The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  “Where? What?”

  “Thank Significant! Nothing. You were—”

  Behind Mickey the pike, deprived of attention, had been whining disconsolately. Now she began to bark.

  Mickey had forgotten what loud, low, throaty voices pikes had. And how, once they got the wind up, they wouldn’t stop barking until they succeeded in causing a commotion. It was why they made good watchdogs. Mickey tried to kick the dog. She skittered away and redoubled her howls. He scanned the houses. It would be a matter of minutes until someone came out. The river clamored blackly at the bottom of the slope.

  “Give us the torch,” Crispin said in a strangely calm voice. He still hadn’t emerged from the engine cavity.

  “Gotta get out of here! Fuck the daemon!” Mickey wrenched at him.

  “Give it to me!”

  “You’ve got it!”

  “I know! It’s in my jacket, I can’t reach it I’m holding her, I can’t let go!”

  Mickey fumbled in Crispin’s jacket and handed him the little flamegun. The dog kept on barking. Crispin clicked open the nozzle. Mickey heard the fizzle of flame, and then the ear-piercing crack of metal under stress springing apart; he started and dropped the heavy hood on Crispin’s shoulders. “Hell!” On the other side of the street a door opened, revealing a small, hunched silhouette against a gleam of candlelight. “Ina? Ina?” it shrilled querulously. The dog stayed where she was, staring at Mickey, giving tongue. Then voices drew his attention to the first house they’d passed, about a hundred yards back along the track. A crowd of ragged, long-tailed people, probably everyone else in the village, poured into the street, laughing and razzing each other. Mickey dragged Crispin out from under the hood of the truck, nearly tearing his head off in the process, catching the wooden slab and lowering it gently just in time to prevent it from slamming. “Cris, stand up.”

  Crispin blinked. Even in the dark Mickey could see he wasn’t focusing. He was surprisingly light even though he wasn’t supporting any of his own weight. The blowtorch lay on the ground. Mickey tried to pick it up with his tail, but years of forcing himself not to do anything of the sort had made him too clumsy. “Stand up. We’re busted.”

  The Chadou were spreading down the street toward them. “It was an owl,” someone shouted from the rear fringe of the crowd. “Forget it!”

  Crispin freed himself from Mickey’s grasp and took a stumbling step. “Then what are we waiting for,” he slurred.

  A sort of roaring disorientation washed over Mickey. The dog was still barking, and the noise seemed to jab right into his head, piercing his eardrums. He was nearly sick. “What about the daemon?” he managed.

  “I’ve got her.”

  Crispin’s features seemed to waver oddly, his mouth opening and shutting without making any sound, as if he was underwater. The dinning in Mickey’s ears clarified into words. “—she’s right here. Come on.”

  “Where? I don’t see anything.”

  “Look, for the love of the Queen, will you trust me?” Crispin shimmered out from behind the truck and made for the cover of the henhouse. Mickey followed—he could do nothing else, although he knew something was very wrong. The dog spun herself around to point after them, stiff-legged, barking wildly. As they stole down to the riverbank, Crispin’s legs gave out and Mickey caught him. The rest of the escape was a fever dream. Mickey had to half carry Crispin while he issued irritable, senseless orders in far too loud a voice. The buzzing came and went, and the nausea sat in his stomach like a bladder of poison likely to burst at any sudden movement. “Shift down, Queen damn it, you rotten-cunt whore!” Crispin barked at one point, and Mickey had no idea whether he was addressing him, or some regular years in the past, or the daemon. For the daemon was with them. How Crispin had done it Mickey did not want to guess, but the creature had dematerialized and it was keeping up with them, wrapped around their heads like a cloud of gas. The river crawled in his vision as if there were no water in its bed, but black-and-silver snakes, wriggling frantically downstream. The grasses writhed like an ocean of cobras standing on their tails. Behind them, the Chadou were setting up a hue and cry. One man’s voice rose above the rest, and because he spoke in Okimako dialect, Mickey understood even through his sickness and fear: “I’ll fucking string whoever done this! D’you hear, you poxy grass rabbits! I know you know who done it, and if he’n’t come forward, I’ll shoot the fucking lot of you! I’m gnawing well stranded long as you’nt give it up!”

