A Trickster in the Ashes Read online

  Who would have guessed that Ashie would turn out to be the one out of all of them with that instinct most deeply embedded?

  She leaned forward, brows knitted, lips parting. Mickey thought with a tinge of apprehension: June died, Saia went mad and then died Fumie went mad, Zouy died, and I’m on my way to one or the other, while she’s still going strong. What does it take?

  “I’ll take you at your word that you had to give her something. She’s ill, she needs drugs. Fair enough. But what were you thinking of to start her on nizhny? It was only ever imported for a single, specialized market—don’t you know it has connotations? If people find out—and given the rate at which she’s deteriorating, according to you, people will find out—what on earth are they going to think? I’ll tell you what they’ll—”

  Mickey forestalled her. “It’s a painkiller. She was suffering, she was in pain. I thought at the time it was physical pain.”

  “And maybe you were right, who’s to say? But practically every drug on the market works as a painkiller if taken in the right dosage.” She sounded like a physician. “So what made you give her nizhny?”

  “It’s a luxury. She adores luxuries. She always did. You know that.”

  “It may be a luxury now but only because there’s no longer a market for it. Yoshi, the first thing people will think of when they find out is the Decadents of the East—and who wants to be reminded of them? Ugh! The Glorious Dynasty was bad, but they were worse! Thank Significance no one in the family was ever infected with that brand of Ferupian corruption!” She brought out the official phrase without a hint of irony. The strain of holding back that particular footnote to his own life made Mickey’s throat feel dry and tight. He sucked on his cigarette to no avail.

  Telling Ashie about his long-ago flirtation with the Easterners would have given her the explanation she wanted, but it would have done no good. “Do you have anything to drink up here?”

  “There ought to be a bottle of wine in one of those drawers. No glasses, I’m afraid, unless you want to send to the kitchen,” she said with satisfaction, temporarily diverted by her own impracticality. Mickey got up and headed for the sideboard. The drawers had all warped shut. They held debris, dust, and a bottle of Atsui ‘76. He wrestled one-handed with the cork. The sideboard stood half in front of the window: all was black outside, and the glass rattled in the wintry gusts. The wind had made the flight to Swirling relatively quick, but it would be hell to battle on the way back. He made a mental note to start long before sundown. “The point is,” Ashie continued behind him, “the Easterners are gone but not forgotten, and they’ll be back.”

  “I doubt it,” Mickey said. “The Dynasty may yet reappear—most of its influential members are still around. And it was really a sociopolitical organization all along. But the Decadents really believed in the Ferupian Queen. They thought her death would change the world, and it has—for the worse…Perhaps it’s as well their own enthusiasm did them in before they lived to see their prophecies proved wrong.”

  “But their followers are still around,” Ashie said. “They didn’t all die in the fire any more than the Children of the Dynasty did. And they haven’t fared nearly as well since. Decadents indeed: poor, raving madmen is more like it, trying to steal and scrape enough pennies to keep their local nizhny dealer in business.” She tossed her head up. “I may not have been in Okimachi for a while, but I mingle with Okimachians every day, and frankly I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when people find out about our dear sister. It’ll drag the tone of the establishment right down into the mud. And, Yoshi, let’s be honest, you haven’t got anything left to trade on except tone, have you? It was bad enough for business when Saia got mixed up with the Dynasty. And no matter what you say, that taint hasn’t worn off yet.” Her voice rose, and he heard a note of pleading. “Think of me, Yoshi!”

  “I am thinking of you,” he said meaninglessly, standing with the bottle of ‘76 in his hand.

  “So much of what was Okimachian society before the Fire is Swirling society now. And when they find out about Fumie, they’ll remember, and they’ll hold me to account, because whether it was a wise decision or not, I’ve harnessed my reputation to the Achino name. You’re not operating in a void, Yoshi, do you understand that? You’re operating at the very center of a web of gossip that links Okimachi, Swirling, Nishimachi, Sjintang, and for all I know, Okinara and Kingsburg, too. And if you fuck up, you’re not the only one that’s going to suffer!”

