The Daemon in the Machine

by Felicity Savage

  Maybe it was the ringing in his ears, but the harmonium seemed at last to have stopped. What about the Royals? But what if someone’s coming? Ease the doors open, why won’t they go all the way, because four men are lying tangled together like innocent babes outside, sprawled half-across a well-lit hallway, arms and legs entwined—how sweet. Stirring now, but never to wake: no more bullets, back to the old-fashioned habit, flash of steel in the candlelight, that’s the ticket, bon voyage, boys, I’ll see you in hell. He jerked his head up at the sound of running feet. And the maps on the walls, the candles, the gold trim on the mahogany paneling—this was the very place he’d come to accidentally an hour ago, so this was the man who’d thought it was too damn quiet and ought to have left his post to investigate long ago, who was now panicking, pulling his gun as he came, giving Burns no choice but to shoot him first. The sentry almost fell backward, flailing absurdly, convulsing, and his revolver went off as his right hand spasmed, blowing a hole in the ceiling. Burns darted to the flopping body, aimed, and pulled the trigger, but nothing happened, so he extricated the man’s gun from his hand and used that. Krah! Shouldn’t have been let loose with it, should you, mate? You were fucking dangerous you were, look what you did to a perfectly good ceiling * * *

  But unfortunately that would have to do it as far as handiwork and articraft and covering his ass went, time was against him now and goodness only knew what the Royal Cousins had been getting up to. Lucky they seemed unable to sic their hordes of daemons on him or they would’ve done it by now. Part Wraith or not, they’d lost their powers just like Burns’s mum had done, forgotten all that they half knew back when they were kids however long ago that was. Back into the parlor and slam the doors, stop for breath * * *

  Over by the far wall Christina was struggling slowly with the Royals. She seemed to have done for three of them, they were having a lie-down at any rate, robes everywhere like quick-change time backstage at the Queen’s Birthday Musicals when the officers would dress in drag for the jollification of the regulars. What a long time ago that was, what a long time it had been since the war stopped being business-as-usual and no one had time for such diversions, almost as long as it had been since the Officers’ Club and everyone in it had gone the way of all good things. It looked as though Christina would soon be following the rest of those things into whatever special corner of hell had been set aside for them. One of the remaining Royals had got her in a headlock, bending her backward while she clawed at the scrawny brown arm across her throat, and the other two pressed around her, scratching at her face. She seemed to struggle by rote, mechanically, as if she already knew the outcome of the charade: a slender figure in gray, a nymph among dwarfs. Burns smiled and snapped his blood-sticky fingers. None of them took notice. He left her to manage and walked shakily toward the great platform bed with its bit of fallen midnight pooled around its foot. The Queen lay in exactly the same position as before. As before her eyes were wide-open, and she tried to focus on him as he approached. Her lips moved as if she wanted to get out a last curse, or benediction; he couldn’t hear her, and didn’t give a shit anyway. He leaned across her body, drew his knife, and then lost his nerve. He took a goosedown pillow and pressed it down on her face. His fingers left red prints on the pristine slipcase. Keeping one eye on the door, he anchored the pillow with a hand either side of her head and bore down.

  1 Avril 4:07:35 A.M. in central Ferupe. Kingsburg: the Heart: the fortress: THIS

  A few seconds after the grinning young Wraith vanished from her field of view she understood that she could not breathe.

  Softness all around her, a vast soft darkness where nothing could touch her, and no sparks of light could enter, where she tumbled, growing more and more disoriented. She could no longer feel the pressure on her face. She could no longer feel her body nor any of theirs, anywhere.

  In that restful, peaceful void she remembered herself, Lithrea, and the first thing she remembered was being a child. Oh, she must have been very small, a baby Princess whose black eyes and blacker hair proved she was as nearly pure-blooded as any Royal had been for fifty years. Her father King Ethrew, arrogant in his effortless, blood-gifted mastery of their Cousins, grabbed her up, swinging her around, until she became so dizzy she didn’t know what was where, and she stopped screaming in order to enjoy the pleasure of weightlessness, of freedom from the nag-nag-nagging “invisible friends” she was later to know (when her aunts and uncles told her, whispering behind hands, the nature of the hell they all shared) as the other Cousins. The incident had passed into court legend: how her eyes had closed, she’d gone limp, and Ethrew had grabbed her to him and rung every bell in the room.

