“Sccrraaaahhhh! Daaaviiii...”
Burns jumped, cursed, stared around. Away in the far dim reaches of the parlor, a green bird sat in a golden cage, disconsolate as a classroom dunce relegated to the corner. It had flapped its wings, that was what had caught his eye, and now its beak clacked as it drew breath to repeat the one word that had been spoken during the whole proceedings. “Daaaviiid! Scraaaahhh...”
“‘Scram,” he finished for it. “Bird, I’ve never heard better advice.” His pulse was racing. The stupid fucking fowl had nearly given him a heart attack. He took a deep breath, looking over the tableau of death and destruction around whose edges the ornate clutter stood untouched in the gaslight, then saluted the dead Queen and backed to the door. Once outside he took off at a run. He flung himself into the nearest stairwell. Four-nineteen (said his watch) and all’s well, but he knew he was working in the very last minutes before the morning’s scrubbing and fire-building and water-carrying and domicile-staking and louse-upping started. And he was starting to get tired. So far so good, he encouraged himself as he ran up the stairs three at a time, you’re as good as home free. He flung open the door of the first landing and drew breath to raise the alarm (after which he intended to repeat the process on every tier until he reached his own, where he would report hearing an alarm raised and then shimmer away in the pandemonium certain to ensue as a score of guards in a dozen different liveries tried to figure out whether it was genuine and who it originated from). He felt exhilarated, on his mettle, yet at the same time confused.
1 Avril 10:46 A.M. The Likreky Sea: the Parrot Girl
The wind chased the daemon tramp, driving her screaming up crest and down trough. Rain made misty knives of the fifteen-foot waves and sliced into the single sail the crew had had time to hoist. Just as well they hadn’t gotten to the tops’l or foresails, because the mainsail, unused since the ship was built, already showed signs of tearing, and the skipper had given orders for it to be furled again, if anyone would go aloft. They wouldn’t. It was at moments like this that one realized how easily any given crew could subside into a mutinous mob.
And down in the hold, after six hours of vain efforts to rouse a spark of life in the demogorgons, Crispin lifted his head and knew that it was hopeless. Before the storm hit for real, the other crewmen and even Jiharzii had been down here, tiptoeing inside Heletheris’s cage, where he’d dragged Tamine in order to try communing with both daemons at once, begging him to do something—they would never ordinarily go into a daemon cage, not even in a situation as dire as this, so some instinct must have told them there was no danger. Not anymore. At first light they’d all disappeared. He half heard them telling him they were going to hoist the mainsail, so the Parrot Girl wouldn’t be utterly helpless in the teeth of the storm. His pride wouldn’t let him give up on the daemons. Alone in the swashing bilge and the creaking darkness, jolted by the ever-worsening roll of the ship, he remained crouched over them, trying for the first time in his life actually to tap the possibilities of the curse Orpaan had laid on him. To no avail. Either he wasn’t as much of a trickster as he’d thought, as Beiin had thought—poor Beiin—or the thing had been impossible from the start. Even when he ceased his attempts at communion and worked on Tamine and Heletheris as if they’d been people, searching for pulses (but where?), pumping their chests, giving them cardiovascular resuscitation, it did no good.
The shock that first severed his connection with them, in the small hours of the morning, had slammed through him so hard he passed out—and when he came to, facedown on the floor, unable to hear or see or breathe, he knew he was dying. Even then, he thought the daemons had just withdrawn into their days-long melancholia and locked the door behind them. He thought if he tried enough different keys, he could unlock them again. But what he had sensed must in fact have been the shock of their dying. It hadn’t felt like that—his instincts still insisted, stubbornly, they were just out of reach, and if he stretched he could touch them with his mind—but now, even in the half darkness, anyone with eyes could see they were no longer corporeals but corpses. Heletheris had half decayed already. Scales fell constantly, like dandruff, from all along the ten-foot curve of his body and washed away in the swilling bilge. His wings lay crumpled in the filthy water. The leather had started to detach from the radial bones. At this rate he would be a skeleton in a couple of hours.
