of the Raw Marches. Early that morning they had crossed into Kirekune.
It had taken Mickey most of the previous day to pilot the airborne banger across the resettled territories, the two-hundred-mile-wide band of pastureland that he now thought of, in Ferupian, as the Occupied Raw. He was afraid to push the sick old daemon too hard. At sunset he’d put her down in a goat pasture so Crispin could take over the whipcord. It had felt like setting foot for the first time in a strange country. Mickey’s memories of his year at Anno Marono, hundreds of miles to the south, flying Wedgehead with Izigonara’s 20th, seemed oddly distant, irrelevant to this emergency. So, too, did the Occupied Raw seem irrelevant to Mickey’s sense of urgency. They hadn’t yet escaped the war, but you’d never have known it. The grass was the same faded green it had been at Air Base XXI, Sarehole, the air just as soft. Something about the light of the setting sun flattened the landscape, giving the far-off mountains a look of stage scenery. The stream from which they refilled their canteens tasted of metal.
For a hundred years the Kirekuni Empire had been irrigating the former Wraithwaste as it captured it, saving the territory from desertification. Significant Disciples had built brand-new Anno villages and imported villagers from the Ochadou Plains west of the Raw Marches. Settlers and empire-expanding paraphernalia alike had to be either flown across or trucked south from the Teilsche and Lynche passes into Kirekune: the Marches were impassable by land. The Annos farthest from the war front were impoverished little hamlets where, despite the Disciples’ efforts, the Chadou engaged in the same sleepy struggle to survive that their countrymen did on the other side of the mountains.
It couldn’t have been less like the Raw that Mickey and Crispin had just left, that narrow strip of deforested, quickly parching land rife with military activity, buffered from the Wraithwaste only by the Shadowtowns. Mickey tried to tell Crispin they were more or less safe now. Kirekuni SAPpers and airmen stayed on their bases; they didn’t roam freely across what was after all land belonging to ordinary Kirekuni citizens. Crispin wouldn’t relinquish his conviction that the countryside was crawling with Disciples. And Mickey couldn’t blame him for being jumpy. They might be deserters, fleeing from Ferupe for dear life, but all a Disciple patrol would see was their QAF uniforms.
If so much as a harmless Chadou child had come on them while they rested and ate, Mickey suspected Crispin would have shot it. He kept touching his holstered daemon pistol as if it were a lucky charm. Even while he comforted the daemon, his face pressed against the warm wood of the Blacheim’s fuselage, his arms trying to hug its great curves, he’d kept on glancing around for danger. Didn’t he trust Mickey to alert him? Did he think Mickey had secretly turned into a lizard the minute his foot touched Kirekuni soil? Mickey was still a QAF pilot on a sortie. He was as careful as ever not to use his tail to grasp something when a hand would do as well—it was so important to impress on Crispin that now neither of them belonged to any air force, Mickey wa
s on Crispin’s side. But Crispin hadn’t even noticed.
Below, the Blacheim’s shadow scudded across the jagged western slopes. Sitting idle in the rear cockpit, Mickey had to keep looking down at that shadow to remind himself where he was, what was happening. After twelve straight hours in the air he was starting to share the beast’s consciousness as if he were in the pilot’s seat, its pain and fear coloring his resurgent memories of the country to which he was returning.
He still wasn’t sure he should have come. He’d been going to stay at Air Base XXI to put Lieutenant-Marshal Thraxsson off the trail. He’d had it all planned out. He’d have claimed responsibility for shooting down Commandant Vichuisse, the incompetent whom everyone in the squadron had hated. Crispin would have been far away by then, flying high and free in his maneuverable little Gorgonette, Princess Anuei. And in Crispin’s absence, the traitorous Captain Burns of 96 Squadron would surely have settled for Mickey. He had to have someone to carry the can. It wouldn’t suit his purposes to blame Vichuisse’s death on the disastrous encounter with the enemy during which it had taken place. Merely having been the only survivor of a fiasco wouldn’t warrant the promotion of a man like Burns, a half-Wraith who’d worked his way up from the ranks. And it was promotion Burns craved. If he were to make commandant, he needed to be a hero-patriot, the best of the best of the best. And who’d make a more appropriate counterweight to balance his rise to power than Mickey, the Kirekuni turncoat whose traitorousness was, after all, an open secret, whose execution had merely been put on hold by the Bureau of Intelligence at Chressamo?
