He loved, loved, LOVED—
Yet how stupid was it of him to fool himself that he could afford to stay in one place for the sake of a girl who humored him with Sammesday afternoon teas and didn’t care a snap of the fingers for him and likely never had!
When they saved each other’s lives, they had been children.
She sensed his scrutiny, and her expression wavered between alarm and amusement. He meant to give her a quick reassuring smile, but he felt the moon calf grin spreading over his face, the grin of a boy in love who can’t believe his adored one is right here right now, and there was no way to repress it, so he did the next best thing, he acknowledged it. “You knock my socks off every time, Miss Achino. Can’t help it.”
“For goodness’ sake, Crispin.” But in the candlelight, he saw her blushing.
“I wish I didn’t have to leave, but I can’t help that either.”
“Leave?” she barked. The next table looked around. She leaned forward and hissed, “Leave now? Or leave for—for good?”
“Kherouge is like a hot stove top at the moment, I’m afraid, and I’m like a drop of water on it. I’m going to have to skitter off. I can’t say where to, or for how long.” Cold misery weakened him. Resisting it, he reached violently for the teapot and poured more green stuff. She must have had a fresh pot sent because it came out piping. Rae looked as disappointed as a child. She bit her lip, swallowing tears.
“I wish I could stay to come to your friend Breeze’s funeral.” He tried to apologize. “I’d probably be out of place, but—”
“You wouldn’t be out of place.”
“And if you were to need a shoulder to cry on, no one would be quicker than me to offer mine. But—”
“I have plenty of shoulders to cry on, if I needed them, which I don’t and won’t. That’s not the point.”
“Is there something else then? Another reason you don’t want me to—” wanting, willing her to say it—
“It doesn’t matter.” She looked mournfully at her leather case. “I can probably manage.”
“Is it a bill? A debt?” He put his hand to his trousers pocket. “I’d be more than happy—”
“I don’t need you to help me settle my bills, Crispin! We of the Enclave are richer than such as you can ever dream of!”
If you only knew what I dream! “Then…?”
A party of well-dressed Cypeans passed inches from the French windows, laughing, chattering, their umbrellas bumping raindrops down on Crispin’s knee. He caught a whiff of something that might have been sharpgreen or might just have been mint. Rae drew a heavy, stained envelope with three broken seals out of her case. She took out several sheets of paper covered with neat yet frantic-looking handwriting. Crispin’s entire body prickled. Hairs stood up from the backs of his knees to the top of his head.
“A friend of mine,” Rae said. “More than a friend, really.”
Crispin felt his lips curve, his voice burr out an automatic innuendo.
“Not like that!” She giggled. It was the first time he’d heard this particular sweet laugh, some part of him recorded. “He’s my cousin. I’ve never met him, but from his letters he seems very sweet, very genuine. He writes in Ferupian, but he’s an Okimachian, of course.” Another part of Crispin recorded that it no longer cost her so much as a wince to mention her Kirekuni heritage. “The trouble is that—well, he has troubles at home, and his tone leads me to believe they’re serious, although he’s been vague about what they entail.”
“So he’s learned to dissemble at last,” Crispin said.
She frowned, but maybe his words had come out slurred, or he’d spoken another one of those eleven languages he prided himself on knowing, because she continued without comment. “This letter came out of the blue. In six pages he says, more or less, that he’s coming to visit me. Normally he wouldn’t even send me a gift without asking first if I minded—he’s extremely careful not to presume. So I take it that what he’s actually doing is escaping from his enemies at home. He refers to people who may be able to stop him leaving, but he says that barring unprecedentedly hasty action on their part, he was going to flee Okimachi as soon as he finished writing.”
“His letter traveled ahead of him, I take it.” Crispin heard only a slight guttural tremor in his voice.
“Of course, letters move faster and more safely than people, these days. But I assume that if he was able to leave Okimachi, and nothing untoward happened while he was in Ferupe, he should be here any day. I got this letter”—she paused—“almost two weeks ago.”
“Why the hell didn’t you tell me about it last week, then?”
