The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  Daemons according to the Greek idiom, signify either Angel, or the Soul of Men... the Souls of Sain, and Spirits of Angels.

  —H. More

  The Heart of Light

  Icy rain spattered on the window of Rae’s room. She sat on the bed, fully dressed, stroking the marmalade cat which she’d found asleep on her stomach when she woke half an hour earlier. The daemon-trapping disaster had worn her out more than she realized. When she and Liesl returned, Anthea had professed not to have been told Rae was being taken to the dell. Scandalized, she had fussed over Rae and sent her to lie down. Rae had slept through to night.

  Her room was overbright, as usual, and hot, lit sharp-shadowed by the daemon glares affixed to the ceiling. The bright ozonic not-scent permeated the air. A few minutes ago Rae had discovered that if she looked at the glares from above, she could see a shadowy, multi-legged shape in each one, writhing in its hardwood dish. She guessed that before long she would wish she knew how to turn them off.

  She looked out the window into the lashing dark. Somewhere a few miles away Crispin was sleeping in the cold and the wet. Or probably not sleeping: no one could sleep in this. She visualized him huddled in the shelter of a thicket, smoking the last of his vile cigarettes to try and keep warm.

  A key rattled in the lock. Rae turned. It was Hannah. The Wraith woman balanced the tray of food she carried on one knee while she closed the door behind her.

  “Anthea told me to bring you this.” She set the tray down on the bedside table. As always, Rae was taken off guard by the light ironic tone of her voice, so at odds with the perpetually sullen look on her face. “She said you hadn’t eaten since breakfast.”

  “I haven’t! Thank you.” The scrambled eggs looked delicious. Rae reached for the mug of hot milk and sipped, savoring the faint taste of spices. It would be rude to start eating until Hannah left.

  Hannah sat down on the foot of the bed. “You went to the dell with Liesl today?”

  “Is Anthea still angry about that?”

  Hannah shook her head. “But I ought to warn you about Liesl. She’s not what she seems.”

  It’s the same thing all over again, Rae thought in frustration. The endless, thinly veiled backbiting which seemed designed for no higher purpose than to turn her around and around until she didn’t know whether to trust any of them! Then of course there was the possibility that they were all in it together, and meant to confuse her! Whatever the case, she was sick, sick, sick of it. “If all you’re going to do is criticize her, please don’t bother,” she said shakily.

  Hannah looked at her with a smile hovering around her mouth. “You wouldn’t speak like that to me if I were any of the others,” she said. “You’re lucky I don’t hold it against you. Do you know why I don’t intend to? You’re a Kirekuni, and I’m a Wraith; we are neither of us like them. They would speak to you differently, too, if you hadn’t... ” She made a small chopping motion with her fingers.

  Rae found herself disliking Hannah even more. She fought to keep her face stony.

  The Wraith woman folded her hands demurely in her lap. “But to be fair, you can trust Liesl, Rae. Underneath, she’s kindhearted. Kinder than Anthea. Anthea is constrained by the responsibilities of her authority—or her perceived authority.”

  “It was Liesl who told me you were a Wraith. I didn’t know what you were.”

  “Not even Liesl would be able to resist bringing that up,” Hannah said bitterly.

  “Are you—?”

  “I just told you so. Look at me.” Hannah tugged a strand of wavy black hair. “I was born not ten miles from here.”

  “But you look nothing like Crispin!” Rae bit her tongue. Whatever Crispin’s parentage, he hadn’t got a drop of blood in common with Hannah. “What is a Wraith?”

  “Oh, Queen.” Hannah tossed her head. “There aren’t as many of us as there once were. I haven’t spoken to another one in ten years—except for an old man who lives near here with his adopted son. I’ve taken them up as a sort of a cause, in lieu, I suppose, of doing anything more for my people. They’re helpless, they can’t fend for themselves.”

  “I haven’t seen them.”

  “Of course I don’t allow them to come wandering around the house.” Hannah must have read Rae’s expression as accusatory. “There’s no need to look at me like that. The extinction of a people is a dreadful thing. Can you blame me for not choosing to be extinguished along with them?”

