Kuraddero’s rain-shiny face tautened. He didn’t move until the float had vanished around the next curve, the jeeps gamely dragging it in pursuit of the capering, brassy music. Then he walked to the gutter and spoke to one of the sergeant-marshals stationed there.
“Yes, sir!” the man shouted, saluting so smartly he almost knocked his own cap off. “Immediatelee!” He clomped into the street and waved down the next float. Within seconds, its occupants had skidded purposefully off in all directions, and two minutes later music had ceased to come from even the last bandwagon in the procession.
Kuraddero returned to where Azekazo was standing. The droplets in his hair glittered no brighter than his eyes. “In the nick of time,” he commented, “eh?
Azekazo nodded, weak with relief. He thought: but what if you hadn’t been here? On his own, he knew, he would have done nothing. What a disaster if all the encampments had seen and heard! What—a—disaster for morale? He blew his nose several times, polishing it fastidiously as if the tip were silver, hiding his face while desperate self-pity sluiced through the tunnels and runnels of his mind.
10 Avril 3:03 A.M. in central Ferupe. Kingsburg: the Burg: the Heart: the fortress
Burns had done his best to shut Exupery up without actually striking him. Now he was trying to tune him out, and failing miserably. In the silence of the night fortress, the Master Physician’s incessant whispering grated on Burns’s nerves like the buzzing of a mosquito during a pause in a concert. Oblique demands for reassurance alternated with monologues on why it was all going to work out just perfectly, as Exupery scuttled ahead in fits and starts, forever looking over his shoulder to make sure Burns hadn’t fallen behind. With the instincts of a ferret in a rabbit warren he was leading the way through the maze of domestics’ passages that surrounded the fortress proper like a web of grass roots clutching a stone buried in the ground. Burns had no idea how far out beyond the official foundations these passages had been dug; some of them still seemed under construction, with raw walls and bare-joist ceilings and a near total lack of light. But even here, the corner drifts of scraps of fabric, cabbage leaves, and sawdust lifted and sifted in the hot breath of the ventilation system. They were still in the fortress, not in some murky network via which lowlifes scuttled all over the city. But all the same Burns hoped that Exupery really knew where he was going, because he’d intended to take the furnished passages that connected the peers’ suites and the galleries and reception rooms, those public areas that he’d familiarized himself with in preparation for just this hour of reckoning. Only to have to revise his plans at the last moment. He hadn’t known about the sentries who emerged at night, like a plague of uniformed zombies, and stationed themselves outside every single door behind which one of those curiously valuable beings so-called Peers In Residence lived and breathed. The sentries’ job was to see nothing while seeing everything. D’you know, I remember, me, I saw wot looked like the air marshal and the queen’s physician last night, it must have been just right before it happened, mustn’t it, didn’t think they was them at the time a course but ooooh! D’you think they could’ve ‘ad anything to do with—?
Even the sotto-est sotto voce rumor could destroy him later. Since his last meeting with Azekazo, he’d been thinking ahead, farther ahead than was wise—and fighting that tendency by concentrating ferociously on the job.
Back here you didn’t get sentries, but that didn’t mean it was the realm of the eyeless.
He strained his ears, praying for Exupery to shut up, trying to hear footfalls, music, the rattling of dice, the giggles of trysting housemaids and scullery boys. He almost wanted to hear something, anything, anything other than the doctor’s wheezing, irrelevant prattle.
“—but I think it will have the desired effect,” Exupery whispered for the fourteenth time. “I attempted to strike a balance between inducing a comatose, unnatural slumber and making the mixture too mild, in which case we could not be certain that one of the sentries, perhaps, was not even now gallantly resisting the sensation of drowsiness that is the real beauty of this particular potion. Subjects given it believe, invariably, they simply grew tired and were unable to keep awake. There are no aftereffects such as those caused by your heliobore or your milk of poppies. They will have pleasant, even humdrum dreams! I think it is this way...follow me... But of course I did not have all the ingredients on hand—after so long without any shipments, the Aesculapyry’s medical supplies are shamefully depleted—and I had to make a few substitutions. Incarnadine for oil of euxstasia, for example. The beetle-shell pigment—now here’s a little-known fact—has the same soporific properties as the essential oil of what you probably call a coughweed; but it is also a—erhmm—a laxative, and I was leery of using it as liberally as I would have the euxstasia; nonetheless, I made sure that I put a substantial pinch—it is of the consistency of tapioca, and has something of that flavor—in every single cup of Vitalica (if you will remember, this is a drink of my own concoction that the Queen’s personal attendants are given every night; it is mostly sugar and privilege, but they seem to find it beneficial as an immunization against the bonechills we associate with proximity to the Royals)—and I expect that at this very moment both sentries, the maid, all three military attachés and both footmen are sleeping like innocent babes...”
