The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  Jacithrew gave a sudden great heave. Crispin tightened his grip. The room was lit by daemon glares nailed to the plunging taproot in its center. In the real world, outside the western domains anyway, daemon glares were luxuries, but in the Waste things were obviously different. A radiance far brighter than gaslight emanated from the silver cages. Each object in the cave, from the logs piled beside the fire hood to the thread-roots hanging from the ceiling to the wooden machine fragments—some as large as beds, some smaller than a man’s hand, some half-cannibalized for parts—cast shadows like black paper cutouts.

  He felt a tentative tap on his arm. It was the child. “Please let Jacithrew go,” Orpaan whispered. “Please please please. He’s me new dadda see, since me mum and me real dadda got kilt. He tends after me, please. I tend after him. See.”

  It was impossible to refuse such a request. Crispin let Jacithrew go; the old man flopped back onto his three-legged stool with a shriek. Orpaan, to Crispin’s astonishment, climbed onto Crispin’s knee and sucked his thumb feverishly, all the time keeping an eye on Jacithrew as if he were afraid the hermit might hit him again.

  Without warning, Jacithrew leaned forward and said clearly, “The orphan takes to you. You are one-of us.”

  “What? One of who?”

  “Your skin, your eyes! You are one of the ancient folk, the masters of daemons! Had you been one of the pale folk”— Jacithrew made a surprisingly swift chopping motion with one hand—”I would have gulletted you as you lay at my mercy. But now I am convinced of your heritage!”

  He was mad.

  “I had not thought there were any more of us left. There is Hannah, of course. But she is different.” He plucked at Crispin’s arm. “And you are so strong—so healthy!”

  As mad as a Marout hare. The old man’s ravings nearly topped Rae’s carefully worked-out future history for a tall tale.

  On the other hand, if Crispin humored him, he might just get a second bowl of stew out of the bargain. Soon he would be strong enough to start searching for Rae in earnest. He settled the little boy more securely on his knee, mindful of the child’s bruises. “Jacithrew, huh?” he said to the old man. “How’d you get a name like that? Sounds like a noble. A squire, anyhow. But I’ve already been wrong about that once, and I swear if you’re a noble, I’ll eat my hat.”

  They soar by the ponds of Heaven,

  go sporting to the farthest darkness,

  showing what it means to have a body hit no desires,

  to keep living on and on to the end of time.

  —Mu Hua

  Secret Signs

  30 Marout 1895 A.D. The Wraithwaste: Holstead House

  Rae did not know what to say. To her intense frustration, she suspected she was going to cry. They wanted her to tell them all about herself, and there was no way, of course not, so why couldn’t she come up with any lies? Her mind was blank of everything except fear. And a shriek that echoed silently: Crispin...

  She couldn’t stand them all staring at her like this. The pity in their eyes—

  She rested her forehead on her blanket-wrapped knees and shuddered. She remembered stumbling through the naked woods yesterday morning, hanging on the blond girls’ shoulders, into sudden shocking greenness, past an earthy enclosure where chickens, ducks, and turkeys gabbled to each other across a pond, into the house where the girls lived. There had been something wrong with her, she still did not know what. Her body had tingled all over as if all her limbs were asleep and would not wake up, she had scarcely been able to form a coherent thought, and when she tried to speak, her words staggered drunkenly. They had led her to this attic bedroom, they had plumped up the goose-down pillows and folded down the patchwork coverlet and told her to go to sleep. Since the door was locked, and her head was woozy, and every time she touched the window catch a shock of occult pain went through her, she had gone to sleep. When she awoke it was night. She had slept at least twelve hours.

  She had barely had her eyes open for a minute when they had all pushed into the room, skirts swinging, hair flying indecently, a nightmare of loose femininity. “She’s awake! She’s awake!” In with them wafted a strange, prickling not-scent that made Rae’s eyes sting. They gathered round the bed and wanted to know her name, where she came from, what she had been doing in their daemon dell.

  “I don’t know where I am,” she said, raising her head. “Who are you?”

  “Oh, the poor child.” Their voices rang with concern.

