One of Beiin’s daemons flapped overhead in lazy pursuit of its own tail. Finally the truck—or rather, five trucks—came. They were Glückens, Ferupian vehicles that must have been older than the war, older than the Kirekuni occupation of the Likreky islands. They careened down the pier at dangerously high speeds, scattering loiterers, and pulled up with white daemon breath smoking from under their hoods. The drivers jumped out and surveyed the enormous crates dubiously. There ensued an interminable episode of walking around the crates, and estimating daemon and man power. Then everyone seemed suddenly to reach a decision. Jiharzii shouted an order at one of the “crewmen” and jumped into the cab of the first truck. Beiin followed.
Crispin realized that to be left behind would be a disaster. He swung up, hoisting his carpetbag after him, and squashed in after Beiin. With four people squeezed into the cab, he had to hold the door shut manually. The driver started the engine, U-turned, and accelerated down the pier. He appeared to enjoy his job: he manipulated the whipcord as if it were a horse’s reins, swerving from side to side of the obstacle course that was the pier, sometimes coming within inches of the edge. Crispin had all he could do to stay in the cab without falling out. The bag on his lap obscured the view. The cab reeked of booze and dazeflower and daemon breath.
Redeuiina: tall; blocky stone houses; wide streets sloping uphill from the pier; a sea of black faces. The truck charged at thirty miles an hour through a market—a chaos of jewel-bright fruits, shouts, and bedraggled poultry. Finally it pounced to a halt and they all scrambled out. Crispin stamped to ease the cramps in his legs. Even in the rainy twilight, the buildings here looked different, more familiar than the building-block houses of the lower town, where life spilled from every door and window in the form of laundry, children, goats, cats, and hand-painted advertisements. Here, lace curtains hung behind glass windows, and iron knockers in the shape of gargoyle heads adorned the doors. This was the good part of town. And Redeuiina’s respectable people built in continental style. Beiin and the skipper of the Parrot Girl were conferring, looking up at the nearest town house. Crispin watched people circling the parked truck, dodging the traffic of donkey carts, rickeys, and ancient daemon vans. They seemed to come in all colors—Lamaroon dark, Kirekuni pale, and every conceivable mixture of the two. He thought about walking away from frustration, away from mystery, into the unknown. He’d had enough of the skipper, the genius player, and their secretiveness. Alone, penniless but free, he could treat with Lamaroon on his own terms. On the point of sidling away, he looked over his shoulder and saw Beiin staring at him with an unreadable, assessing gaze. The rain had darkened the trickster’s yellow dashiki to the color of orange peel. He looked slightly embarrassed, then beckoned. “This is the house of Governor Yamaxi,” he confided in an undertone.
“Never heard of him.”
“A very puissant personage. Not only a statesman, he is a businessman. Since the loss of certain of his interests in the Fire of 1212, he is expanding into other areas. Our friend Jiharzii has had in the past a mutually profitable partnership with him, and expects to renew it.”
Crispin’s head filled with questions he knew would get no answers. He was starting to ask them anyway when an engine roared and he turned to see the truck lurching downhill, its rear doors flapping like stiff flags. Hasp Jiharzii put his finger to his lips portentously. He mounted the steps of the house and banged the Significant’s-head knocker.
After some moments a soft-faced Lamaroon girl put her head around the door. Lace fluttered from the bun on top of her skull. Beneath her knee-length white skirt, she wore black stockings and pointy black boots. Fluttering her fingers like a dancer, she indicated that they should enter. She looked like a cross between a maid and the Akilas’ gay-girl Sraveui, except that she was so small and her face so chubby she couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Crossing the threshold, Crispin felt a pang of nostalgia that was frighteningly specific.
I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow;
Where below another sky
Parrot islands anchored lie...
—Robert Louis Stevenson, “Travel”
Here We Are Again!
