The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  A lieutenant-marshal was in charge of an entire parallel, giving orders to five to ten flight commandants, who each commanded a squadron themselves and had five more (like 80 Squadron) answering to them. The lieutenant-marshal’s sub acted for him, exercising nearly identical powers. Westanthraw, lieutenant-marshal of Lovoshire Parallel, was practically a figure of myth, wielding the power of life and death over the careers of close to forty captains like Vichuisse.

  “My name is James Duncan, acting for Lieutenant-Marshal Thraxsson of Salzeim Parallel. These are Commandants Lennox and Figueroa, both of Salzeim Parallel. Your Vichuisse is now a commandant, also of Salzeim Parallel.” He did not give the bombshell time to sink in. “You two are now captains of Salzeim Parallel. You will be leading standard thirty-five-man squadrons in an offensive capacity, answering to Vichuisse, as before.” The hint of a smile crossed Duncan’s lean face. “We have had a good many vacancies open unexpectedly in the defensive units. We are reassigning several of these units to the offense, and we hope that with captains like yourselves in command, no more vacancies will open.”

  In the background, Vichuisse grimaced nervously.

  Duncan said, “Congratulations, both of you.”

  A sweet taste filled Crispin’s mouth. Flames were leaping in the corners of the room, sprouting like malignant fireworks from the necks of the empty bottles on the floor. When he heard Butch saying fervently, “I accept the assignment with all my heart, Sublieutenant-Marshal,” he managed to prise his lips apart.

  “Accept, sir.”

  “Then you are dismissed.” Duncan turned his back on them. Crispin paid the rote obeisances to the officers and followed Butch out of the room, doing his best not to stumble. His skin stung from the biting heat, and he thought over the roaring of the flames, It’s a good thing I learned to read.

  “Vee has to have pulled strings,” Carl Redmanhey said from his bunk. “There’s no other way it could be possible.”

  It was past midnight, yet no one had suggested they get some much-needed sleep. The long, awful day of report-making and accounting for damages was over. Every minute of it, Crispin—and, he guessed, Butch, too—had vacillated between euphoria and acute nerviness. Vichuisse, unfathomably, had taken his crew out on the night patrol duty that should have been Festhre’s. It was as if he wanted to give his remaining lieutenants some time alone to discuss the change in two of their fortunes. The visitors had not appeared in the mess at supper: Festhre and Redmanhey had taken this as a personal affront, and both of them were already in a bad mood when the lieutenants retired to their quarters after several hours of dissembling in front of their men.

  “There’s absolutely no other way,” Redmanhey repeated irritatingly. “I don’t mean to slander him, but he hasn’t, done anything to merit a commandancy! And commandancies are almost always given to captains from within the parallel, anyhow. A promotion to Salzeim? Vichuisse?” He blew a series of smoke rings. “I smell a rat. Several rats.”

  Butch was warming his hands at the brazier. “It’s wildly improbable,” he said wretchedly. “I thought that myself. Cris, you saw me!”

  “You were a bloody wreck,” Crispin agreed. In the presence of the commandants and the sublieutenant-marshal, Butch had been a model of reserve; but outside, in the wet, he had come as close as made no difference to breaking apart under the stresses of shame and honor and euphoria. And Crispin had been grateful, because the necessity of making Butch pull himself together had driven the flames away.

  The flames.

  They had come back, for the first time since that awful morning when they surrounded him and he thought he was going to die.

  He added more kindly: “I was a wreck, too, if it comes to that.”

  “Oh, surely not you,” Festhre said from his bunk. He, too, was smoking—not tobacco, but his “specials” that he kept for disasters and celebrations. “Surely you’ve always known you’d be the first one Vichuisse would choose, if something like this happened.”

  Crispin jumped to his feet. “I didn’t fucking ask for it, if that’s what you’re implying!” Festhre looked up placidly at him. “The last thing I wanted was a Queen-damned promotion! He’s plagued me because of I don’t know what since day one, and now he’s taking me to Salzeim so he can go on plaguing me! It’s pure fucking sadism is what it is!”

  “You know that isn’t true,” Festhre said.

  “He hates me! Do you deny that?”

  “I do, as it happens. I didn’t think even you were paranoid enough to confuse favoritism with sadism.”

