Mickey swayed with the crowd, his arm and tail wrapped around his body.
Yet tonight’s fever wasn’t a slow burn of hate that might eventually erupt into violence; it was a drugged single-mindedness akin to something Mickey had seen regularly while he was training to be a Disciple, when sergeants stirred their cadets into frenzies of patriotism that ended in bloody noses and broken arms. That sort of emotion seldom resurfaced after the recruits reached the actual war. And you never saw it outside the military. In other words, the Decadents had accomplished a miracle. No orators without the power of Significance invested in them should be able to affect their followers as strongly as Disciple officers could affect their men. But the three Decadents up there on the podium of overturned garbage trucks had done it. They’d stirred this crowd to teeth-gnashing passion in the name of an abstract. Of course, that abstract wasn’t religion, it was political revisionism: no matter what the personal convictions of the Decadents, no matter how many times they invoked the Queen, the Easterners were no longer a religious cult. Rather, at some point after the Dynasty-controlled courts pushed it underground, the cult had metamorphosed into an anti-Dynasty machine. Few of the regulars at the safe houses across the city believed the original argument for decadence, that civilization as they knew it would end when the Ferupian Queen died. But the changes instituted by a Dynasty-controlled Significant had touched everyone in Okimako, and displacing the foreign influence was a real-life goal everyone could get worked up about. In the meantime, nizhny helped when it came to bearing the day-to-day realities of layoffs and excessive policing. The cult’s membership had swelled with true believers. You had to compromise somewhere. And the Decadents’ compromise had paid off.
Mickey heard himself shouting along with the rest, his eyes teary, his voice cracking, at the same time as his mind kept on analyzing the mess he’d got himself into. Conclusion succeeded conclusion with cold limpidity.
If only Crispin had been a little less paranoid, a little more patient!
The Decadents’ exhortations from the podium had a note of naiveté that would have won over the hardest-boiled cynic. Such fanaticism is hard to oppose: it can only be accepted or dismissed. And scarcely any of the Fugue folk whose spouses, or friends, or drinking buddies brought them to a safe-house meeting found themselves dismissing it. Because it made sense. Everyone supported reviving good old-fashioned Kirekuni patriotism, winning the war with Ferupe, and reclaiming Significance from the “foreigners.” It made sense.
Mickey no longer heard the words of the Decadents on the podium a hundred feet away. The words needled straight into his brain, transmitted like electric shocks via a chain of touching bodies: the crowd was so tightly packed that there was no loss of contact all the way to the top of the dump, where furiously excited men and women had flung themselves across the overturned garbage trucks to pluck at the Decadents’ ankles.
The Dynasty brainwashed my mother and made my sisters old before their time. It changed the city I loved into a place where I don’t belong anymore. Everything that’s gone wrong since I came back started with the Dynasty. Things could have gone so differently.
Crispin!
—Time to take the city back.
—We’re going to put things back the way they used to be.
If only! Mickey thought. If only!
Tears were dripping down his neck. He couldn’t free his hand from the crush to wipe them away. Only a small part of him knew he wasn’t crying for the same reason as the rest of the crowd, whose support for the Decadents manifested itself in ecstatic emotion. He was crying because the charged atmosphere freed the despair and self-pity which had hounded him all day—the despair which had brought him there in the first place. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t come, he wasn’t that keen, it wasn’t worth being arrested if the Disciples broke up the rally; but as of this morning, when Crispin finally rejected him outright, he had nowhere else to go. Now or ever.
And anyway, there wasn’t a Disciple in sight, though the rally was getting wilder and wilder, and word of what was going on out here must have got back to the city. Maybe the powers that be had decided to turn a blind eye. And maybe if the Disciples did nothing about the rallies, the Dead would. The constant undercurrent of rumor running through the crowd brought news of fistfights and a stabbing on the lower fringes. Clashes were inevitable, and would probably continue through the night, but suddenly a face-off as a finale to the rally no longer seemed likely. The crowd’s fever had been sublimated beyond the possibility of its devolving into a simple turf war. Soon noise would no longer suffice to channel it. Soon the Decadents would have to either calm their followers down or release them like a flaming arrow at their target. Mickey had never seen a Decadent who knew where to stop. Nizhny erased all human instincts, letting logic spin out untrammeled until it was no longer logic. Sometimes the unconscious hunger for reality drove the fanatics to slice their flesh, and that distracted them—and their listeners—from whatever they had been saying. But the three Decadents on the podium were already bleeding profusely from their arms, legs, and faces, and still shouting slogans into their megaphones. The tears in Mickey’s eyes blurred the podium into a ball of light freckled with waving fists.
