The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  But in less than a second, or so it seemed, he realized that he was no longer in the big top at all.

  There was no transition; it was just that the crash of sensations was so enormous and sudden that it took his brain a minute to process it.

  He was standing in a street. It was night. He could feel the pavement under his boots, smell smoke in the air. There was a saliva-sweet taste in the back of his mouth, as if he had drunk a cup of bitter tea. All around him, people were running and screaming and crying and trying to establish order and failing. Their clothing billowed around them. Monstrously tall buildings huddled over the pavement, blocking out all but a thin orange strip of sky.

  He could not distinguish even a word of what the people were shouting. The cadences sounded all wrong. Not like normal speech, nor yet like the Lamaroon his mother had spoken to him when he was little. The corners of Ferupe were different enough that they could seem like foreign countries. But this place was truly alien.

  The people had tails. Long, pale rat-tails carried high behind them, which they used as third hands: holding bags and bundles aloft, lifting swaths of skirts, wrapped around children’s wrists. Now he knew where he was. Kirekune.

  A man turned to scream something at him, his face stretched blank with terror. Crispin didn’t need to understand him to know what was meant. It’s getting closer! The windows in the tops of the buildings flickered redly with the light coming over the roofs.

  So why was he, Crispin, standing still? Why wasn’t he afraid?

  As if that flaw in the plausibility of the whole picture had shattered it, like a sheet of glass, he was no longer standing at all.

  He was no longer himself. He was sensation without comprehension.

  The night whistled blackly around him, windy and strangely warm. That warmth was of the air: the leaping orange glow that ringed the peak of the city-mountain before him, like a necklace of malignant orange crows. His cheeks stung with it and his eyes ran. The part of him that was still able to think wanted to shield his face, but he could not move his hands: he didn’t even have hands. Didn’t have a face. He was immaterial, swooping dizzily over a vast slum of shacks that crawled with people as tiny as ants fleeing a kicked anthill.

  The face of the city-mountain loomed clifflike before him, honeycombed with black maws, lumpy with buttresses and built-up ledges. Round domes and needlelike spires pricked up like black hair all over the mountain’s head.

  Closer, closer, and he was swooping up to one of the maws, entering it. He was drawn, pulled along as if he were on a string. The floor of the tunnel had been paved, creating a wide street. Filthy stalactites thorned the roof. Gaslights cast a black pool of shadow around each piece of rubbish in the gutter. The tunnel was empty but for a few groups of fleeing people. They all had long black hair. The tails held gracefully behind them gave them an oddly toylike appearance. They might as well have been clockwork mice. They came scuttling from around the sharp bend ahead, and from little tunnels that opened halfway up the sides of the main tunnel. Many of these lesser tunnels had sentry booth-like structures at the entrances, and the tiniest had curtains.

  But if they were all fleeing, then Crispin was flying in the wrong direction. Why was he going back into the city, when it was on fire?

  And again, the obvious question shattered the stream of images. He was standing in an empty street of the same city. A different street. Here, there were no crowds, no screams of fear. Crispin did not recognize these buildings with their elaborate facades, nor the crossroads farther up the steep hill where vendors’ stalls lay overturned, nor the still-lit gaslamps, to one of which a dog was chained.

  The dog’s terrified barking was the only noise apart from the ominous background roar. Orange light flickered over everything. Crispin could hear the flames crackling further down the hill. Close-up, he knew, a fire sounded like a cacophony of trees cracking and elephants screaming and glass breaking, all rolled into one. So it was a good long way off yet. But still—too near—

  And if he was correct, the fire was no longer above him, as it had been in the last street where he stood, but below him. He was on the peak of the mountain.

  A stranger stood in front of him. Crispin blinked. Why hadn’t he seen the man before?

  But before he could take in the details of the stranger’s appearance, the whole scene—sight, sound, smell, feel, and taste—fell to pieces with a long, bright, painless tinkling. It was as if his failure to recognize the man instantly had been a mistake in all possible worlds, a fatal step off the high wire of continuity.