And Tamine: her head lay in his lap, dog-jaw loose, yellow teeth showing. He could push two fingers under her silver collar now. Her neck had shriveled like an old woman’s. Impossible to imagine that a few minutes ago he’d been pushing his own breath into her, mouth to mouth, lips to cracked green lips. Her belly looked putrid like the belly of a fish caught too long ago to eat. The ship’s rats disagreed, though—one of them, he saw with sudden revulsion, was even now creeping in through the bars, its shiny eye fixed on Tamine’s tail. He hurled the first thing that came to hand, missing, but frightening the vermin off. The missile clattered against the bars, and he saw it was one of Tamine’s talons.
All her others had fallen off, too, lying in semicircles around the stumps of her forelegs.
He swallowed his nausea, slid the dragon head off his lap, stood up, and stretched. When he blacked out six hours ago, he’d knocked his head against the wall. In his concern for the daemons he’d forgotten about the lump, but now it shot pain into his temple. He touched it inadvertently, making it worse. And just then the Parrot Girl must have plowed into an especially deep trough, for the whole ship seemed to hit a brick wall, stopping dead, bucking, and as Crispin grabbed at the air for balance he stumbled over Tamine’s carcass and fell to his knees. He clung to the bars of the cage, immobilized by seasickness. The agony in his skull compounded and intensified his nausea, and the ship was rolling, wobbling, abso-fucking-lutely astonishing she was even holding together: the wall of the passage was bowing in as if a giant hand were crushing her to driftwood, and the noise, dear Queen the noise of waves thwacking the hull, and underneath the din, dopplering it louder and softer, the throb of blood in his head.
His stomach threw bile up into his throat, and he just managed to swallow it.
Fresh air!
He fumbled for the door of the cage, thought he’d locked himself in (or Jiharzii had, let him rot with his useless beasts; wouldn’t put it past the bastard), but then he found the catch, and he was out, stumbling along the corridor, up the shimmying ladder, another ladder, shoving a mouthing Lamaroon out of his way, and out through the sea door. In his absence the aft deck had become a landlubber’s hell. He clapped both hands to his eyes to keep from being blinded by the rain.
Marout flowers may bring Avril showers but I’d forgotten it ever got this bad—
He’d never been at sea in this kind of weather before. Less air than rain, less rain than salt. Waves loomed like foam-toothed ogres over the bulwarks. Sea torrented across the decks. Five seconds, and whatever parts of him weren’t already soaked with bilgewater were drenched with spray. Sea boiled around his knees, and he staggered for balance. High on the aft deck, he spotted the dark, hunched figure of Miiarli the inexorable. The first mate was manning the wheel.
Crispin fought his way up the ladder, shouting. He couldn’t hear his own voice, but apparently Miiarli could, for he yelled without stopping his wrestling match with the wheel, “What the fuck you doing out here without a rope, genius player?”
“Hah,” Crispin shouted, “that’s a joke that is, ‘genius player,’ hah, that’s rich!”
A rope around Miiarli’s chest anchored him to the wheel; as far as Crispin could see its main advantage was that when the instrument was torn loose from its moorings, the first mate would go with it, following his raison d’être to the bottom of the sea. Miiarli screamed, “She get a damn lot worse, you know! Long as you see me out here, you know she ain’t nothing but a breeze! Just’s long as the timbers don’t crack!”
Up here the Parrot Girl’s rolling and plunging was far more pronounced. Crispin
knew he was going to vomit. He dropped to his knees, jammed his head between the rails, and retched. He hadn’t eaten for so long that his stomach, wrench though it did, produced nothing but bile—stinging his throat, starting tears in his eyes, bringing no relief, just more salt. Tamine and Heletheris would have to be heaved overboard, then they, too, would be salt. What had happened? Nothing in the world is ever going to be the same, he thought wildly. Spray lashed his face and the wind sliced his thoughts to pieces. Nothing will ever be the same!
