But perfume herself had no hunger creases on her face. Perfume wafted in his ear, and he had to concentrate on staving off exhaustion.
He refused her offer of honorary court robes. The QAF uniform and even the stains on it were the key to his power, among those men and women whose power was to his as a Cerdres 2000 was to a fucking butterfly just as much as among his own men (and besides there wasn’t anywhere in that flimsy getup he could’ve stashed his knife and gun). And he always refused to stay overnight in the fortress. When the music stopped it was back out to the cold and the wet for Davey-boy, back to the piss-reeking flophouse in the northern suburbs where he’d taken over two factory warehouses to hangar his men’s aircraft, where your feet were always cold and even the liquor tasted like mud, but where the door was booby-trapped better than a professional spy could’ve done it, so that even the men you had on guard, who you trusted, wouldn’t get more than their noses inside before screamers swarmed them...
But the sacrifice was worth it. Definitely worth it.
Maintaining one’s mystique was the key to survival. He’d known that ever since he managed to enlist in the QAF by passing as a southerner from Huizol.
And he’d already got what he wanted.
He was going to go back, though.
Afterward.
If the fork-tongued latrine-slime long-tail mealymouth ever—
As a drizzle began gently to fall from the bright gray sky, the little bird bounced again out of nowhere and stood not ten feet away on the grass, regarding him. He knew it was the same one. This time he stooped slow and threw fast. This time he made his kill. “One down, one to go,” he said aloud. His voice sounded dangerously loud in his ears. He’d stipulated that he be met by one man, only one, and General Kuraddero had agreed but said in that silky way of his that to demonstrate mutual trust Bums also should come alone. He’d complied as much because there was no one he trusted enough to bring along as because he gave a shit about their conditions—it was them who needed him, not the other way round. But right now he wouldn’t have half-minded someone to watch his—
A report split the calm afternoon.
He hit the ground so fast he didn’t know he’d dropped until his face was in the grass. He got up, cursing aloud—no point keeping quiet if they already had a bead on him, his only hope was to keep his cool—brushing the wet off his uniform, flicking droplets from his attaché case—his heart pounding like ten men running hard—his eyes everywhere, the Cerdres, the beeches, the hedges, the next field and the next, even the far-off hovels—and maybe they hadn’t been shooting at him, maybe they’d just shot their own escorts, even bigwigs get stuck with grasses, but accidents will happen and dead men tell no tales—
“Queen—”
A mechanical cough, loud in the distance.
A mud-spattered black jeep—the new, fancy kind with an imported internal-combustion engine—leapt around the bend, traveled a short distance farther under its momentum, and backfired again even more loudly.
They’d sent a small, dapper man whose tail was almost bare of tattoos. Sweat soaked the armpits and back of his Disciple’s uniform. He’d had to push his jeep halfway from Kingsburg, he explained. If he had a rank, he didn’t divulge it, introducing himself only as Mr. Azekazo. After Burns had helped him push the malfunctioning vehicle up to the copse, in among the beeches where it wouldn’t draw attention from the road or the sky, Azekazo held up his hand—wait!—and, diving into the back of the jeep, produced a folding table and two folding chairs. He set up the table in the center of the copse between girthy beeches whose branches arched overhead, rooflike. The table nearly flew out of his hands as a striped umbrella zoomed up and burst open like a parachute.
“A neat piece of engineering,” Burns said, watching it in case it hadn’t finished metamorphosing.
Azekazo wiped his nose with the back of one slender ivory hand. “In view of the weather we’ve been getting?” His Ferupian was accentless and only sounded foreign because every sentence lilted upward like a question.
“Having trouble adjusting?” Burns asked. “Doesn’t rain this much in the empire, huh?”
“No?”
“Not in the Raw either,” Burns said, in heartfelt tones.
“But you are a Kingsburg man, Lieutenant-Marshal, no?” Azekazo walked out of the copse and looked around, as if satisfying himself they were alone. As he returned he caught Burns’s eye for the first time, only to flick his gaze away immediately.
“No,” Burns said. He was trying to decide how much to tell the diffident little lizard, whether the best way to get the drop on him would be to draw him out with confidences or to intimidate him with professionalism. Would it be best to offer explanations the lizard could easily swallow, or to remain inscrutable, alien, a new kind of gun that if not treated with respect could blow up in your face?
