The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  Outside, “screamers” shrieked in the distance.

  Pull yourself together!

  But—

  The end of the world. It was all going to happen as she had said. The death of the Queen. The destruction,

  Unless this vision meant Crispin could do something about it.

  But this was ridiculous. He was letting his nerves get the better of him. Nobody could see into the future, and even if that were possible, no one could change it! He remembered that on the occasion of both visions he had been strung out, wrought up. And there had been a third time, hadn’t there, when he dozed in the truck he had stolen from Valestock—that hadn’t been a fully fledged vision, but it had been clearer than any dream. On all of those occasions his nerves had been so tightly wound, his temper so high, that nobody would have found it strange if he started spouting gibberish. Seeing things was a relatively sane way of letting off steam.

  Lifting his head to stare at the blank wall, he did not know what to believe.

  The door opened. A man in the gray uniform ubiquitous in Chressamo entered the cell. A leather belt which looked as though it could deliver a nasty sting cinched his waist to a girl’s narrow span. He entered the room, followed by two guards, and the door closed behind them. Crispin did not get up.

  A smile creased the man’s seamed face. He was probably about fifty, but his face made him look a hundred. “You may salute.”

  “Actually, I’d rather not,” Crispin said dully.

  “You’re not a soldier? You’ve never saluted your superiors? Let me tell you, it will make your life a good deal easier. Like this.” The man demonstrated. Crispin sat back on his cot, knees apart. “You should be more frightened of me than of the Kirekunis.”

  “All you’ve done to me so far is lock me up.” Crispin did not care what he said or what happened.

  “Salute,” the man said. “That’s an order.”

  Reluctantly Crispin got to his feet and saluted.

  “Much better. Much, much better.” The man turned to the guards. “I’ll have coffee. But I don’t think this interview will be very protracted.” He glanced at Crispin’s untouched tray. “It doesn’t look as though the young man wants anything.”

  “I wouldn’t half mind a whiskey,” Crispin said.

  “Did you get that?” the man said, unbelievably. “A double shot of D’Aubier for the young man.”

  The door closed. “Thanks,” Crispin said. “What should I call you—sir?” He owed him that now.

  “Sostairs. Colonel. Can’t you read?”

  Crispin saw that one of the multicolored bars that decorated the man’s chest was in fact lettering. He shrugged.

  “Ahhh.” Sostairs let out a long sigh. Crispin wondered if he had inadvertently saved his own life, or made a terrible mistake. Maybe the thing Sostairs hoped to pin on him—whatever it was—depended on his ability to read. In that case, Millsy had been right, after all.

  But Sostairs was directing more questions at him. “Where were you born? What were you doing in Pilkinson’s Shadowtown? I’m afraid it will be necessary for us to know more about you, Mr. Kateralbin.”

  Crispin didn’t remember giving his captors his name. He shrugged again. “I was born in the heartlands in the back of a truck. I grew up in a circus. Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show.” He had nothing to lose by giving that information—were they to check up on him, they would find his record clean, at least as far as Smithrebel’s went, for circus people’s loyalty to their own, even after time passed, was stronger than their patriotism. Valestock was a different matter. So was the Wraithwaste. As he was wondering how to proceed, the guards saved him by coming back with two folding chairs and a laden table. Sostairs dismissed them and measured black coffee into his cup.

  The unfolded furniture, fragile though it was, filled the little cell to overflowing. Crispin glanced out the window, where the noon sky glowed sapphire, imagining the heat, and the wind, and the stink of daemons blowing from the Wraithwaste. His throat closed; he raised his glass in a wordless valediction, and downed the amber liquid at a swallow. “Excellent spirits,” he said when he could speak.

