23 Marout 1896 A.D. The Raw: the Kirekuni front lines: 1,500 feet
Orange fire arched through the air, crossing and recrossing the lurid rainbows of screamers. The gusty Marout wind pulled the arcs out of shape, warping them ragged. Among them, KE’s and Gorgonettes lumbered and lifted like heavy sea beasts chasing each other through a grove of thread-fine seaweed. Death enacted its ribbon show on its own, a thousand feet above the Kirekuni Raw; the aircraft merely happened to have stumbled into the midst of it.
Or that, at least, was how it looked to Crispin from 1,500 feet. He had made his second kill of the day and he was circling above the dogfight, out of range of the ground fire, catching his breath, trying to see who was down, who missing. The two flights of KE-111s and 122s that had intercepted Vichuisse’s strike force—though reduced from eighteen craft to twelve—darted about so fast that they seemed twice as many. But the odds were on their side. And the sky was clear. Kirekuni backups weren’t pouring out of every corner of the compass, as they usually did when the enemy encroached even a half mile into their airspace. The simultaneous attacks north and south of here must have them on the hop.
The bunkers behind the Kirekuni lines were cracked open, burning. Antlike figures rushed to and fro on the ground. Screamers that had fallen from the air chased them like ravenous fireflies.
Crispin took Princess Anuei down into the action, yelling, his voice lost in the wind. Triumph—all too rare a feeling—surged through him.
It was the role of QAF officers to make their men believe every mission was the one which would decide the war. Morale was a function of hype. But work as Crispin and the rest might, the regulars had got wind of the fact that this was an unusually important strike. Last week, the infantry had lost a whole mile of ground in a defeat of unprecedented dimensions. Something had to be done to keep the rout from snowballing. The specter of losing Cerelon’s Shadowtown—everyone’s nightmare for fifty years—loomed large and solid. If Ferupe lost Cerelon, it lost the metalworks, which would probably mean the loss of the northern Raw... And that, in turn, could mean the loss of the war.
Night-long closet sessions between QAF and Army high-ups had resulted, among other things, in this mission: two crews each of Vichuisse’s, Crispin’s, Eastre’s replacement Matheson’s, and Burns’s squadrons joining forces to stage an all-out attack on the section of the Kirekuni battle lines which the Queen’s infantry hoped to overwhelm that night. To the north and south, Lennox and Hawthorne’s men were mirroring their attack.
Crispin circled into the fiery gap where he’d last seen Jones. Screamer ports open, he roared straight at a KE-111 and pulled up at the last moment. In his rear sights the lizard stalled and plunged.
Easy as scalding babies.
He was Princess Anuei. He was her daemon. He was screaming. He was consciousness divided in twelve—single-mindedly pursuing his own prey, and at the same time keeping an eye on every man of his and Jones’s crews. Thank the Queen, none of them had been lost. Yet. He was flying. He could not have said how many minutes it was until he caught a glimpse of a signal in the corner of his eye. He twisted. It was Vichuisse’s lieutenant, Morton, performing the left-right-home. What?
Others had noticed, too. The flowing moment eddied into confusion. To port, a man of Burns’s crew, caught off guard, was entangled in orange fire.
High and to the east, Vichuisse’s Cerdres 500 looped the loop determinedly.
Obey orders!
It was so deeply ingrained that they had to do it even though the orders made no sense. The battle was by no means over. Kirekunis remained alive in the air and on the ground. The strike force had the odds in their favor—but their commandant wanted them to run for home, now.
Crispin’s blood burned. Bastard deserves everything Burns has planned for him! he thought furiously.
Obey orders! But he had to make a token show of defiance—foolhardy though it might be. He signaled his crew and Jones’s and took them down for a last pass over the lines. Burns picked up the cue and followed with his ten remaining kites. One after another, moving too fast to be caught in the feeble ground fire, they emptied their screamer magazines into the disarrayed Kirekuni infantry. Finally they followed the rest of the strike force into the east.
The Cerdres 500 was a silver glint in the distance. Behind it, the wedges of Gorgonettes and Killer B-99s straggled out for miles. A good many of them, Crispin saw, had been damaged to the point where they were scarcely aloft. Burns’s Bee was wobbling badly, its rudder broken half-off. Matheson, Eastre’s successor, was gone. If a captain survived his initial dunking in the deep waters of combat, then he learned how to swim. Matheson, apparently, hadn’t even been able to tread water. Perhaps Vichuisse had been right, after all, to pull out. But still—
In Crispin’s reflectors, the surviving Kirekunis fled into the massed clouds on the western horizon. Seven KEs. Seven enemies who should have died today. They were strung far apart, probably suspecting a pincer maneuver, unable to believe they had been allowed to escape, seven tiny monoplanes like insects against the gigantic violet cumulonimbus that had threatened storm all day.
A dozen pilots of other squadrons who judged their planes too badly damaged to make it home, Burns among them, set down at Sarehole. After four months, Crispin was accustomed to this use of his base. He rattled off orders for accommodations to be made in the hangars without even thinking about it. Yet as he inspected the bullet holes in the wings of his men’s kites, and soothed the trembling daemons with calm, a disconnected part of his mind wondered if Burns had exaggerated the damage to his plane in order to land at Sarehole and have another go at convincing Crispin to “commit.”
If so, he had chosen his moment well! Crispin had never been angrier with Vichuisse. Only his knowledge of Burns’s essential sneakiness made him cautious. When Crispin first met the Wraith-blooded captain, he’d thought him as honest as the day was long. Now that he knew him better—and was party to his and Emthraze’s deadly serious scheme against their commandant—he understood that although Burns did embody the virtues cherished by the QAF, honesty, bravery, patriotism, and a fighting spirit, there was not an ounce of traditional morality in his makeup.
The tension in the mess that evening was as electric as the storm-heavy air. Vichuisse’s baseless decision to pull out had cheated the pilots of the catharsis of victory or defeat that usually followed an engagement. Aggression uglified their voices. Sitting at the captain’s table, Crispin reached up to rub his neck. His body was rigid with tension. Usually when he landed after a battle he was shaking so badly he couldn’t light a cigarette; tonight he was in perfect control of his limbs, but he felt as if he were about to explode. When he opened his mouth he was not sure at any point what was going to come out—harmless small talk or a vicious indictment of the commandant. It wasn’t the first time in his two and a half years of flying with Vichuisse that such bizarre things had happened. And near-catastrophes had become far more common since they moved to Salzeim.
The night was high and windy and dark when Crispin and Burns finally left the mess. Not a sliver of moon or one star showed through the clouds. “Something’s got to be done,” Burns said furiously, aloud. “We’ve got to act! Talk can’t avert farces like this! Talk can’t avenge Matheson! Something’s got to be done!”
“Vichuisse didn’t kill Matheson,” Crispin said, though he had no particular desire to defend their commandant. “Man just wasn’t good enough to cut it.”
Burns snorted. “Think you? He deliberately assigned him first place in the attack. That’s as good as telling a green captain to commit suicide.”
“All the evidence in the world isn’t going to get him indicted. Don’t bother.”
“Fuck that! How can you not be angry?” Lines of weariness showed on the Wraith half-breed’s face as he lit a Belize cigarette. The wind blew several lucifers out and he cursed explosively before succeeding on the fourth try.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Crispin said.
“Let’s go to your quarters and get drunk!”
“You want to talk treason with my men listening through the walls?”