—We have been enslaved! The people of Kirekune have all been enslaved! But now we are aware! Now we can end it!
He didn’t care what happened.
—We shall rise up!
“Rise!”
—We shall erase every reminder of their foul influence!
“Erase!”
How could I have let myself fall so completely in love when I knew there wasn’t the slightest chance of reciprocation?
During their stopover in the plains, he’d given up resisting. From then on he’d been a hopeless case, head over heels, tumbling, reveling in the fall the same way you enjoy a carnival ride, with mixed ecstasy and queasiness. Why had he done it to himself—only to end up like this?
Because he’d hoped. As long as you didn’t know, you could hope. And now he knew.
A young Decadent with long, wild hair, stripped to the waist to expose multiple gashes, had just taken over from the Rainbow Road girl, who sat in a bloody stupor in the middle of the podium, ministered to by the third of the trio. The young man leapt from skip to skip, surefooted and crazy, brandishing his megaphone. When he swung in Mickey’s direction, Mickey felt as if the sea of people wasn’t there, for he could see straight into the Decadent’s face—the rigid magnetic grin, the whites of the eyes. He would have been attractive if not for the sweat and blood streaming off him.
—They will rue their complacence! They will curse the Queen!
“Curse her!” screamed the girl on Mickey’s right, along with the rest of the crowd. “Curse the bitch!” She was shaking and sobbing, leaning against Mickey, reaching over the heads of the people in front of her as if she thought she could touch the far-off Decadent. She was a friend of Mickey’s sister Zouy. If she recognized him, and threatened to sing, he’d be able to blackmail her; but it didn’t seem as though anyone would care, after tonight, who was in the city and who wasn’t, who was legal or otherwise. After tonight the Disciples’ rules would no longer hold. They’d never held anyway. They’d never been more than a false social contract by means of which the Dynasty and the foreign Queen manipulated Significance. Yes, that was right: the Disciples and the Dynasty were a single objective. The only objective.
Mickey had relived that kiss so many times that the memory of it had grown tasteless. He’d second-guessed the whole morning—from the time Crispin started stroking his back, to the terrible, meaningless moment when they parted in the Urba Uphill with a slap of hands. Unarguable that for a moment at least, Crispin had wanted it. Mickey had felt him becoming aroused. There’d been a wonderful relenting passion in his embrace. Unarguable also that he had pushed Mickey away. Unarguable that in making too many demands on his tolerance, Mickey had lost him forever.
“Erase!”
“The way it used to be!”
“Flame and forgiveness!”
Something bright arced overhead. Mickey scarcely noticed. But heads around him turned, and when a second fireball followed the first, the crowd shifted. The noise level dropped and then recommenced, lower, grumbling. The Decadent on the podium jumped up and down with a third torch in his hand. Mickey watched, uncomprehending, as he hurled it far over the heads of the crowd. Zouy’s friend was crying uncontrollably, sagging against him. The man on her other side grabbed her and shouted in her ear. As he pulled her away, her face rigidified into a grimace of anger. Her tears flew like sparks. With a shock of panic, Mickey felt the rest of the supporting bodies around him lurch away. He spun. Jostling, colliding groups of people blocked his view of the foot of the dump. He heard shouts coming from down there, and the chime of metal. Something had caught fire in the foothills of garbage. One, two, then three—four—five fires flaring into the night.
