Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt; therefore the inhabitants are scorched, and few men are left.
—The Bible
If I Live or If I Die
4 Aout 1896 A.D. 4:07 A.M. Okimako: The End, Part Three
Choking.
(One hundred percent wet immersion in the best-kept widely known secret of all: the blood of a city is shit and silt, urine and soot and oil and sludge and maybe 10 percent water so the river itself won’t catch on fire if it’s your lucky day Kateralbin, evaded the enemy for the eight hundredth time in a row but the game isn’t over yet, there’s still the next fifty years or maybe the next five minutes depending on how long you can hold your breath, Roll Up And See World-Renowned Trapeze Artist Plummet To Splashy Finale!!!)
Floating.
Searing.
Darkness.
(Equivalencies: reality, a quick bumpy trip down the waste-disposal chute)
Wait. What’s happening?!?
4 Aout 1896 A.D. 2:56 A.M. Okimako: The End, Part One
Crispin jogged uphill. Orange light flickered over everything. It transformed the old city from the citadel populated by invisible angels it had been earlier this evening into a Town Of Terror. The air resounded with a roar like a high wind. On both sides of Feverfew Lane, narrow elaborate wedding cakes of buildings rose into the orange night. The fires lower down and higher up on the hill must be eating the goodness out of the air, for his lungs were working like bellows. The broken windows and open doors of the fantastic, pastrylike houses were black, empty. So too was the street itself. The inhabitants must already have fled—either out to the countryside, forewarned, or to some exclusive haven for the nobility. A hastily concocted conspiracy seemed likely. And Crispin had a pretty good idea where they were all going to earth. Whenever a man on a pakamel galloped past, veils flying, or a carriage festooned with trunks rumbled by, they were heading, without exception, uphill; and when squads of Disciples, insectile in riot gear, passed him at a run, they were all heading downhill. Significance would not hesitate to let its citizens burn to death on its doorstep, Crispin thought angrily, if that meant saving its own high-maintenance hides. The Significant Himself, having got religion, would probably opine with a straight face that the dead were better off that way.
Were ordinary members of the Dynasty welcome in the old palace, among the nobility?
He doubted it. He’d practically given up hope of finding Mickey, Saia, and Fumia. He’d also given up pretending that Ashie and Zouy might not be dead. The backdrop of artificial scenery he’d mistaken for his future had lifted, revealing reality and drama as two incompatible entities. One was deadly, the other delusory. The cosmic arsonist had you on toast no matter what your choice. The blank wall at which foresight terminated was now no more than an hour off; a traitorous streak of fatalism tempted him to give up, to sit down and wait. Nothing more nor less than horror kept him on his feet, moving. They said it was a shadow, a pale horse, a merciful silence, but he knew better. He was terrified of burning, and he knew that if he stopped for an instant, the fires behind and ahead, both the real and the hallucinatory, would swoop in, closing with a roar of glee.
For a while he’d clung to the hope of meeting the mysterious stranger whom he’d glimpsed night after night on the cusp of waking, whose potential as a savior or nemesis had been limited only by the limits of his imagination. Such childish fantasies! That figure was only Mickey, for whom Crispin was searching in a misguided attempt to keep a promise Mickey would surely never have exacted if he’d known what it would entail. If you don’t come, I’ll never forgive you... But even if Mickey was still alive to forgive him, it was like looking for a gold sigil in a mountain of sawdust! Why had they ever supposed it would be possible to meet up later?
The city seemed determined to hammer his audacity home to him at every turn.
He glimpsed him against the light at the top of the hill, a black silhouette. The wind pressed his loose Kirekuni clothes against his frame, revealing that he was thinner than any human being should or could be. His shoulders were stooped. He had a tail— and when Crispin passed him, he was still standing as if paralyzed, and he was an octogenarian, his head drooping under the weight of gold around his neck. Every skinny Kirekuni in a long coat looked like Mickey from a distance. Over and over Crispin’s heart leapt. And then the strangers would jostle past, and he would see their undamaged limbs, their faces stretched with terror. He hit Summit Street again several bends downhill of the palace complex. Here, a solid mass of humanity churned, stirred by Disciples in riot gear with flamethrowers and rifles. So close to what they perceived as a haven, the Okimakoans were actually displaying some resistance to being herded back downhill. Men, women, and children screamed and fell. In a few places the Disciples were being overpowered, their intended victims appropriating their weapons and vanishing into the grand residences on either side of the street, from whose ground-floor windows the muzzles of the guns protruded. From behind a gargoyle that, Atlas-like, supported the eaves of a tall mansion, Crispin peered uphill. Something nearer the palace was on fire. Streams of water reached over the heads of the crowd.
