The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  “I thought the Children of the Dynasty were all just sitting around, waiting for the end of the world.” But even as Crispin spoke, he remembered what Fumia had said the first time they talked in the kitchen: sexual tension had prevented him from taking in as much of the conversation as he should have, but he vaguely remembered her citing the Dynasty’s materialism as the reason she could not believe their message the way Saia did. “So they really are hypocrites.”

  “Through and through.” Mickey slammed his fist against his thigh. “They say they long for transcendence, and then they maneuver within the material sphere not to hasten transcendence, but for ends that are themselves contained within the material sphere! If you think for even a minute, you can see it’s illogical! Some say they’re just misguided, that they really think they are using the Significant to hasten the end; but I credit Prince Yatsifari and Zezuki and their friends with being intelligent and well informed, and no one who’s well informed could believe they’re hastening the end. Stalling, or trying to prevent it, if anything.”

  Crispin said, “But you and your precious Easterners want to hasten it, huh? You want to go up in flames?”

  “I didn’t say—” Mickey stopped walking. Crispin wheeled around angrily to face him. The alley reeked of garbage strewn where trash cans had been overturned. Pale flames licked up through holes in the roofs of the houses. At Mickey’s recommendation Crispin had left his daemons at home. Belamis, Akele, Mishime—

  “I didn’t say I believe in transcendence!” The cosmeticked, ragged, drug-ravaged figure reached out and laid his single hand deliberately on Crispin’s right shoulder. A physical recollection made Crispin shudder, and for no reason he could think of, he reached up and closed his hand over the skeletal fingers. “The Queen hasn’t touched me, is how the Dynasty puts it,” Mickey said. “The Queen still exerts her influence over me, is how the Easterners put it. Their philosophies are diametrically opposed, you see... Maybe one of them is right, but I tend to think the whole premise of the Queen having any influence at all over our... our souls... is baseless.” He shrugged. “I’m the only one in either cult that’s been in the Ferupian military.”

  “In other words, you’re aware it’s all mystical crap,” Crispin said. “So why the hell have you got involved?”

  Mickey hesitated. “‘Whether we’re going to transcend tomorrow or next year or never,’“ he quoted at last, “ ‘we still have to act as if in relish of today.’ That’s always been the Easterners’ credo, as opposed to the Dynasty’s, and I buy that one hundred percent. Anyone who’s seen the Dynasty in action can’t be neutral—he’s got to be either for or against—and I know where I stand. They’re taking over Okimako, and if we don’t do something about them soon, it’s going to be too late, and this city—this empire—is going to be destroyed before anyone has a chance to transcend anything. Even if I personally can’t do shit about it, even if no one can do anything about it, I can at least say I was on the side of common sense. If the Easterners were the same cult they were five years ago, that is, a bunch of dancing, idealistic maniacs, I would never have gone near them. But what with the ban on demonstrations—and I think their leadership’s changed—they’ve started to make sense.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  It was as if an irksome weight had been lifted off Crispin’s shoulders. A tide of gratitude warmed him through. At the same time he was conscious of wry embarrassment. I thought—didn’t I? that I was being made responsible for an obsessive loser halfway down the road to fanaticism of one kind or another. How despicably arrogant of me.

  “Mick, I underestimated you. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m tired of your apologies.” Mickey released Crispin’s shoulder. The alley was dark enough that they could see a faint sliver of moon overhead, floating in the mist of the city lights. “One’s got to take everything with a pinch of salt. No absolutes. No preconceptions.” He was hugging himself with his arm and his tail, jogging up and down a little. How could he be cold inside all his bundled rags? The summer night was so warm and humid that on the descent to the Fugue, Crispin had begun to sweat. But maybe Mickey was cold. He had lost so much weight that his collarbone, shadowed inside the swaths of fabric, stood out like a sharp-cut wrinkle in sand.

  “Well, if you’ve still got your head on straight, then what is it that’s fucking you up?” Crispin said. “Because you are fucked up. Is it just the pharmaceuticals?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m careful.”

  “Just as long as you don’t kill yourself.”

  “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it? To make sure I don’t?”

