A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  Someone had left an identical showbill for him to find a week ago.

  Someone had ripped his room to pieces and left a Smithrebel’s flyer as a calling card.

  What sort of underhanded trick was Mr. Nakunatta playing now?

  He stood immobile in the crowd, perplexed. Someone had transformed his childhood paradise, his training ground for the QAF and for the rest of the world, from a family-friendly carnival of freaks and acrobats into a glorified shrikouto arena. The circus had been Easternized! Who had done it? And how were they connected with his stalker? And what about that Mime, who, thank heavens, he’d managed to lose?

  He was afraid to try finding out. Later, watching Rae’s reunion with her former road companions, he thought he’d probably made the right choice. But all the same it plagued him: had Smithrebel’s changed hands? And if so, who was the new owner?

  He’d worked out the mystery of the Enclave, at the very least. Or so he’d thought. He’d had Rae bring them to her home with the intention of proving his theory and putting it behind him, so that he could concentrate on those other questions on which his life hung.

  But now he was afraid the Enclave might not be a self-contained mystery after all. He was afraid the answer to the question of what inhabited the dungeons beneath the garden might prove Rae and her culties part of the interconnection, too.

  He’d indulged in a good deal of speculation as to what the Sisters’ “Resident Royals” might really be. Deformed Cypean gnomes, slaves to their wives’ pleasure? Mere effigies, the repositories of prayers and the Sisters’ frustrated fantasies of marriage? Or possibly, just what the women implied—exiles from the Ferupian Royal family subsisting in hiding, imagining that they’d someday reclaim their domains? The origins of the Enclave’s twenty-odd children and infants were quite mundane, he’d decided without ever having met them—and this afternoon he’d become convinced that Rae’s son had been fathered by Master Player Authrond. (How could she have given herself to such a man? How could she have kept on treasuring his memory—as she clearly had done—after she’d left the troupe, and no longer depended on his goodwill for her survival?) He made her pregnant, and she ran away and found sanctuary here. Significant knows who the rest of the children’s fathers are—tradesmen, longshoremen, local Jack-The-Lady-Killers with hundreds of notches on their bedposts—

  It had been a neat theory, and it had blown up in his face.

  Rae’s son looked like a cross between a human and a plucked bluebird.

  No back-alley liaison could have resulted in a child with such unnatural coloring, his skin too evenly pigmented to be some sort of birthmark, with such long, spindly limbs. Nor could he be the son of a Ferupian—Royal or otherwise.

  They’d slipped around the outside of the fortlike courtyard, into the garden where Rae said there was a seldom-used entrance to the basements. A little mauve face popped up from behind a hedge, and Rae’s face fell in horror.

  “Mother!” Its teeth chattered as it threw itself at her legs.

  “Jonny, go inside! What are you doing out here? You’ll catch cold.”

  “Looking for nest-eggs! Looking for windfalls!”

  “Where’s Auntie Lightning and Auntie Tornie?”

  “Omar got sick at work. He has a fever. They told us to go play. The others went to the spring fair on Xalme Boulevard, but I stayed here.” Virtuously, it added, “I didn’t want to get in a street brawl, Mother.”

  Rae detached it roughly from her skirts. “These gentlemen are—are—health inspectors. Secret health inspectors. If I find out you’ve breathed a word to anyone—”

  Grinning, the creature—Jonny—pinched his nose. “Won’t breeve!” he said nasally. Then his eyes narrowed. “Did you ask to see their identification, Mother? Lots of people pretend to be other people, and then they come back and rob you. You’d better look at their papers.”

  Rae raised her hand threateningly. “I haven’t any patience with you!”

  Mickey elbowed Crispin. His face glowed with fascination. “She treats it like a child. But it isn’t, is it? What can it be?”

  “It’s her son,” Crispin whispered, as Jonajonny scampered away through the toy labyrinth. His hair, the same pale purplish blue as his skin, glowed like a phosphorescent dandelion clock in the twilight. “He’s three and a half. I had no idea.”

  Mickey whistled softly.