Because for several days, in fact ever since Lamaroon vanished astern, the glittering sequined quality of the atmosphere on deck and even down in the tramp’s bowels, even at night, had been interfering with his attempts to handle the demogorgons. After the second day of limpid, headachy early-summer brilliance and the second night of lip-lip-lapping water on the becalmed ship’s hull, Crispin had looked down at the Parrot Girl’s shadow, lying on the moonlit water as on a mirror, and resigned himself to trying trickery. Fat lot of difference that had made. Yamaxi’s profits, and if it went on much longer their lives, depended on him, and he couldn’t make any difference. Desperate, he blamed the worsening ringing in his ears on a side effect of the oppressive weather. Now the weather had broken—with what a vengeance!—and the demogorgons, his responsibilities, his nemeses, were dead; but the ultraviolet ringing in his ears hadn’t abated. If anything it had just got worse. He felt as though he were no longer seeing the world clearly, but through some kind of haze that warped light directionless, into mere illumination. And even as he vomited, sobbing with misery, a part of him superciliously pronounced his despair a waste of tears. It was pick-yourself-up and get-a-move-on time again, because with the death of the demogorgons, the possibility of rectifying the wrongness that had threaded through the last few days, no, the last few months, like a minor-key motif, crescendoing in a discord of death, had vanished. There remained nothing in the world that couldn’t be questioned. There remained no possibility of getting any answers at all. Yleini. She appeared in his mind’s eye, smiling as she waved from the West Pier. And then as her necessary corollary, he saw Rae—but not as she was now, as she’d been five years ago. There remained, he thought hyperbolically, no possibility of ever finding out the truth. He staggered to his feet.
This is the revelation we are living in—all the treacherous things, all the evilous thinqs, all that is to come, this is just a preview.
—Buju Banton
THE END
*cough cough* Hi! It’s me again, your humble author. By now you must be wondering: what did happen to Rae, anyway? Weren’t she and Crispin fated to be together? What happened to that? We find out the grisly truth in A Trickster in the Ashes, the third and last book of the EVER trilogy. You can pick it up at any good bookseller, or via the handy collection of buy links I have curated on my website: http://felicitysavage.com/books/a-trickster-in-the-ashes/
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Now, read on for a preview of A Trickster in the Ashes ...
BONUS PREVIEW: A Trickster in the Ashes
Book Eight: Fin de Siècle Fever
Grey
12 Sevambar 1899 A.D.
Lamaroon: five miles outside Redeuiina
Crispin Kateralbin and the Slux man, Edward Macafryan , Jr.—Ted, as he insisted they call him—stood in the liquid-honey autumn sunlight watching Lamaroon laborers tear up thorn hedges. Sugarcane stubble wept up the scent of green death wherever they trod. This was the second week of construction on the Yamaxi Airport, and the fields Governor Yamaxi had bought up for the project looked like a battlefield, except where were the corpses? Crispin, taking his first spin in the Gorgonette he’d purchased for a song along with fourteen others from a demobbed QAF flight commandant turned black-market arms dealer on the lam from the Kirekuni bank rollers (the kites had been no more than hulks when Crispin acquired them, as obsolete as all the rest of the airplanes and trucks and tanks and jeeps and bikes and ships used in the war, but Yamaxi had shelled out to have them refurbished with powerful diesel engines)—having got the local Disciplinarians to clear the Dai Keuire straightaway so he could use the road for a runway—flying for the first time in more than three years—had been kidney-whacked by memories of patrolling the fringe of the Wraithwaste, seeing logging details hard at work below. They’d been clearing the forest so salvage trucks could reach a downed enemy aircraft, or to get wood for a replacement settlement for Wraiths whose Shadowtown had been swamped by the enemy, or to build a new barracks, or just because someone abhorred the concept of off-duty infantrymen and had ordered them “productively” out of his sight. But one couldn’t (Crispin reminded himself now, squinting across dusty blond stubble at dusty brown laborers taking a flask break, keeping one eye on the irascible man beside him) fall into the trap of remembering the past as a time of rhyme and reason, because back then, too, despite the staring exigencies of winning the war and staying alive, one had had just as hard a time making decisions, and—just as now—the choices that seemed clear-cut had resulted as often in disaster as had those that seemed six of one, half a dozen of the other.
“Say, these lads work like niggers,” Macafryan commented. His irony was obviously intentional: over by the half-uprooted hedge most of the men had sat down, and sun glinted off a flask passing hand to hand. Clouds of paperweed smoke rose straight up in the still air.
“Perhaps you are not yet used to the ways of the south, Mr. Ted,” Crispin said in his newly acquired, painstaking Throssomi. “To do business with us requires that you treat time as an infinite resource.”
“Time is money,” Macafryan objected.
