30 Avril 1896 A.D. The Raw: Cerelon’s Air Base XXI
The morning of the thirtieth dawned bright and clear. When Crispin stepped outside he realized it was the first real day of summer. The air was absolutely still; the sun had already bleached the sky. The only sound was the sharp tan-tara of the bugle floating from somewhere near the barracks, where the talented pilot who regularly performed the reveille was ornamenting it with trills and minor notes. It was a perfect day for flying.
An unsuitable day for murder. Everything would be visible for miles.
Don’t hex yourself, Crispin thought, and he rapped his knuckles against the wall of the mess. A splinter caught in his skin, drawing a bead of blood.
At 9:35 he gave a pep talk to his crew and to Jones’s. At 9:45 everyone scrambled for their kites with perfectly choreographed haste. Crispin admired the way they followed each other onto the runway at precise intervals, taking off far enough apart for safety, yet close enough that not a fraction of a minute was wasted. How much they’d improved! Jimenez would not have known them.
Crispin himself took off at the very end of the queue. The wind whipped past the cockpit as Princess Anuei gained speed. The bellowing of the daemon sounded like music in his ears—full of energy, sharp like trumpets, deep as a double bass. Then the kite lifted, and Toeleris’s roar died to a purr. Helmeted and goggled, Crispin took a brief look down. It never failed to amaze him how unassuming Sarehole appeared from the air. Just a handful of wooden dice without spots thrown down on the vast flatness of the Raw. No trees to shade the base; only the threadlike stream from which the ground crews drew water, some two hundred feet away. No one would ever guess that fifty men lived and worked here day in and day out. The buildings looked deserted. Perhaps that was why the base had thus far, in Crispin’s tenure, escaped the ground-strafing of which Burns had warned him—the lizards thought it was deserted now.
Or maybe they simply had better things to attend to.
Crispin gave the signal for his crews to form one large wedge, with himself at its leading tip. They headed south. The warm gale exhilarated him. His hands were perfectly steady on stick and whipcord. Several miles to the east, they sighted the wedge of aircraft spearheaded by the silver Cerdres 500, and farther off, the identically sized wedge which could only be Burns and his men. The plan was for them all to converge over the Ferupian front, ten miles to the south. Then they would make for their target—the Kirekuni infantry which scouts said had been massing for days opposite the spot where the strafing of an ammo dump had weakened the Queen’s lines. It was in the middle of the battle which was sure to ensue, as soon as a Kirekuni patrol got wind of them, that Crispin planned to act.
10:56 A.M.
The child that the wind and the earth had when they danced
But eleven years earlier, when he watched his mother die (although he had not known that was what was happening), he had not acted. He had knelt frozen behind the curtain among Anuel’s prohibited props, caught between the instinct which told him to scream and the fear of betraying his presence in the black top, where his mother had forbidden him ever to set foot on pain of “the worst beating you ever had from the biggest roughneck in this circus and break my heart, too.”
Joie 1885 A.D.
Ferupe: Linhe Domain: Gilye City
Breaking Anuei’s heart was the only childhood nightmare that still frightened Crispin, now he was training on the flying trapezes and growing an inch a week. Anuei’s regular threats had not lost their power, but gained it, if anything, now that he felt himself maturing beyond the ability to obey her. She hated the fact that he was training with the Valentas, but he couldn’t give it up just for her. And here in the hot dry east, the smell of Millsy’s uncollared daemons pervaded the circus lot like dust, and he could not help scanning the crowds who trickled past the ticket booth, looking for his father’s relatives.
And Anuei was saying, “No! No!” and she was struggling, “Don’t!” in the middle of the act in which she had engaged with her customer. Crispin knew what they were doing, but he had never seen it done like this, and he wanted to be sick. And Anuei was crying weakly, “Stop, it hurts!” and then something in Lamaroon, and then she was still. And after an obscenely long time the little tanned easterner pulled away from her and scrambled around the tent like a huge, desperate spider, picking up this, putting down that, checking her pulse, whimpering, and finally seizing on what he must have seen as the only possible solution—but Crispin didn’t understand that, nor would he ever understand, for in later years he would not allow himself even to remember those moments when he crouched, a terrified pair of eyes and ears, hearing (uncomprehending) the first crackle of flame, seeing the bright flower in Anuei’s long hair, and not being able to move.
She had always taken a metal fire-bowl into the tent with her, for burning incense. It was one of the many ironies of her career that incense was not a Lamaroon tradition. It had first been introduced to Ferupe by eleventh-century explorers who traveled to the far-off Asias. Seven centuries later, it was popular in many parts of the continent, and the cheapest and .best sorts all came from Cype; but it had never caught on in Lamaroon, perhaps because people there were too poor for frivolities, and uninterested in mysticism, or perhaps because the natural smells of that island country were so powerful and delightful that no artificially produced scent could compete. But then again, almost none of the accessories Anuei used to set the mood in her tent were authentically Lamaroon. In the nineteenth century, Lamaroon—Anuei had philosophically told her son—was just too much like a hotter Ferupe. At least the Lamaroon that people knew was. Authenticity would have bored them. Most of the props were Cypean trash-deco, with the odd trinket from Izte Kchebuk’ara.
And here the circus was on the Cypean border again, and Anuei had told her son she’d asked Saul Smithrebel, as a special favor which everyone had known he would grant her, because he always did, to show the outskirts of Gilye for three days straight while she made a shopping expedition into the Cypean sector to replenish her supplies of incense, glass beads, tattoo inks, and suchlike. The border between Ferupe and Cype, as it had most recently been redesigned, cut straight through the city. Anuei had told Crispin that this time he was old enough to accompany her. He anticipated the trip with avid curiosity. The roustabouts had tried to scare him with horror stories about Cypean ghosts and vampires and religiosos—he half expected that as soon as he and Anuei crossed that invisible line down the middle of Border Street, these oddities would start popping out of the walls; he wanted to be able to report to his older friends that they hadn’t. All his friends were grown men, but he did not consider them any different from himself. At twelve, he stood on the borderline; his childish curiosity was beginning to be tinged with the darker, more dangerous curiosity of the adolescent. He had just been initiated into the firing of daemon rifles, and promoted to the roster of sentries who stood duty every night outside the circled trucks.
