The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  “So you’re saying?” Burns glanced out over the fields, to the hill, where mist and rain blurred the distant hovels into humps like corpses.

  “What could defeat an omnipotent Royal? Why, a force—an ideology—more omnipotent! Significance!”

  I get the point, I get the point! And Burns supposed he had inherited some instincts from his mother’s long-oppressed people after all, for he’d just discovered that nothing repelled him so much as people who tried to justify winning wars and imposing their own interpretation of civilization on others. Mealymouthed imperialists! Why waste everyone’s time telling us why it’s for our good, why not just take the money and run? That’s what you’re going to do anyway!

  He forced himself to say brutally, “So the Queen must die? That’s not exactly the stop press of the century. Where do I come in?”

  “Do not suppose that I am wasting your time,” Azekazo said, his gaze dancing everywhere. “Do not suppose that...” And, his ideological zeal abruptly giving way to embarrassment, he told Burns what General Kuraddero wanted, in addition to what he had already persuaded Burns to do.

  He detailed all over again why Burns was the man for the job—the only man for the job.

  Burns had known what was coming, but all the same he was too stunned to interrupt.

  He fixed his gaze on a peg-capped mushroom near Azekazo’s feet, and every time the lizard did a little shuffle step, he prayed the black boot wouldn’t come down on it. It was so rough and moist, almost purple-dark, like a woman’s nipple. Shouldn’t be allowed...

  When Azekazo had finished, Burns walked straight past him, out to the hedge, shoved through it, and crossed the grass to his Cerdres. “I’m not a gambling man,” he shouted over his shoulder. “Hire assassins!”

  “You know better than anyone how heavily the Heart is guarded! No one except an insider would have a chance!”

  “Well, I’m not exactly an insider!” Although he would have the opportunity; he could swing it, he knew how, too—yanking open the cockpit, unfolding the step, hoisting himself up his head spun for a second—what was the name of the man he’d met at that last dinner party? The little bald one who’d sat on his right—Exton—Exu—the doctor—”I’d be in too much danger for the rest of my life!” He breathed in the cockpit’s familiar smell of leather and damp mold and daemons. “Both before, and after, in danger from everyone. The reason I did this in the first place is because I wanted peace, not to have to look over my shoulder every day,” he said softly, not so much to Azekazo as himself, and almost believed it. Through the rain-warped glass he saw Azekazo darting along the hedge, trying to find an easier way through than the one Bums had taken, where admittedly there had been thorns.

  “You could have anything you wanted!” the lizard shouted. “Do you realize what Significance would feel constrained to give a man who had done such a thing for us? You could have a position in the military, in the government—an ambassadorship to any country you wanted—a millionaire’s income—”

  “Or a knife in the back!” Burns shouted, leaning out—and seemed to hear someone else saying the same thing to him, the same superiority used as a disguise for cold feet, in response to something he’d suggested—who? And how long ago? Whoever it had been was certainly dead now, so no danger of being caught out in a hypocrisy—but that didn’t change the fact that he didn’t like hypocrisy—not unplanned hypocrisy, born of stupid bravado and subsequent stupider fear—

  Without even bothering to buckle in he wrapped the whipcord around his fist and willed the engine to life. The daemon’s voice, deep and grainy, rushed straight from his ears to the big muscles of his thighs, pooling in the small of his back and his groin, energizing him. The propellers started, first one and then the other, throwing off rain, gathering speed. Azekazo made it through the hedge and ran around to the nose of the plane, his tail lashing comically. He shielded his eyes, peering up at the cockpit. He couldn’t see in, of course. His uniform jacket flapped in the wind from the propellers. “Significance does not think the way you do, Ferupian-Chadou!” he shouted. “Significance acknowledges its debts and keeps its promises! Did we not keep our first agreement with you—what reason have you to think we would not—”

  The propellers reached full speed. Burns kicked the Cerdres into motion. The plane lurched over the uneven clods of soil under the grass—the field had probably once been grazed by cattle. Azekazo threw himself out of the way, rolling back under the wing. A near miss, Burns thought as he brought the Cerdres around, heading for the far end of the field. He swung the plane around again and felt the daemon’s exuberance swelling, bulging like juice in a flash-fruit. Daemons always gave him of their best. That was the part of his inheritance that was actually some use. Through the rain that streaked the windshield he saw Azekazo standing by the hedge. The lizard did not move as Burns thrust the Cerdres bouncing down the field. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted something which Burns couldn’t hear, but could easily guess: “If you change your mind, you know where to find me!”