He sidled out into the throughfare, avoiding bands of fleeing desperadoes, and zigzagged as fast as possible between the fallen. At least he was only one of many moving targets. He passed the burning building. It was the First Mansion of the Glorious Dynasty. It had once been the family seat of the Shusuxo, one of the oldest noble tribes in Okimako, whose wealth had declined to the point where they had to open their home’s ownership to a syndicate; a century of mercantile prosperity followed, the newer shareholders obtained a majority of the ownership, and they sold the mansion out from under the Shusuxo’s backsides—to the Dynasty. It had been one of the outrages that spurred the first rise of the Decadents of the East. No one would ever profit off the mansion again. Flames roared into the night. Despite the presence of several fire trucks, it seemed inevitable that the conflagration would spread.
After the next bend, Summit Street would debouch into the plaza in front of the main gates of the palace complex. Crispin dodged a Fugue man with an heirloom sword in each hand. A trio of Disciples buzzed toward him and he threw himself into the lee of an abandoned carriage. The Disciples pursued the Fugue man. Crispin picked himself up off the wet street and dashed for the bend, lungs bursting, evading crossfire and hurtling bodies.
At the entrance of the plaza, he skidded to a stop and slid with infinite care back into the mouth of Summit Street.
Fifty yards away, a hideous obstacle stretched clear from one side of the plaza to the other: a barricade constructed of the bodies of the bourgeoisie, chinked with their belongings. Disciples stood on jerry-rigged platforms behind it. Disciples aimed and fired in front of it. Disciples paced like lions, tails twitching, among the scattered corpses that littered the plaza. Some of them worked to tie the newly fallen together (from the way the corpses jerked, not all of them were dead) and drag them back to shore up the gruesome breastwork.
No screamers here. Not a flicker of rainbows under the orange night sky. The soldiers had breech-loading rifles. They booted the barricade and joked loudly.
Farther back behind the barricade, Crispin could just see teams of firemen trudging back and forth, five to a hose. Lengths of piping snaked across the plaza from a central water main. The nozzles had been mounted on little trolleys, so that they sprayed straight up into the air. A fine, cool mist blew onto his face. He didn’t doubt that the whole palace complex was surrounded with such shields, and that within, on a tower top perhaps, the noble and the very rich of Okimako were praising the aesthetic effect of fire seen through moving curtains of water.
The End, Part Two
Outside the First Mansion, a crowd of culties huddled miserably. Drenched by the hoses of the firefighters struggling to put out the blaze, ignoring shouted orders to move, they seemed oblivious to the sporadic slaughter behind them. Crispin shouldered in a
mong them, peering at their faces. The wall at the end of foresight loomed so close ahead of him now that it took all he had not to flinch every time he stepped toward it. The flames threatened to overwhelm his senses. It took him some time to realize that the culties weren’t acting like victims of a calamity. From time to time they conferred, gazing at the fires on the roofs with concentration so furrowed it had to be to some degree spurious. And why did the crowd condense and thin, as if it were waxing and waning by the moment?
They weren’t culties at all, Crispin realized at last. Their nondescript cloaks had fooled him. But no one here was a child of the Dynasty. They didn’t cast their eyes groundward, as did those for whom conspicuous piety had become a reflex. They wore no amulets. Even in this moment of terror, none of them were saying prayers, sincere or otherwise. And now he saw the logic behind the crowd’s shifting and shrinking. Every time the firefighters transferred their attack to a new section of the mansion’s facade, or the violence in the street created a distraction, ten or twelve people slipped between the fire trucks, toward the mansion, seemingly unafraid of the flames darting from the windows over their heads.