It was a combination of these things that made him, for the first time in his life, risk breaking his mother’s heart. He wanted to witness her exotic dancing and her inking of tattoos on stunned men’s biceps and backs. Surely, even if she discovered him, she was pleased enough with him at the moment, as evidenced by the offer of the shopping trip, that her heart wouldn’t break?
And she couldn’t discover him!
What he did not know as he wormed under the edge of the black top, having coaxed a reluctant Millsy to stand guard while he worked out one of the tent pegs, was that Anuei’s heart was going to break—or rather to pop, as a result of her obesity and a particularly unnatural sexual position—that very afternoon. The inside of the tent was black after the dazzling eastern sun. Wriggling under the canvas, laying it flat behind him so that not a crack of light should enter, he found himself in a narrow curtained-off space full of boxes. He eased them aside to make room to kneel. His fingers itched to lift the lids of the boxes—anticipating wetness, smoothness, lumpiness, he did not know what—but he sought the overlap between the curtains. He could already hear the sounds. Such sounds, inadequately disguised by the chirping of Anuei’s rare birds!
The curtains were heavy and dark red. Cheeks burning with shame, Crispin eased them apart just far enough to see.
Gilye, everyone agreed, was a strange city. None of the performers or roustabouts liked it. They hailed from northern and central Ferupe, and they did not like the east in general. During the middle hours of the day, Gilye was deserted; at night, it came alive with gaslight and crowds and weird, tuneless tinkly-tonk music. But the Gilyanese, like most easterners, thought entertainment was as important as food and sleep—that was because they were all half-Cypean, the Old Gentleman maintained—and so they flocked to the circus, not knowing or caring that Smithrebel’s was just a mud show. They had never seen Murk & Nail’s, or Gazelle’s, or the Stix Brothers’. To them, Smithrebel’s Fabulous Aerial and Animal Show was as exotic as their honky-tonk music was to the Ferupian circus band. “And that’s why we keep coming back here!” the Old Gentleman railed when his people grumbled. “Where d’you think your salaries come from when we’re stuck in some western dirthole? Eh? They come from these sons of bitches and their triple-Queen-damned Cypean trade route! Now who says I don’t know about saving for a rainy day?”
It was on the eastern swing before last, Anuei told her son with an artful mist in her eyes, that she had met Joe Kateralbin, Crispin’s father.
“He told me he loved me,” she said.
He had come to see her act. Then he had come again. And again. And again, paying twice what she charged each time.
“First I didn’t believe him when he said he couldn’t live without me. Then he signed on as a roustabout—one of our men did run off with a Cype girl. And after that he didn’t talk to me no more, just sat staring at me with those big sad eyes across the fires at night. Couple of months down the road, I had to believe him.”
She sighed nostalgically. Crispin, as a child, had pressed her to continue. The middle of the story varied—Anuei enjoyed inventing romantic vignettes too much to keep repeating the same thing over and over—but it always ended the same way. “Joe couldn’t stand this cold northern climate. He got feverous. He needed the sun, that man, like you and me need air. I nursed him for weeks—you being just a new baby I wasn’t performing anyhow—but he died no matter what. Aah!” She pulled a horrible face. “Saul cried crocodile tears at Joe’s graveside, him. He was joyous!”
And the postscript of the story, which Crispin recited in silence, grinding his teeth, was that after Joe Kateralbin’s death Saul had got Anuei back.
Crispin did not know, of course, that Saul had had her to himself all along; that the stories of Joe were an elaborate fiction created by Anuei because she hated Saul and was ashamed of having let him father her child; that she had chosen his surname because there had been a roustabout named Kateralbin who died of fever around the time of Crispin’s birth. Crispin had no ties to the east except the ones of which he convinced himself. In the fullness of time he would find out the truth. By then, he would feel so strongly about the east that that particular element of Anuei’s fiction would have passed into reality. But now he was only twelve, and it was the middle of the day in that hot city where he believed Anuei had met Joe, and the customers drifting along Smithrebel’s tiny midway were probably the only people awake in the entire city, for most of the circus people, too, had succumbed to the heat and were resting in the trucks before the evening performance. And inside the incense-gloom of the black top, Crispin watched in terror as flames sizzled in Anuei’s hair and leapt up the painted hangings. The rare birds beat against their cages. Anuei did not move even when the fire caught her wooden beads (she wore nothing else) and spread to her pubic hair. The john was long gone—he had gibbered, setting the fire, and slipped out as silently as a thief—and Crispin knelt paralyzed behind the curtain, tears pouring down his cheeks.
Only when the smoke got thick enough to throw him into a spasm of coughing did he move. He struggled out from under the side of the tent, choking, his eyes running. Millsy had been waiting anxiously outside; he wondered why Crispin had not yet reemerged, but he hadn’t seen the threads of smoke escaping through the seams of the tent. He tried to catch Crispin, but the boy eluded him. Sobbing, Crispin dashed toward Sunflower 1, shouting for Saul. “Old Gentleman! Old Gentleman! Anuei—fire—the fucking bastard—help—fire—”
In his terror, Crispin had used his private name for Saul, and so neither Smithrebel nor anyone else knew who he was calling. But his distress alerted a good number of locals and midway vendors. When they saw the flames bursting from the roof of Anuei’s tent, the crowd dissolved briefly into chaos, but inside a minute everybody was organizing one of those spontaneous efforts to combat disaster which some say are a measure of our humanity. A local man, a complete stranger, took it on himself to crawl into the black top and try to rescue Anuei. It was far too late, of course. By the time Saul arrived oh the scene four minutes later, the flames had been put out, and Crispin, hysterical for the second and last time in his life, was being held back from the steaming wet ruin.