  Mickey had just enough of his wits left about him to smile.

  A moment later, he heard the report of a rifle: the trader, as good as his word, was firing on the villagers.

  Mickey had always been grateful for his sense of direction and even in his half-fainting state, it didn’t fail him. Not too long after he expected to, he broke clear of the grass into the ruts the Blacheim had left when she landed. With the last of his strength, he dragged Crispin up to the plane and dropped him. The reek of burnt daemon flesh still lingered about the place; as if in response to it, the presence of Uemiel suddenly thinned, withdrawing. Mickey staggered off and threw up into the ashes.

  6 Maia 1896 A.D. 6:05 A.M.

  Kirekune: Somebai Province: the Eastern Plains of the Chadou

  At dawn Mickey watched Crispin balancing on the drop ladder, his upper body inside the engine cavity, banging the final nails into the cell into which they had forced the malicious Uemiel. Unlike Elektheris, she hadn’t gone willingly. For the best part of the night, while Mickey slept, Crispin had been working on her. In the last hour of darkness he resorted to force. The daemon’s shout woke Mickey. Jumping up, he saw Crispin wrestling with four feet of pinkish orange daemon and eight feet of whipping yellow hair, struggling to fasten the silver collar around her neck. When he understood what was happening he grabbed the blowtorch and went to help. While the silver was touching her skin, she couldn’t dematerialize; still, by the time they managed to pin her down long enough to weld her collar shut, most of her hair had been singed off in the torch flame, and she had given Mickey and Crispin both nasty power shocks. Then it was a renewed struggle to manhandle her into the cell inside the Blacheim. Arms and legs kept shooting out while they tried to close the cell, sometimes kicking perilously close to gears in the upper housing. It was like trying to fit a hydra-headed Jack back into its box. They both kept bursting into laughter: a nervous reaction to tension.

  Mickey was trembling with the effects of nerves and sleeplessness. He longed for a cigarette. Neither of them had suggested taking time out to eat or rest until the daemon had been properly celled.

  “And they wouldn’t give me a job at the daemonmongers’!” Crispin remarked hollowly, banging another nail in. “Fucking ignoramuses!”

  Something whistled through the left sleeve of Mickey’s blouse and thudded into the Blacheim’s wing. He whirled. They erupted out of the grass all at once: five lanky, ragged Chadou men with hairy untattooed tails like those of rats, and a big Okimakoan—the tinker, Uemiel’s owner. No more knives flew. They were going for the sure thing, and they’d surrounded Mickey before he could even draw Crispin’s revolver. In thirty seconds he fired all six rounds, and two men fell, clawing at the jewel-colored, famished spiders that were gnawing through their hands to get at their throats, but that left four of them. Although the tinker wasn’t using his projectile rifle for fear of hitting his allies, they all had knives, and Mickey found himself backed up against the fuselage, laying about him with the butt of the revolver. His opponents were inexpert fighters, even the tinker, using their knives as they would have used their fists, and Mickey just managed to hold them at bay—but he couldn’t last. He was already bleeding heavily from his right forearm, which he was using in lieu of a shield to parry the blows raining on him, and it wouldn’t be long before one of them scuttled under the Blacheim and cut his legs out from under him from behind. And he must have been hit in the body, too, because his stomach was cramping so fiercely his eyes watered, blurring everything in
sight. Suddenly the onslaught lessened as one of the plainsmen and the tinker broke away right. Mickey drew his dagger, and, as the other two Chadou slewed their eyes around to see where their fellows had gone, he lunged for the throat of the one on the left. Scarlet splashed onto the trampled grass as the man fell, jerking. Now it was one-on-one, and although it had been a while since Mickey fought hand-to-hand, he was combat-trained, whereas the Chadou man had probably never been in a more serious set-to than piss-drunk brawls with the fellows from the village five miles upriver. The wail of a screamer stabbed through the noise of Mickey’s own breath in his ears. Eeeeeee!

  The Chadou man made the mistake of looking around.

  Eeeeeee!

