Child of the River

Chapter Twenty-Six The Thing Below

A short way down the shadow-filled atrium, in the glow of a palm-oil lantern which had been lowered on a chain from the lofty ceiling, two men bent over something. Yama ran forward with his knife raised, but they were only priests tending to Pandaras. The boy lay sprawled on the mosaic floor, alive but unconscious. Yama knelt and touched his face. His eyes opened, but he seemed unable to speak. There was a bloody gash on his temple; it seemed to be his only wound.

Yama sheathed his knife and looked up at the two priests.

They wore homespun robes and had broad, wide-browed faces and tangled manes of white hair: the same bloodline as Enobarbus. Although Yama had guessed that this was the place where the young warlord had received his vision, he still felt a small shock of recognition.

He asked the priests if they had seen who had wounded his friend, and they looked at each other before one volunteered that a man had just now run past, but they had already discovered this poor boy. Yama smiled to think of the spectacle the masked assassin must have made, running through the temple with a sword in his hand and blood running down his bare chest. Gorgo must be nearby—if he had sent the assassin, surely he would want to witness what he had paid for—and he would have seen the rout of his hireling.

The priests looked at each other again and the one who had spoken before said, “I am Antros, and this is my brother, Balcus. We are keepers of the temple. There is a place to wash your friend’s wound, and to tend to your own wounds, too. Follow me.”

Yama’s right arm had recovered most of its strength, although it now tingled as if it had been stung by a horde of ants. He gathered up Pandaras and followed the old priest. The boy’s skin was hot and his heartbeat was light and rapid, but Yama had no way of knowing whether or not this was normal.

Beyond the colonnade on the left-hand side of the atrium was a little grotto carved into the thick stone of the temple’s outer wall. Water trickled into a shallow stone trough from a plastic spout set in the center of a swirl of red mosaic.

Yama helped Pandaras kneel, and bathed the shallow wound on his temple. Blood which had matted the boy’s sleek hair fluttered into the clear cold water, but the bleeding had already stopped and the edges of the wound were clean.

“You will have a headache,” Yama told Pandaras, “but nothing worse. I think he struck you with the edge of his vambrace, or with his pistol, rather than with his falchion. You should have stayed with me, Pandaras.”

Pandaras was still unable to speak, but he clumsily caught Yama’s hand and squeezed it.

The old priest, Antros, insisted on cleaning the shallow cuts on Yama’s back. As he worked, he said, “We heard two pistol shots. You are lucky that he missed you, although I would guess that he did not miss you by much, and you were hurt by stone splinters knocked from the wall.”

“Fortunately, he was not aiming at me,” Yama said.

Antros said, “This was a fine place once. The pillars were painted azure and gold, and beeswax candles as tall as a man scented the air with their perfume. Our temple was filled with mendicants and palmers from every town and city along the length of the river. That was long before my time, of course, but I do remember when an avatar of the Preservers still appeared in the shrine.”

“Was this avatar a woman, dressed in white?”

“It was neither man nor woman, and neither young nor old.” The old priest smiled in recollection. “How I miss its wild laughter—it was filled with fierce joy, and yet it was a gentle creature. But it is gone. They have all gone. Men still come to pray at the shrine, of course, but although the Preservers hear every prayer, men have fallen so far from grace that there are no longer answers to their questions. Few come here now, and even fewer to bare themselves humbly before their creators. Most who come do so to ask the one below to curse their enemies, but there are not even very many of them.”

“I suppose that most people fear this place.”

“Just so, although we do have problems with cultists from time to time, for they are attracted by the same thing which the ordinary folk fear. My brother and I come here each evening to light the lamps, but otherwise the temple is not much used, even by our own bloodline. Of course, we have our high day when the atrium is decorated with palm fronds and wreaths of ivy and there is a solemn procession to aspurge every corner and to propitiate the Thing Below. But otherwise, as I have said, most people keep away. You are a stranger here. A palmer, perhaps. I am sorry that you and your friend were attacked. No doubt a footpad followed you, and saw his chance.”

Yama asked Antros if the Thing Below was the machine which had fallen in the final battle at the end of the Age of Insurrection.

“Indeed. You must not suppose it was destroyed. Rather, it was entombed alive in rock made molten by its fall. It stirs, sometimes. In fact, it has been very restless recently. Listen! Do you hear it?”

Yama nodded. He had supposed that the high singing in his head was his own blood rushing through his veins with the excitement of his brief skirmish.

