“Don’t tell me you’re doing business already?”
“Some men do enjoy afternoon indulgences.”
“Whereas women occupy themselves productively with naps, gossip, and shopping.” He gestured at the string bag of purchases—Ashie’s, probably food—on the table by the window.
“Speaking of which, you bought Fumia a frock? I can’t believe saying good-bye to Crispin unhinged her so badly that that was necessary!” Ashie put her hand on hip and raised her eyebrows. “The way she described it, you could probably have bought back Dragyonne Street from the profiteers for the same price!”
Her reprimand was teasing, not severe as Fumia’s would once have been; nonetheless it tapped into his own financial anxieties. He said more sharply than he had meant to, “Shush. It was affordable. I’ve got everything in hand.”
“All right, be like that.” She turned her back and fidgeted with the dazeflower mortar, sighing stagily. Mickey went to the window and lifted the curtain. They were on the fourth floor. Between the roofs, he could see the docks farther downhill, the masts of the local fishing boats leaping wildly, synchronized by the surges of the river. He smelled rather than heard Ashie coming up behind him. She wore a potent, sandalwoody perfume. He wondered how much that had cost. Her hand came around his shoulder holding the packed pipe and a lucifer. “Here you are, monsieur.”
He struck the lucifer on the slate windowsill and inhaled. The smoke entered his lungs like a benediction. “Give it here,” Ashie said impatiently, and he handed the materials over without looking at her. As he expelled a long, controlled breath, the smoke clouded the window, milky strands twining, and for a moment he saw the brothel he would build on the site where Akila-uza had stood. A tall fretworked building flanked by equally magnificent town houses, its gilt-framed windows iridesced blankly in the morning sun. Gargoyles patterned after late Ruling Significants puffed aloft its eaves; the carriage of some rich man with whom Mickey had business dealings pulled up, pakamel harness jangling like money, and he himself was opening the door.
The land of milk and honey don’t seem to be nowhere
But don’t tell that to Johnny, its a family affair
His sister’s in the bathroom, crying tears of despair
And when you can recover how’s it feel to be their mother?
And their mother don’t seem to be nowhere
All I want to do is get it through to you
We’re picking up the pieces and we’re making something new.
—Stereo MC’s
Book Seven: Roustabout
A Bird in the Clouds
15 Okandar 1896 A.D. /1212 Y.L. Kirekune: Sjintang Province
Laid off!
“Not as if we didn’t know it was coming, though.” The Izte Kchebuk’aran shook his head, expounding. “Shipments of building materials for the capital, that’s what’s going to be in the hold of every Slow Express on the river this winter, mark my words, and the cap’n knows he can get boys to work for their passage, slave-hire, just so long as he’s going to Okimako. The kids don’t even think there was a Fire of 1212, most of ‘em. They think the capital’s streets are paved with gold. Young lunkheads. But don’t you fret, Lamaroon.” The Izte Kchebuk’aran leaned across the other three newly redundant sailors, Okimakoans all, who walked in silence, staring at the mud. “Come have a drink with meself. Going to roust out a few lads I’m acquainted with.”
“Thanks, but I’ve got business to take care of.” Crispin despised the Izte Kchebuk’aran’s transparent effort to salvage his dignity. “Wouldn’t want to hold you up.” The man had been displaying an unpleasantly proprietary attitude toward him. Crispin didn’t want him to think they were friends. When he first signed on to the Oilflower, he’d listened eagerly to his advice, but before long he realized it was as often as not inaccurate. The Kchebuk’aran had no more inside information than any of them did. They were all transient hires, scum on the river. The Fire of 1212, which destituted thousands, had been a windfall for barge captains seeking the cheapest of cheap labor.
But the cheapest of the cheap was also the most readily disposable. Transformed by the stroke of a pen into unemployed undesirables, they left the world of the Slow Expresses without fanfare and wandered aimlessly into the warehouse district that buffered the river wharves from Sjintang proper. It was raining. The jigsaw streets were wide and subdued. The warehouses loomed, shabbily painted in mauve, yellow, green, or a combination of periwinkle and pink. Crispin thought he could smell the sea.
(Good-bye, said Ochinella, the bloated, musk-skinned hag who crouched, twenty feet of sag and stink, chewing her fingernails in the dark daemon room of the Oilflower, a fifth mile away, a quarter, a half. Come back and see me some time.)
