Rae shook her head.
“The degree to which the reality of Ferupe’s distress is kept from her citizens is appalling. I’ll explain later, or maybe Hannah will. The war is her specialty, you see.” Anthea laughed. “The long and the short of it is that soon we will be no more. I’ll leave the rest to her. But there is a bright side of which I do find it pleasant to speak: our task is far easier now than it was for our sisters a hundred years ago. Tricking used to be a difficult art. Now the daemons are so numerous that it is like picking up apples from under a tree. It is a joke really, a joke on the daemonmongers. They do not know that we catch more daemons more easily than our predecessors did, so they pay us the same per-capita prices, leaving us with far more money than we have any use for. We invest it in the Kingsburg banks. Of course, the more daemons there are in Ferupe, the more likely a disaster becomes, so one could say that we are being irresponsible; but to look at it another way, it is now necessary for us to provide Ferupe with enough daemons to last for eternity. And when the war finally reaches us, my sisters and I do not intend to be caught in the screamer factories. Rather, we will leave the Waste. But we will not starve.”
Rae could follow none of what Anthea was saying. Wars, daemons, disasters; none of it seemed particularly relevant to the bright stillness of the menagerie. She looked around, wondering where the rest of the daemons were. “But how exactly do you catch them?” she asked when Anthea paused for breath.
“Oh, my dear, forgive me! There is so much to tell you ... When daemons feed, they materialize. We create an ambiance where they like to come to feed. The smallest ones eat grass and berries, and they lure the bigger ones. Anything the size of Fanimus or larger we lure back to the house. Some trickster women, myself among them, hold, too, that the big ones get bored, and curious about anything they do not encounter in the normal run of their existence. They have minds; did you know that? At least, before they are collared.”
“How do you lure them back here? Isn’t it dangerous?” Rae remembered the huge, spider-limbed water daemon which had stunned Crispin, and which had stunned her, too, before it rushed back up the waterfall. That was what had been wrong with her on the walk back from the dell; that was how Sally and Millie had caught her so easily. That numbness, that inability to think. Daemon shock.
Anthea smiled. “It is dangerous. But only if it is done wrong. And no girl who does it wrong lasts very long here.” She patted the cradle of branches beside her. “Come sit with me. Exarces is very comfortable.”
Rae bit her lip. Anthea’s words sounded ominous. Uncertainly, she walked over to the cradle of branches and sat beside Anthea. The creepers on the roof kissed and separated, twining, parting. Rae blinked. It was as if she were watching them grow through a kinetoscope, speeded up, jerky from the motion of the hand crank. For the first time since entering the menagerie she became aware of the not-scent. It was so strong that it was no longer so much a scent as a texture in the air. The row of sunflowers against the wall of the farmhouse shimmered as if heat were rising from the clotted earth.
“Is everything in here a daemon?” she asked suddenly. “I mean, the trees—everything?”
Anthea smiled with girlish delight. “I wasn’t sure whether you’d guess.”
It seemed obvious now. Rae ran her hand along the smooth, dappled bark of the tree. “What did this look like when it was—” She had been going to say alive. “When it was a daemon?”
“This is its quiescent state. It’s how we store them until the traders come. This is really a warehouse, not a menagerie; but, in this line of work euphemisms are necessary. When they’re quiescent”—Anthea circled a branch in her thumb and forefinger—“it’s much easier to put collars on them.”
“But why don’t they dematerialize?”
“Maybe you noticed that the door is flanged with silver? The keyhole is silver, too. So is every single nail and rivet in the walls.” Anthea shook her head, glancing up at the roof. “And every beam is oak. Even if they could dematerialize, they could not escape without doing themselves an injury.”
This place must have cost a fortune, Rae thought. Who built it? For all Anthea’s rather ostentatious talk of investments, the trickster women seemed too out of touch ever to have had any initiative. It had probably been the daemonmongers, their masters, who had set them up here. The house seemed several hundred years old. Had there been daemonmongers hundreds of years ago? Of course there had. After all, there had always been daemons.
Anthea was looking at her closely. “My dear, I don’t want to pry. But have you family members in the business? You are so perceptive, I’m starting to wonder whether you did mean to come here after all, you mysterious little thing.”