“It is the second time in as many days,” Antros said. “Most of our bloodline are soldiers, and part of our duty is to guard the well and the thing entombed at its bottom. But many have gone downriver to fight in the war, and many of those have been killed there.”

“I met one,” Yama said. He did not need to ask when the machine had begun to be restless, and felt a chill in his blood. He had called for help in the merchant’s house, and the feral machine which had answered his call was not the only one to have heard him. What else? What else might he have inadvertently awakened?

Out in the atrium, someone suddenly started to shout, raising overlapping echoes. The old priest looked alarmed, but Yama said, “Do not be afraid, dominie. I know that voice.”

Tamora had returned to the inn, she said, and had had to threaten the painted witch who ran it to find out where Yama and Pandaras had gone. “Then I realized what the game was, and came straightaway.”

“It was Gorgo,” Yama said, as he tied the laces of his torn, bloodstained shirt. “I appear to have a knack of making enemies.”

“I hope you gouged out his eyes before you killed him,” Tamora said.

“I have not seen him. But someone shot an arbalest bolt at me earlier, and I remember that you said Gorgo had killed someone with an arbalest. He missed, and then he sent another man to kill me. Fortunately, I had some help, and was able to scare off the assassin.”

“I will have his eyes,” Tamora said with venomous passion, “if I ever see him again! His balls and his eyes! He is a disgrace to the Fierce People!”

“He must be very jealous, to want to kill me because of you.”

Tamora laughed, and said, “Oh, Yama, at last you show some human weakness, even if it is only conceit about your cockmanship. The truth is, I owe Gorgo money. He’s not one for fighting, but for making deals. He finds work for others, and takes a cut of the fees for his trouble. And he loans money, too. I borrowed from him to buy new armor and this sword after I was wounded in the war last year. I lost my kit then, you see. I was working on commission to pay off the debt and the interest. I got enough to live on, and he took the rest.”

“Then the job I did with you—”

“Yes, yes,” Tamora said impatiently. “On Gorgo’s commission. He didn’t really expect me to succeed, but he was still angry when I told him that we’d killed the merchant and hadn’t been able to collect the fee.”

“And that is why you agreed to help me.”

“Not exactly. Yama, we don’t have time for this.”

“I need to know, Tamora.”

Yama understood now why Tamora had embarked on such a risky enterprise, but he still did not understand why Gorgo wanted him dead.

Tamora hung her head for a moment, then said with a mixture of vulnerability and defiance, “I suppose it’s only fair. The star-sailor job would have paid well, but we lost the fee because you went crazy and grabbed that circlet. And I still owe Gorgo, and I was going off to work for you, as he saw it. I said he should wait and I’d pay back everything, but he’s greedy. He wants the liver and the lights as well as the meat and bones.”

Yama nodded. “He decided to kill me and steal the money I have.”

“He said that he would rob you, not kill you. He said it was only fair, because you’d lost him the fee for killing the merchant. I didn’t know he’d try and kill you. I swear it.”

“I believe you,” Yama said. “And I know that Gorgo found someone else to help you with the job in the Palace of the Memory of the People. He wanted me out of the way.”

“A man with red skin and welts on his chest. I told Gorgo that I was going to work with you, Yama, and no other, but Gorgo said the man would be waiting for me at the Palace gate. I went there, but I couldn’t find the man and I went back to the inn and found that you had come here.”

“Well, the man you were waiting for was here. It was he who tried to kill me.”

“I was going to tell you everything,” Tamora said. “I decided something, while I was waiting. Hear me out. I made an agreement with you, and I will stick with it. Fuck Gorgo. When the job is finished I’ll find him and kill him.”

“Then you will work for me, and not Gorgo?”

“Isn’t that what I said?” Tamora said impatiently. “But there isn’t time to stand and talk a moment longer, not now! You’ve been lying around in bed, and then fooling about in this mausoleum, and meanwhile I have been busy. We have already missed one appointment, and we must not miss the second, or the contract will be voided. Can you ride?”

“A little.”

“That had better mean you can ride like the wind.” Tamora seemed to notice Pandaras for the first time. “What happened to the rat-boy?”

“A blow to the head. Luckily, the assassin Gorgo hired had some scruples.”

“Maybe it’ll have knocked some of his airs out and let some sense in. I suppose you still want to bring him? Well, I’ll carry him for you. Why are you staring at me? Do you call off our contract after all this?”

“I have already woken things best left sleeping. If I go on, what else might I do?”

