The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  26 June 1896 A.D. Kirekune: Greater Okimako

  An earsplitting snort flayed the night. “Oh, shit,” Mickey whispered, stiffening. “I know where we are. Damn it to hell.”

  Crispin glanced at him. “Spit it out.” He was carrying the much-damaged satchel which contained everything worth taking from the poor old Blacheim: a large oaken canister of splinterons—of undeniable value here—and a handful of Ferupian coins over which they had argued. Mickey said the coins would incriminate them if they were searched, but Crispin said he would rather be incriminated than broke. He’d also overruled Mickey’s more strenuous objections to bringing Uemiel. He was leading her on a gear chain he had wrenched out of the transformation engine. At the moment she was following along tamely enough, like a lobotomized monkey, but all the same Mickey felt it utter madness to take her. What could make them more conspicuous, in Okimako of all places?

  Especially since they had come down in the middle of the night at least fifteen miles out from the city rock, on a strip of clear ground amidst the dense habitations shaped too much like a runway to be true. And it was too good to be true.

  “We’re in a pakamel breedery,” he said as the beasts continued to snort and howl in the long, low buildings at the other end of what must be their exercise ground. The ground was bare and trampled hard—from the pakamels, of course, thundering over it every day, being broken to the bridle. Dozens of such animal-breeding farms ringed the city. Mickey should have known. He should have remembered. The security here would be thicker than a pakamel’s skull.

  “What the fuck are pakamels?” Crispin hissed.

  “Big and hairy. Long necks. Thick tails. Come from Izte Kchebuk’ara. They carry stuff on their backs, people ride them. First-class prestige prizes, but uncomfortable as hell.” Mickey glanced back at the Blacheim. Merely a shadow on the night—if you didn’t know it was there, you might not see it. He hoped. They were lucky the entire farm hadn’t woken when they landed, lucky Uemiel had for once kept her voice down, lucky that their approach must have been relatively quiet compared to the noise of the Sayonozima Road a mere half mile off over a rise. From the air they had seen the Sayonozima as a broad winding river of stars. Now they could hear it. The noise of every imaginable sort of vehicle pouring into and out of Okimako twenty-four hours a day was so loud Mickey had to raise his voice. “They can smell us. They can smell her, I bet. The wind’s at our backs. But we have to get out through the stables; the ground’s got barbed wire around it.”

  “What’s—what d’you call it?”

  “Ba—” Mickey gasped a laugh. Of course he wouldn’t know. “You’d call it a waste of metal.”

  As they started toward the stables Mickey reflected giddily that it was astonishing they’d even made it this far. They’d soon left the plains behind and flown over increasingly heavily settled pasturelands. They lay low during the day and flew at night. If anyone spotted them taking off at twilight or landing at dawn, he or she presumably took the Blacheim for a Disciple machine, licensed to be wherever it wanted. Knowing the Kirekuni military mentality as Mickey did, he suspected that even if the spotter had been a Disciple himself, he would have taken the battered bomber for some new, as yet unpainted K model being tested in secret... because the other possibility was simply not a possibility: not once during sixty years of air warfare had an enemy plane penetrated deep Kirekune, or for that matter deep Ferupe. If it had happened, the pilots had got away with it for this very reason. The same reason Mickey and Crispin were getting away with it.

  Or had been getting away with it.

  They reached the fence and crept along it. On the other side of the barbed wire, on the other side of the wall, Mickey heard the pakamels stamping and bawling seemingly inches from his head. Short-tempered stable hands tried unsuccessfully to calm them down. Their familiar Okimako slang jabbed into his brain like a knife into his body, disabling him in a wash of apprehension. He clenched his fists, forgetting as always that he only had one left to clench. Pain ran up the arm that was no longer there.

  Crispin reached the end of the fence first. A gaslight hung on the wall of the stable opposite, inside the gates, five yards away across dry muck. Crispin stopped just inside the shadow of the stable wall. Come on! he beckoned. Mickey crept closer. The raw, tourniqueted stump bandaged to his chest throbbed distractingly.

  “Before we go for it, which way out?” Crispin whispered. Mickey racked his brains. Breederies were double-fenced all around. Inside the fences... he remembered four or more stables facing each other across a roughly square yard. The big house belonging to the breeder would lie on the far side of the yard from where they were now, with an indeterminate number of sheds and hired hands’ quarters in between the stables and the house. And the gate was on the far side of the house. Hopeless!

