A Trickster in the Ashes

by Felicity Savage

  “That sounds like an assignment for the house intelligence network, not the General Prosecutor of War Crimes,” Crispin commented.

  Azekawa only sighed again and clasped his hands around his knee. He looked troubled. Crispin was saved from saying something gauche by Burns, who barked a laugh, and said, “I hope the men you’ve put on Charlotte are better than the lot you gave me two weeks ago.” The shambles of the tenth had stung Burns’s pride to the quick, Crispin knew. “I’m never working with uniforms again, and that’s flat. The jumpy-fingered fathead who shot him”—he glanced at Mickey—“was executed last night. Kateralbin and I supervised the proceedings in person.”

  A twinkle came into the lizard’s light green eyes. “Of course it was your right to punish him as you saw fit, Field Prosecutor Burns. But on a personal note, David, it doesn’t become you to blame your failures on your subordinates. The operation was in your hands; it was your responsibility to run your agents smoothly—”

  “And yeah, I know, I know I fucked up.” Burns shook his head. “Bodies all over the street, the Disciplinarian Commissioner for the Burg and corporals from five different military detachments knocking on your door wanting to know what happened, complaints from the comptroller, formal memos from every legation in the quarter…tell me about it! Three blind mice, see how they run, but this is the twentieth century, and they all have guns,” he said with another laugh, a real one this time, which ended in a spasm of coughing—the bruises on his throat hadn’t quite faded yet. He had a peculiar habit, picked up at some point since Crispin had known him first, of quoting everything from epic poetry to nursery rhymes, emended by himself to fit the situation.

  Crispin picked up the thread, smiling. “Two were running and causing strife, and nearly missed the chance of their life—lives—life—whatever—” He shrugged. “Did you ever see such a sight in your life, three blind mice!”

  “Spare me your literary efforts, I beg of you,” Azekawa said with an amusingly exaggerated wince. He leaned over and tugged the folding table closer. Fragrant steam wisped off the pile of scones and the mess-sized platter of buttered toast. “Tea, anyone?”

  “I’d rather have something stronger, frankly,” Mickey said, speaking for the first time since Azekawa had entered.

  Azekawa shook his head and poured four cups of steaming amber liquid. Ferupian tea, not Kirekuni. It was one of the first clues Crispin had had, and he should have picked up on it. He still hadn’t completely forgiven Burns for omitting to enlighten him; but Burns, who protested that he’d assumed Crispin would figure everything out on his own, had a point. If nothing else, Azekawa’s eyes should have tipped him off—who ever heard of a Kirekuni with eyes as green as Chinese jade? “I wonder what Dr. Cowles would say if he heard his patient calling for hard liquor, and not even up yet,” Azekawa asked rhetorically.

  “Are they still giving you morphine, Mick?” Crispin had been longing to ask that for days, but he hadn’t dared without Azekawa there for protection.

  Mickey hacked. It could have been meant as a laugh. “I refused it after the first week. Soon as I came around. Can’t you tell the difference between a doped-up invalid and the walking wounded?”

  “You haven’t been trying to walk, have you?” Burns said, taking a scone and splitting it with his thumb, scattering crumbs on the wooden floor. “Significance, Achino, don’t you want to heal?”

  Mickey stared at Burns until the Wraith-blooded man looked away with a shiver. Perhaps, Crispin thought, Burns had remembered the sore point he had an amazing tendency to forget, that it was he who’d wounded Mickey—wounded him much worse than his subordinate had, brought him, in fact, to the brink of death. The bullet from the Disciple’s semiautomatic had gone through the flesh of Mickey’s shoulder—a clean wound. Burns’s Smith & Wesson .38 slug had punctured Mickey’s lung. Crispin would forever be in the debt of Dr. Cowles, who wasn’t a Disciple surgeon, or even in the private employ of an official—he was a Briton who’d happened to be passing en route to the Hall of the Aesculapyry at the moment when Burns initiated his “operation.” From the doors of the Stock Exchange, where he’d taken cover, Cowles had seen Mickey ease through the hue and cry in the street, picking Burns’s men off one by one. He’d seen Burns shoot Mickey on the steps, and Crispin rush Burns again with the intention of possessing his Smith & Wesson and shooting him to death. A detachment of Disciples thundered up and pulled Crispin back; Mickey sprawled forgotten, bleeding, in danger of being trampled. Cowles ran across the street, thrust himself through the melee, and used the combined authority of a medical man and a Westerner to summon help. The only reason he would give for having risked his own life to save Mickey’s—tugging his little Edward VIII beard, blushing the color of ripe cherries—was that he had admired Mickey’s “cool.”

