A Trickster in the Ashes Read online

  “There is no need to be premature,” Daisuke said automatically. At that Mickey laughed.

  “Singularly bad advice, if I may presume to say so. The biggest and best decisions I’ve made in my life have been premature ones.”

  “Perhaps that is why you are currently facing such an unenviable fate,” Daisuke spat.

  “Got me there, Omoke. Got me there.” Mickey tipped his head back, pretending to regard the stars. In actuality his eyes were closed and he was picturing Achino-uchi in all its glory, its diamond-paned windows golden in the morning, the stone cherubs cooing to each other across the heaped roofs. The House of Ecstasy had never had such a grand incarnation. Two hundred and fifty years, and it ends like this. Why had he failed to realize that cloud castles were incompatible with architecture?

  “Tell your chauffeur,” Daisuke said with cryptic portentousness, unaware that Mickey already knew Gaise was Significance’s creature, “that there may be a job opening for him within Significance. We are always in need of mechanics, and I have heard good reports of him. Tell him to come by in the morning three days from now and ask for me.”

  And that, Mickey thought, is all the warning I’m likely to get.

  In the middle of the night, when the fire had died down and Gaise snored like a pig, Mickey sat up and shook him awake—but not in order to tell him, as Daisuke no doubt expected him to have done by now in some fit of self-sacrificing altruism, that Significance had another post lined up for him.

  I wouldn’t be in your shoes either, Gaise.

  “Wake the fuck up!”

  “Whuh…?”

  “Find me my writing materials. You’re the only one who knows where anything is at this stage, so you’ll have to suffer the consequences.” It gave Mickey vindictive pleasure to treat Gaise as a servant. “Now. I don’t care if you have to turn the house upside down. Just don’t wake anyone. And after that you can start packing my large pigskin case.”

  “You’re fucking crazy, Yosh. Wake up. Then go back to sleep.” Gaise flopped down again on his stomach.

  “Now! Bloody hell, do I have to kick you?” And he did, so hard even he was surprised. Gaise screeched. Pretending he’d meant it, Mickey reached to the side of the bed and felt for lucifers to light candles.

  “Significance! No peace!” Grumbling, Gaise sat up. The lucifer sparkled in Mickey’s hand, and, as quick as a snake striking, Gaise darted his head forward, lips clamped around a cigarette that hadn’t been there a second earlier. Smoking, he swung reluctantly out of bed and started turning drawers upside down onto the carpet.

  “Quietly!” Mickey growled, and sat back against the headboard to think. My darling cousin…

  After a second he followed Gaise’s example and lit a cigarette. He forced himself to relax by holding the smoke in his lungs for long minutes. Was it possible to explain at all? Of late his letters to her, while increasing in length and frequency (and provoking ever more cautious responses), had grown extremely selective in their reportage of current events. My darling cousin…

  A crash startled him. Gaise had somehow managed to knock the mirror off the dressing table. Naked as the day he was born, skin copper-bright in the candlelight, he was struggling not to drop the heavy framed glass. “Don’t break it,” Mickey snarled.

  I’m coming—I’m deserting them all—all at once—

  He would, of course, have to put it more delicately than that.

  —take hold and bind him.

  Double twist bis arms behind him.

  Remember all the sentence called for

  And execute it to the letter.

  —Séamus Heaney

  Turning Not into A Tree

  16 Jevanary 1900 A.D.

  Cype: Kberouge

  It seemed to Rain that Kherouge had become a hive of secrets. Admittedly, she lived with the biggest, ugliest, greediest secrets of all. But she tried not to let that warp her perception of the changes she noticed every time she went abroad in her adopted city.

