The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  “No!” Mickey hurried back to him, stopping just short of seizing his hand. “You’re coming! Don’t say you’re—”

  Crispin looked at him. “I was thinking I might let you be reunited with your family on your own. I could turn up tomorrow, or some other time—it would be more tactful.”

  He was lying, of course. He’d planned—or decided on the spur of the moment, which was worse—to desert, to end their partnership here. Cold, aching misery drenched Mickey. He felt as if he was at the bottom of the Orange, in winter.

  “But if it makes a difference to you, of course I’ll come.”

  “If it makes a difference,” Mickey nearly choked. “A difference...!”

  Crispin said sadly, “I’ll tag along, then. But I don’t know about you; I’m thirsty. I could handle a drink before we go. And I expect your mother and sisters will better appreciate seeing you again if you’ve got a snap in your eye. You don’t want to turn up looking like the walking dead, do you?”

  Mickey could have wept with gratitude. At that moment he would have done anything for Crispin. He hated his own malleability, and the treacherous physical energy generated by the desire to please. “We have time, I suppose,” he said ungraciously. They set out through the market. Bakers, cheese-sellers, fruiterers, jewelers; and straggling up the steep ground beside the rock face, the armorers. Though things were naturally slowing down toward the end of the day, the Urba seemed to be in good health. Mickey even detected an improvement: the last time he’d been in Okimako, one hadn’t been able to visit any market without having to stop while a chain of cult members danced past, singing and holding hands, holding up business, ignoring the jeers directed at them from all sides. But now he saw no sign of culties anywhere.

  Perhaps a law prohibiting such public exultations had been passed. Or perhaps religion had just gone out of fashion.

  From the armorers’ pitch on the higher ground, the Urba looked like a sea of chaos. Most of the costerers were closing down their stalls for the night, preparing to trundle them back to their homes in the lowest streets of the new city. Bright curtains flapped, boxes of wares crashed to the ground, and draybeasts howled querulously, restive from being tied by their masters’ stalls all day. When Mickey was in the thick of things, all this had seemed as it should; but now it came to him that the activity of the market was queerly guarded, subdued in a way it was impossible to pin down. Simultaneously, he realized that everywhere, especially in the armorers’ pitch, black-uniformed Disciplinarians flecked the crowd. The more humane policemen helped stall owners harness up their draybeasts; others just watched, chewing cinnamon sticks, or smoking. Mickey had never seen so many of them in the new city except when there was to be a procession. It was sinister.

  He pulled Crispin fast uphill, longing to ask him to carry Uemiel, to hide her (although beat officers were no more likely than a Dead urchin to know a daemon when they saw one). Luckily the streets were still reasonably crowded with ordinary people as well as police. And this was a tavern district.

  He led Crispin into a fenced wine garden on the corner of Army and Luminous Street 22.

  “It’s in here.” He was breathing hard. “Give me the money.”

  “No, you stay here,” Crispin said. “You’re in no state. Anyway they’re more likely to take it from me, aren’t they? One foreigner’s more or less the same as another, in terms of being probable customers for the black market, that is.”

  “I know the man we want,” Mickey protested. “Name’s Jin.”

  “Exactly.” Crispin gave Mickey a gentle push that knocked him into a small iron chair. “Give me five—no, ten minutes. Keep your head down, too. Here, hold on to her.” Mickey felt his fingers being closed over something that felt like a sharp-bladed, vibrating knife. He grunted in shock and dropped it. His head swam; for a second he thought he would be sick. He barely heard Crispin saying, “Shit! How stupid are you, Kateralbin!”

  Through hazed vision Mickey saw him swoop up the chain. That was what it had been: Uemiel’s chain!

  “I’m taking her with me. Sit tight.”

  It could have been ten minutes or an hour that Mickey slumped in a daze, scarcely conscious. The shock of touching Uemiel’s chain had exacerbated his headache to unsupportable proportions. When Crispin finally came out, Mickey saw through a blur that he was jubilant.

  “Fucking horrible exchange rate!” He sat down across from Mickey, setting two tumblers of whiskey and water on the table, and slapped a jingling pocket. “Never mind, it bought what we needed! The QAF special!”

  “How—how much did we have, Ferupian? What’d you get?”

