A Trickster in the Ashes Read online

  Breeze shifted. A waft of hot air licked Rain’s face. Banked down, the forge inside the other woman’s body had built up a tremendous heat.

  “I know Cloud just wants to protect her. I mean, I want to protect Jonny and ‘Stell. Looking the way they do, they could never get anywhere, so it’s better if they don’t try, at least not yet. But keeping Fan ignorant isn’t going to help. Cloud didn’t even bother to warn her about menstruation. Fan hadn’t changed her bed, and I could see it was stained, absolutely polka-dotted. The room smells, too. Someone’s going to have to show her how to cope. But it won’t be me; she’d never forgive me. She already isn’t going to forgive me.”

  Rain shifted from the chair onto the edge of the bed and laid her hand on Breeze’s hip. The blanketed bone felt like hot iron.

  “I wish they’d let me use makeup on the children. Then I’d have rouge and lip paint and kohl and powder and I could make you look like yourself again. Crispin wants to see me in paint. He’s disappointed that I’ve aged. Maybe he’d give me the money to buy a few things. But I know you’d never let me touch you.” She thought for a minute. “Fanny might, though. She doesn’t know she’s ugly: she envisions herself playing her Princess, blue face and white hair and all! But there isn’t a woman born who doesn’t believe there’s room for improvement.”

  Fanny was Rain’s inside line to Cloud. All the Sisters played each other off against one another: and Cloud had taught her daughter how to do that, even if she hadn’t taught her how to staunch her bleeding.

  There had been too much blood. On the sheets, dried on the floor, on wadded clothes in the corner of the tiny bedroom.

  “They did hurt her. They must have just about ripped her in half. No wonder she pretended not to hear Sister calling us for dinner. It probably still hurts her to walk. She’d rather starve than be seen limping.”

  Fanny had sat on the floor, her gaze fixed on Rain’s hands, while Rain read the play. The girl’s mouth and shoulders drooped at angles. She didn’t say a word as Rain gingerly attempted to explain why Roderick’s Quest could never be produced. In an effort to compensate, she’d asked what type of man Fanny imagined playing the soldierhero. Did he look like Omarhad? (Fanny, thanks to her mother’s overprotectiveness, had never seen any other adult male.)

  “Queen, no!” Fanny had started up off the floor, daemon-fire in her eyes. “Roderick? The Princess marries him! I’m not marrying ugly, skinny, green-faced Omar! I’m going to marry a normal man!”

  Apparently glimpses from windows had done enough damage.

  I knew a normal man once, Rain had thought. I thought if I had the luck ever to meet him again, I’d marry him that very day, in my street clothes. What happened?

  The Wraithwaste was what had happened. Rain tended to recall that time with the unemotional clarity of distance. But now she smelled the musky, tangy odor of wild daemons, heard pine needles crunch underfoot, saw her friend Hannah crumpling on the threshold of the menagerie, saw the corpses of the other trickster women and their boyfriends arranged like cords of wood waiting to be burned. The embers of the bonfire glowed dully in the dawn. Crispin dragged her away.

  But she hadn’t really escaped, had she? The Wraithwaste had been reduced to a wasteland, and the Kirekunis, one heard, were relocating the displaced and desperate there by the truckload; the trickster women had died out with their daemons—but daemons weren’t extinct, and neither were the kind of women who enslaved themselves in rapt servitude to them, while refusing to admit that slavery was a two-way bond, and that slaves must eventually be sold out.

  Everything that had happened to Rain since the age of eleven seemed rather than chance to have been the result of her own subconscious’s hideously infallible sense of direction. Give or take seven years, she’d jumped straight from the frying pan of the Seventeenth Mansion of the Glorious Dynasty into the fire. And she and Crispin should have stopped to put it out because she was still burning. Her meandering route from Holstead House to the Enclave of the Most Patriotic Sisters might as well have been a beeline.

  She bared her teeth and braced herself. But as she thrust herself upright, her head spun, and Breeze’s voice penetrated her dizziness, a cold flame chattering in the dark. “Rain, will you lie down beside me? I’m f-f-freezing. Rain? Will you come give me a cuddle?”

  “You’re not cold,” Rain snapped. “You’re burning up.”

