The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  But this is all frightfully impersonal and, I’m afraid, rather antipatriotic. From our point of view, They have Disciples and Disciplinarians enough: I could be jailed for writing this... or worse, I could get you in trouble, darling. What is the government like in Cype, anyway? How much does it care what people do and think? For that matter, is there a government? Cype is a Ferupian protectorate, or was one until now, isn’t that so?

  The question had never occurred to her. Pressed, Rain would have guessed that there was a government... maybe in those big, stone-columned buildings in Ghixtown district... but not for the life of her could she have said what it was “like.” Still less could she fathom why her new Kirekuni cousin was interested. Her gaze drifted of its own accord down the page, but the sun blazed through the window of the dormitory, and her heart was sinking.

  Compared to here, Kherouge sounds a delightfully freewheeling sort of place! Perhaps after things stabilize, I’ll get Ashie to come up from Swirling and look after the business while I pay you a visit!

  Anyhow, to put things in perspective, here’s what I officially know. The war is as good as over, the Disciples are advancing on Kingsburg faster than they can send word of their victories to us moneygrubbing civvies at home, and this letter will in all probability reach you before summer, because the southern ports and the northern passes have now been officially opened to intercourse with the east. See how fast They try to establish proprietary rights over gestures of beneficence, even at the same time as, if I know SAPpers, the Disciples are massacring every Ferupian they can catch between the Wraithwaste and Kingsburg.

  But there I go again, nattering like an old city pundit about the great, big world, and not a word about our family! Our family. How exciting it is to have a relative halfway across the world—what new vistas it opens up! I must definitely pay you a visit as soon as possible!

  Rain understood barely one point in ten the man was making, but she understood that one well enough. It raised a dread-sweat on her shoulders. No, she thought, stay in Okimako! Don’t come here, don’t come and see me; I couldn’t bear for you to be disappointed, because I don’t know what you think I am, but I’m not—

  But the letter continued in the same vein. I would invite you here (insisted the minuscule handwriting, that formed the Ferupian words jaggedly) only I daresay things won’t be settled enough for a young lady to cross the continent on her own for at least ten years, and I want to meet you sooner than that. To think I didn’t even know you were alive! It happened that one day recently, Fumia went into a state of tears and hand-wringing for no apparent reason: dashing all over the house, flinging things out of trunks and boxes with wild abandon, screaming at the girls. She thought they had stolen something from her. I eventually managed to learn what it was: letters from you, and copies of the letters she and our mother (may she rest in the arms of Significance) had written to you! She had forgotten all about them for nearly a year, and then suddenly remembered! Imagine my excitement! You see, I’d always known about you! We are supposed to have lived together in this very house when you were a baby and I was a small child. But, well, Saia always told us you and your parents were dead. I don’t think she believed it herself; though—because it was she who took it into her head to locate you, with the help of the “cult” she belonged to at the time, which her sister (your mother) had belonged to before her.

  Rain frowned. With the help of the cult? Saia Akila, she knew, had converted to the Glorious Dynasty. Then, were her own Sisters—or at least some of them—privately in contact with the Dynasty? She squirmed to think it, but the organizations had not a little in common. On the other hand, whatever missives might once have crippled pigeons were undoubtedly no longer being sent, at least not between Cype and Okimako. The only news she’d previously heard of the “Fire of 1212”—and she hadn’t put two and two together at the time—had been that all religions in Kirekune had been destroyed, disbanded, and abolished. And the Sisters had taken this news stoically as they took all indignities. There would come a day when they were the last devotees of Royalty in an increasingly bright sun-time, and that brightness was approaching faster than anticipated—at the speed of a tank, a mud-churning truck, a cart-ox, a marching army, instead of at the plodding pace of dynasties. That was all...

  With difficulty she forced her attention back to the letter.