“Don’t shout! People are looking! What’s wrong?”
“I know him.”
“You can’t possibly! I haven’t even told you his name! Please, oh, please sit down—”
Crispin had half risen. Unclenching his teeth, he lowered himself back into his chair. “This changes everything.” He ran his hands over his hair. “I wish you’d told me you were still corresponding with them.”
“‘Them’?”
“Your relatives. The Achinos.”
He saw questions replacing each other in her eyes like blinds flying up on rooms within rooms. At last, leaving all of them unasked, she whispered: “I’d hoped you were still going to be here. Since I’m not allowed to know men, I thought perhaps you could—”
“You might at least have let me and Mick know about each other. It wasn’t fair to compartmentalize us.”
“Mick…? His name is Yoshi! You don’t know him.” She looked relieved. “And he’ll be a stranger here, and I was hoping that since I’m in no position to have houseguests, you’d be able to find him somewhere to stay, show him around, make sure he’s all right…”
“Oh, Significance,” Crispin said wretchedly. He glanced from side to side and stiffened as he sensed someone at his shoulder. His right hand slapped the small of his back, grabbing for a gun that wasn’t there, before he realized it was the waiter.
“Sir? The hour for the evening meal approaches! Shall I recite the specials? Breast of chicken with mint and honey sauce, duck stuffed with gamboises in a broth of egg, grouper, I recommend the grouper, fricasseed in orange butter and—”
“The duck,” Crispin snarled. “And the chicken, too, for the lady. Chop fucking chop!”
The Cypean’s face froze, and he melted back into the dance of candlelit tablehoppers whence he had materialized. Crispin took one glance at Rae and averted his eyes. He hadn’t been wrong to sense danger, for it was Mr. Nakunatta at his shoulder now, Mr. Nakunatta rooting through the loose lucifers and bottles of kerosene, gasoline, diesel, and engine oil in the pockets of his baggy, suspendered trousers, finding a pencil stub, his mean little mouth pursing with satisfaction as he added another check mark to his notes, tcha! Mr. Nakunatta in his other incarnation as Mr. If Only, Mr. Too Late Now!
It was always the arsonist’s doing when old friends came together again.
Rae said something. Crispin risked a sidelong glance at her. His shock must not have shown on his face, or maybe Rae knew what monsters looked like better than he did. “I don’t actually care for fowl,” she said tartly. “I’ve been eating pastries all afternoon.”
24 Fessiery 1900 A.D. 12:45 A.M. Cype: Kherouge
Crispin returned to his lodgings with a heavy heart and a heavier stomach. Rae had, as usual, turned down his offer to escort her home. It was scarcely past the witching hour, and he wasn’t drunk; but he’d eaten the chicken and the duck he ordered for her, and didn’t feel capable of washing them down with tavernshop wine. Bloated but not tired, he climbed the stairs in the dark, still seeing her hurrying away, her skirts rustling like sweepings of night, her hair floating under her black umbrella. An expression of distaste had appeared on her face as he gluttonized the dinner platters. Sitting back and scrubbing his lips with the napkin, he’d thought, I’ve lost her for good this time
But at the end of the evening, she’d los
t her cool. She thanked him belatedly, over and over, for staying on. He couldn’t remember agreeing to stay, at least not aloud; he resented her assumption of his compliance. She grew flustered by his silence, and ended up forgetting her notecase. Out of sight, Crispin sheltered it from the rain with his body—his heart thudding—and looked inside. Old letters from Saia and Fumie. He had Fumie’s copies of these, and knew them by heart. And thirty to fifty envelopes addressed to Rae in Mickey’s writing. The stationery ranged from front leaves torn out of books, stuffed in handsewn cloth envelopes, to expensive calligraphed eggshell. Crispin pulled out the letters and glanced at paragraphs here and there, his eyes fastening on hideously transparent understatements. When he left Mickey in Swirling, four years ago, Mickey had seemed resigned to his status as head of his diminished household. He’d seemed prepared, even eager, to take on the task of rebuilding the family business. Yet every sentence here seemed a euphemism for desperation. Humorous hyperbole stood in for facts. Rae might have been fooled, but Crispin wasn’t. Had Mickey felt like this all along, and successfully hidden it from Crispin? Or had things gone wrong for him again?
