The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  Unbelievable! He was free of her, and he had seventy-five hundred sigils in his pocket. If you converted the sum into pounds, it was almost equivalent to a regular’s pension from the QAF. Crime had paid, all right! But his ill-gotten gains had come with a warning. Trickery was in his blood, and if he ever again went near a daemon—at the moment an unappetizing prospect—he knew he would have to hold back, canceling out his unasked-for talent with deliberate clumsiness, as he’d done on the second leg of their flight over the plains. He’d learned his lesson! Tricksters were sighted where handlers were blind, sensitive where they were numb, dexterous where they were merely aggressive—in other words, tricksters existed in a wide-open state where the filthy, fear-sick consciousnesses of creatures like Uemiel could pierce their minds and lodge like barbed knives. In the future, instead of gripping the knives, he would juggle them.

  Millsy, he thought, you must have been certifiably insane to go through that shit every day just to amuse a few stupid hayseeds who had no concept of the enormity of what you were doing!

  But actually, he reflected, Millsy had probably just been addicted. Because there came a point when no matter how horrid, paranoid, and vicious daemons were, you would feel lost without the uniquely intimate companionship they provided. Crispin knew all too well, now, that that was the other place his prolonged communion with Uemiel could have led. Why else, after all, had he taken her with him on his wanderings night after night, when he could perfectly well have left her at the Akilas’, when she only fogged up his memory and warped his deductive powers—if not because he’d begun to need her?

  Reason and dreams had saved him. Ironically, he now had to be grateful to the visitations that constituted enough of a personal emergency that even through the mental din of communion, he’d felt their prickings. The other monkey on his back had kept him grounded.

  He wouldn’t credit his dreams with prophetic accuracy until he had to—but there could be no doubt anymore that long before he came here he’d been familiar with this city. He’d known about the voluminous summer clothing Kirekunis wore, and the gaslamps that stood like slender sentinels on the corners. Wandering back downhill without Uemiel, he’d experienced an overwhelming sense of déjà vu, far stronger than the first time he entered the city in Mickey’s company—as if this particular brand of madness fed on the input of the undistracted senses. Everywhere he went, the map in his head guided him. As his explorations added living color to the streets he’d previously seen only at night, dichotomy after dichotomy vanished; there really was only one Okimako, and it was the same in his head as it was at his fingertips. He knew it as well as the slipperiest lowlife born and bred on these streets.

  It was no use wondering how. Why? That was the question. He was in no hurry to go in. He moved into the shadow of the house opposite, leaned against the wooden wall, and lit a cigarette in order to think.

  If your brain was going to trawl knowledge of some place out of the air, and add garnishings of fire to give it that je ne sais quoi of nightmare, why shouldn’t it be some random village in the middle of nowhere? Whenever he’d had one of the hallucinations there’d been an Okimakoan nearby. The two Kirekuni roustabouts employed by Smithrebel’s; Rae, who’d been born in Okimako; the Kirekuni interpreters employed in Chressamo; Mickey. But (until now) there’d also been many more individuals who hailed from other places. The only explanation he could think of was that his subconscious was somehow sensitive to an unknowable human priority, a current in the climate, a whirlpool of inevitability centering around this very city.

  Around Okimako?

  But if that was true—following the possibility to its logical conclusion—then it stood to reason that the important thing was not Okimako itself, but the flames it was in when he dreamed of it. And if that was true, then the visions weren’t merely the results of some unusual sensitivity, but prophecy indeed.

  No! Impossible!

  What was the truth? He had to know. He couldn’t leave until the process of revelation was complete. “And anyway, where would I go?” he said aloud. “First I run away, and then I run away from the place I was running away to?”

  He’d planned only this far, no farther. That a onetime QAF captain should be reduced to this! But what if there is no revelation, only a mystery?