  “Chressamo’s cellars are among the best in the Raw, perhaps even in the whole country. We get shipments twice a year.” The man looked up from his mug, and the corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement. “Once, our liquor-cellar supply plane—an old Blacheim—was shot down in the Wraithwaste by a KE-111 which had got hopelessly lost. I suppose the Shadow men got the bottles, those which didn’t break. Imagine it: they must have been soused for months!” Sostairs laughed heartily, and Crispin joined in, though he didn’t see the joke. “But I am not here to tell anecdotes.” Sostairs became serious again. “Nobody just ends up in Shadowtown, Mr. Kateralbin. That is, unless he is a Shadow. Which you aren’t.” The bony fingers reached out and fingered the stubby braids Rae had made in Crispin’s hair. “And you aren’t Ferupian either. That is one of the reasons we’re interested in you. This is a war between races, remember, and we are having trouble placing you on either side of the conflict.”

  “I’m as Ferupian as you are!” Crispin cried. “I’m half-Lamaroon by blood, but I’m just as ready to give my life for the Queen as the whitest man in the country!”

  “A half-breed! I see.” Sostairs’s voice went as sharp as a rapier. “I’m going to be honest with you. You are not the real reason you are here. Understand? We want to know why you were bringing a Kirekuni girl into the war zone. There are Kirekunis resident in the domains. We are aware of this. And it is understandable that in a time of war and widespread prejudice, an alien might take drastic steps to disguise herself. As long as these easternized Kirekunis stay where they are, they are none of our concern. But circumstances like these give us reason... ” He paused. “To intervene.”

  Crispin swallowed, his mind in turmoil. “She’s my wife,” he said. “We escaped into the Wraithwaste because of—of—we were being unfairly hounded by the authorities in Lovoshire. We were traveling with our adopted son. He was sick, we were trying to reach habitation, we’d gotten lost—”

  Sostairs’s voice cut like a knife across his babble. “She said she’d never seen you before the day you were arrested. Under coercion, she admitted that she had been traveling with you, but she swore up and down that you knew nothing of her purposes.”

  “She has no purposes!” Crispin gripped the edge of his chair with both hands. How could she have said that? Hadn’t she realized that if either of them lied to the soldiers, their stories could not match? He wanted to fly at Sostairs’s throat. Vividly, he remembered the despair which had come over Rae in the Wraithwaste. Her submissiveness had forced him to make all the decisions, to physically drag her onward when she said I can’t. A few times she had turned her cheek so that he could slap her—her hand all the time clenched tight around that damned amulet—and he had had to work harder than he imagined possible not to slap her. The only explanation he could think of was that the time she had spent with the trickster women had damaged her more than she had known at the time. He wasn’t sure she would ever recover. The thought of her in the soldiers’ custody...

  He bowed his head. Blood drummed in his ears. Anything that he said would either contradict her or condemn her.

  Sostairs said, “Both of you have lied about your pasts. And you were traveling with a subhuman child who you say was your adopted son. Incidentally, she pretends to know no more of the child than of you. Frankly, Mr. Kateralbin, it reeks.”

  “What do you want?” Crispin asked without looking up.

  “Another whiskey?” Sostairs said.

  Crispin did not move. Cold drops slopped onto his knee; he heard liquid being poured. He felt blindly for the glass and drained it.

  “It reeks of conspiracy,” Sostairs said, his voice ringing implacably in the silence. “Perhaps between the Significant Empire and the Shadows. One would hardly suppose the Shadows capable of such complex planning, but no law, even that of st
upidity, is hard and fast in times of war.”

  Crispin shook his head. “That’s bloody ridiculous.”

  “Is it? She admitted to charges of counterintelligence work after an amulet of the Glorious Dynasty—I’m sure you know what that is, Mr. Kateralbin—was found on her person.”

  “After you tortured her?” Crispin poured himself more whiskey without thinking about it. “In the name of the Queen! I—well, in the first place, if she was a spy, and I was trying to get her back to the Kirekuni lines—”

  “Is that what you were doing, Mr. Kateralbin?”

  “—then walking straight into Shadowtown and ordering dinner would be a damned stupid way to go about it! You must see that! And I’ve heard of the Glorious Dynasty, and I know Rae had something to do with them once, but she hasn’t spoken to any culties in years—”

  “What has she been calling herself, again? I’ve forgotten.” Sostairs smiled.