“Beg pardon; I’m an Okimakoan myself, and I tend, I’m afraid, to think everyone else is from a big city, too?” The lizard cocked his head. He sat down and unhooked a flat wicker basket from under the table. Burns sat, too, holding on to his attaché case, staring at the lizard’s hands, which rested over each other on the basket. He caught himself holding his breath and exhaled.
“Okimako?” he said casually. “I hope you didn’t lose anyone in the Fire of 1212.”
He knew what to call the disaster that had struck the lizards’ capital, as he knew the names of all the Significants from the inception of the empire to the present day, and the tributaries of Kirekune’s big rivers; he could draw a map and locate all the areas of heavy industry, all the northern mining towns; he knew the dates of the Western Expansion, the Likrekian Occupation, and the Incorporation of the Mim; he could recite the details of the trade agreements with Eo Ioria and Izte Kchebuk’ara; since that first meeting with General Kuraddero he’d set himself to learn more about Kirekune than he had in eleven years of killing its soldiers.
“Everyone,” Azekazo said. He started to open the basket. Pop went one catch, pop went the second.
“Sorry,” Burns said.
“Many others suffered, too, but thank you all the same?”
“I’m half-Wraith, Officier.” Burns saw now there was going to be no way of avoiding talk; he’d have to make the best of it, go with the illusion of candidness. He hoped his confession didn’t sound too contrived. He was glad now that he’d hardly ever said it straight out before, so the words felt fresh, even painful. “My mother was an infantry sergeant’s bride of convenience. I grew up in the Raw.”
Azekazo paused in the act of lifting the wicker lid.
“But you did not follow your father into the infantry? Why?”
Burns was taken aback by the senselessness of the question. He frowned, pushed out his lower lip, and shrugged. As if I could have, even if I’d wanted! He doesn’t have any idea how hard it is to get your foot in the door when you have Shadowtown written all over you! Born with silver chopsticks in his gob. “I used to watch the patrols skimming overhead,” he said, looking down at his hands. Toss in a bit of poetry—bet your ass he’ll fall for a flashy vocabulary. He’s bilingual, got to pride himself on it. “Especially in the sunshine you’d almost have thought the war had been designed just to showcase the very best our century had produced, in terms of engineering, in terms of men with nerve. A self-validating apotheosis of—of daemonology. Benign. Its only sins, perhaps, vanity and self-absorption—but then war demands absolute commitment for however long you’re involved, and that’s part of its beauty, isn’t it? I wanted to be in the air force. I wanted to be up there with those men who knew how to get the best performance out of the best technology.” And that, too, was true. “Have you ever flown an airplane, Officier?”
“I have been flown in one, yes?” The lizard, disappointingly, seemed unaffected by Burns’s soliloquy. He blew his nose on a crumpled hanky. “But I fear I am not a daemon handler...”
“Really?” Burns heard the note of contempt in his own voice. “How
curious. For us, daemon handling is the most basic requisite of military training. I suppose it’s different among your people.” Ranking officers should be similarly skilled as the men they commanded, only better—all around paragons of the field and the brain. That had been the philosophy of the QAF, in theory. In practice what you got was Thraxsson, Macorathre, Vichuisse, what you got was aristocratic cowards whose names immunized them to the disastrous consequences of their half-assed experimental tactics, what you got was defeat—but Azekazo knew the last as well as Burns did, and Burns saw no need to inform him of the whys of the catastrophe. Besides, the wounds were too fresh, they still rankled. The misty air wafted to and fro as if the trees were fanning the men with their branches.
“Maximum efficiency is achieved by each man concentrating on his own job,” Azekazo said flatly. “A general should be an expert at strategy; a pilot should be an expert at daemon handling; and an adjutant major of the 108th Significant Battalion, Intelligence Division, should be an expert at conversation, no?” He smiled a tiny, self-deprecating smile and, uncrumpling his handkerchief, regarded it. “Alas, I am ill fitted for my post!”
“You are too modest, Officier!” Adjutant Major; fuck it, Kuraddero’s palmed me off with an underling; if they’re wasting my time I’ll—“Your command of Ferupian is impressive.”
