The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  In the space where he had been performing, three small girls were doing a complex ribbon dance. No one was watching them. He gave them a thumbs-up; the youngest dropped her batons and her face crumpled. The main exit was on the Significant’s side of the hall, where the crowd was thickest. The gathering, though constantly eddying, remained static within limits: concentric orbits determined by status, centering on the Significant’s dais. Crispin cut directly across social territories, squeezing himself and his daemon cage between people’s backs where there should have been no room to squeeze. As he neared the Significant, the affluence of the crowd grew less conspicuous. The shapeless sacking garments dominated, and he heard the whirr of spindles. Somehow in the press the most dedicated (or pretentious) Children of the Glorious Dynasty were making room to drop their distaffs. Up and down, up and down, went the toylike objects. Some of them were jeweled and made of precious metal. The nobles and nouveaux riches wrapped the skeins of newly spun thread around their arms and carried bundles of carded wool high over their heads in the tips of their tails: they looked like a herd of dingy sheep whom some madman had decked out in gold jewelry. Like sheep, they bumped subtly against each other, jabbering in hushed voices, striving to reach the foot of the dais or even better, attain its steps. Almost all the Kirekunis in this inmost orbit were either Children of the Dynasty or dressed to blend in with the same. The exceptions were a crowd of children in long, straight brocade robes, who on second glance proved to be the Creddezi ambassador’s party: tiny men who had fluent Kirekuni, and employed it judiciously to hypnotize an audience that included the only other non-Kirekunis. Two pompous, sweating Eo Iorian diplomats; a silent brown Izte Kchebuk’aran; and a small cabal of men with short-cropped brown or gray hair and outlandish moustaches. Minus these facial decorations they could have been Ferupians, but their very presence here identified them as Far Westerners. Ixtaran? Throssomi? Yanglos? Or even Slux?

  As Crispin circumvented them carefully, he couldn’t resist craning for a look at the Significant.

  And then, of course, he understood everything.

  A tide of people picked him up and carried him, reeling with shock, through the doors. Disgruntled merchants and provincial nobility thronged the outer salon, gobbling hors d’oeuvres and drinking too much wine to compensate for not having managed to attain the Signficant’s presence. Careless of causing offense, Crispin shoved his way through and out into a hallway, part of the labyrinth that took up most of the palace’s ground floor. It was mercifully empty. He slumped against the wall, ignoring the sentries’ stares, feeling furious and foolish and absurdly cheated.

  The Ruling Significant wasn’t a Kirekuni.

  Or at least, not more than a quarter of one by blood.

  The shockingly ugly face topping the traditional robes had skin the color of almond shells, only just lighter than Crispin’s own, pointing to islands blood, or Eo Iorian, or Mime. Straight, mousy hair—a Ferupian influence. High cheekbones under slanted eyes evoked the snowlands, or maybe even the foreigners from across the sea. The Significant had been animated in conversation with the closest members of the Dynasty. Poking down out of a slit in the robes, a pitiful, vestigial tail twitched at the corner of His seat.

  He looked nothing, nothing at all like the statues Crispin had copied in his attempt to pay Him homage.

  And more devastating yet—ironically so—he had appeared to be in perfect mental health.

  Doesn’t take a mastermind to figure it out!

  Crispin swung around and strode away. In a single glimpse he’d seen that the Significant was a man like any other. A man prone to influence from the determined and the charismatic, just as anyone in a comparable position of power would be, if any comparable position of power existed. One did, of course: the Ferupian throne. But part of the Ferupian Queen’s mystique was her famed dignity, her otherworldly reserve, which the cynical, since the war started going badly, had begun to interpret as evidence of insanity. Crispin had never paid attention to such amateur pundits. But now everything was coming clear. The Queen, her relatives, and her ancestors might none of them be sane—not, at least, since the undocumented date when the Royal family first felt the effects of its policy of inbreeding.

  Crispin wanted to break things. He wanted to overturn the wrought-iron daemon glares and smash the false windows in their bays and put his fist through the paintings that lined the walls.