  The Patriotic Sisters were no longer Kherouge’s only unpublicized freak show. Now there was an endless parade of Americans and Europeans. They never ventured outside the hotels and society mansions, where they enjoyed the hospitality of the Kirekuni nouveaux aristos, except in cars. You knew they were coming a hundred yards off by the entourages of urchins, grandmothers, stallkeepers, laborers, everyone old or young who had no pride, who trotted alongside the vehicles, choking cheerfully on clouds of exhaust as they ogled the pale faces inside. The foreigners looked like better-fed Ferupians, but their somber-hued clothes, rigidly molded and stark of line, marked them out. These costumes fascinated Rain. They were unlike anything she’d ever seen. What sort of society commanded its men to sheathe their bodies in multilayered scabbards of fabric? Were they really that dangerous? And how did their women function as anything other than ornaments, imprisoned in those absurdly full mobile cages—you could see their skirts were steel-reinforced. However, she knew she would never get an opportunity to quiz the foreigners on the history of Western fashion, so she deferred her interest in them altogether. The Kirekunis had staged a surgical extermination of the Ferupian governing class and stepped calmly onto the bridge of the Kherouge slave ship, inviting the foreigners up almost as an afterthought, without causing more than a couple of ripples on the deep waters of Cypean idiosyncracy.

  It was the internal-combustion engines for the sake of which the foreigners had been invited to the protectorate that had really altered the rhythm of life. Automobiles were more numerous in booming Kherouge, whose broad flat concourses might have been designed for them, than in any other city on the continent. Some streets, especially in Center City, remained madhouses of beast- and human-drawn wagons, but others, including the dust highways that led out from the city to the stockyards and the drovers’ depots, had become rapids of metal and glass, lethal not just because of the speeds at which motorists accelerated around blind curves, but because of the poisonous fumes their “horseless carriages” exhaled. Autos zipped blithely around disassembled models arrayed in front of disassembled walls, scattering the scavengers combing the wrecks for sellable parts. Who had expected that the extinction of daemons would make Kherouge more dangerous?

  The extinction of daemons had had other effects, too, not all of which Rain could pin down. Perhaps the effects were inside her head, because they always manifested when she was in a pessimistic mood, when the remainder of her life seemed to lie before her like a car wreck strewn along the winding streets through which she slipped, hooded in black and shunned like a beggar, to have lunch with Crispin. What use combing the detritus? Not one flywheel, shaft, panel, or window remained whole; she would just have to pick her way onward as best she could. In the evenings, even in winter, loiterers clogged Center City. And at these times men and women, animals and hawkers, would shimmer before her eyes as if in an unseasonable heat wave, and their movements would take on a jerky mechanical quality. She blinked; she looked at her hand. The bones and muscles and veins seemed too perfectly interconnected under the stretched skin. Her own body was a mystery to her. It was an enemy. Once she’d glimpsed her face in a mirror behind jewelry displayed on a stall, and the black eyes and full lips and neat straight nose, the exile’s pale complexion, seemed unnatural, as if all the humanity she thought she possessed had been stealthily drained from her, leaving female features that were merely prototypical. She felt like part of the first shipment of a new model of humanity—of dubious quality, possibly issued by a fly-by-night firm—the rest of which had got lost in transit. Fear skewered her, and she concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

  And then there came a moment when she realized everything was silent, and she lifted her head, and the dizzily shimmering street gave way to a waking dream. The life-affirming babel was silent. The winter sun brimmed up to the top of a red stone canyon, tawny and cold and solid as congealed resin, and nobody was there. Rain was alone in a giant stage set of kings’ tombs, in a theate
r with all the lights on, wandering scriptless in front of an invisible audience of thousands. And then she turned and made them out through the footlights—and that was worse. Because all at once, she understood that Kherouge wasn’t a city built by man, but a sprawling rock formation inhabited by squatters forced out of the diamondtina by the drove conglomerations, who had done up their holes in the cliffs each as befitted his social status, and who all, rich and poor, lived in perpetual suspicion of the future, of each other, of what the sea might bring next. In this climate of suspicion, the Sisters were in worse danger even than Cloud, Sunlight, and Aurora realized.

  Rain hadn’t told Crispin she was afraid she might be going mad. Or going into an absurdly early menopause.

  But in her saner moments she wished she were menopausal. Her depressions often originated in her terror of getting pregnant again.

  Crispin and pregnancy were connected only in the graveyard of her dreams—but since he arrived in Kherouge, black moods engulfed her ever more frequently. All the years she’d been in Cype, she hadn’t let herself think about him for fear her longing for what might have been would drive her crazy. And now her Prince had thrown himself on her mercy, and proved himself no more than a married civil servant on the run from the law.

