The disturbance was coming from Main Street. Crispin thought about going back to sleep. In this town they probably called the fire brigade when something spilled on the kitchen range.
But in the small hours of the morning? No. It had to be a real fire. Queen—in this damp, it couldn’t even be that!
He sat up.
When it had been raining for months, a fire couldn’t start unless it got a lot of help. The police of Valestock weren’t stupid enough that they would fail to figure that out. Arson! A real turnup for the books. If Constable Carthower and his colleagues weren’t already infesting the streets, they would be soon. Crispin stood, slinging his knapsack over his shoulder, and was about to put distance between himself and Main Street when a thought struck him.
Rae.
Every muscle in his body went rigid.
“You’ve got a death wish, Kateralbin,” he said aloud, and spun and loped in the direction of the fire.
As he slid along Draper toward Main Street, his worst suspicions were confirmed. The arsonist had known what he was doing: the blaze had evidently started in the armorer’s shop. Crispin couldn’t tell whether the barrels of daemons in the back of the shop had gone up yet, though small explosions, irregularly spaced, sent the firemen staggering back from the flames, their boots skidding on the glass that had fallen from the windowpanes. Puffs of black smoke lifted into the night. Neither sand nor water hoses seemed to be having much effect: the fire had already spread to the lower floors of the lodging houses on either side of the armorer’s. A crowd of escapees huddled in the shadows on the other side of the street. More were being carried or dragged down the stairs, shrouded in wet blankets. Crispin could not see Rae anywhere.
Three white-coats stood behind the firemen’s rumbling daemon pump, guarding a second huddle of refugees. Crispin pressed deeper into the shadows.
Carthower was shifting from foot to foot, worrying his lower lip. Coward, Crispin thought with hatred. Then he saw that the refugees—five or six men, so badly burned that their clothes hung in singed rags—were chained with their arms behind their backs, faces outward, in a painfully tight circle. They were singing. The sound was barely distinguishable over the noise of the fire and the pump; the words were impossible to make out. Crispin couldn’t even hear the tallest policeman shouting “Shut up!”, though when he struck one of the prisoners an open-handed blow across the mouth, the implication became clear.
Crispin blinked, and flitted across Draper Street to join the larger crowd of refugees. The inhabitants of nearby houses were pouring out, some gathering to scream unhelpfully at the firemen and policemen, some mingling with the blanket-wrapped, shivering refugees, searching for relatives, neighbors, friends. Crispin moved through the crowd, unobtrusively examining sooty faces, until he saw Rae.
She was standing alone in front of a dress shop a little way down the street. Flames danced luridly in the window behind her. Her face was pink with heat. She still wore the violet dress, with a man’s coat over it: a tough, waterproofed affair bunched in by a drawstring at the hem. Her hair was coming down around her face in silky strands.
He touched her arm. In the circumstances, it didn’t seem at all unusual that she sagged against him. Anyone else would have done, he thought as he held her carefully close. And why hadn’t anyone else come to offer her refuge from the night and the destruction? Heartless. They were all without heart.
“What happened?” he said in her ear.
She was shivering. “Oh, Queen! I’m so glad you’re here! I can hardly believe it. I don’t know what happened. Yes, I do. Culties—culties set it in the armorer’s. They probably planned to burn themselves to death. Anticipation of the End Of Humanity. That’s what they call it when they do something like this. They’ll kill themselves now, first chance they get, because they got rescued before they could burn to death.”
“Didn’t know there was much of that around here,” Crispin said, though he was remembering what Millsy had told him to the contrary.
“Yes, Apocalypists. They live outside town. Nobody pays any attention—I could have told them—Apocalypists have no class, absolutely no class.” She laughed, with a note of hysteria. “They’ll blame the Dynasty, because it’s the best known cult, but only Apocalypists would do something like this. They haven’t had any revelations—they just steal other people’s ideas. They’re pathetic. That’s why they pull stunts like this. They’re afraid to wait for the end of the Dynasty, so they think they’ll cheat death by killing themselves—they’re crazy, they’re fucked up—”
“It’s all right,” Crispin said, although it wasn’t. “All right. Stay calm.”
