30 Marout 1895 A.D. The Wraithwaste: Holstead House
Rae did not know what to say. To her intense frustration, she suspected she was going to cry. They wanted her to tell them all about herself, and there was no way, of course not, so why couldn’t she come up with any lies? Her mind was blank of everything except fear. And a shriek that echoed silently: Crispin...
She couldn’t stand them all staring at her like this. The pity in their eyes—
She rested her forehead on her blanket-wrapped knees and shuddered. She remembered stumbling through the naked woods yesterday morning, hanging on the blond girls’ shoulders, into sudden shocking greenness, past an earthy enclosure where chickens, ducks, and turkeys gabbled to each other across a pond, into the house where the girls lived. There had been something wrong with her, she still did not know what. Her body had tingled all over as if all her limbs were asleep and would not wake up, she had scarcely been able to form a coherent thought, and when she tried to speak, her words staggered drunkenly. They had led her to this attic bedroom, they had plumped up the goose-down pillows and folded down the patchwork coverlet and told her to go to sleep. Since the door was locked, and her head was woozy, and every time she touched the window catch a shock of occult pain went through her, she had gone to sleep. When she awoke it was night. She had slept at least twelve hours.
She had barely had her eyes open for a minute when they had all pushed into the room, skirts swinging, hair flying indecently, a nightmare of loose femininity. “She’s awake! She’s awake!” In with them wafted a strange, prickling not-scent that made Rae’s eyes sting. They gathered round the bed and wanted to know her name, where she came from, what she had been doing in their daemon dell.
“I don’t know where I am,” she said, raising her head. “Who are you?”
“Oh, the poor child.” Their voices rang with concern.
“Poor girl. Rae, that’s her name, isn’t it? Rae.”
“She’s a Kirekuni, you know.”
Panic swelled in Rae’s throat. What supernatural perception did they possess? Then she remembered that they had undressed her. Her skin was bare under the soft woolen nightgown they had put her into. “You already know about me. What more do you want?”
“Her nationality matters not at all, Millie,” said another, severely. “A woman is a woman.” It was the oldest one who spoke, the crone with the beautiful face. Rae longed to pin up the silver hair that straggled over her shoulders—then the aristocratic cheekbones and high forehead would be done justice. She’d have to get rid of that sack of a dress, too. Give her a gown of pale mauve linen, with a trumpet hem, and pearls at her neck...
Rae’s terror was slowly subsiding.
The old woman rested an authoritative hand on the shoulder of the dark-skinned one who knelt dose by the bed, her black eyes fixed on Rae’s face. “I am Anthea,” the old woman said. Her brown-spotted fingers closed a little tighter on the dark one’s shoulder.
“Hannah,” said the dark one.
“Liesl,” said the tall, freckle-faced woman standing at the foot of Rae’s bed.
“Sally. Millie. We’re so happy you’re here, Rae,” said the two blond girls, speaking with a simultaneity that would have earned applause from a music-hall audience. They giggled, as if appreciative of their own comic effect. Rae guessed they were only a couple of years older than herself.
The freckled woman—Liesl—turned on them with sudden fierceness. “What are you two doing up here, anyway? You ought to be watching Mother! Go on! Get out!”
The taller twin—Sally, Rae thought—yelped and brushed at her arm, though nothing had touched her. Without a backward glance, they piled out the door. “Impossible,” Liesl muttered. She folded her hands on the foot of the bed, glancing defiantly at Anthea.
“We are not giving Rae a very happy introduction to our sisterhood, Liesl,” Anthea said. She smiled sadly at Rae. “I’m sorry. But we are glad to have you here. I hope we did not give you the impression we were not.” She moved slowly over to the dresser and took a pile of clothes out of the drawer. “Hannah, you may go. Liesl—mmm—you may go to the menagerie and pick out a daemon for her to practice on when I show her our first tricks. She may as well start finding out what we do here.”
“She hasn’t even told us where she comes from!” Liesl said in a low voice. “Did you notice that, Anthea? Or has she bewitched you, as Sarah did? And she hasn’t told us why she was with a Wraith! She might be planted by the culties, like Sarah, to sabotage us! Or by the lizards—seeing as she is one! How can you talk of showing her our tricks?”
Anthea’s old gaze rested on Liesl. “Have I been wrong yet in the matter of a girl, sister? We will keep this one.”
Rae started upright in bed. “Your ladyships! I’m afraid there has been a misunderstanding—”
“Sssh.”
Liesl laughed. “Welcome to Holstead House.”
“No call for sarcasm, Liesl,” Anthea said, her voice taking on an edge. “Out.”