  The British doctor was only in his thirties. He’d served in the Crimea. He still came to the Tausseroys’ every other day to visit his patient, but now he was being handsomely paid for his services, whether he liked it or not. (The monies came, as always, from Azekawa.) Crispin had let Cowles know in plain English, ignoring the little doctor’s embarrassment, that any favor he might need in the future, anything, he’d only to give the word, and Crispin would do it for him.

  “Medicine or not, I don’t trust that stuff,” Mickey said plaintively. “I haven’t touched it for seventy-two hours. And it’s fucking killing me.” He looked at Crispin. Pain or no pain, the dark eyes were steady.

  Crispin’s bandaged ribs twinged as he reached into his trouser pocket. Grimacing, flinching, he took out his hip flask and topped up Mickey’s teacup with whiskey.

  “Oh, dear,” Azekawa said.

  Burns said nothing; his mouth was full of scone. He chewed and gulped, and said at last, indistinctly, “Fling a jigger of that over here, will you, Cris-Kat?”

  Crispin obliged. Then—what the hell—he spiked his own tea.

  “You young men,” Azekawa said, nearly laughing.

  “Hideo One-Foot-In-The-Grave, huh?” Crispin reached for Azekawa’s hand and turned it over. It was weather-roughened and accustomed to a wide variety of weapons. A fragile, long-fingered Kirekuni bone structure showed through skin that had once—so Burns said—been as soft as a scholar’s. “Age is only skin-deep—I believe it was you who said that.”

  Azekawa took his hand back, making a rueful moue as if he deplored Crispin’s forwardness.

  “I suppose you’ve got to stay in character all the time, Hideo,” Burns said thoughtfully. He was already on his second scone. “Even when you don’t have to. Otherwise you might start making mistakes. But doesn’t it worry you—don’t you find yourself, sometimes, thinking like him? Aren’t you afraid of losing your own self inside all the trickery?”

  “Not here,” Azekawa pleaded.

  “Then where?” Burns persisted, taking a huge bite of crumbly sweet scone slathered with butter. He wiped his mouth with his hand, his eyes presenting a challenge to Azekawa. Crispin never intended to forget again how important it was to watch Burns’s eyes and pay no attention to his mouth. If you let yourself be distracted by the wicked grin and the charm and the filthy Shadowtown vocabulary, you risked forgetting how dangerous the Wraith-blooded veteran was. “Do you change back to your real self when you’re on your own at home, with the door locked? In case you forget how?”

  Azekawa frowned with mock severity. “For one thing, it is impossible to, as you put it, forget how. Would you ever forget how to walk?”

  “It feels like I just might,” Mickey put in. They stared at him. He shrugged and went on drinking his tea, three-quarters Jack Daniel’s really, with quick delicate sips.

  Azekawa laughed. “Belinda and Emily and I serve as each other’s memories. That is an advantage of living in the capital, where I am not the only one of my kind. And even if not for them, how could I possibly forget I am not—not this—this man whom I pretend to be—when I have two inquisitive young mutts like yourselves reminding me of my duplici
ty every chance you get? As a matter of fact I wish you would not. I feel I have been slipping.” Anxiety crossed his face like a shadow. “I am afraid that, well—” He sighed. “I wish this hadn’t come up today!”

  “If it’s me you’re concerned about, don’t worry, your secrets are safe,” Mickey said. The words sounded pregnant with a deeper meaning. Crispin remembered with a pang that Mickey was the only conspirator whom Azekawa hadn’t chosen: instead, he’d had Mickey foisted on him by Crispin, who’d disobeyed implicit but definite orders by coming to Mickey’s bedside and relaying everything, day by day as he learned it, whispering into the ear of the half-conscious form in the curtained bed, resting his cheek against Mickey’s cheek, inhaling Mickey’s fevered breath. He’d been impressed and somewhat dismayed to discover, when Mickey regained his voice, that Mickey remembered everything Crispin had told him over the preceding weeks word for word.

  When Mickey hit the streets again, in the new role Crispin had plea-bargained for him, would he be in danger? Crispin wasn’t underestimating Azekawa, or for that matter Belinda and Emily Tausseroy, anymore. He’d learned his lesson. From now on he’d be more paranoid than a paper-pusher and proud of it.