He looked down at himself. His duster was damp and sooty. He raised his hood, fastened the flap that covered his mouth and nose, and at the appropriate instant attached himself to a party of deserters. They hurried purposefully around the side of the burning building. Flames shot across the passage no more than fifteen feet overhead. The air was so hot it hurt to breathe. The firemen were evenly matched with the blaze: they’d managed to control it but not damp it down. Crispin forced open his eyes and saw the person ahead of him vanishing into a dark doorway. Into the mansion? Maybe they were culties, crazy to the last, bent on dying in what they believed an apocalypse! But no—even if that kind of faith existed in the Dynasty, fanatics wouldn’t kill themselves unobtrusively. They would hurl themselves into the conflagration in full view of the firemen and all their brethren. He ducked into the doorway and stumbled on thin air. There was no hallway at all, just a flight of stairs leading down.
The End, Part Three
In the Shusuxo’s day the Mansion must have had a set of ordinary cellars, two or three levels deep. Crispin fancied he could still smell potatoes. The stairwells and the empty storerooms were gaslit. But once he descended four or five flights of stairs—no longer following the band of impostor culties, who let themselves through various doors beyond which he didn’t trust his anonymity—daemon glares sizzled under the ceilings and the labyrinth of recently carved-out passages seemed endless. Every door he passed was shut, and they all bore masses of frustratingly stylized characters. Crispin didn’t doubt that this warren of excavation was the work of the Dynasty. The organization had as many facets as a paste diamond—every time you turned it you saw another face, another flaw.
In the hot, electric silence, he felt more afraid than at any point so far. Out on the hill, he’d been an ant scurrying from a randomly stomping foot. Now, thanks to his own stupidity, he was alone in the stronghold of a different enemy. The dangers here had nothing to do with the fate he’d foreseen for himself. This disquieted him—and at the same time offered a thread of hope. But by now he had an idea of the tricks foreknowledge played whenever he thought he’d got a fix on it. For a start, it would be much harder to get out of this labyrinth than it had been to get in. Pacing warily along, he couldn’t escape the sense that these intricacies of tunnels and stairs added up to one big booby trap whose shape he had yet to perceive. The Children of the Dynasty were the victims of tonight’s catastrophe—the Easterners were the villains! Yet every scrawled-on door seemed to promise iniquities sleazier than anything he’d seen in the safe house on Rainbow Road. The passage he’d been following came to a dead end. False flames flickered in front of a single door.
He turned to go back; then paused. Conversation came from behind the door. For no good reason, he turned again, stealthily, and pressed himself against the wall beside the door, holding his breath.
“—this lot here, Major!” The voice held a note of disbelief. “They must have thought no one would ever find them. But why didn’t they destroy them immediately?”
“These are contracts, my good man,” lectured a thin, oily voice. “You don’t destroy a contract before you’ve claimed your share of the proceeds!”
“And you can take your grubby paws off them, scoundrel,” said another man furiously. “You certainly won’t be claiming anything. The Ferupians may have intended to honor these contracts with the traitors; no one will ever know; but our contract with you is another matter. Payment on condition of success only.”
“Lord Shusuxo, are you implying—” The thin voice rose to a screech, and its Kirekuni became momentarily incomprehensible. “We made good! We accomplished exactly what we promised? Is not the mansion burning over our heads?”
“And a good deal more is burning, besides! Significance will have my head and Jinshe’s if it finds out we had anything to do with this night.”
“Not now we’ve found this little lot, my lord,” interjected the calm voice of a military officer. “I’m not sure you realize exactly what we’ve got here. Let me take a look.”
“As complete a set of implicating evidence as I’ve ever seen in court,” someone else said presently in tones of satisfaction.
“This won’t be going to court, my lord. Mark my words, this is going to be knife-in-the-night business—your sort of business, friend.” The last remark was evidently addressed to someone else. The deep voice carried a ring of deliberate insult. “Perhaps Significance will give you the honor of getting the job done. After tonight, you’ll need the work.”