  “Poor girl. Rae, that’s her name, isn’t it? Rae.”

  “She’s a Kirekuni, you know.”

  Panic swelled in Rae’s throat. What supernatural perception did they possess? Then she remembered that they had undressed her. Her skin was bare under the soft woolen nightgown they had put her into. “You already know about me. What more do you want?”

  “Her nationality matters not at all, Millie,” said another, severely. “A woman is a woman.” It was the oldest one who spoke, the crone with the beautiful face. Rae longed to pin up the silver hair that straggled over her shoulders—then the aristocratic cheekbones and high forehead would be done justice. She’d have to get rid of that sack of a dress, too. Give her a gown of pale mauve linen, with a trumpet hem, and pearls at her neck...

  Rae’s terror was slowly subsiding.

  The old woman rested an authoritative hand on the shoulder of the dark-skinned one who knelt dose by the bed, her black eyes fixed on Rae’s face. “I am Anthea,” the old woman said. Her brown-spotted fingers closed a little tighter on the dark one’s shoulder.

  “Hannah,” said the dark one.

  “Liesl,” said the tall, freckle-faced woman standing at the foot of Rae’s bed.

  “Sally. Millie. We’re so happy you’re here, Rae,” said the two blond girls, speaking with a simultaneity that would have earned applause from a music-hall audience. They giggled, as if appreciative of their own comic effect. Rae guessed they were only a couple of years older than herself.

  The freckled woman—Liesl—turned on them with sudden fierceness. “What are you two doing up here, anyway? You ought to be watching Mother! Go on! Get out!”

  The taller twin—Sally, Rae thought—yelped and brushed at her arm, though nothing had touched her. Without a backward glance, they piled out the door. “Impossible,” Liesl muttered. She folded her hands on the foot of the bed, glancing defiantly at Anthea.

  “We are not giving Rae a very happy introduction to our sisterhood, Liesl,” Anthea said. She smiled sadly at Rae. “I’m sorry. But we are glad to have you here. I hope we did not give you the impression we were not.” She moved slowly over to the dresser and took a pile of clothes out of the drawer. “Hannah, you may go. Liesl—mmm—you may go to the menagerie and pick out a daemon for her to practice on when I show her our first tricks. She may as well start finding out what we do here.”

  “She hasn’t even told us where she comes from!” Liesl said in a low voice. “Did you notice that, Anthea? Or has she bewitched you, as Sarah did? And she hasn’t told us why she was with a Wraith! She might be planted by the culties, like Sarah, to sabotage us! Or by the lizards—seeing as she is one! How can you talk of showing her our tricks?”

  Anthea’s old gaze rested on Liesl. “Have I been wrong yet in the matter of a girl, sister? We will keep this one.”

  Rae started upright in bed. “Your ladyships! I’m afraid there has been a misunderstanding—”

  “Sssh.”

  Liesl laughed. “Welcome to Holstead House.”

  “No call for sarcasm, Liesl,” Anthea said, her voice taking on an edge. “Out.”

  And before Rae realized what was happening, the door had closed after Hannah and Liesl.

  Anthea let out a sigh. Then she smiled and held out the folded clothes to Rae. Fine wool. Rae fingered it. Her mouth watered. It felt like Anchain cashmere from the south. But how could it be, here?

  Perhaps the women—the trickster women—were not cut off from civilization at all. Just becau
se Rae and Crispin had been walking for days did not mean they had come very far. But where had they come? And where was Crispin? What had the women done to him, when they left him lying on the grass of the daemon dell?

  “Get dressed, my dear.” Anthea lowered herself with a sigh onto the foot of the bed. “Please, give no thought to their hostility. Things are strange these days; no one from Ferupe can be trusted. We have had to become cynical. That is why Liesl was rude. But she should not have questioned my judgment.” She shook her head. “Are you hungry?”

  “No,” Rae said. She was starving, but she would not have eaten anything the trickster women offered her unless she was at death’s door. To think she had suggested that she and Crispin throw themselves on these women’s mercy! There was no mercy here: she could feel it in the way they treated each other.