  The retort was delivered with rueful humor. A month ago, Crispin thought, it would have been a plea for reassurance, a cry of suppressed resentment. Had the Easterners actually helped Mickey straighten his head out by lending him their own, larger perspective?

  They started to walk again. As they turned into another broader street, Crispin experienced the first disbelieving shock of recognition. Before he could speak Mickey said casually: “It’s true, isn’t it? My older sister told you to come see what I was up to?”

  Crispin forced himself to look at the other. His head was wheeling, his vision flickering palely. “Of course not. I don’t—wouldn’t—talk about you to her.”

  “I hope not. Because anything Fumia knows, Saia knows.”

  “Not a word.”

  Mickey looked dissatisfied. He darted suddenly away across the street. Even before he fetched up in front of an undistinguished two-story housefront fifty yards down the hill, Crispin knew where he was heading. The plain wooden door might as well have been painted red. In the course of Crispin’s earlier, Uemiel-trammeled explorations, this was one of the places that had given him the clearest intimations of danger. Now the sensation returned. His spine crawled, and he had to force himself to follow Mickey’s scuttling trajectory. Mickey let them into a smoky, dark hallway. A murmuring of voices could be heard from deep within, punctuated by an occasional cry as if someone were in pain. Out of nowhere, a Kirekuni with a thick black moustache and the arms of an ironsmith appeared, greeting Mickey with a finger placed to his lips, and, as if to compensate for that womanish delicacy, an enthusiastic tail-shake that brought the two men sidestepping comically against each other’s backs. Then the man advanced on Crispin with the grin Crispin associated with confidence tricksters. “Welcome to the Rainbow Road Center, my brother,” he whispered. “Flame and forgiveness.”

  Crispin had just enough presence of mind to give his name as “Mills Giftson,” from southern Ferupe. If politics was the name of the game, it would never do for this man to connect him with the Lamaroon Genius Player who’d been invited to perform for the Significant. But he increasingly doubted the Easterners were capable of making such connections. He’d wanted to believe that Mickey had stumbled across a strain of genuine subversion; but his suffocating awareness of danger, of badness, was fast undermining such hopes. He knew it was irrational to pass judgments based on a hunch. And yet the almost physical nature of that sudden blow from sixth sense prevented him from ignoring it.

  “Gotta stay on duty,” the usher stage-whispered. “You know the way, Akila.”

  Mickey nodded nervously and led Crispin up a short, creaky flight of stairs. They slipped into a room large enough once to have been two—the remnants of the partition were still scattered across the floor—where two dozen or so Kirekunis sat in a ragged circle on folded, stained blankets. The only thing that might have distinguished them from the average man or woman in the street was their inordinately concealing clothing. They greeted Mickey in blurred voices. The air was literally gray and fuzzy with smoke. Crispin soon found a hookah in his hands; he didn’t like the smell of the drug (nizhny, Mickey had called it) and only pretended to take a puff, then lit a cigarette.

  Nothing was happening, at least nothing that he could see. There was no talk. Just these thin, fervid-looking working stiffs puffing on their hookah
, their eyes following its progress around the circle. What was he missing? Presently a thin man with oily hair, whom Mickey identified in a whisper as the Dealer, began to hold forth in mumbling tones on the subject of the Dynasty and the Significant and the Queen. Some of the political specifics were interesting, and Crispin suspected not widely known, but surely everyone else in here had heard them before? The slant was basically the people versus the corrupt, selfish nobility—or in other words, as the Dealer made abundantly clear, the Easterners against the Dynasty. They were casting themselves as reactionaries and revolutionaries in one, patriots nobly opposing once-great leaders who had been blinded by foreign influence. Crispin saw at least two major inconsistencies: for a start, they weren’t physically opposing anything, nor even making their presence in the city known, as they had done before the edict against public demonstrations was passed—and on top of that, if the Dynasty was a foreign influence, so was any cult! Nonetheless, he could see how this rhetoric might stir up converts, implying as it did that anyone not an Easterner was part of the problem. But the thin man’s monologue had less to do with strategy than it did with paranoia. Apparently the very concept of leadership had been irrevocably corrupted by Ferupe, and the influence of such corruption tainted all humankind. All leadership stemmed from the Ferupian Royal dynasty; therefore, when the Queen died, all humankind would also die a fiery, fatal, and final death, save for those few who had previously repudiated the Queen and all her scions, who would then live in glorious anarchy. Crispin thought it interesting how, where the Dynasty preached the mind-bending concept of transcendence (and that was the word Mickey had used; perhaps the Dynasty had got to him more deeply than he knew), the Easterners, perhaps with an eye to a wider audience, had simplified the promise of salvation to continued existence right here in Okimako.