Burns started to retort angrily, but then he shook his head. Side by side, they walked away from the mess hall, between the hangars where chinks of light around the big doors told them that 130 Squadron’s riggers were working overtime on the damaged kites, into the grassy open. Behind them, the base lay invisible in the night, blacked out. The ground was wet, treacherous. Clods gave way to muddy sinkholes.
“Been talking to Sade,” Burns said now in a confiding undertone. “Been talking to Lennox. I got an audience with Duncan last time I was in Cerelon. He gave us the go-ahead. Not in so many words of course. But what it comes down to is, even if they know what happened, even if someone, though I can’t imagine who, kicks up a fuss—Thraxsson won’t beef. Duncan promised me that.”
“You trust him?”
Burns was silent for a moment. “He’s a bit too good to be true, isn’t he?” he said at last. “But we don’t have much choice.”
We. Us. The unspoken assumption of a shared purpose irked Crispin, although it should not have. “Why do you keep saying we?”
“I thought you were with us! Shit!”
“Look, of course I’m with you! I trusted you before you trusted me, remember?”
“The fuck is your problem then?”
“My question is, exactly who is we? Now that Matheson’s gone, and Figueroa, is it just you, me, Keynes, and Emthraze? And who are we to take the law into our own hands?” Crispin had to force out the rational objection: the red beast wanted Vichuisse’s blood, wanted him to burn. Three lieutenants had died since Crispin took over 130 Squadron—all of them flying with Vichuisse when they went down. Taft. Kimble. Hammersmith. Crispin missed them sorely, but that wasn’t the real reason he wished Vichuisse erased from the world. Three years of compelled gratitude and swallowed indignity could not find expression in words.
“Look,” Burns said. “What good is the law if it gives us a commandant like him? The law is corrupt! The law is made in Kingsburg! This is war—and in war the insulted strike back! That’s what it’s all about! Would you rather have the law or your life? Because that’s what it’s going to come to sooner or later.” He paused, then said more softly: “And besides, what has any Ferupian law ever done for you, Lamaroon?”
So that was the shape of it! Crispin had suspected it, but knowing nothing of Burns’s past, had never asked. “If it comes to that,” he said, “what has the law ever done for you, Wraith?”
“Ohhh,” Burns said, his voice soft and terrifying the way Jacithrew Humdroner’s had been when he called his daemons. “I’m not going to forget that.” He made a hissing noise that could have been laughter, or not. “You’d better believe I won’t forget that.”
Crispin shrugged. It was what he had suspected. But what he wondered now was whether Burns had inherited that daemon-calling gift from one of his parents; Crispin had assumed he had it, and that that was why he’d survived so long in combat, but now he doubted it was true. Ferupian law would in one way or another have prevented a man with that gift, (Orpaan’s gift, Jacithrew’s gift, the trickster woman’s gift a hundred times distilled) from getting anywhere near a QAF captaincy. If they had known about Crispin’s resistance to gravity—which gave him a tiny but appreciable edge in combat, in that he could make up the weight with screamers—he probably would not have got his captaincy, either. He probably wouldn’t even have got his wings. Princess Anuei.
They came to one of the small, sluggish streams that trickled across the expanses of the Raw. The water gurgled between grassy banks, as black as the sky, gleaming only slightly. Burns lit another cigarette. The wind blew the smoke into Crispin’s face. “Queen, I wish we hadn’t lost Matheson,” Burns exploded. “He’d agreed to do it. Did you know that? I persuaded him. Sure, the giggling little fool would have agreed to anything in order to get connections—if Vichuisse had asked him to assassinate me, he would’ve agreed just as fast, I bet—stupid snot just wanted to be in with someone so he’d make commandant—but no matter! He’d agreed! And then he has to go and fucking die on me!”
“Your persuasive powers are admirable,” Crispin said drily. The sarcasm was lost on Burns, who was in full flow.
“I’d do it myself, I could even have done it today, and believe me I was burning to, but too many of those regulars didn’t have a clue, they would’ve reported me faster than you can say toady. And it’s not as if I’ll have another chance. Vichuisse never assigns me to fly with him, I wouldn’t even have been on the strike force today if he had drawn up the lists, but Thraxsson did it at HQ because of this situation we’re in. Vichuisse must have been shitting his pants! He isn’t stupid, he knows something’s afoot, and he guesses it has to do with me, because I don’t pretend to like him—I’ve never been any good at that kind of fakery—”
“Too fucking true!”
“Now you—he likes you—”
Crispin closed his eyes. He dug his nails into his palms.
“I’ve never understood that.” Burns took a deep drag on his cigarette and cocked his head inquiringly. “Were you? At one point?”
“No! Queen, no!” Crispin spat into the stream, nauseated by the very idea.
“No need to jump down my throat. I’ve never seen you with a girl.”
“That’s because there was only ever one for me, and she’s dead.”
Cris, I’m not happy here! Please come and get me! I can’t believe you’ve forgotten about me... For a moment the howling night rang with her voice. In the west, thunder growled like rocks moving.
“I’m sorry,” Burns said.
“It was a long time ago.”
“And you haven’t since?” Burns laughed. “Queen.”
For some reason, though it had nothing to do with the question, Crispin thought of the night he had spent at Air Base XV, the night he and Butch had sworn eternal friendship. Try as he might to forget it in the intervening months, it kept popping back into memory at the oddest moments. That night had been the beginning of the end of their friendship. He regretted Butch right now more than ever.
“Damn! You’ve got harder balls than I do!” Burns laughed so hard he coughed. He must have noticed Crispin’s silence then, for he stopped and said in a completely different tone, “So? Are you willing?”
“What?”
“Oh, tch, tch, your gutter mind!” Burns laughed again, but it was gentle. “You youngsters! If only I weren’t so fucking transparent to him, I’d do it myself. I’ve always hated that about myself: that I can’t hide my thoughts. Sade Emthraze is the same, or he would do it, too. But he suspects us both. It’s got to be you or Keynes. You were his men, he won’t see it coming until he’s being eaten alive by your screamers. And though I hate to admit it, both of you are more popular with your squadrons than Sade and me are with ours. You’ll have a better chance of swearing them to silence.”
“Have you asked Butch?” Crispin stared at the stream. How could water so black be so visibly in motion? Lightning flashed far to the west. The wind skirled a few drops of rain into their faces.
Burns made an “ugh” noise and pulled his muffler up round his ears. “Yes. But he’s... I’m sorry, Crispin. But he’s a liver lily. His teeth chattered—I swear to the Queen he nearly jumped out of his skin when I asked. Even if we did manage to pressure him into it, he’d probably fuck up or back down at the last minute and create a shambles we’d never hear the last of. It’s got to be you. I truly am sorry.”
“I... I can’t.” Embarrassment at his own weakness heated Crispin’s face. He looked full at Burns. “It’s my luck. I’m afraid—David—if it turns—”
Even in the darkness, he could see the harsh lines appearing oh Burns’s face. “I never took you for a coward!”
Shame and pride filled Crispin. He knew exactly what Burns was doing, and yet he could not resist. Burns embodied the pragmatic, diplomatically skilled, and yet hot-blooded ideal of a QAF officer, where Vichuisse embodied the reality: the death of the soul, paranoia, the foolish aristocrat’s pride, the incompetence and stubbornness that had kept this war dragging out and dragging and dragging well beyond its allotted life span. Crispin wanted to kill Vichuisse, wanted to see him spiral down out of control into no-man’s-land. And Burns knew that.