  “I’m not his favorite!” Crispin jabbed his thumb at Butch. “If he has a favorite, it’s his man the—Kirekuni! Vichuisse favors him the same way he does me, only worse.”

  Crispin hadn’t meant to mention the Kirekuni. But for the past twelve days Mickey Ash had been on his mind, in his peripheral vision, like the hallucinatory flames.

  “But I meant the promotion,” Festhre said as if Crispin had not interrupted. “You’re more ambitious than any of us. You wanted it. If you deny that”—Festhre paused, as if trying to word his thoughts as delicately as possible—“I shall know you aren’t half the man I have thought you.”

  Crispin could not deny it. The realization took the wind out of his sails, at the same moment as Butch said definitely, as if Festhre’s jibes had been directed at him: “I did want it. Who doesn’t? But I wouldn’t have wanted it at this cost.”

  “What cost?” Crispin shouted. “There was no fucking cost! It doesn’t matter that we’re an insignificant squadron in an insignificant parallel, it doesn’t matter that we’re on a ten-year losing streak, it doesn’t matter that we got shifted to a dead-end base... ” In the back of his mind he knew he was about to explode. His muscles were tight with frustration. “All that matters is that Vichuisse comes from a Kingsburg family with plenty of court connections, he’s always known he wouldn’t have to succeed to get promoted, and he’s probably been pulling strings behind the scenes for years to set this up! It’s absolutely literally a gift from the Queen! There is no cost!”

  Redmanhey jumped down off his bunk and put an arm around Crispin’s shoulders. “Calm down, boyo. You’re all worked up and no wonder. Sit down.” He guided Crispin by force to Keinze’s bunk, its blankets neatly folded by the dead man that morning. Still gripping Crispin’s shoulder, he fished in a pocket and lit another cigarette. Crispin took it thankfully.

  Butch looked at him. “I meant Keinze.”

  “Oh, shit,” Crispin mumbled. He took a deep drag, and coughed.

  “Yeah.” Redmanhey took his arm from around Crispin and braced his hands on his knees as if about to rise. But he did not move. “Poor old Keinze. He’s going to get forgotten in all this excitement, if you ask me.”

  “I was supposed to ask Vichuisse if one of my men could read his eulogy,” Crispin said.

  “One of your men?” Redmanhey looked at him in surprise. “Whatever for? I’m gonna. And Vichuisse can stick me if he doesn’t like it.”

  Crispin shook his head. They were all silent for a minute. Crispin guessed the others, too, were remembering Keinze. A loyal servant of the Queen for so many years, hardened by survival, a year away from the pension whose material value would not have meant much to him (for he had been the heir to a squiredom in Lynche) but the accolade of which would have made him a contented man, his services to Ferupe finally honored. All gone in a half minute of bad timing.

  Bad timing gets every one of us in the end, Crispin thought.

  The officers’ quarters were chilly and oppressively neat, the half-hooded brazier gave off a light so cold that the temperature seemed ten degrees lower, the floor was tracked with muddy footprints, the lieutenants were gloomy; but the fact that Crispin was sitting here among them seemed suddenly the most precious gift he had ever been given. Far more precious than a promotion to Salzeim. So far my luck’s been good... extraordinarily good. He shivered. Look how far I’ve come. lf it weren’t for the Old Gentlema
n... If it weren’t for Rae... if it weren’t for Colonel Sostairs... If it weren’t for the flames, said the part of him that remembered Prettie Valenta lying crumpled on the red-and-white lino in the ring.

  Festhre was smoking pensively. Butch was staring at the tiny daemons twisting in agony under the hood of the brazier.

  Redmanhey got up. “I’ve had enough of this,” he said. “I’m going to bed. You kids can stay up. I’m not particular.”

  “‘Kids’? Captains, you mean,” Festhre murmured.

  “In the name of the Queen, lay off, Brian!” Crispin burst out.

  Festhre looked up. “What, dearie? Does it really bother you?”

  Butch let out a strangled snarl. “Yes!”

  “Then, of course, your wish is my command... sir.”

  “Fuck you, Festhre!”

  “My pleasure.” There might have been a twinkle in Festhre’s eye. “Good night, dears. Don’t forget to thank the Queen twice over.” He kicked off his boots and wriggled under his blanket.