  “Please, Rain? I think I’m d-d-dying.”

  She hated it, she knew how utterly cut off it was, how hideous and how sickeningly mindless. Sometimes she beat her wings like a new Daphne, turning not into a tree but a machine. And yet, she was overcome by the nostalgia. She struggled to get more and more into accord with the atmosphere of the place, she craved to get her satisfaction of it.

  —D. H. Lawrence

  Green

  Jevanary—Fessiery 1900 A.D.

  Cype: Kberouge

  Crispin had only gone to Kherouge, but he thought of it as going into hiding. From Tomichi Minami, ex-Secretary of the Interior, now fresh in his grave, where he’d been sent for conspiracy to murder a foreign national; from Minami’s friends; from Yleini and her friends, who hadn’t even waited until Crispin left to start assassinating his character; and from Yamauchi, who had used Crispin to help him take his worst enemy off the political map of Lamaroon, and would sooner (Crispin knew) see his former employee dead than see him exposed for a cat’s-paw. The Little Governor had pulled off a coup de théâtre and he was going to make sure, money no object, that the scenery didn’t fall apart before he finished strutting onstage.

  By the time the trial was over, Crispin had been more than happy to comply with Yamauchi’s “suggestion” that he leave Lamaroon for a while. In fact, he’d left before he said he was going to, on a different ship, to an undisclosed destination. Traveling pseudonymously on the Okimachi Fleurdelis, he’d experienced for the first time in months a sense of lightheartedness. Almost lightheadedness. The Fleurdelis, a daemon vessel, had been refurbished temporarily and at great expense as a three-masted frigate while Redeuiina awaited shipments of steam engines from America. Her sailors were mostly Lamaroons, some new to the trade, some ex-daemon handlers who resented being forced to depend on the wind. Luckily for everyone aboard, the Fleurdelis’s skipper had also hired two mariners from the French Pacific islands who lorded it over all the Lamaroons, crew and passengers alike, but knew how to sail. When the Fleurdelis got under way, she cut across the winter gray ocean as fast as ever she had with demo-gorgons in her belly. A twenty-foot jib boom jutted from the bow, anchoring three sails of its own. From a distance the ship must have looked like a butterfly. Multiwinged, she skimmed over the waves as if she weighed nothing at all. The wind blew steadily from the south, and they had a clear run to Leondze.

  In that grubby, bawdy river-mouth town, Crispin lost the pair of sailors inexpertly trailing him, holed up for a day and a night, and took passage on a fishing lug for Kherouge.

  The Cypean capital had been one of his regular ports of call in the days when he’d traveled with Cap’n Jiharzii, before Yamauchi decided he’d be more use at home and yanked him off the circuit. The Little Governor knew of Crispin’s particular attachment to Kherouge (though not why he was so attached. No one knew that). If anyone decided to hunt him down, this was one of the places they’d look.

  But as soon as he set foot on the wharf, and heard the throb of diesel generators, and saw the steam-powered cranes swinging and dipping, lowering meat containers into the holds of cargo ships no longer bound for the Ferupian Raw, but for Kirekuni ports, he knew they’d never find him. Kherouge was no longer a provincial cattle city of red stone and silence. Someone highly placed in the Cypean Assembly, maybe the newly inaugurated Kirekuni governor, had smelled the future coming and ordered a co-optive strike. In the ten months since Crispin last visited, the unseen hands of city administration had transformed Kherouge into a strange half-mechanical, halfmedieval hybrid, simultaneously expanding in meatpacking
factories, slaughterhouses, and drovers’ depots, into the desert at its back, and consolidating around Ghixtown, the port district where the mansions and the merchants’ emporiums glowered at each other across the fortuitously wide streets. Crispin took lodgings in the heart of Ghixtown, just off the whizzing Mesyleme Boulevard, close enough to the docks to smell salt when the wind blew. He changed streets and lodging houses once every ten days to avoid conspicuity. Let them look!