“Lamaroon. You got no fucking right being laid off,” one of the Okimakoans said suddenly.
“What?” Crispin said.
“Cap’n woulda kept you on if you hadn’t got his back up. If you’da signed that contract he offered you, you’d have a job for the rest of your life. Daemon handlers rare as gold these days, after half of them getting charcoaled in the capital. You’re off your fucking head.”
Having decided to quit handling, Crispin had wanted to keep the secret of what he’d once done for a living. At first he’d succeeded in passing himself off as an ordinary laborer. But eventually he had been unable to resist sneaking down into the noisy bowels of the ship, past the massive, clashing engine that drove the turbines, just to see what kind of creature lurked in the daemon room. Ochinella. It was such a pretty name.
One of the other sailors had come on him there, kneeling in the swill, his forehead pressed to the silver bars, sharing her misery. What he had not known was that for the fifteen minutes he’d been communing with her, the Slow Express had been bucking along like a speedboat, plowing past everything else on the river as if it was standing still. The cap’n offered him a year’s contract at a handler’s salary; after he refused it, everyone on board except the Izte Kchebuk’aran turned on him—especially the Oilflower’s official handlers, ex-Disciples, bitter men past their prime. A couple of times, in heavy rains, they were reduced to enlisting his help, and then they detested him more.
“Wouldn’t know the chance of a lifetime if you was offered it on gold,” the Okimakoan said, obviously trying to provoke Crispin so that he could vent his frustration on him.
“You’re extremely ignorant,” Crispin said tiredly. “Let me enlighten you. Daemons are a crutch. If you handle them, you start depending on them. And a man ought to be able to stand on his own two feet. I don’t fancy being a cripple; I like my independence. That’s why 1 didn’t sign.”
“Wouldn’t half mind being hooked, meself, on sum’n that brings in five thousand sigils a year,” the man said. The other two Okimakoans laughed nastily.
Crispin sighed. He was keenly aware of the contradictions inherent in using mundane metaphors to describe the occult, contradictions that guaranteed failures of communication—but how else could you speak of such things? Daemons themselves had no language other than slogans and catchphrases borrowed from humanity. And the comparison to a crutch was quite apt, now he thought about it, Not only was a crutch a necessity for a cripple, but you could use a stout one to bash other people over the kneecaps and make them cripples! He smiled to himself.
“What you got to grin about. You’re out of a job just like we are, now.” The Okimakoan sneered, swinging his battered duffel from hand to hand as if he wanted to hit Crispin with it. “All any of us got is two options. The army or the cakewalk at the docks. Not that you’d be screamer fodder like we would if you enlisted. Creamy sheets and silverware and a girl to wash your feet and do whatever else you wanted is what you’d get. Handlers are all ponces, if you ask me. Beetlebacks.” Then, abruptly changing tack: “What right do ‘roons have to be handlers anyway, that’s what I want to know.”
Crispin said nothing. The rain drenched them to the skin. They emerged from the warehouse dist
rict and walked into the city. The streets filled with a bobbing sea of umbrellas, in whose shelter crowded swarthy, stubby-tailed southerners dressed in layers of riotous pastels. Nearly everyone was on foot. Only now and again a horse-drawn carriage bruised its way through the pedestrians. For all its shipping, Sjintang was a town in the later stages of decline, debilitated like Naftha, its Ferupian counterpart, by a century of Disciple-enforced trade bans.
“More lads are needed than ever on the front so I heard,” the Izte Kchebuk’aran said with determined optimism. “No able-bodied fellow has to starve, eh? I heard they are offering extra incentives; shorter stints for the same compensation—”
None of the other ex-crewmen deigned to answer. Crispin glanced doubtfully at them. If there was a reason the five of them had not yet gone their separate ways, it was becoming less and less apparent. The others must have sensed this, too; the quietest of the Okimakoans stopped without warning, and said, “Right. I’m off.”
“Where yer going?” yelped the aggressive one.
The answer was mumbled. All three of them conferred for a moment, huddling in a bunch; then, abruptly, they made off into the crowd. The third man looked apologetically over his shoulder and raised a hand to Crispin and the Izte Kchebuk’aran. Then they vanished down a side street.
“Okimakoan trash!” the Kchebuk’aran said fretfully, gazing after them. He was obsessed with the capital; at times he behaved as though the Fire of 1212 had been a personal insult. He turned to Crispin. “Where d’you think they might be going, maybe?”