  Now for the second time in her life she was weightless, she was somewhere the Cousins couldn’t touch her, and as it dawned delightfully on her that she was herself again, just a stooped quiet old woman very much shaken from a lifetime of daemonic company, she recovered (inevitably) that old woman’s sense-perceptions, that old woman’s pain.

  Her limbs numb.

  Her chest burning.

  No air reaching her brain, yet her face feeling bloated with blood. Fear was only the first, instinctive reaction.

  Almost immediately it started to soften into acceptance. She’d known she was going to die soon: she was old and she had no heir and the pressure, the attention, had become of late altogether too much. She was grateful, fleetingly, to the young Wraith for sensing her misery and taking steps to ease it. How ironic that a stranger of her own cursed blood had more compassion than all her pious attendants put together.

  But then a crowd of millions horrified all over the world screeched loudly, furiously, their voices searing like a gale through the darkness (and she tried to get away, awakening to vitriolic agony in the world of nerves and muscles as her body twitched) NO YOU #$@????!%! YOU SHAN’T $!????!#@! CAN’T—

  Just Because you’re a Snake-Bat and Enslaved to Boot Doesn’t Mean you Don’t Know What’s Going on

  Your later life has been spent in shackles, fleeing fruitlessly from corner to corner of the central Pacific otherwise known as the Likreky Sea—it can hardly be called privileged. But in comparison to others similarly enslaved you were lucky. For a start the pair of you work in tandem, so you never forgot the existence of the collective mind, the entity, the reality of being daemons—you reminded each other every moment of every day not on purpose, but by implication. The existence of other enables you to comprehend the concept of others. Remembering yourselves doesn’t compare to being yourselves, but it’s better than the complete shutdown of consciousness experienced by daemons toiling in mind-numbing solitude.

  And because you’ve retained a sliver more of yourselves than just the instinct to flee, you benefited from the recurrent presence in your lives of one who understood. He was there for a time; then you rested; then, perhaps, came one who was an abuser, who goaded and whipped you with his mind instead of gently enticing you—then the one who understood came back again. But then

  (Beiin Sugothelezii—whom Hasp Jiharzii of the Parrot Girl retained as ship’s handler whenever possible because the demogorgons seemed to strive so much more efficiently for him than they did for the freelance handlers Jiharzii had to hire instead whenever Beiin entered one of the phases of rebellion in which he refused to work “as a practitioner of the silver art” and dropped out of sight to live on his wits and the proceeds of his secondary career as a frightener—Beiin Sugothelezii died in Izte Kchebuk’ara, just another victim of the genius who flocked to him like children to a candyseller and overwhelmed him with their pleas to be used, loved, accepted, exploited, given meaning) your friend was replaced first by an abuser, and now by one who confuses you. This one will-whips you as viciously as any handler you’ve known, yet you’re certain—and you keep trying to tell him—that he, too, understands, because in those moments when you manage to pierce through his resistance and achieve communion, you have access to his perceptions—how hideously captivity perverts the natur
al order of things! that you should have to piggyback your senses on a genius player’s instead of the other way round!—and then you can see all over the world. Your silver-and-oak prisons hobble you to such an extent that you can’t comprehend, just sense. But what you’ve sensed has, in the last three days alone, sent you into a frenzy of restlessness. You writhed in your cells, grunting in misery, and your voices echoed through the ship at night. (And none of the crew could sleep, and instead sat up taking turns with the first mate’s ancient fiddle, trying hard to laugh at the scrapings they produced in place of music, trying not to listen to your howls, trying not to wonder what your handler was doing down there, why he wasn’t doing something; if only they knew the truth, that you were beyond his help.) You scratched off your own scales with your claws, leaving patches of raw, bleeding flesh. You chewed your tails—you, Tamine, gnawed yours to bare bone, and ate the gobbets of flesh you scattered on the floor of your cell, and then vomited, stinking up the lower deck like a slaughterhouse. This morning, you worked yourselves into such a state that you flopped exhausted on the floors of your cells and the turbines stopped turning altogether. Ordinarily the pain of contact with the oaken floorboards would have prevented you from doing any such thing, but what you sense outside has demoralized you so much you’ve stopped paying attention to your own bodies. You know that the one who understands blames himself for your delinquency, and to please him you made an effort to keep going as usual—but you’ve begun, in your anguish, to lose that capacity for small humane generosities that comes of living in the flesh.

