At first Crispin saw nothing at all. His own face swam reflected in the reflected room. Then Mickey moved out of the reflection, and Crispin heard a series of hisses as the candles were pinched between wetted fingers. The room went dark. Now he could see into the top stories of the buildings across Fleur Street. None of them were as tall as this one; he could see over their roofs, mansarded in the new style, and away down the hill, across a chaos of darkness and light mapped in vaguely gridlike patterns, to the bottom of the city rock, and beyond that—beyond that?
The City of the Dead ought to have been a uniform sea of darkness, but it wasn’t. Even as he watched, bright, unmistakable splotches of light ate toward each other. It was as if the artist who drew the city grid, in the process of making the tiny brush-tip dots of windows and streetlights, had spilt orange over half his painting.
“It’s worse than I expected,” Mickey said.
Crispin turned, pressing his shoulders against the window. “What do you mean?”
“It took me almost two hours to get here. I was going—” Mickey shook his head in the darkness. “It’s spread. I don’t understand why they haven’t done anything about it. I suppose nobody bothers about what goes on in the City of the Dead, and tonight because of the rallies—”
“The what?”
“—they’re being especially careful not to pay attention to any rumors they—”
“Rallies?”
“We weren’t advertising; no one was supposed to come this time except converts; I would have told you, but I didn’t know it was going to get out of hand like this. Come to that, maybe the Disciples aren’t turning a blind eye—maybe they really don’t know what’s going on. Their command structure is in total disarray, I’ve heard. There’s upheavals in headquarters, jurisdiction arguments between the Disciplinarians and the troops—I suppose it’s possible that when they learned about the rallies, back whenever, the intelligence just got lost in the system. The blackcoats in the Fugue will have found out what’s happening by now, of course, and so will the infantry stationed down there, but they have no access to headquarters or the dispatching system...” A note of urgency returned to Mickey’s voice. “But when that reaches the mountain, they’ll have to do something about it, or they’ll have another Fire of 1068 on their hands. Of course, nowadays we have a whole army of firefighters, but I’m just afraid that by the time they get around to deploying them, it’ll be too late. And Significant knows, maybe the Firefighters HQ is in chaos, too!”
Crispin forced himself to speak calmly. “I don’t get it. How did it get started? How bad is it?”
Mickey shrugged. “You can pretty much see from here.”
Voices inside Crispin’s head; laughter; ballooning images of flame, faces with the skin cracking and parting to reveal sizzling flesh. He pried at the nightmare’s internal logic, trying to find a loophole. It had to be a joke. Any minute now the cosmic trickster would drop his mask and admit he had just been stringing them along. Reality could not so accurately reflect dreams. The two could not blend. But the cosmic trickster, after all, was one and the same as the arsonist...
“Your beloved culties set the fires, didn’t they?” Crispin guessed aloud. “They’re trying to get the drop on the apocalypse by burning down the world.”
Mickey traced circles on the pane with one finger. The window was at eye level for both of them, a monitor of encroaching destruction. “It’s nothing to do with apocalypse. This isn’t your Ferupian type of religion, in which certain barmy people believe deeply in something there’s absolutely no proof of. Look at that... He tapped the pane. Crispin saw that two of the largest, closest fires to the east had met in a joyous multiplication of might. “The only barmy ones in the Easterners are the Decadents, and they aren’t in control, they’re the tools of certain other people who are not barmy at all and who see, I suppose, an opportunity to overturn the Dynasty and replace them. I’m just guessing here, but I think they put words in the Decadents’ mouths, convincing the Decadents that the political struggle was a means to an end. Kirekunis would never fall for the Ferupian-import type of religion. They’d just laugh. But they will fall—they have fallen—for knee-jerk patriotism. Talk about Significance and you’ll get a rise out of your average Okimakoan every time. It was clever.”