“No.” Rae shook her head quickly. “Where I grew up, we were never allowed near daemons.” The Dynasty’s policy of noninterference had meant that the exploitation of daemons was frowned upon severely. And for some reason, that was one of the few Dynasty edicts which the Prince of the Seventeenth Mansion did not let his disciples contradict in their everyday life. There had not been a single daemon in Carathraw House since the Dynasty bought it. “But I ran away,” Rae said sadly. The temptation was too much for her: she was tired, and hot, and alone, and Anthea was nothing if not sympathetic.
“You ran away?” Anthea said. “From where?”
Rae shook her head. “Plum Valley Domain,” she said, biting her lip. She knew she had to resist the temptation; it was this same craving to share the things that tormented her which had led her, against her better instincts, to try to convert Crispin. Now she was convinced that she could not speak of the Dynasty without trying to convert her listener. The force of her belief seized precedence over her more oblique, delicately shaded needs. That was why she dared not start confessing her past to Anthea. On the other hand, Crispin had never been kind to her as this woman was. She could not remember anyone except Sister Flora, at the Seventeenth Mansion, ever being this kind to her.
Anthea started forward. “Look! There’s Mother!”
Rae looked up. She had not thought “Mother” really existed. But sure enough, a tiny white-headed figure with a yellow imp on either shoulder glided between two trees at the other end of the menagerie.
“She blends in well, doesn’t she?”
Rae nodded.
“I hope the twins are somewhere about. Mother cannot be trusted not to leave the door open when she comes back upstairs.”
“Anthea, ma’am,” Rae gasped. She could not stop herself any more. “I’m sorry, I ran away. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t—”
Anthea pulled her into her arms. Rae, her cheek pressed against cashmere, tried desperately not to cry. “You poor child! I’ve tired you, haven’t I? Yes, I have! I’m always too eager to show off the beauty of our life here! I forget that you have come through the Waste, and the first thing you need to do is recuperate! I shall have a thing or two to say to Hannah and Liesl for forgetting to remind me! There now There now.” She stood up, still holding Rae close. “Mother! Sal! Mil!” she shouted angrily, shattering the quiet of the garden.
Rae heard the twins’ footsteps. She pulled away from Anthea to face them.
“Girls, I’m leaving you in charge of Mother,” Anthea said breathlessly.
“That’s where we’ve been,” a twin who could have been Millie said.
“Watching her.”
“And watching you.”
“For the last three hours.”
Three hours? Rae thought.
“We think it’s time for Mother to go to bed.”
“When she’s ready to go,” Anthea said evenly, “you may.”
“Then we’re going to be up all night.”
“You pamper her too much, Anthea,” the other twin said sulkily. “She’s old. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. I can’t imagine why you bother.”
Anthea did not answer, but Rae could see her trembling as the twins sauntered away, arms round each other’s waists. Sa
lly extended her free arm above her head and dropped her head onto her sister’s shoulder. Now that Rae knew what the other girl was doing, she watched with fascination, not confusion. “Sssst!” It was a shrill, wet noise, like the sound a furious cat makes in its mouth. “Here, here, come—”
The daemon pushed up out of the ground and crawled up Sally’s body, red-skinned, with an enormous bald cranium and fingers tipped with long yellow claws. Rae watched all the humanity drain out of the girl’s face as the daemon wrapped itself around her arm and sucked her fingers, one after the other, lovingly. Her sister stood as steady as a rock, supporting her.
“Anthea!”
Liesl stood behind them, stolid, red-haired, angry. Muted by the undergrowth came the sound of the door slamming. “What are you doing? I thought I told you to give her some time to prove herself before you took her in here! Now she’s seen things we can never let her get away with!”
“You forget that we’re keeping this one, sister,” Anthea said. She took Rae’s hand and pulled her past Liesl.
“Her man is staying with Jacithrew!” the red-haired woman said. “He’s one of them—a Wraith! Just as the girls said! In circumstances like these... I can tell you, Anthea, you may as well forget about her!”
