Ancients of Days

Chapter Ten The Committee for Public Safety

“Daphoene was the daughter of Rega by another marriage,” Prefect Corin said. “I think it was Rega who had the idea—Syle is a clever man, but not one given to carrying out his schemes. Rega, however, is very ambitious. She was not content to be the wife of the secretary of a dwindling department. Her father was a failed merchant who killed himself before his debtors could, and she clawed her way up from poverty. I half admire her for her ambition, if not for her methods. She is a magnificent bitch.”

“She altered her daughter’s appearance by surgery and infected her with machines carrying the essences of dead people. It is a technique we have used to produce battlefield advisers. The infected subject becomes a population which, when asked a question, can by heuristics derive the best solution to a particular problem. It has not had a high success rate—most of the subjects retreat into fugues. Daphoene was more successful than most, but the procedure blinded her, and most of her own personality was destroyed. However, Rega felt that the loss of her daughter’s sight and sanity was an acceptable sacrifice to her own ambition. I think that Luria suspected that Daphoene was Syle’s stepdaughter, but she had no proof. It was Syle who organized the search for the new pythoness, after all, and Syle who kept all the records, and he married the only person who could betray him.”

Yama said, “They meant to betray me from the beginning. Luria wanted to exchange me for the safety of her department; Syle and Rega plotted to use me as a counter in a bargain with you. At the last moment, Syle feared that the plans would go wrong and tried to persuade me to help him against you, but I would not. And even if I had helped him, I think that Rega would still have betrayed me.”

Brabant had been innocent. The conversation which Pandaras had overheard had been staged by Syle and Rega, part of the scheme to lure Yama into territory under the control of the Department of Indigenous Affairs so that he could be captured by Prefect Corin. It was well known that Brabant patronized the bawdy house at the edge of the day market, and Prefect Corin had waited for Yama there. But Yama had escaped the trap and had to be betrayed all over again, this time publicly. The gatekeeper had informed Syle of Yama’s return, and Syle had delayed the start of the public inquisition until Prefect Corin’s men were in place.

Prefect Corin said, “No doubt Rega will infect her new daughter once she is born—and meanwhile Syle will find an amenable candidate to play the role of pythoness. He is our man, now. These old departments are utterly decadent, Yama, incurable except by the most radical surgery. We have developed a new system where all, from the humblest clerk to the most senior legate, are answerable to a network of committees. With no center of power, no single person can influence the Department for their own ends. Thus, we are able to take a long-term view with the best interests of Confluence in mind. In time, all will fall under our system, and we can begin to win the war against the heretics.”

They sat side by side on the narrow cot in Yama’s tiny cell, lit only by a luminous stick. Yama’s fireflies had been stripped from him, as had his knife and the ancient coin which the anchorite had given him. He had been allowed to keep his copy of the Puranas and his clothes, nothing else.

The cell was Spartan. There was the cot with its lumpy mattress, a plastic slop bucket, a shelf which folded down from the wall, and a square of raffia matting on the stone floor. A spigot in the wall delivered lukewarm, tasteless water. There was a plastic cup hanging on a chain beside the spigot, and a drain beneath, no bigger than Yama’s outspread hand. Prefect Corin assured Yama that it was no different from his own cell and every other private cell in the Department of Indigenous Affairs. Husbands and wives each kept their own cells when they were married, and children lived in dormitories until they were old enough to be given a job and a cell of their own.

The heart of the Department of Indigenous Affairs was a vast honeycomb of cells and narrow corridors, interspersed with long, low chambers where clerks worked, row upon row upon row, fireflies flickering above their heads as they bent over papers and books and slates. A hundred layers of cells and corridors and chambers crammed into the middle levels of the Palace and ringed by outlying territories sequestered from other departments, which contained barracks and armories.

Tamora and Pandaras and Eliphas were being held a long way from Yama, in their own cells. They were undergoing debriefing, Prefect Corin said, and would be released once it was finished. Yama asked when that might be, and Prefect Corin replied that it might take only a few days, or it might take years.

“Once we know everything,” he said.

“There is no end to questions,” Yama said.

Prefect Corin considered this. He said, “In your case, that might be true.”

It was never quiet. There was always the sound of voices somewhere, the clash of doors slamming, the tread of feet. Yama lost track of time. At the beginning, he was mostly left in darkness, and meals—edible plastic occasionally leavened with a piece of fruit or a dollop of vegetable curry—arrived at irregular intervals. Later, when daylight was piped into his cell through a glass duct, he could at least read in the Puranas and mark, by the waxing and waning of the weak light, the passage of the days.

At intervals, Yama was taken from the cell and marched by armed guards to a large, dimly lit room divided into two by a pane of thick glass. It was where he was tested.