  Some minutes later, when Festhre and Redmanhey were both snoring, Crispin sat down on the floor next to Butch and wrapped a blanket around his back as carefully as a mother. Butch shifted slightly, acknowledging his presence. “I can’t stand that motherfucking fag sometimes,” he mumbled. “Gonna be glad to get out of here. ‘S truth.”

  “Yeah.” Crispin confessed. “Me, too.”

  Butch was trembling. Crispin lit two cigarettes at once and gave him one. They used the brazier as an ashtray.

  “Fucking shame we have to take Vichuisse with us though. All I was hoping for when he summoned me was that he was gonna tell me he’d got promoted or transferred or demoted. It wouldn’t’ve made any difference as long as he was leaving and we were gonna have a new captain.”

  “I don’t think there’s much to choose between any of them,” Crispin said.

  “Not if those ponces we met today are a fair sample, no!”

  “Scheming aristocratic fools,” Crispin said vehemently, and then realized he had committed a faux pas. But the faint smile on Butch’s face reassured him.

  “I’m an aristocratic fool if it comes to that.”

  “Not a schemer, though. You’ll make a better captain than any of them.”

  “Queen grant.”

  They could hear rain falling again. Crispin wished Vichuisse, out on patrol, joy of it.

  Butch said suddenly, “But you know what really gets my goat? I have to take the fucking Kirekuni with me.”

  “Do you?”

  “I can’t exactly leave him and bring the others. And I’m not leaving Jansson, or Lance. They’re my right-hand men.”

  “Yeah,” Crispin said slowly. Then, “Listen, I’ll take him off your hands.”

  “You’ll what?”

  He had said it. It was too late. “I’ll give you Potter and take him. Do you a favor.”

  “Potter’s your best man. You’re crazy.” Butch was breathing quickly, shallowly.

  “Nope. This is what I figure.” It hurt to say it, but he had to. “I figure him and me understand each other better than anyone else could. And Potter—Potter’s getting just a bit too forward for his own good, lately. I don’t trust him anymore.”

  “That thing with the eulogy,” Butch said understandingly.

  “Yeah. That was Potter. He shouldn’t have asked.” A minute later Crispin remembered that Potter had not asked, he had offered; but again, it was too late. The brazier sputtered blinding blue light as one of the daemons died.

  Crispin wondered uncomfortably: Did Butch look at me differently when I said that? He had always tried to discourage even the ghost of the idea that he and the Kirekuni might be similar in any respect. He dreaded his friends’ perceiving him as other—the thing that the Kirekuni indubitably was.

  But Butch knew him better than that. They could say anything to each other.

  The brazier was down to two-thirds power. “If you’re sure, then,” Butch said cautiously. “I’ll tell him tomorrow.”

  “I’m certain.” Crispin gave Butch’s arm a squeeze. Butch looked at him in surprise, and then grinned.

  “You’re a peach, you know that?”

  Crispin got up. “Give us the blanket... ”

  As he lay down in the top bunk, he saw the face of the Kirekuni like a ghost before him on the darkness. Mickey Ash was not wearing his usual closed, inscrutable expression but smiling superciliously. In an odd way the thought of him was comforting: as long as Ash was there, Crispin felt that he was in no danger from the flames, or the visions, which were really the daytime and nighttime aspects of a single horror, a horror that frightened him beyond reason, considering it was entirely in his head.

  But he managed to forget both it and the Kirekuni without too much difficulty by dwelling on the uncomfortable prospect of telling Potter that he was coming to Salzeim, but not as a member of the crew with which he had served for eleven years.

  22 Devambar; 1895 A.D. The Raw: Salzeim Parallel

  Two, and only two, ground routes led through the Wraithwaste to the war front. Troops, supply convoys, messengers, and armaments trucks clogged them daily. One route started in Salzeim; the other in Thrazen Domain.

  The Thrazen route had been opened in the 1850s, when it became apparent to the Queen’s generals that the war had spread south, that it was not going to be won in the immediate future, and that a southern access was needed to prevent the Kirekunis from taking control of the South Waste. Thrazen had been chosen because in that domain, the daemonmongeries of the west existed side by side with the commercial culture of the south. Thrandon City was only two weeks by truck from Valestock and one week from Naftha, a southern port metropolis, the second biggest city in Ferupe. Before the war, Naftha had flourished hugely on profits from the metal-and-daemons trade with Kirekune; when war broke out, its economy started to collapse, only to be saved by the southern-spreading army’s fortuitous need for supplies. Via the Thrazen War Route, Naftha drained the south of its young men and daemons, as Thrandon drained the west and the heartlands.

