Ancients of Days

Chapter Eleven “You are a Monster”

Yama was returning to his cell after a testing session, with two guards walking a little way in front of him and two behind. His hands were bound by a loop of plastic that was designed to remorselessly tighten if he attempted to struggle against it. He had learned to bend his arms and rest his fists against his chest, as if in prayer, to minimize movement. Coronetes had told him that this form of restraint, called the serpent, could amputate limbs if left on for too long.

The corridor was lit only by the luminous sticks carried by the guards. Yama moved in a bubble of dim green light, with darkness ahead and darkness behind, every ten paces passing a facing pair of doors. The doors were slabs of dense, grainy white plastic deeply recessed in the fused rock walls, as indistinguishable from each other as cells in a honeycomb.

Yama was thinking about the tests. In the past few days he had been fitted with a metal cap while moving the fireflies about. And the fireflies were changing, too. At first they had become slow to respond to his commands; now their little minds were hedged with loops and knots of futile logic which he had to unpick before they would obey him. Those testing him were beginning to probe the limits of his power; he was beginning to worry about what might happen when those limits were reached.

Without warning, two doors were flung open, one on either side. Three young men rushed out from the left; two from the right. They yelled hoarsely, clubs cocked at their shoulders. The leader swung a killing star on a short chain. Yama ducked and rammed the man in the chest with his shoulder, catching him off balance. The man slammed into the wall and Yama broke his nose with his forehead. Then someone kicked Yama’s legs out from under him. The serpent tightened around his wrists when he tried to break his fall and the back of his head struck the floor. Two of the attackers began kicking and pummeling him while the others fought with the guards.

Yama tucked his head into his chest and curled up as tightly as he could. There were no machines he could use against his assailants—like the guards, the young men had no fireflies—but their own ineptitude saved him. They were too close to each other to use their clubs properly and they wore only soft-soled shoes, so that their kicks bruised rather than broke bones. Then someone fell heavily on Yama, saving him from the worst of the blows. A moment later, one of the guards fired his slug pistol, and the attackers ran.

Yama was hauled to his feet by two of the guards. It was Coronetes who had fallen on him. The old man’s white shirt was ripped down the front and wet with blood. One of the guards knelt beside him and the other two dragged Yama away. The serpent was a band of intense pain around his wrists; his hands had lost all feeling.

The guards would not answer his questions. They unclasped the serpent and left him alone in his cell. Yama massaged his wrists and hands. His fingers were numb and pale, and felt as if they had swollen to twice their normal size. They started to hurt as blood flowed back into them. Yama took that as a good sign. His chest ached with each breath, but the pain was not sharp, and he did not think his ribs were broken. He had cut his tongue, and there were pulpy bruises on his scalp. There was blood on his shirt, so much blood that the shirt stuck to his skin. He took it off and ran his hands over his flanks and back and found many deep bruises but no other wounds. Then he realized that it must be Coronetes’ blood.

He had rinsed his mouth out and started to wash himself when the two guards came back. They still would not answer his questions. They fitted the serpent to his wrists and marched him out of his cell. As always, the corridors were deserted. He was led through a great hall crammed with long tables which looked as if they had been abandoned only moments before: pens flung down on unfinished sentences; slates still showing ranks of glowing half-empty bowls of tea. More guards were waiting—figures at the far side of the room. A hood was thrust over his head and the forced march was resumed. At one point he was taken across an open space—cold air whipped around him—and soon after that the hood was ripped from his head and the serpent was unclasped. He turned just in time to see a door slam shut. It was less than an hour after he had been attacked.

The room was four times the size of his cell, and looked even bigger because there was no furniture except for a narrow bed. The walls were fused rock, smooth and slick as glass; the floor was rammed earth. It was shaped like an egg, and at the narrower end sunlight flooded through a big glass bull’s-eye.

He found a spigot that yielded an icy trickle of rust-colored water, and stripped off his trousers and washed Coronetes’ blood from his bruised body as best he could. There was a thin gray blanket over the striped ticking of the bed’s mattress; he wrapped it around his shoulders and for a long time knelt by the window, gazing out at the blue sky. By pressing his bruised face against the cold glass, he could glimpse a segment of a steep slope of tumbled black rocks. Trees clung amongst the rocks, their branches all bent in the same direction. Wind fluted beyond the roundel of glass, and now and then birds slanted through the air, crossing from right to left as they tilted on air currents beyond the edge of the scree slope.