2 Jevanary 1897 A.D. The Likreky: Lamaroon: Redeuiina
Crispin sat on a doorstep at the edge of the mart in the Yard—as Redeuiinans affectionately called the low town—smoking a cigarette and warming his fingers on a mug of beef broth. At his feet, a bevy of reptilian pigerows tussled over the corpse of a dead rat. Here, he was not so much invisible as he was a piece fitted into the puzzle of the town: in his black cotton trousers and long, padded coat, he knew that he no longer looked like a transient from “foreign,” but rather one of the lightskins who cherished their Lamaroon heritage with even more pride than the darkest men did. When he first arrived here, he’d worn himself out in furious defiance of everything and everyone native to Lamaroon. But the island was bigger than he was, and reacted not at all. At last he’d had to concede that flexibility was his only choice. This camouflage was the only one available to him, and he’d assumed it grudgingly. These days, even the locals often took him for one of themselves, and started in surprise when they heard his accent (the hardest trace to cover).
But his Lamaroon had improved from nonexistent to passable. Yleini was a better teacher than Mickey had been. She was able to formulate and articulate the laws of her language, where so many native speakers couldn’t. And she was assertive enough to keep their lessons from degenerating into practice sessions of another kind. Crispin stared into the bustle of commerce, wondering, with a rapidly darkening sense of the comedy implicit in the situation, how he’d once more become embroiled.
He’d thought it really was just a diversion this time. Pointless, yes, but a luxury affordable because it came with no strings. Everything aboveboard, cards on the table, here I am and here you are, so why don’t we spend some time together?
I must have been crazy to stay with her. But she’d seemed to take him for granted. Such total acceptance—the way she always beckoned him closer, never closing him out or putting out thorns—was seductive. And besides, he hadn’t had anywhere else to go.
Her reserves of local wisdom were at his disposal. Sexually, she was both pliant and passionate. But the darling worm he’d first seen in the doorway of Governor Yamaxi’s uptown house, who wasn’t as young as she looked, had turned. He hadn’t seen it in the offing. He hadn’t suspected she was discontented. The storm had blown up last night out of nowhere—like a snake-bat daemon coalescing out of a pocket of soft, still air. She wasn’t going to stand for it anymore. She was the daughter of a poor but honest rural family, and Crispin was taking advantage of the fact that her relatives weren’t on the spot to treat her like a prostitute. She had “taken pity” on him because he wasn’t like Lamaroon men, and she’d felt she could trust him. But she’d been wrong, hadn’t she? She’d compromised herself for nothing. Nothing!
The scene had been entirely engineered by her, and the role she’d chosen for herself had been that of the deceived damsel cutting loose a false lover. Tearful yet determined.
But Crispin, as he gulped the broth that would have to do for supper, guessed in a burst of optimism that she hadn’t meant last night’s parting to be final. In the roundabout way Lamaroons had, she’d only been presenting him with an ultimatum.
He’d slept in the front room of one of his coworkers after she kicked him out at midnight; after a cursory wash up, he’d gone to work at the East Pier. It had come home to him that he was taking advantage of her, at least in the matter of lodgings and language lessons. He contributed part of his pay for rent, but her weekly wage as the governor’s maid was far larger.
Halfway through the morning he’d almost killed a fellow dockhand through inattention. Driving a forklift didn’t involve much skill, but required a specialized kind of split-level concentration. At the same time as you navigated along the pier, you had to hold your daemon to superior, unnatural st
andards of vertical exertion, or the load suspended high on the fork would come crashing down, as it had done today. The fellow strolling alongside, steadying the boxes, had got out of the way only just in time. Crispin hadn’t gone home after his shift because Yleini had told him never to come back.
He lit another cigarette and finished the broth. It was steaming and salty, a poor substitute for the gourmet leftovers Yleini regularly brought home from the Yamaxis’ and heated up over the little charcoal brazier her family had given her when she left the jungle for the city. His stomach was rumbling in stupid anticipation. The afternoon had darkened to the hour when the merchants started rolling up their awnings; now children lost interest in the doings of their elders, abandoned their hoops and wires, and darted screaming through the labyrinthine streets of the Yard, intoxicated by the coming night.