  “Then we shall go down to the menagerie.” The older woman smiled. “I am so excited. I know you weren’t planning to come to our house, Rae. You’ve made that clear enough. I hope that someday you will tell us where you were going. Not many travelers come this far into the Wraithwaste, unless they’re coming to us! And none of them ever leave. I should not like to see you end that way. However, I am convinced you will not. Once you see what our life is like here, you will no longer want to leave.”

  Rae stripped her nightgown off. “You’re trickster women,” she said.

  “That is what they call us in Ferupe. But we have no tricks that a girl of ten couldn’t learn.” Anthea laughed, and Rae found herself smiling, too. “We are just ‘working girls’.” The meticulous way she used the slang term pointed up her old age. “You are a ‘working girl,’ too, aren’t you? You have a look of independence about you.”

  “I’m a costume designer,” Rae said, unable to keep a trace of pride out of her voice.

  “Wonderful! But you are not completely independent, are you? You are part of a network the size of a town or a city, without which you are nothing.” Anthea’s voice was so gentle that for a minute Rae did not realize the trickster woman had utterly dismissed Rae’s passion. Anthea went on, with that edge creeping into her voice again: “We, on the other hand, have complete autonomy. We have all of the Wraithwaste for our domicile. The only people within two hundred miles are others like us.” She smiled. “Other ‘working girls’.”

  Rae was getting an increasingly bad feeling about the nature of this place. To hide her confusion, she fastened the tiny wooden buttons up the front of the dress. She was disconcerted to discover that the garment was completely shapeless. Her breasts pushed it out into a shelf, and from there the fabric fell straight to the middle of her calves, without a flare in sight. Her waist was disguised. There was a slit in the back enabling her to walk, but that was all. “Your ladyship?” She plucked at the excess fabric. “I don’t think this quite fits.”

  “It fits perfectly,” Anthea said. “And—by the way—there are no ladies here. Call me Anthea, as if I were your sister.” She hopped up, very sprightly for a woman of her age, and took Rae’s hand. Her fingers were bony and dry. Rae smelled that strange, nostril-prickling not-scent. “Because I am your sister. And I should like you to meet our Mother.”

  Holstead House was built in the sprawling, organic style of farmhouses. It must have been at least five hundred years old, probably more. Rae could not get rid of the feeling that she had been here before; but that was probably only because she had been in so many similar houses during her days with traveling shows, when they were frequently reduced to singing to gentlemen farmers for their supper. The kitchen had whitewashed walls and stone flags. Tabbies dozed around the hearth that smoldered in one wall. Pointing to a closed door next to the hearth, Anthea said that it led to the drawing room. “We only use that room when one of the Freeman brothers, Jethro or Alfred—they are our agents—comes. That is, once in a blue moon. When we are alone we prefer to be comfortable rather than to observe the formalities. Beyond the drawing room there is a dairy and pantry, which open only to the outdoors.”

  Rae nodded. After the unnatural brightness of the bedroom, the firelight was soothing. Around the kitchen walls hung a wealth of peppers, onions, garlic, and squash, braided into ropes. From the look of the wooden sink, the house had running water. Running water! The provenance of those wealthier than Rae ever hoped to be. Her mouth watered at the sight of half a loaf lying in its crumbs on the kitchen table. But she was strangely convinced that she must not eat anything here, that it would be laced with mind-altering poisons.

  Anthea drew her back into the high, dark entrance hall that would not have seemed out of place in the Seventeenth Mansion. But they did not go out into the front garden, though Rae would have liked to see all that greenness again, even in the dark—just to know that it had been real. The back door was even more massive than the front. Anthea beckoned Rae out into the night. “Around here. We have no doors between the house and the menagerie. It is safer this way.”

  Rae had forgotten how cold it was outside. Gasping, she crowded into the door that Anthea opened. The brilliance made her eyes hurt. Anthea reached over her and slammed the door shut.

  Rafters arched to a roof as high as that of a music hall. Whippy, naked branches and serpentine creepers twined up the walls. In a farmhouse, this would have been the byre—or in a wealthier establishment, servants’ quarters. Here it was a tropical garden, lit by a hundred unmoving suns.