  Mickey lifted the bottle and took a long drink. The alcohol spread hot and tender through his gut. “I find it hard to believe a mere rumor could substantially damage your business. Everyone has troubles. Everyone has secrets they’d prefer to keep.”

  “You’ve forgotten what it’s like,” she said. She lifted her hands and made them swim to and fro, then attack each other, the fingers of the left hand savaging the thumb of the right. “You don’t have any attention to spare for anything except your own dilemma. But I can tell you right now that you’re being watched. You’re the first who’s been sucked into the mangle, and everyone is holding their breath to see what happens.”

  “Your blasphemy is impressive, but you’re not telling me anything I don’t know.”

  “Even if what happens is the worst, no one will blame Significance. They’ll look for someone else to blame. I’m already having to field questions—What business, exactly, does your brother have in the old city?” Viciously, she mimicked a noble’s accent. “What are the nature of his connections? Just between you and me, they’re saying Greater Significance is feeding him peaches. Is it an open buffet, by any chance? I’m trying to imply that you’re being smiled upon—I’m not doing you any favors; it’s self-preservation—but people suspect by now that Significance has something on you.” With a flash of guilt, Mickey realized she was refraining from asking him what that was. He ought to be grateful to her. “I can’t afford to fight renewed suspicions of cultism, too! Certain people—I won’t name names, but they’re in the business—think the Achinos have lasted longer than we deserve to. They’ll use every little bit of rumor they get hold of to bring us down. Her sister smokes nizhny; she’s a cultie; her brother’s a cultie, too; Achino-nichi is a hive of religiosos; and then business falls off, and then what are you going to do to make it up to me? You won’t be able to do anything, Yoshi!”

  Mickey lit another cigarette, saddened by the knowledge that she didn’t want his secrets. She didn’t want the truth—that would have been too dangerous. She wanted plausible excuses. And he’d never been able to pull a rabbit out of a hat to save his life. Hoping to placate her by accepting culpability, he muttered, “I don’t know what I could have been thinking—” but he did, of course: out of a misguided desire to protect Fumie, he had supplied her with the one drug whose effects and side effects he’d experienced firsthand. If he knew exactly what she was doing, then nothing too terrible could happen to her—that had been his cockeyed reasoning; but in reality he hadn’t been reasoning at all. Ever since the Fire, she’d complained of headaches, and after he and she moved back to Dragyonne Street, these had fructified into backaches, swoons, indispositions, epileptic fits, name an illness and she had it. For the first few months, she’d complained like a hypochondriac and he’d stopped taking her seriously. Then she ceased to complain. He breathed a sigh of relief and thought no more of it—until he started finding her in corners, sitting on the floor, quiet as a sleeper but with the grimace on her face, her eyes wide-open. And her hands rubbing her stomach, her breasts, her crotch, circling as if they had a life of their own. One day he realized that these withdrawals weren’t aberrations, they were a new pattern—and fear flashed through him, charring every scrap of logic he possessed. He dropped to the floor, shaking her, shouting at her. When she blinked and slapped weakly at him, he could have cried (he did, later, in Gaise’s arms); he would have done anything to stop that look reappearing on her face. He racked his brain, and finally made his way to the charre
d beach that had been the East Bank promenade, where he found a glum dealer sitting in front of a hotel that had become a refugee squat. He recognized the man. He’d been one of those geniuses who held the Decadents of the East in the palm of his hand. Evidently his connections hadn’t been flexible enough to keep him from ruin when his market vanished overnight. Averting his face in case he himself should be recognized, Mickey brought a grin to the fellow’s hardened visage by purchasing a month’s supply, a small expensive packet wrapped in red tissue paper.

  Before the month was up he’d realized his mistake. He went back intending to warn the dealer off, to threaten him if necessary. But the fellow had moved his pitch—probably by private agreement with Fumie, who on her good days could charm water from stones, cooperation from geniuses.

