The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  She fell silent. Her lips moved as if she was chewing. She looked suddenly old.

  Rae shivered and knelt on the bank.

  “Jaseras?” she said, with a feeling that she was making herself ridiculous by taking part in this game. “Jaseras! Are you there?”

  It all happened in the space of a few seconds, and afterward, she was not the same person ever again. Such moments of personal flux are rare, and it is even rarer to know them as they happen. Rae did. She smelled the scent you got in a smithy where men were forging iron, and knew the world had changed forever. The air crackled. Tiny fingers tugged her hair. Small daemons were gathering around her head, diaphanous wings drifting across her vision. She had no attention to spare to brush them away. “Slow smooth powerful one,” she whispered, the words coming from she knew not where. “Jaseras. Body of beauty.”

  She knew, as if she could see into the water (but the knowledge had nothing to do with sight) that the daemon had thrust himself out of his rock cranny under the bank, unlidding his dark eyes, that he was paddling toward the surface, responding to the sound of his name. As he came closer, her world loosened at the seams, and opened up. There was a genuine connection between daemons and humans, something stranger and stronger by far than the connection between friends, or between man and woman, a resonance of blood, a forgotten instinct—and she had just remembered it. It was like feeling the person you loved most in the world coming toward you. Patterns of fiery light formed in her skull, burning so bright that the world before her eyes paled: tendrils of light reaching toward each other, melding. When she joined with the daemon she would no longer have to endure the distractions and demands with which her body constantly assailed her. She would dematerialize.

  Nothing life offered could be so sweet as that freedom. Who would be human?

  Jaseras sounded.

  The tiny daemons scattered, chittering, as his sleek head thrust through the surface. He must have been at least ten feet tall when he stood on solid ground. His face was more beautiful than any man’s, his hair floated on the water like black weed, his spine was finned like a trout’s, his skin was the color of red rose petals. She wanted to touch him.

  Slowly, so slowly that the moment seemed to last hours, he reached out of the water and took her hand. His skin was wet but not slimy, soft but not clammy. Her hand was completely hidden in his fingers.

  “Now get up,” she heard Liesl saying, from a great distance. “Stand up, girl! Make him follow you!”

  How did Liesl expect her to move? She knew instinctively that movement would shatter the communion. Jaseras’s power pulsed through her, an electrical, sexual buzz that came in waves as he rested his elbow on the bank and rubbed his cheek against her arm. She couldn’t have moved for the life of her.

  “Rae!”

  That wasn’t Liesl, was it?

  “Hist! Rae! Up here!

  A familiar voice. Whispering. Rae suspected she wouldn’t have been able to hear it if not for the daemon. Physically connected to Jaseras’s power, her senses were sharpened tenfold.

  With a great effort, she focused on the woods at the top of the other side of the dell.

  Nothing moved.

  “Now, Rae! Here!” Liesl shouted, and Rae felt the length of silver lame hitting her back and sliding to the ground. Jaseras flinched. She kissed his fingers, she would swallow him whole if that would make him stay with her—

  “Rae, I’m here! Dammit, girl! Just give me some kind of signal! I’ll deal with her, but I—I have to know if you’re on her side! If you are—you’re not, are you? You’re not!?”

  “This is the hard part, Rae!” Liesl’s voice had taken on an oddly pleading tone.

  “Rae, in the name of the Queen! Give me a sign—” Crispin was pleading with her, too, in the only way he knew how, with anger. He must think she could not hear him. Was he readying himself to attack Liesl even now? He must not do that.

  She sat back on her heels. “Crispin, where are you? I can’t see you!” Her voice was as loud as a child’s cry, and wavery, petulant. The connection with Jaseras broke. She clapped her hand over her mouth.

  She was back in her own body, huge, awkward, cold. Physical sensation roared through her, destroying the fine points to which Jaseras had tuned her senses. Her feet had gone to sleep. She opened her eyes and found that she had sprawled over into the grass. Liesl was standing above her. “Get away!” she shouted at the forest. “This is not your place, Wraith! Jaseras!”