Burns’s frown grew deeper. “I always thought you were one of the bravest men I know.” He shook his head. “I’m not usually so wrong about people!”
Sincerity and manipulativeness were the flip sides of Burns’s character, and sometimes, as now, they coexisted: Crispin knew he was being manipulated, and yet he could not stand for Burns, his one remaining real friend, to think him a coward. “I’m no liver lily,” he heard himself say. “I’ll do it.”
“—Crispin?”
“I said I’ll do it! Just give me the word!”
Burns grinned disbelievingly and held out his hand. Not for him the embrace, which smacked of the patronizing squire! Numbly Crispin shook his hand, “Queen! I knew you’d come through!”
In the west lightning flared again, silhouetting Burns against the horizon, and it seemed to Crispin that the brightness did not die down: rather, the bolts of lightning multiplied and changed color, going from blue to yellow, and now they no longer came from the clouds but the ground, leaping up from the miserable ramparts of the far-off battle lines which themselves looked strangely different, black and heaped, towering; and huge tongues of orange shot into the sky, reddening half the heavens as if an all-consuming dawn were coming from the wrong side of the world.
And Crispin could not answer Burns’s questions about date and place and strategy, because it was dark, insufferably dark, and he had just seen Okimako for the third time.
Avril 1896 A.D.
The Raw: Salzeim Parallel: Cerelon’s Air Base XXI
In the middle of Avril, spring came. These tender yellow days were scandalously few. But while they lasted, the sunlight dripped with honey and the ephemeral scent of primroses and dog violets blowing on the breeze sweetened the moods of men. Victories were few, but no one seemed to care much. In summer, when the dust winds blew, skirling up the soil of the denuded Raw, aggravating hot-weather chills and fevers, the moment would catch hold of them again. It always did. But for these few days the QAF captains were hard put to knock a sense of urgency into their men—even though the army-air force initiative to prevent the Kirekunis from pushing forward to Cerelon had largely failed. The infantry retreat continued at an undignified pace. The troops were falling back so fast that the workforces scarcely had time to construct new ramparts before the soldiers were among them.
Among the supplies lost to the enemy were several hundred barrels of screamers. This security breach caused a flurry of panic at Army HQ. But even after sixty years of falling victim to screamers, the Kirekunis had no clear idea of how to use them, and in a series of fatal barrel-openings, they killed more of their own weapons experts than the Ferupians had all year. The real disaster was that they finally put two and two together in the matter of fire and daemons. Soon the SAF was no longer strafing Ferupian ammo dumps with fire-jennies, but bullets. Now it was up to the Ferupian soldiers to try to contain the destruction with flamethrowers—and to ferret through the ashes afterward in search of the precious nuggets of metal from the KEs’ guns.
The retreat continued apace, and, by the end of Avril, as summer drew its first burning breath, one could see the new ramparts from the rise behind Sarehole.
The QAF was affected only indirectly by the streak of setbacks that had transformed Army HQ into a forcing bed for nervous breakdowns. The nature of the pilots’ job did not change; succeeding merely became more important. And though the officers knew the missions they flew now could determine the war, it was difficult to make the regulars, whom experience had convinced that the fighting would never end, feel the same urgency. The only reason their hype continued to have any effect at all was because the death rate was so high, and climbing, that at any given moment, less than half the regulars in any squadron had served for more than a year, and so were unused to emergency as a way of life.
And this dreadful spring seemed to have induced fatalism in even the youngest hotbloods. Crispin fretted his days and nights away, wondering if 130 Squadron’s relapse into the Jimenez pattern of loss after loss was due not to the yellow season, but to him: namely, to his distraction. The anti-Vichuisse conspiracy consumed most of his physical and mental energy. Even when he, Burns, and Emthraze were not meeting in secret to discuss their plans, he was pondering the deed he had agreed to do, and wondering how on earth he was going to slip it past his crew. He would have to enlist one of them, at least, to back him up. But who? Or could he go it alone? The moment he had imagined countless times already (sight-lock, screamers, tailspin, pieces of Cerdres 500 all over the Raw) had got into his bones. He could no longer place it in context.
The date they had set was the thirtieth of Avril. On that day, he, Vichuisse, and Butch were scheduled to fly a mission into no-man’s-land.
On the twenty-seventh of Avril, a jeep drove up to Sarehole as Crispin was getting ready to take off on patrol. A groundsman came to Hangar One with the news that Flight Commandant Vichuisse had arrived to see the captain.
Crispin’s heart thudded sickeningly. He knows, he thought. He knows.
His own voice sounded strange in his ears as he told the groundsman to ask the commandant to wait in his office. He looked around the hangar, seeing it with different eyes. The riggers were making the final check over the crew’s kites, rushing here and there with silver nails, canvas glue, and last-minute tidbits for the daemons. In accordance with the bizarre superstitions of their trade (which Crispin did not condemn, having been immersed in them himself, and knowing they did the daemons no harm), they would not feed the daemons splinterons before a flight, instead pushing morsels of chocolate through the mesh hatches. The daemons loved chocolate, although they wouldn’t touch any other human food. The side door opened, and the rest of Crispin’s crew came in, suited up, carrying their helmets. Among them was Mickey, tail flicking. “Captain!” he shouted. “Do you know who’s here?”
“Change of plans, don’t worry!” Crispin called back. He grabbed a rigger. “Go fetch Lieutenant Jones! On the double! Give him my apologies and say due to unforeseen circumstances he’ll have to take my patrol this afternoon!”
Unforeseen circumstances—the men were sure to assume the worst. Few reasons existed for a commandant to pay a surprise call to one of his squadrons, even given the rate at which briefs were being chopped and changed in Cerelon. After Vichuisse left, Crispin would have to dissemble better than ever before.
Always assuming he was still there to do it!
He gritted his teeth. On the way to his office he stopped in the lieutenants’ quarters to make sure Jones had got the message and to change out of his flight suit into dress trousers and a jacket borrowed from Carnation, the tallest of the lieutenants. Carnation woke from a deathlike sleep to mumble, “Yeah, course, Captain, what’s mine’s yours, anytime... ” and then rolled over on his face again. Crispin dragged somebody’s comb over his scalp and tried on a welcoming smile in the tarnished mirror over the washpail. Damned if I’ll let him see he’s caught me off guard!
The day had started off sweet and fresh after a night rain, but it had rapidly turned blowzy. The sun was invisible behind a cloud haze, and the sky glowed as bright as an unshaded daemon glare. Horseflies buzzed around the slops outside the mess. Inside Crispin’s office, the blackout curtains were three-quarters drawn, though he was sure he’d opened them that morning. Woodsmoke thickened the dimness. Vichuisse had opened two bottles of Crispin’s Beaudonne lager and set out glasses on the overturned crate that served as a table; he was squatting by the hearth, trying inexpertly to start a fire. The day was so warm that it was unnecessary, but Crispin controlled his irritation. “Let me, sir.” He nudged Vichuisse respectfully aside, arranged the kindling into a pyramid, and lit it with the speed of twenty years on the road. Then he opened the window to let the smoke out and sat down on a half barrel across from Vichuisse.