  “I agree, if people find out about Fumie’s addiction, it could be the straw that breaks the pakamel’s back as far as I’m concerned,” he told Ashie. “But you and I aren’t in identical situations. Whatever rumors come your way, you’ll be able to ride them out, because—” It had been on the tip of his tongue to inform her that whereas she was operating with a wide profit margin, he was on the verge of bankruptcy. Fortunately, she interrupted him.

  “Everyone is vulnerable to rumor.” She flung out her hand and clenched the air in her fist to indicate she wanted the bottle of wine. When he handed it over their fingers brushed. “Ugh, this is horrible. When I remember which cad gave it to me he’ll get a piece of my mind. Breaking the pakamel’s back isn’t a cumulative thing. There’s no middle ground between being fashionable and being the dive where the sailors go on their nights off. Not in a small city like Swirling. It’s everything or nothing at all. Yoshi, do you want to hear some philosophy?” She leaned forward, her face intense as a fist. “All of us who lived through the Fire—all of us who had close encounters—something tells us that as long as we’re alive, we’ll survive. Well, that’s not true!” She glanced around at the seedy little parlor, breathing hard, then reached down and brushed her fingers lovingly across the carpet. “It takes more. You and I, everyone who was caught in the Fire, we were cut adrift from our lives. I was alone, starving, despairing, hiding, for four days—and I’m not afraid of admitting that that changed me. It blunted my sensibilities. I stopped being a person and became a survivalist. That’s why I stayed in Swirling. No one here understands. Here, life still goes on. Okimachi came to the end of its tether and the tether broke and the whole city shot off around the twist—I don’t know how you can bear to live there, it must be like living in a madhouse. But here the thread was never broken. I’ve been able to get back to normal by copying people around me. I need this.”

  Mickey stared at her. As always when he knew they’d become estranged, she reminded him of a small animal—a ferret or a stoat, a creature of instinct, poised for violence against everything she did not understand, intellectually negligible, terrifying in her physical perfection. Her eyes were slits as black as the window, and the shadows of the firelight thickened her brows into stripes of fur. It seemed an outrage that considering the life of nightly depravement she led, she should still possess flawless teeth and a lithe body and a mass of hair like a carved hematite. She practically sparkled with energy. He couldn’t comprehend it. He felt afraid of her.

  “Because I still dream about Zouy. I dream I’m looking for her. I dream I find her. Sometimes I dream I find her body burnt. And then I wake up, and it’s just me again. At those moments, being alive is enough and too much.” She paused. “Being alive is enough for you, isn’t it?” Her eyes accused him of a shortcoming he was surprised she knew about. “You’ve been keeping going on sheer momentum. But when it comes down to it, you don’t care about success anymore, and that’s why I know that asking you to do something—about Fumie, about extricating yourself from Significance, even for my sake—is pointless. You aren’t going to fight until your back is flat against the wall and they’re holding a knife to your throat. And maybe not even then.”

  She nodded with dire satisfaction.

  “I know. Because I have to struggle with the same fatalism every time I dream about Zouy. But I am struggling. I’m succeeding, Yoshi, and I’ve learned all over again how fragile success is. I’ve relearned how to feel the subtle currents that govern societies that aren’t tearing themselves apart from the inside. You can’t feel those currents anymore. And Okimachi is a whirlpool anyway.”

  Mickey sensed suddenly that this was a speech she’d delivered before. He no longer gave her credit for openness, though he still had to admire her acting. “Do you still play the samisen?” he asked.

  She looked angry at being interrupted. “I—for fuck’s sake, Yoshi, I don’t have time!”

  Her fists pushed at her thighs. Her dress had bracelet-length sleeves, and he noticed how thin her forearms were. The musician’s muscles in her wrists had atrophied.

  “I’m fucking speaking metaphorically!” He flinched from the defiance in her face. At last she was improvising. “You’ve forgotten what a metaphor is, Yoshi! You can’t hear the melody anymore, you can only hear the drums! But there’s a minor theme playing now and I’m telling you to listen, because if Achino-uchi fails after two and a half hundred years, it’ll be bad, but if I lose everything I’ve created here, it’ll be worse! And what’s more, it will be your fault, and I will hold it against you.”

