“I hope the pay is at least adequate,” she said coldly. He fell back as he felt a gust on his face. What did I say this time? When he sat up she stood on the other side of the room, riffling dismissively through his purchases. “What a lot of money you must have spent.”
“Queen, I—”
“You’d better go look up this Jiharzii now.”
“We can’t live on air, you know.”
“Yleini!”
She turned to face him, and he was struck by the louche witchy elegance of her, her body giving form to the formless black dress that she had tied at the waist with a length of string. She rested one hand on the table and the other on her hip. One high-arched foot scratched the other calf, her house sandal flopping away from the sole, held on by mobile brown toes. “I don’t want any of this,” she said, fingering through the bags, her lip curling in boredom and dissatisfaction. “Sweets, peanuts...this isn’t a meal! You eat it. I’m going to Roiini’s.” Yawning, she reached for her shirt—one of his, cut off so it wouldn’t reach to her knees—and inserted her arms into the sleeves. “Are you going up the city, then?”
From across the room he couldn’t see her eyes. He shrugged and looked out the window. In the street below, a covered cart was unloading packaged foods for the neighborhood shop; two Lamaroons stood guard while the delivery boys darted in and out. High-and-mighty, these paid-by-the-hour bullyboys, hands resting on knife hilts, pretending not to see the children playing chicken with them.
A bang from the room behind him jarred Crispin’s consciousness. He turned, slow with dread. As he suspected, she’d left.
Yaah! Yaa-aah! You too stupid to catch me! You got a face like last night’s chamber pot!
Even after the meat pies Crispin found he was hungry. Arthritically, he got up and went to the table. But despite her vocal dismissal of sweets and peanuts, Yleini had taken everything edible he’d bought. Probably she meant to give the treats to the neighbors’ children. She would make a terrible mother. Just as well perhaps she wasn’t going to get the chance to be one. Not with his help anyway! He collected a few important items, put them in his carpetbag, and went out, slamming the door so loudly that the old lady in the next room popped her head out, scowling; it was that couple again, the young pair who never stopped fighting, she’d heard they weren’t even really married...but by the time she’d selected the ripest of her choice imprecations, the half-breed boy was halfway downstairs, clatter clatter thud as he jumped to the landing. His tangled locks flew. She was sure he never washed his hair. No standards, that was what it was: a drop of water never hurt no one and as a girl she’d loved to go bathing when it got this hot...
Maybe a thunderstorm brewing, although it wasn’t the season yet, not for a good few months...
Still, something had to happen (as she shut the door again regretfully and the dark of closed curtains wrapped her round and she lowered her bottom into the depression in her favorite chair, the queensarms right in the middle of the room in the middle of all her things) something to clear the air because it felt prickly, thunder-heavy, like ropes tied around your chest, and she couldn’t get her breath somehow but then again she was getting on couldn’t deny it so p’raps it was natural; but she rested her head with a sigh against the oily place on the back of the chair and she didn’t even have the energy to bang on the floor when the brats downstairs started screaming again.
It’s a naked child against a hungry wolf;
It’s playing bowls upon a splitting wreck;
It’s walking on a string across a gulf
With millstones fore-and-aft about your neck;
But the thing is daily done by many and many a one;
And we fall, face forward, fighting, on the deck.
—John Davidson
The Falcon Full of Passionate Intensity
7 Avril 1987 A.D. Ferupe: the Kingdom: eleven miles northwest of Kingsburg: a field
The Gorgonette scouts had said this morning that it was raining all over the Kingdom. David Burns thought it might just as well be raining all over Oceania. Right now the Kingdom was Oceania—here the whole continent’s fate hung in the balance. Right here in this copse, actually—not to give oneself airs.
He tugged at his collar and walked out of the beeches, then back in among them. He refused to look at the road on the other side of the field, a brown rut between hedges. Along that road (if they weren’t lying, getting ready to ambush him, or just fucking not planning to show up) the lizard’s jeep would cough into view.
He scanned the fields. The little brown hovels over there in the lee of the hill were obviously deserted. No smoke rising from the chimneys. No roosters squawking. No dogs streaking about. Burns wondered idly whether Mr. and Mrs. Peasant and their old parents and their brats and all their neighbors had got wise and made for the east...or whether they, like so many others, had moved to Kingsburg, believing it a haven...or whether they lay dead over there in their doorways...or whether they were slave-ganging for the lizards...or whether they’d been cooked and eaten. Queen knew what the lizards did with captives, and Burns wouldn’t put cannibalism past General Kuraddero for one, not after speaking with him for five minutes, not after getting bounced off his eyes as if they’d been brick walls. Although he expected the man’d be a bit more of an epicure. The yellow-haired daughters of peers were probably more to his taste.
The lizards had closed so tightly around Kingsburg you could see them from third-floor windows in the suburbs: a deep siege of tents and troop carriers and tanks and hastily constructed wheeled towers. Impenetrable. Overland, anyway. Yet here, a mere ten minutes by air outside the siege, you might have been fooled into thinking there was no war at all. You figured they didn’t want to despoil their future territorial holdings. Good farmland, this.