Burns grated under his breath, “I swear the worst part of being a snake in the grass is having to work with other snakes!”
“What? What? What?” Exupery glanced over his shoulder, presenting a face like a small, bony moon.
“Can’t you bear to shut the fuck up and contemplate your transgressions in silence for a minute?” Burns growled. “You oughtn’t to be committing treachery if you can’t stand to think about it!”
Exupery yelped in a hurt tone, “Now I know you don’t mean that, Lieutenant-Marshal, sir!”
“On my honor, I mean it!” Burns was too exasperated with Exupery to care about keeping him happy. And besides, in the back of his head a little voice was reminding him the physician had already played his part, done his job, outlived his usefulness. “And I mean this, too: I’m sick to death of your self-justifications. There can be no class of person more repulsive than the doctor who sells his patient up the river. And of those, the most contemptible has got to be the doctor whose patient is the Queen—what greater responsibility imaginable? who sells her not for cash in the hand—not even because his own life is in danger—but because he trusts in the promise of riches and safety! You’re not just contemptible, physician, but stupid!”
Exupery stopped short in a dark elbow of the corridor and sputtered, scarcely able to speak for indignation: “Do you—do you mean to say—your promises—are false?”
A moment ago, Burns had been on the brink of losing his temper, but now a perverse, contemptuous impulse kept him calm. He looked at the wringing, bejeweled hands, so small and bony in contrast with the globular stomach and plump thighs under the court robes, and detected that the physician was deathly afraid.
“Lieutenant-Marshal, you are a military man! No one could blame me for assuming, for accepting without question, that you would be telling the truth! But you are joking with me, of course! Testing my nerve! Ha, ha—”
Burns inserted both hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth, straddle-legged, “I don’t have time, tonight of all nights, to play jokes.”
“Then you—then you merely used me? Your promises were false?” Comprehension turned Exupery’s face to sweating wax. “Air Marshal, I am shocked; shocked! You are supposed to be a man of honor—”
“So are you,” Burns said; and as liquid exhilaration flooded his body (as if his blood were straight spirits and he could feel it racing through even the smallest veins) he withdrew his hand from his pocket and moved casually forward, extending his palm to Exupery. Automatically, after the habit of a lifetime worshiping the demigod Etiquette, the physician began to stretch out his own hand. To his credit, he stopped short; he looked up at Burns an
d his eyebrows met, knitting—the lips of his babymouth parted—and at that moment, still holding his eyes, Burns took two more quick steps forward and grabbed Exupery’s ear, pulling his head over to the side, simultaneously prisoning one of the short arms between their bodies as he yanked the physician close. Before the other flailing arm could do any damage he had slit Exupery’s throat. The man had several double chins, and Burns had to saw and jab for five seconds before he found the jugular. He flipped the body away from him before the gout of blood spurted out. He caught the twitching heels and dragged the physician—heavier, in death, than his stature warranted—into the corner of the corridor’s elbow. The corpse stopped moving. The splashed trail and the pool of blood around the body drained into the cracks between the floorboards. Burns walked quietly away and let himself into the nearest staircase. In contrast to the passage, it was brightly lit by gas hoods. He checked his hands and sleeves. He seemed to have escaped getting spattered, although the robe Christina had insisted on kitting him out in, like all peer gear, was so fussily patterned you wouldn’t be able to tell if someone had gone at him with a bucket of blood and a paintbrush. Under the robe Burns wore his own QAF pants—he hadn’t been able to bring himself to relinquish pockets, loops, and sewn-in sheaths and the weapons and other useful toys they concealed—and Christina had made the concession in exchange for finally being allowed to dress him “properly.” In the high-collared sleeveless brocade robe, with its deep armholes that showed off the red silk blouse and its splits up the front and back that showed off his filthy fatigues, he looked properly absurd and attracted more looks than he did in uniform. Christina’s dinner guests had taken it for eccentricity. Tonight, with any luck, all anyone would see of him was the robed silhouette.