  Bloody right I know where to find you, if someone doesn’t come along soon to help fix that ill-made chassis you call a jeep!

  A knife in the back is what you’ll get... !

  The daemon filled Burns’s consciousness to brimming, but as he skimmed up to a cruising altitude below the soggy carded-wool clouds, he suddenly remembered, like a knife rending the fog, who it was that had said that to him. His brain had been working on the voice, and now it showed him a face. A long, pale face with an aristocratic forehead and a hint of weakness in the chin.

  “Keynes! Raaauuuhhhh!”

  One of Burns’s private verities of life in the Raw, one of those axioms which had served to keep him sane, had been that Butch Keynes was always—no matter what—wrong. The man had been as reliable as a barometer.

  “Fuck it!” he shouted. “Raaaaurrr!” His lips pulled back from his teeth. He let go of the stick and slammed his fist on his thigh, bruisingly hard. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” He was grinning.

  Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer...

  and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

  The best lack all conviction, while the worst

  Are full of passionate intensity

  —W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

  Have Their Bones

  7 Avril 1897 A.D. Lamaroon: Redeuiina: the West Pier: the Parrot Girl

  “Delighted to have you on board once more! Impossible to say how delighted I am!”

  Jiharzii pumped Crispin’s hand. Crispin concentrated on not turning his head away. He’d forgotten about Jiharzii’s teeth.

  “We’ll be setting sail by the end of the week; now that I have a full crew”—the grin widened—“I am free to finalize my arrangements. Until then you are welcome to stay on board.”

  “I’d be grateful.”

  “You will have the run of her. Miiarli and the other men I have retained are still ashore, visiting their relatives, or sleeping with whores, or whatever it is they do when I have not got my eye on them! I myself have been biding on board, serving as sentry; but our dear, mutual friend Devi Yamaxi has invited me again and again to stay at his house, and now that you are here, you will be able to make sure no one steals my beloved Girl, no?”

  “No problem,” Crispin said.

  “By the way, Devi has expressed an interest in having you for supper; or luncheon; or breakfast; or any combination of the three! He, too, is delighted to have you on the team, and I can assure you that no ill will exists, nor ever has.” Jiharzii spoke Kirekuni better than he had before, enunciating each of his colloquialisms with zest. Crispin wanted to tell him that it was no longer necessary, he could speak Lamaroon to him now, or Redeuiinan dialect anyway; but on second thought there was no need for the skipper to know Crispin would be able to understand his private conversations. “I would be much honored by an audience with our dear, mu
tual friend,” he said carefully in the language of that friend’s people.

  Jiharzii understood the term he’d used, and chortled. “Audience! My dear man, speak not of audiences but rather chitty-chats! We are all partners. The split—I have not told you, have I!—is fifty-thirty-ten-ten. I wish I could give you fifteen, or even twenty—believe me when I say that trustworthy handlers are hard to find, and especially so at the moment for some reason; I will not hide the fact that I beated the bushes for someone else to take this position, but was unable to do so—”

  “Odd; I’ve been trying to find work for two weeks now and no luck!” Crispin commented, unable to keep the memory of his frustrations out of his voice.

  “—but of course, as a speaker of Ferupian, you have always been my first choice, for this is a very specialized position, is it not, ha, ha!”

  “All they would talk about was ‘accidents.’ ”

  It amused Crispin to see how adroitly, with a quick gesture of ssshing, Jiharzii steered the conversation to something more pleasant.

  “I pay the midshipsmen out of my pocket, but let me assure you that that is no hardship. On our last voyage to Izte Kchebuk’ara alone—” He lowered his voice and murmured a figure in Crispin’s ear.

  “Sounds good to me,” Crispin said.