All his mental and sartorial preparation had been in vain. Vichuisse was clearly not in any state to notice what Crispin was wearing, let alone the nuances of his manner. As they exchanged pleasantries, Crispin wondered what state Vichuisse was in. The commandant had not shaved. Wrinkles marred his uniform. He smelled as if he had been drinking. A less definable scent—that metallic, nose-wrinkling whiff Crispin had associated with him since the earliest days of their acquaintance, which he had not since been able to identify with any brand of cologne—also hung about him. He tapped his foot with the incessant jerkiness of a drug addict. Yet his speech was as precise as ever. “It has been a long time since we talked, hasn’t it, Kateralbin? I do miss those chats we used to have.”
“Both of our posts are demanding, Commandant.”
“Demanding, yes, yes, indeed. It is a strain.” Vichuisse laced and unlaced his fingers. His mouth twitched.
Crispin eyed him dubiously. “Commandant—have you thought about taking some leave? You haven’t had any in years, to my knowledge.”
“You’re implying that I need a rest!” Vichuisse smiled. “But why should I fritter away what time I have left?”
He does know! Crispin thought, nauseated with horror. Somehow he managed to control his voice. “Why do you say that, sir? Are you ill?”
“Only as we all are.”
“Sir?”
“Is it unlucky to admit that one is going to die?” Vichuisse smiled pityingly. “I am going to die; you are going to die; so are all your fine young men, and their Shadow women. Every last one of us is sick with glory. This war is almost over, Kateralbin. We are making a heroic last stand, but had you heard what I have at HQ, you would know it is useless. The Kirekunis will be on us by the time the year is out, and they are without mercy.”
“It isn’t their intention to crush us, according to Mickey,” Crispin said before he could stop himself.
“Mickey... ? Oh, Ash, Eighty Squadron, our pet lizard, yes.” Vichuisse nodded. “He and I were once so close... I should like to see him. He’s on base, isn’t he?”
“I can have him sent when he gets back from patrol,” Crispin said, and whistled to summon the sentry he had placed outside the window. “Yes. Pilot Ash. The commandant wishes to see him... I know he’s out. Have someone tell him to come as soon as Lieutenant Jones debriefs the crew on their return.”
“Thank you, sir.” The door closed. As Crispin turned back to Vichuisse, he felt the irrational dislike and fear that the commandant always engendered in him. But now it was diluted with pity. What was Vichuisse, after all, but a withered little drunkard with food stains on the breast of his uniform? His eyes swam like yellow-dyed Queen’s Birthday eggs in their sunken sockets. He looked older than his thirty-odd years. Had he deteriorated in recent months? Or had he ever been more than this? Had his superiority and seeming omniscience merely been illusions produced by the hierarchy? He relaxed on the half barrel as easily as if it were his own leather armchair, leaning against the wall, knees apart, one hand beating a careless tattoo on his thigh. But his face wore a pinched, tense expression, like the face of a neophyte walking a high wire for the first time, and Crispin realized what had changed. Every time he and Vichuisse had met before, they had been in the commandant’s territory, or on neutral ground. This time they were in Crispin’s territory. Crispin’s very own office, in fact, the seat of the captain’s power, which, lacking possessions, he’d furnished with jerry-built furniture and a few selections from Jimenez’s leavings. He cherished it because it was the only space of his own he’d ever had; but it was the accidental simplicity of the decor he ended up defending to visitors who had grown up, one and all, in mansions full of chockablock rooms. Eventually he had decided he wouldn’t change a thing even if he could. Now, for the first time, he understood why he felt so much at home here. The office could not have been less like Vichuisse’s bourgeois sanctuary. Against the spartan backdrop, the commandant with his stylish neck scarf and shined shoes looked not just out of place, but flamboyant, superfluous.
Watching him drain his wineglass, Crispin said, “Sir, I’m busy. Was there a reason you wanted to speak with me? Something urgent?”
“No.” Vichuisse smiled. “I simply wanted company. The time hangs heavy on one’s hands, you know.”
Crispin did not know.
“When one has no one to talk to... You and Ash. You were the only two men I ever commanded whom I could be honest with. When the Queen sent me first him, and then you, in the space of less than a year, I thought I was being rewarded for my perseverance in the face of dislike and subverted mutiny. I used to wonder what I’d done to deserve my men’s disrespect! Now I know it was just that I was too passionate. Too passionate, at least, for these mercenary regulars and honor-obsessed lieutenants with whom we must contend.”
Crispin winced. “Commandant, haven’t you at least considered taking a couple of weeks off to fly home, see your family, take it easy—don’t you think it would do you good?”
“And leave six squadrons in Burns’s hands?” Vichuisse smiled. “No, the truth is, Kateralbin, that I could not abide to return to Ferupe without going home. And I cannot go home. Should you like to know why?”
Crispin shrugged.
“I was my parents’ second child.” Vichuisse paused, as if expecting Crispin to object at his starting from the beginning. After a moment he went on. “Shortly after I joined up, my older brother died of a fever—in no way akin to the fever that is consuming me now—but undoubtedly designed by the same evil. It was his unrequited love for a shepherdess on our estate. The physician called it pneumonia, but I knew better. I was the only one he confided in. After his death I had the option of being demobilized, but I stayed on the front.”
“Why?”
It seemed to Crispin that as he spoke that one word, the faint bad smell in the room got stronger. Vichuisse wrinkled his nose as if he, too, scented it.
“I could not face taking responsibility for our unfertile lands—this is northern Lynche of which I speak, on the edge of the snowlands—our ungrateful villagers, and our cumbersome flocks of sheep. All my life I had longed to escape, and I was not about to let my brother’s weakness cheat me out of my freedom. Besides, I was already in love with the air force.” He smiled as if remembering, “The affair has lasted ten years now, and my passion has not cooled—although I have seen evidence lately which tells me hers has. Love’s tragedy is that it must be unequal. Yet someone said that ‘if there must be a lover and a beloved, let me then be the one who loves too much,’ and I have lived by those words.”
He cracked a smile. Crispin took a gulp of ale. The Beaudonne flamed in his insides.
“So I left the estate in the hands of my aging mother. About five years ago, she was taken in by cult charlatans who offered to buy our mansion and lands for a magnificent sum of money. She accepted, but no contract was signed; and in the absence of a written agreement, and since possession is nine-tenths of the law, she cannot do anything to get the land back, despite the fact that she is a daughter of one of the oldest families in Ferupe, and the supposed buyers are nothing but gutter scum, half of them lizards to boot. I suspect the nobility ignored her appeal because she disgraced herself long ago by marrying my father and forcing her family, the Amithres of Lynche, to accept him. They have long memories, the Amithres, like all northern families. And they have great influence in Kingsburg.”
Was that how you got your promotion to Salzeim? Crispin wondered, pitying him. Your Amithres must have guessed, given your record, that any promotion would be a two-edged sword, as likely to destroy you as make you. They must have seen their chance to be rid of the blot on their name. Did you know that?
Vichuisse sighed. “Mother writes to me, from the house in southern Lynche of her even more aged sister and my repulsive cousins, that she has been back to see the estate and that it has fallen into an appalling state of decay. The lizards have let all the servants go and let all the house daemons out of their cells; they have let the lawn go wild and carved ciphers into the teak furniture. The roof repairmen were turned away last winter. In short, Kateralbin”—the self-deprecating smile flashed again—“I’d rather die than go back to see it. I left once; and as an indirect result, the house—where I was born, and where, since I was not aware of the stratification in my family, I spent a happy childhood—as a result, that house has been destroyed. I cannot go back. Even though now that I sense my last days approaching, I have woken from dreams of the stone kitchen below stairs, and the taste of a new potato eaten out of one’s hand with butter dripping between one’s fingers—there is nothing like a new potato boiled straight out of the ground—and skating along the stream under the naked branches of the willows in winter, and the trout under the weir.”