  It was like going through the windshield in a truck wreck—if you were extremely light, like Crispin Kateralbin, and were able after somersaulting thirty feet through the air to land well enough on wet leaves that you didn’t break anything worse than a shoulder. Cartwheeling disorientation took him through blackness, and redness, and heat, and cold, and nausea, and unbearable pain.

  And left him, as limp as a dead rat, hanging on a trapeze under the wet, smelly big top on a rainy night in the Apple Hills, alone in the air, his swing gently slowing to a stop. Far below in the ring, people were standing in a circle around something blue. Many of the bleachers were overturned. (That reminded him of something. Something... What?) On the far side of the tent, a stream of locals were being shunted with some difficulty, like a herd of cows, out of the crowd gaps. Howard-the-lights’ cradle swung empty, and his glares were no longer aimed center air. Their beams dotted the sides of the tent with white circles.

  Crispin hauled himself up onto the bar. He peered down between his feet, holding lightly to the ropes. The combined weight of the performers and ringhands gathered in the ring was squeezing mud up between the squares of red-and-white-checked ring lino. Suddenly, yet without surprise, as if he had known all along (and that reminded him of something too ... something ... what was wrong with him?) he saw that it was Prettie lying in the center of the ring. Prettie sprawled unmoving in her blue leotard and tights. She must be badly hurt.

  “Oh, shit,” he murmured.

  Flames...

  Fading.

  His first impulse—simply to let go of the trapeze and drop down to join them—passed like a breath. Slowly, feeling rather awful, since everyone seemed now to be looking up at him, he snapped his body into a swing, back and forth, back and forth. After building sufficient momentum, he released the trapeze and flew easily through the air to the catcher’s tower. He could not help feeling a little pleased with himself as he made a perfect landing. But as he descended the ladder, back into reality, the ugly, vaguely accusatory expressions on the faces below told him what he had really known all along. Prettie wasn’t just hurt. She was dead.

  What had he done?

  Flames...

  He couldn’t remember. It was like blinking awake at the wheel, only to find that in a moment of exhausted unconsciousness, you have driven off the road. He stumbled as gravity reclaimed him into the heavy, dreary world of Smithrebel’s, where people parted to let him through and whispered as he passed, where nobody took the initiative to do anything, not even cover a dead girl’s body, not even straighten her neck or close her eyes, until the Old Gentleman arrived. Here he carne now, pushing through the curtains with a couple of ringhands behind him. He looked genuinely worried, as well he might, for Prettie was, had been, his star turn. Elise was crying. Herve was hugging his wife and staring at Crispin with a murderous eye. But Crispin himself could not take his eyes off the Old Gentleman. It was not Saul Smithrebel’s fault that his white, jiggling jowls, compressed between the collar of his red ringmaster’s coat and his top hat, looked over-painted, like a clown-face of sadness. But it was a truly remarkable sight, unprecedented in Crispin’s memory.

  Smithrebel shouted, “In the name of the Queen! Tell me you got the gulls out before she croaked!”

  Rain plinked on the roof of Sunflower 1 and on the raised shutters of the windows. Crispin slouched on one of the Old Gentleman’s tiny, hard chairs with his
legs stretched halfway across the room. The Old Gentleman sat against the other wall of the truck, behind his shaky little desk, peering between stacks of papers as if over a siege wall. Everything about him suggested he was on the defensive—but this was his lair, this was his showdown, and Crispin refused to be drawn into participating. Even though, from the way the Old Gentleman was dragging out the showdown, that was what he seemed to be asking for. Even though part of Crispin wished he could say something which would really set the Old Gentleman on his ear. That would be a treasure to take away with him!

  But on the other hand, what was there to say?

  “Thanks very much, I’m sure, sir”?

  He was fired. Sacked. Given the push.

  “Of course, I don’t expect you to leave now,” the Old Gentleman said fussily. “Ridiculous to leave you stranded in the middle of these confounded hills, heh? No, you shall be my guest until we reach Weschess. Or Thrazen Domain. How does that sound?”

  “Marvelous,” Crispin said flatly.

  He detected mingled irritation and uneasiness in the Old Gentleman’s laughter. “Believe me, Crispin, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to! But feelings are running high. At this point it’s become a question of my authority.”