On one side of the glass was a stool; on the other were fireflies, anything from one to more than a hundred. A disembodied voice would instruct Yama to sit on the stool. Once he was seated, his side of the room would be plunged into darkness. Then the tests would begin.

The first time this happened there was only a single firefly, a brilliant point of light that hung in the center of the darkened space on the other side of the glass. Yama was told to move it to the right. He refused, and after a long time he was taken to his cell and left in darkness without food. Judging by the ebb and flow of noise, Yama thought that two days might have passed. At last, weak with hunger, he was brought back to the divided room and asked by the voice to repeat the exercise.

Yama obeyed. Both sides had made their point. He had shown that he was acting under coercion; they had shown that they would not tolerate resistance. The voice was patient and never tired or varied its precise inflection. It gave each set of instructions twice over and waited until Yama had complied before issuing the next. It took no notice of any mistakes or failures. Yama gradually constructed a fantasy image of the voice’s owner. A middle-aged man, with cropped, iron-gray hair and a square jaw, sitting in a cell much like his own, a single firefly at his shoulder illuminating the script from which he read.

“Up,” the voice would say, “Up.” And, “Red firefly circle right, white firefly circle left. Red circle right, white circle left.”

There were hundreds of these exercises. Sometimes Yama was asked to weave complex dances involving a decad of differently colored fireflies; sometimes he spent long hours moving a single firefly in straight lines back and forth across the darkness, or varying its brightness by increments. He did not try to understand the significance of the different kinds of exercises. He suspected that if there was a pattern, it had been randomized so that he could never unravel it. Better to think that there was no pattern at all. Better to think that they did not know what they wanted to find out, or did not know how to find out what they wanted to know.

He worked hard at the tests, although they often left him with bad headaches or worse. Sometimes red and black sparks would fill his sight and some time later he would find himself lying on the floor of the cell, his trousers soaked with stale urine, blood on his lips and tongue.

These fits terrified him. Perhaps they were a legacy of the blow to his head (although the wound had completely healed; there was not even a scar), exacerbated by the stress of the exercises. He told no one about them.

He would reveal no weakness to his enemies.

Whether or not those testing Yama were learning about his abilities, he was certainly learning more about himself every day. Despite the fits, he exulted over the growing control over his powers. And for the first time since he had set out from Aeolis on the road to Ys, he had time to reflect on what he had discovered about himself. Always, his actions had been driven by contingency or by the needs of others. First, under the unwanted protection of Prefect Corin and then, after his escape from the Prefect and (so he thought) from his ordained fate as a minor official in the Department of Indigenous Affairs, in the company of Pandaras and Tamora.

He had promised himself that he would discover the secret of his origin—the silver-skinned woman, the white boat in the middle of the Great River, attended by a cloud of tiny machines—and he had failed. No, it was worse than that. He had not really tried. He had preferred to adventure with Tamora and Pandaras rather than think about what he was, and why he was here.

When he was alone in his cell, he spent his time reviewing every step of his adventures between leaving Aeolis and the fall of the Department of Vaticination, weighing every one of his actions and motives and finding them all wanting.

He slept a lot, too, and in his sleep his sense of the location and activity of machines expanded. Sometimes he seemed to be suspended in the midst of a vast array of little minds that were both quick and stupefyingly dull, with webs of connectivity blossoming and fading around him like a runaway loom simultaneously weaving and unraveling a cloth in three dimensions. Most of the machines were fireflies, but at the periphery of their immense flock Yama could detect larger machines employed in defense of the Department. Further still, glimpsed like bright lights through river fog, were larger machines whose purpose was totally obscure, and interspersed through the volume of greater and lesser machines were intense points which he recognized as the potential energies of active shrines.

And sometimes, at the furthest edge of this inward vision, was a faint intimation of the feral machine he had accidentally drawn down at the merchant’s house. It was very far away, hung in isolation beyond and below the end of the world—but it was always there, the iron to which the lodestone of his mind was drawn again and again.

At times, his sensitivity increased so much that he could even perceive the clusters of tiny machines which every sentient person carried at the base of their brain. Faintly, he could feel in these clusters the echoes of the memories of their hosts; it was as if he was the only living person in an impalpable world inhabited by hordes of ghosts mumbling over their last ends.

In his sleep, Yama tried to discover which of the ghosts might be Tamora, or Pandaras, or Eliphas, but always this effort would shift his trancelike apprehension of the machines around him into a dream. Sometimes he ran along a web of narrow paths between the tombs and steles of the City of the Dead, pursued by men who had by grotesque mutilation merged themselves with machines. Sometimes he fled endlessly from the hell-hound, waking with a start in the very moment that its burning blue light swept across him. And sometimes he harried numberless enemies with bloody zeal, exultant as cities burned and armies fought and looted the length of the world in his name, and woke shocked and ashamed, and swore never to dream such dreams again.