  The wine garden had grown crowded. Crispin straightened up from tying Uemiel’s chain to the bottom of his chair. “Two quid thirteen shillings in silver—he wouldn’t take the copper. Wasn’t Jin, by the way. He’s moved on. But the name seemed to convince them. I got five sigils.”

  “Five sigils? That’s not enough to buy a day’s food. You were taken.”

  Crispin didn’t seem embarrassed. “Considering this is the first time I’ve tried to speak your language, I think I did pretty well. And everyone seemed to agree it was the going rate. It’s because you people are winning the war. What value is Ferupian currency going to have in a couple of years’ time? Money changers’ve always got one eye on the future.”

  Mickey shook his head. He had started his whiskey and water and it was having the prescribed effect.

  Crispin’s eyes twinkled like the little candle lanterns set on posts around the fence of the wine garden and on the fence posts of the others on Army Street. “You should have heard some of the stories they were telling.”

  “About what?”

  “Oh, all sorts of things. Cult warfare—well, not so much that, I gathered, as the fact that there wasn’t any. But mostly about the war. Tavern bullshit, but I expect there’s more than a grain of truth in it, there usually is.”

  “Don’t you care if we’re losing?”

  Crispin took a gulp of his drink before answering. “We? That’s rich, coming from you. Even I’m not Ferupian anymore. Not here, anyway. They were treating me like...I don’t know if they thought I was Lamaroon. One fellow tried talking to me in some language I’ve never heard. I had the impression he thought I was from the Mim. Never seen a Mime. Have you?”

  “Yes, and they look a bit like you, actually,” Mickey said. “Light brown skin. Curly hair. Green eyes. Although they usually dress like princes.” He smiled, carefully; he was still ashamed of his faux pas. “We” indeed. “That’d be one way to get respect.”

  Crispin gazed into his whiskey glass. “Good liquor, isn’t it? I can’t really tell. There’s nothing quite like the first drink when you’ve been dry for a while.”

  27 June 1896 A.D. 7:15 Okimako: the new city

  Blazing lights advertised the function of the house on Dragyonne Street much less discreetly at night than the sign over the door did during the day. All the windows were veiled with chiffon gauzes in rich colors. But through them seeped the light, and against them tantalizing hints of figures appeared and vanished. Three columns of four, the windows glowed like huge resin jewels with living insects trapped in their hearts. They distinguished the town house from the other, more conservatively lit residences along this quiet enclave, where law required comings and goings after dark to be either by rickey or on foot—no four-wheeled vehicles. The Akila-uza House Of Ecstasy might assure its clientele that it was the most discreet establishment of its sort in the city, but of course all merchants had to advertise somehow, no matter what they sold.

  Standing on the other side of the street, looking up at Akila-uza for the first time in five years, Mickey felt the magic of the lights as never before. Simultaneously democratic and intimate, they lured him as powerfully as they might have any other lonely man who’d come that way. But just as Mickey’s purpose was unique (and worthier, he felt, perhaps inaccurately), so the lights’ promise to him was unique. No visions of fem
ale flesh tangled his thoughts. Instead he imagined he could hear Saia’s voice trilling from the ground floor lobby where she greeted guests. He imagined he could hear Ashie playing the lo-lute. His heart was pounding painfully, and his palms tingled. He was very drunk. They’d stayed in the wine garden, bingeing on liquor, rather longer than planned.

  Crispin squinted up at the windows, smoking one of the cigarettes they had bought with the few sigilimis left over. He’d tied Uemiel to the area railings of the house behind them. She whimpered, turning around and around; in the dark her pink skin looked phosphorescent. Crispin looked at Mickey. “No use waiting about,” he said, puffing out smoke. “You’ll just make it worse. Go on.”

  Mickey concentrated, trying not to slur his words. “You’ll be here?”

  “Go for it. The point of getting drunk was to nerve you up, if you remember; waste of good spirits if it hasn’t worked.”

  “I didn’t want to get drunk.”

  “Well, you were knocking them back like a lush.”

  Only because you wanted to get drunk, and I want to do what you do. The night smelled faintly of incense. The glow of the gaslamps at the bottom of Dragyonne Street, and all over the city, erased moon and stars from the sky, turning it a curious yellow-black.