Anthea’s fingers clamped down on Rae’s wrist, and she pulled her through the trees to the door. Rae felt nervous and excited. It was like being a child again, thumbing her nose at Daphne from the safety of Sister Flora’s skirts. She had forgotten Daphne! When was the last time she had thought of her—with regret, with love, at all? How could she have forgotten?
The oaken door slammed behind them. The cold air rushed into her lungs like water. She almost choked.
The black-and-silver shapes of pines surrounded them, jagged cones made of broken mirrors. Tears of cold filled her eyes.
“Anthea, could you—could you show me the front garden?” She tugged the older woman’s sleeve, half-laughing, half-crying. “Look, the moon’s come out—”
I see that woman’s “bite several mouthfuls out of you,” the
laughter of those green-faced, long-toothed people and the
tenant’s story the other day are obviously secret signs.
—Lu Hsun
Daemons!
The next day, Orpaan showed Crispin the trickster women’s house. It was about three miles down the road, and if Crispin had kept going that night, he couldn’t have missed it. It was like an estate house straight out of the heartland, complete with a garden greener than anything else in the Wraithwaste. Orpaan insisted that the trickster women would know if they entered the barrier of oaks around the garden; Crispin was willing to risk it, to see if Rae was there, to get her back, but with Orpaan at his side, he dared not. They slunk all the way around the house and garden, keeping to the pines. No one came out or went in. But the presence of daemons was so concentrated that sometimes Crispin could hardly see for the shimmering of the air. The house gave off an aura of impregnability completely at odds with its comfortable, affluent appearance. Without having so much as glimpsed a trickster woman, Crispin knew they were horribly dangerous.
And they had Rae... !
Still, there was nothing further he could do now, and the day was only half-gone. In gratitude to Orpaan, he offered to take him fishing. Unbelievably, the child—the Wraith, as he and Jacithrew called themselves—did not know what fishing was. Crispin took him to the brook—to a spot well upstream from the daemon dell—and showed him, with string and bent thorns. They had to talk in whispers so as not to disturb the demogorgons that lived in the water. Crispin winced to think how often he and Rae had splashed unheedingly through the Wraithwaste streams.
They caught nothing, but it did not dampen Crispin’s spirits. Now that he had seen the house of trickery, he knew his enemy, and he felt that rescuing Rae might after all be within the realm of possibility. He tried not to think about spending another night with Jacithrew Humdroner in the claustrophobia-inducing underground house.
Orpaan too seemed content. As they walked back in the twilight, he grabbed Crispin’s hand and grinned. Crispin felt a surge of liking for the boy. It was Orpaan who had put Crispin to bed and brought him food; it was Orpaan who had answered his questions and showed him the house of trickery. What could Crispin ever do to reciprocate? Since he was already planning one rescue, perhaps he could just make it wholesale, and carry Orpaan off, too. Jacithrew was as dangerous as the trickster women in his own way.
But when they entered the clearing, all such thoughts were driven out of his mind by the sight of the old Wraith out in the open, upended inside a chaotic mass of wood and leather like a duck feeding on the bottom of a river. Clankings, tappings, and swears replaced the usual silence.
Crispin gaped, his suspicion that the old man was dotty becoming a certainty. He began to grow angry. What did the old loon think he was doing? All the bits of machinery that had lain about the root room were now arranged on the ground in the center of a stubby framework pod. Its leather wings stretched all the way across the clearing. Jacithrew was banging about with a hammer, singing to himself, as happy as a sandboy. When he heard their steps he bobbed upright, beaming. “See!” he shouted. “See, my flying machine!”
“Hannah helped him get the bits we couldn’t make,” Orpaan whispered, tugging at Crispin. “He says we’re going to fly away from here. He says we’re going to fly far, far away from the trickster women. But I thought he forgot. He hasn’t worked on it in ages.”
“It’ll never work!” Crispin said later, after he had persuaded the old man to leave his engineering for the night and come below ground for something to eat. He felt like a father to both of them. That should have been amusing, but it wasn’t. “You’re madder than a blue jay!”