Trouble was he didn’t seem to be having much luck at all so far.
The meltingly cool confidence that had entered him as he realized there was a way to make Exupery shut up—that certainty of success, you could almost call it joy, which peaked when his knife bit into the jugular and lingered afterward like an athlete’s rush—was draining from his brain, leaving him feeling hot and annoyed. He started downstairs, stepping feather-lightly on the corners of the ancient treads (damn this robe, the way it * * * strip it off and bundle it up, leave it lying), remembering he hadn’t meant to kill Exupery. At any rate, not right away. He’d wanted to have the physician on hand to interrogate if the much-touted sleeping potion proved, when they reached the Queen’s chambers, not to have had the desired effect on Her attendants. But even apart from that (he realized as he reached the bottom of the second or third flight, flattened himself against the wall of the landing, peering out through the keyhole at mahogany-paneled walls hung with framed maps, candlesticks in which beeswax tapers burned—he’d never seen this corridor before, didn’t even know which tier he was on) without Exupery’s guidance he didn’t know how to get to the Queen.
He’d just have to go with his gut. He could have—should have—taken the opportunity of visiting Her suite earlier to get the lie of the land. Exupery’s apprentice had to deliver the Vitalicas to the Queen’s attendants as usual, to avoid any connections being made, but Exupery had implied that such was his own eminence, such was the confidence Lithrea placed in her Master Physician, that he could, if Burns desired, get the lieutenant-marshal a five- or maybe even a ten-minute audience during the hours of after-dinner relaxation, when the remaining Royals gathered in the Queen’s parlor and entertained each other with amateur performances on the harmonium or the timpani drums. Of course there was no guarantee the Queen, or any of the other Royals, would so much as notice Burns was there. “But there are folk who’d give their right hand to be present at a Royal concert. Of course—” (Exupery had said, sniggering) “None of them are very good.”
Who needs the Queen when we can choose instead to worship at your feet, Master Physician? Burns had thought furiously, and rejected the offer in a fit of revulsion for his accomplice, instead attending the dinner party perfume herself was giving. She’d been begging him to come, it was practically in his honor, and he couldn’t afford to cross her—she was his alibi and, if necessary, his escape route. And what a party, hell, the vodka was so smooth and bitter it felt like a sin not to get drunk on it but he had a job to do—
But now—
That’s what comes of following your dick instead of your head! he thought, and simultaneously: Christina!
He was still crouched at the door, staring at the map hanging on the other side of the corridor; as Plan B unfurled itself in his mind he half-consciously estimated the price of the gold-inlaid frame and the candlesticks on either side. Then he blinked. Through the keyhole, nothing but darkness. Had he gone blind? What—
A man belched. The latch rattled as the patrolling sentry whose body blocked Burns’s view leaned against the door. “Too quiet,” he murmured aloud, “too fucking quiet by half,” and Burns, rigid, having thrown himself back on haunches and one hand, gripping his bloodstained knife, heard a crackle and then a long slow exhalation as the man lit a cigarette off a nearby candle.
“But none of my business, nuh-uuh...”
With excruciating care, Burns backed across the landing on his hands and knees. When he reached the stairs he rose to his feet—thank goodness he’d got rid of that robe—and tiptoed upward, striving with might and main to recall which treads creaked even a little; one flight then another—not * * * not thinking, Davey! Fuck it, use your head it’s the only thing you’ve got going for you.