The colors of Vichuisse’s uniform and decorations seemed to have faded as he told his little story. He seemed no more than a shade of his former self, a ghost lingering for a few moments before it fled to Lynche.
“I’m sorry,” Crispin said at last.
“I didn’t come here for your sympathy, Kateralbin, although it is touching in the extreme!” The commandant laughed, swung around, and lit a cigarette with a brand from the fire. “I merely came—one might say—to settle my affairs.”
“Sir?”
“In the past I have not conducted myself toward you as a commanding officer should. I have come to make my apologies.”
Crispin actually yelped in surprise.
“Yes!” Vichuisse’s eyes glinted. “I condescended toward you when I knew in my heart you would surpass me. Not wishing to see you ostracized, I concealed from my men the fact that you had spent time in Chressamo, when I should have let you account for your past yourself.”
Crispin hadn’t thought Vichuisse knew about Chressamo. If he had, he would never have gone anywhere near the captain. But of course Vichuisse had known! And as large as Crispin’s debt to him had been, now it was infinitely larger.
“I treated you like the worst sort of recruit scum at the same time as I made you my protégé and gave you every advantage! I want to apologize both for picking you out of the mud and for throwing it in your face! Do you forgive me?”
Yes, Crispin wanted to say, yes! You are my commandant!
“Well, honest forgiveness can never be got just for the asking. I am glad you did not lie.” Vichuisse shook his head and exhaled slowly.
“Why—sir—why did you favor me? Was it for the same reason you favored Ash?”
Vichuisse laughed, and evaded the question. “I always had a yearning for the exotic. You and Ash were as close as I was ever able to come to it. What I should really have liked to do was to travel to Cype, Lamaroon, Ea loria, the Americas... if there had not been a war... Oh, make no mistake, I am dedicated to this air force as I believe few are. But... well, it is too late now.”
And Crispin remembered Butch standing in a moonlit alley in Cerelon, smiling and saying in the same self-deprecating, vaguely amused tone, Too late now. Been thinking a lot lately about what I’ve missed... but it’s too late now.
Too late now. That night had put an untimely end to Crispin and Butch’s friendship. Too late—
Jacithrew Humdroner, the mad Wraith, standing tippy-toe at the top of a dead pine, flapping his wooden wings and shouting delightedly, I will fly and fly and fly away from this dead place to a land where all is life, I will fly south to Izte Kchebuk’ara where the sun shines all day and there are beautiful red-skinned women, where there is wine to be drunk beside a sparkling sea—
Too late!
A dreadful flickering dimmed the room.
There had to be some way to escape the parade of skulls, the ribbon show—
But its too late now! Flames in the hollows, and either I’m mad or the world is going to end in Okimako, and I will be there, and I’ve visioned nothing beyond that night—
Vichuisse was staring at him with amusement. “Was that a goose walking over your grave? You look positively pale.”
Crispin forced his fists to unclench. “Have you ever loved anyone, sir? A girl, I mean? I mean, loved?”
“Not as such... what does that matter?”
“I did,” Crispin said, hearing his voice shake. “I did.”
The familiar mocking smile leapt onto Vichuisse’s face. “And never once said a word! You are a dark horse and no mistake, Kateralbin! To think that all this time I believed you and Keynes... And that was the only reason I offered him a post in Salzeim!”
Crispin shrugged. He was trying too hard not to see the pale flames coming out from under the skirting to take offense. “I had a girl, Rae her name was,” he said thickly. “They killed her in Chressamo.”
The amusement vanished from Vichuisse’s face. “I am sorry!” He sounded as if he meant it. So had Burns, although neither of them knew Rae from the Queen. Everyone meant it, the first time; then the thrill of vicarious misery paled and they left you alone with your grief. Only this time the trouble was that Crispin could not locate his own grief. Despite having spoken the charm of her name, he still felt keyed up to the point of screaming, imprisoned in the coils of the plot into which he had thrown himself so recklessly, with no release in sight. Over the course of the last three years, the stirring of the red beast had continuously prompted him to seek refuge, consciously or unconsciously, in the old grief, which was immutable, certain, and above all, understandable both to himself and to others. But this time the ploy had failed. Rae had no power to free him from the enigma of Vichuisse. He tried to conjure an image of her face and saw Gorgonettes and KE-122s reeling in a blank sky. Words replaced coherent thoughts. “Black hair—Rae. I miss her. I don’t know why I’m talking like this! I—”
“You mustn’t brood. It will take the edge off your brain,” Vichuisse reproved. “I want you to be more than I ever was. And I want you to succeed by the brilliance of your prowess alone, as I could not. You have the potential, you can be a commandant, maybe even lieutenant-marshal in time! If you let your career slip away over some girl, I will kill you!”
It was said in jest, but in Crispin’s wretched state, every word resonated. “But I don’t miss her anymore!” he protested. “I don’t!”
“Good, then! Good! The QAF must be your first love, as she has been mine, if you are to succeed. And right now, her only hope is for those few who truly love her to give her their all—”
There was a knock outside. “Come in!” Vichuisse called—just as if it were his office, Crispin thought in a flash of renewed dislike—and Mickey entered, grinning, his cheeks flushed with altitude. When he saw Vichuisse his grin snapped off like a light. Watching the commandant as if he thought the unkempt little man would spring, he sidled inside and took a seat on the third half barrel. As if by magic, the flames died down. The air thinned and became breathable again as the tension surged, redirecting itself into new channels. Crispin’s pulse slackened. “Have some Beaudonne, Mick!” he said expansively. “It’s warm, but it’s perfect!”
“What I need.” Mickey knocked down half a glass straight.
Vichuisse’s eyes sparkled. “I came especially to see you, Ash!” He made a dramatic gesture, placing one hand on his heart. “How long it’s been!”
“Commandant... ” Mickey had clearly noticed Vichuisse’s bedraggled drunkard’s appearance. He shook his head mutely.
“I am ill,” Vichuisse said lightly. “You on the other hand, you’re looking well!”
“The northern climate suits me. But I hate summer.”
“Better alive in summer than dead in winter,” Crispin said with a wink. “How was patrol? Sightings? Encounters?”
And in a few minutes he had managed to downshift the conversation smoothly into flight talk such as any three pilots, anywhere, might have shared. The topic held little interest for Vichuisse; it was obvious that he wanted to say certain things to Mickey which Crispin should not hear. As soon as Crispin saw the shape of things he made an excuse to leave, but Mickey kicked him in the ankle so hard that he stayed put. Vichuisse grinned knowingly, and proceeded to reminisce without a trace of embarrassment, as if he and Mickey were alone, although he did not fail to include Crispin in his repulsive innuendos. The Kirekuni deflected the stabs at his pride with astonishing grace. The only sign that the unraveling of his private life affected him at all was the rate at which his glass emptied. As Vichuisse chuckled on and on, Crispin was struck again by the strange impression that the commandant was fading: it was as if despite the lascivious anecdotes issuing from his lips, he possessed no more substance than a shadow in the corner twittering of the time when it had a body, and steadily dissolving as it poured out the memories that had given it an existence in this world.