The old hermit cackled. Inside his beard, his lower lip was poochy and soft. “You shall see yourself proved wrong-oh-wrong-oh, my boy! Tomorrow is the time! I am delighted”—from his seat on a tree stump stool, he made a bow—“to have a larger audience for my maiden flight than I anticipated.”
Crispin stared. “When you want to, you can talk like a fucking scholar.”
Jacithrew’s eyes were cloudy. He reached down, scrabbled in the pan of roasted hazelnuts, and stuffed several into his mouth. The pair’s food was left by Hannah, one of the trickster women, at the fork of the road. It was better than any Crispin had ever eaten. When he saw chicken soup and hazelnuts, his estimation of the trickster women had risen several notches. It had taken a great deal of self-restraint not to finish off the nuts as soon as he took them out of the fire. Courtesy! Courtesy! he thought, watching crumb-filled saliva drool down Jacithrew’s beard.
Jacithrew seemed to have decided that Crispin was worth talking to. Or perhaps—more likely—he did not know who he was talking to. On and on he went. On and on. Nine-tenths of his ramblings were pure nonsense; but he did not seem to mind argument. He even seemed to enjoy it. And even though the old Wraith was mad, Crispin could not resist challenging his absurd theories.
“My machine is of the soundest construction,” Jacithrew said proudly. “It will bear me up. I am light. And my daemons are as strong as any the pale bitches can catch.”
He waved a hand at the corner of the room, where the low-hanging roots shimmered in the bright light of the daemon glares. At least three very powerful daemons were squatting there, invisible. Another—Kankeris—guarded the door in the tree overhead. Seeing that one briefly materialize had given Crispin an understanding of the “shimmering trees” which he had noticed elsewhere in the Wraithwaste. Under each of those trees, he guessed now, had been a root room, the home of Wraiths.
Hopefully, better balanced Wraiths than these. Crispin did not like to think that Jacithrew and Orpaan were representational of their race—that living in the Waste was enough to drive even the natives mad.
The fire cast a feverish red light on Jacithrew’s face. Given the heating power of the daemon glares, Crispin could not see why Jacithrew had insisted
on lighting the hearth. Orpaan huddled at Crispin’s feet, arms wrapped around his leg, thumb in mouth.
“I shall fly over the tops of the trees,” Jacithrew said. “I shall fly all the way south to the land of the Painted Nomads.”
“The Red Nomads,” Crispin said. “Izte Kchebuk’ara.”
“Yes, Kchebuk’ara. Yes, that’s it. I can’t stay here any longer! A Wraith does not live on charity from pale people.”
Crispin ate another hazelnut. “You’ll kill yourself. I examined your machine, and it looks all right—I mean, it has wings and everything—but it can’t work!”
Jacithrew pouted.
“I don’t know anything about airplanes, but I know you can’t just jump off a tree and expect to fly,” Crispin said relentlessly. “It doesn’t make the least bit of sense. If that was the way it worked, everyone would be flying instead of walking!”
“Ah,” Jacithrew said with a big smile. “But everyone does not have my daemons. Have you seen my daemons? Sueras!” He clapped his hands. “Amanse! Gelfitus! Fremis!”
They materialized as they came to him, shambling hand over hand through the clutter like skinny apes. The largest, Fremis, which had crimson-and-cream-dappled skin, would have been fifteen feet tall if it had been able to stand up under the low ceiling. Amanse was a female with green hair. They filled the room with their long limbs, draping themselves over Jacithrew’s lap, over his shoulders, knotting themselves around his feet, chittering nonsense. Crispin froze, terrified that one of them would touch him. His skin prickled all over with anticipation of the shock.
Jacithrew grinned, his face framed by a circle of blue arm. Orpaan sleepily cuddled Amanse’s green-tressed head. She licked the child’s arm with a pink tongue, and Crispin wanted to sweep him out of danger. How did the Wraiths do it? In their natural state daemons were wild, dangerous creatures—but these were as tame as dogs! And they were uncollared! Millsy’s beasts had been child-sized; these were giants; and the Wraiths weren’t even tricksters! Crispin’s old daemon bites, from the time Millsy had tried to make him a trickster, ached hellishly.
The War in the Waste Page 21