He broke his fingernails prying at the glass, but it was firmly embedded in the smooth rock. It did not break or crack when he kicked at it; he succeeded only in bruising his heel. He had just begun to scrape at the hard earth at the bottom edge of the window when a chirurgeon came in, flanked by two guards. The chirurgeon tested Yama’s limbs, probed his mouth and shone a bright light into his eyes, then left without saying a word. Another guard brought in a slop bucket and tossed Yama’s bloodstained shirt onto the bed, and then Prefect Corin came in.

After the guards had locked the door behind them, Prefect Corin sat on the end of the bed. Yama stayed by the window. He was conscious of being naked under the thin blanket. He said, “How is Coronetes?”

“Dead. As are your attackers.”

“Your Department is not of one mind about me. That is comforting.”

“It was not a conspiracy. They wanted revenge because you had blinded their friends. You did not try to defend yourself. Why was that?”

“I believe that I broke someone’s nose.”

“You know what I mean, boy.”

“I am your prisoner, not your servant. I do not have to explain myself.”

“You are the prisoner of the Department. I am here because I brought you to Ys. I am still responsible for you. You do not believe me, but I have your best interests at heart.”

Yama smiled. It hurt. “Then you endure our conversations as a punishment?”

“It is my duty,” Prefect Corin said. “Just as it was my duty to bring you to Ys.”

“You failed at that and you failed to catch me by trickery, too. In the end you had to use force. Perhaps you are not very good at carrying out your duty.”

Prefect Corin rarely smiled, but he smiled now. It lasted only for a moment and did not thaw his wintry expression in the slightest. He said, “I lost you once, yet here you are all the same. If I was superstitious, I might say that it was fate, and that our lives are bound together. But I am not; and they are not. I have my duty. You have your duty, too, Yamamanama. You know what it is, but you resist it. I wonder why it is that you are so ungrateful. Your stepfather is a senior officer of the Department, and so in a sense the Department raised you. It educated you and trained you, and yet you resist acknowledging your considerable obligation. You believe that your own will is stronger than the collective will of the Department. Believe me you are wrong.”

“I do not know what you want of me.” A silence.

Yama corrected himself. “I do not know what the Department wants of me.”

Prefect Corin considered this. At last, he said, “Then you will be here a long time, and so will your friends. It is not about what you know, but what you can do.”

“I am sorry that Coronetes was killed. He did not deserve it.”

“Nor did the men who attacked you. They were not much more than boys, and foolish boys at that, but they were brave. Their only mistake was that they were more loyal to their friends than to the Department.”

Yama said, “Do you wish that they had killed me?”

“You are a monster, boy. You do not know it, but you are. You have more power than any individual should have, and you use it without purpose. You do not even know how to use it properly. You refuse to serve, for no other reason than your pride. You could help win the war, and that is the only reason why you are kept alive. Some want you dead. I have argued against it, and so you still live, but I cannot defend you forever. Especially if you continue to resist.”

“I have completed every test as best I could.”

“This is not about the tests. It is about loyalty.”

“I will not serve blindly,” Yama said. “If I am here, with such gifts as I have, there must be a purpose to it. That is what I want to discover. That is why I came to Ys.”

“You should try and be true to the example of your stepbrother. He served. He served well.”

“I will go to war in a moment, but you will not allow it. So please do not invoke Telmon’s bravery.”

Prefect Corin put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, looking directly into Yama’s face. His brown eyes were steady and unforgiving. He said, “You are very young. Too young for what you possess.”

“I will not serve blindly,” Yama said. “I have thought long and hard about this. If there are those in the Department who want me to help them, then they should talk with me. Or you should kill me now, and then at least you will know that I will never fight against you.”

“We are all one, hand and brain,” Prefect Corin said. “Your stepfather did not like the way things had changed, but still he served.”

“Yes, Coronetes once said something similar.”

“But you will not serve. You set yourself apart. You are a monster of vanity, boy.” Prefect Corin stood up and tossed something on the mattress of the bed. “Here is your copy of the Puranas. Read in it carefully, and consider your position.”

Once he was certain that he had been left alone, Yama began again to scrape at the base of the circular window. He broke a thin strip of wood from the frame of the bed and used this and water from the spigot to loosen the packed earth. The sky had darkened by the time he had dug to the depth of his hand and found the point where glass merged seamlessly with fused rock. Perhaps the window was no more than a place where the rock had been made transparent, but apart from the door it was the only possible way out of the cell.