But Mickey, especially now that he was drunk, was there enough to make up for Vichuisse and five more besides. Tail switching, scalp bristling black, smoke puffing from his mouth, he was more corporeal than a materialized daemon. Watching him, Crispin thought it was a wonder how he pulled off his blending-in act all day, every day. Was this special corporeality the reason he and the flames could not exist in the same place? Or was it because he was Kirekuni? Crispin did not know: it was enough to have gained a reprieve. In the absence of his personal horror, liberated from grief, nothing could faze him, not even Vichuisse’s distressing indiscretions. Vichuisse was going to die two days from now anyway, so what did it matter? What did anything matter?
Vichuisse finally took his leave as twilight was falling. The fire in the hearth had died to embers, and the smoke haze in the room glowed orange as the sunset slanted in between the blackout curtains. Crispin and Mickey saw the commandant off in his jeep. They exchanged a sigh of relief as they reentered the office. “Hind leg off a donkey,” Crispin said, and rolled his eyes.
Mickey laughed. “I’ll leave you in peace, too, Captain.” He turned to go.
Crispin stopped Mickey before the Kirekuni reached the door. “No. Stay. I have something I want to talk over with you.”
Mickey’s smile vanished. He looked suspicious and tired.
“I’ll have supper sent in. You are hungry, aren’t you?”
“Ravenous,” Mickey said without a smile. He was rigid with tension. It showed in his shoulders, his stance. He must hate Vichuisse more than any other man in 130 Squadron. He would do.
“That simply wasn’t on, was it?” Crispin said, sounding him out. “I would have left, but you—”
Mickey whirled around twice and threw up his hands in one of his operatic foreign gestures. “I thought he wouldn’t bring it up with you there! The last thing I wanted was to be alone with him! And what the fuck was he thinking, anyway? What the fuck was he thinking?”
His vehemence startled Crispin as much as if a songbird had cawed like a crow.
“What does whatever happened in the Lovoshire Parallel between him and me have to do with the fact that I have a patrol to fly at dawn and I haven’t slept for days and he’s a bloody commandant and he should have more sense? Nothing! That’s what! He’s an insane inbred aristocrat worse than any of the rest of them! I always knew it, and now I’ve seen it! Mad! Mad! Mad! He’s mad!”
“He’s just a drunkard, but it comes to the same thing,” Crispin said.
“No fucking joke! He—”
“He thinks he’s dying.”
“Ho, does he? Hypochondriac! Dying my ass! He’s gonna live to be a hundred after he’s killed us all with his fucking incompetence or bored us all to death with his slimy anecdotes!”
A breath of wind crept in through the open door. The slit between the curtains glowed red. The windows faced west, toward the sunset. Toward Kirekune. Crispin had never once asked Mickey about his native country. Although their acquaintance was as close as the gap of rank permitted, they had never spoken of anything personal. Not, at any rate, since the night at Fostercy when Mickey revealed that he was left-handed. For him, that was personal.
I’m a fool to confide in him, Crispin thought, and then said, “But you know, Vichuisse may be right. I should be extremely surprised if he survives the mission two days from now.”
It took Mickey an astonishing two seconds to get the idea. His eyes lit up and his body spasmed as if he were about to hug Crispin. Then he flung himself across the room, pacing. “Who? Who? Who’s in on it? What can I do?”
Crispin chuckled. “Not so fast! Captain Burns. Captain Emthraze. Captain Keynes.”
“Everyone!”
“Not the fellow who took Matheson’s place; Lang’s a brown-nosing weasel. But Commandant Lennox. And Sublieutenant-Marshal Duncan.”
“That means Thraxsson,” Mickey said, and then something quick. Crispin asked him to translate. “Sorry! I said: ‘Tell it to the Significant!’ It means sort of, ‘This is too good to be true!’”
Crispin smiled.
“What’s the plan? A pincer maneuver? Who’s going to—”
“It shouldn’t be difficult. We’ll be engaged by the enemy. It’ll be reported as an accident—that is, if anyone even notices he was taken down by his own side.”
Mickey frowned. “But they will. Have you ever seen Vichuisse put himself in danger in an engagement? He keeps to the edges and plays umpire. That’s how he’s lasted so damned long. It’ll just have to look like a blunder—like somebody got disoriented. Do you want me to—”
“No,” Crispin said more sharply than he had meant to. “I want you to back me up. To edge him into my sights. And second me if I have to explain. That’s all.”
Mickey squinted. “You want him bad, don’t you?”
Crispin half nodded, half shrugged.
Mickey sank down on a barrel-chair and performed his cigarette-lighting trick with his tail. “I love it! It’s so Queen-damned Ferupian! I love it!”
“Don’t your people bear grudges, then?”
“Your people... I haven’t heard that for months! Nobody gives me shit around here like they used to. I think you terrified it out of them.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“If you had, you would’ve said you lizards. But no, we don’t, we don’t even think in terms of grudges. We don’t ask questions. Orders are orders. If you’re commanded to perform an operational suicide attack, you’re supposed to thank the Significant on bended knee for singling you out. I could never have done that, and I knew it—that’s why I made such a terrible Disciple. That’s why I ended up here.”
“But what do you mean it’s so Ferupian? Seems to me it’s un-anything.”
“Oh, no, no, no!” Mickey shook his head. “It’s been too long since you were a regular, Captain! The rumors... In this parallel, they fly like birds. This death... that death... well, it wasn’t an accident, you know, he wanted a promotion... well, he had a grudge against him for stealing his girl... and so forth and so on... sometimes I can’t help laughing because it’s just so parochial. War on the other side of the Raw, it’s this gigantic finely tuned operation, the army and the air force and the Chadou, that’s the civilians they moved in from the other side of the mountains, all following the same set of orders, all synchronizing like the different bits of a transformation engine. Our command is totally centralized and all our communications go by air. And it works because we’re winning, Captain. There’s an energy which reproduces every time the SAPpers gain ground. But over here... well, there’s nothing organized about it! It’s really just sanctioned murder of whoever you happen not to like, and all too often that isn’t the enemy, but the fellow you see every day! The Ferupian military is eating itself.”
“That’s rather harsh.”
“But it’s true! The only explanation I’ve been able to think of, short of a difference in the national temperament, is that one hundred fucking years of defeat has—how can I put it—killed the daemon in the Ferupian war machine. And it’s fallen apart into this gigantic mess of aggression which is so poorly directed that a hell of a lot of the time, people take it out on their own officers. And some of those officers, like Vichuisse, are trying to hold the system together, but it’s absolutely fucking useless, because they’re incompetent to practice what they preach, because of the ridiculous system you have for selecting officers, which is based on social class, of all qualifications, and which in my opinion is the real reason Ferupe started losing the war in the first place... And meanwhile, you all have this ridiculous faith in the Queen, as if she can’t lose the war even though she really has nothing to do with it, as if she’s some unstoppable force of nature!” He stopped, abashed, as if finally realizing he was treading on forbidden ground. “At least, that’s what I think... ”
“Do you despise us, then?” Crispin asked eventually. Mickey’s words had stung him to the quick, and yet he had expressed more or less the same opinions accepted by all the officers Crispin knew, merely having arrived at them from a different, clearer perspective.
“Despise you? Significant, no!” Suddenly Mickey was serious. “How could I? This is my adopted country, isn’t it? I belong here. In Ferupe. In the middle of this defeat. And no, I’m not having you on! There’s a family history of Ferupian tendencies—my aunt joined a Ferupian cult, and so did my uncle, ten years later. My mother’s dream is to get Ferupian girls in her brothel: she knows what sells. I joined the Disciples, but now look at me, here I am! It’s funny the way it comes out.”