Some of Anuei’s props were salvaged—although Crispin never found out what happened to them after that (he suspected Saul of confiscating them). But the Balloon Lady herself was unsalvageable. The exotic dancer, the skilled prostitute, the tattoo artist, the mother of one and lover of one who wept all night for her (Crispin in the multiple arms of the Flying Valentas, Saul alone), the woman who had had the distinction of being the only full-blooded Lamaroon performing in a Ferupian circus at that time—Anuei Eixeiizeli was three-quarters cremated already.
Saul canceled both the performances that night. No one objected. Anuei had been better loved than she had been appreciated. They cremated the rest of her on the spot. The Gilyanese came in crowds to see the circus, and when they found that it was off, they stayed to watch the funeral pyre. Some of them helped the festival atmosphere along by setting off fireworks and tossing strings of red crackers into the fire. Others started a tuneless, catchy Cypean chant. Crispin was staring miserably into the fire when he found himself caught up in an impromptu conga line snaking around him. A toothless, grinning Cypean woman gripped one of his hands; a boy a few years older than himself took the other. His feet were drawn into the stamping, shuffling dance step. The other boy bent forward and shouted, “Sing up!” Timidly, Crispin added his voice to the chorus. Soon he was singing so loudly and being tugged about so fast that the tears were dry on his cheeks. He could not cry. He could not even think.
Saul and Millsy both found the Gilyanese people’s disrespect horrendous. Joining forces for what was probably the first time in their lives, they encouraged the Ferupian roustabouts to break up the party. The locals departed, cursing quietly. Saul shot their dirty looks back at them; he was thinking, wildly, that Gilye no longer seemed so hospitable, and that with Anuei gone there was no reason to stay, they’d move on this very night, yes, move on, and with an armed man riding on the roof of every truck—
Detached from his companions, his back to the dying bonfire, Crispin scuffed his feet in the dust. The night wind blew cold. The stars shone faintly overhead, misted by the lights of the circus lot.
Saul’s hand closed on his shoulder.
10:37 A.M.
Kherouge: Center City: the Enclave of the Most Patriotic
Consecrated Sisters
Sun-time
“My blood is Royal!” chanted Rain with the others. “My body is Royal!”
The pianola’s slow, majestic chords rolled out from the back of the chapel like waves of sound, breaking over the veiled heads of the Consecrated, whence the foam of voices rose. Rain knelt in the back row, where the pianola was loudest. Sister Fairday clasped her right hand, Sister Breeze her left. The chapel was full of summer dust—right outside the windows lay the courtyard in the middle of the Enclave—and the musky incense the Consecrated used to combat the dust added to the weight of the air: but by moving her head infinitesimally to one side or the other, she could smell Fairday and Breeze’s good, familiar soap-and-onions perfume. The women prayed slowly, in a manner that tested both vocal pitch and lung capacity, prolonging each word on note after downsliding note, so that what might originally have been conceived as a hymn became a mantra. Repeat after repeat, Rain’s lips and lungs formed the words on their own, and her mind wandered where it had been wandering far too often lately: out of the Enclave, out of the familiar streets of Kherouge, into the vast, terrifying, scintillating world where she had been Rae, and from which she had fled. The memories of that flight still gave her nightmares. She was all of twenty-one now, and a mother, and she had been safe in the Enclave for two years. But she still cried in her sleep. And Breeze had to slide into bed with her and hold her to keep her from scratching herself as she clutched for the silver amulet that no longer hung around her neck. She’d had to discard the amulet when she entered the Enclave, along with the gowns Master Player Authrond had given her, and his necklaces and earrings. Silver made the Royals’ skin break out; and a Sister wore only black.
But amulet or no amulet, even with nothing to remind her of the past, her mind still wandered. The letter she had received from Okimako worried her. She could remember her mother mentioning a sister in Kirekune, but she had not imagined the woman was still alive, far less up to locating a long-lost niece, and she had never heard of any of the other family members Sala Ash mentioned. She did not know whether to reply, or what to say. She did not know how Sala Ash had found her. That was worrying, too. And her mind slid farther back into the past: to the toothlike tower, and Colonel Sostairs, the author of the worst pain she had ever felt; to Master Player Authrond. Had he grieved when she ran away? Had he found another floozy yet?
Finally, inevitably, her thoughts went to him. She always ended up thinking of him. It saddened her that she had forgotten his face. She remembered only striking details: his massive, callused hands, the thin white marks on his huge pectorals, the way he had felt inside her when they made love, she biting her lips not to cry out because the orphaned boy was sleeping right there beside them. Where might he be now? And where was Crispin?
They were both dead, they had to be dead, and she hoped they were, prayed they were, for she wished them well. She wished them the bliss of the Royal embrace, not the dreariness and pain of sun-time.
She wished Crispin dead. She wished him here.
No!
“My heart is Royal!”
Sunlight slanted through the window slits. They had already been kneeling for over two hours on the stone-flagged floor of the chapel. Rain’s knees were throbbing, and her back ached. She welcomed the pain as a distraction from her thoughts of him. But her discomfort brought a different, equally familiar worry. Why was it that she could no longer lose herself in prayer as she had been able to in her first year with the Consecrated?
“My offspring is Royal!”
It wasn’t that her thoughts were wrong—no thoughts were wrong, for there was no wrong, only a single Right—but thinking distracted her from praying.
As always, the first order of the day after their morning chores had been communion with the Resident Royals. Communion drained her of any lingering sleepiness, leaving her with a marvelous sense of lightness and emptiness that was the closest thing to bliss anyone could achieve in sun-time. After communion, she generally sailed through the subsequent three hours of hymns and cued prayer on wings of pure spirituality. The blooming heat of a Kherouge summer could do nothing to wilt that energy. Each word from whichever Sister was leading the prayer sparked chain reactions of understanding in the bright emptiness of her mind.
