The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  She kissed him wetly on the mouth, catching him off guard. Before revulsion could kick in (for this wasn’t the Christina who’d tittered and flirted her way past his barriers and made him feel like he’d conquered her, this was Lady Gregisson, whose name he’d sold to the lizards) she pulled away. She darted to the vanity table and put her back into it, heaving it out from the wall. “Give me a hand, David! Softly, softly, don’t wake Dorcas, she’s just in the next room—”

  Cracks outlined a door papered in the same pale green as the rest of the chamber. Christina led the way into a cramped, dark stairwell and locked them in. Burns frowned. He ought to have expected her to have something of the sort up her sleeve, it made no sense for the fortress’s domestics to be the only ones with access to a secret network of passages, but—“I could have used this earlier.” His voice echoed and he winced.

  “Not even for you, darling, would I have let Exupery in on my little secret. I’ve always hated that man. Truth be told, you’ve done us all a favor. And after tonight he would have been out of a job in any case, wouldn’t he?”

  But her voice shook a little, and Burns understood that she hadn’t really believed he was going to kill anyone—certainly not Exupery. To him, explaining what had happened had felt unpleasantly like confessing his helplessness; but she could easily have interpreted Exupery’s death as a threat to her. Maybe that was even what had caused her to make the snap decision to help him over and above the requisites of their original understanding, He’d proved now that he meant business—something he’d never thought he had to prove, not after the high-altitude infighting in the Salzeim Parallel, not after the horrors of the retreat. But of course she’d witnessed none of those dark days. She didn’t know, poor woman, how much more dangerous it was to be Burns’s friend than his enemy.

  That was another axiom of the Raw that, to his regret, held true in the war zone that was the rest of the world.

  Stairs, more stairs, an endless crooked passageway in which she took his hand to lead him and he let her, because he saw himself otherwise lost and forever wandering in these mole-tunnels where moths flapped stickily into their faces and cobwebs tickled their joined fingers. More stairs. How deep are we going?

  “Let’s say you’ve already gone deeper than any man I’ve been with!” And she laughed that same delighted trill he’d heard when he first kissed her neck pretending to himself he was under the influence of vodka though he’d scarcely had a sip, reasoning with himself that there were hours to kill before he had to meet Exupery—but now they weren’t in a boudoir whose baroque femininity lodged it safely beyond the borders of Burns’s job, this time they were right in the midst of the ordeal that could make or break his future, and he needed her, not the other way round, and he wanted to kill her for reminding him how he’d relented, earlier, in the face of tenderness. She grunted in surprise. He realized he’d dug his fingernails into her wrist. He let go. She took her hand to herself, shrugging, which he could feel because he was treading so close behind her down the questionable little spiral staircase. She asked in a suddenly tart voice, “Did you speak to Gift Mills?”

  “The trickster who came to dinner, the old, bearded man?”

  “He’s in bed with Boone Skinner—the comptroller of the Waterworks. And Boy Charthreron.” The opposition, Burns thought. “I wondered. You didn’t, perchance, happen to drop any hints in his presence about the, ah, after-dinner entertainment you had planned?”

  “I was introduced to him, no more than that. And I haven’t been dropping hints to anyone.” He added sarcastically, “Should I have been?”

  “Well, maybe after the fact will do just as well...” She sighed. “He—Gift—was once a dear friend of mine. He returned to court recently, and now, as I said, he’s in with the Boone crowd. I don’t agree with Boone about anything. It used to be an amicable rivalry—but as ideology has come to determine more than just guest lists, it has devolved, I’m afraid, into hatred. Yes, I’d have to say hatred. But ideology, hard and simple, remains the key issue separating me and my friends from Boone and his. And since...since the discontinuation of the Dynasty project...I’ve, ah...”

  “Realized you put your money on the wrong fighting cock and you’re trying to switch bookies,” Burns said.

  “What an interesting metaphor!” She sounded irritated. “I have always been of the opinion that a weak man—or woman—is one who won’t change her mind after she’s been proved wrong!”