  And Salzburg City, in Salzeim, drained the north and the east. The Salzeim War Route was older, broader, and shorter than the Thrazen. Its Ferupian terminus lay in rolling green farmland, whereas the Thrazen route led into the difficult western hills. It had been established in 1802, at the very beginning of the war, when Kirekuni forces first moved on the Wraithwaste. It was the first road anyone in living history had ever cut through the Waste. Ninety percent (so the soldiers’ tale ran) of the troops ordered to hack that first path through the pines had died, some from overwork and accidents, most from stranger causes.

  Even now that the Wraithwaste was being felled on a daily basis, its western fringe constantly eaten away by the Ferupian army’s retreat, the soldiers still told horror stories about the deep forest. Not one of them, though they dreamed constantly about going to Shadowtown on leave, would have considered pursuing their dusky-skinned whores into the woods where the girls came from. They hated the Wraiths largely because the Shadow people weren’t afraid of the forest—and the forest was not inimical to them! It was an outrage. Everyone knew that if a soldier marching on the war route strayed from his comrades, only his bones would be found in the morning! Wild daemons and humans shouldn’t mix, and that was that. The Wraiths were simply unnatural. Unhuman.

  A few objected that daemons didn’t kill trickster women, either. And that traders invaded the forest regularly with impunity. Ah—but trickster women and traders never had to hack down Waste pines for cookfires with trembly-triggered sarges watching their backs—did they? The gorgons are smart! the soldiers averred. They know what’s theirs, and they want to hold on to it!

  In 1815, the daemon rifle was developed to defend troops against the dangers of the Waste, which was then taking a ridiculously high toll on recruits. “Kirekuni” guns with their metal bullets couldn’t hurt a dematerialized demogorgon. Only another daemon, fired at high speed from a bazooka, had any effect at al
l. And even then, it could only slow a Waste daemon down, not kill it.

  It was thus, through experimenting with a series of flawed prototypes, that the Ferupians discovered the “screamers”’ effect on men. A few years later, the Kirekuni rampart gunners were being answered with hailstorms of screamers—a vast improvement over the sabers and flamethrowers with which the Ferupian soldiers had previously had to face the bullets.

  Daemon engineering advanced by leaps and bounds, on both sides of the Raw. By 1830, hundreds of small aircraft—invented a half century earlier but never daemon-efficient enough for civil use—had been adapted for warfare. From these beginnings the QAF was born. The ever-resourceful Kirekunis quickly developed their own air force, which would soon be larger, better trained, and better equipped than the QAF; but during the few years when the Ferupian pilots owned the air, they were lauded as the instrument of Ferupe’s salvation, and the lingering effects of this acclaim kept the QAF safe from criticism for several decades.

  Only in the 1880s did the eye of the court, constantly on the lookout for a scapegoat to blame for the Kirekunis’ unstoppability, light on the air marshal general, by then a senile nonagenarian. He was replaced in quick succession by seventeen other air marshal generals—which instability hastened the decline into which the air force had already fallen. The facts were that the QAF budget had been surreptitiously tapped to provide for the ballooning infantry, and that most of the flight commandants and lieutenant-marshals were as incompetent as the notoriously pettifogging ranking officers of the army and of the minuscule navy that guarded the southern coast. Each QAF squadron was also having to cover a far vaster area than it had in the thirties and forties. Poor organization and a shortage of pilots meant inevitable defeats. And in the nineties, as the war seemed to be going worse and worse, blaming the air force became fashionable among the rank and file, too. One thing the QAF officers were doing a good job of was keeping their own men nearly as ignorant of the big picture as the general public at home in Ferupe. Of course, nothing could keep the pilots from tasting personal failure, but they had no idea how badly Ferupe was in fact losing—or how vitriolically the infantry blamed the air force for their own defeats. A QAF regular coming into first contact with an infantryman, whose experience of those defeats was far bloodier and more personal, would be in for a nasty shock.