  What a blithering imbecile! Mickey stabbed him. Steel scraped bone but he had not misjudged his target: the blade slid sweetly in between the ribs, and the man’s entire body convulsed, spittle-flecked features distending. He dropped heavily to his knees. Just for good measure, Mickey stooped and cut his throat neatly, stepping to the side as he did so to avoid the spray of blood. He stood up, glancing around. The kill tally his brain had been keeping—a reflex so ingrained he didn’t question its accuracy—told him that according to the number of screamers he’d heard, unless more of them lurked in the grasses, that was the lot.

  Pain hit him in a series of dizzying pulses as time slowed to its normal progression.

  Crispin hurried with the blowtorch from body to body, making sure the Chadou were all dead. The screamers, in their communal-spirited fashion, had all migrated to the tinker’s body and settled down to feast at their leisure. Two of them were squabbling over the entrails in their screechy little voices. Crispin paused at a distance of three feet and aimed the blowtorch. At the first lick of flame, all twelve went up with a whoomp and a crackle. Crispin stepped back, fanning his face. “Can’t have ‘em coming after us.”

  Mickey stared numbly.

  From the pockets of his flight fatigues, Crispin produced a dozen beaten-tin cigarette boxes, grinning as he fanned them out like a conjuror. “Look what they had on ‘em. Must’ve just bought them off that fellow. Stroke of luck, eh? Wish I could’ve searched him, or the truck cab—should’ve done, no telling what might’ve turned up. His gun’s a loss, too.” He glanced regretfully at the flames licking over the body, which still gripped the long-snouted projectile rifle. “But only a fool would try to shift screamers once they’ve dug their teeth in.”

  Mickey leaned against the nose of the Blacheim, wrapping his left arm and his tail around the propeller. His right arm was killing him. Blood was dripping into his hand. His side had gone numb. All over so quickly. Well, that was the way it went when people meant business. The sun was rising in the east, an orange fireball in a watercolor wash of pink spreading rapidly up the gray sky. The grasslands rolled featureless as a desert to the horizon.

  “Winged?” Crispin said from behind him.

  “I’m all right.” The scent of roasting human flesh brought back his nausea. He swallowed bile. “Put that out, can you?”

  “With what? Too much trouble to stamp it. Just let it burn down’s better,”

  Mickey closed his eyes. He felt Crispin come up behind him, engulfing him in a psychic shadow of the deepest black, a shadow composed of his sweat-and-soot-and-daemons smell and of Mickey’s special awareness of him, an awareness that could judge the distance between flesh and flesh to the inch, which filled that distance with aching, as if Mickey’s own skin had been flayed away, leaving his whole body supersensitive to the least movement of the air.

  “For fuck’s sake, you’re bleeding like a pig.”

  Crispin moved around to the other side of the propeller and began to untangle him.

  “Look at you!”

  Mickey opened his eyes and stared between the broad, scarred blades at Crispin. “Actually, I can’t believe I’m alive. This is the first time I’ve ever fought hand-to-hand, apart from in training. I’m quite pleased with myself.” As recently as last week, he’d routinely shot down as many enemies as possible and then returned to base and eaten well and slept like a baby. He hadn’t felt like a killer then. He did now. In air warfare, the intellect was always engaged—in flying one’s kite if nothing else. One concentrated on obeying one’s briefing; the objective of murder was taken for granted, if not incidental. By the time Mickey joined 80 Squadron he had begun to be a competent pilot, but the handicap of his left-handedness had prevented him from subsequently merging with his Gorgonette the way the real aces did—the way he’d merged with his knife just now. As he fought the Chadou, instinct had extinguished the moral compunctions that Flight Commandant Vichuisse’s death had awakened in him. He needn’t have worried. He was a career soldier.

  “We gave a pretty good account of ourselves, didn’t we?” Crispin peeled back Mickey’s sleeve. “Six to two, not bad odds, not bad at all...of course, they didn’t know what they were getting into...Queen, you’re a mass of cuts! Muscle and tendon, too... What were you doing, parrying with your bare arm?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s beyond me why you ever thought you were a coward!”

  “I a—hhhh!” Mickey flinched as Crispin picked bits of cloth out of open gashes.

  “Here, sit down. No, watch it, not there.” Crispin guided him around the nose of the Blacheim into the grass. He looked under the plane’s belly and saw the smoke from the slowly cooking corpse of the tinker rising straight up.

  “What happened to you? I thought I was a goner.”

