The War in the Waste

by Felicity Savage

  10:38 A.M. Ferupe: Kingsburg: the underground fortress

  The Queen listened with what, for her, approximated pleasure as her Royal Cousin Farthred played his harmonium. The tune was called “A Sweet Rain in the Heartlands,” and it was composed through with no choruses. Farthred played loudly and accurately, though mechanically: this was one of his best days, Lithrea thought, and even on his bad days he was good enough to command the attention of the gathered ladies and courtiers and even the Royals, who unlike their inferiors would not have pretended interest if they hadn’t felt it. Even if they had been bored, however, the Cousins and Aunts and Uncles would still have had to listen, for Lithrea had asked Farthred to play, and the Queen’s request was law. Farthred would have had to play even if he had ten broken fingers!

  But of course in that case, Lithrea thought vaguely, she would not have made the request! For she was the kindest monarch in centuries, wasn’t she, a kind Queen and a gentle one, everyone called her Lithrea the Compassionate, at least everyone around her did, and as for the outsiders she didn’t know, it was only rarely she remembered that there were outsiders. Remembered on her own, that is. Her other self remembered them all the time like needles in its nonflesh, and hated them, my goodness how it hated them! But all the same Lithrea was kind to them, and if she was kind to the commoners, well, of course, she was the very spirit of beneficence where her own relatives were concerned.

  And she had a special soft place in her heart for Farthred, or at least she had had when she still had a place in her heart for anyone. She liked Far even though he had not been able to give her a child, any more than her other male Cousins (of whom there were fewer and fewer as the oldest ones died off) had been able to. None of them had sired a child on any of the other Royal women either. It had been a proper old game of musical beds when she was young! But the hurdy-gurdy had played, and then stopped, and it was all of no avail. There were no Royals young enough to have children anymore, and the sycophants went about with terror and greed in their eyes.

  Despite the fires in the many hearths, it was freezing cold in the parlor. It always got cold whenever two or more Royals gathered together. The courtiers’ lips were blue, and they chafed their hands as they smiled and tapped their toes to the music. They understood nothing about Lithrea and her relatives; they were too stupid to understand, her father had told her, even were the Royals to try to explain. Lithrea knew this, and so she had never tried. She simply took it for granted that no one except herself and her Cousins—and perhaps the Significants, but she could only feel them as a hostile shimmer in the white distance, she had heard nothing from them in twenty years, ever since that imbecile ambassador flubbed his mission and communications froze—that no one except these few knew the true, terrible immensity of the situation. If they did, perhaps they would give Lithrea a little more credit. Perhaps. They thought she was as crazy as a crab in boiling water, and as close to dying. She had glimpsed looks of dread on the faces of even her most trusted advisers when she missed what they said because a daemon had been jabbering in her ear, or when she stopped in the middle of a sentence because for a second she had been no longer Lithrea but a daemon in the far-off Wraithwaste, where Lithrea had never been, the whipcord choking her as she fled from the pain at thirty miles an hour.

  But still and still, Farthred was good on his harmonium. And music was the only thing that could distract her from the immaterial for so much as an instant, these days. Only music could banish her Cousins’ relentless non sequiturs.

  She adjusted her face into an expression of bliss, intending to doze for a few moments, cocooned in the music. And the variously beringed courtiers must have been so relieved that she was not twitching, or calling out fragments of street barkers’ pitches she had never heard, that they did not see her hand slip off the head of her idiot lapdog. They did not see her eyelids flutter closed. No one—especially not her Cousins, who like her were enclosed in the world of their heritage, hemmed off from the courtiers and from each other by the frantic jabbering of the other cousins who twined invisibly about them—saw the slow rise and fall of her bodice stop.

  Lithrea’s seventy-two-year-old face relaxed. Miles of fine wrinkles smoothed out of her skin. A thread of drool crept out of the corner of her red-painted mouth.