  “What’s eating you, Harrish?” Burns’s use of Azekawa’s other name was a transgression unthinkable even here, Crispin gathered from the lizard’s reaction, a stiffening of the body and air-dance of the fingers, even here in the Tausseroys’ safe house. Burns helped himself to toast. “It’s not all those complaints I caused? And anyway, I think I’ve said I’m sorry enough times. Fire me if you want.” He didn’t sound sorry. He knew Azekawa didn’t have the option of firing him. (Shared secrets, after all, worked both ways.) “Is the Lesser Significant still sore about it? I’ve never before known him to waste his time on tempests in teapots.”

  “It’s not just the—the unfortunate miscarriage of justice on the tenth.” Azekawa, alias Harrish Acanaguan, alias Palmer Tallwood, sounded genuinely upset. He rested his elbows on his knees and bowed his head. “I really didn’t want to bring this up today! This is supposed to be a celebratory occasion! We’re supposed to be congratulating Achino on his swift recovery!”

  This was in fact the first day Dr. Cowles, a stickler for the proprieties despite his idealism, had given his official permission for Mickey to have more than one visitor.

  “We’re not supposed to be worrying him with the affairs of the world. He could have a relapse! And it is probably no more than speculation!”

  “I assure you,” Mickey said with amusement, “I’m fully recovered enough to hear if something’s gone wrong. I won’t faint.”

  The pane squares of light had sunk down his legs as the sun rose in the sky. Now they illuminated the fine wool fibers on the blanket covering his feet. No dust drifted in the beams: the Tausseroys’ servants kept a spotless household. From where Crispin was sitting he could see the sun in the window, a molten stripe between the neighbors’ chimney pots. Belinda and Emily lived—as the real Belinda and Emily had lived before them—in the haute center of Rotterys, which had suffered less than any other part of the city in the victory and the reconstruction. Their pretensions to aristocracy were the envy of the whole street. They employed two maids, a cook, and a footman to look after and effectively to blockade the four-story town house on Minday, Wennesday, and Freeday while they paid social calls throughout Rotterys, Hastych, and the Burg. On Tossday they received. On Treesday they were “at home.” On Sunday they took care of their other business. Not even the maids doubted their Sunday pretext—an old aunt who allegedly lived in Hausuisse, so far away that Belinda and Emily sometimes didn’t return until Minday morning.

  Today was Freeday. Belinda would be back for lunch, her “daughter” shortly afterward.

  Azekawa looked up, his hard jade eyes shining. He entreated, “Do not take fright, friends. But I fear I may have worn out my welcome in Kuroi’s inner circle. The eyes were one thing: who is to say whether or not the trauma of storming a city, even in the rear guard, could cause a man’s eyes to go green, as some men’s hair is said to go white? And that the effect could manifest itself for the first time a year after the fact? Our friend the Lesser swallowed that, though I think he found it rather hard to digest. But recently I’ve had the feeling I was being eased out of his confidence. I have been eased out of his confidence. The tenth was the last straw—but in his mind, it was only an excuse. Since then he has been keeping me busy with unimportant assignments.”

  “Spying on Charlotte Goldtoes,” Burns murmured, “I’d hardly consider that an—”

  “In the name of sanity, David!” Azekawa snapped. Crispin wondered, fascinated, if for the first time he was hearing the Mime’s lizard impersonation falter. “The point is, I am afraid we’re going to have to alter our plans and waste no time about it. It may be necessary to abandon this house, break off all contact with the Tausseroys, and go undercover again.”

  “No,” Crispin said involuntarily.

  “Oh, yes!” Azekawa sighed. “Just as I was coming to understand politics! Distributing pharmaceuticals isn’t one half so interesting as tracking down war criminals: there’s real satisfaction in intelligence work—isn’t there, David?”