  Crispin said sadly: “Ash. I believe that’s her real name. But she might have used Clothwright. Or something else. Depending on how confident she was.”

  “She wasn’t feeling confident.” Sostairs shook his head. “Not at all.”

  “Damn you.” Crispin ground his teeth, almost crying with frustration. “Damn you.”

  “She chopped off her tail. She wanted to disguise the fact that she is Kirekuni. It’s a well-known trick of the lizard spies. Most of our soldiers learn to tell them by their skin, even if they have bleached their hair; but they pass themselves off on the common people of Ferupe with alarming ease. Had I to propose a scenario, I would say she was in Kingsburg, stealing secrets, and she is now returning to report to the Lizard Significant in Okimako. She enlisted you as a guide, and you are probably telling the truth when you say you don’t know anything of her purposes. It doesn’t say much for you that you got her this badly lost; were you trying for the Salzeim War Route, perhaps? We have uncovered spies there, trying to lose themselves in the confusion. The safest, though lengthiest, way for you to take her would have been through the northern snows, which are frankly not worth the Queen’s time to police, since they are so dangerous. But no one has ever praised Lamaroons for their intellect.” He scrutinized Crispin as if he were trying to provoke him. “Mmm. Aesthetically the effect is not unpleasing, but in terms of temperament I cannot think of a worse crossbreed.”

  In any other circumstances, Sostairs’s last words would have set Crispin afire; but he scarcely heard them. The colonel-in-chief’s scenario was frighteningly plausible—much more plausible than Crispin’s own wild tale. He couldn’t tell Sostairs that he had stolen a truck and killed a man, and therefore he couldn’t explain why he had entered the Wraithwaste. In any case, were he to try to explain the Wraithwaste, he could not leave out the deaths at Holstead House, which had been his fault. Many times before he had experienced this angry, choking sensation of not being able to tell the truth because he knew it wouldn’t be believed. Now it was worse than ever.

  “I’ve never been near Kingsburg in my life,” he said sullenly, aware that it was a lie—he had been to the outskirts three times with Smithrebel’s. Stop right there! he thought furiously. You’re just getting yourself into deeper water! Sticking to the truth is the best way to lie! That was not a Millsy saying but an Anuei one. “I’m not a spy!” he insisted. “Before I left the circus I was a catcher for a troupe of aerialists. Now I’m a professional daemon handler. I drive trucks.” He opened his palms and put an innocuous expression on his face.

  Sostairs raised one eyebrow pityingly, as if to say, Really, you could do better.

  “It’s the truth!” Crispin shouted.

  Sostairs swallowed the last of his coffee and put down his cup. “I believe you.”

  “What?”

  “That was off the record.” Sostairs made a chopping motion with one hand. “I am not authorized to believe captives’ stories. But I have had a great deal of experience in this field, and to me you look like a man whose story will not change even when you are in the torture chamber. Therefore, whether it is true or not is irrelevant, and I see no point in torturing you.” Again, he smiled.

  Quickly, so as not to lose this unexpected fair wind, Crispin said earnestly, “I’ve never done anything wrong. Ever.”

  “Oh, I believe you, I believe you,” Sostairs said impatiently. Crispin rubbed his temples. He could not understand. No policeman would ever accept such a sketchy tale! Their interests lay in conviction. But perhaps the laws of the police were not the laws of the army. That made a nasty kind of sense—after all, didn’t Sostairs and his fellows all commit hanging crimes most days before lunch?

  No law is hard and fast in times of war...

  Now the workings of the colonel’s clicking, humming, clockwork mind opened up to him. Sostairs had already decided on a version of the truth that was completely different from Crispin’s, but sufficient for his purposes. And it made no difference whether he was right or wrong, or even whether Crispin confessed, because Sostairs had the power to make whatever he wanted true. Staring spellbound at the bright, cheerful, wrinkled face, Crispin guessed that the colonel anticipated complete satisfaction from Rae in the torture chamber. His real talent lay in separating his captives into those who would and would not crack.