  He hadn’t explicitly reprised his cover as a Mime, letting landlords and curious strangers think what they would, but he assumed he was still being taken for one. Enough real Mimes had, by now, ventured out from the Mim into the brave new Kirekuni-dominated world that city dwellers knew what they looked like—and knew that they weren’t necessarily millionaires. Light brown skin, light brown hair, and green eyes no longer occasioned remarks, nor even interest. On the side streets of Ghixtown, exclusive clubs competed with eateries featuring all-new Kirekuni menus, dockworkers’ taverns, jeweleries, theaters, music halls trying to be theaters, bookshops, brothels, Cypean pastryhouses, tailor shops, drug dens, snailgirl houses, underground shrikouto arenas, and a hundred other distractions from sleep and idleness. Crispin could have lived here for months, never done a stroke of work, and never scheduled two days the same, without ever being recognized as a habitué.

  Nonetheless, he was wary. His fears centered on the danger of running into one of his old contacts. Apart from one Kirekuni who moved in such elevated circles that Crispin didn’t think he’d set foot on the street unless running for his life, Yamauchi’s salesmen all roved as a way of life, claiming bases in provincial towns across Cype and even over the borders in Ferupe and Izte Kchebuk’ara. Yet who knew how they’d recalibrated their operations since Crispin left the circuit? Everyone seemed to be coming to the capitals nowadays. The Kirekunis increased the size of the droves and imposed tighter regulations, and many of the smaller cattle towns scattered across the Cypean diamondtina had withered. Their inhabitants, the drybones, had drifted into Kherouge. Accordingly, Crispin took excessive precautions. He shunned taverns known for dealing, the drybones’ side of Center City, and anywhere else he guessed his former business partners would gravitate.

  But once a week he jeopardized his anonymity, risked recognition, and maybe risked his life. He ventured out of the motorized, modernized, internationalized safety of Ghixtown into a city that the commercial moguls and nouveaux aristos ignored and most birds of passage didn’t know about: the Cypean heart of Kherouge, Center City, whose name no longer applied except in a strictly poetic sense. This was where Rae lived.

  She didn’t like the downtown district. She wouldn’t come to Crispin’s lodgings. She wouldn’t even come to a tea shop near the docks. On the other hand, she wouldn’t meet him near her home, either, and he hadn’t been able to find the “Enclave” although he wandered the tenement maze for hours one afternoon, trailing her and then losing her, disgusted at his own stubbornness; terrified because everyone sheltering from the rain under the balconies and inside the windows was watching him. That night he dreamed (a clutching crowd, men in dark colors and women in bright colors colliding around him, flashes of blinding bluish light and he knew that somewhere beyond the crowd the Mime was watching, the real one who turned up in Crispin’s dreams over and over like a phobia, and Crispin always recognized him no matter which face the young man was wearing that day) and woke trapped in blankets with the candle flames all leaning in the same direction and he knew that someone had just gone out, someone had been watching him sleep, someone had closed the door behind themselves just loud enough to wake him. The door was still locked, but that meant nothing. He resolved in anger never again to leave Ghixtown. But of course he went to meet her again; and again and again: unproductively.

  The place was a cafe on the far side of Center City, where drybones fresh out of the desert congregated. It was a dim, peppermintsmelling hole in the wall where ancients smoked pipes and chatted in their dying language, and young women fed nut-pastries drenched in syrup to their babies. The women had wild long hair blacker and heavier than Rae’s, and spotlight eyes that left Crispin tongue-tied. Someone upstairs played the five-stringed guitar. The Klaxon-harsh notes wandered up and down the scale without ever finding a melody. The street outside was a river with no boats on it. One could have called this area a museum to Cype’s past, if museums had glassless, wood-shuttered windows, if they smelled of cows and allowed in derelicts. Crispin called it a ghetto.

  “You’ll get a knife in your back coming here,” he told her. “You’re a fool not to let me walk you home. It’s not safe. No matter how much of an ascetic you think yourself, you still look like money on high heels. You always did, you know, even when you were poor. You have an air of luxury—” of deserving luxury, craving it, he thought. “Even if you deny it now.”

  “I have all I need.”

  He persisted. “But you used to want so much more. Possessions. Respect. Success.” He almost hated her. “Love.”

  She smiled inside her black hood and raised her teacup. He wanted to kiss that taut dry smile, wet her lips with his tongue, soften them. After he and Yleini moved into the house on the hill, into the second stage of their marriage with all its trappings, Yleini had slept in a cheesecloth mask so that he should never see her without her makeup. In contrast to his wife’s meticulous, lush perfection, Rae’s naked face stunned him as a skull would have.

