Ancients of Days

Chapter Seventeen The City of the Dead

Tamora’s keen eyes had already glimpsed the first intimation of smoke far downriver, but it was not until the beginning of the afternoon watch of the following day that one of the sailors, perched on a ratline high above the deck, sang out that there was a fire to port, a fire on the shore. Everyone crowded to the rail. A little dark cloud hung at the edge of the land, a smudge that was, Pandaras said, no bigger than a baby’s claw. Captain Lorquital examined it through her spectacles before declaring that it was trouble they would do best to steer clear of.

“There are fast currents we can use further out, and there’s a floating harbor we’d have had to cut around in any case.”

Yama had been staring at the shore with growing realization. Suddenly anxious, he asked to borrow the Captain’s spectacles. He squinted through one of the lenses and the distant shore leapt forward, horribly familiar. For two days they had been sailing past barren hills populated with the ruined houses of the dead, but only now did he see that they were within sight of the heart of the City of the Dead.

There was the wide valley of the Breas, with its quilt of fields and channels; there was the skull-swell of the bluff, and the peel-house perched atop it like a coronet; the dusty hills with their necklaces of white tombs and stands of dark green cedars and black cypresses saddling away into the far distance, where the snowy peaks of the foothills of the Rim Mountains made a hazy line against the blue sky. And there was the shallow bay, with the long stone finger of the new quay running across the mudflats to the water’s edge, and then the old waterfront of Aeolis.

And Aeolis was burning.

A triple-decked warship stood at the wide mouth of the bay, raking the little city with green and red needles of light that splashed molten stone where they struck. The bombardment seemed pointless, for every stone building was already smashed flat, and everything that could burn was afire. Black reefs of smoke rolled up, feeding the pall which hung above the city like a crow’s wing. Dr. Dismas’s tower was reduced to a melted stub; light raked the ancient ruins beyond it and stabbed into the flooded paeonin fields, sending up boiling gouts of mud and clouds of steam. Only the temple still stood, its white façade smudged by smoke, the tall lycophytes lining the long avenue which led to it withered or aflame.

Yama cried out, and Pandaras said, “What is it, master?”

Yama shook his head, heartsick. He climbed up to the quarterdeck, where Captain Lorquital and her daughter were already plotting a new course at the chart table, and heard himself asking them to turn the Weazel toward the shore, not away from it.

“It is my home,” he said. “Most of the people I hold dear live there. My family. My friends.”

He was thinking of Derev. She was brave and clever and resourceful. She would have found a way of surviving.

She would have escaped to the hills above the city. She knew the way to Beatrice and Osric’s remote tower. Or perhaps the Aedile had taken her in, and her family. He would have tried to protect all of the citizens. Or perhaps she was with their friend Ananda, the sizar of the priest of Aeolis. The temple still stood, after all.

Ixchel Lorquital looked hard at Yama and said, “Sit down for a moment.”

Yama found he was trembling. He said, “I must go ashore.”

“It’s too dangerous,” Aguilar said. “I’ll fight if I must, but not against a warship. She could burn us to the waterline with one shot.”

Tamora had followed Yama. She stood at his shoulder and said, “Do as he asks.”

Captain Lorquital looked at her, looked at Yama. “I must do what’s best for the ship. That’s a military action, and I won’t put my ship and my crew in the middle of it.”

Eliphas was sitting in his customary place by the Captain’s sling chair. He said, “If that is your home, brother, don’t you think your enemies know that? They know you’re traveling downriver, and perhaps hope to lure you ashore.”

Yama’s throat was parched. He said, “Lend me the dory. I will put ashore myself. You can anchor at the old floating harbor, or there are shoals and banyan islands downstream where you could hide a flotilla of ships. I will rejoin you within a day. If I do not, sail on without me.”

Aguilar said, “And lose the dory?”

“Then set me ashore here and now. I will meet you on the other side of the city in three days.”

Eliphas said, “You should not put yourself in danger, brother.”

Captain Lorquital said, “I’d not be happy to lose a passenger, either.”

“I’ll go with him,” Tamora said.

Pandaras jumped on to the rail behind her. He drew his poniard and flourished it above his head. “So will I. He’ll need his squire.”

Aguilar said, “If these three want to go over the side, let them do it now, before we’re in range of the big girl’s cannon.”

Captain Lorquital considered, sucking at her silver lip-plug, then told her daughter, “I won’t have three passengers putting themselves in danger, but clearly they’ll jump over the side if they have no other option. I’ll keep to this course. If there’s no trouble, perhaps they can go ashore.”

Aguilar stared at Yama and said, “There’ll be no good to be had from this.”

Captain Lorquital said, “Have a little charity, daughter. The first sign of trouble, and we run for it.”

Tamora said, “You must trust him, Captain. He will protect you.”

Yama bowed his head, hoping that the vessel of Tamora’s faith would not be wrecked on the reef of his own self-doubt.

Aguilar snorted. “Then pray he can whistle up some wind. We’ll need it.”

Yama and Tamora put out from the Weazel in the dory a little way upriver of the floating docks. Pandaras had been persuaded to remain behind to ensure that Captain Lorquital kept to the agreed rendezvous at midnight. He waved from the rail of the poop deck as, in the last light of the sun, the little ship heeled around and headed out toward the center of the river.

Tamora took up her oar and said, “I reckon that black-skinned silver-eyed bookworm is right. It is almost certainly a trap.”

Yama said helplessly, “I know. This is the doing of the Department of Indigenous Affairs. The peel-house still stands, and it is theirs.”

“And we are doing what they want by walking into it. Grah. At least we will take them by surprise.”