“Oh, ever since I was at the university I have been specializing. Ferupian studies, as you may well imagine, were not the most popular field, but I have always been fascinated by the Land of Daemons, and I confess a degree of competence in the language. Had I not been available, you would have been met by someone with more decorations; oh, certainly; General Kuraddero has taken the liberty to discuss your case with several of his colleagues, and their lordships are all very, very interested. In fact they wish me to convey their hope that this will not be the last occasion of our collaboration?” Azekazo replaced his hanky carefully in his pocket. “The only unfortunate result of the Significants’ philosophy of military superspecialization,” he said as if he were continuing in the same vein, so that for a second Burns didn’t know what he was talking about, “is that when teamwork is for some reason impossible, it gives rise to inconveniences... such that, since I am not a handler, and for me to have been driven by a handler in a daemon jeep would have violated your conditions, I make a laughingstock of myself for the birds and the rabbits in that ungainly machine.”
Burns followed his gesture. The jeep had been backbreakingly heavy to push. The engine must have weighed a ton. It had a metal chassis, a roll bar, and black-tarp panels—he’d bet it could have end-over-ended down a mountain and looked pretty much the same at the bottom. It wouldn’t have been possible to manufacture it in Ferupe.
“The state of the art,” Azekazo said resignedly. “It will be some time before the planned armywide shift to diesel becomes practical, I fear. Motorcars are all very well for nobles tooling around town, but military use requires durability and ease of service.” With a decisive movement, he laid the wicker basket open. Burns started. He’d expected to see documents, maybe Kirekuni currency, maybe even gemstones (he’d told them to choose their preferred method of payment); but in wood shavings nestled a picnic lunch. Azekazo spread two white napkins on the table, then with waiterly dexterity laid out sandwiches, a dish of dried fruit, a platter of gourmet Ferupian cheeses, another of sliced meats, and a bottle of white wine. Bone-china plates, silver cutlery, and long-stemmed wineglasses completed the place settings. Small, fresh daffodils in a crystal vase went in the center of the table next to an ashtray of the same crystal. Azekazo closed the wicker basket again and laid it down beside his chair. Burns stared at the spread, lit in faint red-and-yellow stripes by the daylight falling through the umbrella. He wondered if he was going mad.
“Valdonne 1787,” Azekazo said, holding up the wine bottle. “Ferupe’s vintages are so very, very delicious, yet I hear that wine is not popular among the common people here, as it is in Kirekune. It is odd?”
“Matter of how much you can lay out to get sozzled, isn’t it?” Burns struggled for composure. He couldn’t take his eyes off the moist slices of meat, the cheese bulging like white flesh from between its dusty rinds. “Beer’s cheaper.”
“Not necessarily... demand lowers prices, and thus if all wine is high-priced, one must conclude that there is no demand for cheap vintages...but that is by the by. A more interesting question, in the same vein, is the matter of internal-combustion engines.” Azekazo blew his nose again, cocked his head. “Before the metal shortages, Ferupian factories that produced transformation engines could have been switched over to the production of internal-combustion engines, one by one, without causing a ripple; and your highway system, we freely acknowledge, is wider reaching, better policed, and better maintained than ours, perfectly suited to motor traffic; yet Ferupe has shown no interest in the design, the production, or even the purchase of the Westerners’ engines. That is odd, no?” He unwrapped the sandwiches and arranged them in a crescent on the dish. “At the very least, one would expect Ferupe to have understood years ago that Significance has made the elimination of the Wraithwaste a priority—for the purposes of removing one of the great barriers between the nations, as the official line goes, but more specifically for the purpose of eliminating Ferupe’s source of wealth and letting out its very lifeblood. And wouldn’t one expect Ferupe to have decided by now that since realistically it could not prevent us from eliminating its source of daemons, it had better gird its loins and—what is the phrase—‘join the paddywagon’? Yet you have refused to acknowledge that the current generation of captive daemons must be the last. There are the forests in the heartlands and in the Iron Hills of Kirekune, of course, as well as in the Likreky, but their output cannot make up for the loss of the Wraithwaste. You are clinging to an infrastructure whose foundation has been destroyed, and you don’t even seem to know it!” He glanced up, and added quickly, “I am merely indulging my own curiosity—as a scholar, I take an interest in the mentality of the land I have studied so long, and am now so happily visiting...do not think I am trying to pick your brains on behalf of the honorable general!”