But lately she had been coming out of the confessional more tired than euphoric. And her mind had been drifting unconscionably.
The sun would be high in the sky before they ate anything. But she could already feel her stomach growling.
It was probably just the fatigue of Jonathan’s birth, lingering on longer than normal because she was not yet accustomed to the life.
“Consecrated—my laughter! Consecrated—my tears! Consecrated—my breath! My sun-time is Royal!”
Her Sisters would care for her if she became sick. Her Sisters would not let her fail.
“My body is Royal!”
Jonathan was only six months old, He was still suckling. She nearly lost her place in the chant as she imagined the piercing cries that would greet her when she hurried to the nursery to give him a feed before noon. Only six months old, and he could scream like a vulture.
“My blood is Royal!”
Six months old and still so ugly—
(His little hands and feet were as well developed as those of an infant three times his age, and he was already beginning to sit up—it was unnatural—)
So ugly!
Jonathan. My son.
Where is the one who should have been his father?
“My heart is Royal!”
An expression of pure joy shone on the face of Cloud, Speaking Sister. She clawed the air above her head, reaching for the ceiling. Cloud was a stout woman—she had borne seven offspring—but right now she looked as though she might fly weightless through the roof, her black robes flapping like birds’ wings. The pianola chords swelled, The women raised their voices in the final cadenza of the hymn, and the very dust that danced in the walls of sunlight seemed to vibrate. The barking of a courtyard dog outside was almost inaudible. “My offspring is Royal!”
Oh, dear Queen, my Queen, do something
But at that moment in the depths of the palace-fortress in Kingsburg, the Queen was not doing anything at all. Lithrea the Second floated on a sea of cushions in the sixth parlor of the Royal suite nine stories below the ground, her face a dark, wrinkled little raisin in the magnificent candy of her morning gown, whose ruff stood up behind her head like the frill of a lizard. Her bib of jewels encircled her neck as tightly as a collar. The total weight of the gown was about forty pounds. She could not have moved so much as an arm without help.
10:38 A.M. Ferupe: Kingsburg: the underground fortress
The Queen listened with what, for her, approximated pleasure as her Royal Cousin Farthred played his harmonium. The tune was called “A Sweet Rain in the Heartlands,” and it was composed through with no choruses. Farthred played loudly and accurately, though mechanically: this was one of his best days, Lithrea thought, and even on his bad days he was good enough to command the attention of the gathered ladies and courtiers and even the Royals, who unlike their inferiors would not have pretended interest if they hadn’t felt it. Even if they had been bored, however, the Cousins and Aunts and Uncles would still have had to listen, for Lithrea had asked Farthred to play, and the Queen’s request was law. Farthred would have had to play even if he had ten broken fingers!
But of course in that case, Lithrea thought vaguely, she would not have made the request! For she was the kindest monarch in centuries, wasn’t she, a kind Queen and a gentle one, everyone called her Lithrea the Compassionate, at least everyone around her did, and as for the outsiders she didn’t know, it was only rarely she remembered that there were outsiders. Remembered on her own, that is. Her other self remembered them all the time like needles in its nonflesh, and hated them, my goodness how it hated them! But all the same Lithrea was kind to them, and if she was kind to the commoners, well, of course, she was the very spirit of beneficence where her own relatives were concerned.
And she had a special soft place in her heart for Farthred, or at least she had had when she still had a place in her heart for anyone. She liked Far even though he had not been able to give her a child, any more than her other male Cousins (of whom there were fewer and fewer as the oldest ones died off) had been able to. None of them had sired a child on any of the other Royal women either. It had been a proper old game of musical beds when she was young! But the hurdy-gurdy had played, and then stopped, and it was all of no avail. There were no Royals young enough to have children anymore, and the sycophants went about with terror and greed in their eyes.
Despite the fires in the many hearths, it was freezing cold in the parlor. It always got cold whenever two or more Royals gathered together. The courtiers’ lips were blue, and they chafed their hands as they smiled and tapped their toes to the music. They understood nothing about Lithrea and her relatives; they were too stupid to understand, her father had told her, even were the Royals to try to explain. Lithrea knew this, and so she had never tried. She simply took it for granted that no one except herself and her Cousins—and perhaps the Significants, but she could only feel them as a hostile shimmer in the white distance, she had heard nothing from them in twenty years, ever since that imbecile ambassador flubbed his mission and communications froze—that no one except these few knew the true, terrible immensity of the situation. If they did, perhaps they would give Lithrea a little more credit. Perhaps. They thought she was as crazy as a crab in boiling water, and as close to dying. She had glimpsed looks of dread on the faces of even her most trusted advisers when she missed what they said because a daemon had been jabbering in her ear, or when she stopped in the middle of a sentence because for a second she had been no longer Lithrea but a daemon in the far-off Wraithwaste, where Lithrea had never been, the whipcord choking her as she fled from the pain at thirty miles an hour.
But still and still, Farthred was good on his harmonium. And music was the only thing that could distract her from the immaterial for so much as an instant, these days. Only music could banish her Cousins’ relentless non sequiturs.
She adjusted her face into an expression of bliss, intending to doze for a few moments, cocooned in the music. And the variously beringed courtiers must have been so relieved that she was not twitching, or calling out fragments of street barkers’ pitches she had never heard, that they did not see her hand slip off the head of her idiot lapdog. They did not see her eyelids flutter closed. No one—especially not her Cousins, who like her were enclosed in the world of their heritage, hemmed off from the courtiers and from each other by the frantic jabbering of the other cousins who twined invisibly about them—saw the slow rise and fall of her bodice stop.
Lithrea’s seventy-two-year-old face relaxed. Miles of fine wrinkles smoothed out of her skin. A thread of drool crept out of the corner of her red-painted mouth.