  He was vaguely surprised that none of the liveried sentries stopped him for questioning. Perhaps they thought he was a diplomat or a guest of some official. Disciples wouldn’t have been so unsuspecting, but luckily he encountered none, and emerged unscathed from the inner palace, from the colonnaded outer complex, and from the courtyard where pilgrims seethed in a solid joyous mass, not by the tradesmen’s gate he’d come in at, nor by the grand-scale Summit Street entrance where the pilgrims were admitted, but by a tiny solid door which he stumbled on by accident. It let him onto a side street, narrow enough to be an alley, dark and comparatively quiet. At some point while he was waiting, performing, or wandering, night had fallen.

  On one side of the alley the crinkled wooden eaves of a mansion towered. On the other, gargoyles rioted against the sky. The wall around the palace complex was a masterpiece of the stonemason’s craft that had found small expression elsewhere in the wood-built city, and thus been diverted to the propagandist profession of portrait sculpture.

  Crispin walked down to another street, equally deserted. He had no idea where he was in relation to Summit Street, the only throughfare he knew in this demesne of the powerful that rose into the sky above the Haverhurst, above the old-money residential districts, above every area that new-city folk frequented. But downhill was still downhill—or ought to be. Streets plunged into valleys and rose steeply again; alleys climbed three floors between houses, ledged like stairs. The top of the mountain wasn’t a plateau, but a mass of jagged hills that no number of architects had managed to flatten. A troop of Disciples passed by, lanterns swinging, and Crispin pressed himself into the shadows between two mansions and wondered whether the old city was bigger than he’d ever imagined. The splashing light vanished around a corner. The slap of boots marching in unison grew fainter. It was the first time he’d ever been lost in a city: it was oddly humiliating.

  But the black, breathless repose of the edifices around him squashed all such self-absorption. The bedizened mansions shouldering against each other on their lopsided foundations—the strands of bedrock that passed for streets—the crooked strips of sky overhead, misted with light that rose from the living city below like steam from the body of a gigantic animal on which the old city was no more than a howdah, riding—all of it combined to evoke one reaction, well documented in the tales of those who had been unfortunate enough to find themselves marooned here after sunset.

  Fear.

  Crispin sat down in the rocky street, his back against gilded siding, his arms folded on his knees, his daemon cage at his side. Without opening his eyes he could feel the weight of the architecture pressing in around him—heavier, strangely, than in the Veins, where you really did have solid miles of stone above you. It was as if Okimako generated some sort of reverse gravity. Here everything flowed naturally upward, like the pilgrims, pressing up toward the Signficant, like the nobles and the culties in the salon, pressing as close to Him as decorousness allowed, lofting him into the sky—what must it be like to be Him, son of a millennium of simultaneous miscegenation and overrefinement? Here in this mountain city where natural laws were inverted by man’s hierarchical instincts, even the river flowed upward, pumped into pipes and mains by the demogorgons whose throb one could feel through the soles of one’s feet, through the rock! What must it be like?

  Thank the Queen I’ll never know, Crispin thought drowsily.

  Belamis, Favis, Akele, Kendris, Indela, and Mishime were showering him with love, the flip side of their aggravating enthusiasm. They were like soft hands stroking his mind. A sexual, almost phys
ical sensation. The night was warm.

  Yis yis yissss...

  He took deep slow breaths, ignoring their advances, concentrating instead on disconnecting his consciousness from them and inevitably also from everything less immediate than their attentions: sounds, sight, discomfort, cares, worries. A difficult state to achieve, but seductively languorous.

  3 Aout 1896 A.D. 8:50 P.M. Okimako: the old city

  Someone tapped his knee.

  He exploded into the street, coming properly conscious in a fighting stance, his boot knife (the one at his belt had been confiscated by Tsuhachi) in his hand.

  “Calm down, my friend!” Someone raised both palms and smiled a white, amused grin. “If I had wished to rob you, you would never have known—and anyway, your daemons are scarcely worth stealing!”