  Inside her head she was running, galloping, flying, worming, crawling (for she had all forms and none) across a dark landscape shot across with lightning. She was daemon. She was Wraith. She was Royal. She was in every last corner of the world at once. She was darkness hemmed in by the light that roiled at all her horizons, hearing the distant screams of pain from those cousins who had already been embraced by the light, feeling their agony. Their/her necks were collared with cruel silver, they/her were burned alive in hardwood saucers, they/her were choked by silver-braided whipcords, they/her were fired half-dead out of blunderbusses, they/her were crammed into tiny cells whose oak walls irritated them beyond pain to madness. They/her in the distance were all mad. Nothing remained in any of their/her minds except pain and fury and fear: kill, flee, kill, escape, flee!

  And the light was closing in. The last bastion of darkness where she ran, galloped, flew, wormed, crawled, slept, ate, sang, talked, and groomed herself was shrinking faster than she would have believed possible. The western horizon was loud with gunfire, red with blood.

  Lithrea moaned. She wasn’t her father, able to calm the darkness with a silent command. Her old heart pounded. The darkness was a lake and the lake was dammed up, and the shores were closing in. Where were the fish to go? Where? She had to escape before the dam burst—

  In the sixth parlor, Royal Cousin Alithry’s head jerked up and she let out a raw, bubbling cry. Then she slumped sideways in her chair. Her wig fell off and dangled. None of the other Royal Cousins paid any attention; they went on smiling vaguely, listening to Cousin Farthred, who kept on playing, like a windup music box that cannot be stopped until it has finished its tune. But the courtiers leapt out of their chairs, pressing around Alithry, and the Queen’s parrot on its golden perch sensed their panic and screeched, “Kingsburg’s burning! Kingsburg’s burning! Fire fire! Fire fire! Pour on water. Pour on water—” a jingle it had heard from the mouth of the Queen, which she had got from her invisible cousins, who had got it from a gang of street children in the Razia district. “Kingsburg’s burning! Kingsburg’s burning—”

  “Royal Alithry! Open your eyes!”

  “Alithry!”

  “Fire fire! Pour on water!”

  “If somebody doesn’t shut that damned parrot up—”

  “She was just sitting here, and then—”

  “We all saw what happened. It’s the same thing happened to Royal Melithra. Go get Physician Exupery, quick!”

  “Don’t be a fool! If you have him down here for nothing, he’ll—”

  “It’s not nothing.” A youth with blond hair was pressing Alithry’s shriveled, sallow wrist. “Her heart’s not beating.”

  “Queen, no—”

  “It’s not, I tell you.”

  And as children looking to the oldest of their crew when disaster strikes, all of their faces turned like sunflowers to the Queen, who had not moved, nor paid any attention to the minidrama going on below her dais. She lay still on her cushions, under her midnight blue canopy with its dripping swags of topazes. Her idiot lapdog was licking her face. Her bosom was not moving, and her eyes were half-open, slits of yellow whites showing in her face like bones through crescent-shaped gashes.

  The panic that had previously been contained within the parameters of a familiar disaster lit the room on fire. Faster than any fire, it moved out into the rest of the suite, upstairs, through the rest of the palace. Soon the courtiers—none of whom had dared to come closer to the Queen than five feet—were crowded out of the parlor by sentries, ministers, policy makers, generals, advisers, clerks, and a host of physicians. These packed in around the Queen like voyeurs at the scene of a violent crime. Exupery himself was hu
stled through the crowd. The top brass willingly gave ground to him. Fussily, he extracted his stethoscope and placed it on the least jewel-encrusted part of the Queen’s bodice.

  “There are vital signs,” he said at last. The ministers, generals, and advisers controlled a collective urge to strangle him. They had already ascertained that Lithrea wasn’t dead—not like poor Royal Cousin Alithry! “But what’s wrong with her?” someone shouted. “Is she sleeping? In a swoon? In a coma? Or is it—”

  “We are all aware that the patient is prone to fits,” Exupery said calmly. “However, this time her withdrawal appears more pronounced. She does not respond to external stimuli. I shall have to examine her at length.” He put down his stethoscope and started to fiddle with the Queen’s bodice, possibly in the hope of finding the fastenings. His chances were poor: every man in the room knew it took six ladies to dress the Queen—three to hold her gown while the others lifted her into it. The air took on a sudden metallic bite. The ministers and advisers closest to the Queen sneezed.