  “No, of .course not!” Did you deliberately abandon your people? Rae was wondering. Or were you caught, compelled, coaxed into abandoning them? She did not want to follow that line of reasoning too far. “But what do you mean, they’re being extinguished?” she asked. “I don’t understand! Are we in danger, too?”

  “In the name of the Queen, girl!” Hannah picked up her feet and laced her fingers around her ankles. “Of course we’re in danger! Have you never heard of the war?”

  “Oh,” Rae said. “You mean the soldiers are killing your people?”

  “Not precisely. Well, not in a consistent fashion. We aren’t Ferupe’s enemy.” The daemon glares cast shadows on Hannah’s face that twisted as she moved, disguising her expression. “Maybe we were, thousands of years ago, but now the army pretends we don’t exist. It’s easier for everyone that way.”

  Rae imagined the kind of persecution she and the other children of the Dynasty had endured, magnified to include the carnage she vaguely associated with the war. “How can you say such a thing?”

  Hannah’s face did not change. “Because we really don’t exist anymore, as a people.” She sighed. “All right. I’ll tell you a story. The story of the Wraiths.”

  Rae glanced involuntarily at her supper tray, then returned her gaze to Hannah’s face. The last thing she needed was to offend yet another of them.

  “Before history began, say twenty-five centuries ago, the Wraiths owned the Wraithwaste. They didn’t have palaces or treasures, but they had all they needed. They had slaves to labor for them: the daemons, who at that time were not crazed beasts, but another race. The catastrophe of the present day began—this is all in the history books which you’ll be shown if you stay here long enough—when Thraziaow, Wraith King, took his great entourage of Wraiths and daemons out of the Waste to join forces with a people who had more potential for greatness. The Ferupians.”

  As a child, Rae had been made to repeat litanies: endless lists of Kings and Queens who at one time or another had held all humanity bound up in their hearts. Lists which began with the name of Thraziaow. No one had ever said he was a Wraith.

  “One can only suppose that the King’s aim was to unite the Waste with Ferupe, and create a power that could not be stopped. And his descendants, though they soon became fat, white, and inbred, were more successful than he could have dreamed. When the Wraiths first came out of the Waste, the Ferupians were little more than crofters ruled by petty nobles; but over the course of a thousand years, Ferupe expanded its borders to Cype in the east, Izte Kchebuk’ara in the south, and the snowlands in the north. The Wraithwaste remained its western border. Not of Ferupe, yet the most treasured possession of the Kings, because of the daemons.”

  “My teachers said that Thraziaow had revelations,” Rae said. “They never said he was a Wraith, though. I never heard of Wraiths.”

  “I’m surprised you were even taught of him! Ferupians don’t like to remember that their empire blossomed under the tutelage of Wraiths—even Wraiths who had a healthy share of that desire for personal advancement which is such a cherished part of the Ferupian mentality. As for the revelations, your teachers were right. Wraiths used to be prophets, it came from their constant proximity to daemons. The gift has almost vanished now. I think it was concentrated in the ruling dynasty, and when Thraziaow left the Waste, he took it with him, just as he took the secrets of daemon mastery. Did your teachers tell you that?”

  Rae did not want Hannah to ask any more questions about her teachers. The trickster women’s
tolerance might extend to Kirekunis, but it certainly would not embrace culties. “What were the secrets of daemon mastery?”

  “That’s the kind of thing I should be talking to you about.” Hannah gave an obviously forced smile. “Mastery was the talent of the Wraiths. Trickery is women’s business, and it has all but replaced mastery. The Queen, and her relatives, are probably the only masters of daemons left. Then there’s handling, which is the specialty of men. It’s a very fine balance, and everyone distrusts everyone else—especially the daemons, who resent all of humanity. Resent isn’t a strong enough word. They hate us. They would destroy us all if they could.”

  “They hate us? How can they hate us? They’re just—just daemons... ” As Rae spoke, she remembered communing with Jaseras. For the first time in her life, she had felt herself in the presence of a kindred soul.