  “Cris.” He wrenched himself away from contemplation of the lights. He faced Crispin. His teeth were very nearly chattering. His hand went out of its own volition, plucking at Crispin’s cuff, trying to pull his hand out of his pocket. “Don’t leave. Please don’t leave, all right? If they won’t have me—if they will have me, which I’m doubting more every minute—if you leave, I’ll die, I know I will. I’ll come and get you within five minutes.” Miserably, he forced himself into silence.

  “I keep telling you I’m not going anywhere,” Crispin said, detaching Mickey’s hand gently. The impatience in his voice was not well concealed. “And you’d be wise to be a little more restrained than that when you make your case to your mum.”

  Shamefaced, Mickey turned and stumbled blindly across the street. Behind him, he heard Crispin picking up the butt of his cigarette and lighting a fresh one from it. He climbed the steps, slammed the knocker against the door, deliberately ignoring the convention of three soft taps, and waited, resting his forehead against the cool wood.

  Light spilled into the street. “Monsieur Kachi—ah.” An older woman he did not recognize held the door a crack open. She spoke in fluid, fast, disapproving Kirekuni. “I’m sorry, monsieur. I believe you have the wrong address.”

  Mickey shoved her and the door back and pushed inside. He ignored her gasp of horror (and Crispin’s chuckles coming faintly from the shadows). “Where can I find Madame Akila?”

  The narrow intimacy of the hall gave the first hint of the house’s nature. Only one door opened off it, and that to the lobby. The hall and the lobby were holding chambers, a filtration system for undesirables without appointments. From the back wall, Aunt Saonna glared down, her tail high, her dress brilliant blue, captured in paint at sullen twenty. “Madame Akila is not at present available,” the woman said icily. She was fifty and exquisitely dressed. Mickey had never seen her before. “May I suggest, monsieur, that you return at an hour when my gracious mistress is less likely to be occupied with non-business-related affairs?” She moved backward toward the bell rope that summoned security. In seconds her tail would dart up and tug it.

  Mickey nipped around her and snatched it up, holding it out of reach with the tip of his tail while he fended her off with his single arm. “It’d be different if I was wearing silk and leather, wouldn’t it? It’d be How-can-we-be-of-convenience-m’sieu? For now, I’m not Dead, though I may look it. Where is Madame Akila occupied?”

  Her nails were coming uncomfortably near his face. “Monsieur—you—” she spat between her teeth.

  He gave her a final push and escaped into the lobby, nearly colliding with a puffy-cheeked client who was wearing too much gold jewelry. After so long in Ferupe, gold struck him as tawdry. The gay-girls of the lute trio, fingers stilled, gaped at him from their wrought-iron dais in the center of the room, which was otherwise furnished completely in tasteful black. Mickey addressed himself to the wearer of gold chains. “Which of you lot knows where I can find the lady of the house?”

  Far away in the house, the alarm bell tinkled sweetly. He wheeled. Five or six men on the couches looked blank. A girl clutched a tray of glasses that tinkled as she trembled. “Don’t sit there with your mouths hanging open. It does you no favors. Now, chop chop! Any of the family, any one of them will do!”

  The allaise whisked into the lobby, lips pursed, skirts hissing. “Samone! Cheech!” she trilled in a semblance of a sweet, undisturbed voice. The security guards, Mickey knew, though he didn’t recognize the names. “Oh, Samone!”

  Mickey dived for the door to the back hall, leaving behind a stunned silence inadequately masked by the allaise’s platitudes. Ten feet to his left, where the front hall, had it been longer, would have intersected with this narrow passage, was the Blue Door that led to the domicile of his childhood. It was locked. He charged it with his good shoulder.

  It gave: on darkness and dust from which he recoiled, eyes watering. Something that had been behind the door crashed hollowly down the stairs.

