A Trickster in the Ashes Read online

  Ever: A Trickster in the Ashes

  Felicity Savage

  For Joe, who sustained and unintentionally inspired me

  Epigraph

  Since his birth in the back of a truck, Crispin Kateralbin has been a daemon handler, a trapeze artist, a fighter pilot, a street entertainer, a deckhand, a dock laborer, and a wanted man. A halfbreed who never managed to find acceptance in the United Domains of Ferupe, he has achieved wealth and anonymity as a middleman for Devi Yamauchi, governor of the island protectorate Lamaroon and drug-smuggling monopolist.

  The war that divided Oceania for a hundred years is over. The Significant Empire of Kirekune has conquered Ferupe, and by extension the whole continent. Now Significance is busily reaching out to the rest of the world. The daemons that sustained Oceanian technology were made extinct in the last stage of the war, and Significance is courting the United States, Europe, and Japan with an eye to modernization. This is badly needed. The infrastructure of the Empire has stretched and frayed in the two years since the conquest. Mime entrepreneurs flourish, and in unimportant colonies like Lamaroon, law and order are no stronger than the morals of their enforcers.

  This only means that in the center of the Significant Empire, Significance leans heavily on private citizens who can be of use to Them. Mickey Achino learned this the hard way. A friend of Crispin’s in the Ferupian Air Force, he went home to Okimachi, the capital of Kirekune, just in time for the devastating fire Significance itself set to rid itself of the cults that had got a grip on Okimachian society. Since the end of the war, he has been struggling to rebuild his family business. His only confidante is his cousin, Rae Achino, whom he corresponds with although he has never met her.

  Rae, like Crispin, grew up in Ferupe. She now lives in occupied Cype, where she has joined a cult that persists in worshipping the Royals of Ferupe. She was once Crispin’s lover. Now she believes him dead.

  He might as well be dead. He’s neck-deep in an illegal industry, stuck in a loveless marriage, and plagued by visions of the future. Worse still, thanks to his knack for foreign languages, Devi Yamauchi has handed him the job of tour guide and nursemaid to wealthy Western investors.

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Maps

  Book Eight

  Grey

  Feel No Pain

  Mere Babes in This Business

  To the Letter

  Turning Not into A Tree

  Green

  Morning Shatters

  Twist

  The Smell of Blood

  Crazy

  Feed the Famished Affections

  Skyline

  Book Nine

  The Lily-White Boys

  Out of Tune

  Long-Legged Heart

  Composers More Than Anyone

  Who’s the Man with the Master Plan?

  Never an Enemy

  About the Author

  Books by Felicity Savage

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Maps

  Book Eight

  FIN DE SIECLE FEVER

  Grey

  12 Sevambar 1899 A.D.

  Lamaroon: five miles outside Redeuüna

  Crispin Kateralbin and the American, Edward Macpherson, Jr.—Ted, as he insisted they call him—stood in the liquidhoney autumn sunlight watching Lamaroon laborers tear up thorn hedges. Sugarcane stubble wept up the scent of green death wherever they trod. This was the second week of construction on the Yamauchi Airport, and the fields Governor Yamauchi had bought up for the project looked like a battlefield, except where were the corpses? Crispin, taking his first spin in the Gorgonette he’d purchased for a song along with fourteen others from a demobbed QAF flight commandant turned black-market arms dealer on the lam from the Kirekuni bank rollers (the kites had been no more than hulks when Crispin acquired them, as obsolete as all the rest of the airplanes and trucks and tanks and jeeps and bikes and ships used in the war, but Yamauchi had shelled out to have them refurbished with powerful diesel engines)—having got the local Disciplinarians to clear the Dai Keuire straightaway so he could use the road for a runway—flying for the first time in more than three years—he’d been kidney-whacked by memories of patrolling the fringe of the Wraithwaste, seeing logging details hard at work below. They’d been clearing the forest so salvage trucks could reach a downed enemy aircraft, or to get wood for a replacement settlement for Wraiths whose Shadowtown had been swamped by the enemy, or to build a new barracks, or just because someone abhorred the concept of off-duty infantrymen and had ordered them “productively” out of his sight. But one couldn’t (Crispin reminded himself now, squinting across dusty blond stubble at dusty brown laborers taking a flask break, keeping one eye on the irascible man beside him) fall into the trap of remembering the past as a time of rhyme and reason, because back then, too, despite the staring exigencies of winning the war and staying alive, one had had just as hard a time making decisions, and—just as now—the choices that seemed clear-cut had resulted as often in disaster as had those that seemed six of one, half a dozen of the other.