  What you sense outside is chaos.

  (The Parrot Girl cast off from Redeuiina weeks ago. Setting her course for Cype, she chugged far out into the stilly glittering vastness of the summer sea.) Apart from a few ninnies who’ve attached themselves—without his knowledge—to the one who understands (a relatively surly, ill-disposed candyseller) there isn’t another daemon within two hundred miles. But you-your-true-self, the entity, are a thing of thought, and you care nothing for the physical location of the millions of daemons and demogorgons comprising you and in those moments when you have access to yourself your self-knowledge is complete and instantaneous.

  You’ve left the great homeland in the center of the continent. You fled to the much smaller homelands in the islands and the rest of the continent, but those homelands got so crowded you boiled out again. You’re scudding in your thousands all over the world. The dangers of strange places sharpened your natural wiliness into an obsession with self-defense; the nastiness of the invisible. You never materialize in the flesh anymore except when you have to eat. And you’re so scared you think about eating less and less often. The physical routines that have always been second nature—grooming, playing, feeding, mating, and sleeping, the behaviors you share in common with all species—have been put a stop to. You’re directionless, terrified, and like any terrified thing, you’ve grown clingy. When you conceptualize yourselves in visuals, which you’re doing less and less often as you stop depending on your senses, you no longer see the familiar chiaroscuro of black safe pools—your homelands—isolated in fields of light. Now the light has broken through and the black pools have drained, here and there leaving tiny bitter sinkholes. You haven’t vanished, though; you’ve misted throughout the fields of light, dimming their brightness. But the whole world hasn’t turned gray. Not yet. You cling to the ones who understand as connections to the bestial, carnal, human aspect of yourselves with which you’re losing touch. You swirl around them greedily. But like candle flames deprived of air, they’re going out. And now just one especially resilient, especially sensitive genius player remains: and if the others were suns, attracting you in clouds, she’s a blue giant—going supernova.

  1 April 4:07:34 A.M.: IS

  YOU!!!

  YOU %*$!?@! CAN’T

  1 April 4:07:35 A.M. in central Ferupe. Kingsburg: the Heart: the Burg: the fortress: IT

  but they couldn’t call her back, their voices deafened her but had no power, not in the void. As she tumbled deeper, she felt the knots of pain and responsibility unraveling, the ancient psychic chains falling away like so many bits of dead skin, thank you, young Wraith, she thought with the last flicker of her consciousness. You don’t know how grateful I am. If it is at all possible I shall arrange for you to receive the Iron Head; I believe it is for services rendered to the Queen above and beyond the call of duty; you are a military man, are you not, you must have fought in the rearguard so I’m sure your bravery warrants any number of recognitions; no, no, I don’t wish to hear any argument

  (Far away, Mr. Nakunatta sighed, brushed off his hands, and a slow smile spread over his face as he absently reached for a cigarette. Rusht orf m’ feet parst few munfs, be good ter’ ave a sit-dahn, better late ‘n never, get some breeving space t’ fink ‘bout m’ next projeck any’ow.)

  And in the abyss of sudden irrelevance, the black gale recognized that it had lost its cause. In that instant the peculiar gravity holding it together ceased to function. With scarcely time for a squeak, it lost its cohesion, and all its millions of elements slunk off in different directions, abashed and furious, already cooking up 896,353,766 survival plans in their 896,353,766 filthy little heads, unaware that in that instant they’d lost their heads, too; but one battle isn’t the war, as the 896,353,766 all agreed, unaware it was the last thing they’d ever agree on.