“Nowhere I’d want to go, or you would either. Hiro will get the other two in trouble. I’d bet you a hundred sigils if I had it that by this time tomorrow, they’ll be broke, drunk, and more than likely in the lockup.”
“More than likely,” the Kchebuk’aran agreed with relief. “More than likely!” He grinned at Crispin as if realizing that all was not lost, after all. “I could stand a drink myself! Something to warm a body up: this damned rain!”
“Gonna forget your cares?”
“I’m not one of those who the first thing they do when they’re let go is to waste what little they’ve saved,” the Kchebuk’aran corrected him in a hurt tone. “A glass of wine, and look out for my old acquaintances. That is my tactics. By tonight I’ll know where they’re hiring.”
“Sounds straightforward.” It wouldn’t be. Two months after the fire, the unemployment wave had rippled as far south as Sjintang.
“Come.” The Kchebuk’aran pushed his head forward and stretched out both hands yearningly; he had an eager smile on his face. “I’ll stand you one. What do you say? What do you say?”
Crispin didn’t think he could bear another minute in the company of anyone who reminded him of the Oilflower. He wasn’t capable of speaking without swearing. He shook his head and retreated. The Kchebuk’aran came after him in little half-running steps, his mouth open; Crispin ran. He heard the Kchebuk’aran shouting after him. Then he heard only the pounding of his own feet and heart, and the susurrus of rain falling on the streets trodden to mud.
After a while he stopped and looked around. He was in a narrow street that seemed to be partly commercial, partly residential, and partly vacant. Though he hadn’t noticed passing through the center of the city, he must have done so—from the nature of the shops (Express Luggage For Gentlefolk; Kichiyama’s Almanacs; Souvenirs From Sjintang) he was in the last remaining genteel neighborhood, near the port. He stuck out his tongue to catch the raindrops. He imagined that they tasted of salt.
He looked forward to seeing the sea, which he hadn’t done on the Oilflower’s previous stopovers in Sjintang, nor in fact since Smithrebel’s last pass through the south when he was eighteen. Right now, though, he was too tired to walk any farther. He sat down on a doorstep. The door behind him was padlocked. He coughed and let his head fall back against the soggy wood. The southerners passed, streams of them, without glancing at him. On this coast, in a city with a sizable underclass of Lamaroons—many of whom he’d already seen, striding in wary cliques—he himself didn’t qualify as exotic. It was both exhilarating and depressing. He hadn’t liked the men he worked with on the Oilflower; nothing could have been more distasteful than the prospect of spending a year trolling up and down the Chirowa with them—but on board the Slow Express, he’d at least been a name, not just a face. Now he wasn’t even a face. Magically, he’d become invisible.
He wiped the rain out of his face, sneezed, and allowed his thoughts to turn to daemons. His (admittedly cursory) stab at explaining his views to the Okimakoan had been his first since the disaster of the refused contract, and he decided now it would be his last. He wasn’t going to get involved again, not even in explanations. Anyway, there was little or no chance that anyone, even another trickster, would sympathize with his views. By blood a trickster, by training a handler, and by natural inclination neither—what did he have to say to the legions who did their jobs, took home their pay, and even enjoyed their work? It would be like a horseman telling an elephant rider that his knees were all wrong. Yet at times like this, he knew he was right. Everything that had ever gone wrong had started with daemons. Prettie Valenta’s death, a direct result of the visions he’d fallen victim to as a result of being fatigued from working two jobs at once, the Holstead House trickster women’s deaths, little Orpaan’s death, the hideous end in Chressamo of his and Rae Akila’s love affair, the deaths, too, of friends and superiors in the QAF, from Lieutenant Fischer to Commandant Vichuisse (and in between, all the regulars whose tragedy was that there were too many of them to remember each death separately), the deaths of Zouy and Saia Akila, Crispin’s slow, horrible, stupid falling out with the surviving Akilas. It had all been the faults of Elektheris, Uemiel, and Akele, Belamis, Kendris, Indele, Favis, and Mishime. The splinterons’ devilry had been the most insidious of all. He hadn’t known until after he had lost them just how much he’d come to depend on them.