  But that didn’t really make sense. If fire was the effect, somehow or other, the war had to be the cause, didn’t it? All right, so that was a stab in the dark—but what could be more important in terms of continental politics, and the sheer numbers of people affected, than the changes that a victory must set in motion? Had anything as big as this war ever happened before? And the war was ending. The Kirekuni forces had gained a momentum that couldn’t be stopped. Crispin and Mickey had got out of the Salzeim Parallel just in time. From gossip, he’d learned that Cerelon’s Shadowtown had been overwhelmed. The engagement in which Vichuisse had died might very well have been the beginning of the end.

  It made Crispin writhe to think that if he’d stuck it out, he might have got off scot-free in the confusion. He knew Ferupian military policy well enough to guess that Army Command would have been prioritized to get out first. The QAF and select infantry units would have been assigned to fight a rearguard action, while the bulk of the Parallel’s soldiery tripped over their own skirts in the bottleneck at the Raw mouth of the war road. Crispin might even have been able to redeem himself in the eyes of Lieutenant-Marshal Thraxsson through acts of heroism during the retreat. If only Mickey hadn’t dissuaded him from doing the honorable thing! If Mickey himself had had a shred of honor, he might have been prepared to accept the consequences of what they’d done instead of oh-so-cleverly crafting an escape route for himself by playing on Crispin’s overdeveloped survival instincts, and then on Crispin’s sense of responsibility toward an underling who had, after all, saved his life, and couldn’t be left to face the music alone, could he?

  Crispin ground his teeth. That way lay the shifting of blame to another’s shoulders, always unfair after the fact. He was here. All he could do was wait.

  And for now the obvious place to do that was the Akila-uza House of Ecstasy, whose name, translated, was humorously reminiscent of the kinds of things Ferupians called their music halls.

  The smoke from his cigarette curled into the crystalline morning air. He looked speculatively up at the brothel. The windows were blank in the sunrise. All quiet in the land of the lotus eaters? The house looked as well-bred as any other in the terrace. The little plaque over the door might have said “Horticulturalists Incorporated,” for all he could make of the crosshatched squiggles that passed for writing here. At night, of course, the very architecture of the house seemed to whisper a lubricious come-on—and the interior decor was so over-the-top that it gave him the shudders. In Ferupe the place would have been closed down on charges of blatant indecency. Not that it would have been allowed to open in the first place in a neighborhood like this. Dragyonne Street curved around the perimeter of one of those residential areas where there was no point in even coming unless you had money. Carts creaked along Luminous Way 15 down at the end of the street, but no one, on foot or wheels, came up the hill.

  The fact that Mickey’s family was honest-to-goodness rich had come as a shock to Crispin. It put Mickey himself in a different light. Crispin hardly knew how to talk to him anymore (not that it hadn’t already been getting difficult, in the last days of their stay by the river), and in fact they’d scarcely spoken since their arrival, even though they’d been put in the same bedroom, a tiny one at the back of the “new wing.” If you squinted sideways out of the window, you could see the garden behind Akila-uza where the gay-girls and johns sat and talked in the evening. Until the small hours the light from the colored lanterns shook on the ceiling, and you could hear the girls’ artificial laughter.

  All this opulence was, of course, a carefully crafted illusion: the Akilas’ wealth did have limits, and the “new wing” was extremely cramped. The family lived in each
other’s pockets. On the first floor there was the kitchen and a minuscule sitting room, and on the second, four small bedrooms, occupied in order of decreasing size by Saia; Ashika and Zouka; Fumia; and Mickey and Crispin. Their room was still a mess from one of the girls’ hastily having removed her things. Femininity exuded from the pale yellow walls and thick white throw rugs. It made Crispin feel restless, as if he were not a guest but an intruder. It was another reason he tried to keep away from the house as much as possible.