  They were standing on the main cargo deck, at the edge of one of the main hatches, which were propped open, perhaps to air out the holds. Crispin imagined he could smell dazeflower. Beneath in the daemon rooms, Tamine and Heletheris engaged in manic private communion that he could sense only as a buzz, as of a conversation just out of earshot. Above in the slightly hazy afternoon sunlight the tide was out and hardly anyone moved on the pier. The hanks of seaweed clinging to the stony flanks of the pier filled the air with the smell of rot. The bay sparkled like a vast coffer of diamonds. On all sides vessels large and small bumped and rocked; the Parrot Girl had been tied up so long here at the West Pier—Jiharzii had changed harbormasters—that she’d been boxed in. In the meantime she’d received a pricey makeover. The peeling fixtures had turned robin’s-egg blue; the decks glowed from a recent sanding; the door handle that vanished in Jiharzii’s fist as he led Crispin below was new brass that shone like gold.

  You are welcome to the third cabin.” The big man moved catlike down the dark stairs, then up again, into the lighter, brighter interior of the foredeck. “It is vacant now.” His voice dropped briefly into a dolorous bass. “You have heard the sad news about Beiin.”

  “I heard.”

  “On the return voyage—there was no use in wasting the cabin space—I took a passenger, an Iztean with business in the Likreky; and made a little profit on his passage and the cargo he wished to transport, which our dear friend does not know about, ha, ha, ha!” Jiharzii turned another brass handle and a small door swung open to reveal sparkling-clean walls, a bunk with white sheets turned down and pillows plumped, a desk and built-in chair. Not a personal possession in sight. But not even sanding had been able to remove the daemon clawmarks from the lower edge of the bunk. Still deeper scratches scarred the porthole. Through the crazed glass, Crispin could see the swaying masts of the next boat, a schooner out of Sjintang, white-hulled, on whose bowsprit sat a Lamaroon adolescent, swinging his legs and disconsolately fondling a five-foot snake-bat: yet another genius player compelled by circumstance, or his own sense of changing times, to the “silver art.”

  Jiharzii gestured Crispin expansively into the cabin. “No need to be suspicious! You, after all, are our most valuable crewman, after myself, of course—don’t tell Miiarli I said that—ha, ha! There are drawers—hooks—cabinets for your personal possessions; I believe the Iztean left writing materials behind, which you may by all means appropriate; a great letter writer, that fellow, although of course he had no way to deliver his missives until we reached port and he could as easily have taken his messages in person, a fact which, when he comprehended, discombobulated him quite! A curiously naive race, the Izteans! Feel free...”

  20 Marout 1897 A.D. Izte Kchebuk’ara: Dumanna’ah

  The cold spicy sunlight of a winter’s morning in a desert land; the Four-Corners-Of-The-World souk, orderly for such a big city (though perhaps this is not so strange considering the price the K’urlers exact from anyone who causes civic disorder); and a tall Likrekian man wandering aimlessly between the tents and the K’urler booths, attracting half-shy, half-curious looks from shoppers. Not on account of his wild eyes—there are so many questionable characters on the loose these days—not even because he is muttering (perhaps) to himself, but because...well, no one quite knows why he or she turns around to watch the foreigner go. This land is too barren, its history too straightforwardly bloody (not staid, in no way convolute, scum is never allowed to form on the water here) for them to understand why their spines ache as if with a passing flu.

  But things are changing, even if your average Iztean hasn’t yet quite caught up, as is evidenced by the fact that when the foreigner slides abruptly to his knees, clutching his head, letting out belly-deep groans, when people rush instinctively to help him with their long ocher-skinned hands thrust from their sleeves, he finds somewhere the strength to shout in Iztean, choking on the red dust: Get back! Get back! Keep clear if you—