He began to extend the little hole he had made, scraping away hard earth a few crumbs at a time until the frayed strip of wood met something embedded in the dirt. He probed carefully with his bleeding fingertips and felt a thin curved edge, then dug around it until he could pull it free.

It was a ceramic disc, an ancient coin exactly like the coin the anchorite had given him. But the Aedile’s excavations had turned up thousands of coins around the tombs of the City of the Dead, and there was no reason to believe that this one should be any different from those.

Yama dug a little more, but could find no potential weakness in the window’s edge. He filled in the hole he had made and as the room darkened around him he leaned against the window and watched the shadows of the bent trees lengthen across the tumbled rocks. He fell asleep, and woke to find a constellation of faint lights hung just outside the window. They were fireflies, drawn away from the wild creatures which lived amongst the sliding stones.

Beyond the shifting sparks of the fireflies, the small red swirl of the Eye of the Preservers was printed on the black sky.

Something nagged at Yama, like a speck in his eye. It was the coin, shining softly on the dirt floor. He picked it up. It was warmer than his own skin, and had become translucent, with fine filaments and specks of cold blue light shifting within its thickness.

There was an active shrine nearby.

He could suddenly feel it, with the same absolute sense of direction that linked him with the feral machine. He shivered and drew the blanket around himself. He knew that he could activate the shrine even at this distance, and a plan of escape presented itself.

It was horribly risky, but no worse than trying to climb through a window high above a steep slope of sliding stones at the top of a mountain. And he could not even open the window. Before he could frighten himself by thinking through all the consequences, he willed it.

Beyond the bull’s-eye window, the fireflies scattered as if before a great wind.

His trousers were still damp, but Yama drew them on anyway, and tucked the sliver of wood inside the waistband. Then he wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and sat by the window in the dim red light of the Eye of the Preservers, waiting for something to happen. At intervals, he held the coin up to his eye, but the shifting patterns of luminous lines and specks told him nothing.

Perhaps the shrine was dead after all… but then he knew it was not, as surely as if a light had been shone in his face. He got up and paced around the room, a fierce excitement growing in him. Presently he heard shouts, and then the thin snapping of slug guns. The sounds of distant combat lasted several minutes; then there was the scream of an energy pistol’s discharge and wisps of white smoke began to curl around the edges of the cell door.

Yama scrambled to his feet, and at the same moment the door was flung back with a crash. A guard tumbled in ahead of a thick billow of smoke. His tunic was torn across the chest. The right side of his face was scorched, his hair shriveled to blackened peppercorns.

“Come with me!” the guard yelled. “Now!”

Yama straightened his back and drew the blanket around his shoulders. The guard glared at him and raised his rifle.

“Come now!”

For a moment, Yama feared that the man had lost his mind and would execute him on the spot. Then the guard looked over his shoulder and screamed. He scrambled across the cell, knocking Yama aside and fetching up against the bull’s-eye window, clutching his rifle to his chest and staring wide-eyed at the door. Yama faced it squarely, his heart beating quickly and lightly. Blue light filled the frame. And then, without a transition, the hell-hound was inside the cell.

It was a pillar of blue flame that seemed somehow to extend beyond the floor and ceiling. There was a continual crackling hiss as its energies ate the air which touched its surface. Its heat beat against Yama’s skin. He had to squint against its brilliance as he held up the coin. It took all of his will to stand still.

He said, “I do not know if we have already met, or if you are brother to the one I called forth before, but in any case I apologize for my behavior. I ran away because I did not know what I had called, and I was afraid. But now I have freed you knowingly, and I ask for your help.” He did not see the hell-hound move, but there was a brief wash of heat on his skin and suddenly it was gone.

The guard screamed. When Yama turned, the man fell to his knees and flung his arm before his face. The sleeve of his tunic started to smolder. Yama realized what had happened, and looked away before he killed the man.

He had expected the hell-hound to clear a way for his escape. Instead, it had enveloped him.

He was the center of a blue radiance that fell on everything he looked at. He no longer felt the hell-hound’s heat.

That was a property of the outermost shell of its energies.

Instead, he felt a tremendous exhilaration. His bruises and cracked ribs no longer hurt. There was a prickling all over his body as every hair tried to stand away from its neighbors.

