The War in the Waste by Felicity Savage

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

Undone

Earlier that evening, Crispin had seen Jacithrew Humdroner break his neck. There was no gore, no screaming or thrashing. Only the body in the wreckage of the flying machine, rearranged into the shape of a dead, twisted thing.

Orpaan had been too hysterical to do anything except curl up and scream. Crispin straightened out the corpse as best he could, carried it off into the Waste, and laid it under the pines, on a bier which he made by ripping apart the flying machine. As he turned to leave, his hair stood on end. The twilit air looked empty, but shadows danced and scudded across the carpet of fallen needles. Scavenger daemons were gathering.

It was a stupid death which could easily have been avoided. Crispin himself could have prevented it from happening, had he believed for one moment that the madman was really going to jump off the top of the big pine. But rationality made him stand and watch, sneering, until the very last moment, when it was too late, and he scrambled for the rope ladder. The flying machine did not go anywhere at all, though the daemons in it roared mightily. It plummeted straight down, crashed into the earth, and kept going through the roof of the root room, coming to rest in a jumble of soil and furniture.

Crispin, who had seen several fatal falls—most recently Prettie’s—was less shaken by the death than he was by Orpaan’s hysteria. The child howled and screamed, seemingly inconsolable, until Crispin, growing desperate, slapped him in the face. After that, the boy clung to him and would not let go. Hitting him was probably exactly what Jacithrew would have done.

The moment when, looking up, Crispin had thought, Strike me, he’s really going to—the moment of the fall—neither one replayed itself in his mind as he led Orpaan through the woods. Instead, he could not forget what Jacithrew had said as he started up the rope ladder. The words had not really registered on Crispin’s mind until after the old hermit was dead. Jacithrew’s manic grin never left his face, but, interspersed with gibberish about the south, Crispin heard distinctly: “Look after my orphan, boy! He’s a good child, and you’ll be a better guardian for him than I was. At least”— Jacithrew sniggered— “he won’t have to live on charity any longer—”

Jacithrew had cared for Orpaan, but not enough to keep on living for his sake. Crispin wondered if he had known the flying machine wouldn’t work. If, like an old soldier, having lost sight of everything except his own inflated notions of pride and honor, he had planned his own grand tragedy.

But, no, he had been mad. What must have happened was that Crispin’s arrival had liberated Jacithrew from his responsibility to the child, freeing him to take the risks he must have known testing the flying machine involved. And indeed, although Jacithrew could have completed the machine at any time over the past five years or so, he had only started working on it in earnest after Crispin stumbled through the roof trap.

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