When he peered out of the stairwell on the third landing and saw Exupery’s corpse sprawled in the corner, he knew he’d reached the ninth tier, and he burst out, leaping over the body, coming down as softly as a one-touch landing, launching himself into a run. He’d had plenty of practice in speed and stealth as a kid, sprinting away from soldiers in Shadowtown, and this wasn’t the first time it had paid off: through the maze, around the prickly pear, up and down the dead ends, past doors that, judging by their grandiose dimensions, would have led him to the public / aristo-residential areas of the tier, past a service elevator oh so tempting but certainly it would have made noise, until he stumbled on another back staircase, a tiny spiral of darkness that probably accessed the domestics’ living quarters rather than their storerooms and pantries and workrooms. If you don’t meet anyone now, you know luck is with you, he pep-talked himself. She lives on the fifth tier. Count the doors. Time was of the essence—he’d learned from her that the hour between three and four in the morning was the only time the ant colony of the fortress quietened down: not all social activity (persistent even in the face of shortages and increasingly confident predictions of doom) had stopped, but most of it had moved behind locked bedroom doors. In less than an hour the skivvy legions would be rising and shining, busying themselves with fires, breakfasts, cleaning, and errands, or more likely the latest episode of the soap opera of the Fall of Kingsburg: for while the peers, grimly determined to pretend nothing was wrong, socialized, tea-partied, wined and dined, and bed-hopped with vim, their servants took a ghoulish interest in the siege, which to them had no more reality than a stage play, no more terror (and no less fascination) than a neighborhood sexual scandal; they were constantly stopping work to share gossip. If they knew what was coming they’d keel over into their mop buckets, Burns thought, and passed by the latchkeyed doors to their warrens with feelings of mingled disgust and impatience. Finally he reached the fifth tier and, steeling himself to nonchalance, reentered the public passages.
Draperies hung thickly in alcoves where, during the day, policemen staffed checkpoints; shaded daemon glares threw cones of white across the corridors, illuminating old-master paintings or other objets des hautes prix. Every time you left one of these spotlights you were plunged into pitch-darkness. Burns’s eyes hurt, and he felt disoriented. Strolling along as if he hadn’t a care in the world required a supreme effort. The scrutiny of the liveried sentries, posted in pairs and threes under the mantels that mimicked the p
orticoes of mansions, drove him wild. Men and women both, they held their elbows and cap brims at sharp angles, like the teeth of a mechanical jaw that would remain open until he took a false step—and then chomp! He wished he could find the machine’s switch and turn it off. He wished he could turn the climate-control system off. The weight of perfume in the air had crippled his sense of smell all over again. No doubt, a ground-interred building like this one hosted odors the housekeepers deemed it in good taste to mask, but the unsubtlety of the atmospheric doctoring prickled him to anger. Must they make things harder for him at every step? He was already crazy just trying! With fine disregard for the hour, feigning drunkenness, he tipped a nonexistent cap to Christina’s Izte Kchebuk’aran sentries, giggled, and passed through the doors they opened to him.
She’d fallen asleep waiting up—Goldilocks slumped in Papa Bear’s leather chair, still painted and half-dressed, her bodice undone where he’d pulled her breasts out to squeeze and suckle them. Her hot-curlered hair spilled over the arm on which her head rested. The odor of lovemaking in the room brought back physical memories, and he wanted to get out of there as fast as possible. He turned up the gaslight and shook her awake. The sensual, lush creature of white skin and copper curls vanished on the spot: her little eyes, hard and glinty as brass, spoiled the illusion of sexiness, spoiled even the beauty of her well-preserved face. Every time he glimpsed that flat, determined look of hers, he was reminded of the flip side of her need to be the life of any party she was anywhere near. “Let me change,” she said after he explained about Exupery. She stripped unselfconsciously, asked him to help her out of her corset, and skinned into a man’s blouse and hose that she pulled from behind a loose panel at the bottom of her wardrobe. “Ah! Much better.”
He expressed surprise. She laughed.
“Do you think I meet my agents after-hours in the Hall of Justice and the Stock Exchange in full regalia? My pet projects may have been curtailed, but that doesn’t mean I’ve lost my touch. The failure of the Dynasty in Okimako wasn’t my doing—if I’d been on the spot, it might all have turned out quite differently!” She waved a stiletto at him. She must have taken it from her hair. He exclaimed involuntarily. She laughed again. “Oh, you men! Come here.”
The Daemon in the Machine Page 47