  Lithrea started violently up off her cushions. Her skull met Exupery’s nose and he fell backwards with a screech. “Freesias!” Lithrea screamed. “Fresh-picked freesias from country gardens! Melon ice, ma’am? Strawberries cherries blue raspberries, who’ll buy me raspberries, only two shillin’s the quarter; I gotta sell ‘em cheap, me little daughter cried when I was going to drown ‘em, only a shilling for the black an’ two for the calico, their mum’s the best mouser in Razia, shine ya shoes, sir? Kingsburg’s burning! I kin tell yer lonely—it’s a dark evenin’—Kingsburg’s burning—”

  A rasping noise came from her throat and she fell back. Everyone gathered was momentarily stunned. Exupery recovered first, and stumbled to his feet, trying vainly to staunch his bleeding nose. “Hot tea!” he shouted, windmilling his free hand, spraying drops of blood over the ministers and military men. “Hot tea, and five drops of my tonic number seven, and have her ladies take her to her boudoir! Now! On the double! Are you all half-wits?”

  Lithrea opened her eyes.

  What are all these people doing here? she thought vaguely. They will excite the cousins and we will have no peace for days.

  Her whole body ached. If only they wouldn’t all come running every time she...

  “Why has Farthred stopped playing?” she said suddenly. “Have I been asleep?” She attempted a joke. “That’s really no cause for alarm, you know. Even I have to sleep occasionally. Although I admit, it was rude of me to drop off while my dear cousin was performing.”

  “I—I believe he has finished now, Queen,” stammered one of the overhanging faces.

  “Then tell him to give us another tune. He is so clever with that harmonium of his.”

  The fire flickers and dies.

  10:59 A.M.

  The Raw: Salzeim Parallel: the Kirekuni lines, 3,000 feet

  The Kirekunis took much longer than Crispin had expected to mount a counterattack. The Gorgonettes, led by Vichuisse’s Cerdres, were making their fourth dive at the scattering ground troops. Their screamer holds were nearly empty, their mission of destruction close to complete. When Crispin heard bullets directly above him, he thanked the Queen silently. He had been afraid the Kirekunis weren’t going to put in an appearance after all. He dragged Princess Anuei sideways to avoid an orange fountain of ground fire and pulled her up out of her dive. Behind him, a Gorgonette spun sideways and burst into flame. Not all the troops on the ground were too demoralized to strike back at their killers, and at the lowest point of the attack dive, when the Gorgonettes opened their screamer ports, the little monoplanes were particularly vulnerable to ack-ack. This was neither the first loss of the day nor, from the look of the sky, would it be the last. As Princess Anuei gained altitude, Crispin cursed silently. There were far more of them than he had hoped for. Although to hope for any at all had been unpatriotic, really, hadn’t it? KE-122s, old-style Shuilies, and even some Horogazi firebombers. They were fairly pouring out of the east, five or six dozen of them, raining fire on the Gorgonettes caught down at rooftop height.

  Several Ferupian planes in succession nose-dived into the ground. The rhythm of the attack dive faltered and broke apart. Two Gorgonettes collided and instantly self-destructed. The shrapnel from that collision would kill more Kirekunis than the two planes ever could have by firing on them—that was the idea behind operational suicide, of course—yet what an ignoble way to die. Crispin winced to see it. The battle was boiling up toward him. Coolly, he assessed the odds. The Kirekunis’ style of attack was not far off operational suicide today. They were flinging their aircraft about with nerveless abandon. They had the advantages of surprise, altitude, and numbers. The Ferupian pilots were all out of formation and firing wildly—apparently forgetting that they were as good as out of ammunition.

  Crispin banked so fast that Princess Anuei nearly stalled, and plunged down into the fray, signaling his crews to rally to him. Escape obviously had to be their first priority. Vichuisse would just have to wait—that’s all—have to wait—

  As a squadron captain, he had trained himself to resist the killing frenzy which even the tamest engagements had once provoked in him. But his men, even stoic Jones, had not. Battle was an addictive sort of candy, no matter how bitter the odds. One taste, and you could not stop. You wanted that lizard, that one, and your daemon howled and thundered, egging you on, and you didn’t care if you died trying, you wanted him—

  Crispin couldn’t catch his men’s attention, far less make them rally to him. Not even Mickey responded to his signals. Through the clatter and the fire, he could see Burns desperately trying to marshal his own men, with as little success. Didn’t the fools understand that if they didn’t turn tail and run now, they wouldn’t get out of there alive? There were just too many KEs, and they were attacking too wildly!