Staying in Ferupe to face his fate would have been the first noble thing Mickey had done in his life. And who more worthy of such a sacrifice than Crispin, the only genuinely principled man Mickey had ever known, the only man who didn’t have a cowardly bone in his body?
He should have expected that Crispin’s principles wouldn’t countenance Mickey’s dying for him!
Crispin hadn’t admitted it was a matter of principle, of course—he’d said he needed Mickey. Kirekune might as well be the dark side of the moon for all I know about it. Just how far d’you think I’d get in Okimako without someone who speaks the language? But he was just giving Mickey an honorable way out of going through with his plan to martyr himself. And Mickey had taken it. That was what he couldn’t forgive himself for. When he fired on Captain Burns yesterday morning, risking his life to save Crispin’s, he’d thought he was shaking his lily-livered monkey for good and for all—but the monkey had spoken, again, and dived down the first available bolt-hole. It was the coward in him who’d agreed to return to Kirekune. When he suffered such persecution and humiliation at the hands of 80 Squadron that he’d seriously considered suicide as a solution, the coward in him, Yozi, hadn’t let him take his own life. Yozi remembered Okimako and love and wine and sweet things. Yozi refused to believe that even if he did make it home, he’d find himself an outcast, an embarrassment to his family. And probably find himself being tried as a deserter from the SAF, too—that had been more than three years ago, but Significance could hold a grudge for three hundred.
The wind in the open cockpit was dry and cold. Mickey knew it was like an oven on the ground. West of the Raw Marches, Maia was summer, and summer meant murderous heat everywhere in Kirekune except perhaps on the northern plains, or on the western coast, where Mickey had never been. In Okimako in summer, the sewerlike Orange River was so full of people day and night there was practically no room for the water. In Okimako, in Kirekune. Ever since they flitted across no-man’s-land into enemy airspace late yesterday afternoon, Mickey had been aware the rules of the game were subtly altered.
And Crispin hadn’t spoken into the tube in hours. Mickey wanted to say something just to see if he’d respond. While they flew up the eastern slopes, the daemon wheezing in the thinning air, Crispin had issued a stream of instructions and brittle banter. But then they’d crossed the ridges. Sunlit knife edges standing up between canyons unfathomably deep, black as if they were filled with water, but no water anywhere; and then those gave way to slopes scored by deep gullies running east-west now instead of north-south. Occasional birds sailed by on the head wind. The daemon was tiring. Mickey could no longer pretend he wasn’t hearing it cough, snort, and roar in pain, its voice audible over the wind. It was too old. All Crispin’s coaxing had made no difference.
“—any ideas?” Crispin’s voice crackled through the tube.
“What? What did you say?”
“I said I don’t think there’s any way we can land here! Do you have any ideas?”
Mickey grabbed the speaking tube close to his ear. “Why do we have to land?” He wanted Crispin to say it. He glanced down through the slipstream at slopes and miniature cliffs, crags and dusty red gullies reduced by height to deceptively shallow wrinkles.
“Why d’you think? I can keep her in the air maybe another fifteen minutes.”
Mickey had thought his terror glands deactivated by exhaustion and nervous overload. He’d been wrong. “I don’t want to die!” he muttered aloud, “dammit, not now—”
“What? What? Speak up!”
“You couldn’t fit a motorbike down any of these valleys!”
“Well, the daemon’s senile: I might be able to convince it this crate is a motorbike...” Crispin’s voice wandered: he must be mentally wrestling to keep the daemon from giving up altogether.
“I’ve lost it!”