Inside her head she was running, galloping, flying, worming, crawling (for she had all forms and none) across a dark landscape shot across with lightning. She was daemon. She was Wraith. She was Royal. She was in every last corner of the world at once. She was darkness hemmed in by the light that roiled at all her horizons, hearing the distant screams of pain from those cousins who had already been embraced by the light, feeling their agony. Their/her necks were collared with cruel silver, they/her were burned alive in hardwood saucers, they/her were choked by silver-braided whipcords, they/her were fired half-dead out of blunderbusses, they/her were crammed into tiny cells whose oak walls irritated them beyond pain to madness. They/her in the distance were all mad. Nothing remained in any of their/her minds except pain and fury and fear: kill, flee, kill, escape, flee!
And the light was closing in. The last bastion of darkness where she ran, galloped, flew, wormed, crawled, slept, ate, sang, talked, and groomed herself was shrinking faster than she would have believed possible. The western horizon was loud with gunfire, red with blood.
Lithrea moaned. She wasn’t her father, able to calm the darkness with a silent command. Her old heart pounded. The darkness was a lake and the lake was dammed up, and the shores were closing in. Where were the fish to go? Where? She had to escape before the dam burst—
In the sixth parlor, Royal Cousin Alithry’s head jerked up and she let out a raw, bubbling cry. Then she slumped sideways in her chair. Her wig fell off and dangled. None of the other Royal Cousins paid any attention; they went on smiling vaguely, listening to Cousin Farthred, who kept on playing, like a windup music box that cannot be stopped until it has finished its tune. But the courtiers leapt out of their chairs, pressing around Alithry, and the Queen’s parrot on its golden perch sensed their panic and screeched, “Kingsburg’s burning! Kingsburg’s burning! Fire fire! Fire fire! Pour on water. Pour on water—” a jingle it had heard from the mouth of the Queen, which she had got from her invisible cousins, who had got it from a gang of street children in the Razia district. “Kingsburg’s burning! Kingsburg’s burning—”
“Royal Alithry! Open your eyes!”
“Alithry!”
“Fire fire! Pour on water!”
“If somebody doesn’t shut that damned parrot up—”
“She was just sitting here, and then—”
“We all saw what happened. It’s the same thing happened to Royal Melithra. Go get Physician Exupery, quick!”
“Don’t be a fool! If you have him down here for nothing, he’ll—”
“It’s not nothing.” A youth with blond hair was pressing Alithry’s shriveled, sallow wrist. “Her heart’s not beating.”
“Queen, no—”
“It’s not, I tell you.”
And as children looking to the oldest of their crew when disaster strikes, all of their faces turned like sunflowers to the Queen, who had not moved, nor paid any attention to the minidrama going on below her dais. She lay still on her cushions, under her midnight blue canopy with its dripping swags of topazes. Her idiot lapdog was licking her face. Her bosom was not moving, and her eyes were half-open, slits of yellow whites showing in her face like bones through crescent-shaped gashes.
The panic that had previously been contained within the parameters of a familiar disaster lit the room on fire. Faster than any fire, it moved out into the rest of the suite, upstairs, through the rest of the palace. Soon the courtiers—none of whom had dared to come closer to the Queen than five feet—were crowded out of the parlor by sentries, ministers, policy makers, generals, advisers, clerks, and a host of physicians. These packed in around the Queen like voyeurs at the scene of a violent crime. Exupery himself was hustled through the crowd. The top brass willingly gave ground to him. Fussily, he extracted his stethoscope and placed it on the least jewel-encrusted part of the Queen’s bodice.
“There are vital signs,” he said at last. The ministers, generals, and advisers controlled a collective urge to strangle him. They had already ascertained that Lithrea wasn’t dead—not like poor Royal Cousin Alithry! “But what’s wrong with her?” someone shouted. “Is she sleeping? In a swoon? In a coma? Or is it—”
“We are all aware that the patient is prone to fits,” Exupery said calmly. “However, this time her withdrawal appears more pronounced. She does not respond to external stimuli. I shall have to examine her at length.” He put down his stethoscope and started to fiddle with the Queen’s bodice, possibly in the hope of finding the fastenings. His chances were poor: every man in the room knew it took six ladies to dress the Queen—three to hold her gown while the others lifted her into it. The air took on a sudden metallic bite. The ministers and advisers closest to the Queen sneezed.
Lithrea started violently up off her cushions. Her skull met Exupery’s nose and he fell backwards with a screech. “Freesias!” Lithrea screamed. “Fresh-picked freesias from country gardens! Melon ice, ma’am? Strawberries cherries blue raspberries, who’ll buy me raspberries, only two shillin’s the quarter; I gotta sell ‘em cheap, me little daughter cried when I was going to drown ‘em, only a shilling for the black an’ two for the calico, their mum’s the best mouser in Razia, shine ya shoes, sir? Kingsburg’s burning! I kin tell yer lonely—it’s a dark evenin’—Kingsburg’s burning—”
A rasping noise came from her throat and she fell back. Everyone gathered was momentarily stunned. Exupery recovered first, and stumbled to his feet, trying vainly to staunch his bleeding nose. “Hot tea!” he shouted, windmilling his free hand, spraying drops of blood over the ministers and military men. “Hot tea, and five drops of my tonic number seven, and have her ladies take her to her boudoir! Now! On the double! Are you all half-wits?”
Lithrea opened her eyes.
What are all these people doing here? she thought vaguely. They will excite the cousins and we will have no peace for days.
Her whole body ached. If only they wouldn’t all come running every time she...
“Why has Farthred stopped playing?” she said suddenly. “Have I been asleep?” She attempted a joke. “That’s really no cause for alarm, you know. Even I have to sleep occasionally. Although I admit, it was rude of me to drop off while my dear cousin was performing.”
“I—I believe he has finished now, Queen,” stammered one of the overhanging faces.
“Then tell him to give us another tune. He is so clever with that harmonium of his.”
The fire flickers and dies.