Not that Burns knew anything about farming.
The Cerdres 2000 stood on the other side of the nearest hedge, propellers drooping, rain trickling down its nose. Cerdres Metalworks (hah!) had once welded fuselages of one hundred percent sterling silver, but not anymore. As late in the game as this craft had been built, a year before the fall of Cerelon, there hadn’t been enough metal for axles, struts, or engines, let alone ostentation. The kite was wooden, painted silver. The downpours of the last few weeks had weathered it to nickel gray. Burns despised the stupid defiance implied in the silver paint—the typically Ferupian refusal to admit the worst—even as he acknowledged the power of appearances. He’d worn his dress uniform today, despite the fact that the too-short sleeves hampered his style and the brocade collar itched damnably. He was a lieutenant-marshal of the Queen’s Air Force, and the lizards would expect him to look like it. Unless he was unlucky enough to get sent a heraldry specialist, they’d never know that these particular stripes belonged to one Colonel Harold Russwetter, d. 02/03/54 of injuries sustained blah-blah-blah (no one had written it up anyway).
He stood in the silent copse holding his attaché case, fuming. It was a little after midday. Crows huddled on the dripping branches.
You’d never guess a whole army had passed this way two short weeks ago, he thought again. They clean up after themselves well, you have to give them that. Not like the Ferupians.
The northern divisions’ retreat to the capital, conducted at first with orderly stealth, had turned higgledy-piggledy when the lizards got vicious again without warning. Midway through Aout, everyone still left in the Wraithwaste, from the Lynche mountains down to the Lovoshire Parallel at least and probably farther south, too, had had to flee before the onslaught of tens of thousands of fresh, well-armed Disciples and the logging teams that followed after them like mop-up crews at a demolition derby. Burns had seen it firsthand, organizing rearguard actions with the rags of his six squadrons, subsequently with the rags of other people’s squadrons, subsequently with anyone he could find, training them himself in a few hours and sending them off west with the private knowledge—cold comfort—that if they forgot how to work the whipcord, they would at
least do for operational suicides. Since the Kirekuni air force had inexplicably vanished, or Queen knows probably gone somewhere else, Burns had been able to shower fire-jennies and splinterons on the lizard troops with impunity. But there’d got to be so many Disciples and so little ammo and fuel, and it kept on pissing down, fucking cats and dogs, that he hadn’t, of course, been able to make a difference. Practically living in the air, landing only to hand off his kite to someone else for a few hours, the retreat crawling beneath him day in and day out, day and night. He’d felt like a Royal, surveying it from the wet heights that had never before been so safe. An endless panorama of misery. Straggling for thirty miles, men and machines submerged villages, climbed hills, crossed rivers. Forced marches, townsfolk squeezed until they coughed up everything they had, men, women, and children dropping dead in the mud, casualties left to die in the trampled fields, in the mangled orchards, on the roads pulped to wide brown rivers by the passage of thousands.
And not a high-ranking officer anywhere. Not a single Queen-damned set of decorations anywhere in the blood-dimmed river. Thraxsson and the rest hadn’t stuck around, you could be sure. They’d legged it back to Kingsburg—or more likely had themselves flown back tout suite chop-chop long before the real disaster even started, in the two-month respite after the fall of Cerelon when you had to smoke any drug you could get in order to be able to breathe. Rumor had said at the time that the bigwigs were having another stab at negotiations. Of course now, as a result of his sub rosa activities, Burns knew better—there hadn’t been any negotiations going on at all, the Disciples’ war had just got stalled from the inside, from Okimako—but back then no one had known a thing, so people had come up with their own hopeful, stupid interpretations. Keynes, the milksop, had kept believing the predominant rumor right up to the day he died. Kept believing the powers that be would call the whole thing off any day now. Burns had told him over and over that no law of nature said anyone was going to slam the brakes on before everyone was dead, and that if he, Burns, had had the wherewithal to get the hell out, he would have, too. Tout suite, you could be sure. He’d really been trying to plant the idea in Keynes’s head—without saying it straight out, at which Keynes would have taken offense, high-strung aristo that he was—that if Keynes wanted to, he could make his getaway. But Keynes was even denser than Burns thought, or he had a death wish or something because he’d clung fingernail-wise to his honor and been quite a bit of help right up until his Killer Bee malfunctioned over the Kirekuni encampments. Voilà, Butch flambée aux clouds.
Burns would never have pulled out, himself. Not if you’d shown him the road and put a pack of Disciples on his ass. Men had called him a lot of things, and 90 percent of it he owned up to, but a deserter he wasn’t. Not like that puling Kateralbin. And he’d never made a hasty decision in his life.
True cunning was a function of nerve. It lay in sticking around until everyone else had given in to their frailty and fear, their cowardice and weariness—and then calmly collecting what they let fall as they ran sobbing to their graves.