  The main problem, of course, was that on no basis he could divine, the Akilas were treating him as he imagined they would treat a guest of honor. Maybe their etiquette compelled such hospitability—and in that case it was his duty as well as his instinct to keep out of their hair. Too, they’d just been reunited with their son and only brother, and Crispin was perceptive enough to see that Mickey’s welcome wasn’t unconditional—all his newly reopened relationships, not only with his mother (the obvious problem area), but also with his sisters, were distinctly sticky. Between the two younger sisters and the mother, too, Crispin sensed an old, bitter tension. The oldest sister, Fumia, seemed to be the stable center around which the family revolved, but she was so reserved Crispin couldn’t tell where she really stood, especially with regard to Mickey. As an outsider, not just to the Akilas but to their very culture, he knew he had no hope of understanding all the currents and tides that had once held the women together and were now pulling them apart. The most he could do was not offend. It would be awful if he somehow sabotaged Mickey’s chances of recovering their good graces (not just for Mickey but for him, because that would mean they were thrown back on each other’s resources). But in his quest to make a favorable impression, he was blinded and lamed by the fact that not only were the Akilas Kirekuni, they belonged to a social class of which he had no knowledge. Had one transposed them to Kingsburg, they would have been the sort of people who went to the opera, not circuses.

  As a ranking officer, he’d known and flown with many men of the landed class, and even a few sons of the city-bred elite (though they tended to follow their fathers into business rather than join the army). But in the QAF, he’d been on equal footing with them. No matter how well-bred one might be, the Raw was a world unto itself, with its own set of social stratifications that, while by no means unlinked to the classification system of the real world, could, unlike the latter, be infiltrated. Crispin had been as much at home with his captaincy as any squire’s son, and perhaps more so—unlike children of sufficiency like his old friend Butch, he’d been fitted from birth for a soldier’s life. But now he was in their world. A world of painted china and heavy damask curtains, silver candelabra and women in layered skirts, wallpapered walls and musical instruments played for pleasure, not money. And he had a nasty feeling he was out of his depth.

  He realized he’d been eyeing the house across the street as if it might spring at him. He chuckled, threw away his cigarette, and crossed the street. Fumia had given him a key. He let himself into next door with it. When the Akilas had purchased the two bottom stories of this house, so Mickey related, another door had been set into the base of the hall staircase for the people who still lived upstairs. He went past that door toward the kitchen. The cool dim scent of citrus filled the passage, and although he was exhausted by the rigors of the night and the wrench of disenfranchising Uemiel from his brain, he was too hungry to ignore the pangs. The family didn’t expect him to be here for meals, or anyway he hoped they didn’t; but surely they wouldn’t mind if he got himself a bite of something...

  Seventy-five hundred sigils crackled in his pocket, and he realized he could pay them for his food now. It was an invigorating thought.

  He stopped dead when he saw Fumia washing dishes in a basin set into the counter below the windows, her back to him. Though the day was so young she looked immaculate as always, a blue apron tied over her skirts, her hair pinned in a chignon from which not a single strand escaped. She turned. “M’sieu Kateralbin! Are you—” He saw her take in the long, sand-colored summer duster he wore. “Have you been out? All night?”

  “I’m sorry to disturb you, m’selle,” Crispin said in his increasingly facile Kirekuni. “It’s so early, I didn’t realize anyone would be up.” He gave a half bow and started to leave.

  “I’m making myself breakfast. Won’t you have some? You weren’t here for supper last night. Such a pity, Ashie found some fresh river trout for sale, and she prepared it most deliciously.”

  At the mention of breakfast Crispin couldn’t help stopping. Fumia let out a silvery laugh. Like her little-girl voice, it was at odds with her tall, slender figure and her classically straight features. But merriment left her face quickly. She confided, “I couldn’t sleep either. Do sit down, Mr. Kateralbin.” She rustled to the table and pulled out a chair. “The tea should be ready. I’ve put a row of little sticks in the back garden so—see?” Crispin followed her pointing finger out of the window. He couldn’t see anything in the bare, dusty, high-walled yard apart from the two larger-than-life erotic statues that passed for landscaping. “So whatever time of the day I may make tea, I have only to wait until the shadow of the house or the fence advances from one stick to another to know when it will be perfectly steeped.”