“Fuck patriotism.” Crispin couldn’t take his eyes off the spots of light wavering in the flawed glass. Is it possible for the end of the world to get any more sordid? Mickey brought his forehead against the glass. Crispin looked at the sooty cheek, the tangled eyelashes. Mickey had been crying. The nightmare had patched seamlessly into the fabric of reality. Half-seen flames like jagged blind spots leapt through the dark room. Yet Crispin sensed an ambiguous reprieve in the offing. An outbreak of mob violence. It may mean Okimako is reduced to a slag heap. But that doesn’t mean the world is ending. In fact, it puts paid to the possibility that I was ever dreaming about the end of the world in the first place.
But then what was the real nature of the information he had been privileged with? He could think of only one possibility. And for a moment he felt bone-weary of the whole tedious game of survival. Am I no more than an animal, with no choice except to fight for my life? Am I completely at the mercy of my instincts?
The weariness lasted only a moment.
“Where are you going?” Mickey yelped.
Crispin turned and dragged him away from the window. “Getting the hell out. So are you.” He wrapped his arm around Mickey and squeezed him, feeling the thin shoulders curl toward him in an automatic physical response. “We’ll make it easily. Nobody up here has a clue yet. We’ll beat the rush.”
“Wait a minute!” Mickey pulled away, his eyes wide and agonized. “I didn’t come uphill to look for you! I bumped into you accidentally! I was on my way to the Forty-Eighth Mansion! Fumia took Mother there earlier—I have to convince them to come—then I have to get Ash and Zou from home and convince them to leave before they find out what’s happening. If they’re still there alone when people start panicking, they won’t know what to do! They’ll stay there and fry!”
This is the way the future conspires against us. Crispin took a deep breath. “All right then. You go to the mansion. Get Fumia and Saia. I’ll go to Dragyonne Street and pick up Ash and Zou. Stay at the mansion, or nearby. We’ll come meet you. It’s probably going to take you ages to sneak into the old city this late at night, but by the time I get hold of your sisters and we get back uphill, the streets are going to be in chaos, and the gates will be standing open.” Unable to keep a note of viciousness out of his voice, he said, “It’ll be a cinch!” He kicked the daemon cage aside, scarcely noticing the hatch come open as it fell, and flung back the door. He’d forgotten the prostitute waiting outside. She stood arms folded, tapping her fingers on an elbow that poked through a hole in her chartreuse satin. As Crispin and Mickey started at full tilt down the stairs, she called sarcastically, “That was quick!”
“The city’s on fire,” Crispin yelled over his shoulder. “If you leave now you’ll get out in time. If you don’t, don’t say you weren’t warned.”
“Ha, ha,” she shouted down the stairs, “Think you’re funny!” Then, wistfully, echoing down the dark stairwell: “But if y’all ever need the room again, just come by!”
Mickey threw open the front door and they nearly knocked down a trio of elderly Kirekuni men dressed to the nines. Crispin wanted to shout a warning, but of course the fewer people that had any idea what was happening until they got caught in the mass panic, the better the chances of escape for those who were forewarned. Mickey evidently reached the same conclusion, for his mouth opened, then he just seized Crispin’s hand, and shouted, “lf you don’t come to the mansion, I’ll never forgive you!” His voice seemed to filter through the hubbub of Fleur Street like a beam of light through water. “Because we’re going to wait! If you don’t come, by the time we know you’re not coming it’ll be too late!”
Crispin winced. “All right
! An hour and a half, tops!” He swung downhill into the crowds. His senses, attuned to the nightmare, were picking up all sorts of interference. Flames washed around the feet of passersby like yellow grass in a wind, and it seemed as though every Kirekuni whose eyes he accidentally met opened his or her mouth in surprised recognition. He couldn’t hear anything but a greedy cackling, like dry reeds in a wind, and this hampered him because he had constantly to look around to make sure he wasn’t about to be run down by some vehicle. Despite all this, he made relatively rapid progress.
Not until he had got out of the worst of the crowds did he realize why.
He’d left his daemon cage in the prostitute’s room on Fleur Street. Before he had time to decide whether or not to go back, he met the first wave of refugees.
