The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  About the only profession unhurt by the downturn was the entertainment industry. For the first time, prodded by adamant pressure from Saia, the brothel on Dragyonne Street opened its membership to Disciplinarians and Disciples. The gay-girls brought new complaints to Fumia, Ashie, and Zouy every day; one of them even had to have a physician’s attention. However, the new regulars, mostly high-ranking, paid their fees with scrupulous punctuality.

  No blackcoat had ever dropped coins in Crispin’s kitty in the Haverhurst. But all the same he was raking in amounts of money that would have made Saul Smithrebel, the owner of the circus where he’d been raised, rush to sign him up. His new affluence made him feel at once put-upon and embarrassed. Jingling pockets were nice, of course, but he could not think of anything to do with the money except cache it under his mattress. This wasn’t what he’d set out to do in Okimako. And it niggled at him that he couldn’t take a day off from his show without having the daemonmongers ask where he’d been. Because what he really wanted to do was explore. The skin-prickling awareness of danger he’d experienced on his arrival in Okimako had abated, but recently, as he settled into his Haverhurst routine, it had returned. He wanted to poke about in the blue-blood districts of the old city and the seediest streets of the low, the two areas between which, he felt somehow, he ought to be able to get a fix on what was wrong. He couldn’t shake the feeling that Okimako was a disaster waiting to happen. Coupled with the regularity of his vision-dreams, this sense of inevitability, of a stage play winding to its close, made his daily routine seem at times surreal. It was as if he’d been in the city for years. He was reenacting Millsy’s show almost exactly, with only a modicum of added flair to compensate for the stupidity of his daemons and the heat-stupefaction of his audiences.

  On the first of Aout, a Disciple stayed to watch three successive shows. The black uniform glimpsed repeatedly between the flowing summer beiges and wide hats alerted Crispin to the possibility of trouble. During the fourth show, his mouth was so dry he could scarcely sustain his patter. Dark fell and as the last audience dispersed, looking wistfully over their shoulders, he knelt to cage his daemons. The backdrop walls still radiated the day’s heat. Blood pounded in his ears. He knew the Disciple was standing nearby, waiting. When he straightened up he didn’t see any badges on the black jacket—but from the way the man held himself, it was obvious he was no ordinary beat cop.

  “Congratulations,” the Disciple said with a hint of mockery in his voice. He didn’t make the mistake most Kirekunis did of curling their tails forward in an attempt at a “tail-shake.” He held out his hand. Numbly, Crispin shook it. The Disciple’s tail, held erect behind him, was so thickly tattooed the skin could hardly be seen. “You have been chosen as one of a group of performers who will entertain the Significant on Minday the third of Aout.”

  “That’s—that’s the day after tomorrow!”

  “Correct. Here is your official notification.” The Disciple extended a folded paper. Crispin could think of nothing to do but take it. “If it is not possible for you to participate, come to the tradesmen’s entrance of the palace beforehand. Otherwise be there by five P.M. on the third.” He turned and strode away. “Again, congratulations,” he said over his shoulder.

  Blinking, Crispin put down his daemon cage and unfolded the sheet of paper. It bore no characters, just a woodcut logo. Although darkness was gathering fast around the half-deserted ruins, he had no trouble making out what was depicted: two heads, joined at the hair, tilted as if they might grow out of the same neck. Certain distinguishing characteristics made him think they represented the Ruling Significant and the Queen.

  1 Aout 1896 A.D. 8:25 P.M.

  Just as an experienced actor can go from genial to threatening without moving a muscle, so, with the coming of night, the old city altered its aspect. While Crispin made his way down the hill, it seemed to him that the darkness shimmered with the ghosts of murdered nobles and the echoes of whispered secrets. He joined the crowd of new-city working stiffs collecting on the uphill side of the locked gates. Charwomen, shopboys, couriers, and hustlers clustered together, tails drooping, weary from their long hot workday. At nine o’clock, the Disciples would come to crack the lockdown and release them into the world of lights and commerce and twenty-four-hour cafés. Gaslight slanted through the gates in stripes, tigering the crowd.