  “No need to apologize.”

  “I merely... ” The Old Gentleman sighed. “Crispin, you have always been so reliable. I don’t understand how you could suddenly—”

  Crispin blinked. The Old Gentleman didn’t think he had meant to kill Prettie. Did he?

  “Nobody else understands either. That is part of the reasoning behind their outrage. The feeling is that Herve and Elise... and the boy... ”

  “Fergus.”

  “Yes. That they are suffering enough already. That it would be unforgivable of me to keep you here, constantly reminding them of their grief. As if I cared more for a half-breed daemon handler than for my star performers. Do you see? I have no choice.”

  You’re lying to me, Crispin thought. You know that everyone thinks I did it deliberately, because I was going to be let go from the troupe. Never mind that that makes no sense whatsoever. You’re afraid that if you show favoritism to me, the Valentas’ll pull out of the show. Then you’d really be up a creek, wouldn’t you? But you know, Old Gentleman, you’re the owner. You don’t, have to justify your whims. Nobody could force you to fire me if you didn’t want to.

  “I was going to quit anyway,” he said, wishing it did not sound so much like the false bravado of a punished child.

  The Old Gentleman yelped with happiness. “But I understand! Of course you, too, are heartbroken... You and she... oh, yes, I know. Everybody knew. And I understand perfectly. I remember how I felt when your mother passed away.”

  Don’t you drag her into it! Crispin thought.

  He had not actually had time yet to consider his feelings. At first, shock had overwhelmed him. Later, curled in the driver’s seat of Columbine 4, unable to face sleeping in the men’s quarters, he’d been overwhelmed by guilt. Guilt that grabbed him by the throat and overpowered him. And it drove him wild that he could not recall what he had done wrong. When he had failed to twist close enough for Prettie to catch his wrists, when he had, as Millsy told him, gone limp on the trapeze, failing even to look up as she tumbled thirty feet to the checkered linoleum and the elephant shit, screaming at him, reaching vainly... in her last moments, she had lost the grace which all her life had lifted her out of the ordinary. And Crispin had not the vaguest recollection of it. In his memory, there was no gap between Prettie alive, flying, and Prettie dead.

  He thought of Millsy, lying in his bunk in Hollyhock 7, out cold along with a dozen other men who on most nights could be found transfixed behind the wheel of a truck. Crispin, too, should be there. For a daemon handler, not even tragedy outweighed the lure of an unexpected full night’s rest. The Old Gentleman would not usually let anything short of a fire stop Smithrebel’s from tearing down on schedule, but he had allowed that the Valentas, now reduced to two, deserved their night of vigil. However, most of the circus seemed to be treating Prettie’s death as a welcome excuse to suspend routine. The dripping night was dead silent but for a voice which Crispin recognized as Elise’s, sobbing and throbbing and falling like a hoarse reed pipe. Even Crispin, shifting and scratching in the darkness, had been appalled to feel a sense of relief blanketing his mind. Questions and answers came gradually to seem less vital.

  Finally sleep rolled over him. Then there was no more Prettie hovering on the edge of his vision, no more Prettie asking with her big eyes if she could ride with him in the cab (and snuggle up under his arm, and kiss his neck), no more dreadful responsibility every night that she flirted with death. All the strings tying him to the Valentas were cut by the scissors of oblivion.

  Until he woke before dawn, grinding his teeth, his body prickly with sweat. He couldn’t remember what he had been dreaming, even after it hounded him awake again and again. Drugged with exhaustion, for sleep had got its teeth properly into him, he dragged his coat over his head and allowed himself to be the subject of a tug-o’-war between exhaustion and the terror that lurked in sleep. Finally, when morning shone through Columbine 4’s windows and the birds of the Apple Hills gave full, dolorous voice, he gave up the fight for rest and crawled out of the cab in search of breakfast, grumpy as a wild elephant, and sore-eyed.

  Now the Old Gentleman stared at him thoughtfully, fingers laced beneath sagging jowls.