  Who knew what might have been? All she knew was that life had cheated her, stolen a cherished fantasy and given her back a bitter pill. A burden of concealment.

  She had only one unknown factor, one possible catalyst, left in her life, and his letters told of an increasingly dubious sanity. Still she hadn’t shown them to Crispin for a second opinion. She didn’t know why, unless—the very thought made her smile—she was instinctively acting out of feminine craftiness, like a woman juggling two lovers.

  Lovers!

  The only lover with whom she’d ever achieved a real rapport lay in a one-bed sick bay on the top floor of the Enclave, utterly absorbed in dying except for that one hour out of twelve when she awoke and pitter-pattered downstairs to the dungeons, where Kherouge’s biggest secrets moped in chains.

  And that had to be another effect of the extinction of daemons—the changes in the Royals. Never before had it been necessary to lock them up. But now, if not for bars and manacles, there’d be a Great Escape every day. The chains were iron, not a speck of silver in the alloy—the Sisters weren’t that cruel—but Rae suspected it was the indignity that really hurt the Royals. Their eyes glowed red from weeping. Their skins had hardened into reptilian hides, and in one case a pelt. They’d all gained weight. Some of them appeared to have grown taller and heavier of frame, though in the too-small alcoves to which they now had to be confined you couldn’t tell for sure. Their appetites had increased. Playing handmaiden to them had become an unappealing task, arduous as never before to all the Sisters—except Breeze and those younger ones who strove fanatically, stupidly, to copy her example.

  22 Fessiery 1900 A.D. 6:25A.M.

  Cype: Kherouge: Center City: the Enclave of the

  Most Patriotic Consecrated Sisters

  “No one’s come to visit me for days,” Breeze said mournfully. “I know you’re busy, Rain, I’m not blaming you—but sometimes it feels as though everyone’s forgotten I’m here. Sometimes they don’t even send me anything to eat.”

  “But you’re looking much better,” Rain lied. She stroked the veins on the back of Breeze’s hand. “There’s color in your cheeks. Shall I bring a mirror so you can see?”

  “You naughty creature!” Breeze smiled. “You always try to tempt me into vanity!”

  The entire Enclave had been heated by daemon braziers, and so far the Sisters hadn’t been able to find any other system as cheap. The sick bay felt cold and damp. Outside, rain misted down into the muddy courtyard. It was a gray dawn. Rain had been up all night with Breeze’s daughter. Annabedette had the flu.

  “The Royals don’t care if I have color in my cheeks—and as long as they don’t, why should 1?” Breeze gripped Rain’s hand. “I don’t care how weak I get—it doesn’t matter how weak I get—as long as I can still serve them.”

  Rain wanted to shout herself hoarse. Why can’t you see that serving them in excess of the demands of our consecration is what’s weakened you? She said carefully, “I don’t think you should take communion again until you’re less frail. I’m not just saying that out of concern for you; the fact is you don’t have anything to share with them. It would be pointless.”

  “Hasn’t Cloud always said it’s the ritual pledge of patriotism that counts?” Breeze objected.

  “It depends who the ritual is for. Them”—Rain took a deep breath—“or you.”

  Breeze’s eyes flashed, doing duty for sun and moon and stars. “You think I’m selfish. It’s you that’s the selfish one!”

  “I would like to keep you with me, it’s true,” Rain confessed. “But for your sake, I don’t want you to throw your life away. You won’t be any use to the Royals when you’re dead.”

  “You just told me I looked better!” Breeze started up off her pillows, clasping Rain’s hand, eyes glinting with sudden fear. “What aren’t you telling me? What did that physician really say? Tell me!”