  “I’m in no mood to argue philosophy, Chrissie.” Burns felt stiff and flushed with disbelief. The noise of his own footsteps boomed in his ears. He saw all too clearly what she was getting at. His personal distaste for politics notwithstanding, procuring those incriminating letters had of necessity involved learning about the factions at court—learning enough, anyway, to know that Boone Skinner and his friends supported letting the Royalty peter out after the Queen died; they said they objected to the very concept of a monarchy, but everyone knew their “secret” agenda had been concocted long ago with an apocryphally prescient eye to pleasing the Significant, and hopefully preserving their own skins after the conquest. Of course Significance would never sanction the annihilation of the Ferupian dynasty. How would that make Them look? Not just bloody but mean-spirited, and the Queen was Their cousin, too. But They would certainly smile, in private, on anyone willing to take matters into his own hands.

  No one but Burns knew that the ones taking matters into their own hands were, in actual fact, Kuraddero and Azekazo. Boone Skinner and his friends had stepped up their anti-Royalist rhetoric simply as an excuse to collaborate. They were all monarchists at heart. The difference was that Christina had retained the courage of her convictions right up until Burns swayed her with his QAF credibility and off-the-cuff hyperbole. To do her justice, her way might have worked—but only if the endgame of the war had been averted before things reached the catastrophic status quo. She’d been trying to accomplish just that with her mysterious Dynasty project. Last summer she’d almost succeeded. Burns, stuck in the Wraithwaste with only that gloomy barometer of rectitude, Keynes, and daemon tobacco and a daily dose of rumor for diversion, had nearly gone mad with uncertainty and boredom before (far away in two cities at once) Christina’s conspiracy fell apart.

  Now he understood for the first time how desperate she must be. Her plan had failed, and now she was trying to shift gears, reverse, ally herself with the Skinner faction in order to save her life. The reappearance of this Mills character, her old friend, had brought such an alliance within the realm of possibility. Burns had previously assumed she was assisting him in his (as far as she knew, vengeance-impelled and one hundred percent independent) mission of regicide simply because she liked him, and didn’t give a shit, knowing the monarchy was doomed anyway. But she was hoping, of course, to present her part in the Queen’s death to Mills as proof of her sincere affiliation with Mills’s (and Skinner’s and the conquering lizards’) cause. It could work—Burns saw how the trickster, the comptroller, and their blue-blooded henchmen would be impressed that a woman had done what the lizards had asked them to do, what they hadn’t done and couldn’t do because they were spineless Queen’s cowards of the first degree—but still, anyone who openly admitted, much less took pride in, having done tonight’s dirty work would be setting herself up as a sandbag with a bull’s-eye painted on, a target for the opprobrium and blame and knives of every monarchist in Ferupe, and that meant everyone in Ferupe once they’d felt the lash of the lizards’ tails across their backs a few times. She wasn’t thinking far enough ahead. Her desperation would be the death of her—either sooner or later. And if she exposed herself, she would expose Burns. It would be inevitable.

  Her eyes, he thought in the cobwebby dark. His knees ached from the endless descent in her perfumed wake. A woman with eyes like copper will do anything—anything, even write her own death sentence and mine—to stay in favor. Her world is so circumscribed, a world of cream, of scum that’s risen to the top,
of everything on the surface, that she equates being in favor with being in power! “Fuck me!” he breathed, and focused on the shadowy slim figure ahead because she had halted on the stairs and she was stooping, her curls sliding aside to expose her neck, she was wriggling headfirst into a hatch she’d yanked open in the outer wall of the spiral, sublimely unaware that she’d given herself away, she was vanishing, her boots dancing at him. Her voice came back muffled: “Follow me! We’re nearly there! But keep quiet...”