But they were always with him, like splinters of cold metal under his skin.

At intervals, Prefect Corin came and sat with Yama, and slowly, punctuated by long silences, a conversation would begin. Yama supposed that these conversations were really interrogations, but mostly it seemed that Prefect Corin was interested in Yama’s childhood, asking about details—and details within those details—of small events or ceremonies, the geography of Aeolis or the hinterlands of the City of the Dead, the disposition of books in the library of the peel-house, the lessons taught by the librarian, Zakiel, or by the master of the guard, Sergeant Rhodean.

The matter of the white boat, the mystery of Yama’s origins, the attempted kidnap by Dr. Dismas, Yama’s adventures in Ys—none of these were ever touched upon.

Yama did not have to dissemble about his encounter with the custodians of the City of the Dead and the slate they had shown him, in which he had seen a man of his bloodline turning away to contemplate a sky full of stars. Nor did he have to describe how he had drawn down the feral machine at the merchant’s house, or the merchant’s last words; nor how he had woken and then defeated the feral machine which had been trapped far beneath the Temple of the Black Well; nor what the woman in white, aspect of one of the Ancients of Days, had told him when she had appeared in the shrine.

But it also meant that all these adventures and discoveries were thrust to the back of his mind by Prefect Corin’s patient but insistent demands for increasingly minute details about the mundane days of his childhood. It was as if all that had happened to Yama in the handful of days between leaving his home in Aeolis and arriving here, in this bleak cell amongst thousands of identical cells in the Department of Indigenous Affairs, had been no more than a vivid dream. It was another reason why, when left alone in the unquiet darkness of his cell, Yama traced and retraced his every footstep between Aeolis and Ys like an ox plodding around and around a water lift, the groove of its path infinitesimally deepening with each round. He was frightened that if he forgot even the slightest detail of his adventures he would begin to forget it all, as the unraveling of a piece of cloth can begin with the fraying of a single thread.

Whenever Yama asked a question, Prefect Corin had a habit of falling silent, as if engaged in an internal dialogue with himself, before asking a question in return. The Prefect’s dry, spare manner intensified during these interrogation sessions. His silences were vast and arid; his gaze burned intently while Yama talked at random about his childhood, like a mountain lion fixing on its prey and waiting for the moment of weakness or uncertainty that will betray it. It was as if he had shaped his intellect to a single inquiring point, as one of the fisherfolk might flake a pebble to form the head of a harpoon. Yama got no answers from him at all—only questions. And he did not know if the answers he gave to the Prefect’s questions were sufficient. Like all of his own questions, that also went unanswered.

Apart from Prefect Corin and the disembodied voice in the divided, darkened room, Yama’s only human contacts were his guards. Four men had sentry duty outside Yama’s cell, changing watches in regular succession. They lived in the cells on either side of his, and marched with him from his cell to the room where he took his tests, and back again.

Only one of the guards ever talked with him. This was the old man who took the second of the night watches, from midnight to dawn. His name was Coronetes. He confided to Yama that he did not mind the night watch. He was old, his wife had died, and he did not sleep much.

“You, young man, sleep very soundly,” Coronetes said. “It is a gift of the young. Old men do not need to sleep because soon they will be dead, never to wake again until they wake into the world at the end of time created by the will of the Preservers.”

Yama smiled at this conceit and replied with one of his own. “Then it will be no sleep at all, because in the interval you will not exist, and so no time will pass. As it says in the first sura of the Puranas, ‘Before the Universe there was no time, for nothing changed.’ “

“You are a devout man.”

“I would not say that.”

“I suppose you must have done something bad, to be here. But you are often reading in the Puranas.”

“Do they watch me, then?” Yama had not thought of that. He had believed that the cell was as private as the inside of his head.

Coronetes nodded vigorously. “By the same pipe through which the light falls. I thought you would have known that. But I do not think they watch now. They sleep.”

Like most of the common people of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, Coronetes was slightly built. His coarse hair was black, despite his age, and worn in a stout, greased pigtail that fell halfway down his back. Although he was, as he liked to say, as scrawny as a plucked chicken, he was still a strong man; muscles knotted his skinny arms as if walnuts had been stuffed under his brown skin. He had volunteered for the army at the beginning of the war. He had fought in the Marsh of the Lost Waters, and still suffered from fluxion of the lungs.

“There are sandflies that enter the mouth or nose of a sleeping man,” he explained, “and creep into the throat to lay eggs. The larvae get into the lungs and every now and then one turns into a fly and I must cough it out. But I am luckier than many of my comrades. The diseases of the midpoint of the world and the wild creatures of the marshes and the forests accounted for most of them, not the fighting. It is for that reason that the heretics are brothers to the gar, panther and sandfly.”