Because they were so weak, he’d treated them with far more lenience than he ever had a demogorgon—and thus fallen under the spell of a trickery that was a thousand times more subtle than his own, which had no correlation to the number of dp involved—a trickery of mutual need. A few days after the little daemons died in the Fire, he’d been gripped by vicious pangs of withdrawal. The pain made him cranky day and night. He’d tried to hide it from the Akilas. But hiding it only made it worse, made him impatient, short-tempered, hyperactive—and, yes, as Fumia had at one point accused—a slave driver. He didn’t blame her or Mickey or Ashie for having come to hate him. He blamed trickery. Trickery had caused the whole sad mess. Belamis, Kendris, and friends had been his single halfhearted attempt to capitalize on the talent with which he’d been cursed—and what had been the upshot? The Oilflower. Sjintang. Alone. As close to broke as made no difference.
Not for the first time, he wished he hadn’t given Mickey back the last of the jewels. Or if only Mickey had had the decency to refuse them, as Crispin had been half-counting on him to do.
The passersby looked ill in the colored light that filtered through their umbrellas. They strolled along, unconcerned by the rain, as if they had all day to get where they were going. He felt as if he hadn’t seen a bed or a hot meal for a week, and probably looked like it, too: he was bedraggled and weary and restless. In the south, everyone moved at an amble, no matter what they were doing. Even the wharves operated at walking pace, as if nothing in the world was worth hurrying for—an assumption diametrically opposed to the one Crispin had had drilled into him since the day he was born in the back of a moving truck. He’d learned quickly that he could only last a few hours on shore before the urge to pick fights, just to stir things up, compelled him to retreat to the Oilflower. (As an invention of the north the Slow Expresses, their moniker notwithstanding, operated on the far more sensible principle that speed and efficiency are everything.) And now he was feeling that urge. The Okimakoans and the Izte Kchebuk’aran who’d been laid off along with him wouldn’t e
ven stop to consider their impulses before they started a beef with the locals; afterward they’d say trouble just seemed to happen to them. But when Crispin had been thrown off-balance by the deaths of the six little daemons, he had been forced into a habit of self-examination. He couldn’t forget himself as easily as he had before.
At least, not without help...
He laughed to himself. Damn the Kchebuk’aran, he was right! He stood up, and dizziness passed over him like a foretaste of inebriation.
In the tavern called the Pink Peacock, the bar girls were dressed as—what else?—peacocks. They’d attached fans of pink-dyed feathers to their high-held tails; their bibs were also made of feathers, and they wore close-fitting pink trousers. Crispin found them hilarious and not in the least sexy. He’d sought a “northern-style” tavern in the hope of finding a spark of the energy that was missing from the rest of Sjintang—but if this was northern style, he was a peacock! The men leered and tugged the waitresses’ tails, to which crude attentions the girls responded with giggles that rang out like timed counterpoints to the xylophone-and-steel-drum tunes coming from the musicians’ dais. From time to time, covert transactions took place, and couples disappeared behind the bar, the men grinning foolishly.
Crispin sat by a window, feeling more invisible than ever, in two minds about the group of Lamaroons huddling together on the far side of the room. Part of him wanted to approach them, unsure only of the protocol for doing so; part of him wanted to pretend they had nothing in common. Outside the window, the night was quite calm, but the rain hitting the glass made it look as though the ships’ lanterns far out on the bay were dancing. He’d maintained his drunkenness successfully and parsimoniously for hours.
Why?
Neither he nor Mickey had had any real hope of locating Ashie, Zouy, or Saia alive. But Mickey was afraid Fumia would go catatonic if their bodies at least weren’t found. So Crispin trudged along the burnt-out streets, dodging bands of Disciples who would have arrested him as soon as look at him, searching the ravaged City of the Dead and the charred city rock, witnessing the same scenes of destruction over and over. Eventually he stopped scrutinizing the faces of the wandering refugees and focused his search on things he had a chance of finding: abandoned daemon vehicles, store cellars that hadn’t yet been thoroughly looted. He followed the ransackers’ word of mouth into the new-city districts that had been abandoned but not burnt. In this way he added to the pocketfuls of jewels which were the Akilas’ worldly wealth. Entering a house in the Joichi one day, he pricked his ears. Somewhere upstairs, a woman was singing a popular chanson d’amour “I was born a poor poor girl... for twenty years I was at the mercy of the world...”
The Daemon in the Machine Page 28