The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  Crispin drank. He lit a cigarette and puffed at length, allowing his silence to speak for him.

  Beiin said, “Then let me see if I can tell you. You grew up in Ferupe, that much you let me know; and in Ferupe, they are both dependent on genius and terrified of it. You were a handler by profession. You drank the blood of a trickster, probably by accident.” He smiled at Crispin’s astonishment. “Oh, such transgressions are not as rare as you might think, although of course law forbids any variant of the ritual to be conducted once a child passes the age of two. Would-be poachers are the most common culprits, and, of course, they always explain their new powers away as an accident... Since you are clearly ignorant of islands customs, no doubt in your case it really was an accident. But anyway, you are now in something of a quandary. A genius player, an expatriate, untrained, and afraid.” He rolled the words off his tongue with relish.

  For a minute Crispin was too indignant to speak. He was also a little intimidated by Beiin’s perspicuity. “Strong words!” he said finally. “Some would say insults! And wild conjectures. For your sake, I hope your reason is less extravagant than your invention.”

  “The reason why I wished to speak to you in the first place, to be quite honest, is this.” Beiin pointed at the big silver cage sitting beside Crispin’s chair. “If you are not afraid of your genius, why do you keep them caged?”

  Crispin shrugged. “Got to let them know who’s in charge.”

  The genius player shook his head, smiling. His little dark eyes gleamed in the netted skin. “That alone tells me you have no inkling of genius. It is not a matter of control. It is a matter of acceptance.”

  Crispin stared at the Likrekian, longing to be rid of him. Out of the corner of one eye, he could see the fear and hate on the face of the bartender, who, temporarily unengaged, had propped her chin on her fists to stare at them.

  “One must welcome genius. They are like children: to win their affection, one should feed them from one’s own plate instead of throwing scraps on the floor. Instead of wrestling them into submission, one must coax them so gently into one’s service that they do not even know they are serving. I do not let my genius trick me. I trick them.”

  “That’s what it’s all about.”

  “Yet unless I am very much mistaken, your genius are tricking you. Small though they are, and mindless. Every genie is capable of trickery more subtle than anything the untrained human mind can copy. The only way is to convince them that they do not need to use their powers to win your cooperation. That is something my father knew—something every poacher in the Likreky islands knows—although when I first learned the art from him, I was too young and stupid to understand. I tried at first to fight them, to subdue them the way the Ferupians do, the way the Kirekunis learned from them to do.”

  “I’d like to see you drive a demogorgon at forty miles an hour without subduing it,” Crispin said.

  “That is the silver art. Foul, barbaric.” Beiin waved his hand dismissively. “Trickery is a different matter. Understand, I am not maligning you. You cannot be blamed for your upbringing among the ignorant. But the fact remains that no continental understands genius except insofar as they abuse it.”

  “You’ve obviously never met a trickster woman!”

  The Myrhhean blinked innocently. “I have not had the pleasure. I have been told that my—my hustle—would probably not be received in the west of Ferupe with as much approbation as it is here in Kirekune.”

  “You’d be lucky to get a gig with a mud show.”

  “Do you know any trickster women?” Behind the girlish lashes, Beiin’s eyes shone suddenly avaricious. He lowered his voice. “What are they like? How—how do they... I have heard stories...”

  Crispin remembered the trickster women of the Waste too well, even after all these years, for him to want to claim any association with them. Gaunt young misers living in a hell of their own devising, a hell into which they had tried to drag Rae with their old-women’s hands: they were as vicious as the daemons they adored. He shook his head and brushed his fingers across the top of the cage beside him. “No. I have no experience of them.”

  Beiin sighed. He lit one of Crispin’s cigarettes, then plonked his elbows on the table and blew gloomy smoke rings for a few minutes. “Aaah! In any case, I do not need to hear any more tales to know that trickery is in a sorry state in the so-called Land of Daemons. And that is just why I am trying to tell you a few things! Do you not believe me? Or—I know what it is!” He waved his cigarette. “You think I mean to get something out of you!”

  “I don’t have anything you’d want. You already told me my daemons weren’t worth stealing.”