  Hannah shook her head. “We should never have let Anthea take you under her wing. She forgets how little common people know about daemons. She forgets that most people, and especially women, take them for granted, like food and air. Listen. Daemons were people once. Human, you understand. A race native to the Waste. Like the Wraiths. But not as clever as they were strong, and plagued with mutation. After millennia of enslavement by Wraiths and Ferupians, for all intents and purposes they have stopped being human. All they have left now is the desire to rebel and kill.”

  “So why don’t they?”

  “Because ninety percent of the daemons currently in use across the world are just splinterons. You won’t have heard that term before. Handlers tend to use it to mean tiny feed daemons. But in reality, a splinteron is a daemon collared by trickster women in the Echre Domain forests, say, or the Southern Wylde. Over the centuries daemons have escaped, or been deliberately freed, in woodlands all over the world. The descendants of those daemons are like farmbred tigers: just as dangerous as any Wraithwaste daemon, but passive, and easier to trick. A Waste daemon can bend hundreds of splinterons to its will, given a chance, and in fact that’s how people are running the newest factories—the human overseer-handlers control the Wraith daemons, which in turn control the lesser daemons.

  “Splinterons come of isolated branches of the Wraithwaste blood strain. Centuries of inbreeding have weakened their—their ability to conduct. Every handler knows that a Waste daemon is the most powerful, but, just like a man, he thinks that that’s because it’s bigger. On the contrary. Waste daemons generally are bigger, but that has little to do with it.” She was ticking off points on her fingers, looking closely at Rae. “The daemon race is structured in a different way from humanity. Each human being has his own life, his own soul. But daemons all over the world have what might be termed a collective life thread. Each one, from splinterons to ancient Wraithwaste daemons, draws on the strength of all the others. Splinterons are only lesser because they’re not such good conduits of the occult.”

  She’s describing the daemon race sort of the same way Sister Flora and Brother James used to describe the human race, Rae thought. All linked together. It made sense, a dire, horrible kind of sense. She just could not quite pin it down—

  “Wraithwaste daemons can provide thousands of dp without exerting themselves. For heavy industry, they’re the only ones which will do. And that is why the war started.” Hannah took a breath. Rae twisted her hands in her lap. Anthea had said Hannah would tell her about the war, that it was the Wraith woman’s specialty. But it wasn’t what she wanted to hear about. Transcendence had guided her; she felt herself on the verge of truth. Tell me more about the collective life thread! Who holds the end of it? Where is the knot?

  Yet she did not dare interrupt Hannah, especially now that the Wraith woman was leaning forward, speaking with passion. At any moment she might say something that would rip the curtain off the picture of apocalypse that had until now hung in shadow in the central room of Rae’s mind.

  “The Kirekuni Empire is far younger than the Ferupian Empire.” Rae knew this. When she was younger, she’d had to memorize history backward and forward. “Some say that the first Significants were cousins of the Ferupian Kings—that the Lizard Significant, unlike his subjects, has no tail. That’s as it may be. But the histories are definite on the fact that in the beginning, the Kirekunis were isolated between their rivers, rich in metal, but ignorant of industry and technology. It was through contact with the by-then-full-grown Ferupian Empire, and trade by sea and across the northern pass, that the Kirekunis learned how to handle daemons. They instantly applied daemonology to warfare, as the Ferupians never had, and the Significant Empire grew to greatness, dominating the whole western side of the continent. In hindsight, we can blame the Dynasty for failing to see that if they taught the Kirekunis all the tricks of daemon manipulation, the Kirekunis would come to envy the Ferupians their possession of the greatest daemon source in the world. It must have become clear quite quickly that the Kirekunis had far more drive than the Wraith Kings, or at any rate their descendants, ever had. In building their empire, they didn’t just persuade dozens of scattered domains to unite under a single monarch—a relatively peaceful undertaking—but they marched outward from their homes on the plains and conquered thousands of miles of desert and steppe. They built Okimako. But even there, daemons have always been scarce. I have heard that in Kirekune, it would be unheard of to burn a daemon for light.” Hannah gestured to the daemon glares. “In all the lands that they conquered, the Kirekunis did not find one source of daemons as rich as the Wraithwaste. And even today, they depend on splinterons from the daemons that Ferupe once sent them in friendship, and later traded for metal. That’s why they mounted the war: to capture the Waste, which Ferupe had never allowed them to colonize as we do.” She shook her head. “We should have anticipated it! After all, every other time the Significants have wanted something, they have just rolled out their legions and taken it.