Aout-dry, built of plywood, scrap lumber, and cloth, the shacks of the Dead were exquisitely flammable. The feverishly exalted Decadent had demonstrated that; now the Easterners were following his lead. But some of them had been distracted. All over the dump, age-old resentments erupted in spontaneous combat. Men pursued each other, cursing each other, hurling chunks of scrap at each other’s backs. Their shouts of hatred and pain almost drowned out the crackle of the blossoming fires. You could tell the Dead men from Easterners not just by their clothing, but by their style: the Dead moved fast, like ferrets, where the Fugue men struck out with clumsy, golemlike aggression, the nizhny in their blood rendering them insensitive to hurts sustained. At the moment they had the advantage of numbers, but the Dead multiplied as Mickey stood dumbstruck like shadows in a dark room. And all the time the most conscientious Easterners lit brands at the burning shacks and hurled them into the gathering packs of Dead spectators. They plunged back and forth in zealous bunches, commandos blindly following orders, too enthusiastic to notice that they were attacking the wrong objective. The City of the Dead was no objective at all.
Mickey forced his paralyzed body into motion, half-running, half-clambering toward the top of the dump. A particularly efficient squad of culties was collecting the rest of the torches from the podium. As they jostled downhill, he caught sight of the Decadents in their midst, faces incandescent in the flaring yellow light. All three still had their megaphones, and as they reached the fighting at the foot of the dump, they began to use them. It sounded as though they were trying to call the Easterners back from their arsonous rampage, to get them to band together and head for the old city—but within moments, they or their hovering coaches, among whom Mickey had recognized the Rainbow Road Dealer, comprehended that it was a doomed effort. The cracking amplified voices changed their tune, improvising on the situation, goading the Easterners to further aggression. Two of the original fires had met, the others were spreading, small conflagrations were budding too fast to count. Knots of Dead fled along those lanes that had not yet caught fire, but all the time more were arriving, and soon no one would be able to come or go. There’d been no rain since before Mickey returned to Okimako.
Screams and battle yells lofted into the night like a host of sparrows. Someone had a projectile rifle and had decided the occasion warranted deployment. The reports thwacked Mickey’s ears like explosions. Sweating and crying, he reached the top of the dump and hauled himself hand over tail up the cab of one of the overturned trucks. All its windows had been kicked in, and he used the frames as footholds. Far off across the dark spraddle of the City of the Dead, the Kirili Fairgrounds spun like a voracious paradise on earth. The colored lights blinked gaily, and Mickey could hear the hurdy-gurdy music that pervaded that permanent festival; but the Ferris wheel had stopped turning.
He lay flat on the hot filthy metal, sobbing.
Someone crashed into the truck. He heard a grunt, and then a shout, so loud it couldn’t have been ten feet off.
He scrambled to his feet, knowing he was silhouetted against the sky, not caring, despairing. The city rock rose, frozen, filling the northern vista. Closer than that, in every direction, south and east and west, on the banks of the Orange and out near the urban limits, fires clumped like constellations in the blackness of the City of the Dead. Seven roughly defined clumps apart from the one at whose epicenter he was standing. There were three more landfills around the northern side of the city. The erratic, sooty breeze chilled the tears on his face. Within a short time two of the clumps had become glaring sprawls.
He hadn’t escaped the fever. Briefly it had overwhelmed him, but now he’d cried all the tears in his body and the resulting recklessness felt like energy. The stump of his right arm throbbed.
Where power is all-surpassing, fingers may be burned;
take care and draw no closer to His Excellency’s glare!
—Tu Fu
Therefore
Aout 1896 A.D. 9:21 P.M. Okimako: the new city: Fleur Street
“You are afraid,” Beiin Sugothelezii stated as the two of them sat down in the corner of a tavern. Fleur Street was a notorious pleasure district.
“Me?” Crispin laughed, hoping he sounded convincing. Even just walking the new city streets in the genius player’s company, he’d felt horribly, unreasonably conspicuous. But he did have reason to fear. In order to escape the old city, it had been necessary to induce the Disciples to unlock the Summit Street gates. Their other option would have been to break into one of the mansions that backed up against the wall—something Crispin had been prepared to try, but Beiin had insisted was uncalled-for. Instead, the Myrhhean had dealt with the Disciples in the same way that just now he’d convinced the bartender to serve them islands rum free of charge.