That means he is. Then again, maybe he isn’t! Queen knows what they really want out of me! But who gives a pig’s fart, anyway? Azekazo could have asked straight out, and Burns would have told him whatever he wanted to know, because he didn’t give a shit. A bargain had already been struck, and he trusted them to keep it because he knew lizards, he’d flown against them for eleven years, he knew their heads inside and out; he’d seen their brains splashed on the soil of the Raw. But if Azekazo’s orders were to beat all around the mulberry bush, to try and turn Burns’s head inside out, let him waste his breath! Burns would humor him.
He took a deep breath and unclenched his fists under the table. “Yet it’s only natural that here in the Land of Daemons, we should hang our hats on daemonology, don’t you think?” he said half-seriously. “An analogy: if you’d lived in a city all your life, and it was burned to the ground one day, you wouldn’t go start a farm, would you? You’d cling to the ruins, hoping against hope you could salvage things!”
Azakawa gave an exaggerated wince, cutting a sandwich into squares with fork and knife. “Yes; yes. But—and I assume I am free to criticize, in light of the circumstances”—he looked wryly at the trees, as if they represented Ferupe’s defeat and Burns’s treachery—“I think you have made a fetish of daemonology, to your misfortune. Placing all one’s eggs in one basket’—I believe that is the phrase.”
Burns shrugged. “In light of the circumstances, I’d have to agree. And yet, isn’t that a little revisionist? After all, if I remember rightly, the war began, and continued, because Significance coveted our unlimited access to daemons! This decision to jettison daemonology, on behalf of the whole world, in favor of the Westerners’ inventions must have been recent—so there’s no need to be smug.”
“Neither you nor I was born when the war started,” Azekazo said, “but I b
elieve your summing-up is correct. Nonetheless, I intended to point out, mainly, that in contrast to Kirekune, Ferupe does not seem to have learned anything in a hundred years? You have pushed daemonology to its limits—”
“That’s what they said before the screamer cannon was invented—”
“—but don’t your generals see that they have put their money on a horse that won’t make it around the track? It would be useless for them to admit it now, of course; still, I am curious to know whether Ferupian officers concede that the new Western technology is, in fact, superior. For it is widely believed that Kirekune’s greatest achievement in this war has been, not merely the winning of it, but the lessons we have learned en route. We started this century still blindly trying to catch up with Ferupe, our erstwhile mentor—but we are ending this century with a new agenda and a new technology espoused on our own initiative, in keeping with Significance. Our engineers are already well enough versed in internal-combustion mechanics to compete with the Ixtarans, the Throssomi, and the Yanglos. The Fire of 1212 was a setback, but already we are building new factories. Creddezi consultants are currently working with Significance.” Azekazo rolled a circle of salami into a tube and popped it into his mouth. He kept his eyes fixed on Burns as he chewed. He reminded Burns of the little brown bird—his moustache bobbed the same way its beak had. The comparison filled Burns with sudden anger at the absurd chivalry of this déjeuner avec trahison à la carte. What kind of overplanned, misguided attempt at manipulation was this?
Well, I’ll fucking well give the self-satisfied little reptile what he fucking wants.
“Seems to me it all works from the top down,” he said. “For crying out loud, you keep saying the majority of Ferupians’ opinion, as if the majority of Ferupians had a single thought in their heads that wasn’t put there by whoever pays them and protects them, and payment and protection both all come from the Queen. Your Significants are just that, Significant. Whatever they want to be. Now and in a hundred years. But our Queen is the Mistress of Daemons.” He reached for a sandwich and bit in. The tender chicken breast practically melted in his mouth. “She can’t get away from what she is,” he said with his mouth full. “We can’t get away from who she is. What she is, is what we are.” The worst sort of fanatic religionationalism, the patriotic equivalent of draft horsepiss. He bloody well hoped Azekazo swallowed it foam to dregs and vomited it back out for Honorable Fucking Son-Of-A-Slug Kuraddero without changing a single word.
The Daemon in the Machine Page 43