  I’m not sure if Fumia explained why she took over the responsibility of writing to you. She was not frequently given to explanations, was she? To put it as briefly as possible, long before the Fire took our poor mother from us, she had become strange in the head. Now Fumia, I am afraid, has gone the same way. Not that she’s got religion as Saia did. She has just had something of a—I don’t know how to put it—a nervous breakdown. She is in perfect bodily health, but it is no longer possible to hold a conversation with her. Nor is she, needless to say, competent to do business. I am running the business largely on my own—don’t think I am proud, darling, or heartless, for if I could afford to, I would devote all my days to her, in the hope that I could find some way to cure her—but we must eat.

  And someone has to keep the name of Akila on the lips of Okimakoans, even now that both “Okimakoans” and “Akila” are such decimated populations. Our youngest sister Zouka was another unfortunate victim of the Fire. And Ashika has chosen to remain in Swirling, where we subsisted for some time immediately after the Fire. She has opened a branch operation. She has an astonishing talent both for business and for girls, which none of us perceived before. Akila-nichi, I hear, and not just from her, has rapidly become important in what I suppose must be called Swirling’s semilegal sector (some of her “sidelines” compel me to advise caution—she pays no attention to me of course!) but she is simultaneously completely aboveboard and the authorities are very happy with her. I don’t know how she does it; I never had a head for the murky realms outside the law. The one time I ventured into the Fugue, which has since become a byword for criminal anarchy, I didn’t know what I was getting mixed up in.

  Besides, here in Okimako I am of course tight under the eye of Significance, as Ashika is not. I am sure you will agree that it is wisest to stick to the legal side of the business. This is profitable enough, at any rate; there is now practically no other new-city House of Ecstasy that the people up on the peak deem respectable. The only problem is the venue. We are currently living in, and operating out of, the ruin of our old house. Who would have guessed that Akila-uza was constructed on the steel-cage principle? It remained intact, and I had it refurbished for immediate use. The place retains a certain decayed charm, and you wouldn’t believe what you can do with a few veils, but an enterprise such as Akila-uza demands grander premises. I am constructing a brand-new building next door. Even as I write the laborers are hard at work. It is to be four storeys tall with a central staircase worthy of a mansion. It could be finished by summer—if their brute dogs leave me alone! Darling, it is insupportable! At night, each noble and highly placed bureaucrat brings his own guards, who proceed to look daggers at each other and consume vast quantities of noodle soup; in the mornings, the blackcoats come knocking with their notifications, and their regulations, and their barely concealed guns. If I didn’t take good care to be on the up-and-up to the last triplicate, I’d have been hung out for the birds before I even turned a profit! I believe it is only because I’m missing one arm (I was wounded in the war) that I have been spared physical coercion. It seems as if they view me, and all the other businessmen who’ve ventured back to pick up the pieces, as sponges to be twisted until we’re dry. What will they do then, I’d like to know, when they’ve managed to kill us all off or drive us out? I can only hope the war ends first.

  But this is not very toothful fare, is it, darling? I meant to write a warm letter of greeting, welcoming you into the family once again, and conveying my assurances that we shall soon meet. And I find I have filled both sides of the paper with descriptions of my hardships, and crossings-out, and ravings again
st Significance-which-is-ineffable. I would not have you think I am a revolutionary. I admit that my opinions are my own, but this is the first time I have committed any of them to writing, and I only risk it now because of the rumors that say the censorship posts have been abolished. I promise you that I am not now risking, and will never risk, my skin. There are too many here whose lives (I am appalled to have to confess) depend on me.

  Besides, I have undertaken to become your correspondent, haven’t I? And I should not like to present you with a third cousin, only to deprive you of him! On that (admittedly a little morbid) note, I am, now and forever

  Your affectionate cousin

  Yozitaro Akila

  Rain had to force herself to read to the end; as her gaze flicked over the half-crossed-out signature at the bottom of the flimsy page she felt her whole body slacken with relief. Her hands crumpled the letter weakly. She wanted to shred it.