  But I don’t get it. The end is coming, they say. Do they think they’re going to huddle in here while the devastation somehow magically passes them by? They can’t be that stupid. Mick isn’t that stupid.

  But Mickey had said he couldn’t credit their “extravagant promises!” What was he doing here, then, if not sucking up the promise of paradise on earth? It seemed as if he’d seized on one fragment of the Easterners’ doctrine—their opposition to the Dynasty—and magnified it to the importance he felt it ought to have. Crispin glanced uneasily at him. He was hugging himself, staring at the wall above the Dealer’s tousled head, obviously not focusing. Whenever the hookah came to him, he would uncoil for long enough to take a deep, thirsty drag. The smoke smelled like burning flesh. Like burning daemon flesh.

  Crispin wrinkled his nose and drew deeply on his third cigarette. The last thing he needed now was for his senses to start playing tricks on him. His vision was already doubling: the haze in the air must be reaching his blood. All the windows were boarded up with sheets of plywood painted with Kirekuni characters, and, in the overcrowded room, the temperature seemed to be rising by the minute. This place was sordid and these people misguided, their tired, hate-filled anarchism the stuff of a thousand trade-guild meetings. His sense of real live danger had been largely transmuted into disgust and a desire to disassociate himself from them all. But he couldn’t leave without Mickey. Just like in the old days, he felt responsible for Mickey, whose capacity for rational thinking, the very quality that redeemed his idealism, was what had got him into trouble yet again.

  You don’t allow for human fallibility, Mick. Crispin closed his eyes. You take what people say on face value and don’t allow for slippage, because you just can’t bring yourself to believe that people are self-involved, faithless backbiters who’ll do anything for five quid or a five-minute high. You need someone to take care of you.

  Just as he was about to lean across and suggest a tactful withdrawal, the Dealer ceded the floor to the person on his left. This was an androgynous young Kirekuni with an unusually reddish mop of hair above a heart-shaped face, and a high, sweet voice unroughened by the smoke. The swathing layers of clothing concealed his/her figure. Within thirty seconds after he/she began to speak, Crispin started to wonder if Mickey had been misled after all. He sat forward, unwillingly fascinated. This person espoused more or less the same party line as the Dealer. But in her words, the doctrine of anarchism caught fire. The Easterners woke from their drug-induced torpor to growl assent at every other phrase. Crispin found himself nodding and agreeing right along with them.

  —The Ferupian Royal family has harnessed humankind to their will. They have selfishly hoarded the puissance which should have been equally distributed among the people of the world.

  —The Queen must die, with all her relatives. The Ferupian Dynasty must not be left with even one heir.

  —The Queen will die if we win the war.

  —The Dynasty proposes to halt the war. They have already persuaded the Significant to pursue peace negotiations.

  (I knew it, Crispin thought, I knew it; remembering rumors of stalled troop movements, remembering whole divisions of Disciples strolling at their leisure through the Haverhurst. He didn’t know whether to be glad that Ferupe had gained a reprieve, or whether to share the Easterners’ outrage.)

  —The Dynasty’s foolish aim is to protect the Ferupian Queen. The Dynasty reveres the Queen. The Dynasty has got everything completely backward. The Dynasty must be stopped.

  —We have friends in high places. The Ruling Significant’s younger son, Hiroxi, sees eye to eye with us; he, too, wishes to push on and win the war. We must further penetrate the palace. We must first try to do things the civilized way, for after all, we live in the most civilized city on earth, don’t we?

  The androgynous woman’s voice was honeyed.

  —Don’t we?