“And yet for a Ferupian, you have some very odd ideas,” Crispin said.
“I do, don’t I! Maybe I’m just trying to justify my own cowardice by deciding everyone else over here is a coward, too... But... but... ” He closed his eyes and touched his lips with the tip of his tail. Then he opened his eyes again. Liquid black pools, almost perfectly round.
Crispin took pity on him. “Not that odd, actually. All the commanding officers think more or less the same thing, if you can get them to admit it. Congratulate yourself on your perspicacity, rather.”
“Don’t flatter me.”
“I wasn’t.”
Mickey bit his lip. It was an oddly endearing gesture. “You aren’t going to change your mind, are you? You’re still going to... involve me?”
“There isn’t anyone else in this squadron,” Crispin said. “There’s Butch. Captain Keynes of One-forty-five Squadron, I mean. But I—I can’t depend on him.”
“I hate Keynes’s guts. He hates mine. He blames me for everything that ever went wrong when I was in his crew. I’d kill him if I thought I could get away with it... Does that change your mind?”
“Bit late now,” Crispin said dryly. “You could rat on all of us. I’ve got to involve you!”
And for a second the flames appeared again, dancing high between him and the Kirekuni, blotting out his vision; but they had no heat, no power, and they vanished as quickly as they came. The air was dim and sharp. The smoke from the cigarette Mickey was holding in a twist of his tail smelled like campfires, like toasting bread, and Crispin suddenly realized how hungry he was. Outside, the first night patrol was taking off. The grumble of daemon engines came almost too low to be heard. Voices yelled over the wind, which blew chilly through the open window—summer was not quite here yet.
“I’ve always thought you were different from the rest of them, Captain,” Mickey said. He had been observing Crispin with his head on one side.
“So has everyone else.”
“I mean as an airman. The rest of them just say they love glory, they say they live for the kill... but you, you really do. You may be bloodthirsty, but that’s so refreshing. And you value your squadron’s efficiency over your personal advancement. Or at least, that’s how I’ve perceived it.”
Four years in Ferupe had given Mickey an irritating habit of qualifying everything he said, which detracted not a whit from the inflammatory nature of his opinions. “Don’t suck up to me, Pilot,” Crispin said. He was wondering how he could seal the other’s complicity and dismiss him. Mickey was simply too perspicacious and opinionated. He made Crispin uncomfortable.
“I wasn’t sucking up! I just wanted to tell you that I admire you! Is that a breach of propriety?”
“Call me Crispin. As if propriety hasn’t been breached just about as thoroughly as it can be, this afternoon.”
“Yes! But that’s what I mean! You’re so different from him... Even in a matter like this you’re straightforward. When I first came here, I thought all Ferupians were such bastions of honor! I thought they did from their hearts what we do because we’re ordered to. Then I realized the truth. And I thought, there has to be someone who really is like that, who embodies grace and selflessness and bravery and all the rest of it, what they praise in the anthems. But I never met him until you joined Eighty Squadron. Do you remember when you wouldn’t flog me because you knew it wasn’t fair? I thought, this man is the real thing. I couldn’t believe my luck when you traded me with Captain Keynes.”
He’s a boy, Crispin thought, gazing at the pale, excited face. He was twenty-three, the same age as Crispin, but right now he did not look it. A boy, hero-worshiping someone who once did him a good turn. That night outside Vichuisse’s quarters... Crispin had forgotten all about the flogging until this moment. “Don’t be ridiculous, Pilot,” he said coldly. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“What’s the other half, then?”
“Nothing that would improve your pretty picture of me.”
“But I don’t really know anything about you, Captain,” Mickey said. “I’m just going on what I’ve seen. See... I think you’re going to crash and burn. If you want to know the honest truth, I don’t like the sound of this thing we’ve got ourselves into. Burns... Emthraze... Keynes... Lennox... Duncan... and all their men... why must you be the one who actually does it?”
“Think about it.”
“Well, I’m all for exing Vichuisse, but you’re the one in the pilot’s seat! And I think you’re going to hit turbulence, but I can’t say whether it’ll be good or bad... I don’t want to speculate, either. I just wanted to tell you that I’ll be at your back when it happens.”
Crispin had never had a worse hex laid on him. Paralyzed, he felt his luck oozing away from him, beading out of his skin like sweat, dripping to the ground. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, rubbing away the premonition, and when he looked at Mickey before the other had time to rearrange his features, he saw that revealed on the Kirekuni’s face which he had hoped not to see.
Mickey would have Crispin’s back two days from now, then, even if something went horribly wrong, which pray the Queen...
Such a depressing explanation for his enthusiasm. But was there ever any other explanation? Crispin wondered in a fit of gloom. Or did all human interactions reduce eventually to that one viscous back-and-forth tide?
A cough and a shuffle outside the door alerted him to the silence inside the room. He and Mickey had been closeted in here far too long. And after Vichuisse’s visit, the men probably already suspected something was afoot! “At ease, Mick,” he said, and clearing his throat, called to the groundsman outside the door: “Come in, damn your eyes, don’t stand outside eavesdropping like a bloody Shadow! Come in!”
“Captain Burns to see you, sir,” the night-shift man said as he opened the door.
Crispin saw the unspoken Again in the man’s face. He blew out his breath and spared Mickey a quick smile. “Tell him I’m waiting to receive him... and have our suppers sent from the mess, with three plates. Oh, what the hell, tell them to whip up something a bit better than usual. Have them go through stores. This is going to be an all-nighter.”
Twenty-four hours later, he was in the Officers’ Club at the once-a-month get-together. He had no more liking for these civilized orgies of booze and hypocrisy than he had had before he ever attended one. The gatherings were meant to reinforce amity among the captains and commandants, but everyone deplored them as a waste of time, even though they attended religiously. Crispin usually just flew in to Cerelon the next morning for the briefing meetings. But tonight, in light of the secret drama which was to unfold the day after tomorrow, he had to be at the club.
No one except the conspirators themselves was supposed to know about the plot. Crispin had come to see whether, in fact, they did.
But all seemed as usual. Smoke and talk filled the clubroom. Cocktails were consumed faster than beer at a public flogging in Kingsburg. Burns was at his suavest; Emthraze sat in a corner, exchanging secret smiles with his vodka; Vichuisse was giving his all to anyone with an iota of compassion; Butch was doing the rounds to a warm reception. Crispin wondered if he was imagining that since Butch and he had stopped being friends, both of them had become more popular with the rest of the officers. The first time they had both attended one of these gatherings—on what Crispin thought of as that terrible night—Butch’s efforts to ingratiate himself with their colleagues had been largely spurned. Now he was the life of the party. Had he been networking behind Crispin’s back? One thing was certain, he was uproariously drunk. When he performed a Dewisson song-and-dance number on top of a coffee table, heels clacking like out-of-sync castanets, Crispin wanted to sink into the floor.
But this was not possible, even metaphorically. Despite his efforts to keep a low profile, one officer after another claimed his attention, pressing drinks on him, smiling toothily, regaling him with meaningless good wishes. Crispin watched their eyes. Were those flashes of complicity—or merely the wet gleam of drunkenness?
“Good job on One-thirty, Kateralbin! Keep it up!”
“Glad to see you in town at last. We thought you’d kicked the bucket!”
“Where’s your sidekick, Captain? The Kirekuni, I mean! Ha!”