  “Say, these lads work like niggers,” Macpherson commented viciously. His irony was obviously intentional: over by the halfuprooted hedge most of the men had sat down, and sun glinted off a flask passing hand to hand. Clouds of paperweed smoke rose straight up in the still air.

  “Perhaps you are not yet used to the ways of the south, Mr. Ted,” Crispin said in his newly acquired, painstaking English. “To do business with us requires that you treat time as an infinite resource.”

  “Time is money,” Macpherson objected.

  “And you are very good to have patience with us while we absorb your so-practical American philosophy. My Kirekuni colleagues and I understand perfectly your impatience. I am afraid, however, it will take the work crew a little longer to become enlightened. In the meantime they are like mules: if they are not allowed to work at their own pace, they do not work at all. During the war, because of the ban on trade, jobs were very few, but now the harbor is crazed with shipping, and the shipyards, too, have changed from family businesses into industries”—Crispin gestured at the horizon, where construction cranes swayed amid the shacks of the outer slums—“and so, by working for us, the men feel they are doing us a favor, not the other way around.”

  “But what I’m trying to find out here is how much longer is it going to take?” Macpherson slapped a succession of pockets with increasing irritation, finally jerked a fat gold watch from inside his coat, glanced at the dial, then stuffed it away: a gesture serving no purpose but to signal his impatience—Crispin didn’t think the watch even worked. “We’re scheduled to start construction on the San Fernando site on the first of October, we’ve been putting the stockholders off with sweet talk for a year already, share prices’re dropping like lead, my partner can’t lift a finger until I authorize the necessary expenditures, and Christ knows even if I decided to leave tomorrow I wouldn’t get home until the middle of November; ocean-liner departures are just about as irregular as everything else around here!”

  “At any time you wish,” Crispin offered, “an airplane and pilot will be provided. With refueling stops in Naftha, Leondze, and Grizelle, you should be in San Francisco in less than a week. All expenses, of course, will be ours.”

  The American looked momentarily taken aback. “That’s mighty generous of you, Mr. Kateralbin.” Then he threw his shoulders back and forth a couple of times, puffed out his chest, and expostulated determinedly: “But the whole reason I’m here! If you recall! Is to observe the procedures of airstrip construction so we can start work in California! And correct me if I’m wrong but so far I ain’
t seen no procedures, no, sir, not one little bitty procedure a-tall! Less you count more paperwork’n ud sink the Titanic! I’ve visited a lotta foreign places, m’ boy! And lemme tell you! Not even the Frenchies don’t love red tape’s much as yer Kirry-coonies!” He glared at Crispin, indignant and expecting something to be done about it.

  Crispin kept his expression bland and conciliatory. He lowered his gaze to the cracked wing tips planted in the stubble. Macpherson breathed out loudly in anger, and then with a sharp movement (Crispin flinched, thinking the American was going for the pistol stuck in the back of his waistband) he yanked a bottle from the recesses of his coat and swigged. The English label said JOHNNIE WALKER but Crispin knew that since the Cisco Bay Queen docked in Redeuiina Macpherson had refilled it several times with local firewater. Well, Ted, I see you’ve learned the initial technique for coping with the Likreky, Crispin thought. The American restored the bottle to its hideaway, fought with a cigar and lucifers, and finally got the banana-sized stogie lit. Squinting into the sun, he puffed forcefully, well satisfied with the invective he’d delivered and apparently confident that Crispin would now take steps to shorten his distastefully necessary stay in Lamaroon.