  “Well, then! I am trying to give you tips! I am older than you are. Not so much older as you may think.” He brushed his fingers across his rugged cheek. “But I have been at this game for more than a decade now—and I am merely trying to impart what I have learned to you, a Likrekian far from home.”

  Crispin shifted in his seat. The hairs on his shoulder blades stood on end; he guessed at least two of Beiin’s daemons were hovering close behind him. “I don’t claim Lamaroon as my home.”

  “Very well, then: you are so eager to deny your ancestry; I will forget you are my countryman. But I tell you this, since I left the islands, the number of tricksters I have encountered is fewer than the number of fingers on this hand. And they are strange, cold men for the most part, so secretive that it is impossible to hold even the most innocent of conversations with them!” He shook his head as if hurt by memories. “I hoped that finally I’d met someone with whom I could—how do they put it—talk shop.”

  “I knew a Ferupian trickster once. He was good to me.”

  “But you did not learn much from him.”

  I could now! Queen, I could now!

  “They are freaks of nature—self-taught and frustrated. I pity them. But it is not necessary for you to become one of them. Not now that you have met me! Hee hee hee!”

  “You might as well stop patronizing me,” Crispin said, surprising himself. “I’m not a trickster, I’m not even a handler anymore. I’m just hustling. And I have no intention of going on with this particular hustle any longer than I stay in Okimako.” But that will be for the rest of your life, a voice murmured to him. “I’m through with daemons,” he told Beiin, fighting to ignore the flames licking up the legs of the tavern’s tables. “They’re not even energy-efficient. They just screw around with your head. These newfangled internal-combustion engines, now, they don’t fuck with you! I could take my profits and buy into one of those partnerships that’s manufacturing them!” He clenched his fists under the table. His neck was prickling, and his right leg was going numb from the weak field of malice exuded by the angry splinterons in the cage. He sat back and took a long burning drink of rum.

  Beiin’s brows furrowed. He stared at his hands on the table. A tall, neatly built man, with his coat off and his bare shoulders hunched, he looked like nothing so much as a laborer struggling to understand an advanced mathematical concept: the quintessential stupid darky of the music-hall stage. Part of Crispin rejoiced to see him so discombobulated, and part of him winced in sympathy. But of course, like everyone in this city, Beiin was more than he seemed. The air around his body shimmered perceptibly, and his kinked silver hair, so unexpected atop those powerful shoulders, gleamed in the candlelight. Crispin felt his scalp tightening. Beiin raised his face, looking genuinely confused. “But you cannot give up trickery. It’s in your blood.”

  “That’s my problem. Not yours. And I didn’t ask for your—”

  “I admit that true genius playing is a thing of the past,” Beiin said so softly Crispin had to strain to hear him over the noise of the tavern. “In the Likreky it used to be an art. But first the Ferupians and then the Kirekunis brought handlers with them when they came to rule us; and handlers care nothing for the beauty of a good play. Now genius is no more than a paper knife in the hand of a pauper. Even the poachers would
rather have guns.”

  His rueful smile stretched and warped into a freak mask as his daemons drifted across the table between them, warping the air.

  “That’s tragic and all,” Crispin said, shuddering. “But if you think trickery isn’t getting the respect it deserves, why don’t you just find an apprentice and teach him the game? Or a girl; then you wouldn’t have to mess about with fucked-up blood rituals.”

  Beiin shook his head. “I will have no children.”

  “Well, then, I don’t know what to say. You’ve made a good case for why I should steer clear of the whole business.”

  “But you cannot!”

  “Watch me.” He braced his hands on the edge of his seat, preparing himself to make his escape while carefully not thinking about it lest the daemons should detect his intention. His eyes watered and his face felt taut. The two nearest tables had been vacated several minutes ago by Kirekunis who probably attributed their increasing discomfort to a draft: they were as insensitive to the occult as they would be terrified if they knew what was sharing the tavern with them.

  “If you would only just accept it! The blood that you were given was strong and pure, I can tell! You are wasting that power! You could be a great player. You could be better than I am by far!”