10:59 A.M.
The Raw: Salzeim Parallel: the Kirekuni lines, 3,000 feet
The Kirekunis took much longer than Crispin had expected to mount a counterattack. The Gorgonettes, led by Vichuisse’s Cerdres, were making their fourth dive at the scattering ground troops. Their screamer holds were nearly empty, their mission of destruction close to complete. When Crispin heard bullets directly above him, he thanked the Queen silently. He had been afraid the Kirekunis weren’t going to put in an appearance after all. He dragged Princess Anuei sideways to avoid an orange fountain of ground fire and pulled her up out of her dive. Behind him, a Gorgonette spun sideways and burst into flame. Not all the troops on the ground were too demoralized to strike back at their killers, and at the lowest point of the attack dive, when the Gorgonettes opened their screamer ports, the little monoplanes were particularly vulnerable to ack-ack. This was neither the first loss of the day nor, from the look of the sky, would it be the last. As Princess Anuei gained altitude, Crispin cursed silently. There were far more of them than he had hoped for. Although to hope for any at all had been unpatriotic, really, hadn’t it? KE-122s, old-style Shuilies, and even some Horogazi firebombers. They were fairly pouring out of the east, five or six dozen of them, raining fire on the Gorgonettes caught down at rooftop height.
Several Ferupian planes in succession nose-dived into the ground. The rhythm of the attack dive faltered and broke apart. Two Gorgonettes collided and instantly self-destructed. The shrapnel from that collision would kill more Kirekunis than the two planes ever could have by firing on them—that was the idea behind operational suicide, of course—yet what an ignoble way to die. Crispin winced to see it. The battle was boiling up toward him. Coolly, he assessed the odds. The Kirekunis’ style of attack was not far off operational suicide today. They were flinging their aircraft about with nerveless abandon. They had the advantages of surprise, altitude, and numbers. The Ferupian pilots were all out of formation and firing wildly—apparently forgetting that they were as good as out of ammunition.
Crispin banked so fast that Princess Anuei nearly stalled, and plunged down into the fray, signaling his crews to rally to him. Escape obviously had to be their first priority. Vichuisse would just have to wait—that’s all—have to wait—
As a squadron captain, he had trained himself to resist the killing frenzy which even the tamest engagements had once provoked in him. But his men, even stoic Jones, had not. Battle was an addictive sort of candy, no matter how bitter the odds. One taste, and you could not stop. You wanted that lizard, that one, and your daemon howled and thundered, egging you on, and you didn’t care if you died trying, you wanted him—
Crispin couldn’t catch his men’s attention, far less make them rally to him. Not even Mickey responded to his signals. Through the clatter and the fire, he could see Burns desperately trying to marshal his own men, with as little success. Didn’t the fools understand that if they didn’t turn tail and run now, they wouldn’t get out of there alive? There were just too many KEs, and they were attacking too wildly!
Princess Anuei juddered as bullets ripped across her port wing. Kill or be killed.
Crispin did not know how much later it was when he depressed his firing button and—
—nothing happened.
A. thin stream of tinies sputtered from his ports. The KE-122 he’d been targeting dodged them easily.
If he had even one burst of screamers left, it would be a weak one. His thoughts resolved themselves into a single word, a word like a drop of freezing water hitting his brain softly, coldly, relentlessly.
Vichuisse.
It was the water torture to which he had been subject for months, which distracted him from everything else, amplified all of a sudden to an immediacy that could not conceivably be denied. Forcing himself not to touch the screamer button, he maneuvered Princess Anuei out of the deadly center of the action.
Vichuisse.
Tremors came over him, shaking his body like a leaf in the wind. In the past he had never started to shake until after a battle, but this time his teeth were chattering, and he could scarcely maintain his hold over Princess Anuei’s speed-maddened daemon. Vichuisse was not hard to spot. There he was in Crispin’s reflectors, circling, high up and far out of the action, “playing umpire,” as Mickey had said, his Cerdres 500 glinting like a noon star on the whitewashed sky. Crispin did not waste a second as he took Princess Anuei into a climb.
Queen, oh Queen. He felt his lips forming the words, felt them buzz in his throat, though he could not hear a thing. I don’t have a second but help me. Send Mickey. I’m nearly out of ammo, and if I try for Vee and can’t do for him, then I’m done for, I might as well commit operational suicide! Queen, send Mickey, and let him have some screamers left in his hold. Let him have been frugal—Queen—
He swore aloud, disbelievingly, as a winged fleck climbing ahead of him out of the west, toward the same 4,000-foot pinnacle where Vichuisse circled, proved to be not Mickey, but Burns. The fuselage of the Wraith-blooded captain’s Killer B-99 was painted with a lewd arrangement of red petals that was impossible to mistake even from a distance. “Shit!” Crispin said as relief washed through him, making his hands shake so badly he could scarcely grip the stick. “From now on I say my prayers every day! Queen!”
Burns had professed inability to take part in the actual murder because Vichuisse already suspected him of treacherous inclinations. But Burns hadn’t known he even would have the chance to take part until two days ago. This mission was to have been Butch’s. And Burns hated Vichuisse even more than Crispin did. It would have been sheer humiliation for him to watch Crispin make the kill he wanted so badly. He, too, must have succumbed to the water torture.
With difficulty, Crispin stalled his climb and looped the loop. It was the simple signal he and Mickey had decided upon in Burns’s hearing. It meant: Go for it.
Vichuisse must have seen the two Gorgonettes ascending toward him. He thought nothing of it, of course. Or perhaps, Crispin thought, he believed his two captains had taken his own sensible approach to the massacre below: get the hell out and wait and see who wins.
Whatever was passing through his mind, he did not make any attempt to escape.