And before Rae realized what was happening, the door had closed after Hannah and Liesl.
Anthea let out a sigh. Then she smiled and held out the folded clothes to Rae. Fine wool. Rae fingered it. Her mouth watered. It felt like Anchain cashmere from the south. But how could it be, here?
Perhaps the women—the trickster women—were not cut off from civilization at all. Just because Rae and Crispin had been walking for days did not mean they had come very far. But where had they come? And where was Crispin? What had the women done to him, when they left him lying on the grass of the daemon dell?
“Get dressed, my dear.” Anthea lowered herself with a sigh onto the foot of the bed. “Please, give no thought to their hostility. Things are strange these days; no one from Ferupe can be trusted. We have had to become cynical. That is why Liesl was rude. But she should not have questioned my judgment.” She shook her head. “Are you hungry?”
“No,” Rae said. She was starving, but she would not have eaten anything the trickster women offered her unless she was at death’s door. To think she had suggested that she and Crispin throw themselves on these women’s mercy! There was no mercy here: she could feel it in the way they treated each other.
“Then we shall go down to the menagerie.” The older woman smiled. “I am so excited. I know you weren’t planning to come to our house, Rae. You’ve made that clear enough. I hope that someday you will tell us where you were going. Not many travelers come this far into the Wraithwaste, unless they’re coming to us! And none of them ever leave. I should not like to see you end that way. However, I am convinced you will not. Once you see what our life is like here, you will no longer want to leave.”
Rae stripped her nightgown off. “You’re trickster women,” she said.
“That is what they call us in Ferupe. But we have no tricks that a girl of ten couldn’t learn.” Anthea laughed, and Rae found herself smiling, too. “We are just ‘working girls’.” The meticulous way she used the slang term pointed up her old age. “You are a ‘working girl,’ too, aren’t you? You have a look of independence about you.”
“I’m a costume designer,” Rae said, unable to keep a trace of pride out of her voice.
“Wonderful! But you are not completely independent, are you? You are part of a network the size of a town or a city, without which you are nothing.” Anthea’s voice was so gentle that for a minute Rae did not realize the trickster woman had utterly dismissed Rae’s passion. Anthea went on, with that edge creeping into her voice again: “We, on the other hand, have complete autonomy. We have all of the Wraithwaste for our domicile. The only people within two hundred miles are others like us.” She smiled. “Other ‘working girls’.”
Rae was getting an increasingly bad feeling about the nature of this place. To hide her confusion, she fastened the tiny wooden buttons up the front of the dress. She was disconcerted to discover that the garment was completely shapeless. Her breasts pushed it out into a shelf, and from there the fabric fell straight to the middle of her calves, without a flare in sight. Her waist was disguised. There was a slit in the back enabling her to walk, but that was all. “Your ladyship?” She plucked at the excess fabric. “I don’t think this quite fits.”
“It fits perfectly,” Anthea said. “And—by the way—there are no ladies here. Call me Anthea, as if I were your sister.” She hopped up, very sprightly for a woman of her age, and took Rae’s hand. Her fingers were bony and dry. Rae smelled that strange, nostril-prickling not-scent. “Because I am your sister. And I should like you to meet our Mother.”
Holstead House was built in the sprawling, organic style of farmhouses. It must have been at least five hundred years old, probably more. Rae could not get rid of the feeling that she had been here before; but that was probably only because she had been in so many similar houses during her days with traveling shows, when they were frequently reduced to singing to gentlemen farmers for their supper. The kitchen had whitewashed walls and stone flags. Tabbies dozed around the hearth that smoldered in one wall. Pointing to a closed door next to the hearth, Anthea said that it led to the drawing room. “We only use that room when one of the Freeman brothers, Jethro or Alfred—they are our agents—comes. That is, once in a blue moon. When we are alone we prefer to be comfortable rather than to observe the formalities. Beyond the drawing room there is a dairy and pantry, which open only to the outdoors.”
Rae nodded. After the unnatural brightness of the bedroom, the firelight was soothing. Around the kitchen walls hung a wealth of peppers, onions, garlic, and squash, braided into ropes. From the look of the wooden sink, the house had running water. Running water! The provenance of those wealthier than Rae ever hoped to be. Her mouth watered at the sight of half a loaf lying in its crumbs on the kitchen table. But she was strangely convinced that she must not eat anything here, that it would be laced with mind-altering poisons.
Anthea drew her back into the high, dark entrance hall that would not have seemed out of place in the Seventeenth Mansion. But they did not go out into the front garden, though Rae would have liked to see all that greenness again, even in the dark—just to know that it had been real. The back door was even more massive than the front. Anthea beckoned Rae out into the night. “Around here. We have no doors between the house and the menagerie. It is safer this way.”