  Princess Anuei juddered as bullets ripped across her port wing. Kill or be killed.

  Crispin did not know how much later it was when he depressed his firing button and—

  —nothing happened.

  A. thin stream of tinies sputtered from his ports. The KE-122 he’d been targeting dodged them easily.

  If he had even one burst of screamers left, it would be a weak one. His thoughts resolved themselves into a single word, a word like a drop of freezing water hitting his brain softly, coldly, relentlessly.

  Vichuisse.

  It was the water torture to which he had been subject for months, which distracted him from everything else, amplified all of a sudden to an immediacy that could not conceivably be denied. Forcing himself not to touch the screamer button, he maneuvered Princess Anuei out of the deadly center of the action.

  Vichuisse.

  Tremors came over him, shaking his body like a leaf in the wind. In the past he had never started to shake until after a battle, but this time his teeth were chattering, and he could scarcely maintain his hold over Princess Anuei’s speed-maddened daemon. Vichuisse was not hard to spot. There he was in Crispin’s reflectors, circling, high up and far out of the action, “playing umpire,” as Mickey had said, his Cerdres 500 glinting like a noon star on the whitewashed sky. Crispin did not waste a second as he took Princess Anuei into a climb.

  Queen, oh Queen. He felt his lips forming the words, felt them buzz in his throat, though he could not hear a thing. I don’t have a second but help me. Send Mickey. I’m nearly out of ammo, and if I try for Vee and can’t do for him, then I’m done for, I might as well commit operational suicide! Queen, send Mickey, and let him have some screamers left in his hold. Let him have been frugal—Queen—

  He swore aloud, disbelievingly, as a winged fleck climbing ahead of him out of the west, toward the same 4,000-foot pinnacle where Vichuisse circled, proved to be not Mickey, but Burns. The fuselage of the Wraith-blooded captain’s Killer B-99 was painted with a lewd arrangement of red petals that was impossible to mistake even from a distance. “Shit!” Crispin said as relief washed through him, making his hands shake so badly he could
scarcely grip the stick. “From now on I say my prayers every day! Queen!”

  Burns had professed inability to take part in the actual murder because Vichuisse already suspected him of treacherous inclinations. But Burns hadn’t known he even would have the chance to take part until two days ago. This mission was to have been Butch’s. And Burns hated Vichuisse even more than Crispin did. It would have been sheer humiliation for him to watch Crispin make the kill he wanted so badly. He, too, must have succumbed to the water torture.

  With difficulty, Crispin stalled his climb and looped the loop. It was the simple signal he and Mickey had decided upon in Burns’s hearing. It meant: Go for it.

  Vichuisse must have seen the two Gorgonettes ascending toward him. He thought nothing of it, of course. Or perhaps, Crispin thought, he believed his two captains had taken his own sensible approach to the massacre below: get the hell out and wait and see who wins.

  Whatever was passing through his mind, he did not make any attempt to escape.

  The sky shone leaden white. Visibility had been one hundred percent this morning; now the distance was hazy. A heavy blue mist hovered at the horizons. The sun was nearly at its zenith. Neither side could use the solar advantage unless they were diving straight down on their enemies, and by this time, such measures were no longer necessary anyway. The KEs had all but wiped out the Gorgonettes. The QAF was being paid back in spades for the havoc it had wreaked among the Kirekuni troops. Nothing moved in the dust of no-man’s-land except screamers: jewel-colored points of light zipping to and fro until they happened on a corpse, of which there were literally hundreds. There would be no SAPper attack on the Ferupian lines tomorrow—but QAF Squadrons 125, 130, and 139 would never be the same again. Crispin and Burns had a few moments, if that, before the KEs turned their sights upward.