He’d materialized his daemons.
All four were at least eight feet long, spiny dragons with fearsome fangs, barbed tails, and clutching talons. Their wings churned up a tornado.
Neither the Disciples nor the other patrons of the tavern had stuck around long after that display. But ten minutes later, the tavern was full up once again with off-duty draymen, clerks, and sweatshop girls, all of them drinking hard enough to keep the bartender and her serving girls busy.
“You are afraid of genius,” Beiin insisted.
“If you must call them that—”
“It is the Likreky term.”
“I’ve been handling genius, then, since I was thirteen. You may be able to impress the hell out of a few teenaged recruits, but—” Crispin shook his head and took too long a drink of rum. It tasted like molten gold, and burned going down. His eyes watered.
“But I am telling you that you are not so different from them,” Beiin said out of the shadows between the blurs of two candles. “You may be better used than they are to displays such as mine. But at heart you, too, are afraid of the power you hold on such a thin rein. You are a continental.”
“I’m not trying to burst anyone’s bubble, Sugothelezii—but you’re living on borrowed time, going about making people do what you want by conjuring dragons! The Kirekunis”—he lowered his voice as a group of men descended the stairs from the street, pushing loudly through the door—“have a lot of rules, and they’re the only ones who can break them. You make your living by frightening people. The Disciples are the only ones allowed to do that.” The sheer outrageousness of Beiin’s hustle upset him deeply. “It’s going to catch up with you. Daemon dragons aren’t the same thing as money, and from what I know of Okimakoans, hundred-sigil notes are the only things you can flash in their faces and get consistent good results.”
Beiin leaned forward, grinning unrepentantly. “Nonetheless, all’s well that ends well! I was actually in a Disciplinarian jail near the Urba Downhill—it was at the end of last week—when I was discovered by one of Tsuhachi’s Disciples. He happened to be eating lunch in the company of the warden, a friend of his, at the same time as I was putting on a little show for my cellmates (unpleasant though they were). He was very impressed.”
>
Crispin laughed. “Make a habit of getting chucked in jail?”
“Hee hee hee hee!” Beiin had a surprisingly high, squeaky laugh. He hitched himself farther across the table. “Let me tell you a secret: as long as you have not killed anyone, jail life is easy, and there is no better place to make friends! Mm-hm. I had already been arrested four times on charges of petty theft and vandalism before I even left my home!”
“In Myrhhe?”
“It is a backward country. The Kirekunis have concentrated their efforts, as the Ferupians did before them, on Lamaroon. I was the youngest of nine; my father was a humble genius player who made his living mostly by illusion and intimidation. I take after him!” He shook with amusement. “He taught me the art of genius when I was still a child. But I scorned it for a thing of smoke and mirrors, useful only to scare superstitious mountain dwellers into supporting a charlatan and his family—until I traveled to Lamaroon, and discovered that the colonials are even more afraid of genius than the mountain folk are! Then—aah, then I began my illustrious career.”
“Same here, more or less,” Crispin said. He was starting to get drunk. “Jail started a lot of things off for me.” In retrospect, he had to thank the Valestock police for setting him on the flight which had led to the QAF. But it still made him shake with anger to remember their lascivious threats, their red faces, their bulging white coats speckled with soot from the fires which had materialized again in that dreary market town. Had that really only been the second time? He was momentarily suffocated by the sense that the whole world was as flammable as a wad of tinder—that all his life, fire had been dogging his heels, springing up wherever he went like puffs of dust in a desert, as if some invisible arsonist was stooping over him, itchy fingers on the flint and steel. Would he never escape?
His daemons whispered from their cage.
“But if you will excuse me,” Beiin said, watching him, “you were never in a Likreky jail, and you were not brought up there. And genius does not come naturally to men, whether or not they have islands blood; the ability to play is dependent on repeated exposure from birth. Immunization, one might say.” He cocked his head on one side and took a sip of rum. “I would be interested to learn where you got your talent.”
The Daemon in the Machine Page 20