Tamora said briskly, “Would you emasculate yourself, then? If you don’t know who you are and where you came from, then you can’t know what you can become. Come with me, or not. I’m taking the job anyway, because I’ll get paid for it with you or without you. And when I’ve finished there, I’ll kill Gorgo.”

She slung Pandaras over her shoulder and walked away with a quick, lithe step, as if the boy weighed nothing at all.

After a moment, Yama followed.

It was dusk. Warm lights glowed in windows of the houses around the mossy plaza. Two horses were tethered to a pole topped by a smoky, guttering cresset. Tamora and Yama lifted Pandaras onto the withers of her mount, and then she vaulted easily into the saddle behind him. She leaned down and told Yama, “I had to pay the painted witch a fortune for the hire of these. Don’t stand and gape. Already it may be too late.”

The horses were harnessed cavalry-fashion, with light saddles and high stirrups. Yama had just grasped the horn of his mount’s saddle and fitted his left foot in the stirrup, ready to swing himself up, when the ground shook. The horse jinked and as Yama tried to check it, he saw a beam of light shoot up through the aperture of the domed roof of the Black Temple.

The light was as red as burning sulfur, with flecks of violet and vermilion whirling in it like sparks flying up a chimney. It burned high into the sky, so bright that it washed the temple and the square in bloody light.

Yama realized at once what was happening, and knew that he must confront what he had wakened. He was horribly afraid of it, but if he did not face it then he would always be afraid.

He threw the reins of his mount to Tamora and ran up the steps into the temple. As he entered the long atrium, the floor groaned and heaved, like an animal tormented by biting flies.

Yama fell headlong, picked himself up, and ran on toward the column of red light that burned up from the well and filled the temple with its fierce glare.

The temple was restless. The stone of its walls squealed and howled; dust and small fragments rained down from the ceiling.

Several of the pillars on either side had cracked from top to bottom; one had collapsed across the floor, its heavy stone discs spilled like a stack of giant coins. The intricate mosaics of the floor were fractured, heaved apart in uneven ripples. A long ragged crack ran back from the well, and the two old priests stood on either side of it, silhouetted in the furnace light. Balcus had drawn his sword and held it above his head in pitiful defiance; Antros knelt with the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes, chanting over and over an incantation or prayer.

The language was a private dialect of the priests’ bloodline, but its rhythm struck deep in Yama. He fell to his knees beside the old priest and began to chant too.

It was not a prayer, but a set of instructions to the guards of the temple.

He was repeating it for a third time when the black mesh curtain which divided the right-hand apse from the atrium was struck aside. Two, four, five of the giant soldiers marched out. The red light gleamed like fresh blood on their transparent carapaces.

The two old priests immediately threw themselves full-length on the floor, but Yama watched with rapt fascination.

The five soldiers were the only survivors of the long sleep of the temple’s guards. One dragged a stiff leg, and another was blind and moved haltingly under the instructions of the others, but none of them had forgotten their duty. They took up position, forming a five-pointed star around the well, threw open their chest-plates and drew out bulbous silver tubes as long as Yama was tall. Yama supposed that the soldiers would discharge their weapons into the well, but instead they aimed at the coping and floor around it and fired as one.

One of the weapons exploded, blowing the upper part of its owner to flinders; from the others, violet threads as intensely bright as the sun raked stone until it ran like water into the well. Heat and light beat at Yama’s skin; the atrium filled with the acrid stench of burning stone. The floor heaved again, a rolling ripple that snapped mosaics and paving slabs like a whip and threw Yama and the priests backward.

And the Thing Below rose up from the white-hot annulus around its pit.

It was brother to the feral machine that Yama had inadvertently drawn down at the merchant’s house, although it was very much larger. It barely cleared the sides of the well—black, spherical, and bristling with mobile spines. It had grown misshapen during its long confinement, like a spoiled orange that flattens under its own weight.

The giant soldiers played violet fire across the machine, but it took no notice of them. It hung in the midst of its column of red light and looked directly into Yama’s head.

You have called me. I am here. Now come with me, and serve.

Pain struck through Yama’s skull like an iron wedge. His sight was filled with red and black lightnings. Blind, burning inside and out, he gave the soldiers a final order.

They moved as one, and then Yama could see again. The four soldiers were clinging to the machine as men cling to a bit of flotsam from a wreck. They were shearing away the machine’s spines with the blades of their hands.

The spines were what enabled the machine to bend the gravity field of the world to its will. It spun and jerked, like a hyrax attacked by dire wolves, but it was too, late. It fell like a stone into the well, and the temple shuddered again.

There was a long roaring sound, and the column of red light flickered and then went out.