  After their release, Crispin sought out his favorite tavern and ordered one whiskey and water, with another to be brought in fifteen minutes. He was determined to celebrate at all costs. But the first drink intensified the sense of despair that had been creeping over him, to the point where it blotted out excitement and trepidation alike. Racking his brain, he could come up with no expedients other than going home with a strange woman or tippling himself silly. And it was getting late, and the tavern was obscenely crowded with laughing people; the difficulties involved in doing either of those things made them too tedious for consideration.

  Carrying his cage of daemons like a leper’s bell before him, he slunk back to Dragyonne Street.

  The Akilas would all be asleep by now. The brothel took care of its real business without their help. If an authority figure was ever needed, there were the bouncers, Samone and Cheech, and the allaise, Madame Kezaki. As Crispin let himself in he hoped Fumia hadn’t worried when he missed supper. Although Mickey was no longer expected to eat with the family—he’d become a ghost in the house, slipping in and out at will, heralded only by the furtive chink of his key in the lock—Crispin, by contrast, had become more firmly entrenched here than he’d ever planned. The only thing that kept him from withdrawing—more subtly than Mickey had done, of course—wasn’t Zouy’s fawning flirtation, nor Saia’s abrupt stabs at conversation (an honor she conferred on few), nor the burning stares Ashie slid him out of the corners of her eyes (all the more delightful because they were artless); it was the sheer challenge of sitting across the table from Fumia every night, of feeling her wince every time their hands brushed, of playing cards with the other sisters in the attic office while she sat at the big desk doing her accounts. Whenever they were in the same room he was exquisitely aware that she was aware of him. Whether she was attracted to him or had gone off him entirely he couldn’t tell; all he knew was that there was unfinished business.

  A gas bracket illuminated the hall. Its faint chirruping was the only sound in the house. Akele Belamis Indela Mishime Favis Kendris, hungry after performing all day, fuzzed sleepily at his mind, and he couldn’t hear anything at all. The house was warm.

  Mickey came out of the anteroom, apparently masquerading as a beggar who thought it was winter, clad in multiple layers of drab with exaggerated spots of rouge on his cheeks and black cosmetic rimming his eyes. When he saw Crispin he made an abortive attempt to retreat; but he must have realized it would only make him look worse, for he gripped the doorjamb as if for support, and then came on, slowly. “Hi,” Crispin said with a fake smile.

  Mickey snarled silently and began to ease past. He held his stump with his good hand, tenderly.

  “Are you all right’?”

  Mickey stopped. “We have to talk,” he said at last, in Ferupian.

  “Talk, then!”

  “Queen,” Mickey growled. “Not now! I’m already late... Are you going to be in tomorrow?”

  There was clearly something wrong with him. Crispin had known it for a while but had been reluctant to think of it in such stark terms—terms that demanded action on his part. Now he realized, through the mist of daemon interference, that it was more than his prerogative, it was his duty to find out what was going on. At least he doesn’t want to talk right now. The very prospect of trying to pry Mickey open at this hour, in this place, was too dreary to contemplate—the Raw Marches all over again, except in reverse, except that Crispin was no longer under the illusion that he and Mickey could ever come to understand one another. “Of course I’ll be here.”

  “Of course,” Mickey spat, and oozed to the door, dripping rag
s. “So will I then. Flame and forgiveness.” He yanked open the door and went out. The last phrase had been in Kirekuni; by the time Crispin realized what he had said, he was gone.

  Flame and forgiveness?

  The daemons gobbled like discontented chickens in his head. Desultory shocks of power traveled up his arm. Guilt compounded by pity attacked him.

  Flame and forgiveness!

  Mick, Mick, what on earth have you got yourself mixed up in? Men like you are better off in the army—at least it keeps them out of trouble!