  Macpherson was a heavyset man, as tall as Crispin, with the largest, reddest-veined nose anyone in Yamauchi’s household had ever seen. Despite his mania for “hygiene” and “sanitary arrangements” he had an air of perpetual scrofulousness: his face shone with sweat, and, no matter what the hour, he looked as though he’d just walked ten miles in his jacket, topcoat, and top hat. He drove Crispin time and time again to the crumbling precipice of rage. When he spoke to Yamauchi, he couldn’t have been more deferent if he’d learned his business craft at the palace of the Significant, and in the company of Yamauchi’s wife Jionna he was a lumpish paramour, kissing her hand, passing her the salt before she asked, and almost every day producing with great ceremony an installment in a series of “house guest gifts”—some of them things Crispin wouldn’t have given a whore. But with Crispin’s wife Yleini he was worse than brusque, hardly a please or a thank-you. Crispin had to add them in when he translated the American’s words for her, along with the “Mrs. Kateralbin, you certainly must have got your beauty sleep last night, ha ha ha!” genre of compliments he regularly accorded Mme. Yamauchi. And as far as Crispin himself was concerned, the American appeared to have decided off the bat that despite Crispin’s having presented himself (mendaciously, but Macpherson didn’t know that) as special aide to the governor, despite his identifying himself (as he’d started to do so long ago that by now everyone believed him) as a Mime from the Mim, he was no more than a flunky provided by Yamauchi for the express purpose of ferrying Macpherson about the city, allaying his fears (usually to do with hygiene), and acting as a whipping boy for the virulence the American concealed so well in the presence of his Kirekuni coinvestors.

  It had been Yamauchi’s idea to extend their plans for a commercial air service into America. The idea had been Crispin’s to begin with. Now it belonged to the colonial government. Yamauchi was a vocal proponent of the new internationalism, though not because he considered himself a forward thinker: his particular bureaucratic genius wasn’t for grandstanding but underhanding, it wasn’t for altering the status quo but getting around it, and as a rule the only personal touch he added to the Okimachi party line was the imbuing, perhaps intentional or perhaps not, of all Lamaroon’s internationalist projects with an air of illegality, even seediness, which showed in the personalities of the foreign business partners he handpicked from the masses crawling out of the woodwork. All of them were American with the exception of a Briton and a French Tahitian, who together operated a cargo-shipping line in the lower islands, and that pair was sleazier, in person and in business practice, than all the Americans put together. The Briton, a pathetically down-at-heel aristocrat whose English sounded so different from the American dialect Crispin had learned that at first he couldn’t understand a word of it, had gone “pubcrawling” in the Yard and been arrested by the Disciplinarians for insulting a prostitute and attempting to molest a perambulator. After that, Yamauchi invited only Americans into his domicile. Each man’s fetishes stemmed (asserted Yamauchi, in his student-of-humanity mode) from the peculiarities of whatever land his parents had left when they emigrated to the New World. The Americans themselves called it the New World. But to Crispin nothing about them or their culture was new. He’d seen all the ingredients before.

  It had quickly become transparent to him that the reason Americans and Kirekunis got on so well (and had been getting along well, in secret, for the better part of two decades if you could believe the rumors) wasn’t just because Kirekunis saw, in the Americans’ obsession with morality, a reflection and validation of what they considered one of their own national characteristics. It wasn’t even, as cynics said, because the Americans’ cultielike reciting of prayers to their Christ Jesus, their Father God, and their multifarious saints proved them in the Kirekunis’ eyes primitives, thus justifying the lizardly conviction of global superiority. The reason was, and most people in Redeuiina couldn’t see the forest for the trees, because both Kirekunis and “New Worlders” lived by the rules of a deeply entrenched social hierarchy unquestioned by anyone at any level of it; they in fact, whether they knew it or not, needed such a hierarchy in order to function with any efficacy at all. And Macpherson, forcefitting the Likreky into his personal hierarchy, had classified probably Crispin and certainly Yleini as “jumped-up niggers,” “sidekicks to the white colonials.”