The sky shone leaden white. Visibility had been one hundred percent this morning; now the distance was hazy. A heavy blue mist hovered at the horizons. The sun was nearly at its zenith. Neither side could use the solar advantage unless they were diving straight down on their enemies, and by this time, such measures were no longer necessary anyway. The KEs had all but wiped out the Gorgonettes. The QAF was being paid back in spades for the havoc it had wreaked among the Kirekuni troops. Nothing moved in the dust of no-man’s-land except screamers: jewel-colored points of light zipping to and fro until they happened on a corpse, of which there were literally hundreds. There would be no SAPper attack on the Ferupian lines tomorrow—but QAF Squadrons 125, 130, and 139 would never be the same again. Crispin and Burns had a few moments, if that, before the KEs turned their sights upward.
They reached Vichuisse’s altitude and kept climbing—4,500 feet; 5,000 feet. Crispin’s ears popped. He and Burns were forcing their kites toward the apex of a gigantic triangle with one foot in no-man’s-land and one in the Kirekuni Raw. Finally, at 5,300 feet, they met and circled. Vichuisse was directly below them. Right about now he must be starting to wonder what was going on.
The windshields of Burns’s Killer B-99 were frosted with a multitude of cracks. Crispin found it slightly unnerving not to be able to see Burns inside as they passed within forty feet of each other, coasting, letting their daemons catch their breath. Then Burns waggled his rudder: the Bee did a little waltz step in the air. Crispin took his hand off the stick for an instant to give Burns the thumbs-up.
They dived.
Gravity pressed Crispin back into his seat. His vision strobed black. Princess Anuei’s daemon bellowed in pain. He was vaguely aware of Burns diving beside him, wingtip to wingtip, as if they were flying an exhibition. For whom were they parading their skills? Vichuisse? The orange-streaked mess of the battle spun upward, with the single star of the Cerdres 500 superimposed on it, metal wings reflecting the sunlight into Crispin’s eyes. Somehow, he managed to fix Vichuisse in his sights. How was Burns able to target through the opaque ruin of his windshield? He was edging dangerously close aport. Crispin sheered off a little.
The Cerdres filled his sights. He opened fire and felt a fair-sized burst of screamers leave the ports: the dive must have forced every last one of them back into the gun chambers. Emeralds and rubies and sapphires streamed out ahead. He actually saw Vichuisse’s pale face in the shadow of the cockpit as the little daemons glommed onto the Cerdres’s fuselage, which after all contained no real silver, nothing to repel them. Then he yanked the stick hard sideways, forcing the Gorgonette into a port-side spin which was necessary so that he should not dive into his own fire, and as he fought to bring Princess Anuei under control, he blacked out. A split second later he was jerked back to consciousness by an unbearable pain in his leg.
A screamer.
He must have flown into his own fire after all.
This is how pilots die! Quick, quick!—side revolver, safety catch, aim, bring her out of the spin damn it, what if I shoot my foot off— pain—
The crack of the shot deafened him. Gunpowder filled the cockpit. The screamer that had attacked him, and the screamer from his revolver, fell wrangling into the space under his feet. But there were more of them. On the windshield, skinny arms splayed. They were trying to gnaw through the glass. On the wings. Bits of screamer caught in the props. The cockpit wasn’t a sealed chamber; they would have no trouble getting in.
His revolver only held six rounds.
Crispin dispatched the three that found their way into the cockpit, and Princess Anuei’s vertiginous spin shook the rest off. But the trouble was that in order to shoot at them, he had had to take his left hand off the stick—there was no letting go of the whipcord—which meant the spin worsened. And he was losing altitude without regaining control—3,500 feet; 3,000 feet.
Just as he was on the brink of leveling her out, a double fountain of garnet arched across his wings.
The shock made him lose control again. Quite accidentally, Princess Anuei tumbled out of the way of the jeweled rain. Crispin cursed as he struggled once more to level her out. A Ferupian enemy on his tail! Had the attack somehow failed to finish Vichuisse off—was he now chasing Crispin to exact his vengeance? That couldn’t be right! Vichuisse wouldn’t try to kill Crispin! Knowing him, he’d probably promote him instead?
In Crispin’s reflectors.
Burns.
And it all fell into place.
Every smile, every handshake, every conspiratorial nudge, every last fucking minute of their hypocrisy. “Damn it,” Crispin said. “Damn them all, and me, to hell and back.”
How stupid had he been? How trusting, how gullible, how wrong?
He did not lose control again, even though his hands were shaking worse than before, and his left arm ached from the kick of the revolver. He could not lose control again. The determination to get out of this made his blood run cold and slow. The Bee was a black silhouette against the whiteness that filled his reflectors. The dead eye of its shot-up windshield seemed to glow: opaque, merciless. The sun shone brilliantly above. The sky had taken on an overbaked sheen. Crispin could not shake Burns off. Burns fired again: he must have been conserving his ammunition specially for this. This time Crispin did not lose control, and few of the screamers caught Princess Anuei’s wings. Two of them found their way into the cockpit. He dispatched them. Now his revolver was empty.
Out of ammo, completely out! He couldn’t keep this up! If Burns fired successfully on him again, he would be done for. And in the game of cat and mouse, Burns was chasing him downward toward the buzzing swarm of KEs. The Kirekunis had surrounded the few remaining Gorgonettes and were picking them off with deliberate cruelty. Crispin wondered in a moment of black humor what they thought of the spectacle above—one Ferupian hell-bent on shooting down another.
We’re doing their job for them, aren’t we, and have been all along!
Burns fired yet again, and Crispin stalled Princess Anuei dead. It was an old trick. The screamers fell ahead of the Gorgonette’s nose, dropping into the void. For a minute Crispin thought Burns would overshoot him, cheated by his own velocity—but not for nothing had the Wraith half-breed worked his way up through the ranks, any more than Crispin had; and they had both learned their craft in the same school. There Burns was again, firing a long burst, maddened now by the determination to destroy his prey. Crispin knew that feeling well, too. This time the screamers fell just short of Princess Anuei’s tail.