  But what did he do with those he thought too tough to bother torturing? Did he simply dispatch them? Innocent, criminal, or traitor to the Queen, it didn’t matter once you were dead...

  Crispin took a deep breath.

  Sostairs was leaning back in his chair. His gravelly voice measured out the sentences. “Mr. Kateralbin, you say you are wholly loyal to Ferupe. And I think you mean it. The fact that you were traveling with a Shadow child speaks in your favor, actually. We Ferupians are naturally more compassionate than the lizards, and if you thought to befriend a Shadow child, your Ferupian blood probably rules your Lamaroon blood, not the other way round. I believe you could be trustworthy.”

  Crispin nodded, trying to put a look of eagerness on his face. The colonel’s condescension was offensive, but life was worth more than dignity.

  The blue eyes glittered. “There are two options which we usually offer in cases like this. One is your freedom of the Raw.”

  I wouldn’t last five minutes, Crispin thought. They’d use me for target practice. “And the other?” he said through numb lips.

  Sostairs had been engaged in tilting the coffeepot to see whether there was any left. He glanced up. “Oh? Oh, yes. Of course we are always in need of recruits. You will be provided with employment. Nothing fancy. But if you are, as you say, a daemon handler, you’ll get something a little better than a run-of-the-mill infantry position. I believe several of the QAF squadrons currently rotated to the front are in need of ground workers—riggers, fitters, daemon handlers, strippers, and so forth. Of course, if you were lying—”

  He fixed Crispin with a glare which made Crispin very glad that he had told at least some of the truth. Sostairs was not the sort of man who forgave dishonesty—reticence being a different matter. Why, oh why, had Rae been stupid enough to lie to him? Rae...

  “You will be sent for later today.” Sostairs put down the coffeepot and stood up so fast Crispin thought a blow was coming. He nearly fell over backwards trying to avoid it. Awkwardly, almost knocking over the table in the confined space, he stood up and held out his hand. The look on Sostairs’s face made him drop it fast and salute. “Sorry—sir.”

  “Not to worry.” Sostairs favored him with an eagle smile. He looked almost human now, if supercilious. “I am glad. You have made a brave man’s choice. You would be surprised how few do. Most of those who have got themselves on the wrong side of the law have an extraordinarily poor sense of their own well-being. All they want to do is run, and, given the chance, they run blindly.”

  “Not me, sir,” Crispin said piously.

  “As I said, I respect you for that, half-breed or no half-breed.” Sostairs turned his head. “Freeman! Drown!” The guards entered the r
oom and clacked their heels smartly.

  “Sir,” Crispin ventured. “These squadrons you mentioned—does QAF mean the air force? Not the infantry?”

  “Yes. The air force. Depending on your aptitude, you may even be sent for flight training. However, there is a—mmm—” Sostairs looked Crispin up and down, frowning. “A height requirement,” he said finally. “Not all of the squadron captains are as flexible as we here at Chressamo, where everyone is welcome. Eighty Squadron—where are they now? about thirty miles north of here, Pilkinson Air Base II—now, they have less rigorous standards. Flight Captain Vichuisse is laudably determined to foster unity among his men. Nonetheless, you may not fit in. I am merely warning you of the possibilities. I have nothing to do with the selection process.”

  Crispin’s head danced at the thought of airplanes. The air force. Bigger daemons than any in trucks. Demogorgons the size of those used in factories. Monsters. Ogres of power.

  Emboldened by Sostairs’s apparent goodwill, Crispin reached out and stopped him as he opened the door. It was worth a try— “Sir, I don’t know how promotions go around here. Is it possible to, is it possible—I know you have nothing to do with the process, but could you put in a good word for me? With the air force, I mean? So that I—so that I could be trained to fly?”

  Sostairs turned in the doorway. He gave Crispin a withering look. “Your impudence is astounding, and astoundingly stupid. Be thankful I am not having you executed for crimes against the Queen! Technically you are a spy’s accomplice, and that is high treachery! However, it is good for every squadron to have a traitor or two among its inferiors; they come in handy as scapegoats.”