  “They assumed you were alone.” Crispin smiled in a way that reminded Mickey of nothing so much as Captain Burns of 96 Squadron. It was a toothy, self-satisfied grin that would have been endearingly boyish if it had reached the eyes. “They were so bent on getting you they didn’t even see me. I just slipped down off the ladder and around the other side of her and Bob’s your uncle... Reconnaissance pays, boys,” he added loudly, cupping one hand to his mouth as if calling to the bodies. “Remember that for next time! Here, lie down. I want to see your ribs.”

  Obediently Mickey lay back in the grass, tucking the curled tip of his tail under his head. Brown stems soared above him as tall as spires, topped by pale green budding seed heads that bobbled against the paling sky. Crispin unbuttoned Mickey’s tunic. Mickey wondered what he’d done to coax the daemon to follow them back to the aircraft; and what it had done to him. Never again, he’d said after the first time. I’d starve first, I’d die of thirst. But he looked far better now than he had before the Chadou’s attack...

  “All the same,” Mickey said, yawning.

  “All the same what?”

  “All the same I’m through with this shit. Fighting. Killing.”

  “That’s an old story, son.” Crispin laughed as he ripped strips out of Mickey’s tunic.

  “You don’t understand. The only reason this happened is because we did something we shouldn’t have.”

  Never again, he thought with the crystalline clarity of semiconsciousness. I’ve had enough. We’re out of the Great Problem now—we’ve no excuse for going on like this. It’s time to clean up. No one can live this way forever, and the sooner we get off the truck, the less likely we’ll get thrown off. All soldiers die in the end...

  The pain was receding, localizing, becoming manageable.

  “You’ll feel better when you get some sleep,” Crispin said. “You can sleep in the air. I want to take off as soon as possible, in case more of ’em come to see what happened to the first lot. This here is just a flesh wound, you’ve lost a bit of blood, but if it doesn’t heal straight, well, star and plaster me. We’ll put down by a river and you can wash. One thing though, you’re going to be flying copilot for quite a while.”

  “Uh?”

  “Your right arm’s fucked, isn’t it? You won’t be able to handle the whipcord.” Crispin lifted Mickey carefully and wrapped strips of fabric around his abdomen below the ribs. He said casually, “I’m gonna take you up on your offer, I think.”

  “W
ha’...what offer?”

  “To teach me Kirekuni. They were yelling at you, and for all I knew they could have been saying something important.”

  “They were just calling me a tattoo-tailed lily-livered nancy boy.”

  “Before we get to Okimako I’ve got to be able to at least speak a few sentences. I’ll tell you the things I have to be able to say, and you can tell me how. All right?”

  “Oh...oh, yes. I can teach you more than just a few sentences,” Mickey yawned. “I mean, gram—gramma—grammatically it’s not half as complex as Ferupian. And there are fewer words in the...the spoken vocabulary.” As always when he was tired, he had to search his brain for the Ferupian words. “The trick is...nuance. It’s really easy to choose the wrong word and offend someone. But people will make allowances.” He chuckled. “And if you fuck up bad and get into a fight, no...no doubt you can dispose of any number of my lily-livered countrymen.”

  Crispin sat back on his heels. “I felt the same way as you once,” he said. “Not that long ago. Then I realized Lady Luck’s a two-faced bitch; nothing’s fair, so why should I bother trying to straighten something out that’s so far out of whack I wouldn’t be able to even things up if I lived a hundred years? All anyone can do is take responsibility for himself.”

  “And everyone else can go hang?”

  “Yeah, well. Life is all about alliances.”

  Mickey chuckled. “In other words, making the best of a crap hand.”

  “Fuck you. How’d you say that?”

  “I know who my friends are.”

  “ ‘Fuck you’? Bit long, innit?” Crispin repeated the sentence with surprising accuracy. “‘I know who my friends are.’ How’s that?”

  “Fine.” Mickey closed his eyes. On the bright red field of his lids he imagined he saw Crispin’s silhouette. The tangible shadow of him coming closer, enveloping Mickey, his heady effect on all the senses quickening Mickey’s breath and sending a rush of heat straight to his groin; finally, after a pause during which anticipation enhanced arousal to an unbearable pitch, the brush of lips on...