Rae had forgotten how cold it was outside. Gasping, she crowded into the door that Anthea opened. The brilliance made her eyes hurt. Anthea reached over her and slammed the door shut.
Rafters arched to a roof as high as that of a music hall. Whippy, naked branches and serpentine creepers twined up the walls. In a farmhouse, this would have been the byre—or in a wealthier establishment, servants’ quarters. Here it was a tropical garden, lit by a hundred unmoving suns.
Anthea turned to her, smiling broadly.
“Where’s all this light coming from?” Rae whispered.
“Daemon glares.” Anthea pointed up. The suns were only ceiling lights, as bright as the overhead stagelights in the Old Linny, except white, not colored. And because they were everywhere—on the walls, on the trees, even half-buried in the earth—neither the trees, nor the flowers, nor Anthea or Rae themselves cast any defined shadow. It was what gave the uncanny impression of daylight.
She picked up one foot. A shapeless puddle of blackness shrank beneath it.
She looked up. Anthea was watching her with a strange expression on her face: not hostility, or dissimulation, but joy and pride and the desire to impress. Rae had readied her defenses for everything conceivable except this naked want. It was her instinct to recoil. She carefully kept her face immobile.
Faint insect sounds swelled around them. Nothing moved.
“Pssst!” Anthea hissed, rising on her tiptoes, looking up. “Sssst!”
She stripped the sleeve back from one wrinkled arm with expert speed. “Sssst! Here, baby, here, dear one! Adorable Fanimus!”
An especially large flower fell slowly from the branch of the dogwood to which it had clung, twisting and turning (though the air was preternaturally still), its tiger-striped petals fluttering like streamers. It landed asprawl on Anthea’s thin arm, dusting her skin with pollen, and though it could not have weighed more than a few ounces, Anthea staggered under the impact. “Fanimus,” she murmured caressingly. And the flower became a tiger-striped baby of perhaps a year. It clung to Anthea’s arm with an un-babylike strength.
“I love you,” it said in a high voice, crawling to her shoulder. “Is the bread ready? Eleven dozen head, that’ll be 242,000 pounds—shall we send it to be deposited as usual?”
“In the name of transcendence,” Rae said, watching Anthea play with the daemon. “You can do that. My—my friend—would be so envious.”
“Your friend?” Anthea said absently, caressing the daemon. “Liesl and Hannah went back to the dell to look for him, earlier tonight, but he was gone.”
Rae did not like to think about what the trickster women would do to Crispin if they caught him. She chewed her lip. Will he come? He’s probably twenty miles away by now. But he has to come. He can’t leave me here! I don’t know how to escape! Crispin...
Nights of watching him sleep sprawled on his face, watching his broad back rise and fall. Mornings of going stubbornly through her toilette, ignoring his pleas to come on, come on, the sweet awareness of his gaze resting on her body and hair. The impossible, absurd longing to touch him, just once, to close her fingers on his forearm. She knew the warmth of his skin. She knew the prickle of his body hair. She remembered... She would not let herself remember how his arousal had felt, pressed against her leg, in the heat of those last few moments before he discovered what she was.
Anthea said, still in that abstracted voice: “Are you watching closely, Rae? You have probably never seen a daemon materialized. Or if you have, it was celled in the bowels of some machine with a collar round its throat. Daemons are invisible, except when they choose to materialize, and they materialize only when they feed.”
“What—what do they eat?” Rae forced herself to pay attention.
“Each other. And trees, plants, any vegetable growth. Animal life, if necessary. That is why the Wraithwaste is a waste. Nothing is alive here, except where we’ve forced it to live again by clearing out the daemons. There’s threads of sap running through the pines, keeping them from rotting where they stand, and that’s all. Most of the animals have been gone for at least fifty years, eaten by the daemons, or driven out.”
“But wasn’t it always like this?”
Rae could not imagine the silent forest through which she and Crispin had wandered ever having been green. Death was so thick in the air that it seemed the desuetude must have lasted a thousand years.
“Not always.” Anthea leaned against the lower branches of the tree from which the daemon baby had fallen. Rae blinked, seeing the tangled, naked trunks shift to accept her weight, linking themselves in a kind of cradle. The baby scrambled off her arm, up to one of the topmost twigs, and gradually turned into a flower again. Anthea looked wistfully up at it, rubbing her arm.
