The Daemon in the Machine by Felicity Savage

Author:Felicity Savage [Savage, Felicity]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epic fantasy, proto-weird, weird fantasy, lgbt fantasy, dieselpunk
Publisher: Knights Hill Publishing
Published: 2013-04-26T06:00:00+00:00

Another Sky

Novambar 1896 A.D. The Likreky Sea.

The Parrot Girl was a tramp turbine eighty feet in length. Her cargo remained a mystery although she was down in the water, both her big holds filled. She had two masts, but Crispin never saw them rigged; her skipper, Hasp Jiharzii, had no qualms about using as many barrels of splinterons as necessary to make the crossing on daemon power alone. Demogorgons named Tamine and Heletheris strove day and night in the ship’s transformation engines. It seemed to Crispin that they were the only two on board who did any work. Beiin went below, occasionally, to give them pep talks; by Crispin’s standards the Myrhhean was neglecting his duties as a handler, but perhaps his skills as a trickster enabled him to bypass the silver collars and shackles and go straight for the daemons’ withered minds. And, of course, as Beiin well knew, persuasion was more efficient than force.

The crew’s main duty was to keep the daemons fed. The rest of the time they lounged in the fo’c’sle, smoking dazeflower, drinking, and swapping stories of their conquests. The Parrot Girl was overall in a sad, dirty state of disrepair. When you touched a handle it fell off; when you hauled on a rope it broke. At first Crispin tried to make himself useful by doing repairs, but every cupboard that might have held supplies was locked, and the keys hung on Jiharzii’s belt, next to the keys of the cargo holds. The skipper countered all attempts to procure them with a smile and an invitation for Crispin to come have a drink and tell another story of his wanderings.

The skipper seemed excessively interested in the places Crispin had been and the things he had done. Crispin asked Beiin why this might be. The genius player looked shifty and averred that all islanders liked tales. Condescendingly, he added that Crispin would soon get used to the ways of “his countrymen.”

Crispin doubted this. He doubted, too—as the Parrot Girl continued her slow, roachlike progress across the uneasy sea—whether the ship’s peculiarities had anything to do with the fact that she was Lamaroon-owned and operated. Not all Likreky ships were shabby—one sight of the Sjintang seaport in daylight had been enough to confirm that. And not all Lamaroons were lazy. Most of the longshoremen at Sjintang were Likreky men. That morning, as Crispin and Beiin walked out to the tug that was to take them to the Parrot Girl, Crispin had looked around and thought that he might have been able to find work after being laid off from the Oilflower, after all, without having to break his anti-daemon vow. Beiin’s emphasis on Likreky solidarity had assured him that it would serve, in a pinch, as a contact: that was how the genius player had introduced him to Jiharzii, as a Lamaroon, a daemon handler only incidentally.

But even in the teeth of a hangover, he’d shuddered at the thought of staying an hour longer in Sjintang. And anyway they’d shaken hands on it.

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