Rae had filed the letters chronologically. Crispin put the ones he’d taken out back in order and walked slowly toward the Olde Tyme Hospitality lodging house, at once eager and reluctant to sit down and read from the beginning. As he rounded the last twist in the stairs he fumbled in his pocket for his keys.
The crack under his door glowed brightly.
He felt a pure, exalting desire for the 26 Nen Shiki Kenju he hadn’t carried since his days on the dealing circuit.
He laid the black leather case on the landing. He edged toward the door, tried it soundlessly, found it locked, then stepped back and snapkicked the knob. The crash splintered through the lodging house. He kicked the door again and it sagged inward, leaving the lock mechanism in the frame.
No one was there. But whoever had ransacked the room had made no attempt to be neat.
Some minutes later, as Crispin attempted to clean up the mess, Mickey’s letters forgotten (nothing to be done about the seam-ripped upholstery and emptied pillows and unframed pictures, a pity in retrospect that he’d picked such a genteel establishment this time around, but he could at least gather his own things together before reporting the crime to the landlady and watching her have a coronary, and whoever had done this probably wasn’t coming back tonight), he discovered the showbill someone had left blank side up on the floor.
It was an etching of a girl in a short, fluffy costume. She could have been a cabaret dancer, a tightrope walker, a prostitute. The Ferupian lettering said: ABBATOIR ROAD FAIRGROUNDS #1 SHRIKOUTO EVERY NIGHT 9 PM I AM THE HUMAN KNIFE. Crispin sat down on the ravaged mattress and folded the showbill carefully into squares, smaller and smaller and smaller, thinking: If I live until tomorrow the first thing I am going to do is roust a black marketeer out of bed and make him sell me a gun an American one this time the new automatic pistol with a ten-shot magazine and the hell with… He walked to the window and tossed the folded paper out into the rain, then took the first letter out of the case.
Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast,
Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest;
‘Tis but ivy-leaves around the ruin ‘d turret wreathe,
All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and gray beneath.
—George Gordon, Lord Byron, “Youth and Age”
Morning Shatters
1 Marout 1900 A.D.
Cype: Kherouge
Mickey had been told that according to the disused Cypean calendar this was the first day of summer. At half past nine in the morning the sun came punctually through the clouds, astonishing him but not the Cypeans: a lady standing nearby, waiting like him for Breeze Enkhoupista’s funeral procession to get under way, whispered under cover of the chanting that the rain would continue tomorrow, and for several weeks. This was just a sneak preview of summer, an annual phenomenon. He had to believe her because theirs wasn’t the only funeral party heading for the Mountain of Bones today. Obviously having anticipated the good weather, a dozen other processions set out from Kherouge at the same time, black-clad mourners competing in a gruesome hearse race. But most of the families who could afford to entomb their dead on the Mountain of Bones could also afford motorcars, and so the other groups drew slowly ahead, leaving Breeze Enkhoupista’s party to cough on dust and exhaust. The Most Patriotic Sisters didn’t let that stop them chanting their dirges. On foot, with the elderly Enkhoupistas riding in rickeys, and the coffin on a wheeled plinth drawn by black oxen, the party numbering about 150 covered the five miles to the mountain in about an hour, and the cult women, dressed like a masquerade party over whom someone had poured black dye, kept up their keening and chanting all the way.
“We hardly ever get to perform for an audience,” Rae said cynically when, out of breath, she dropped back to walk for a while with Mickey and Crispin.