“The Waste has only been dead for, perhaps, fifty years. Although in trickster years, of course, that is more than two lifetimes ... It has to do with the war. How much do you know about the war?”
Rae shook her head.
“The degree to which the reality of Ferupe’s distress is kept from her citizens is appalling. I’ll explain later, or maybe Hannah will. The war is her specialty, you see.” Anthea laughed. “The long and the short of it is that soon we will be no more. I’ll leave the rest to her. But there is a bright side of which I do find it pleasant to speak: our task is far easier now than it was for our sisters a hundred years ago. Tricking used to be a difficult art. Now the daemons are so numerous that it is like picking up apples from under a tree. It is a joke really, a joke on the daemonmongers. They do not know that we catch more daemons more easily than our predecessors did, so they pay us the same per-capita prices, leaving us with far more money than we have any use for. We invest it in the Kingsburg banks. Of course, the more daemons there are in Ferupe, the more likely a disaster becomes, so one could say that we are being irresponsible; but to look at it another way, it is now necessary for us to provide Ferupe with enough daemons to last for eternity. And when the war finally reaches us, my sisters and I do not intend to be caught in the screamer factories. Rather, we will leave the Waste. But we will not starve.”
Rae could follow none of what Anthea was saying. Wars, daemons, disasters; none of it seemed particularly relevant to the bright stillness of the menagerie. She looked around, wondering where the rest of the daemons were. “But how exactly do you catch them?” she asked when Anthea paused for breath.
“Oh, my dear, forgive me! There is so much to tell you ... When daemons feed, they materialize. We create an ambiance where they like to come to feed. The smallest ones eat grass and berries, and they lure the bigger ones. Anything the size of Fanimus or larger we lure back to the house. Some trickster women, myself among them, hold, too, that the big ones get bored, and curious about anything they do not encounter in the normal run of their existence. They have minds; did you know that? At least, before they are collared.”
“How do you lure them back here? Isn’t it dangerous?” Rae remembered the huge, spider-limbed water daemon which had stunned Crispin, and which had stunned her, too, before it rushed back up the waterfall. That was what had been wrong with her on the walk back from the dell; that was how Sally and Millie had caught her so easily. That numbness, that inability to think. Daemon shock.
Anthea smiled. “It is dangerous. But only if it is done wrong. And no girl who does it wrong lasts very long here.” She patted the cradle of branches beside her. “Come sit with me. Exarces is very comfortable.”
Rae bit her lip. Anthea’s words sounded ominous. Uncertainly, she walked over to the cradle of branches and sat beside Anthea. The creepers on the roof kissed and separated, twining, parting. Rae blinked. It was as if she were watching them grow through a kinetoscope, speeded up, jerky from the motion of the hand crank. For the first time since entering the menagerie she became aware of the not-scent. It was so strong that it was no longer so much a scent as a texture in the air. The row of sunflowers against the wall of the farmhouse shimmered as if heat were rising from the clotted earth.
“Is everything in here a daemon?” she asked suddenly. “I mean, the trees—everything?”
Anthea smiled with girlish delight. “I wasn’t sure whether you’d guess.”
It seemed obvious now. Rae ran her hand along the smooth, dappled bark of the tree. “What did this look like when it was—” She had been going to say alive. “When it was a daemon?”
“This is its quiescent state. It’s how we store them until the traders come. This is really a warehouse, not a menagerie; but, in this line of work euphemisms are necessary. When they’re quiescent”—Anthea circled a branch in her thumb and forefinger—“it’s much easier to put collars on them.”
“But why don’t they dematerialize?”
“Maybe you noticed that the door is flanged with silver? The keyhole is silver, too. So is every single nail and rivet in the walls.” Anthea shook her head, glancing up at the roof. “And every beam is oak. Even if they could dematerialize, they could not escape without doing themselves an injury.”
This place must have cost a fortune, Rae thought. Who built it? For all Anthea’s rather ostentatious talk of investments, the trickster women seemed too out of touch ever to have had any initiative. It had probably been the daemonmongers, their masters, who had set them up here. The house seemed several hundred years old. Had there been daemonmongers hundreds of years ago? Of course there had. After all, there had always been daemons.
Anthea was looking at her closely. “My dear, I don’t want to pry. But have you family members in the business? You are so perceptive, I’m starting to wonder whether you did mean to come here after all, you mysterious little thing.”
“No.” Rae shook her head quickly. “Where I grew up, we were never allowed near daemons.” The Dynasty’s policy of noninterference had meant that the exploitation of daemons was frowned upon severely. And for some reason, that was one of the few Dynasty edicts which the Prince of the Seventeenth Mansion did not let his disciples contradict in their everyday life. There had not been a single daemon in Carathraw House since the Dynasty bought it. “But I ran away,” Rae said sadly. The temptation was too much for her: she was tired, and hot, and alone, and Anthea was nothing if not sympathetic.