  He whirled at the sound of footsteps and saw a short, ugly Kirekuni and an Izte Kchebuk’aran making for him. Both men wore black neckerchiefs. “Listen, you don’t have to throw me out, I’m trying to leave!” The dust caught in his throat. He coughed. “I just want to see my family! Just let me see them, and then I’ll leave, I’ll leave, and I won’t come back—”

  “You’ll be leaving, boy,” the Kchebuk’aran intoned. Mickey turned and threw himself at the door at the end of the hall, a door he didn’t remember being there, conscious of the bouncers speeding up. As he slammed into a green antechamber the Kchebuk’aran made an unsuccessful grab at him. An open staircase coiled up the left-hand wall of the antechamber to a small balcony and further doors. It was the obvious escape route, but Mickey had a horror of being trapped off the ground. He heard cheerful, unfamiliar female voices coming from behind the door to his right. With some notion of casting himself on the mercy that women had always shown to him, he wrenched at the knob and stumbled into a long, narrow kitchen. One wall was all windows, with counters underneath them displaying the debris of a recently prepared meal. In the wall at the room’s far end, an arrangement of silk flowers blazed in a gigantic fireplace. Before the fireplace stood a small circular table; four pale faces gaped at him. Chopsticks scattered across plates. Chairs pulled out from the table. One voice, soft, scarcely audible, murmured something that sounded like a litany.

  Humiliating, liberating doubt washed through Mickey. He narrowed his eyes, shaking his head apologetically. The security men’s hands closed on his arm and tail and stump. They frog-marched him backward, gripping him at arm’s length as if he were contagious, reassuring the diners in unctuous professional tones. Pain dizzied him. He moaned. The girl seated on the far side of the table cried out and rose, sending fine china smashing to the floor. “Yozi.” Her voice was a harsh wail. “Yozi Yozi Yozi. It’s him. Get away from him. Yozi.”

  She rushed toward him. Tears poured down her cheeks, over a mouth suddenly gone to rubber.

  “Yozi.”

  She clung to him, weeping.

  He embraced her with his single arm. She was Zouka, his youngest sister. Their tails locked together in a knot. He could neither talk nor cry, as she was, as Ashika was, the two girls jabbering and weeping at the same time, drowning out each other’s words. He looked over their heads. Fumia—yes, it was she—stood in the middle distance, arms folded. Beside her stood their mother, fidgeting. Suddenly he could understand what Saia was muttering. Her old face wrinkled as she fondled the amulet hanging at her neck. “The irony. The irony! It is insupportable.” Then she dropped again into Ferupian. “Yet all is equivocal. As the Glorious Dynasty comes to an end all shall be redeemed in
silence. All redeemed. In the name of our glorious Queen Lithrea. All redeemed. All silenced.”

  Mickey jerked away from his sisters.

  ...fitting to make merry and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost and is found.

  —The Bible

  Book Six: Fire

  The Butcher and the Policeman

  3 Joie 1896 A.D. Okimako: the new city

  Crispin returned to Dragyonne Street in the peachy yellow light of the Kirekuni sunrise, buzzing with an elation so intense it was downshifting moment by moment into the depression that comes with emotional overload. “Fucking unbelievable,” he whispered. He stared up at the Akila-uza House of Ecstasy, shaking his head. “Never again. Never again.”

  It had been his fifth night wandering the city bound up with Uemiel. Their togetherness was as intense as that of two lovers—but nightmarish. People had stared at the foreigner dragging the pink hominid on a chain, but hadn’t bothered him—his sleepwalkerlike progress had probably frightened off any potential molesters. Just as well, because he would have presented an easy target: he’d been almost literally unconscious, mentally blinded by the sparks that flew out where his and Uemiel’s minds were clashing together, where he was desperately resisting the mesh.

  She had been his slave, and she had come close to becoming his master, or what was perhaps worse, his symbiont. But then, in the middle of the night, he realized he had a choice. Reason forced its way for a crucial instant through the morass of helpless revulsion into which his mind had degenerated. It said quite clearly: Get rid of her or go mad.

  He held on to that thought for dear life. As soon as the gates of the old city opened at 5:00 A.M., he stumbled through in the crowd of lackeys, tradesmen, and menial workers, keeping his head down until he reached the Haverhurst daemon market. There, he sought out Goshima & Uemura, Small Daemons and Splinterons Ltd., an establishment at which in a previous fit of sanity he’d inquired about prices. He sold Uemiel to the assistant who was opening up shop. The spotty Kirekuni boy had been staggered at the figure Crispin named; he’d consulted a book and seemed about to offer more, before his training kicked in and he hurriedly shelled out the thousand-sigil bills, wetting his lips repeatedly with a red tongue like a snake’s. Donning thick silver-weave gloves that Crispin would have given anything to own a few days ago, he led Uemiel into the back of the shop. Crispin could have hugged him. The newly opened space inside his mind had already filled up with brightness and noise.