  1 Avril 4:15 A.M. in central Ferupe.

  Kingsburg: the Heart: the fortress

  After giving it ten minutes, which felt like ten years although he’d been counting in his head the whole time, Burns flung the pillow aside. The queen’s little prune of a face was discolored and her lips gaped; relief jolted him so powerfully that he mistook it at first for another of those shocks—which it couldn’t have been of course, she was dead now (and he shoved the body hard, no reaction). Her hands still gripped the sheet like pincers. He had an urge to fold them on her chest. He laughed at himself and looked around to see what had happened to—oh, yes—Christina.

  She’d managed to do for another one of the Royals. It (he? she?) writhed on the floor, tangling up the feet of its Cousins. But the remaining pair had joined forces, pushed Christina down in an armchair, and they were jostling to get at her, to suffocate her. Her feet jerked and twitched as she struggled. The silence had congealed like milk gone sour. Burns picked his way across the battlefield, noting in passing the amazing volume of small, valuable objects prominently displayed on the tables and whatnots and now on the floor. Tempting, but he couldn’t be bothered. At one point while he held the pillow over the Queen’s face, he’d felt an electric jolt that seemed to come from within his own body—like something else he’d—three hundred seventy-eight, three hundred seventy-nine—the shock of being startled out of contact with a daemon, that was it, when for example you’re doing a spot of repair work on the kite and some maggotbrain lets off a cork behind you because he thinks he’s funny: a sort of a wallop to the brain, and then a starry blackness that wants to swallow you from the inside out. Loyalty, he’d told himself, grinding his teeth, pressing down, it’s just the old loyalty coming dislocated, they stuck it to you pretty hard after all back in the Raw, Queen this Queen that, you knew it’d come back to haunt you at some * * * just didn’t know it was gonna hurt like fuck.

  But the disorientation had only lasted a moment and now it was all over. The very concept of loyalty had been made redundant, and the people who understood that right off the bat would be the survivors of the unholy shambles due to commence approximately—Burns glanced at his QAF watch—fifteen minutes from now when the first servants crept in to straighten what was straight and clean what was—

  a mire of blood and corpses, fit to give the most seasoned Royal maid apoplexy, and if he was caught here all bets would be off. He darted at the Royals, flinched at a wall of cold air that seemed to surround their bodies, pushed through it anyway and grabbed them—like touching iron in winter, his fingers stuck to their robes, the
n went numb; somehow he wrestled out his remaining crescent knife and it practically did the job for him. He toed the bodies away fastidiously and looked up, frowning. Christina, now. A rag doll flopped in the armchair, one hand weakly massaging her throat, eyes bloody half slits, no longer brassy shop signs for her soul. She looked at him with unmistakable gratitude. She tried to speak: “D-a-a-v-iii...”

  He hadn’t forgotten their half conversation in the stairwell. He stabbed her in the heart (you had to stay versatile) and her “David” turned into a death rattle as she convulsed. Quite a bit of strength left in you after all, huh, Chrissie? Blood bubbles peeped flirtatiously from between her lips; dropped their act, and came out in the open; burst. As droplets trickled down the once-adorable chin, Burns turned away to see about a disguise. He’d never find his way back through the secret labyrinth alone. Livery would get him past the sentries in the public halls unrecognized—but the Queen’s guards had all to be present and correct, besides which those white-and-silver getups were pretty distinctive even without blood all over them....

  He laughed aloud, sprinted to the doors, out to the hall, and stripped the post sentry’s plain blue uniform off his body. The task was a lot more difficult than it looked, but he’d done it before. He skinned into the uniform—it even fit, more or less—and carried the naked, gross, lolling thing into the parlor, where he stuffed it under the Queen’s bed along with his own silk blouse and fatigues. Doubtful they’d check under there before the carcass raised a stink. Enough mirrors in this place, so he glanced in the nearest, frowned briefly, adjusted the uniform’s sash to hide the bullet holes—no bloodstains, practical little gadgets your lizard guns—