  It wasn’t a hatch, it was a shaft of the ventilation system running on the level away from the stairs: and as he followed her, daemon breath sighed full in his face. Covering that up had been one of the more beneficial effects of the perfume in the upper regions. He writhed after her, keeping just far enough behind so she didn’t kick him in the head. They jackknifed around a corner, the top of the shaft so low Burns could hardly raise his head off the floor, lucky he’d never been claustrophobic, couldn’t have piloted Gorgonettes if he had been, let alone the tiny speedy Killer B-99 he’d been flying the day he fucked up one of his plots for the first time by failing to kill Kateralbin—he’d still kill the idealistic half-breed if he could ever find him, just to tie up loose ends, but Kateralbin was probably dead by now anyway—that had been a possibly fatal failure on Burns’s part, but it had had no repercussions, and that proved Burns had used up his quota of free throws: this time he was gunning for the Commandant of All Squadrons Everywhere and there could be no fuck-ups, this time it was your money or your life, steady trigger finger and hold on to your hats, me boys, leave no witnesses, did I say your money or your life, Madam Queen? I meant * * *

  Light was growing imperceptibly in the shaft. And was that music? Yes, when he halted, panting, to listen, unquestionably yes. From ahead. What the hell? As they wriggled along the music got louder and the light became a misty brightness in which currents of daemon breath swirled like fog. Burns could see the dust and mouse droppings on the soles of Christina’s boots.

  Her feet stopped sculling. “Are you still there, David?” Voice less than a whisper, he could hardly hear her under the strains of what might be a piano.

  “Course I’m—” He heard himself, a raw tense growl, and stopped. The fuck right does she have to call me ‘David’? “Sure we’re in the right place?”

  You go first and see.” A laugh that was no more than a release of breath.

  He took hold of her feet, waited for her to startle and then relax, then worked himself up beside her in the shaft, turning her bodily on her side to make room until they were pressed thighs to thighs, stomach to stomach, chest to breasts, face-to-face oblivious to the strains of the dance they were supposed to be taking part in. She gave him an ironic half grin, he could see the grains of white face powder in among the hairs of her eyebrows. Putting his hands on her shoulders, he forced her back down out of the way and rolled on his stomach to see through the grille.

  He was high up. Right under the ceiling. A trampoline of fabric stretched level maybe two feet down, like a tarpaulin over the top of a truck, it was that same blue; after a second he realized it was the canopy of an enormous bed. Maybe right now Lithrea was sleeping underneath. The thought waltzed like a shudder down his spine, and he thrust his thighs against the sides of the shaft to feel his weapons. Lights blazed all over the room. Exupery’s potion must have been so powerful it had knocked the attendants out before they even had time to turn the gas off. Gas, not daemon glares, and that was odd for one thing because you’d expect the Queen to go for the best, price be damned, and for another thing because where then was Burns’s sensation of daemons-in-the-neighborhood coming from? It was much stronger now than it had been in the depths of the ventilation system. His body prickled incessantly, and it took an act of will not to roll about like a dog with fleas. He was never wrong about daemons. Never. That was his heritage from his mother, and skimpy it might be, for example he hadn’t inherited her Wraithly intimacy with daemons, her ability to have them for friends, which had always unnerved him and which had formed the point of the wedge that drove mother and son apart. Burns was just a highly skilled handler (for which thank goodness, every trickster he’d known had come to a bad end) but he had this sense. And it was telling him that more dematerialized daemons fizzed, buzzed, and fought within these four walls than anywhere he’d ever been short of the Wraithwaste.

  Pressing his face to the grille, he saw two men in livery by the far entrance: one half-sitting against the doors, his chin resting on his chest, the other sprawled facedown on the mosaic floor. From his awkward vantage point, the canopy blocked out most of the rest of the parlor, but it made sense to assume the maid and the attachés-in-attendance and the other four sentries were in the same condition as those two. Hooray for Exupery.

  At last he spotted the source of the music: a double-grand harmonium. Of course, Exupery had said something about that, hadn’t he? And a little old lady rocked arthritically on the stool before the gleaming, yellow-painted box, her hands bouncing across the keys. The tune was old-fashioned, fluttery, not enough get-up-and-go for Burns’s taste—but what interested him was the old lady herself. She sat like a butterfly struggling to emerge from its chrysalis in a shell of robes. The shoulders peaked up around her waist, the skirts cascaded down behind the stool. Her long hair shone white as ice, but her wrinkled skin was as dark as Burns’s own, and he would have wagered money she was half-Wraith.