  Burns, still gobbling toast, looked confused and angry. The mask had slipped, Crispin thought, and Azekawa didn’t even realize what he’d said. The situation vis-à-vis Kuroi must have deteriorated more than he was letting on if it was distracting him this badly. Burns, of course, had no idea that before Acanaguan had been Azekawa, he’d been Tallwood. He was completely in the dark about the pharmaceuticals connection. He thought Azekawa had laid a trap for Crispin and assigned Burns (at Burns’s own request, Crispin guessed, though he would never know for sure) to arrest him simply because Crispin was a war criminal, because Crispin had long ago been condemned to death. At the court-martial shortly before the fall of Cerelon, Burns had been the main witness for the prosecution. Anyone else would have apologized by now; Burns had just related the juicy details of the proceedings, where two Shadow thieves had been made to stand in for the missing Crispin and Mickey, and expected Crispin to share the last laugh with him. In his mind, both his and Crispin’s wrongdoing was limited to the treasonous murder of Anthony Vichuisse. Everything after that fell in the morally gray realm of necessity.

  “I think, all in all, it is best if I am completely open,” Azekawa said sadly.

  “Everything’s been on hold until I get better, hasn’t it?” Mickey said. He braced his arms against the sides of the chaise longue. “Don’t think in terms of the future anymore. Think in terms of tomorrow. That’s what I’m doing.”

  Azekawa didn’t say anything. Crispin gaped as Mickey levered himself shakily upright. He’d lost weight during the fever. Inside his expensive flannel pajamas and cashmere robe, he was a skeleton knobbed with bandages as grasshoppers are knobbed with joints. For this occasion, he’d washed and combed his hair (or one of the Tausseroy women had done it for him: Belinda took a victor’s sadistic pleasure in mothering him) and it hung in broad, concealing waves over his corded neck and sunken temples. He took one step and then another. Burns dropped his toast butter side down and cursed.

  “Excuse me,” Mickey said to Azekawa, who sat at the foot of the chaise longue.

  The Mime moved his stool aside automatically. Mickey rested his hands on the windowsill. His shoulders sagged. He twisted his head to gaze up and out at the sun.

  “Well, this is cause for celebration! Let’s help ourselves to Belinda’s sherry!” Azekawa cried roguishly.

  “Lie back down,” Crispin said between his teeth, getting up and dragging Mickey back to the chaise longue. Mickey didn’t resist. But what if someone had seen him at the window—one of the neighbors’ servants or a passerby in the street? “Do you want to have a relapse?” Crispin heard himself employing the tricks of the interpreter’s trade. He sank back into his own chair and saw Azekawa flapping an envelope at him.

  “Before I forget. This was addresse
d to you at my suite in the underground fortress. It arrived early this morning.” Crispin took it. Sweaty fingerprints marred the rag weave, but the seal was intact. “Yamauchi would never forgive me if I failed to give it to you. He must have written back the moment he got my note saying that you had been found. But I don’t think that whatever he says can have much bearing on…ah…more recent developments.”

  12 Maia 1900 A.D.

  Kingsburg (“Ataramachi”): the Burg: the KPD

  (now Disciplinarian, in effect military) headquarters:

  three weeks earlier

  The Disciples frog-marched Crispin up from the dungeonlike basement of the ugly redbrick barracks at top speed, making no allowances for his ribs. At every step he had to bite his lip to keep from moaning. The nurse with the sweet pale face who’d come to his cell last night, offering friendship in the form of a hypodermic needle, had bandaged him stiff from nipples to hips. Her hands weren’t as gentle as her face. Every time she said, “Now hold still, ain’t you a man?” he knew something worse was coming.

  He couldn’t work out why he wasn’t dead yet.

  Mickey was dead. Burns had shot him in the heart, and it was Crispin’s profoundest regret, out of a thousand profoundly useless regrets that had offered themselves to his discrimination in the cell, that he hadn’t managed to kill Burns in retaliation before the Disciples pulled him off. But after a while, even his failure in the line of vengeance ceased to matter. He awoke on the floor, under the weak, antiquated gaslight, as if he’d never slept. Mickey was dead.

  It left a void in him—or rather, it left him in a void. A gray emptiness where other people moved like shadows, a torpor of the emotions out of which nothing, not even pain, could jolt him. Pain bored him. Climbing these stairs bored him. Life bored him silly.

  (In later days, and years, he would never quite forgive Mickey for not having been dead. Try as he might, he couldn’t forget those thirty-six hours in the KPD HQ; and every time he looked at Mickey, a fleeting wisp of the emptiness touched him, a reminder that without Mickey nothing else was much worth having. He resented Mickey for having caused him those thirty-six hours, and then survived to remind him of their context—of the fact that certain people in our lives, flawed and undeserving though they may be, have been graced with the wherewithal to summon down that gray void just by dying.)