And then came salvation in the form of a Gorgonette out of the sun. Mickey had not got out of the battle, no one could have escaped that: he had evidently fought free earlier, and been circling high, high up, watching and waiting for his moment. Burns, concentrating on targeting Crispin, was taken completely by surprise. Mickey’s screamers poured over the Killer B-99 like a waterfall. Burns shook the craft like a wet cat, but the screamers clung to it like leeches. One stuck right in the middle of the frosted windshield, giving the opaque eye a red pupil. Now it was Burns’s turn to defend himself with his revolver. Crispin’s disbelief turned to jubilation as he watched the Bee’s windshield shatter wide open to a shot from inside the cockpit. “Finish him off, Mick!” he shouted, forcing Princess Anuei around out of danger. “Finish him off!”
But Mickey wasn’t firing again, just waggling his wings frantically, and almost immediately he turned his Gorgonette and fled east. Of course, Crispin realized, he, too, was out of ammo. That must have been his last burst. Thank the Queen he’d had it! Thank the Queen he’d been frugal!
His leg felt as if it were on fire. He didn’t need to touch the wound to know it was still bleeding. With difficulty, he turned Princess Anuei’s nose eastward and jerked the whipcord cruelly, forcing the exhausted, disoriented daemon to put on speed. Ahead of him, the sky was completely empty. Mickey’s Gorgonette was the only fleck on the lavender-colored haze hanging above the Wraithwaste. Behind him, the KEs were finishing off the last of his crewmates. Quite possibly, he and Mickey were the only survivors of the engagement. No one else could have escaped, not unless they had fled earlier—in which case they were cowards.
And Mickey calls himself a coward ...! Crispin thought. I’ve never seen such ...!
And far to the south, a third little wooden monoplane fled east. From the drunken way it was dipping and rolling, Crispin could tell it was Burns, navigating blind. With his windshield shot out, he must be in agony, scarcely able to breathe. But Crispin felt sure he would make it back to base—if not his base, then somewhere he could put down in safety. Damn! Crispin should have guessed he, too, would escape: he was too good a shot for one burst of screamers to finish him off, and too good a pilot not to make a successful getaway.
Vichuisse: bits of aluminum across no-man’s-land: a death: a daemon burned alive in its collar, in its cell.
But at what a cost! What a massacre!
If Burns and I hadn’t been so fixated, each on our own secret ambition, Crispin thought, maybe we could’ve got our men out of there—maybe we could’ve saved Jones, Harrowman, Dupont, Eakin, Cochrane—
It did not bear thinking about.
He was soaked with sweat. His nose and eyes stung from the residue of gunpowder in the air of the cockpit. His ears rang. He had never in his life felt so battered, wounded, and despondent. Vichuisse was dead. There was that. But maybe he would have died anyway, in a disaster like that! Maybe we should have fought our real enemies and let the war take its toll! Because it does, even on cowards, as we have just witnessed, ladiesangentlemen! What a nightmare—what a Queen-awful show—
But at least I found out—
Mickey: 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 business.
He had guessed at Burns’s scheme. But Crispin had not. How could he have been so gullible?
In his heart, he knew why. His own weakness, after the fact, was painfully apparent to him. He could not permit himself to name it—he could only vow never to make the same mistake again. But even as he promised himself never, never, never, he felt an ocean of loss in that resolve, and through the spume he glimpsed the colder shores of cynicism, distant and blue.
Grief braided itself into a rope, binding him in regret, sealing the knots with truth. He wanted to kick himself for his own stupidity. In retrospect, each detail of the plot was crystal clear, each motive outstanding, each dropped hint so obvious that he wondered uselessly how he could have failed to smell a rat. The future whirled before him, a white void. The names of the conspirators sounded in his head: Burns, Emthraze, Thraxsson—oh, that you could stoop so low, Lieutenant-Marshal!—Lennox, Duncan, Butch.
Butch.
Knife in the heart, twist, flourish, keep this, it’s a bit of nothing, I know, but it comes from me, I want you to remember that. Crispin was actually wearing that little wooden monkey today; he’d tied a string on it and hung it around his neck, under his flight suit.
Some good-luck charm!
Butch!
Below, the Raw of the Cerelon sector lay peaceful and still in the sunlight. The day was so calm and clear under the blazing white sky that the land looked like an artificial construct: hills of papier-mâché under a daemon glare. Drawing strength from the spirit of Millsy, the spirit of Anuei, the spirit of the circus, Crispin thought, There is nothing to be gained from stopping here. The show must go on! My leg hurts like the devil, is all, my leg hurts—
—and he wanted a cigarette and a drink, he needed a cigarette and a drink, Queen, his hands were shaking, and no matter how soon Burns carried his tale of treachery to HQ, no matter how soon they came for him, he would not meet them before he had a cigarette, a drink, a wash, and a change of clothes, even condemned men were allowed such things! Even traitors had their rights—
Sarehole came into view below, weathered pine buildings gleaming softly in the sun. It was the most welcome sight Crispin could imagine. His remaining squaddies did not know their captain was a wanted man. They would succor him.
His pocket watch said it was 1:30. As he came in to land, the riggers were putting Mickey’s plane away. Mickey himself stood at the end of the runway. Even from this height, Crispin could see his tail switching. When Crispin climbed stiffly down out of Princess Anuei’s cockpit—the shakes already making a comeback—Mickey hurried up to him and hissed, grabbing his arm with clawed fingers: “You’ve got to get out of here.”
“One hairbreadth escape a day is enough for me. I hope you’ve broken the bad news to the rest. I’m not up to it. I need a drink.”
“Don’t you understand? He was shooting at y—”
“A triple whiskey.”
“You’ve got to escape.”
My man is my man only some of the time
Cause some of the time he’s like hard to find —
Living kind of hard for a lot of his days
Cause see, in our days he had the phrase that pays —
And now I never see him while he do a bid
While he do a bid
Here’s the real truth, kid:
—Terminator X