His only firsthand experience of culties was the “Royal Dance Troupe” of Smithrebel’s, who swore up and down that they were charlatans. Real culties didn’t visit the circus. Of course everybody knew they were nihilists, and a disgrace, and ought to be outlawed—but if you thought about it, the only crime against society of which they were actually accused—the buying up of tracts of land for monstrous prices—seemed quite innocuous. And that was just as much the fault of whoever owned the land in the first place.
But if this was the kind of thing that went on, in the night, in isolated towns...
If it was a dry season, half of Main Street would be in flames right now. Crispin understood why a town would not want to have the news of such vulnerability noised about.
. “But they’ve got them all now!” he murmured. “Do you want to get a better look?”
“No!—Yes—”
As they eased through the crowd, there was a tremendous boom. Redness flared almost to white; heat hit them like a wall. People cried out.
Cautiously, Crispin took his fingers away from his eyes.
The daemons had gone up. The armorer’s was a fireball, burning with the white brilliance of a glare. Flames licked out of the top windows of the house where Rae had lived. The firemen and policemen were pulling back, wheeling their equipment, chivvying the manacled culties along with them. As they were kicked away from the flames, the men tipped back their heads, singing. “What! Ho! Blow a kiss! To the birds of the apo-ca-lypse!”
One of them jerked his chin at Crispin and Rae in a beckoning gesture. A grin studded with black teeth split his stubbly beard. He looked as though he were laughing. “I see you, sister!” he shouted through his companions’ song. Rae froze.
“Pay no attention,” Crispin muttered, “come on, we’ll go—”
Within a minute all six culties had changed their tune. This time they shouted the words so loudly they were audible even over the din of the fire.
“It was late last night / When the flames broke out / And downstairs ran my lady-o / Her brothers dear / Did await her there / With a kiss, and a Bonnie Bonnie Biscay Oh!”
Rae screamed. All three policemen turned toward her and Crispin. Carthower’s eyes narrowed.
“She did it,” the first man shouted, and all six took up the chords. “She did it! She did it!”
The policemen ignored them. Heads together, they were staring at Crispin and Rae. Carthower gestured emphatically; Crispin could guess what he was saying. Why had he been such a fool as to come anywhere near the police a second time?
“She did it! She did it!”
“You’re hurting me,” Rae sobbed, and Crispin realized he was gripping her wrist.
“Sorry.” He relaxed his grip. “But I think we’re going to have to run for it.”
And as Carthower launched himself on a winding path through the crowd, randomly starting and stopping as if he were playing a game of Red Light, Green Light with Crispin, as if he thought Crispin did not see him approaching, it started to rain again. The noise of the skies hitting the fire was that of water being poured onto a piping-hot griddle the size of the big top. Even the townsfolk’s screams of gladness could scarcely be heard. The culties put their heads back and gnashed their teeth, shaking chained wrists. Crispin dragged Rae away down a side street. The rain was so loud that he couldn’t tell whether or not they were being pursued. Their boots skidded on the wet cobbles. Once they fell, in a tangle of wet limbs. Crispin dragged her to her feet. “Can’t you go any faster?” he shouted.
“No,” she gasped. “You’re killing me! Leave me behind!”
Suddenly his assumption that she was coming with him struck him as ludicrous, even frightening. Had her proximity worked on him somehow? That was what the cleverest kind of daemon did when they were trying to get you to fall asleep at the wheel. He stared into her face. She looked wretched with fear; her hair clung in black snakes to her cheeks. The rain trickled off her onto his hands. His instincts screamed at him to go, get out, leave her. “I can’t leave you! Come on!”
She sobbed. “You have to go, they’ll catch you. They’ll pin the whole thing on you.”
“Queen, I know what to do,” he muttered, and pulled her protesting around, in the direction of Slimey’s, where the bartenders were probably even now stuffing padding under the upstairs door to stop the joint from flooding.
In this end of town, the windows of the houses were dark. It seemed nobody had noticed Main Street going up in flames. Rain slopped off the roofs and gurgled along in the gutters. The eighteen-wheeler was still parked outside Slimey’s. Crispin closed his eyes for a moment as they slowed to a walk. A long-haul cross-country rig with the Wesson & Sons logo on her grille (he recognized the monogram as you might a face), sixty feet from fender to fender, over Lovoshire regulation weight for unarticulated vehicles. That was why she had not been parked in the depots outside Valestock. Bringing her into the streets made even less sense, but rules were rules, after all.