  The big daemon splashed out of the water in a rainbow of transformation. His legs split into a fan of feathers. His arms stretched into wings of translucent skin. His face elongated and stiffened into a beak. He rose into the air and dived between the pines, shrieking gloriously.

  Rae screamed, “Jaseras! Oh, my love!”

  And the daemon faltered, reeled through the air, and fell in a muddle next to her. He smelled of burnt leather. Liesl choked and staggered back. Up in the pines, there was the noise of somebody—actually, it sounded like two or three somebodies—getting away. Rae gathered Jaseras into her arms. She did not have even to try for communion with him, not this time—he sucked her in. His power pulse boomed like thunder, terrifyingly erratic. Crispin. Jaseras. Cris. Jaseras. Jaseras—

  Silence descended on the dell.

  Liesl pulled Rae roughly to her feet. “How I hate them!” Her low voice was trembly with loathing. “Forever interfering in our business! The Waste is ours, not theirs! All they know how to do is destroy our work, the sly, black shadows?” She shook her fist at the brown face of the forest above the waterfall. Her voice cracked. “You have never, not once, done anything which might encourage me to respect you!”

  Rae gathered Jaseras to her breasts, trying to support his trailing wings and his water-slick body. He was transforming into human-form again, slowly, as if invisible hands were remolding his body from the outside. He was very heavy. She couldn’t feel the pulse of his power anymore.

  “Leave it,” Liesl said. “He’s dead.”

  Revulsion washed through Rae. She dropped the demogorgon and scrambled backward.

  “Yes, I know.” Roughly, Liesl pulled her to her feet, well away from the corpse. It was as corporeal as any dead bird, though no one could have mistaken it for a bird.

  “We have to bury him,” Rae said shakily. “Don’t we? Shouldn’t we do something?”

  Liesl pulled her to her feet. “No. There’s nothing we can do. It’s best to leave them for the carrion-eating daemons. That way, their deaths are of some use.”

  “Don’t you care?” Rae heard her voice scaling toward hysteria.

  Liesl stuck her hands into the pockets of her coat. “I know what you’re thinking, Rae. There are far too many of them, and nonetheless one could mourn each one as a lover. But if you think grief is intolerable, try guilt. We ship out hundreds of them every year, and each one that goes into captivity would be better off dead.”

  “I don’t understand why he died. He flew up—and then—”

  “The Wraiths killed him out of sheer spite. They are no better than wild beasts.”

  Liesl spoke as if she knew Jaseras’s killers from long experience. Yet it had definitely been Crispin up in the pines. Then, Liesl could not know it had been he. Logic helped Rae regain a little self-control.

  “Who are they? The Wraiths?”

  Without warning Liesl started toward the edge of the dell. Rae scurried after her.

  “They lived in this forest before it was ever part of Ferupe. Before there was a Ferupe. They have daemon blood. A lot of it, even today. It’s possible to civilize them, but even then you can’t trust them.” They started up the side of the dell. Rae’s feet slipped on the exposed roots; her dress hampered her movement. “Our sister Hannah is a Wraith,” Liesl said. “You must remember that. Don’t treat her the way you would treat anyone else, because she’ll take advantage of you. That’s how they are.”

  They were walking through the dead pines now. Liesl held
a broken branch out of Rae’s way.

  “You didn’t do too badly,” she said abruptly. “Even if the Wraiths hadn’t come, I would have had to step in—you weren’t in any condition to follow through on your initial overture to him. But you established communion in such a way as to make me think that you have talent.”

  Rae’s heart swelled. In the back of her mind, she was appalled that so qualified an approval, from one she mistrusted, could make her happy. But she had forgotten what it was like to be approved of. The word encouragement had not been part of Madame Fourrière’s vocabulary.

  “Thank you,” she stammered.

  Liesl laughed. “You don’t trust me. You’re wise. But listen now”—her face went serious—“you would do well not to trust Anthea, either. She may act like your own mother, but she’s a daemon in disguise.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, not literally.” Liesl’s mouth quirked. “I mean that she is extremely charismatic, in such a way as to deceive the unwary. When a new girl comes to the house, Anthea isn’t straight with her, the way I’m being with you now—she tries to draw her in by making this seem a far nicer place than it is. You’d think she would know better after the number of failures we’ve had. But in fact she doesn’t have the wisdom which comes with age. She’s much younger than she looks. How old do you think she is?”