The outraged protests, led by the thin voice, revealed to Crispin that there were at least a dozen men in the room. What kind of gathering included ordinary Disciples, officers, nobles, and a mystery man with a mysteriously familiar voice? At last another new voice boomed over the rest.
“We,” it stated, “are never out of work.”
The pronouncement, made with the simple certainty of judgment, had the effect of quieting everyone else in the room.
“We’ll resolve these issues later,” the major with the calm voice said after a moment. “Elsewhere. Gentlemen, your lordships, shall we—”
“I bet he liked to come down here and look at them,” interrupted the first lord. Crispin heard papers riffling. “Look at the way this place is set up! That’s a Hasegale! And these carpets are leopard. It’s a private study, mark you. A fireplace all the way down here; think of the problems of ventilation! And what’s that over there? A dumbwaiter to bring hot snacks from the kitchen!”
Wood panels rattled. “No dumbwaiter, Shusuxo.” The voice was hollow, echoing, as if the second lord had put his head into a closet. “Bigger. And Significance, it stinks.”
“An elevator, then. All the modern conveniences! Zezuki, or whatever he was really called, must have spent many a happy hour salivating over these contracts.”
“I’m with the enlisted man, there—I can’t understand why he didn’t burn them.”
“Oh, come, Banranki. Who wouldn’t get pleasure out of contemplating a fait accompli like this?” (“Speak for yourself, lord,” another man muttered, very close to the wall, provoking stifled laughter.) “Treason on such a level!” More riffling. “And the delicious irony of maneuvering in full view of the city!”
“Not entirely in full view,” pointed out the major.
“Well, obviously. But my point is this: the sheer extent of this defiance of Significance, the hypocrisy, is so enormous that we never suspected the rumors could be true! There’s a lesson to be learned in that, if I could only—”
“But, Shusuxo,” objected Lord Banranki, “this hole always had better security than a bourgeois girl’s bedroom! That alone was enough to convince me there was monkey business going on—”
“Never even mind,” another Disciple close to the wall whispered sarcastically, “that enormous amounts of money were entering th
e city from unknown sources... I tell you, if the rest of the nobles are like him, they deserved to lose their shirts.”
“Be lucky if they don’t lose their heads over this fuck-up.”
“We’ll be lucky if we don’t lose our heads—what d’you think you are, above the law like that dealing bastard?”
“Below the law!”
The others couldn’t have heard everything, but they must have sensed a certain skittishness among their men.
“Allow me to make my point!” Lord Shusuxo snapped with sudden authority. “How long has this been going on under our noses, my friends? The earliest date on these receipts—look here—‘Received from Sidarius Earl Smythe-Bellinger, Signed Prince Zezuki of the First Mansion of the Dynasty in Okimako, 19 Sevambar 2506.’ Twenty-five oh six—that’s 1165! Nearly fifty years ago! And we waited to put a stop to it until it got so bad we had to—”
“A fine time for hindsight this is, my lord!” the major said suddenly. “You know as well as I do that you and your peers could not bring yourselves to move against the Dynasty until the devils had actually got their claws into the Significant—no, pardon me, you refused to act until the Dynasty-masterminded freeze on martial activity threatened your hopes of expanding your interests into Ferupe after the posited victory. A fine time for hindsight, indeed: a large portion of your interests have gone up in flames because of your shilly-shallying!”
“Major,” Shusuxo said frostily, “Lord Banranki and I are fully aware of the current emergency. You overstep your sphere of recommendation.”
In the stiff silence that followed, Crispin, spellbound, tried to work out how many different factions were present. Lord Shusuxo—the ousted owner of this very mansion?—and his accomplice Lord Banranki. The major and assorted Disciple functionaries. But who was the owner of the thin oily voice? And who had said with such certainty, We are never out of work?
At that moment the thin voice spoke again, inappositely. “Well, if you had thought to call on us earlier,” it whined, “you would never have had to resort to such extreme measures in the first place. You may not have known where the soi-disant princes were getting their cash, but we—well, I’m not saying we did either, but it would have been child’s play for us to find out; a task requiring small remuneration, at the very least monies appropriate to the significance of the documents dis—”
The Daemon in the Machine Page 24