  “You just said that genius was a thing of the past. And you’re telling me to become a player?”

  “The compensation for making the decision to do no one any harm is the gift of power.” Beiin leaned across the table. “I could kill everyone in here. I could kill dozens, maybe a hundred, before someone reached me.”

  Crispin saw the mad arsonist looking out of the Myrhhean’s eyes.

  “You could, too! You could trick larger and larger daemons, if you would only accept them! It is not a bond of power. It is a bond of love. I could command my daemons to rampage, and they would do it for love; and if I was killed, they would continue to rampage, no longer having anything better to do. Their natural inclination, in the city as anywhere else, is to kill humans, but while I live they would rather stay near me. Because I love them. Because I have accepted them.”

  Never, Crispin thought. Accepting occult power—as Bein did, as Millsy had done, as the trickster women did—disconnected you from the rest of the human race. Beiin was the definition of a lost soul. He lived in a bubble world where daemons’ whims took precedence over the rules of human society. That he managed to sustain this constant communion in the middle of the largest city in the world only underscored how powerful a trickster he was. But his power began and ended with the sheer ability to trick daemons of such size. The real power was theirs.

  The room was smoky and the rum had hit Crispin hard, but he knew neither of those things was the reason every last curl on his head was straightening out. Humans and daemons existed in natural antipathy. Ferupians knew that without even thinking about it—anyone could deduce it from the simple fact that deaths, burns, shocks, premature aging, and slavery were the only results of interaction between the species, and from the fact that all handlers fell victim to the same disability—a dangerous tendency to narcolepsy. In the Raw, Crispin had been known for his “knack” with recalcitrant demogorgons. Neither he nor his men had guessed why they responded so well to his touch; only a Wraith, perhaps, could have told him the truth and warned him of what was to come, warned him of the alien element in his blood that he was nourishing every time he strapped himself into the cockpit. But he’d always resented the physical demands of handling. He resented the truism that his men depended on daemons for their lives. All the other pilots assumed that since he’d been a “civvy handler,” he must be tolerant if not outright fond of daemons—but he’d made a point of joining in the abhorrence of them that was practically a religion in the Ferupian military.

  His encounters with Elektheris, and then with Uemiel, who had thrown her coils around him as subtly and powerfully as a python coils around a sleeper, had confirmed the sense of it.

  That was why, instead of probing the possibilities of his talent, he’d chosen to become a hack. His show was an optical illusion. Compared to Beiin’s flourish of dragons it was child’s play. Compared to poor old Millsy’s unspectacular dog-and-pony act, behind which lay ten times the skill and patience necessary to train wild animals to ride bicycles, it was as simple as letting off fireworks. But he had no desire to learn what they knew. All he wanted was to get away.

  No one, even Millsy, really understood. Even Rae: given half a chance, she would have stayed in the Wraithwaste with the trickster women, but that was only because at first they’d been kind to her. Like 90 percent of the people in the world, she’d had no flair for the theoretical and couldn’t see why it mattered anyway. She’d been content with clichés. Like everyone else—everyone except Mickey, to whom daemons made no more difference than pakamels, but who had an ability to see through fakery of any sort, occult or mundane, with unselfish clarity.

  But that ability seemed to have failed Mickey now, for he’d kissed Crispin this morning with a passion greater than anything Crispin had ever seen, and where was he? Guiltily, Crispin pushed that question to the back of his mind, fastening instead on the memories that jingled reassuringly in his mind like money in his pocket. Fumia!

  His chair toppled as he stood up.

  Beiin looked up, scowling.

  Instinctively, with a kind of suppressed desperation, Crispin reached out and placed his hand on the Myrhhean’s shoulder, not quite holding him down, not quite pushing him back into his seat. The daemonic roar in the air was overwhelming, but he forced his mouth to smile. After a long moment, Beiin looked down and made a small quelling movement. Then he picked Crispin’s hand off as if it were a slug, and remarked slowly: “I should like another of those cigarettes.”

  “Here. Have two,” Crispin said weakly. “Have the box.”