There was a short corridor beyond the cell. Guards scrambled in panic through the door at the far end, although one paused and shot at Yama several times before running too, his clothes and hair smoldering. Yama followed them into a wide plaza. Sheer black rock rose on three sides; there was nothing but the darkening sky on the other.

Men ran or stood their ground and fired. Slugs caught and sank slowly in the outer edge of the blue light that surrounded Yama, flaring brightly before evaporating. An officer fired a pistol, but its discharge merely whitened Yama’s vision for a moment.

He did not attack the guards or even look at them, but strode directly to the edge of the plaza. A railing glowed red and yellow and white before melting away. Directly below was the steep slope of black rocks he had seen from the window of the cell. Yama’s sight washed with white light for an instant—the officer with the pistol was foolish, but brave. Yama did not look back, but gave himself to the air.

He floated down like a soap bubble, landing beside a dead pine tree which immediately burst into crackling yellow flame. The air was alive with things which hummed and whined. Bits of rock flew off and the foliage of the stunted trees danced jerkily. Yama realized that the guards were still firing at him. He walked to the edge of the slope and gave himself to the air once more.

It took a long time to fall. The hell-hound was subject to the world’s gravity fields, but could modify them so that it fell at a constant rate. Yama saw a long slope spread below him, curving away on either side and studded with the lights of temples, sanctuaries and the offices of those lesser departments which had long ago lost battles for territory inside the Palace and now clung to existence on its roof. He gave the hell-hound an order, and it slid sideways through the air.

The glass-walled tunnel which linked the street of pleasure houses with the territory of the Department of Indigenous Affairs had been repaired with wooden paneling that burst into flames at a touch and fell away. Yama stepped through and walked amidst reflections of blue fire into a square under a high domed roof.

Three guards ran into the gateway on the far side; their officer drew his pistol and fired twice, and then stood amazed when he saw that the energy beam had done no harm. The air was hazed with recondensed particles of rock vaporized by the deflected pistol blast; Yama’s gaze burned through them and glanced upon the officer, who threw up his hands to protect his eyes.

“Fetch your masters,” Yama said. “Do you understand? I wish to speak with them.”

The officer turned and ran through the gateway. Yama followed. He was quite without fear. He felt as if he could run forever through the maze of corridors and halls, and laughed wildly when men shot at him. Slugs embedded in the hell-hound’s outermost shell became molten stars that flared and died.

He entered a huge refectory hall. Hundreds of people ran from him through a maze of tables. A confused cloud of fireflies billowed after them. Tables and chairs charred as he brushed past. He shouted for the masters of this place to come out, but there was no answer except for a volley of rifle shots from a gallery above the arched doorways at the far end of the hall. Frayed battle standards hung above the central dais of the hall. Yama stared at them until they caught fire, then leaped on to the dais and shouted that he would speak with the masters of this place or burn it all down.

Men ran forward, dragging a long hose. They sprayed water at Yama, but the water exploded into steam when it struck the hell-hound’s envelope and the men retreated, clutching scalded faces and hands. An officer on a floating disc fired his pistol. The blue glow of the hell-hound flared white. The high-backed chairs and the long table, inlaid with ironwood and turtle shell ivory, burst into flames; the stone of the dais burned Yama’s feet through the thin soles of his boots. He jumped down, stared at the officer until the man’s clothes caught fire, and strode through the nearest door.

Yama’s passage through toward the heart of the Department of Indigenous Affairs was a confusion of shouts and screams, flame and smoke and gunfire. He was filled with an exultant rage. Red and black lightning jagged his vision. He could have killed decads, perhaps hundreds of men. He did not know. His rage had taken him and he let it lead him where it would.

When it cleared, he was standing at the base of a vast circular shaft that rose through a hundred floors; the temple of Aeolis, the largest building Yama had known before he had come to Ys, could easily have fitted into it. Its looming walls were hung with tiers of balconies; its vast floor was crowded with desks. Books burned in stacked shelving, in tumbled heaps on the floor. Scraps of burning paper flew into the darkness above like sparks up the flue of a chimney.

Soldiers armed with slug rifles stood in front of every door around the base of the shaft, draped from head to foot in black cloth. They kept up a steady bombardment and the floor around Yama was soon littered with flecks of molten metal. A machine spun slowly through the air toward him, its mind defended by intricate loops of self-engulfing logic. In his anger he punched right through these defenses and the machine suddenly screamed upward, its load of explosive detonating with a white flash and a flat thump at the top of the shaft, half a league above.