  “If I could have given you all of that, I would have. Did you know that?”

  “I do remember that I wanted to be a wardrobe mistress,” Rae said reflectively. “But it wasn’t meant to be. And there’s certainly no need for you to try to make amends now.”

  Her gentle reproof stung. He did feel a need to make amends for derailing her life five years ago, and for precisely that reason he didn’t want to talk about the Wraithwaste or the Raw, where she’d undergone horrors that were undeniably his fault and for which he could never recompense her, not if he gave her all the things he’d given Yleini and more. He wanted to talk about Valestock, Lovoshire, where they’d met. That town no longer existed, and it intrigued him to find out whether those two people still existed or whether they, too, had been changed beyond recognition by the Kirekuni victory. “I thought your plan was to marry into money. Why didn’t you? Not for lack of opportunity, I presume.” He looked her over, deliberately approving: the years and the horrors had not ravaged her but refined her.

  “There were opportunities. But something always kept me from stretching out my hand for them. Now I know it was the razor-pinioned bird getting in the way. I don’t suppose you know what I mean,” she said, and smiled again. Her smile had always been a signal of artifice, not as expressive of her real personality as her frown, or the spontaneous laugh of delight he hadn’t yet managed to provoke. “That’s a personal metaphor of mine. I’ll explain. I was always destined for consecration.”

  “You’re still evangelizing,” he commented. The woman of my dreams. The light of my life. But his Rae of light had changed her name, just as her cousin Mickey had done and for similar reasons; now she was Rain. And she shed no more light on his dilemma than did the perpetual drizzle which had descended on the city (he was told) just before his arrival, and would probably persist through Fessiary and much of Marout.

  That had been their first meeting, and although he’d been afraid he’d come to the wrong part of the city entirely—the directions she’d given in her letter had been unclear—when he walked in the door of the cafe there was no question in his mind. She sat in a back corner under a candle. Her beauty sucker-punched him, knocked him flat on his back, and he was so flummoxed that he forgot to drop the stayaway swagger he’d affected walking through the ghetto; dimly through the mist of his confusion he saw her lean back, her gaze flickering amusedly up and down him as he came between the tables. He resisted the impulse to check his fly. He wore a Western-style suit, wool-blend imported, had started wearing them at Yamauchi’s insistence d
uring the public fingering of Minami, and to his surprise found he was comfortable both with the cut and other people’s assumptions. He pulled out a chair and sat. He envied her serenity even as his own heartbeat stabilized and his arousal cooled, his body knowing what his mind couldn’t yet accept. The suspense was over and it was time now to despair. “From rags to riches, it appears, Mr. Kateralbin,” she said in her low, rich voice, somewhat bitterly.

  23 Fessiary 1990 A. D. Cype: Kherouge

  Today, as always, she wore black. But not the same black. And today for the first time she’d consented to meet him in Ghixtown. Anxious to make her feel at home, he’d found a pastryhouse whose menu reflected that of her haunt in the drybones ghetto, the difference being the customers, who were rich Cypean collaborators flirting with their desert heritage for the sake of credibility. They sat by the French windows, which were open to the gently falling mist. Early afternoon, and only a few umbrellas bobbed along the street. Nothing to look at, nothing to distract them from each other. She wore a long black taffeta dress, modestly high-necked but tailored through the bodice, and he could tell she was wearing a corset, and that she didn’t usually, because she kept arching her back as the boning dug in. She’d brought a flat black leather case. Her skirts rustled tantalizingly every time she leaned down to make sure it was still under her chair. He couldn’t stop looking at her. She usually swathed her figure in that black shroud, he couldn’t remember what the Cypeans called it but it was a dead giveaway of desert provenance, and even the ghetto women would rather wear rags. The “Sisters,” most of them, came either from wealthy families or foreign countries. Why did they choose the pardath—that was it—for their uniform? They were trying to mummify themselves, trying to belong in the past, like the half-breeds of Redeuiina who worked harder than anyone else at being Lamaroon. They were trying to isolate themselves in some kind of cultural stasis.