  “I have,” Rain said. “And it hasn’t stopped you, has it?” She was no longer so careful what she said to Breeze as she’d once been. She’d realized that no matter how brutally she tried to force comprehension on the other woman, it was no use. Last week Breeze had submitted to a medical examination. Ideologically speaking, that amounted to a breach of consecration, but Breeze had suffered the doctor gladly. Perhaps Sister Cloud had revealed to her what Rain had found out on her own—that this wasn’t the first time a doctor had been called to the Enclave. Had Cloud also revealed that every previous time, it had been for more or less the same reason? Times changed, but fanatics remained unoriginal—they always chose the method of self-destruction closest to hand. And the Enclave, like the cult Rain had grown up in, like the communities of trickster women that were fast fading from the world’s memory, attracted disproportionate numbers of fanatics—those seemingly paradoxical types who combined sentimentality with stubbornness, neurotic cowardice with an antisocial, almost ghoulish drive to see just how far they could push themselves.

  After seeing Breeze the physician had wetted his lips, nervous as a boy in a brothel, looked around at the Sisters, and ventured the opinion that the patient had nothing wrong with her apart from a touch of anemia. He had prescribed red meat, lentils, milk, oranges, and bed rest, clearly doubting his own diagnosis even as he spoke. Rain sympathized with him. Summoned inside so notoriously secretive a community as the Patriotic Sisters, he would have been within his rights to expect a cholera outbreak, at the very least. He couldn’t know he’d only been called to sign Breeze’s death certificate. Telling the Sisters that, in effect, communion was all that was wrong with her was the same as tying their hands, for to stop her taking communion would be to invalidate the principles on which the Enclave was established.

  “The physician said you should rest,” Rain said. “Don’t worry about Annabee. She’s being well looked after.”

  “Annabee, ‘Dette…” Breeze’s eyes clouded over. “I’m so tired, I couldn’t sleep a wink. I just dozed. What are you doing up so early?”

  “That was what I came to tell you. ‘Dette’s over the worst of it. I’ve been nursing her.”

  “Oh, that’s right, she had something, didn’t she. Well,” Breeze said, “all illnesses are merely manifestations of our failings in our patriotic duty toward the Royals—”

  “—and although in general the Founding Sisters demonstrated great wisdom in establishing the precepts by which we live, that one is nothing short of an invitation to suicide!” Rain snapped, unable to restrain herself. “And if you apply it to children, it’s murder!” But Breeze continued as if she hadn’t heard, parroting the words of the hymn that equated faith in Royalty with mental and physical health. It amazes me how you manage to preserve your faith when you yourself are the evidence tha
t it’s groundless, Rain thought, listening. Maybe you just can’t face the fact that when you leaned on that guarantee of immunity, it gave way! This time she managed not to say it. After five years among the Sisters, she’d learned to balance the extremes men had always inspired in her—tongue-tied inability to speak her mind and ill-considered theatricism. She’d learned both to dive deep and to skim the surface. When Breeze finally paused for breath, she said: “Fanny took communion the day before yesterday.”

  “So what? Hasn’t she been taking it for years?”

  But when it came to your lover, or the one who had been your lover for a brief shout of angelic trumpets, there was no surface! You floundered in a sea of infinite interpretations. Rain bit her lip. She’d subconsciously expected someone else to have filled Breeze in by now. But apparently not. “Of course, just like the other kids,” she said gloomily. “But not since…” Remembering Breeze’s prudishness, which had converged with Cypean conventions even as Breeze’s own sex life grew less conventional, she let it trail off.

  “Oooh.” Breeze’s eyes widened. “I’d forgotten! What happened?”

  All Enclave gossip had to do with the offspring. The Sisters’ dedication to solving the puzzle of their children, piece by piece, year by year, consisted of equal parts maternal concern, patriotism, and voyeurism. Some believed the puzzle would reveal itself as a picture in time; others didn’t. The oldest offspring of all was Omar, aged fifteen, who had recently flexed his muscles of independence and started working as a day laborer at the docks—but Fantinora, Sister Cloud’s only living child, was the oldest girl and as such, had long been the object of covert curiosity. A week ago, Cloud had discreetly put out the news that Fanny had had her menarche. That ended speculation that perhaps she never would, but provoked more urgent questions: what would happen when Fanny next had an audience with her father and her uncles? The possibilities had stimulated every Sister’s appetite for the unthinkable.