Coronetes had been so weakened by fluxion and fevers that his wife had not recognized him when he had returned from the war. He had become a clerk, like his father before him, and still wore a clerk’s white shirt, for he had been a clerk longer than he had been a soldier, and had risen to become the head of his section. He was fiercely loyal to his Department and feared no one, but he was lonely in his old age. He had no children, and had outlived most of his friends while still a young man.

“We will rule the world,” Coronetes said, “because no one else will take up the burden. That is why you will confess to the Committee for Public Safety, and that is why you will enlist in our cause. It is the only cause worth fighting for, young man.”

Coronetes and Yama sat on the bed in the cell, lit by a stick of cold green light Coronetes had set on the fold-down shelf. None of the guards had fireflies. Indeed, no machines came near Yama except those on the far side of the thick glass wall of the testing room.

Yama said, “I was brought up in the care of a senior member of the Department. He believed that service to the ideal of the Preservers was the beginning and end of the duty of every Department.”

“The Aedile of Aeolis? He has the luxury of living in a place where his rule is undisputed. That kind of view is considered old-fashioned. It was old-fashioned even when I was a child, and that was a long time ago. Now my grandfather, he was a soldier, too. That was before the war against the heretics. He fought three campaigns within the Palace against departments who tried to usurp our functions and our territory. He knew where his duty lay. You were lucky to be brought up where you were, but now you are in the real world.”

“This cell.”

“It is no different from my cell.”

“Except you will stop me if I try and walk out.”

Coronetes smiled. His mouth was as wide and lipless as a frog’s. He had lost most of his teeth, and those that remained were brown and worn down to the gumline. He said, “Well, that is true. I would do my best. I would kill you if I had to, but I hope it will not be necessary.”

“So do I.”

In fact, Yama never once thought of escaping when Coronetes came to visit him in his cell. It would be dishonorable, for whatever else Coronetes might be and whatever motives he might have, he presented himself as Yama’s friend.

“Tell me about the war,” Yama would say, when he found himself disagreeing with one of Coronetes’ praise songs to the great heart and forthright purpose of the Department of Indigenous Affairs.

Coronetes had many stories of the war, of long marches from one part of the marshes to another, of engagements where nothing could be seen of the enemy but the distant flashes of their weapons, of days and days when nothing at all happened, and Coronetes’ company lay in the sun and swapped stories. Most of the war was either marching or waiting, he said. He had only been in two real battles, one which had lasted a hundred days, fought to capture a hill later abandoned, and one in a town where the citizens had begun to change and no one knew who was fighting whom.

“It is what the heretics do,” Coronetes said. “They force the change in a bloodline, and with change comes war. The war is not one war, but many, for we must fight for each unchanged bloodline, to make sure they do not fall under the spell of the heretics when they are most vulnerable. If we did only what we wanted, we would be like animals, or worse than animals, because animals are only themselves, and cannot help what they are. The Prefect, he had a more dangerous job, moving amongst the unchanged just like the heretic inciters. That is where the war is really fought, if you want my opinion. The heretics are powerful enemies because they are powerful at persuading the unchanged to see things their way. Our Committee is dedicated to destroying the heretics, but even so it uses some of their techniques to ensure loyalty within the Department.”

The Committee for Public Safety had transformed the Department of Indigenous Affairs, turning a musty cabal of legal clerks and semi-autocrats into an aggressive hive of radicals that claimed to be fighting for all the souls of Confluence. The Committee held that everyone was equal, and the least clerk felt that he was as important in the struggle as the most senior general. Coronetes sometimes talked for hours, his eyes gleaming with pride, about the merits of the organization of the Department, of the wonders it had achieved and the paradise it would bring once it had defeated the heretics and united Confluence.

Yama preferred to hear about the war. The patrols that looped through a country of tall grasses without ever engaging the enemy, the camps amongst the buttress roots of trees of the virgin forest of the great marshes, the geometry of advances and retreats. He learned the jargon of the common soldiers, the rudimentary sign language they used when the enemy was close by. More than ever, he yearned to join the army as a cateran or an officer of the light lance, to flee downriver and lose himself in the war.

Yama supposed that these visits might be a part of his interrogation, but if so it did not matter. He looked forward to the time when, late at night, there would be a scratching at the door and he would call out and ask the old man to enter. Although Yama was the prisoner and Coronetes his guard, they both sustained the fiction that Yama was the host, and Coronetes the visitor. Coronetes always waited for Yama’s invitation before unlocking the door, and neither commented on the fact that he locked it again once he was inside. That Yama politely forbore to argue against Coronetes’ transparent propaganda was part of this fiction—that, and his suspicion that anything he said against the Department of Indigenous Affairs or the Committee for Public Safety would be used against him. Yama was always disappointed on those nights when Coronetes’ inquiring scratch failed to come, and had almost become used to the unvarying pattern of his days of captivity when the ambush changed everything.