  “What about when it rains?” Crispin asked.

  She laughed again. “Then I have to rely on my own poor instincts.”

  Not so poor as all that, I think, Crispin thought as he sat down. From his few formal interactions with her, he’d formed a picture of her as the most distilled of the Akila women, embodying the essence of what Saia must have been like when she was young, as well as what Ashie and Zouy would probably be like when they reached twenty-five. The two younger ones seemed very different—Ashie sensitive and shy, Zouy a little flirt who was forever getting reproved by her sisters—but in several respects they and Fumia and Saia were four of a type. They were none of them beautiful; they were shy of giving opinions to the point of secretiveness; and Crispin couldn’t get rid of the feeling that like their city, they were dangerous.

  It was the sense of impending danger that had struck him first, the instant he entered the slums of the Dead, long before déjà vu kicked in. It had lingered long after the mental turmoil of seeing his visions proved correct had driven all other concerns save Uemiel out of his mind: an irrational but unignorable sixth sense, telling him that in this city, unlike Kingsburg, Kotansburg, Domenische, Naftha, Gilye, Valdes, or Grizelle, danger lurked like poison beneath the skin of the houses, beneath the ground, in the very air. It emanated from the river and the rock and the ancient timbers of which nearly all the houses in the new city were built. Incognizant of altitude or architecture, it nevertheless concentrated around certain, apparently random buildings. The city was alive. Not like a mammal but like a beehive, alive and waiting for the signal to swarm.

  And was that so unreasonable? So many people heaped up in one place—Okimako was the densest city Crispin had ever seen—and all of them afraid in one way or another, all of them waiting with bated breath for something to happen.

  Something. He hadn’t yet figured out what it was, although he was convinced most of the people in Okimako knew, or had an inkling. Of course he’d asked himself whether it was all in his head. Was he just projecting his own, secret prognosis of catastrophe onto the faces of the people around him, into their voices, into the very cobblestones?

  But with regard to those buildings around which the danger centered—most of them in the old city, but some scattered at random around the city rock—he tended to think not. In those places he had felt the breath of danger steaming out, so hot, so rancid that it nearly made him stagger.

  On the other hand, the sensation was always fleeting, and if he returned, it didn’t recur. So, was it just a manifestation (in the old city) of his natural wariness of the nobility and their multifarious guards, and (in the new city) of the Disciplinarians who hung about the place like ugly black leeches? It seemed that the city hadn’t al
ways been so heavily policed, though he hadn’t learned, either, what had caused the crackdown. He hoped for the sake of human liberty that this wasn’t the usual state of affairs. The Disciplinarians’ threatening way of extruding themselves from doorways just as you passed, and their heavy-handed approach when they decided to interfere, were enough to make anyone wary. And the Significant Disciples, the real soldiers, were even more intimidating. Unlike the policemen, they were all in tip-top physical form, and they moved through the streets in purposeful cadres. Apparently the situation, whatever it was, had not got bad enough for the military to be assigned to law enforcement; nonetheless, no matter where you went you were likely to be jostled against a wall by a crowd reacting to the whisper of “Abu! Abu!” (Danger! Danger!) Then you were treated to the sight (undeniably pleasing to the trained eye) of Disciples marching past in columns of six or ten, goose-stepping high. The shadows of their caps hid their eyes, revealing only pressed slashes of mouths, but Crispin thought they glanced neither to left nor right. All the same he would stand immobile as a regular on parade, his back to the hot wall, his hood pulled forward to hide his face, glad that the people in front of him were tall enough that he could blend in. Several times he’d caught himself wondering with mingled amusement and dread what would happen if they knew that he, right here, was the Enemy in whose annihilation they had been trained so efficaciously.