“And you are very good to have patience with us while we absorb your so-practical Slux philosophy. My Kirekuni colleagues and I understand perfectly your impatience. I am afraid, however, it will take the work crew a little longer to become enlightened. In the meantime they are like mules: if they are not allowed to work at their own pace, they do not work at all. During the war, because of the ban on trade, jobs were very few, but now the harbor is crazed with shipping, and the shipyards, too, have changed from family businesses into industries”—Crispin gestured at the horizon, where construction cranes swayed amid the shacks of the outer slums—“and so, by working for us, the men feel they are doing us a favor, not the other way around.”
“But what I’m trying to find out here is how much longer is it going to take?” Macafryan slapped a succession of pockets with increasing irritation, finally jerked a fat gold watch from inside his coat, glanced at the dial, then stuffed it away: a gesture serving no purpose but to signal his impatience—Crispin didn’t think the watch even worked. “We’re scheduled to start construction on the first of October, we’ve been putting the stockholders off with sweet talk for a year already, share prices’re dropping like lead, my partner can’t lift a finger until I authorize the necessary expenditures, and Christ knows even if I decided to leave tomorrow I wouldn’t get home until the middle of November; ocean-liner departures are just about as irregular as everything else around here!”
“At any time you wish,” Crispin offered, “an airplane and pilot will be provided. With refueling stops in Naftha, Leondze, and Gazelle, you should be in Sahorlidun in less than a week. All expenses, of course, will be ours.”
The Slux looked momentarily taken aback. “T
hat’s mighty generous of you, Mr. Kateralbin.” Then he threw his shoulders back and forth a couple of times, puffed out his chest, and expostulated determinedly: “But the whole reason I’m here! If you recall! Is to observe the procedures of airstrip construction so we can start work in Sahorlidun! And correct me if I’m wrong but so far I ain’t seen no procedures, no, sir, not one little bitty procedure a-tall! Less you count paperwork! I’ve visited a lotta foreign places, m’ boy! And lemme tell you! Not even the Ixtarans don’t love red tape’s much as yer Kirry-coonies!” He glared at Crispin, indignant and expecting something to be done about it.
Crispin kept his expression bland and conciliatory. He lowered his gaze to the cracked wing tips planted in the stubble. Macafryan breathed out loudly in anger, and then with a sharp movement (Crispin flinched, thinking the Slux was going for the pistol stuck in the back of his waistband) he yanked a bottle from the recesses of his coat and swigged. Well Ted, I see you’ve learned the initial technique for coping with the Likreky, Crispin thought. The Slux restored the bottle to its hideaway, fought with a cigar and lucifers, and finally got the banana-sized stogie lit. Squinting into the sun, he puffed forcefully, well satisfied with the invective he’d delivered and apparently confident that Crispin would now take steps to shorten his distastefully necessary stay in Lamaroon.
Macafryan was a heavyset man, as tall as Crispin, with the largest, reddest-veined nose anyone in Yamaxi’s household had ever seen. Despite his mania for “hygiene” and “sanitary arrangements” he had an air of perpetual scrofulousness: his face shone with sweat, and, no matter what the hour, he looked as though he’d just walked ten miles in his jacket, topcoat, and top hat. He drove Crispin time and time again to the crumbling precipice of rage. When he spoke to Yamaxi, he couldn’t have been more deferent if he’d learned his business craft at the palace of the Significant, and in the company of Yamaxi’s wife Jionna he was a lumpish paramour, kissing her hand, passing her the salt before she asked, and almost every day producing with great ceremony an installment in a series of “house guest gifts”—some of them things Crispin wouldn’t have given a whore. But with Crispin’s wife Yleini he was worse than brusque, hardly a please or a thank-you. Crispin had to add them in when he translated the Slux’s words for her, along with the “Mrs. Kateralbin, you certainly must have got your beauty sleep last night, ha ha ha!” genre of compliments he regularly accorded Mme. Yamaxi. And as far as Crispin himself was concerned, the Slux appeared to have decided off the bat that despite Crispin’s having presented himself (mendaciously, but Macafryan didn’t know that) as special aide to the governor, despite his identifying himself (as he’d started to do so long ago that by now everyone believed him) as a Mime from the Mim, he was no more than a flunky provided by Yamaxi for the express purpose of ferrying Macafryan about the city, allaying his fears (usually to do with hygiene), and acting as a whipping boy for the virulence the Slux concealed so well in the presence of his Kirekuni coinvestors.
The Daemon in the Machine Page 50