  The Dealer, after industriously filling two new hookahs and starting them on their way around the circle, had begun to look disgruntled. He crossed and uncrossed his arms, frowning like a daemon. Finally he tapped the woman’s shoulder. She broke off and jerked around. “Enough talk, Decadent!” He thrust the hookah in her face. The woman—the Decadent—puffed obediently. Then she placed the water pipe on the floor and rolled up her sleeves, exposing stick-thin forearms crisscrossed from wrist to elbow with cuts of varying depth and vintage. None of them crossed the vein, which stood out like a blue snake amid the scabbed and fresh weals. She extracted a small dagger from her clothing and sliced a fresh gash open on each arm, drawing the blade in a steady curve from the back of the wrists to the inside of the biceps. The dagger must have been horrifically sharp. The cuts were at least a quarter inch deep, but the blood didn’t flow freely. It welled up and trembled like lengths of wet, dark red string. The Decadent placed the knife carefully beside the hookah on the floor, hitched herself back against the wall, tipped her head back, and breathed deeply.

  Crispin frowned. He was still buzzing with the urge to get up and storm the palace, to make the Significant see sense, to make everyone in Okimako see the Easterners’ specific sense. (With the Decadent as a weapon, how could such an initiative fail?) Then he looked around and saw what they were all doing, hunched over their laps or hunched over each other. Two dozen little gleaming daggers, their hilts ornamented with what looked like silver heads of the Queen.

  The drug had got into his blood and he didn’t act immediately. He sat back and made faces for a while. Finally the thought crossed his mind: Now, if ever, is the time to get out of here. He turned to Mickey and opened his mouth to speak.

  But Mickey had drawn up his multiple shirts to his chin. He was completely absorbed in the process of making an incision from one side of his stomach to the other. His abdomen was a mass of old wounds—as if he’d repeatedly tried and failed to commit a Disciple’s ritual suicide.

  Crispin wasn’t even aware of knocking the dagger out of Mickey’s hand and yanking him to his feet. Danger blared at all his senses at once, as urgent as an alarm siren when an enemy strafe comes over at two in the morning: the queer smell of the smoke, and the taste of blood where he had bitten his ton
gue, and the feel of Mickey’s bony wrist, and the sound of the Easterners’ bleary and not particularly vehement objections to their precipitous departure. The next thing he knew they were outside in the street, the door slamming closed behind them. He dragged Mickey uphill. The streets that had been populous were empty, the taverns had their shutters padlocked. Gaslights shone on dark, littered cobblestones and trails of slops. Queen knew how long they’d spent in that place. Mickey was crying. His tears, silent and hastily scrubbed dry as he stumbled beside Crispin, were more distressing than any girl’s. Crispin couldn’t bear it. “Blessed Queen, Mickey! Stop! Stop!” He pulled Mickey into the shadow of an alley mouth. “Stop it, I’m telling you! You’re not that fucked-up! You can stop it!”

  “So what if I am fucked,” Mickey gasped. They were the first words he had spoken. It relieved Crispin to know he could still talk. “How could you? They’ll think you were an informer! They’ll blame me for bringing you!”

  “No, they won’t, because you’re not going back there.”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t—”

  “What does that drug do? What is it?”

  “Nizhny. I told you.” Mickey lurched forward, hugging Crispin around the shoulders. His breath burned Crispin’s neck. “Comes from the Likreky. Like most pharmaceuticals. Makes you insensitive to pain.”

  “Makes you...” Crispin clamped his lips shut. He looked down the street, over the roofs of the Fugue. The sky was paling. The moon hung away over the northern hills, beyond the City of the Dead, whose reaches flowed like the black tentacles of a beached kraken over the plain. “Fuck. It’s nearly dawn.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Mickey said in a choked voice. “I could tell things were going on longer than usual. When there are new potential converts, the Decadent tends to speak especially well.” He convulsed suddenly. Crispin slid his hand down between their bodies and fumbled under the layers of clothing. The half-finished incision on Mickey’s stomach was bleeding more heavily than the cuts the other Easterners had inflicted on themselves, and other wounds had also opened, probably during their flight. Mickey didn’t wince when Crispin touched the injuries. He pressed hard against him. “I can’t feel it. See? I can’t feel anything. Touch me as much as you want. I can’t feel anything.”