  “Sixty?” Rae hazarded. “Seventy?”

  “She’s a year younger than I am. I’ll be twenty-eight this summer. There’s no such thing as an ancient trickster woman, Rae. Mother is only forty. The twins are thirteen. You’d never have guessed that, would you? But some of us have aged faster than others. Like Anthea.”

  There was no way Anthea could be only nine years older than Rae. It was impossible. The sun of her success with Jaseras went in. “You’re just trying to get me on your side!” she blurted. “You and Anthea hate each other! That’s obvious! Why should I believe a word you say?”

  “Why should you believe a word she says? In the name of the Queen, follow through, Rae,” Liesl said irritably. “Of course I want to get you on my side. For your own good. I don’t hate Anthea, in fact I love her dearly, I’m merely trying to tell you the truth about her. She’s afraid of losing her authority. But in fact she never had any. There’s no use in looking to her for protection. The rules are the rules, and none of us have any say in that matter. Anthea did at one time, but she couldn’t hold out long enough to make the rest of us accept her as Mother’s successor. And for years now Mother has been too much lost in her mind to enforce her will.”

  Rae shuddered. Up ahead, greenness glimmered through the denuded pines. They crossed the road, a sandy strip like a winding slot in the pines, into the garden.

  “Is it all too much for you? There are traders coming from Valestock next week,” Liesl said. “You still have the option of leaving with them.”

  Back to Valestock? Never. Crispin... He had come for her, he had come, as she had feared he would not. But she was no longer sure she wanted to leave to go with him.

  Her communion with Jaseras had changed her outlook entirely, coloring everything a slightly different shade. Certain things, such as communing with daemons again, had taken on new importance. Other things no longer had much importance to her at all. Her gratitude to the trickster women had been replaced by the need to root through their secrets and extract anything else that might be as wonderful as what she had experienced this afternoon (no matter how badly it had ended). Liesl’s apparent straightforwardness made her perversely eager to find out what the red-haired woman was still hiding. “I’d rather stay,” she said definitely.

  “Very well,” Liesl said. “Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  Gingerly, Crispin touched the bite on his arm. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.”

  He and Orpaan sat with their backs against a pine from which the bark was peeling in long, threadlike pieces. Orpaan was weaving the threads into triangular mats. “He’ll like these,” he said. “He might be able to use them for the flying machine. To make it more comfy.”

  When Orpaan said he, he meant one person: the madman Jacithrew. Crispin did not answer. He had had all he could stomach of Jacithrew and the flying machine. His arm burned as if a hundred fire ants had all stung him in the same spot. Oil and salt. That helped, he remembered. If he only had some. And the foul smell of the daemon’s death clung to his clothes and skin; only a good wash would get rid of that, and washing was a forgotten luxury.

  He looked over at Orpaan. Even if the child, like Jacithrew, could trick daemons, how was it that he could kill them? Millsy had not been able to do that, nor had he implied that any tricksters could. Orpaan hadn’t even struck out at the daemon, just slithered in front of Crispin and stood his ground, his little fists clenched.

  Crispin closed his hand over the child’s fluffy head and turned Orpaan’s face gently upward. The small fingers fell still on the bark weaving. Eyes empty of deception met Crispin’s. “Orpie,” Crispin said, “it’s important. Please tell me. How did you make that daemon stop attacking us?”

  “Because you didn’t.” Orpaan blinked. His eyelids were almost purple. With his skinny body he bore a resemblance to a naked bird.

  “I said how, not why,” Crispin said.

  “You were fighting it all wrong. If I hadn’t been there, you would’ve got hurt.” Orpaan spoke fast, but Crispin was coming to understand his oddly stressed accents. “I had to.”

  “I couldn’t’ve done what you did, Orpie. No way. Who taught you?”

  “Nobody taught me. ‘M a Wraith. Wraiths know daemons.”

  “Am I a Wraith?”

  “No! He thinks so, but you’re not!”

  “Could you teach me to do what you did?”

  Orpaan appeared to think deeply. “Maybe,” he allowed at last. “But your blood’s probably wrong.” Crispin held his breath.