  But sitting on her heels in the middle of her bed, she didn’t move. She looked out of the window at the houses on the other side of the street: red brick, red tile; even their wooden shutters looked rosy in the shadows of the eaves. The dry, brown, creeping-seapinks that swarmed every building in the city drooped listlessly from crumbling mortar. No sounds rose from the street. Nearly everyone in Kherouge except the Patriotic Sisters was taking a siesta. The people who lived in the rowhouses had got used to the Sisters; some of them even sent their children to learn to read and write along with the Royal offspring. But everyone else distrusts us. Doesn’t Yozitaro know that? Why does he trust me? Stupid; because he doesn’t know!

  That venturing to market shrouded in black dresses and black shawls, Rain and her sisters saw gobs of spit land on the ground in front of them, saw Cypeans making the sign that warded off evil. It had got worse in the last month or two, even as the Sisters took in dozens of new converts. Most of them were Ferupian girls, survivors of Mansions of the Dynasty or Apocalypist camps in Lovoshire, Galashire, Salzeim, Lynche, Teilsche, Plum Valley, Greenslope, Kingswater, Goldwater, The Kingdom; girls from as far south as Thrazen and Huizol and Grizelle, who all exhibited an odd mixture of cowardliness (after all, these were the ones who’d fled the Kirekuni advance instead of facing it) and defiance (after all, they’d made it here). They opined quite openly that they had felt drawn to the Enclave as to a Mansion. The older Sisters seemed not to mind the comparison, but it discomfited Rain to think that her reasons for having first ventured into the compound weren’t unique. She didn’t speak to the new girls. Their please-hurt-me eyes reminded her of a time even longer ago—fourteen, had she been, twelve, when she first ventured into what Yozitaro Akila called the great big world?

  Anyway, she didn’t need the new girls. She had longtime friends within the Enclave.

  And Jonajonny.

  (And she brushed her hand fearfully over her stomach to feel whether she showed, hoping she didn’t, hoping the offspring would die inside her and bleed out between her legs, and she hit her thighs with her fists because she was thinking wrong thoughts, selfish thoughts again; her body blooming to the point of constant exhaustion in its new pregnancy seemed to have developed a sentience of its own, destabilizing her into thoughts she desperately did not want to attribute to the baby inside her but could not admit were her own.)

  The room with its row of neatly made beds breathed the familiar scent of cinnamon and gas into her lungs, as if the Enclave itself were reassuring her that nothing would ever change.

  But when she lifted her hand to her nose, noticing as she did so the lumpy joints, how the bones showed inside the thin palm, she still smelled the deep salt of Breeze’s cunt on her fingers; extraordinary how that scent lingered even after soap and water, it was by nature one that wanted to betray itself, wasn’t it, as if its essence were not pleasure but guilt—not that the way they consummated their friendship was wrong, no; for the Royals saw no wrongs, only a single Right—just as long as you worshiped them, anything else was all right, anything at all—

  —but she’d fainted this morning in prayers and Sister Corona had brought her upstairs with instructions to rest until the midday meal—

  —and that was when she’d seen the letter on her pillow, the first mail she’d received in close to a year, the thick cloth envelope grubby from its journey across half a continent—

  Imagine my excitement! You see, I’d always known about you! We are supposed to have lived together in this very house...

  Kindness, affection, vulnerability; none of these were Kirekuni traits, but she had seen them all between the lines of her cousin’s letter. Could it be that he’d written to her, not to satisfy a sense of duty as Saia and Fumia had done, but because he was lonely? It seemed that one way or another, he’d lost most of his other relatives.

  Blinking and sniffling furiously, she dived behind the headboard of her bed and wrestled out her writing materials. Dear Cousin, I am grateful for your letter, but must insist that I receive no more such communications—

  But she was guilty of the same crime of which she suspected him. Namely, an education. And she had something more, something worse: a background in drama. Although she was twenty-three now and had left such things behind, the channel Sister Flora and Brother James had opened from heart to pen remained open, and the instinct for narrative and melodrama Tommy Authrond had honed in her hadn’t vanished. As she rediscovered fluidity it seduced her, and she found herself (as her cousin had perhaps found himself) writing more than she’d meant to.