She wore a sweeping black taffeta dress with black velvet stripes that matched the ribbons fluttering from her cartwheel hat. She was more conservatively dressed than most of her Sisters, and certainly more so than the Enkhoupista clan, who had turned out en masse to represent every province of Cype. Their arrival had surprised all the Sisters except for one stout, middle-aged woman who’d gone forward to greet them amid the clamor and swirl of a dozen funeral parties with composure so proud Mickey wondered if she herself had been an aristocrat at some point. Like Rae, her carriage told of her heritage. “Sister Cloud!” Rae said, staring. Sister Cloud wore an architectural edifice of black brocade. A sullen girl with the complexion of a corpse shuffled behind her, carrying her five-yard train.
And the Most Patriotic Sisters and the Enkhoupistas and the other funeral parties weren’t the only Cypeans who’d anticipated the fine weather, and they weren’t the only ones putting on costumes in the city today. When Mickey first explored Kherouge, he’d ended up wandering out along the Abbatoir Road. In a vacant lot between construction sites and the eponymous abbatoirs, in the rain, he’d seen enormous gaudy tents being erected, trucks disgorging bleachers and folded-up kiosks, diesel generators puffing smoke into the air. A Ferupian man and woman, actor types, told him that the first day of summer would also be the first day of the Kherouge open-air theater season. Four touring companies, having won the right to open the season, had arrived in advance to set up. The actors looked sidewise at Mickey’s tail and the travelstained clothes he hadn’t yet had time to replace. They clearly expected more from a Kirekuni than just questions. Mickey fumbled in his pocket and bought seats for their show: “VULVETTA An Opera Produced By Authrond’s Master Players Back By Popular Demand.”
But he couldn’t imagine any opera topping a Cypean funeral for sheer theatrical impact.
He’d heard that the Cypean love of sensation masked a deeper apathy, even an emotional vagrancy. But in comparison to Mickey’s poor, half-dead city, whose burns the Disciplinarians treated punctiliously with acid, Kherouge seemed a nonstop carnival. When Mickey disembarked from the Phoxefire Dancer, the steamer that had brought him from Naftha, which he’d reached by river after grounding the KE-122 he’d stolen from the OAS on the eastern side of the Newraw Plains, he’d thought: This is what it’s like to live in a city that never need fear fire, only a change of governors.
A city of stone. And through this stone hive buzzed swarms of motorcars. The funeral of Breeze Enkhoupista was the best show he’d seen yet. Black butterflies, the most regal and serene, here defeated all expectations, flapping in an ecstatic caricature of grief, beating their breasts (the Sisters) and hand drums (the Enkhoupistas) in a carefully structured frenzy of noise.
He’d stepped off the gangplank, suitcase in hand. Two paces and he was drenched and deaf. He thought: I’ve done it. I’ve escaped. Here, I can hide for the rest of my life and the twentieth century will come to me I won’t have to budge an inch.
A sense of relief washed t
hrough him.
And then he saw Crispin Kateralbin standing ten yards away under an umbrella with green flowers on it, immobile amid the turmoil of the international disembarkation, looking about a hundred years older than when Mickey had seen him last, wearing a New World-style suit. His hair was cropped short and he had a deep tan. He was glancing about as if he expected to see someone he knew.
CRISPIN.
As the Enkhoupista funeral party wended its way up the Mountain of Bones, they met some of the processions that had overtaken them coming down. The drumming and keening got louder, crescendoing in a fabulous dissonance, every time two clans jostled past each other on the narrow stony road. The mountain was really a low hill. The sleeping giant under the Cypean desert had raised a kneecap and time, wind, and rain had worn gullies in it. These gullies were thickly crystallized inside with stone tombs. Between them, roads circled crags toward the summit. Mickey glimpsed still more funerals descending by other routes. Turning to look back, he saw the road below them and back across the desert to Kherouge teeming with black ants: the processions weren’t spaced far enough apart even for propriety, and a hundred mingled dirges came on the wind—faint, inarticulate.
Crispin said beside him, “You’d think the Kherougese were dying like flies.”
“According to what I hear, they mummify their corpses so they can bury them at their leisure. How considerate it was of this Breeze female to wait to die until it was almost summer, and save the cult the expense of an embalmist.” Mickey’s own flippancy appalled him, belatedly.
A Trickster in the Ashes Page 16