  Trickery was in the blood. And blood could not be changed. But mightn’t there be a chance? Everything was different in the Waste. Anything could happen.

  “One time, Hannah told me—she told me if I wanted, me and her could share our blood with her sisters, and make them stronger. I don’t like them, I didn’t want to. I s’pose—maybe—I like you. I could do it for you.”

  “Could you?”

  “Maybe! I dunno! She said it would hurt!”

  Orpaan was avoiding Crispin’s eyes and fiddling furiously with his pine bark. Nevertheless, Crispin couldn’t help pressing him. The pain in his arm needled at his patience.

  “Orpie. Where are the rest of the Wraiths? I haven’t seen any shimmer-trees anywhere around here.”

  “Cause there aren’t any around here. Too close to the tricky ladies!”

  “Then why do you and Jacithrew live here, on your own?”

  “Just cause—cause—cause they give us stuff. Stuff for me. They’re sorry for me!”

  But not sorry enough to take you to live with them! Crispin thought. Not even Hannah, although she’s one of you!

  He had disliked the trickster women without even meeting them. Now he had seen one, and it had done nothing to improve his opinion of them. The redhead had looked like a farmwife in that sack of a dress, with her man’s boots. And she’d dressed Rae the same way! Jacithrew had implied that the trickster women had as much money as minor royalty—so why didn’t they use it? Crispin had always envisioned trickster women—when he’d envisioned them at all—as dryad-like creatures scarcely dressed at all in veils and jewels, speaking in lovely flutelike voices, floating through the trees with daemons trailing behind them like lovesick troubadours. The reality was not only less appealing, it was downright distasteful. And the way she had been speaking to Rae ... ! Crispin had nearly plunged down into the dell. Only Orpaan’s urgent warnings held him back.

  She’s got daemons! the little boy had hissed, his eyes showing white around the irises. She could kill you just like that!

  But there were so many invisible daemons in the dell, thick as feathers from a burst
pillow. Which of them “belonged” to the red-haired woman? Millsy’s tame daemons couldn’t have killed anyone. How much stronger were hers?

  When he saw that big one rise from the water and transform into a bird, he knew. He had tried to fend it off with his knife, but it just dematerialized wherever he touched it. He couldn’t fight air. Meanwhile it had pecked him badly. If Orpaan hadn’t done whatever he had done, Crispin would undoubtedly have been killed.

  “Stop messing with my hair!” Orpaan shouted, wrenching away.

  “Sorry.” Crispin sighed and stood up. There were no explanations. There never were. “Let’s take you home.”

  Maybe he should just forget about Rae! Better forget her than die trying to rescue her! It was becoming harder and harder to remember the world outside the Waste. If he didn’t move on soon, his mind might warp like Jacithrew’s.

  Orpaan tugged at him. “Will get your girl back,” he promised. “They’re trying to make her tricky, but we won’t let them! We’ll get her!”

  His voice was sad as only an eight-year-old’s can be, vibrating so much with misery that it was almost comical. But he wasn’t playing for effect. A child raised in isolation has no sense of theater. Crispin knew Orpaan would be deeply hurt if he laughed. Instead, he bent and swept the little boy into his arms. Orpaan made a small noise and buried his head in Crispin’s shoulder.

  “You know what, squire,” Crispin said. “I could use your help when I go to get her. You’re more of a match for those bitches than I am.”

  What he really wanted to say was: I’m not going to leave you. Not ever.

  “Yeah. I’ll help.” Orpaan sighed and dug his fingers into Crispin’s neck. “Carry me.”

  “Wriggle round, then. Piggyback. Ouch, don’t grab my arm like that! Shit. Are you holding on?” He felt Orpaan nodding. “Here we go then!”

  It was a walk of perhaps three miles through the forest to the clearing where Jacithrew’s pine stood. Crispin was wearier than he thought, and his arm ached. He had to put Orpaan down before they had gone half a mile. Neither of them suggested using the road. Even in the company of a child who was a “native” of the Wraithwaste in every sense of the word, Crispin felt as if he were sneaking through enemy territory, surreptitiously observed.