  (Half-remembered dreams. Rae walking hand in hand with—with—what? She’d called her children Jonajonny and Estellesme. Crispin had thought once he would name his daughter Anuei; he’d thought that daughter would be Rae’s, too.)

  Rae was already halfway around the foot of the hill. “Are you coming or aren’t you?” she called back to them. The hedges that marked the paths and vegetable plots only reached her knees. The whole garden was on a miniature scale. It might have been designed for children.

  Mickey’s forehead wrinkled. “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

  “It’s some fucked-up business. Got to get to the bottom of it.” Crispin headed after Rae into the fraught twilight, envying Mickey his intellectual detachment. Midges, fooled by the sunlit day into thinking it was summer, moved sluggishly around his head. There was a tool shack at the back of the garden, abutting the windowless cliff of another tenement. Rae led them inside, wincing as the door screeched. Crispin and Mickey watched her struggle with stacks of trowels, bushels of seed potatoes, hoes, spades, rakes, and a wheelbarrow, until they came to their senses and helped her shift everything away from the back wall of the shack, revealing a dusty trapdoor set into the earth floor. She knelt and brushed the loose soil off with her hands. They all struggled to drag back the rusted bolts. Cold, fetid air drifted into Crispin’s face as he raised the wooden slab.

  A shaft led straight down. A ladder was riveted to one of its stone sides.

  With the door of the shack closed, it was nearly dark. Crispin looked up at the other two. Pale faces framed by black hair, features indistinct: they might have been twins, not just cousins. Rae chewed her lip in fear. Mickey seemed to be fighting to maintain his composure. “Still curious?” he said.

  “Hell, yeah.” Crispin swung his legs into the shaft.

  Rae darted forward with a little cry. “Stop! Let me go first. They don’t know you.”

  “What, they’d raise the alarm?” Crispin jeered. “Burglars often try to get in through the basement?”

  “No. They don’t talk anymore. Or scream, or anything. Not since we had to—to lock them up.” She dragged at his shoulder. “But there’s no knowing what they will do. No one’s ever been down to the cells—I mean, no one who isn’t one of us—”

  “I’m not sure I’m still curious,” Mickey said.

  “You heard her. They’re locked up.” Crispin’s spirit shrank from the implications of the word cells. “Give me a break, Mickey, you faced death every day for years, and now you’ve reached the ripe old age of twenty-six you can’t face the unknown?”

  “What is that you always call him?” Rae demanded fretfully. “Is it a title of some sort? His name’s Yoshitaro!”

  Crispin braced his hands on the edges of the trap and swung down onto the ladder. Above, he heard a scuffle, and seconds later, Mickey dropped lightly onto the rung above his fingers, his long tail balancing his weight.

  “But when we were in the QAF, I had no choice,” he said softly down to Crispin. And raising his voice, to Rae: “I prefer to go by a name other than the one I was given, as do you, Rain: we’re both exiles, and exiles have to take precautions. What else is new?”

  “I knew you were running away from something!” Rae complained. Her skirts rustled as she, too, started down the ladder. Crispin prayed the rivets would hold. Their bodies blocked the dim light from the trapdoor overhead.

  “I left Okimachi by choice,” Mickey said sharply. “And I changed my name by choice, too.”

  “Free as a bird, aren’t you?” she retorted. “Well, I’ll oblige you to remember that
not all of us have that luxury.”

  Crispin’s nerves sang in his ears. He was climbing down into the dark, into a reek like the quintessentialized essence of the past, the stench of an evil he recognized. But it couldn’t possibly be what he thought. The stench. He had to concentrate.

  “You’re as free as anyone, darling,” Mickey said. “You could have elected to stay at the fairgrounds, and then go back on the road, and no one would have known where to look for you. No one would have been the wiser, I certainly wouldn’t have blabbed, if that’s what you’re thinking. Neither would Crispin.”

  “You don’t understand. It’s my fate to stay here!”