  He tiptoed up the stairs. The house breathed quietly in the way old wooden houses do. Although he’d meant to go straight to the bedroom and crash, he found himself stowing the daemons under the dressing table, ignoring their squeaks, and coming out into the hall again. In the faint glow of gaslight from below, he went to the door halfway along the gallery. He raised his hand to knock, then stopped.

  I’ve just been kidding myself along. Enjoying my petty little transitory success and trying to use novelty and alcohol to forget about things. I ought to thank Mick for reminding me where my head’s been at... buried in the sand! That was the catch, right under my nose the whole time....

  The summons to court crackled in his pocket as he shifted. The world seemed very small, everything inextricably linked from coast to coast and sea to sea and birth to death, closing about his head.

  ...the trouble being that success seems to lead to success even if it’s just because you’re better rested after sleeping on linen than you would be if you were sleeping on the cobbles, and now I’ve gotten this fucking offer—offer? order—and I should call the whole thing off right now before I fuck myself over worse than ever before (although I’ve certainly managed some spectacular bloomers in my time) because it can’t last and I know it can’t last even if no one else does. But anyone who stands up to the Significant probably finishes floating down the Orange!

  He rapped softly on the door with his knuckles.

  Nothing happened.

  And more than nine thousand sigils in coins and notes bundled under his mattress, and danger threatening from so many different angles at once here in this house that the obvious conclusion should be apparent to anyone with half a brain.

  He pushed the door with his fingertips. It swung inward. The room was windowless and pitch-black, and he’d never been in here before, but a sudden movement over by the far wall told him where the bed was. “Sssh,” he said, and began to pick his way across the cluttered floor.

  “Who? Who is it?” Her voice was fretful, sleep-blurred.

  “It’s only me.” He stepped on something that shattered. “Shit!”

  An intake of breath like a laugh. “I am so untidy... it is one of my most grievous faults...”

  “Funny, I would never have taken you for a slob.” He sank down on the edge of the bed to take off his boots. “But it’s sweet.” She was half-sitting up, wearing something pale. He could scarcely see her face in the vague illumination coming from the crack under the door. Her hair lay in a fat braid on one shoulder. The bed smelled of her perfume. As he unlaced his second boot she reached out and touched his arm.

  “Don’t bother with all that.”

  “Why? What do you mean?” He turned, planting his hands on the wall on either side of her, and kissed her. She tasted of sleep. Her mouth was wet and soft and good, and she wasn’t resisting, she was curling her arms around his neck, which was all he’d wanted to know. He lay down beside her, still kissing her. As she fumbled to draw the sheet over both of them, he unbuttoned his trousers with one hand and vaguely heard the summons crackle again; the paper was stiff and new. He ran his hand inside her nightdress, over her breasts.

  “Oh, Significant,” she breathed, after an exploration of mouths and tongues driven by increasing erotic urgency. “You’re very...”

  “What? Bold? Presumptuous? Badly behaved?” He enjoyed teasing her. “Skillful?”

  “Oh, be quiet!” She laughed, and proceeded breathlessly, in between kisses, to tell him all the things she had thought about him over the last month, some of which were shockingly explicit (but he should have expected that, considering the background she came from). As she spoke, her language lost its superformality and degenerated into the monosyllables and onomatopoeia of Kirekuni baby talk. It was both endearing and a turn-on. They had taken each other’s clothes off, fumbling, and he pulled her against him, squeezing her as desperately as he’d wanted to on the evening of the dinner party two weeks ago, when their mutual affection for Mickey had prevented them from confessing the lust that even then had been seething to the boil. She wrapped her arms around him. The breasts squashed against his chest were lush and heavy; she had more flesh on her than anyone could have guessed from seeing her in those corsets. He raised himself up and looked down at her. Her hair was coming out of its braid, and her lips were puffy from kissing.

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “That’s what they all say.” She was panting.

  The implication of other men only confirmed what the last few minutes had told him: that she was practiced in love. Maybe Ashie and Zouy, in their emulation of the gay-girls, were only following a family trend of degeneracy. “Maybe because it’s true.”