  But wait. That was how he’d come in with Uncle June ten years ago, when June had thought he might be able to bargain for a small pakamel to carry the gay-girls to assignations around the new city. Their rickey man had pedaled them along a classy circle drive. There must be another gate, used by the unsightly: tradesmen, dung-sellers, hired hands, the trains of pakamels themselves. The Sayonozima was that way, and Mickey guessed the trade entrance was on the same side of the breedery. He explained to Crispin, trying to sound confident.

  “Hah!” Crispin laughed. He ducked his head and wriggled through the narrow gap between the gatepost and the gate, jerking the collared daemon after him. Mickey followed more carefully. Now Crispin had disappeared around the far corner of the stable. Feeling horribly obvious in the light of the gas lanterns on the eaves, Mickey dashed after him. The pakamels were setting up a worse rumpus than ever. Now the noise came from all five stables surrounding the yard. Hoping against hope that the stable hands had already gone to their beasts, and would have their hands too full to come out for some time, he sprinted across the front of the stable, across the doors standing ajar, and into the lit gap between that stable and the next. Crispin and Uemiel were nowhere to be seen. He threw himself into the shadows behind the next building. “Cris!” he hissed, pressing himself against the back wall of the stable. “Where are you, dammit!” His arm was sending pulses of red light through his head. Running had set the blood pounding in the stump. In the stable, the pakamels bellowed, and a stableboy shouted.

  “Get out an’ see what’s setting ‘em off, willya? Shuki’s gonna go beetle-backed!”

  A door fell open ahead of Mickey, shedding light from behind its dark rectangle into the yard-wide corridor between the stables and the fence. A figure stepped out, tall, bulky, tunic hanging loose, tail grabbing the latch and banging it closed. Mickey didn’t breathe. “Fuckin’ thinks he can fuckin’ order me shit,” the man muttered, stopping to light a cigarette. The lucifer flared in the dark. “Ain’t gonna take that shit.” He exhaled. “Not me, not this—”

  He jerked convulsively sideways and vanished.

  Mickey stared at the fence, at the clumps of pakamel hair and sacking and rubbish caught on its barbs, the glow from the Sayonozima limning the dark rise beyond. An unmistakably human rattle of breath came to his ears.

  He hurried along the wall and nearly bumped into Crispin as the half-breed dragged the stable hand’s body back around the corner into the dark. “There you are.” Crispin stripped the body fast, stuffing the clothes into the satchel he’d set on the ground. “Good thing this fellow’s big enough... the other one was a skinny bugger. His stuff ought to fit you though. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Mickey said. His heart was still tripping over itself.

  “You’re right, there’s this big fucking gate other side of here.” Crispin gestured, a grin flashing. “Not locked, they must be expecting early-morning deliveries or something... one lizard picking his teeth in a sentry booth, had this bloody great alarm bell.”

  “I don’t suppose he got to ring it.”

  “Didn’t hear anything, did you?” Crispin had wrapped Uemiel’s choke chain so tig
htly around his wrist that she had to squat on the ground beside him. She panted and lowered her face to sniff at the corpse. Crispin batted her away.

  “Nothing except them. Hurry up!” Across the courtyard the pakamels had quieted down, but in the stable downwind of them, behind which they would have to pass, the beasts were roaring so loud Mickey might have thought their throats would split if he hadn’t known what a sustained din they were capable of. It wouldn’t be long before someone put two and two together. “We’ve got to get moving before someone gets the wind up and checks on this fellow!”

  “Sec,” Crispin said. He was trying to work the corpse’s breeches off over its limp tail. “Damn lizards!”

  Mickey saw the cigarette the man had dropped lying in the sand by the fence. Miraculously it was still lit. He picked it up and took a drag. The wind licked his face, cool and gentle, carrying the stink of dung and the subtler, daemonic reek of the Road.