  As is evidenced by the fact that they understand; and scatter in time, before it happens, children scurrying to the roofs of the tents from whose doorways the merchants are emerging in silence, the tears starting from the younger people’s eyes as they watch. These are a sentimental people, not nationalistic-sentimental like the Kirekunis but romantic-sentimental—which explains in part why, for all the gory intrigues that stain their history, the princedom has been subjugated by less sensitive races time and time again. And has been the stage, as a neutral power or in its capacity as the back of beyond where peoples’ last hopes dry up, for incidents like this one, which have their causes in the fabric of the world but which the Izteans prefer not to explain. Explanations do not a story make. It was spectacular, it was surreal, it was art, you should have been there. I wish I had the stomach to do it—I wish I knew how! I would die any day if I knew I’d be remembered by everyone who saw me, the way he’ll be! It was art—

  Say the students, the housewives, the purdah-boys; and their friends nod, understanding. The first person who doesn’t swallow the reportage whole is a Ferupian woman lodging near the seaport, a refugee from an area of the southern Wraithwaste that is now no more. She is becoming dissatisfied with Dumanna’ah and mistakenly blames its dust for the trouble she’s having breathing and sleeping. She will finish, though she does not know it, by replicating Beiin Sugothelezii’s act of art, a month later, on an empty road outside Redeuiina at sunset, watched only by a single goat. But not before she’s told the story of the Castle of Vultures (that she visualized, and comprehended, so easily it frightened her) to a young man whose gnawing curiosity she both envies and pities.

  Curiosity is something that was killed in her when the Kirekunis killed her sisters. The sight of Jenny’s, Sarah’s, Dorothy’s, and Annabella’s guts steaming in the open air put paid to every impulse of inquiry she’d ever had. Now she wants only not to feel. And her friends (who multiply, ecstatically, every day) help her by buffering her both from the sensory world and from her own emotions. They do this, she knows (and this is her sole comfort) because they love her. No matter who else she’s lost, she still has them, and they love her. It’s like an orgasm inside her head twenty-four hours a day, their outpouring of love for her, more satisfying and exhausting than any pleasure Jenny ever gave her with her rough, delicate fingers.

  7 Avril 1897A.D. Lamaroon: Redeuiina: the West Pier: the Parrot Girl

  Crispin turned to Jiharzii. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather not have this cabin. I’ll sleep with the crew. I did before.”

  Jiharzii stopped in mid-eulogy. He pouted: his jaw seeming to unhinge and jut forward so that his lower teeth horrifically enfenced his upper lip. Crispin realized that i
t was the skipper who smelled of dazeflower.

  But the goblins had a kind of sheep of their own—very queer creatures, which they drove out to feed at night, and the other goblin creatures were wise enough to keep good watch over them, for they knew they should have their bones by and by.

  —George Macdonald

  Treacherous Things, All

  9 Avril 1897 A.D. 2:15 P.M. in central Ferupe.

  Singeborg (a village seven miles west of Kingsburg)

  The fifty-three-year-old man whose current cover name was Hidero Azekazo saw Kuraddero standing on the main street and eased through a shifting mass of onlookers to stand beside him. Kuraddero hunched a shoulder in greeting. Both men wore plain uniforms. If any of the off-duty SAPpers recognized their general and commander in chief of intelligence, they were wise enough not to show it. For fifteen minutes Azekazo and Kuraddero watched the parade move, halt, argue, and go back and start again. The Disciples were practicing for the day—approaching, Azekazo prayed, faster than they knew—when they would march in triumph into Kingsburg.

  The stars of the victory parade had been selected for outstanding bravery during the advance. Azekazo wondered if any of the men now slogging back and forth in the mud, tinkering with the engines of floats, or any of the buglers, trumpeters, and drummers who had to play the same fanfares all over again every five minutes, wished yet that they hadn’t won this particular accolade. It was essential that they execute their gala maneuvers perfectly. Especially here at the end of the road, the Disciples’ spirit must be seen to remain patriotically intact, the army organized, energetic, and not above playfulness. If any of the floats depicting the glories of the empire broke down on the day, it would be a horrible omen. Not that Azekazo believed in omens. But he did believe in morale. To him, morale wasn’t an invisible thing, it was the sum total of expression and tone of voice and demonstrable goodwill—and none of the paraders had it. They weren’t putting their hearts into getting it right. Someone up at the front had made a mistake, and the whole procession bogged down again. Everyone backed up to the accompaniment of shouted orders, curses, and the clash of protesting machinery.