The tires came up to his waist. His mouth watered at the thought of the traction in those finger-deep treads. Fantastic for hills. No good for winding roads; but she’d be able to hit sixty miles an hour on the straight.
Smithrebel’s had had a Wesson & Sons for the animals when Crispin was a child, but it had turned out not to be economical. They’d switched to Boltons. The Wesson daemon was so large it gobbled food like there was no tomorrow. His heart quickened at the very thought.
“Stand guard.” Leaving Rae facing the door of Slimey’s, he went to crouch by the front grille.
Daemon price tags increased exponentially according to the size of the beast. And daemons that came from the Wraithwaste, instead of the smaller forests scattered throughout the rest of the country, where commercially owned trickster women captured tiny, short-lived daemons by the dozen, were dearer yet. Wraithwaste daemons were commoner now than they had been when Crispin was little; but because the demands of industry were increasing even faster, and factory owners bought as many as their daemonbrokers could get them, trucking companies had to pay top dollar to get their fingers in the Wraithwaste pie. The daemon in the Wesson & Sons was an ancient, strong beast, top of the line. He could feel its aura emanating out through the grille at him. A wave of shivery heat. Like standing over a pit of embers.
“I know you’re in there, you loathly spotty creature! You sweet road-eater. Do you hear me?”
Heat caressed his cheeks, dried the rain on his eyelashes. He rested his forehead on the wooden fender.
Anger. Pain. Must get away will get away will push and push and push and push as soon as I see the least little opening through which it is just possible I might be able to escape; hunger. Fury. Hunger. Fury. Hunger.
He flexed his fingers and stood up. He walked back around the truck to where Rae was standing. “You’re coming then, are you?” He squinted at the door to see whether there was an alarm.
“I suppose you plan to take—to take this.” She gestured at the monstrous length of the truck. “You know that’s a jailing offense. At least.”
There was no alarm mechanism that he could see. “Not taking it. Borrowing it.”
“I don’t suppose you plan to bring it back!”
“That constable’s got it in for me. If I don’t get out of here, it’ll be a jailing offense. It can’t get much worse.”
“No,” she said with an odd little catch of her breath, “it can’t. Everything I owned was in that room. Granted it wasn’t much.”
He couldn’t leave her to her destitution. On the other hand, there was nothing more irritating than women who felt they had been coerced into doing something against their will—they would rub it in your face twenty-four hours a day.
He jumped up onto the lowest step, balanced there wrestling with the door for a minute, and then slid into the cab, throwing his knapsack in ahead of him.
She heard him cursing as he fiddled with the controls of the truck. Her eyes were prickling. Inside her head she heard the fire bells ringing again, and knew: It’s happening. Just as I always used to fear. They have found out where I am. They’ve come to punish me.
She was drenched through and through. She did not have a penny in the world. She still had her job but nowhere to live, and would she be any unhappier if she went on the road again, in the company of the first person she had met in months who did not seem to hate her?
She couldn’t find it in herself to fear the man. Caution didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing. She caught hold of the rearview mirror and pulled herself up onto the lowest step: not difficult because she was taller than most men, as well as limber from filling in for the boys who performed at the Old Linny. The man leaned over and pushed the door open with his fingertips. She clambered in and settled into the nest of blankets that covered the hard wooden seat. For a moment, as he did not look at her or speak, she wanted to scramble back down, out of the cab, away, but then she saw he was concentrating, like Madame Fourrière concentrated when she was thinking about a new costume, like Rae herself often had to concentrate on not thinking about home, and the truck snarled alive beneath them. She choked a scream. Her teeth rattled.
A grin transformed the man’s face. With one of his huge dark hands he gripped the wheel, with the other a cable that went straight down, vibrating, into the dashboard. It was wrapped so tight around his fist that it cut into the flesh. “Now now, my darling,” he was whispering, “come on my shit-eating lovely, my lipsmacker of miles... ”
The whole great vehicle seemed to rear back, and with a plunge, they took the corner of Mandall and Applewater at a good twenty miles an hour. Behind them, someone was shouting. They did not slow down.
The rain splattered on the windshield. With a surge of delight, Rae realized that they were making for the western road.
When a woman take the blues,
She tuck her head and cry.
Bat when a man catch the blues,
He grab his shoes and slide.
—Quoted by Shirley Williams