From their clothing, they were low-Fugue folk. In a display of mind-blowing stupidity, they’d fled not out into the City of the Dead while there was still time to do so, but up the hill. They obviously thought they’d escaped. They were sauntering along, arguing over who should carry what, lamenting over the possessions they’d had to leave behind, expressing the opinion that even if the fire didn’t reach the Fugue, they’d likely go home to find their houses ransacked by those lazy, penniless excuses for urbanites, those amoral body-thieves, those murderous primitives.
Crispin pushed his way between the first few family bands; came face-to-face with a convoy of mules and handcarts; saw that the normally quiet residential street was jammed for blocks; ducked into an alley and took one shortcut after another, jogging, running, and walking as he felt capable of speed. Soon he stood on the steps of the house next door to Akila-uza, scrabbling for his key. It was a little after midnight.
4 Aout 1896 A.D. 12:14 A.M. Okimako: the new city: Akila-uza
He ripped through the two floors the Akilas owned. He even checked the barren little backyard. Nobody was home. He found the girls next door in the brothel, on the third floor, socializing with two gay-girls and four patrons. The women all wore silks and had their eyes kohled into catlike slits. Zouy and the gay-girls had apparently been engaging with the patrons in mutually pleasurable activities while Ashie played her lo-lute. Crispin leaned on the door. He’d already burst in on eight couples and two threesomes. They all stared up at him, bewilderment slowly changing to annoyance and (on the part of the Akila sisters) intense embarrassment. “Excuse me, ladies and gents, my profoundest apologies—” He searched for inspiration and found little. “The mademoiselles Akila are wanted at home.”
Zouy’s face went pink under her heavy powder. She rose precipitously, and they all heard her whisper to Ashie, “Mother must be early! We’re doomed!”
“Shit,” Ashie said. She stumbled to her feet, dropping the lo-lute. It vibrated a discord and one of the gay-girls reached for it, concealing it under her skirts. Both professionals were trying to cover up the situation with ad-libbed chatter, but their clients paid them no heed, gazing at Crispin with pugnacious disapproval. He had noticed that it was a rare Kirekuni, no matter how elevated his rank, whose urbane manners did not evaporate inside the walls of a brothel—the clientele of Akila-uza seemed to feel that this was a place where they could safely revert to adolescence, groping the gay-girls and guffawing at puerile innuendos at which, in a more public setting, they would have looked down their noses. In a couple of hours they would be sorry they’d let the alcohol go to their heads, but Crispin wasn’t going to complicate the situation by warning them.
“My apologies for depriving you of the ladies’ company, but I have to insist—”
Zouy launched herself at him. Her hair was disarranged from the patrons’ fondling; her face shone with the excitement of a child who has been caught out in naughtiness. He was just able to reach around her and grab Ashie before she butted him out into the red-carpeted, dimly lit hall. “What are we going to do? How awful!” She pirouetted away from him, pressing herself against the walls, giggling. “Crispin, the gentlemen thought we were gay-girls! They didn’t know who we were! What a catastrophe!”
“Shut up, Zouka,” Ashie thrust Zouy aside and took Crispin’s arms in her little hands. “What did she say?” Her voice was high and urgent. “Does she know we’re here, or did Fumia tell her we went calling or—or something? Why didn’t she send Fumia with you, or come herself?”
Crispin looked into her dark-rimmed eyes and delivered the explanation he’d already edited in his mind. “She’s still at the mansion. There’s a fire in the Fugue, mademoiselle. We’re probably in no danger, this high up, but your mother and brother think it would be best nonetheless if you and M’selle Zouy joined them in the old city tonight...for safety’s sake. I’ll escort you.” Now for fuck’s sake don’t ask any questions!
Her hands left his arms and went to her mouth. Her lashes thrummed. Zouy stopped pirouetting. “What?”
“A fire!” Crispin had never been good with children, and that was what Zouy and Ashie were, seventeen and twenty though they might be. He would have liked to tie their wrists and drag them by force out of this false haven. “In the Fugue, coming like the cavalry, so for fuck’s sake will you come on!”
Ashie’s breath left her chest with a harsh rattle. Zouy screamed.