He was going to go home, of course, but to do so without having made up his mind would be fatal. He simply couldn’t bring himself to accede to her unarticulated demands. It wasn’t just his hatred of being manipulated, either—he wasn’t even sure he wanted to...
Because of a scuffle that broke out close by when a dog got into a fowl-seller’s cages, he didn’t hear Beiin approaching, or smell the genius player’s daemons, until all five symbionts stopped before him.
It was the first time Crispin had run into Beiin in weeks, and his heart sank. He should have known better than to hang about in a public place like the mart, where the chances of running across someone you knew were high almost to the point of certainty. But he’d thought he had seen the last of the genius player and his schemes. He’d hoped that by removing himself to the Yard, where his mother’s roots presumably lay, fleeing the high-stakes world of wealth and intrigue in which he’d somehow managed to get tangled, he’d managed to extricate himself also from trickery. But of course there remained Yleini, the connection, the commentator, and possibly (he thought now) the informer.
He stood up reluctantly, grimacing at the sight of the grotesque seraphim: a mass of leathery wings and blinking eyes, with two legs coming out of the bottom and the genius player’s grin in the middle. Only in the Yard could a walking sideshow like this wander through a public mart without raising a hue and cry.
Beiin struck a pose in the gutter, like the star attraction appearing on the stage. “Well, well. Here we are again. For all your fine talk, you have not gone far! Thinking about changing your mind, mmm?”
5 Novambar 1896 A.D. Lamaroon: Redeuiina: the residence of Devi Yamaxi, governor of Lamaroon
Crispin had had to get away. At the first real pause in Governor Yamaxi’s monologue, he’d burst out with some trivial excuse and fled. If he’d stayed in the parlor with Yamaxi, Jiharzii, and Beiin any longer, he would either have burst out laughing, or let loose with a diatribe on the evils of smuggling, of illegal trade in general, and of aiding and abetting the enemy in particular. The irony, the irony of it!
He strode blindly down the hall and started up the back stairs, giving no thought to the fact that this was the private home of his adversary.
They could smuggle diesel engines to the man in the moon if they wanted, and Crispin wouldn’t shop them, as long as they didn’t try to rope him in! But somehow the obscene pride with which Yamaxi discoursed on his wrongdoings, and the way Jiharzii and Beiin fawned on his every word, had made Crispin long to speak the names of law and order. Someone needed to—just on principle! He held his peace only because of the risk that Yamaxi would assume Crispin did mean to shop him. Men like the governor were always paranoid.
And just who did they think they were? They’d apparently dismissed out of hand the fact that there was a war on and they were, like it or lump it, on the side of the Kirekunis. What kind of circles did they move in, to assume without prior confirmation that everyone they encountered—even a stranger like Crispin—would have dismissed the conventions of patriotism just as they themselves had? The skipper and the genius player could be excused because the war was not Lamaroon’s; they could be allowed ambiguity, even racketeering. But Yamaxi was a different story! He was a rat, and that was all there was to it. A rat shitting on the edge of the battlefield, far enough out of things that he couldn’t imagine the hideousness of the war in the Raw. He didn’t know—or disagreed—that that massacre necessitated some rules of operation, some consistent principles to which everyone stuck. Otherwise, it would be the end of the world.
And when the world did end, the apocalypse would be brought on by men like Yamaxi. He was no better than the Princes of the Glorious Dynasty and the traitorous Ferupian peers they’d conspired with, no better than the odious Shusuxo and Banranki. He had a position in the colonial government, and he should have been content with that, but instead he scurried in among the dead and the dying, nosing around the corpses in search of a profit. Crispin ground his teeth at the thought of the little lizard’s oiled-back hair and oiled-back grin, the ever-moving tail blue with tattoos, the long fingernails clacking as he ticked off the items of Kirekuni make he was currently smuggling to Ferupe, Cype, Izte Kchebuk’ara, and Eo Ioria. Wastingele rifles... Karanda revolvers... live draybeasts for breeding... dazeflower, opium, and cocaine grown under his auspices here in Lamaroon... Crispin couldn’t even remember half of them. The point had been that Yamaxi was about to expand into diesel engines. “A sure thing, my dear Kateralbin, an absolutely positive sure thing. Motorcars are all the rage in the Far West, so my contacts tell me, and we will use that intelligence as our main marketing tool. Not that we will need to market these little darlings. They will fly out of the holds.”