  “But this time they were met with resistance. Unlike the barbarian peoples, Ferupe had the resources to fight back. And I do not think it will ever stop fighting until the whole Wraithwaste is destroyed, and there’s nothing left to fight for.”

  Rae shuddered. Questions were bubbling in her mind, but she could not ask them. She could not let Hannah see how much she knew already.

  “That’s the irony of it!” Hannah said violently. “The Lizards are destroying the very thing they’re fighting for! They are settling the lands over which their soldiers have advanced. There are no more daemons there.”

  “But—but then—when the Waste is all cleared, there won’t be any more daemons at all, will there?” Rae grabbed at a thread of hope. “If they have a collective life thread, they’ll all just die, won’t they?”

  “No—no! That isn’t the risk—” For the first time since she’d begun speaking, Hannah checked herself. She shook her head, pressed her lips together, and turned away.

  Rae wanted to weep with frustration. A light was glowing in that room of apocalypse, but as yet it was too dim to see by. She had never imagined that a revelation might be stimulated by someone else; she’d always imagined it as a visitation, a swoon of lights and flutes. Yet everything was always far more mundane than one expected, wasn’t it? On a rainy winter night in a farmhouse in the middle of a dead forest, the world lights up and hangs dripping.

  “You can’t start explaining and then just stop!”

  “Can’t I?” Hannah laughed bitterly.

  “Everybody’s always told me half-truths. Even my teachers, when I was little, told me half-truths. They didn’t know the whole story. You know the other half. You’ve got to tell me! You and I are alike, aren’t we?” She used Hannah’s own argument against her. “Telling me isn’t like telling anyone else!”

  “I can’t help wondering why you want to know so badly.”

  Rae forced herself to meet Hannah’s gaze. “I communed with a daemon today,” she said, knowing that for Hannah, that would explain everything, and anything.

  Hannah smiled. The light in her face took Rae’s bre
ath away. “It’s a unique experience, isn’t it? It stretched your mind wide open. You realized that the definition of humanity is at once broader and narrower than you had been led to believe... But I am a Wraith, and perhaps it was different for you. For me, communing with a daemon under Liesl’s guidance was just a little bit different from what I’d been doing most of my life—just enough different that everything that had been unrelated clicked into place.”

  “You’ve described it exactly,” Rae said delightedly. “I always wanted to make my living in the theater, the real theater, not the music hall—”

  Hannah’s smile died. “Rae, I’m not talking about playacting. I’m an unnatural creature. I’m a result of things that happened decades, centuries, before I was born. I need to talk about those things. I have to talk about them. Liesl doesn’t—” She shook her head.

  “The Wraiths are the key, aren’t they?”

  “The key to what?”

  “To daemons!”

  Hannah shrugged. “You could say that.” Her dark eyes gleamed starlike under luxuriant fringes of lash. Peach chiffon, Rae thought wildly. Layers and layers of handkerchief-pointed hems. A sleeveless bodice with detail of glass beads dyed to match the fabric...

  “There’s nothing more to say about the Wraiths apart from the fact that we will soon be no more.” Hannah spoke absently. Yet her eyes did not leave Rae’s face. “For the first few hundred years we were left in peace. But as the Ferupian Empire expanded, daemon machines were developed, and the demand for daemons increased exponentially. In the last century, industries have sprung up all over the country. As far back as the tenth century, Ferupian women were sent into the Waste, first to learn from the Wraiths, then to oust them from the houses they had built with the Royal guilt money.” Hannah waved her hand around the room. Rae shivered. “All the tricks that my sisters and I know were once second nature to the Wraiths, both men and women.”