The Okimako city alarm wasn’t a clanging bell, like those in most Ferupian towns—it was a gong whose beats seemed to echo back and forth across the city. DOOM-doom-doom-doom-oom. There were many gongs, each sounding at a slightly different tempo. The first had struck a long way downhill, and its beats had multiplied, approaching. Now Crispin could hear a dozen different tempos, one only a couple of streets off. The arrhythmic clamor frazzled his nerves, intensifying the sense of urgency he was trying unsuccessfully to communicate to the sisters. Zouy huddled in a corner of the attic office above the brothel, emitting wet, whooping sobs. In the old clothes of Mickey’s he’d made them both put on, her hair straggling around her, she looked like a maltreated waif. Crispin spared her no pity. He yanked out drawer after drawer, turning Fumia’s carefully kept files onto the floor, kicking them toward Ashie, who sat on her heels in the center of the office, sorting piles of records with maddening slowness. He had to admire the businesslike instincts that had driven her to insist that she be allowed to rescue certain important documents; but by this time he was ready to strangle her. Her “take” pile of papyrus, paper, manila, and parchment already towered too high. He tried not to look out of the attic’s dormer windows as he swept the accounts on Fumia’s desk into one arm and dumped them in Ashie’s lap. Accidentally he kicked the pile she’d amassed.
She let out a brittle half scream. “Don’t! These are Fumia’s things! She’s the only one who knows what’s really important, so I have to—”
“Here. Take this. And this. And this.” Crispin seized three handfuls of documents and thrust them into her face. “Do you want to burn with your precious papers or stay alive without them?”
“It’s not true,” Zouy howled from her corner. “It’s not true!”
“Can’t you hear the alarm? Have you looked out of the window?” Crispin shouted at her.
Fumia’s new investment, the electric lightbulb, a small yellow globe that hung in the center of the ceiling with a cord running to the wall, filled the attic with a dim glow. Its light had none of the harshness of daemon glares: Crispin could see out of the window, over the houses on the other side of Dragyonne Street, into the distance that should have been darkness, which flickered fitfully gold. Watch for thirty seconds and you couldn’t miss it. “It won’t get this far!” Ashie frowned at a bundle of letters. “Significant, she’d never have forgiven me if I forgot these!”
“If it won’t get this far, why are you so keen on this crap? Leave it!” Crispin’s patience snapped. He seized her elbow and dragged her to her feet. The letters fluttered to the floor. She shrieked and scrabbled for them. Bobbing up and down like a pigeon pecking for crumbs, she thrust them into Crispin’s arms. “Here, this, this, this—”
Crispin had chosen his duster in
part for its numerous pockets, and he stowed the papers about his person. “Are you sure this is all you need? What about the chinaware? What about your dresses? The figurines on the mantel in the anteroom? Your makeup? The lacquered window shades? The statues in the garden!”
“Our jewelry!” Zouy wailed from the corner. He looked around just in time to see her plunging out of the door, downstairs to the brothel.
“No. Oh, no.” Crispin seized Ashie’s arm and went after her. The red-shaded lights thickened the carpets to the texture of swamps. From one room poured lute music that momentarily disguised the throb of the alarm gongs. Ashie looked longingly over her shoulder as he hustled her along. He was lucky she and Zouy hadn’t already attempted to rouse everyone in the brothel—now why was that? Neither of them had evinced a care for anything except their precious business documents. Either they were incredibly self-centered, which was true to a degree of all teenage girls—or they were just too terrified. Or they trusted Crispin so implicitly that they believed he’d already taken care of everything. Doom, doom doom doom, doom! They met Zouy in the downstairs hall. She dripped jewels from neck, wrists, fingers, and ears; she’d threaded four ropes of pearls through the belt loops of Mickey’s old breeches; she’d even used a strand of what looked like genuine rubies, and two solid gold chopsticks, to fasten her hair in a messy knot. The sight took Crispin’s breath away. He had known the Akilas were wealthy but he hadn’t yet seen such palpable evidence of it. “Are you planning to go out like that?”
The Daemon in the Machine Page 22