  The tune ended. In the sudden silence half a dozen people could be heard snoring—the sentry who was half-sitting up so loudly and hoggishly he almost drowned out the others. Burns started as one of the armchairs around the harmonium moved, its brocade drapes clapping together; no, it was shriveled dark appendages of the drapes clapping; no, it was hands, and the rest of the chairs clapped, too, a sparse weary simulation of applause. The little old lady slowly bowed her head, acknowledging the praise. Slowly, she began to insert her arms back into her robes, turning in her seat and picking them up one by one. And ceremoniously, the draperies in one of the armchairs gathered itself—a wrinkled tortoise head poked forth—and the whole ornamented hillock of cloth rose and inched forward until it stood behind the old lady, waiting to take her place on the stool: an old man, stooped by the weight of embroidered robes and overrobes.

  Burns felt chilled to the bone.

  “Who was playing?” Christina whispered behind him. “Why have they stopped? Why is it so bright in there? I thought Exupery—”

  The reminder of Lady Gregisson’s presence irritated him profoundly but served to galvanize him. He looked under his elbow at her pale, tense face. “It’s the Royal Cousins. They don’t drink Vitalica apparently. Six of them as far as I can see, but they don’t look like they’ll be much of a problem.” He grinned at her look of horror. “I’m going in. If I’m still alive in a few minutes, come in after me. If not, clear the fuck out.”

  “If you’re taken down, whoever’s left standing will figure out where you came from,” she whispered reasonably. “I’d never have time to—”

  “All right; all right; do whatever you think best!” Burns could feel himself warming up, cooling down, ice in his veins, itchy fingers; his reflexes never failed him. He rose on fingertips and boot toes, rigid as if in the middle of a push-up. He unlatched the grille, laid it gently back against the wall, and without giving himself time to think launched himself into space like a screamer out of a gun. His hands and head plowed into the canopy. It ripped off its moorings, splitting the air, and he was vaguely aware of the music (continuing?) as he somersaulted down, fighting clear of the dusty, heavy velvet, hitting the mattress and bouncing to his feet with a blade in either hand. Curved, paper-thin razor-sharp adamantium-strong, the knives had belonged to a Mime mercenary from the Teilsche Parallel whom Burns had enlisted somewhere along the hideous road from the Wraithwaste, and acquiring them had been well worth the loss of the Mime, who wasn’t much of a pilot anyway. Queen knows how he survived as long as he did. You could put that epitaph o
n a lot of graves, couldn’t you? His weight had brought the canopy folding to the foot of the bed around him, and he saw, resting on the pillows against the elaborate headboard, the small silver-haloed head of an old woman. She could have been a puppet, head and shoulders (and the little walnut-colored hands gripping the folded edge of the sheet) attached there for show. She was so neatly, tightly tucked into the sheets that her body scarcely lifted the spread.

  The Queen.

  Lithrea the Last.

  Wide, cataracted eyes attempted to focus on him; wandered. She frowned.

  All his instincts screamed at him to do it now, do what he’d come for, but he wasn’t leaving any witnesses, not this time. So first those who might wake up, the three men and one girl slumped in—or half-out of—a semicircle of chairs at the bedside. The canopy had fallen partly across their laps, and their faces twitched as though somewhere far off they fought toward the surface of Exupery’s pleasant even humdrum dreams. Easy as potshotting babies with a catapult. One two three four, right along the line, sorry sirs, sorry miss, you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cutting throats was quiet but messy: as he kicked the girl out of the way and jumped over the naval attaché’s body he skidded in the blood pumping from the man’s throat and caught himself just before he would have fallen into a sort of ten-foot pyramidical clothes tree hung with little glass ornaments. What a crish-crash that would’ve been, thank you, Mother, for cat feet! One of the sentries at the door had half-waked, blinking, feeling confusedly for his gun. Burns dealt with him first, took the gun, the latest Karanda double-action revolver, stuffed it in his waistband for safekeeping, and used his own Volcanic on the other sentry—imprudently, he realized a split second later as the backlash sent him staggering, the report shattered his eardrums, and brains and blood flew halfway to the ceiling; he wiped his face, spluttering, What the fuck did I do that for? Dammit—