Their hearty, double-edged jocularity convinced Crispin that a good many of them knew more than they ought. He shot a vengeful glance at Burns, who was holding court in another corner, as if he already possessed the commandancy that would surely be his within the week. Burns looked up. Their gazes met across the crowded room. Crispin frowned at him. What the hell?
Burns mouthed something that looked like Don’t worry—and then the crowd surged between them, blocking Crispin’s view.
Furiously, Crispin plunked his drink down on the arm of someone’s chair. How dare Burns? The occupant of the armchair shifted and knocked the drink onto the carpet. Neither he nor Crispin bothered with apologies. The Shadow maids would clean up a hundred such accidents before dawn. How dare he? Crispin stared in the Wraith-blooded captain’s direction as if by the sheer magnetism of his gaze he could force Burns to look at him again. But the water-dripping obelisk stood in the way. It glowed like a column of light, like the answer to all questions, casting those answers in little bright undecipherable fragments on men’s faces and on the backs of their jackets.
Crispin had not had any sleep the night before. He, Burns, and Mickey had talked until dawn, when Crispin and Mickey were scheduled to fly, and Burns departed in a mist of good humor. The fatigue was getting to him. He’d leave soon, go to the room he’d commandeered in HQ, and sleep, blessedly alone—
“Cris!” It was Butch, flanked by a bevy of captains. “How are you? Haven’t seen you in years!”
He held a cocktail with a little wooden monkey perching on the rim of the glass. His face was flushed from the exertions of his dance routine, his lips wet, his jacket buttoned askew. A horrible chord twanged in Crispin’s gut. He wanted to pretend nothing had ever happened to drive them apart; but Butch had blundered so badly at first, in ignoring Crispin, that now, no matter how friendly he acted, it would be impossible to revise the past. “You’re not a particularly appealing sight when you’re drunk, my friend,” Crispin said wryly.
“I’m stone raving sober! And I’m about to get even soberer!” The rest laughed appreciatively. “We’re gonna make an excursion, Cris. Discover ‘the dark beauty inherent in the night’!” More laughter. “Ask you if you wanted to come!”
“Underage Shadow girls may be your cup of tea, they aren’t mine,” Crispin said. His own rudeness astonished him. “And your actions led me to believe they weren’t yours, either.”
Everybody grinned. There were too many jokes made daily on that topic for them not to know what was meant. Butch’s eyes clouded briefly as the jab hit home, and then opened wide. He was going to choose not to get it. “Ah, yes, my poor, beloved Katerina! But, Cris, she’s five hundred miles away and happily married, too; I daresay she won’t be offended! Nor will your Miss Duckworth! Or was it Clothworth? Duckwright? Do come.”
“Clothwright,” Crispin said. He felt his patience about to snap. “As if it mattered.”
“He’s had a drop,” one of Butch’s followers said. “Let’s go, Keynes. Leave him.”
“Hot-shot ace, my ass.”
“Shut up.” Butch turned to them. “And fuck off, why don’t you?”
They laughed. Apparently even when Butch cursed at them he could do no wrong. “I’ll catch up with you outside. Be just a minute. Grab my coat, will you?”
And they moved off and Crispin and Butch were momentarily isolated among the loud eddies of the gathering. In that instant the mask of joviality melted off Butch’s face, revealing distress. “Cris! When it goes off—I wanted to talk to you, tell you—”
“Tell me what?” Crispin said bad-temperedly. The realization that he had misjudged Butch’s degree of inebriation made him feel even worse than before, and therefore crankier. He despised Butch. He missed him.
“Not here! Can’t tell you here!”
“And I’m Queen-damned well not coming with you to some sleazy Shadow brothel!”
Butch cast a desperate look around, as if expecting inspiration to spring from the air. “You, me, and Vee on the thirtieth, two crews each, right?”
“Right.”
“Word is they’re gonna revise the composition tomorrow. Burns got Duncan to throw his weight about a bit. He—Burns—is in and I’m out.”
“Frankly, I’d rather have Burns than you at my back, anyway,” Crispin said. “And I’m gonna find this all out tomorrow, right? So—”
Butch moaned. His gaze darted over the crowd, the air, the ceiling, everywhere except Crispin’s face. “All right, all right! It was me who badgered Duncan! Burns was pissed as all hell.”
Whatever Butch was trying to communicate was getting less comprehensible by the minute. Crispin sighed. “Go away! You’ve said your piece.”
“You—I—oh, all right. I just wanted to say good-bye, that’s all!” Butch rooted in one pocket after another. “Shit!” With an air of desperation, he pulled the monkey decoration off the rim of his glass and thrust it into Crispin’s hand. “Here. I want you to keep this. It’s a bit of nothing, I know, but it comes from me, I want you to remember that. Please. All right?”
“All right!” Crispin said bemusedly, pocketing the monkey, thinking that Butch must have meant to bring some good-luck charm for Crispin to take on the fateful mission. It was quite sweet of him. Or else—
“Hey, screw her brains out for me. Okay? I’d come if I weren’t so tired.”
“You would bloody well not, and I wouldn’t either,” Butch said, giving Crispin a look of disgust. “You think I do this shit because I enjoy it? It’s public relations, boyo, pure PR.” And then he was gone, swaggering with perfectly faked tipsiness through the crowd to his cronies, who were hailing him loudly from the door, waving his greatcoat at him like a flag.
Left alone, Crispin took the monkey out again and looked at it. It was carved of some dark brown hardwood and it had long legs, realistically crafted so that it could cling to the rim of a glass as if that were a tree branch. It had a skinny curled tail. Its face wore an almost human expression. Funny, he’d seen these little trinkets a hundred times but never noticed the workmanship that went into them. What craftsman in what far-off domain—or faraway country—had carved this little “bit of nothing” all unaware that it would end up on the war front in someone’s martini?
What I should really have liked to do was to travel to Cype, Lamaroon, Eo Ioria... If there had not been a war...
Crispin did not move from his corner, but he found himself exchanging identical phrases of small talk with an unending parade of faces. Everyone of any importance, all the way up to the lieutenant-marshal himself, was seeking him out. What on earth did they all want from him? The only possibility he could come up with was that those in the know—which seemed to be just about everyone except Vichuisse himself, who was still bumping and buzzing against the walls on the other side of the room, getting no more attention than a half-dead bluebottle—those in the know had chosen him to be the next commandant, not Burns, and that they were subtly congratulating him on it. But that was not possible.
On the other hand, Burns was angry about something. When Crispin exchanged the rote pleasantries with him, the Wraith-blooded captain’s evil expression belied his tone. He mentioned Butch several times, needlessly. Crispin gathered the two conspirators had had a falling out.
Faces. Pink, flushed faces. White, sweating faces. White scalps showing through close-shaved fair hair. One slightly darker face, belonging to Burns, who actually looked good in the military buzz cut, since his head was shaped as beautifully as if it had been turned on a lathe. One luxuriant shock of pepper and salt, neatly parted on the side—that belonged to Thraxsson, whose rank permitted him to forgo the buzz cut. What was Thraxsson doing here, anyway? He almost never attended these gatherings. Maybe that was why the crowd was so lively.
In the midst of the noise Crispin felt horribly alone. He hadn’t intended to get drunk, but somehow, by taking polite sips of each of the drinks people handed him, he had become so inebriated that his mind had stopped working properly. Finally he gave himself up to the flow of the night. An endless string of affirmatives.
Faces—
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff—and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
—Vladimir Nabokov