“You ran away?” Anthea said. “From where?”
Rae shook her head. “Plum Valley Domain,” she said, biting her lip. She knew she had to resist the temptation; it was this same craving to share the things that tormented her which had led her, against her better instincts, to try to convert Crispin. Now she was convinced that she could not speak of the Dynasty without trying to convert her listener. The force of her belief seized precedence over her more oblique, delicately shaded needs. That was why she dared not start confessing her past to Anthea. On the other hand, Crispin had never been kind to her as this woman was. She could not remember anyone except Sister Flora, at the Seventeenth Mansion, ever being this kind to her.
Anthea started forward. “Look! There’s Mother!”
Rae looked up. She had not thought “Mother” really existed. But sure enough, a tiny white-headed figure with a yellow imp on either shoulder glided between two trees at the other end of the menagerie.
“She blends in well, doesn’t she?”
Rae nodded.
“I hope the twins are somewhere about. Mother cannot be trusted not to leave the door open when she comes back upstairs.”
“Anthea, ma’am,” Rae gasped. She could not stop herself any more. “I’m sorry, I ran away. I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t—”
Anthea pulled her into her arms. Rae, her cheek pressed against cashmere, tried desperately not to cry. “You poor child! I’ve tired you, haven’t I? Yes, I have! I’m always too eager to show off the beauty of our life here! I forget that you have come through the Waste, and the first thing you need to do is recuperate! I shall have a thing or two to say to Hannah and Liesl for forgetting to remind me! There now There now.” She stood up, still holding Rae close. “Mother! Sal! Mil!” she shouted angrily, shattering the quiet of the garden.
Rae heard the twins’ footsteps. She pulled away from Anthea to face them.
“Girls, I’m leaving you in charge of Mother,” Anthea said breathlessly.
“That’s where we’ve been,” a twin who could have been Millie said.
“Watching her.”
“And watching you.”
“For the last three hours.”
Three hours? Rae thought.
“We think it’s time for Mother to go to bed.”
“When she’s ready to go,” Anthea said evenly, “you may.”
“Then we’re going to be up all night.”
“You pamper her too much, Anthea,” the other twin said sulkily. “She’s old. She doesn’t know what she’s doing. I can’t imagine why you bother.”
Anthea did not answer, but Rae could see her trembling as the twins sauntered away, arms round each other’s waists. Sally extended her free arm above her head and dropped her head onto her sister’s shoulder. Now that Rae knew what the other girl was doing, she watched with fascination, not confusion. “Sssst!” It was a shrill, wet noise, like the sound a furious cat makes in its mouth. “Here, here, come—”
The daemon pushed up out of the ground and crawled up Sally’s body, red-skinned, with an enormous bald cranium and fingers tipped with long yellow claws. Rae watched all the humanity drain out of the girl’s face as the daemon wrapped itself around her arm and sucked her fingers, one after the other, lovingly. Her sister stood as steady as a rock, supporting her.
“Anthea!”
Liesl stood behind them, stolid, red-haired, angry. Muted by the undergrowth came the sound of the door slamming. “What are you doing? I thought I told you to give her some time to prove herself before you took her in here! Now she’s seen things we can never let her get away with!”
“You forget that we’re keeping this one, sister,” Anthea said. She took Rae’s hand and pulled her past Liesl.
“Her man is staying with Jacithrew!” the red-haired woman said. “He’s one of them—a Wraith! Just as the girls said! In circumstances like these... I can tell you, Anthea, you may as well forget about her!”
Anthea’s fingers clamped down on Rae’s wrist, and she pulled her through the trees to the door. Rae felt nervous and excited. It was like being a child again, thumbing her nose at Daphne from the safety of Sister Flora’s skirts. She had forgotten Daphne! When was the last time she had thought of her—with regret, with love, at all? How could she have forgotten?
The oaken door slammed behind them. The cold air rushed into her lungs like water. She almost choked.
The black-and-silver shapes of pines surrounded them, jagged cones made of broken mirrors. Tears of cold filled her eyes.
“Anthea, could you—could you show me the front garden?” She tugged the older woman’s sleeve, half-laughing, half-crying. “Look, the moon’s come out—”
I see that woman’s “bite several mouthfuls out of you,” the
laughter of those green-faced, long-toothed people and the
tenant’s story the other day are obviously secret signs.
—Lu Hsun