  “In all honesty, Crispin, I’ll be sorry to see you go. You are my last reminder of Anuei. In a way—though there were many women before and after—mmm?” He laughed, inviting Crispin to join in a masculine wink-wink-nudge-nudge. Crispin sat like a stone. The Old Gentleman shifted some papers from one side of the desk to the other. Why was he dragging this out?

  “She was the love of my life, you know,” Saul Smithrebel said at last, with the air of one making a great confession.

  “Yes, well, we’ve all gotta get over our losses sometime,” Crispin offered. “I mean, don’t look back too often.” From outside came the cranky roar of a lion, and an elephant’s mournful trumpet, and the voices of the roughnecks. Now that Smithrebel’s had finally started tearing down, it was proceeding at its usual whirlwind pace. Crispin shifted, thinking about all the things he ought to be doing. It had not quite hit him that he was no longer an employee of the circus; he would never again have to load trucks, feed daemons, hump rolls of canvas across a field, take down the cook tent. Never again.

  The Old Gentleman stood up and came around his desk. Crispin did not stand; he would have had to bend his head—Sunflower 1, like all the trucks which had been made into living quarters, was partitioned horizontally as well as vertically, with the upper story reserved for storage. The ceiling was extremely low. Crispin looked up at the Old Gentleman with what he hoped was a pleasant grin (sunny boy holds no grudges). “Well, I suppose that’s that, then?”

  “I’m looking forward to heavy bookings in Thrazen,” the Old Gentleman said. “It’s farm country, and odd though it has always seemed to me, there is far more money for the populace in farming than there is in the daemon industry. Then, of course, there are the army bases around the Thrazen War Road.” He paused.

  Crispin had no desire to work on an army base. And if the Old Gentleman meant that he should join up... no, that would be unthinkable even from him.

  “The point is, of course, that I shouldn’t think you’ll find it hard to get a job.” The Old Gentleman coughed. “You can travel with us all the way through Thrazen, if you like, though of course I can’t allow you to participate in the running of things as you have been. Then when we reach Thrandon, you’ll get two months’ severance pay. That seems to me the least I can do.”

  The thunderous cloud over the horizon lifted a fraction. One of the peculiarities of Crispin’s affiliation with Smithrebel’s was that he never received anything over room and board. He was not sure whether this was Anuei’s legacy—she had been personally kept by th
e Old Gentleman, rather than receiving any regular salary—or whether it was simply the Old Gentleman’s skinflint nature. At least, and this was a larger comfort than it should have been, he knew it was nothing to do with his Lamaroon blood: the two roughnecks who were Kirekunis, and Kiquat, and the Izte Kchebukaran, got paid the same salary as anyone else. It had taken quite a bit of guts to approach them and work around to finding this out. Circus might be lower-class entertainment, but Smithrebel’s people, Crispin among them, considered themselves respectable and did not go around talking about money.

  Millsy had no interest in money. This was another clue to his high-upper-end origins. He provided Crispin with beer coin whenever Crispin asked, but because one had one’s pride, this was seldom.

  Now he was about to receive the first handout of his life.

  “Mmm?” the Old Gentleman said, tipping his nearly bald head on one side.

  “Come to think of it, I don’t know why I’d want to hang around until we get to Thrazen Domain,” Crispin said, grinning widely at the Old Gentleman. “I’ll just slink off, shall I? I wouldn’t want to make any unpleasantness worse. You know.” He paused to let the Old Gentleman get the drift of things. “People might think you might be doing something for me that you wouldn’t for anyone else.”

  Was it possible for the Old Gentleman to turn paler? Crispin seemed to have succeeded in touching a nerve, though he had been probing without much of an idea where to pinch.

  “But, my dear boy... Of course, I understand that in that case you will need more than a few pounds.”

  “Deuce hands, maybe?” Crispin suggested pleasantly.

  The Old Gentleman’s throat bumped. “Yes. Yes.” He fumbled in his pocket, and extracted crumpled pound notes one by one from handfuls of fluff, nuts, string balls, broken knife blades, and coins. Crispin could not take his eyes off the sorting process. There were fivers and tenners. Did anyone in the circus know that the Old Gentleman carried this kind of wealth on his person?