  “Oh, stop.”

  “I don’t think so. Do you want me to?” He was so hard he honestly didn’t think he could. He kissed her again.

  “Do you think I want you to?”

  As she spoke she was flicking his nipples with her thumbs, and she spread her knees, hitching herself down a little so that her wetness touched the head of his penis. The erotic shock went straight through his body. He entered her all at once and paused to savor the moment.

  “This is what my brother wanted you to do to him,” she whispered as they started to move together. But as always when he was aroused, his mind was reverting to Ferupian, to the language he had spoken with his very first lover, Prettie Valenta, and with Rae, whose last name had also been Akila; and he couldn’t be sure if he’d understood her correctly. Anyway, at the moment he didn’t care. It was the last time he would have that luxury.

  2 Aout 1896 A.D. 11:06 P.M. Okimako: the Fugue

  Nowhere in Okimako was livelier at night than the low city, the Fugue. Crispin followed Mickey down the hill and into the “sleaze slough,” as he’d heard the sisters dismissively call it. Mickey was wearing his thickly bundled layers again, and Crispin wore his now habitual new-city summer garb. No one gave them a second glance, but all the same, Mickey wove in and out of crowds and doubled back on his tracks as if he were afraid of being followed. They descended this way to the foot of the city rock, where the Fugue blended into the City of the Dead in a riot of colorfully painted shacks and draybeast stables. Mickey glanced around and started back uphill along a different street than the one they had come down. “I wish you’d tell me where we’re going!” Crispin was starting to lose patience. He thought of Fumia waiting for him in the cluttered darkness, her hair braided. Would she be upset when he didn’t show up to reprise the pleasures of the night before?

  They’d slept in each other’s arms, but at dawn, conscious of the possibility of being found by Ashie or Zouy, he had risen and gone back to his own bed. At breakfast she’d been as implacably demure as ever. He had to remember it was possible that she didn’t intend to allow a reprise, tonight or ever. One couldn’t make prognostications based on a single encounter. He caught up to Mickey. Mickey turned a haunted, desperate face to him.

  “Look, why won’t you tell me? Are you afraid I’ll back out? Because, listen, when you said you had to show me something to make me understand what’s been going on, I said I would come, and I meant it.”

  They ascended a winding, narrow street in whose doorways girls and boys in filmy robes stood like silent advertisements. Crispin dimly recognized the area—he’d been here before at some point, if not during his pre-Haverhurst wanderings, then in a dream. Mickey bit his fingertips. “We’re going to a safe house. It belongs to th
e Easterners.”

  “The—not the cult?”

  “None other.”

  Crispin didn’t know what he had been prepared for. A common drug den; sordidity: boys with whiny voices and soft fingers... “What would your mother think?”

  “She’d disown me.”

  “I don’t get it. Isn’t one set of religious loonies enough for you?”

  “It’s not about religion,” Mickey said mulishly, walking fast. “The Dynasty—I keep forgetting you’ve never been to the Mansion—well, those hypocrites are to the Easterners as day is to night. Wait till you see.”

  “You sound just like every convert I’ve ever heard go off at the mouth.”

  Mickey turned away and spat on the cobbles. “I haven’t converted. I’ve been thinking about it, but I haven’t done it, because I just can’t credit the extravagant claims they make. It’s not even about transcendence as far as I’m concerned, because transcendence is a crock of shit—the Dynasty’s convinced me of that, if nothing else—although of course, some of the Easterners, just like some people in all cults, believe transcendence will occur, and the sooner the better; it’s about opposing the Dynasty. You haven’t a clue what a stranglehold they’ve got on the Significant. I’ve seen it with my own two eyes.”

  “You’ve seen Him?”

  “He visits each of the Mansions in turn. They’ve got Him under their thumb. And they’re using Him for their own ends.” Mickey lowered his voice as they turned into an alley. “Believe me, it’s not about religion at all. It’s about politics.”