  Not an accent often heard, but one Crispin knew from somewhere. The skinny, duster-clad silhouette wasn’t that of a Disciple or anyone’s brawn-for-hire. Crispin lowered his knife, feeling obligated to explain. “My apologies. I was in the military.”

  “The infantry, I take it.”

  “Air force, actually. But we had all-round training.”

  “So I see. But you have switched professions now. No harm will come to you if you put your knife away.”

  For some reason Crispin couldn’t make out the face inside the pale hood of the summer coat. He narrowed his eyes. “You’re a Lamaroon!”

  As soon as it was out he wished he could take it back. Of course the man had, until this moment, believed him a Lamaroon, too! That explained his friendliness! “My mother was a Lamaroon—I knew I’d heard your accent before somewhere—”

  “I am not from Lamaroon, but from the neighboring colony of Myrhhe, although I am well acquainted with all the islands of the Likreky,” the man said in the tone of one imparting highly classified intelligence. “But at the moment, that is irrelevant. My purpose in waking you was merely to inquire whether you would perhaps be able to proffer me some assistance in exiting this appalling termites’ nest.”

  Crispin laughed. “It is a bit, isn’t it!” He stooped to stick his knife into his boot. “Actually, I can’t be of much help there, I’m lost myself.” He circled the Lamaroon, giving him a wide berth, and picked up his daemon cage. “Sorry.”

  “I was ejected from the festivities on account of you!” the man said in tones of injury.

  “Oh. Oh, no.” Crispin put his hand to his head. “Queen damn it! I knew—I knew I recognized you! Not just your accent—that is—” I knew there was another dark face in there, when Tsuhachi was telling us who was going on first and where we were supposed to stand, and about that fucking honorarium I never got—“What’s your hustle again? Batons, isn’t it? Or plate-spinning? Something to do with sticks?”

  The Lamaroon approached in soft-shoed silence. Even in the dark, Crispin made out the distinctive web of lines that covered his face. The short-cropped kinky hair showing at the front of the hood was silver-gray. When the man scratched his nose, a reassuringly unstudied gesture, Crispin saw a bony, age-spotted hand that looked much older than the face. “As a matter of fact, my ‘hustle’ is daemons,” the man murmured.

  “Shit.” Crispin shook his head. “I can’t believe I didn’t...” How embarrassing! “My daemons—I hustle daemons, too; well, of course you can see that—they must have been getting to me. They always get excited when they think they’re going to get to perform.” The truth, as he recalled, was that he’d been so nervous about doing well he hadn’t given Tsuhachi’s other hirees more than a cursory glance. In light of how the evening had turned out, he would rather die than admit now that he’d wanted to make a favorable impression in the salon. “They’re getting to me right now, I think. Hungry is what they are. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m acting distracted—” Though he didn’t know why, he was eager, almost desperate, to get rid of this stranger.

  The Myrhhe man looked down at the cage in Crispin’s hand. “As the only two Likreky men in the room, and also the only two genius players, it seemed odd that we had not earlier made each other’s acquaintance. I meant to do so when the salon was over. However, before I was scheduled to perform, I was, as I said, rudely ejected from the palace. In the process of frog-marching me to the door, Mr. Tsuhachi informed me that he had discovered you were a subversive and that I was lucky he did not detain me as your accomplice. You do not look like a subversive. I should be interested to know what you are.”

  “That sounds like something a plainclothesman would say,” Crispin said bluntly.

  “Pfuh!” The Lamaroon waved his hand as if the suggestion wasn’t even worth taking offense at. “What do you say: shall we find our way out of this horrible place and get drunk to compensate for failing to get paid?”

  But Crispin had noticed something that distracted him. “Where are your daemons?” he demanded.

  The Myrhhean looked at him for a minute. Then he wheeled and started down the street, moving with noiseless grace. His pale Kirekuni clothing seemed to glow in the dark. “That is another reason for my curiosity about you, my friend,” he said without turning.