And so he’d become a commandant, and then sublieutenant-marshal, and then, in due course of time, though he had sped up the promotional process to take into account his men’s need to look to higher authority in such a dire situation, lieutenant-marshal of the QAF. It was his due, anyway. Where Thraxsson and the others had fled, Burns had fought, and taken a bullet in the flesh of his left arm, and gone under the knife without so much as a swig of whiskey to have it dug out by a sniveling country doctor’s boy, and kept on flying, and watched every man he’d managed to persuade to stick by his side go down. I died, sir, in flames, sir... although not in this weather...
His scouts were his pride and joy. Shell-shocked last survivors of crushed squadrons, they didn’t deserve to be called scouts, but fuck it, that was what Burns called them. In the weeks he and they had been nursemaiding the approximately five thousand infantrymen who were trapped outside Kingsburg’s walls, inside the lizards’ mysteriously chivalrous but extremely solid siege, he’d got them organized into more or less regular patrols. After modifying the Gorgonettes to carry extra fuel instead of ammo, they were able to fly all the way back to the Wraithwaste to see what they could see. Unmolested. Still no KEs anywhere. The very first long-range patrol had been gone for days, then come to find him in the chaos that had once been the Kingsburg suburbs, too nerve-shot to sit down even when he thrust bottles of looted brandy into their hands. The Salzeim Parallel retreat hadn’t been the only one, they blurted: at least three dozen other routed divisions were still running. The whole army—as much of it as hadn’t got slaughtered—had fled the Raw. Now they were running for home, running away. In most places the lizards were pursuing them. In some places it was the other way round. In a few places the dam still held, and everyone, lizard and paleface alike, had been swallowed in the Wraithwaste, in the daemon-haunted graveyard Burns’s mother had emerged out of, whose taint he carried in his blood. But the lizard logging teams were hacking busily at the western perimeter of the Waste, making inroads, and the dam was weakening.
Springing leaks from Grizelle to Lynche.
All over the fucking western domains, sir!
Then the dam had burst. The remains of those three dozen divisions, and a good hundred thousand of the people of Salzeim, Lynche, Teilsche, Galashire, and Lovoshire, had hit the Kingsburg suburbs like a dark snowfall and settled into despair. The lizards had them locked down. The Royals, the peers, and the brass hats were stuck inside, too, in the walled Burg, and must be feeling their soft stomachs pinch, since the soldiers and refugees had already been reduced to eating cats and rodents. Of course the rich folks were out of the refugees’ ken. Burns had heard soldiers and Wraith camp followers wasting much breath, in the horrendous middens that passed for billets, in speculation on the meals the Queen and her cronies must be enjoying.
He didn’t bother to enlighten them. He kept a low profile. Anything more might have jeopardized his communication with the court.
The court had somehow learned about him and his stopgap air force, his scouts, learned that someone in Kingsburg was capable of finding out what was going on outside the siege. They were furiously exchanging couriers with the lizard generals, trying to reach some sort of an agreement before the Significants’ patience wore thin and they scrapped manners in favor of storm force. But naturally the court wanted secondary intelligence. They wanted a source they could trust.
It pleased Burns to feed their messengers graphic descriptions of how the lizard infantry were laying the countryside waste for miles around, how they were torturing, killing, raping, and cannibalizing innocent Ferupian civilians.
He looked out from the copse at (Where is the motherfucker? If he’s fucking I’ll * * * Queen-damned traitor, I’ll * * *) the fields, and for an instant let his gaze rest on the shoulder of the green hill around which the road curved. A small brown bird landed on the hedge and stared. It sang a few notes. Quicker than a daemon Burns stooped, grabbed a stick, and launched it at the bird. He missed.
At least it wasn’t really raining.
Not like it had been.
The fact was, and oh, how sweet it was, he had the court wrapped around his dick.
They might have other sources besides him, but who could be more reliable than Commandant Burns, promoted to lieutenant-marshal by Air Marshal Macorathre of the Northern Theater himself (as Burns had told them once he knew Macorathre was safely dead)—Burns who’d fought so gallantly in the retreat, Burns who’d distinguished himself all the way up from the ranks by his rigid adherence to the tenets of military honor, Burns who’d single-handedly saved the QAF from oblivion (not that it mightn’t have been better off there) by enforcing the Ferupian ideal of military loyalty?
Well, anyway, they had to trust him. They needed him.
So he could name his price.
Of course he’d never asked for anything. He was their friend, their loyal servant, their eyes and ears. Why should
they use aliases with him? They didn’t. (He had his sources, too.) He’d even made friends with one of them, although not, to his disappointment, a member of the first circle of puissance: Christina Gregisson her name was. Lady Gregisson. To think Davey-boy, the half-breed brat who’d grown up begging off the soldiers in Porky’s Imports Bar, would ever have found himself the confidant of an aristocrat who was herself the confidante of the Queen! To think he would ever have sipped tenner-a-drop wine from a glass so small it would have done for a thimble, while four ugly red-skinned brutes played violins, while the heavenly chords vibrated underneath the gold-and-white ceiling of the parlor that was so far below ground his ears had popped coming down in the elevator, while not ten miles away ten thousand of the enemy sat waiting!
You’d never have known about the siege, except the pastries were the size of buttons, wouldn’t fill you up if you ate twenty.
The Daemon in the Machine Page 42