  “You’re awfully enamored of this notion of fate, aren’t you? Does it, perhaps, bear some relation to the concept of apocalypse? I hardly need to tell you that that’s passe these days. Just like religion. And if I recall correctly, you said yourself that even this enclave can’t last much longer. Are you going to stand on the rock of religion until you’re washed away, because you’re afraid to swim? I hope that isn’t too difficult a metaphor for you. Most of my other relations adore metaphors; indeed I’ve wondered if they can stand anything else. But you—”

  “Yoshi, I’m not one of your sisters! I’m one of my Sisters!”

  “Will you two stop yapping!” Crispin begged. His voice echoed off the stone walls. Apping…ping…ing… down and down and down.

  Demogorgons.

  He smelled them, and saw them rotting alive in their chains, in the barred cells scattered through the underground labyrinth.

  Against his will, drawn by the old, irresistible compulsion to prove himself, he tricked one of them.

  He squatted inside its cell on stone flags filthy with excreta and molted orange skin. Mickey and Rae watched from outside. He couldn’t take his eyes off the shining erection between the demogorgon’s thighs as it—he—dragged himself close, knelt opposite Crispin, and took Crispin’s hands carefully, gently, in blackened claws. He was a small humanoid demogorgon, no taller than Crispin himself, fat with inactivity. The chain linking his wrists clanked as he raised Crispin’s hands to his mouth and kissed them with dry lips. He seemed to be formally welcoming Crispin into his home: as if, after so long among strangers, an old enemy was just as glad a sight as an old friend.

  He had a mind. His thoughts were a hundred times more coherent than those of any daemon Crispin had ever tricked in the wild, much less handled in a cell. But his long captivity and his unnatural diet had driven him quite mad.

  Crispin found himself immersed in a clotted red whirlpool of hate and need and jealousy, fishing for the facts submerged in the foul torrent.

  The demogorgon wore no collar and he was chained not with silver but rusty iron, so he remained conscious—as a wild daemon would be conscious—of the masses, the Crowd, the rest of daemonkind.

  (896,356,871 * * * 896,356,872 * * *)

  (Still alive then! Disembodied! But still everywhere! Crispin thought, stunned.)

  (896,356,873 * * *)

  He knew of the Crowd’s existence—his consciousness existed only as a warped version of theirs—yet he couldn’t join them, he couldn’t dematerialize.

  Why? No silver here, no oak—

  The red river. Blood. Human blood had tainted the gorgon’s body, corrupted the delicate chemical balance of his supernatural flesh. Drinking the blood of women—and engaging, because they asked him so nicely (and afterward because he wanted to) in unnatural congress with them—had fouled up his physical-mental-instinctive knowledge of kineticism, his joy in at-one-ness with the physical world, his talent for bodilessness, replacing that with a helpless craving for more blood. He wanted to dematerialize—but now that urge translated only into a desire to escape the dungeon and roam free, shambling, panting, through the carnal wilderness of the streets. More congress with humans was his only satisfaction, his only distraction.

  He was dying of hatred.

  His skin was rotting, his bones weakening, his eyes clouding. All the others held here in captivity were deteriorating, too, Crispin understood: some faster, some slower.

  (896,356,874 * * * 896,356,875)

  Crispin was drowning in the red river. He remembered too late (coughing, swallowing, choking) that when it came to uncollared daemons—even, especially, mad ones—no human, trickster or not, could resist for long the sheer intensity of the persuasion with which they lured you into their consciousnesses, into their scintillating, unbearably detailed version of the world. Indela Mishime Akele Favis Kendris Belamis the evil-spawned geniuses had done it, hadn’t they? And this dying demogorgon was a thousand times as powerful.

  Half-conscious, he lay sprawled on his stomach with his face in the slops. The gorgon’s wet, cold erection nudged his outflung hand. Its breath heated his nape intermittently. He heard voices coming as if from a great distance.

  “So much for his new suit. Thirty-five sen, if you can believe it.”

  “Yoshi—it’s going to feed!”

  “It’s going to what?”

  A scaly, repulsive weight descending on his back. The slimy sweat on the demogorgon’s belly soaking through his clothes. Clawed hands placed carefully over his right wrist, then his left.

  “Do something! Do something!”

  Far off, he heard the rattle and thud of the cage door opening.

  Then the world simplified into pure violence.