Diesel engines. That was what had been in the crates in the cargo hold of the Parrot Girl, under lock and key.
And Crispin had thought it might be daemons!
“I really must be behind the times,” he muttered savagely. Reaching the landing at the top of the house, he looked around at unctuous carpets, flocked wallpaper, tassels on the hall furniture, tassels in fact on everything that could conceivably be tasseled. He punched the wall. His knuckles hurt. He punched the same place again, and heard a satisfying crunch of plaster. He felt stupid and furious.
“Monsieur?” a soft voice came from behind him. The Kirekuni vocative. “I must ask you not to do that.”
Whirling around, he snarled, “It would be all very well if they weren’t trying to drag me into it! Let do as you would be let done by, that’s always been my motto! But they assume I’m going to be their, I don’t even know what, their translator or their advisor in this—this—”
Words failed him as he saw he was speaking not to some daughter of the Yamaxi line, who would be implicitly responsible for her father’s crimes, but to the Lamaroon maid.
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean, monsieur. May I direct you to a washroom? To a guest room? The master didn’t say whether you and the other two gentlemen were staying the night...”
“I certainly shan’t be.” He made his decision. “In fact, you can show me out right now.”
She tilted her head on one side and regarded him with interest. In the depths of her eyes she seemed to be trying to work him out. “My master is of noble breeding, monsieur. He’s a very important man.”
“Girl, you don’t know the half of it!” Crispin could not restrain himself. “Your master may dress like nobility, but he’s gutter scum! He’s a rodent! A traitor to his own people!”
“My master is the governor of this island,” she stated calmly. “And a businessman in his own right. I beg you not to slander him.”
“Businessman? Smuggler is more like it!”
Instinctively she put out her hand as if to cover his mouth. “Sssh. I can see that you are new to the islands, monsieur.” Her eyes were wide, her lips parted.
Crispin was taken. He smiled. “Oh? And how can you tell?”
She tossed her head as if it should have been obvious. “You didn’t understand when the skipper and the genius player spoke together in the foyer.”
“They were talkin
g about me, weren’t they? What’d they say?”
Her eyes slid aside. “You are Ferupian. My master wishes to hire you as a consultant on his Ferupian and Cypean expeditions.”
“What happened to his last man, then?” He had put that question to them, but received only evasion in response.
“I do not know, monsieur. It was a well-paying job; I cannot think why the man would have resigned—but he did not return from Cype, the last time.”
I wonder why not, Crispin thought. “Just how well-paying a job? Should I make as much as you do, d’you think? Should I be recompensed in sigils for the indignities—and the risks—I would be subjected to above and beyond my job description?” He grinned at her discomfiture. “Look at that sweet little outfit you have on. Very fetching, and no doubt imported. You have been taught Kirekuni—and your grasp of it is near-perfect. And if I may say so, you’re beautiful. No doubt Monsieur le Governor considers you a rare treasure!” He waxed eloquent. “But not a priceless treasure, mmm? The tab is set at three meals a day and your own room in the attic, with running water and all. A generous estimate in this day and age. No wonder you are his partisan!”
“Leftovers,” she said angrily. “What they would otherwise give to the paupers. And I have my own home in the Yard—the ‘slums’ to you, monsieur! Now I must be getting about my work! You may find your own way out!”
The last phrase was delivered with hauteur worthy of an Okimako socialite. She whirled about with a flounce of her lace skirts. Crispin caught her arm.
“Unhand me, monsieur, I must ask!”
The Daemon in the Machine Page 31