  “Generous of you, my countryman.” The genius player rose and lit a cigarette at the candle, moving arthritically, as if he were old not just in appearance but in his bones. Crispin picked up the daemon cage, and they left. The warm, noisy summer night wasn’t even dark, there was so much light coming from taverns, upstairs windows, gaslamps. Torches flared on the roofs of rickeys, the howdahs of pakamels, and the boxes and postilions of carriages charging up and down Fleur Street. All the city was one gigantic fire hazard. Choked by presentiments of danger, Crispin impatiently countered Beiin’s rather desperate attempts to extract a promise from him that they would meet again. Finally the genius player shrugged, giving up, and glanced down the street. “Plenty of wallets out walking tonight! Aaah! And my partners are fretting for their supper. Do you know what I feed them? Hee hee hee! You would probably rather not know!”

  With a grimace that said, I tried; it’s no loss to me! he turned and joined the stream of passersby.

  Crispin watched the tall figure until it was lost to view. As the tension drained from his body, he decided Beiin had almost certainly been bluffing. He would never have released his daemons on a rampage—any more than they would release him. He cherished his “gift of power” too highly. More than partners, the man and the four daemons were symbionts. The merrymakers and professionals of the night buffeted Crispin. A prostitute’s perfume wafted under his nose. Rubbing his thumb absently over the handle of the daemon cage, he started to walk, planning the encounter he envisioned taking up the remainder of the night. An expiation, he thought confusedly. Making love to Fumia, who’d never allied herself in his hearing with any high concepts, who wrinkled her nose at the very concept of the spiritual, was all these things. The night got hotter and hotter. He took off his coat and hung it over the top of the cage.

  Before he even reached the bottom of Fleur Street, he was attacked by Mickey, who came dashing uphill through the crowds, sooty-faced and wild-eyed. It was shortly after eleven.

  3 Aout 1896 A.D. 11:07 P.M. Okimako: the new city: Fleur Street

  Crispin couldn’t tell if Mickey was delirious with drugs or something else. “What it
comes down to is you were right!” he shouted, dancing from foot to foot. Black smuts covered his sweaty face. Happy crowds burbled past them, taking no notice of the shouting, hopping maniac. “It’s all gone wrong, it’s got out of hand, oh, quick, quick, quick—”

  Crispin gripped his shoulder. “I’ve never seen you this fucked-up. Let’s get you home. You’ll be better off if you lie down for a bit.”

  “Fucking hell, I’m not fucked-up!” Mickey screamed, wrenching away. “It’s happening right now! You don’t believe me—you don’t—come here!” He dragged Crispin across the street, nearly killing them both under the wheels of a chaise drawn by a matched pair of white goats. “Up high! We have to get up high, then you’ll see!”

  In place of a shop window, the six-story building ahead sported a large mirror, decorated with characters and protected by a wrought-iron cage. Crispin recognized the character for “woman” before Mickey bounded up the steps and inside. Struggling with his cumbersome daemon cage, he pursued Mickey’s footsteps up one flight of stairs after another, arriving on the top landing to find Mickey arguing frantically with a young woman in chartreuse whose hair was a drift of tattered ribbons. “Y’all look like an effin’ fag to me,” she said flatly. “Don’t do business with fags.” She saw Crispin. “No threesomes, neither.”

  Crispin hitched his daemon cage onto his hip, fumbled in his pocket, and thrust a hundred-sigil note at her. “Five minutes, m’selle.” The rate for a girl of her caliber was twenty sigils an hour.

  “Y’all want Ramam’s, two down,” she mumbled, gazing spellbound at the bit of paper in her hand, as if it bore horrifying auguries for the future. Vaguely, she gestured at the room she had left. Mickey dragged Crispin inside. Crispin dropped his daemon cage against the door and looked about. The room was bare but for a cluttered dressing table and a bed with a jerry-rigged four-poster top hung with veils. Incense smoke drifted in the candlelight. Mickey stood at the small four-pane window, gazing out as if transfixed. Crispin came up beside him, ready to humor him. “Look,” Mickey whispered, moving aside. “See.”