“I know you are here, Prefect,” Yama shouted. “Show yourself!”

A voice spoke from the air, ordering Yama to surrender—it was the same even, neutral voice which had been with him every day in the room. He laughed at it and then, inspired, shut down the light of every firefly, so that now the vast circular space was lit only by the blue glow of the hell-hound, the flashes of the rifles around the perimeter, and the myriad fires started by spent slugs and Yama’s gaze. Everything was hazed with smoke. Yama felt a tightness in his chest and a scorched taste in his mouth. The air was becoming unbreathable. He knew that he would have to leave soon, and that he would have to kill the soldiers to do it.

Yet still he felt a steady exhilaration thrilling in his blood, a boundless energy. He did not consider himself trapped, but called out again for the masters of this place. As if in answer, the floor heaved sharply and Yama staggered and almost fell. Dust and shards of tiling fell from somewhere above, smashing down amongst the desks; for a moment, Yama stood inside a sleet of burning particles.

The soldiers were as shaken as he. They were still regrouping when a fresh wedge of troops entered through the high doors beneath a long gallery. They parted, and an old man stepped from their midst. He was slightly built and his dress was no different from that of an ordinary clerk, but he held himself proudly and at his absentminded gesture the soldiers around him immediately thrust three people to the front of their ranks.

Tamora shaded her eyes and called out, “Yama! Is that you inside that light?”

“He has come to free us,” Pandaras said.

Yama checked himself. He had been about to run to them.

The old man walked forward, stepping as delicately as a cat amongst broken shards and heaps of burning books.

He stopped when the floor rippled and shook dust into the air, and then walked on until he was fifty paces from the blue energies of the hell-hound. His eyes were masked by a strip of cloth, jet-black against the white pelt of his face.

“I had not thought to ever see one of these things,” the old man said. “I am Escanes, Yamamanama. I am here to ask why you are doing this.”

“I discovered that it is only a machine,” Yama said. “I should thank you for helping me focus on what I needed to do.”

“It is an inertial field-caster,” Escanes said. “Amongst other things. Anything trying to move through it gives up momentum in the form of heat. It burns with blue light because light reflected from it is shifted from lower to higher energy, and it is hot because of the energy released from dust and air in motion against it. I should warn you that we fully understand it.”

“Yet I control it, and you do not. I can destroy everything around me with a look.”

“Because we understand such things,” Escanes said, “we can work against them. You are not invulnerable. You should not have brought it here, my son. You endanger the records of the Department.”

“I will destroy them all unless you let my friends go.”

“I am empowered to speak for the Department, Yamamanama. Listen to what it has to say. We will let your three friends go. You will stay.”

“You will let them go, and let me go, too.”

“I do not think so,” Escanes said mildly. “Think quickly. One word from me, and they will die.”

“Then you will have no hold over me.”

The floor shook again. Yama flexed his knees, as if he was on a boat. Escanes held the edge of a half-charred desk until the shaking stopped. A balcony gave way and smashed down twenty stories into a stack of bookshelves on the far side of the shaft.

Yama said, “Someone is attacking you, I think. Is it war?”

“Our enemies believe that we are weakened from within,” Escanes said. “We will prove them wrong. It is a trivial matter, and not one that concerns you. What matters is your answer.”

“Let my friends go.”

“And you will stay?”

“No. You will come with me.”

Yama sprang forward, and the hell-hound relaxed its perimeter for an instant. Escanes threw up his hands, but he was already inside the hell-hound’s envelope. Yama caught him and turned him around, and held the sharpened bit of wood to his throat. Escanes struggled, but Yama held him easily.

“Tell your people to let my friends go.”

“They will not obey me. I am only a mouth for the Department. We are all one. Do not be a fool, or your friends will die.”

“Your tunic is silk, dominie, not artificial cotton. I think that your dogma requires you to appear to be the same as all others in the Department, but you raise yourself higher than most.”

“We are all one.”

“Yet some value themselves more than others.”

Escanes tried to turn his head, but Yama jabbed the sliver of wood into the loose flesh of the old man’s neck and urged him forward. The soldiers raised their rifles, but an officer snapped an order and they lowered them again.

Yama told the old man, “If my friends walk out of here with me, then your life will be spared. I promise that I will not cause any more damage. You will be free to defend yourself against your enemies. But if anything happens to my friends, then I join your enemies and fight against you.”

“Fight with us, Yamamanama,” Escanes said. “You could be the most powerful general in our army.”