  Mickey looked down. “You’re partly right. I don’t think I feel as strongly about anything as you do about Achino-nichi. I used to, but not anymore.” Not since Crispin left. “Not even about Gaise.”

  She flung herself about in her chair, expressing her distaste with her whole body. “Ugh, that despicable little catamite! I’ve never understood why you crooked types can’t settle for men of your own age!”

  “It has a way of not working out.” Mickey looked down. His cigarette had smoldered nearly to his fingers. He tossed it in the hearth, then buried his face in his one hand. He brought his tail around and laced its tip through the splayed fingers. “I don’t want to drag you down with me. But what measures do you suggest we take?”

  She whispered, “I’ve already told you. Get her off nizhny. Use any means necessary. But you won’t.”

  He uncovered his eyes. There was perhaps six feet of smokecharged air between them. “Achino-uchi is going to fail before summer. All that’s at stake is Achino-nichi.” The words seemed to be coming from someone else. “Your ruin isn’t inevitable. You have two advantages: one, your clientele, while it may be based around a core of socialites, isn’t all of a piece the way mine is—”

  “I told you,” she said. “It’s everything or nothing at all.”

  He acknowledged that with a nod. “More importantly, there’s a hundred and fifty miles between you and Daisuke, and although the Okimachi Aviation Society is practically co-owned by the Disciples, and Significance is making noises about building a state-owned airstrip”—her eyes popped—“apparently there’s some such project happening in Lamaroon, and it hurts the generals’ pride to be outmodernized by a faraway province—it’s going to be a few years yet before they have the kind of access to you that they do to me right now. So plain old geography may insulate you.”

  “Who is Daisuke?” she asked, but then shook her head. “No. Don’t tell me.”

  He drew his finger across his lips. The minute he’d made the gesture, he realized it was a holdover from childhood—both their childhoods. He saw by her face that she’d remembered, too. Sneaking up past the green door into the forbidden heights of the old Achino-uchi building, carving peepholes in the paper-thin partitions: in the years before gender differences set in, he and Ashie had fallen naturally into partnership in crime. Spying on geishas and clients, learning more than they could possibly have understood, exulting innocently in their own cunning, swearing never to tell Fumie because she would just tell Mother…Fifteen years later, they stared at each other in shock. The fire settled loudly, and Mickey wrenched his gaze away. Watermarks of age on the w
alls; the details of the pornographic hangings. Outside the window, the blackness had thinned into discernible silhouettes of rooftops against the sky. He’d have to get some sleep before collecting the Englishmen and starting back to Okimachi.

  “Yoshi,” she said. “There is a way we could firm up those points in my favor that you mentioned. If you could see your way to doing it.”

  He knew what she was talking about. For the moment, they understood each other perfectly. “Of course. I was going to suggest it, actually, if you didn’t. Someone has to keep the Achino name alive, and since it looks as though it’s got to be you, I see it as my duty, really, to do all I can to help.”

  For an instant the wild-animal eyelashes descended and she sank limply into her chair. Relief—or guilt? Once again she’d become a stranger. Then her eyes flew open and instead of any of the responses he had imagined, she said in a bright little voice, “Someone’s coming upstairs! Can you hear? Oh, Significant, why can’t they leave me alone for five minutes?”

  He listened and heard footfalls on the stairs. Several people, jostling and laughing.

  “I know people in Okimachi,” Ashie said. “People in our line of business. I’ll give you names. I’m owed favors. I’ll call them in.”

  “I expect I know the same people.”

  “Yes, but you probably haven’t spoken to them in months. If I put in a word, they’ll do it.”

  From somewhere in her dress she had extracted a compact, and she examined her face, frowning, touching the corner of her mouth where drinking from the bottle had smeared her lip rouge. “Oh, horrors. I look appalling.”