  This wasn’t a guess on Crispin’s part, these were phrases gleaned directly from a diary the Yamauchis’ new maid Saami had found ill concealed under Macpherson’s pillow, and brought downstairs for Yamauchi’s and Crispin’s delectation while the American was at dinner at Redeuiina Provincial Secretary Moriyama’s house. They’d had quite an evening of it until the new doorman, acting as lookout, gave the alert. The diary revealed not just Macpherson’s private, pungent opinions of Redeuiina, which he called a “teeming, bestial city in the anus of the world,” but a good many clues to Macpherson’s plans to go Yamauchi one better in the finessing of contractual perks and quirks and man traps. Yamauchi had drooled with delight. As soon as he was free, he instructed Crispin to call on every respectable Kirekuni household in the city until he found somewhere for the American to dine the next night, so that Yamauchi would have more time to copy down everything relevant and post it to Okimachi.

  One despised the Americans; one was amused and repulsed by them; but one couldn’t find it in oneself to hate them properly, not for long, because they all shared a touching naivete, which was as beguiling as the limpidity of children.

  The hoes began to swing again in staggered slow motion. Macpherson heaved a sigh of self-congratulation.

  Like all foreigners, the American found the concept of daemonkind (and the lands where there had once been daemons, and the people to whom daemons had once belonged) both fascinating and terrifying. On discovering that there was nothing in Lamaroon which could be described as “supernatural,” the foreigners couldn’t decide if they were relieved or disappointed. Crispin told them that in his opinion, the epithet had been wrongly translated: in the days when daemons existed, they hadn’t been “supernatural” in the sense of witches or ghosts or ha’nts (foreign concepts all, superstitions that Oceanians, blessed with the real thing, had never needed); they’d just been work beasts, of a different provenance from mules and oxen. Subternatural was what the word should have been.

  And Crispin, like everyone in Oceania, had taken them for granted until the world turned and changed under his feet. But in the arid lands on the other side of the seas, there had never been any daemons. Amazing but true! Bound to their corporeal forms, daemons had either not been able to cross the ocean, or simply not cared to. And now the sales representatives of the arid lands had pushed their way in, cracked Oceania like a safe with the lock picks Significance had handed them, and fingered through its secr
ets only to find that there were no secrets anymore, they’d all died yesterday. But we have some very nice skeletons we can sell you at a bargain price if in return you will ship us a gross or two hundred gross of your marvelously efficient, magnificently soulless diesel engines so that these aircraft will fly again, carrying private legal safety-checked cargoes these days naturellement, and speaking of aircraft we will now finally disclose to you the specifications necessary to build them, if in return you will not ask too many questions about how ours used to stay up in the air with only a handful of silver-wire cables in the engine cavity—

  “The myth of daemonology,” Macpherson had written in his diary, “is nothing but a fabulous hoax perpetrated upon us for reasons known only to the Oceanians.” In public, the American contemptuously spurned all attempts at discussion of their national differences, as if the distinction between supernatural and subternatural mattered no more than whether one put milk or lemon in one’s tea. But Crispin thought Macpherson was still curious.

  Not that he had much time to think, these days, about Macpherson or anyone else. Because one day in the early autumn of 1897, right after the Ferupian calendar had been outlawed and the Kirekuni calendar that had briefly taken its place been retired in favor of the New World version, he’d woken up and realized he was rich beyond even his unrealistic ambitions.

  And that was the cosmic arsonist’s doing, too.

  Less than a day’s journey away from the monstrous yellow dragon of water Crispin knew for the Yangtze, a man whose underlings spoke of him as Master Hung sat in state in a New World-style drawing room in a house which wasn’t his, whose owner his followers had disembowelled earlier in the day. While the dead man’s servants danced attendance on him, Hung stared into space, and seethed, and schemed. And the men and women in his ragtag army-cum-sect-cum-mobile-refugee-camp loved him so much that tears welled up in their eyes. Hung, whom the dream shrouded in the red haze Crispin had come to understand meant a suicide, believed he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ; he intended to overthrow the tottering dynasty whose grip on the yellow dragon weakened every day. He believed so deeply in himself, and as a result radiated such charisma that Crispin was surprised he hadn’t succeeded. But he couldn’t have, because the vision had that milky brown quality that came from looking back into the past, and if Hung had managed to do more than ransack a few cities, the reverberations would certainly have been felt outside China.