  From the beginning to the end: the Seventeenth Mansion; her mother’s death; Tom, The World’s Fattest Man, Music Hall Prodigy; Valestock, Lovoshire, and the Old Linny House of Delights; Crispin Kateralbin and the Wraithwaste. She left out the trickster women, her trickster women, because she still couldn’t decide if they had been her malefactors or her saviors. But they were the only people she left out. She told Yozitaro about Chressamo. And about Colonel Sostairs, who had conducted his soldiers in a symphony of pain played on her body, enjoining her all the time to “own up,” until finally, arbitrarily, he had stopped the torturers. Squatting beside her where she lay (naked, crying, bleeding from her nose and cunt and the places her fingernails and toenails and certain strips of skin on her abdomen had been, kicked into consciousness for the umpteenth time, no longer hoping that Crispin could come and save her), he’d informed her that this had just been a spot of fun and games. The boys had gone a bit far, hadn’t they? Seeing what a resilient, strong-willed sort of girl she was, he’d decided to offer her a job as an interpreter. Accept, and the fact that she hadn’t confessed to being a spy would be forgotten.

  She’d snuffled that she couldn’t speak Kirekuni. A tailless Kirekuni woman came into the cell later, picking up her skirts to avoid the blood without changing her expression, and stooped to question her in the foreign language without a trace of kindness. She must have judged that, inexplicable as it was, Rae was telling the truth. Sostairs kicked her once in the ribs, with a viciousness she’d not seen from him personally, and let her go.

  I know it sounds odd, darling; but how I treasure that kick!

  And then the long road to Thares Shadowtown in the Thrazen Parallel. She’d gone south for no other reason than that she was always cold with her wounds healing. But north or south, the Raw was no place for an invalid. Shaved raw and desolate for the sole purpose of war, those barren miles and miles contained nothing, not in Shadowtown or in between Shadowtowns, that hadn’t to do with soldiering: defense and offense and sustenance. Nothing but parched red soil (for by the time she left Chressamo it was summer) and tree stumps and scraggles of juniper and the occasional rabbit or snake. Nothing of use to human beings. She hitched lifts with soldiers from Shadowtown to Shadowtown, or walked like a Wraith in the dust, and paid the price of her journeying with her love, because in the war zone nothing was free, not even for one who cast no more shadow on the historic proceedings than a speck of dust.

  She would have eaten the rabbits, but she had no hope of catchin
g them.

  Once a Wraith man, forty and deaf from a living scraped near air bases, trapped one and roasted the flesh for her over a fire that flared nearly invisible in the hot sunlight.

  She traveled, and slept, with him for almost fifty miles.

  After that it was a truckful of recruits, boisterous because they hadn’t seen the war yet, who begged their driver to give her a ride, and gang-raped her; after that an oafish driver of supply trucks took her all the way to Thares Shadowtown. If it hadn’t been for him, she mightn’t have survived the recruits. But he claimed the last of her love.

  By the time she met Master Player Authrond, she had none left. She decided she’d never needed it, anyway.

  That, Authrond told her later, was what he saw in her.

  The Authrond Troupe, a ragged repertoire company that seemed to thrive on being down on its luck, was playing Thares. This was a largish Shadowtown constantly getting bombed and constantly rebuilding itself, bubbling with southern noise and color. The only way you’d have known it wasn’t a more decrepit Naftha, set by happenstance into the fringe of the Waste, was the way it subsided at night into a cemetery city, black and silent. In the southern parallels, both sides favored nighttime bombing. On her first night in Thares Rae didn’t know this. She sat in an alley near Ground Patrol HQ, headachy and hallucinating, having just managed to lose the supplies driver, and the voices of the daemons overhead sounded like a wild hunt in the sky. Then ack-ack chattered, and the searchlights wavered weakly, and orange jennies stitched down on Shadowtown itself!

  When it was all over, the first thing that impinged on her numbed consciousness was a familiar song.

  The singer couldn’t hold a tune to save his life, but long ago, Rae had known the words:

  “ ‘Oh, soldier soldier, will you marry me?

  With a hey and a ho and the sound of the drums?’

  ‘Oh, no, fair maid, I cannot many you