Curiously enough, the Blacheim felt steadier now that she was gliding. The altimeter needle plunged—800 feet; 700 feet. Crispin cursed steadily into the speaking tube. Mickey saw it then, some way behind them. A triangular valley. It looked like an open vise, but no one would have thought of landing on that rampart-construction site behind the Ferupian lines either, would they? “Bring her round,” he said, rapping on the tube to get Crispin’s attention. “A hundred-eighty degrees. Think you can manage it?”
“Bring her around? Where to?” Crispin howled. “Best bet’s to try and hold the glide and take our chances on the slopes!” But even so he was bringing her around in a tight banking curve, raising the starboard aileron and lowering the port one just a little so that the Blacheim swooped gracefully back the way she had come without losing unnecessary height. Mickey didn’t take his eyes off the dials. “Don’t overshoot! Do you see it?”
“A fucking hang glider couldn’t land in there!”
“Any other ideas?”
Mickey heard a short dry crackle, which, after a moment, he identified as laughter. “All right, say your prayers!” He knew better than to speak again. Their lives depended on Crispin’s manipulation of the plane. From this low the valley looked reassuringly wide. The question was whether, as the tall rock cliffs drew closer together at the eastern end, it remained wide enough to provide a long enough taxi. The instruments showed the tail wind as a frightening thirty knots. Mickey had a horrible vision of both the Blacheim’s wingtips plowing into the sides of the canyon and the fuselage tearing like the body of a butterfly with its wings ripped off by a capricious child. He wanted to close his eyes, but he remembered Crispin saying yesterday evening as the sun set over the Occupied Raw, setting grass and trees and aircraft all on fire: If nothing else, I want to see my death coming and spit in its eye—
His hands checked his harness. He could hear the wind singing over the rocks, a thin loud bell-like sound that wavered up and down a scale of four or five notes, distinct from the roar of the Blacheim cutting through the air. The aircraft entered the mouth of the canyon at precisely the same moment as the landing gear touched rock. Mickey caught his breath in awe. There was at least fifty feet clear off either wing. Touch; bounce, bounce, touch and rip of rubber tearing away; scream of brakes and the clank of the wing flaps snapping down. “Sweet Queen,” Crispin gasped into Mickey’s ear. “I’m gonna fuck it up—it’s gone...”
Mickey said nothing. He knew they were safe. That very first touch had installed in him a sense of security. Scream, shriek, pl
unge, and halt. The starboard wingtip was six inches from the cliff.
2 Maia 1896 A.D. 11:30 P.M.
Kirekune: the western foothills of the Raw Marches
“Out of the frying pan into the bloody Queen’s Birthday bonfire.”
Crispin exhaled a white plume of smoke, staring out from the mouth of the valley over the seemingly endless expanses of the twilit foothills. Now they were west of the Marches, day lasted longer—the sun couldn’t just duck below the mountains, it had to trace a long, excruciating descent to the horizon. This high up, the air wasn’t hot as Mickey had expected, but dry. The sun and wind leached every drop of moisture from the body. He had seldom been gladder of nightfall.
He usually permitted himself to use his tail in the lighting of cigarettes, but after glancing at Crispin, he struck the steel on the rock with his right hand, awkwardly. The Queen’s Air Force had cured him of left-handedness. As a result, he’d probably be clumsy for the rest of his life; maybe it was just as well that looked to be a very short time. He said, “You’re talking as though it’s hopeless.”
“If you can see a glimmer, you have sharper eyes than I do.”
Mickey glanced back into the gully. The Blacheim stood on its torn-up wheels at the end of the canyon like the ungainly flying bomb box it was. A mystery how it had ever taken off in the first place.
“That daemon’s a lost cause. Good night, Gramps. We can while away our last days composing its eulogy.”
They had both tried talking to it and got no response. Mickey had poked his head inside the engine cavity and removed the hatch of its cell, expecting a lash of power to blind him—but nothing happened. Through the silver mesh he saw it crouching cramped, a giant in solitary confinement, hands hanging over wrinkled yellow knees, head sunk to scaly chest. Judicious poking with a silver screwdriver had made it snarl, but when he pushed a wriggling splinteron through the feed hole in the mesh, it hadn’t reacted, allowing its intended prey to scramble freely about the cell and even swing on its long, matted black hair.