  An hour later the entire breedery erupted in an outcry when the second-watch security guard discovered the man he was to relieve slumped on the floor of his shed with his head at right angles to his neck. But by that time, Crispin and Mickey were four miles away, slogging through the shaking, throbbing air that bordered the Sayonozima Road. They walked far enough out of the glow of headlights that no driver who happened to glance away from the traffic would be able to see the little naked monkey trundling beside them. The breedery workers’ thin cotton tunics allowed air to pass around their bodies, evaporating sweat... something to be grateful for in the summer night. When Crispin saw the size and positioning of the tailslit in the Kirekuni man’s breeches, he’d opted to keep his own, but they’d both bundled their uniform tunics and jackets up small (hiding the QAF insignia and, in Crispin’s case, his captain’s braid and badges) and buried them in a storm drain that ran under the road. Crispin said he’d never in his life seen so much rubbish. In the drain and along the road and even up on the rise. Drifts of animal droppings mostly, but also rags and bones and rinds, and pieces of vehicles, axles, spokes, even occasionally an entire fractured chassis. Mickey told him that nothing of any conceivable value remained here for long. There were Dead who made a living of sorts scavenging out here.

  But after so long in the desolate, sweet-smelling plains, he could not help noticing that the Sayonozima, the Great Northern Road to metal country and meat country and to the Iron Hills and to the military bases at the mouths of the northern passes, bore a resemblance (at least in fancy) to the war he’d escaped. It was like a swaying, rumbling war front itself, the two sides slipping past each other instead of going at it face-to-face, and the abandoned vehicles were the broken bodies of its dead.

  He and Crispin entered the City of the Dead just before dawn. It was Mickey’s first time in the slums in his life. By the time the sun rose, he’d got them both hopelessly lost.

  27 June1896 A.D. Greater Okimako: the City of the Dead

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t have stayed on the road,” Crispin grumbled for the seventeenth time, brushing at the air in front of his face. Mickey wasn’t sure whether he was trying to brush away the flies, which were indefatigable, or whether the gesture was a subconscious reaction to the stench. The City of the Dead smelled—appropriately enough—like dead things. Decaying fruit, too, and sweat, human waste, burning oil, and burning rubbish. As the sun ascended, the smell grew worse. But the coiled lanes weren’t the middens Mickey’s imagination had conjured. The closest he’d previously been to this pauper town was the riverbank district of the “leisured” Dead; without really thinking about it, he’d expected the deep City to be a mire of filth. But it was more like a graveyard. As far as he and Crispin had wandered, little moved between the hovels except beetles, lizards, and starved cats and dogs. Mickey suspected they were experiencing the stench at a distance. It probably came off the rubbish dumps that were the Dead City’s commercial arteries. He hoped to avoid those if at all possible.

  “I said we should have stayed on the road!”

  “If you’re going to speak Ferupian, keep your voice down.”

  “Why? There’s nobody listening.” Crispin glanced around as if daring eavesdroppers to show themselves. Uemiel panted softly, her head bowed on a level with his knee. So close together that their ragged eaves almost touched over the lane, hovels constructed of sheet metal and salvaged lumber leaned like cells in a giant honeycomb. Cloth-drape doors hung open revealing pitch-black interiors. Some of the huts seemed to have no entrances at all. Mickey glimpsed the spires of the old city. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

  “Nobody walks on the Sayonozima,” he told Crispin wearily.

  “You people! Nobody does it, you say, and then nobody does do it, for no reason whatsoever! Sometimes I think it’s true what they say, that lizards can’t think for themselves, only take orders!”

  Mickey closed his eyes for a second. “The fact is, nobody walks on the Sayonozima because they’d get run down or be kept so busy dodging they’d never get where they were going. You haven’t seen what the traffic is like during the day.”

  “What with all those animals, I can just imagine! On the highways out of Kingsburg it’s daemon trucking twenty-four hours a day. And the biggest, fastest rigs are only allowed to travel at night. We have laws!”

  “We have laws, too,” Mickey said, “except ours have to go through civil courts, they don’t get handed down from on high. Anyway it’s not the animals, it’s these new diesel motorcars. They clog everything up, trying to go faster than the traffic. It wasn’t half so bad when I was small.”

  They found themselves in a dead end and backtracked resignedly. It was not the first time.

  “It used to be bits of the Dead City only got knocked down when the Disciples rolled. Nowdays—that is, when I left, by now it’s probably worse—houses get crushed all the time.”