“You would have made that offer already, if you could. Now repeat to your men what I have told you.”

It was easy to find the way back to the gate—the hell-hound had left a trail of scorched doors and scored floor tiles. Yama let Tamora, Pandaras and Eliphas walk ahead of him. The old man, Escanes, did not struggle, but continued to try to convince Yama to give himself to the mercy and generosity of the Department until at last Yama lost patience and put a hand over his mouth. Yama stopped at the gate and told the others to go ahead. “While I stand here, no one can get past. Eliphas, you know a safe place to take them.”

The old man stared and Tamora shook him and hissed in his ear. Yama asked his question again and Eliphas blinked and said, “It finally caught you, brother.” Blue light shone in his eyes.

“No, Eliphas. I caught it. I understand it now. You remember the place Magon took us to.”

“I remember.”

Pandaras said, “He isn’t quite himself, master. He had a harder time of it than me. I knew nothing important, so they didn’t hurt me. It was just talking, and you know how I love that. I told them many stories.”

The boy wore the white shirt and black trousers of a clerk. Yama said, “It seems you have adopted their ways.”

“Kill them all,” Tamora said. Her head had been shaved, and her face was a palimpsest of fresh bruises laid over old.

“We will talk later, Tamora. Go now.”

The old man, Escanes, said, “She is right. You should kill us all, for else we will follow you to the end of the river and beyond.”

“I am not your enemy.”

“Anyone who does not serve is our enemy.”

“I serve the Preservers, if I can, not your Department.”

“So says any man who is full of pride. Such a one believes that by doing as he wishes he serves a higher power, but instead he has allowed himself to become a slave of his base appetites. You would claim to know what the Preservers want? Then you are worse than foolish, young man. We are the arm of the Preservers. We strive against their enemies at the midpoint of the world.”

“I do not know why I was born here, in this time and place. But it was not to serve your hunger for power.”

Tamora, Pandaras and Eliphas had disappeared into the tunnel at the far end of the plaza. Yama told Escanes to close his eyes, and then thrust him toward the gate. The hell-hound’s envelope had grown hotter because it had contracted, and the old man’s clothes smoldered as he staggered away.

The soldiers rushed forward then. Yama ran across the square into the tunnel and plunged through the hole he had burned in the patchwork repair to the tunnel’s glass wall. The night was spread before him. The hell-hound turned and dipped and in a sudden rush he was down, standing beside the white fountain in the middle of the long lawn.

Yama thanked the hell-hound and dismissed it, and felt a gust of heat as it moved away from him. It shrank into itself and rose, a bright blue star that dwindled away against the black bulk of the mountain.

Yama stood alone in darkness in the center of a circle of charred grass. He thought of returning to the library of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons to ask what the chief of clerks, Kun Norbu, had discovered about his bloodline. He thought of running away. But he knew that he could not. He had saved his three companions from immediate danger, but they were still within the bounds of the Palace, and the Department of Indigenous Affairs would not rest until they were recaptured. Besides, he was so very tired, and his torn muscles and cracked ribs ached horribly. It was as if he drew every breath through a rack of knives. The hell-hound had lent him some of its energies while it had enveloped him, but now he had only his own reserves of strength to draw upon.

He sat at the edge of one of the fountain’s wide shallow basins and drank cold water with his cupped hands, and splashed water on his face. Presently, a small constellation of fireflies gathered around him, lighting his way as he crossed the long lawn and went down the steps. His muscles were as loose and weak as sacks of water, and he had to stop and rest every five minutes. Each time he stopped it was harder to force himself to stand and go on, but the dread of being recaptured drove him forward.

When he reached the beginning of the path through the grove of bamboo, he sat down and rested for a few minutes, breathing hard and feeling beads of sweat roll down his sides. The skeletal tower, hung with creepers, loomed above. Yama struggled to his feet and went on.

White birds, ghostly in the darkness, fled from him.

Yama caught at bamboo stems and lost his grasp and slid down a dusty slope, fetching up against a low wall. Startled goats bounded away, their wooden bells clanking.

Yama lay on his back, looking up at the black sky, the few blurred stars, the red swirl of the Eye of the Preservers.

After a while, the villagers came to discover what had disturbed their animals. They were armed with spears and slings, for lynxes and fierce red foxes prowled the roof, and the Lords of the Palace were restless that night. But they found only Yama, asleep on the cropped grass.