  Anthea turned to her, smiling broadly.

  “Where’s all this light coming from?” Rae whispered.

  “Daemon glares.” Anthea pointed up. The suns were only ceiling lights, as bright as the overhead stagelights in the Old Linny, except white, not colored. And because they were everywhere—on the walls, on the trees, even half-buried in the earth—neither the trees, nor the flowers, nor Anthea or Rae themselves cast any defined shadow. It was what gave the uncanny impression of daylight.

  She picked up one foot. A shapeless puddle of blackness shrank beneath it.

  She looked up. Anthea was watching her with a strange expression on her face: not hostility, or dissimulation, but joy and pride and the desire to impress. Rae had readied her defenses for everything conceivable except this naked want. It was her instinct to recoil. She carefully kept her face immobile.

  Faint insect sounds swelled around them. Nothing moved.

  “Pssst!” Anthea hissed, rising on her tiptoes, looking up. “Sssst!”

  She stripped the sleeve back from one wrinkled arm with expert speed. “Sssst! Here, baby, here, dear one! Adorable Fanimus!”

  An especially large flower fell slowly from the branch of the dogwood to which it had clung, twisting and turning (though the air was preternaturally still), its tiger-striped petals fluttering like streamers. It landed asprawl on Anthea’s thin arm, dusting her skin with pollen, and though it could not have weighed more than a few ounces, Anthea staggered under the impact. “Fanimus,” she murmured caressingly. And the flower became a tiger-striped baby of perhaps a year. It clung to Anthea’s arm with an un-babylike strength.

  “I love you,” it said in a high voice, crawling to her shoulder. “Is the bread ready? Eleven dozen head, that’ll be 242,000 pounds—shall we send it to be deposited as usual?”

  “In the name of transcendence,” Rae said, watching Anthea play with the daemon. “You can do that. My—my friend—would be so envious.”

  “Your friend?” Anthea said absently, caressing the daemon. “Liesl and Hannah went back to the dell to look for him, earlier tonight, but he was gone.”

  Rae did not like to think about what the trickster women would do to Crispin if they caught him. She chewed her lip. Will he come? He’s probably twenty miles away by now. But he has to come. He can’t leave me here! I don’t know how to escape! Crispin...

  Nights of watching him sleep sprawled on his face, watching his broad back rise and fall. Mornings of going stubbornly through her toilette, ignoring his pleas to come on, come on, the sweet awareness of his gaze resting on her body and hair.
The impossible, absurd longing to touch him, just once, to close her fingers on his forearm. She knew the warmth of his skin. She knew the prickle of his body hair. She remembered... She would not let herself remember how his arousal had felt, pressed against her leg, in the heat of those last few moments before he discovered what she was.

  Anthea said, still in that abstracted voice: “Are you watching closely, Rae? You have probably never seen a daemon materialized. Or if you have, it was celled in the bowels of some machine with a collar round its throat. Daemons are invisible, except when they choose to materialize, and they materialize only when they feed.”

  “What—what do they eat?” Rae forced herself to pay attention.

  “Each other. And trees, plants, any vegetable growth. Animal life, if necessary. That is why the Wraithwaste is a waste. Nothing is alive here, except where we’ve forced it to live again by clearing out the daemons. There’s threads of sap running through the pines, keeping them from rotting where they stand, and that’s all. Most of the animals have been gone for at least fifty years, eaten by the daemons, or driven out.”

  “But wasn’t it always like this?”

  Rae could not imagine the silent forest through which she and Crispin had wandered ever having been green. Death was so thick in the air that it seemed the desuetude must have lasted a thousand years.

  “Not always.” Anthea leaned against the lower branches of the tree from which the daemon baby had fallen. Rae blinked, seeing the tangled, naked trunks shift to accept her weight, linking themselves in a kind of cradle. The baby scrambled off her arm, up to one of the topmost twigs, and gradually turned into a flower again. Anthea looked wistfully up at it, rubbing her arm.

  “The Waste has only been dead for, perhaps, fifty years. Although in trickster years, of course, that is more than two lifetimes ... It has to do with the war. How much do you know about the war?”