  Later—much later—he found himself alone in his head again, with all the implications.

  what do I hear? from the paradise on the other side

  dripping water

  wingbeats

  waves thudding on rocks

  sounds of humans and beasts breathing

  the smell of blood

  —Ryuichi Tamura

  Crazy

  1 Marout 1900 A.D. 11:50 P.M.

  Cype: Kherouge: the residence of the Honorable and Mrs. Jice Sibelye-Enkhoupista

  By the time the Sibelye-Enkhoupista house party retired for the night, Mickey was flying too high to know or care what sort of mood the brush with disaster in the Enclave’s dungeons had put Crispin in. They’d reached the Sibelye-Enkhoupista mansion just in time to change their filthy clothes, and made it down for dinner as the last stroke of the gong died. They were seated at opposite ends of the table. As the evening progressed, Mickey’s spirits rose, keeping pace with his blood alcohol. At first he felt like a traitor; later he grew defiant. Damned if he was going to let Crispin spoil his night!

  But now he felt repentant. He looked around the chamber, with its high Kirekuni-style bed and antique Cypean wall hangings. One of thirty-plus bedrooms which, tonight, were all occupied by Sibelye-Enkhoupista relatives and friends. The bay window held a view of Ghixtown; he could see all the way to the docks, where stripes of sea glimmered under the steam-liners’ lanterns. He took a deep, revivifying breath of luxury. Then he went through the connecting door to Crispin’s room. It was a mirror image of his. Crispin sat fully clothed on the edge of the bed, smoking what must have been his thirtieth or fortieth cigarette of the day. Mickey wandered around the room, fingering the upholstery, estimating the prices of the knickknacks, leaving the more constricting components of his suit behind him. “Dunno why the devil they insist on these cravat things.” He wound it around the bedpost. “Damned uncomfortable.” He frowned at Crispin. “I thought you’d given up smoking.”

  “Got the taste for it tonight.”

  Mickey shrugged and picked up the bedside lamp. Its base felt like solid gold. The flame sputtered as he tipped it to peer at the stamp. “Do you have any idea how well-off these friends of yours are?”

  “They’re just as much friends of yours, now—or that’s how it looked at dinner,”

  “Oh, yeah! Who’d have believed it?” Mickey seized on the chance to expound. “Jice Sibelye-Enkhoupista has interests in a string of businesses right here in Kherouge. Had branches in Leondze, Leondizon, Grizelle, and Domenische, too. His Ferupian managers have all been incommunica
do since the victory, and he thinks they probably evaluated the situation and made off with the funds before the Disciples got far enough east to do it for them. But he can’t find anyone reliable to go into Ferupe and find out what’s happening now. 1 told him I could probably save him the trouble of investigating. I saw it in Okimachi. Greater Significance has a sideline in monkeying with special interests. They take over a town, then move the licensed quarter, fleece the owners when they try to buy property in the new area, and harass anyone associated with a business that didn’t move. Most of the high-class houses in the new city went broke that way, and as for me—I had permission to stay where I was, and look what happened.” He could speak of it now without bitterness. All night his mind had been leaping ahead. The fortuitous discovery that he and Jice Sibelye-Enkhoupista were in the same profession opened up new possibilities. “That’s what they’re doing in Ferupe, anyway, and in the Kirekuni cities they perceive as dangerous—among them, of course, the capital. They’re treating Cype very differently. Perhaps they don’t have as great a stake in it. But regardless, it seems this isn’t a bad place to do business these days.”

  Daisuke was too insignificant an official to have any influence as far away as Kherouge. Could Mickey trust Rumika to sell Achino-uchi and send him the funds? If not, could he get Ashie to do it through a representative? Sibelye-Enkhoupista himself had indicated willingness to lend him the capital, but Mickey didn’t like the idea of being beholden to a competitor.

  “Jice is a shrewd old bird.” He translated his thoughts into Ferupian as he spoke. “His houses here took in a thirty percent profit last year—and this year, who knows? Kherouge is booming. At a time like this, competition can only stimulate the scene. He’s smart enough to know that. That, I think, is why he’s receptive to the idea…”