  Crispin spat. “Score one for the diesel engines then!”

  “Don’t they have them in Kingsburg?”

  “Don’t need ‘em. Got daemons.”

  “Diesel is cheaper than daemons.” Mickey didn’t know why he was arguing the cause of the loud, smoky automobiles that everyone except their importers and aficionados wanted to ban. Probably only because Crispin was being such a bastard.

  “But the Queen doesn’t sign her country’s independence away to the Yanglo and Creddezi busybodies just to get access to faddish foreign toys, the way Significance does,” Crispin said.

  Mickey couldn’t think of a response that wouldn’t have provoked an argument in which each of them championed his own country. Quite apart from the hypocrisy necessarily involved, nothing irritated him in himself quite as much as patriotism: the party-line moral self-satisfaction of the QAF was even worse, if possible, than the blind Significant worship that saturated the Disciples’ ranks. He shrugged and kept walking. Apparently disappointed, Crispin jerked at Uemiel’s chain, yanking her head up. His forehead was creased with strain. Sweat stood on his temples. By Mickey’s QAF pocket watch (which he’d reset religiously by the sun) it was seven o’clock.

  As sunrise paled into day, the City of the Dead showed unconvincing signs of life. Women who all looked like crones, regardless of what their real ages might have been, emerged from their shacks and planted themselves in the dust, either gambling on pebble games or sifting kernels of grain from what looked like bowls of dried dung. Most of them had babies, swaddled doll-like objects that never let out a cry. Often their ragged cabals blocked the lanes, and Mickey and Crispin had to choose between retracing their steps or apologizing their way between the Dead women’s skirts. At such times Mickey felt as if the cocooning hum of Okimako withdrew, leaving them in a vacuum of dangerous silence. His back itched; he expected an impact at any minute.

  But if assault and battery was on the women’s minds, the sight of the strangers discouraged it. It was a fair bet none of them had ever seen a non-Kirekuni before, let alone a Lamaroon. They stared with frank uncomprehension at Crispin, and at the
daemon, though Mickey guessed they took her for what she looked like—an exotic organ-grinder’s monkey. They stared at Mickey, too, for that matter: a six-foot-tall tattoo-tail with the straight bones of the well nourished, he was everything they hated most. A missing forearm? Most Dead men were missing more than that before they reached their maturity. Even the children, whose shouts were audible over the noise of the Sayonozima and the Orange, whose manifestation in laughing packs gave the city a much-needed feel of normalcy, stopped dead as Mickey and Crispin tried to pass inconspicuously. The urchins didn’t even approach them for coins. That was something to be grateful for, Mickey supposed. One thing he’d been worrying about was the possibility that they would be plagued by beggars who would turn violent when they found out the strangers hadn’t got a sigil to their names.

  At a crossroads of sorts, a group of hunched, scarred men stood at the door of a shack whose black roof looked like the hoods of two Disciple trucks welded together. They were passing a dazeflower-herb pipe. As Mickey and Crispin approached, the men kept on talking, but the pipe stopped moving, suspended halfway to the lips of a man who could have been a boy or a grandfather. Mickey saw it and cringed.

  “I told you we should have stayed on the road,” Crispin said under his breath, and then in loud Kirekuni, with a nearly unintelligible Ferupian accent, “My dear boy, this place is perfectly amazing! And the locals are so...so... artistically valid! Do you think they’d let me paint them if I asked?”

  “Are you trying to get us killed?” Mickey hissed.

  Crispin grinned. Five minutes later the shacks gave way without warning to the long, shallow slope of a rubbish dump on which Dead clustered as thickly as holidaymakers on the river beaches north of Okimako, where Mickey had been taken when he was little. They were talking, fighting, making transactions, just like those new city household-heads who had business on the brain even when they were supposed to be taking the country air and playing with their children. Mickey’s nose had acclimatized to the ambient smell, but now it got even more pungent. A packed, shaky road led to the top of the hill. As they watched, a dump truck labored to the summit, the draybeasts scattering the Dead with their horns and hooves. Two blackcoats leapt down and winched up the skip until it stood on end. Waste tumbled out in a sloppy cataract. Before the garbagemen climbed back on their vehicle, the Dead descended on their tribute in a voracious swarm.