  3 Aout 1896 A.D. 9:05 P.M. Okimako: the City of the Dead:

  Landfill 24 (the “Fairgrounds Dump”)

  The Easterners were holding eleven rallies tonight on various garbage dumps scattered around the foot of the city rock. The participants, accurately reflecting the membership of the cult, were mostly from the Fugue, with a sprinkling of voyeurs and activists from farther uphill. The Dead hadn’t been invited. The Dead were never invited. Mickey didn’t know whether this snub rankled with them; or whether they would have spat at any offer of fellowship from those lucky enough to have gained a foothold on the city rock. He felt he knew them better now, since he and Crispin had almost died at their hands in the deep city: he guessed it differed according to the substratifications within their society, but that the common factor was resentment. Of course, the Decadents claimed to speak for all Kirekunis, Dead as well as law-abiding citizens. But the Dead knew that big fish don’t stop eating little fish when they get religion.

  He joined the furtive trickle of Easterners walking out of the Great Southern Vein, along the bank of the Orange, through the lights of the Kirili Fairgrounds, and off the beaten path to the hill of garbage where the regulars of the Rainbow Road safe house had been directed to meet. He felt the unblinking gazes of the Dead on his back, but among the other culties he was safe.

  On the dump, the crowd thickened. The sky hung dark and open overhead, the air was rancid, the footing treacherous. Everyone spoke in whispers, as if they sensed that despite the safety of numbers, any barefaced invasion of the pauper town by city folk was a flirtation with disaster. Some of the Easterners Mickey spoke to sounded fearful. Others bolstered each other’s spirits with sotto voce bravado. A few Dead children and teenagers circulated among them at first, begging and picking pockets, but not even avarice sufficed to keep them long in such a hostile climate. Yet even now that Mickey was in the thick of the crowd, hemmed in by bodies on all sides, drowned in the rhythm of call and response, he couldn’t forget the second, silent audience waiting outside the first. From their shacks and tunnels all around the dump, the Dead were listening to the Decadents’ oration. He had no doubt some of them were fingering their knives. Perhaps he’d been oversensitized to their hostility by his and Crispin’s near-fatal experience. But he didn’t think so. His senses were raggedly acute, where nearly everyone else in the crowd had numbed theirs with nizhny. He hadn’t. Not tonight. The pipes were still passing from hand to hand; every time he was offered one he shook his head.

  He felt sure that if he stretched on tiptoe and looked back down the dump, he would see the eyes of the Dead reflecting in the light of the torches flaring from the podium, flat and green as the eyes of grasswolves ringing a campfire.

  Nonetheless, he understood why the Decadents had decided to stage these rallies—the first since the crackdown—outside Okimako proper. For one thing, it ens
ured that they wouldn’t be caught by Disciples—or at least that the lag between report and response would be long enough for the Decadents to inflame their followers into putting up a healthy resistance when the blackcoats finally arrived. And on a still more practical level, the landfills were the only open spaces in Okimako besides the repressively policed Urbas. During the day, they crawled with Dead rag-and-bone men and beachcombers; at night they were notorious black markets. Mickey had also heard the stories about skirmishes between rival gangs and showdowns between the Dead and the trade-guild men of the Fugue, whose resentment of the shanty dwellers who undercut them wherever possible occasionally boiled high enough to bring them roaring, drunk, and armed into the pauper town. These trade-guilders and laborers, men and women, accounted for the largest part of the Decadents’ congregation. The resentment was as strong in the blood of the crowd tonight as ever, but a subtler fervor was channeling it into something unusual, almost sublime. This wasn’t a mob of hooligans: these were men and women united by common grievances, and by leaders more than happy to tell them where their enemies were. Not in the City of the Dead. The enemies were lurking in the mansions high up on the mountain, sleeping the stupid sleep of the condemned in the beautiful houses of the old city where no one here was likely ever to set foot. The foreigners. The usurpers. The corrupted. That alone was reason enough to hate them!