If Derev had taken refuge in the peel-house, then she was surely a prisoner, and surely had been put to the question by Prefect Corin. That was worse than thinking that she might be dead. Yama remembered the way she had fluttered down from her perch in the ruins outside Aeolis, on the night they had met the anchorite. So light and graceful, her long white hair floating about her lovely, fine-boned face.

He took up his own oar. Together they began to row toward the floating docks. After a while, he said, “Perhaps they are afraid, Tamora. Do you think they could be afraid of me?”

“The Captain and her daughter are afraid of you, and so are the crew. And Eliphas most of all. I’ve been watching him. He has a knife, a pretty little stiletto, and sleeps with his hand on it.”

“I trust him more than he trusts himself,” Yama said, “but less than I trust you.”

“You should not trust him at all. He wants something from you.”

As they rowed, Yama kept turning to stare with a kind of sick eagerness at the burning city, but he could see little more than he had from the deck of the Weazel. There was too much smoke, and clouds of steam kept spurting up where beams raked the waterfront, boiling the water of the shallow bay and the mudflats where once he had hunted crabs and dug for treasure everyone had believed to be buried there, finding nothing but the ancient coins.

He closed his hand on the coin he had found in the cell high in the Palace of the Memory of the People, no different to the ones he had dug up as a child, when he had been surrounded by treasure, had he but realized it.

They passed the long maze of pilings and platforms and cranes of the floating harbor. No one answered Yama’s hail, and the long sheds of the carpenters’ workshops had a forlorn, deserted air. A door banged and banged in the wind; nothing else stirred.

The setting sun was dimmed and greatly swollen, a louring red eye that glared through a shroud of smoke and steam. The air scraped the back of Yama’s throat with an acrid, metallic taste. Above the cliffs of the bluff, the towers of the peel-house, rising through the trees of its garden, caught the last rays of the sun and glowed with red light; the river held a bloody cast that had Tamora grumbling about omens. Flecks of black soot rained all around, smudging their skin and clothes. Floating debris began to knock against the dory’s hull. Broken bits of furniture, books, a raft of bottles, half-burned rags. Bales of last year’s hay wrapped in black plastic, taut as drumheads, went floating by, carried out of the bay by the ebb tide. No bodies, but Tamora said that meant little—the dead did not usually rise to the surface until distended by the gases of decomposition.

The dory slipped at a shallow angle toward the shore upriver of the bluff. The hum and sizzle of the light cannon of the warship carried clearly across the water. There was the snapping of heat-stressed stone, the explosive hiss of water suddenly shot to steam, the crackle of innumerable small fires.

As he rowed, Yama wondered again about Derev, and wondered if the Aedile had resisted the razing of Aeolis and was now a prisoner in his own peel-house, wondered what had happened to all the citizens of Aeolis, and again thought of Derev.

He felt a mixture of shame and fear and anger and helplessness. Again and again, the memory of Prefect Corin’s bland face tormented him.

The quiet of the shore was shocked by the clatter of wings as a flock of wading birds took flight from the dory’s approach, dipping as one as they turned across the water. Yama and Tamora splashed into thigh-deep water and dragged the dory up the shallow, muddy beach.

“I wish you’d brought your rapier,” she grumbled. “I said I’d look after you, but you’ll make it very difficult if you won’t begin to think of defending yourself.”

“This is my home, Tamora. I would not return to it armed for war.”

“If your enemy has taken it, then it is no longer your home.”

“We shall see,” Yama said, but to appease her he broke a branch from a young pine tree that the river had cast up on this muddy strand. The branch had been stripped of bark and smoothed by the rub of the water, but it had not yet begun to rot and it made a sturdy staff half again his height.

The sun had set behind the Rim Mountains but the Eye of the Preservers had not yet risen. What light there was came from the fires burning beyond the bluff. The flashes of cannon shot were as inconstant as heat lightning. All of the lights of the peel-house were ablaze, and the sight gave Yama little hope. Clearly, whoever commanded the peel-house did not expect an attack.

Tamora could see better than Yama in the near dark, and she led the way along an embankment above paeonin fields carved from river-bottom land. The old shoreline was marked by a line of ancient date palms. As a child, Yama had spent long summer afternoons in their shade while Zakiel had lectured him and Telmon on natural history. Not far from here, he had met with Derev for the last time before he had left for Ys with Prefect Corin.

Now, as he and Tamora walked along the dusty embankment toward the palms, a faint crackling sounded ahead of them in the near dark. Tamora grasped Yama’s arm and bent her head and whispered that she would go ahead and investigate.

“There are no machines,” Yama whispered back. “Surely they would have machines.”

Light flared amongst the graceful arcs of the date palms. With a clatter of metal on metal, a pentad of spidery, man-sized creatures skittered toward them, followed by armed soldiers.

“We will kill her,” the leader of the patrol, a young, nervous lieutenant, told the mage. “She is no one important. Only a dirty little cateran. Not even her mother will miss her.”

Tamora hissed, and tried to spit at the lieutenant. But the machine held her too tightly; she could not even turn her head.

“My spiders will hold her as easily alive as dead,” the mage said, “and she might tell us something useful. I will be glad to put her to the revolutionary. Her kind are strong-willed. It would be a fine demonstration of its powers.”

Yama and Tamora were each bound tightly and painfully by the whip-like metal tentacles of a spidery machine.

Their feet did not quite touch the ground. One of the soldiers had taken Tamora’s saber; when it had first pounced upon him, Yama had broken his staff against the machine which now held him tight.

“If you kill her,” Yama said, “then you must kill me too, for I swear I will hunt you down.”

The lieutenant said, “You are in no position to tell me what to do, fellow.” He laughed and looked around, and his soldiers laughed too. He was a swarthy fellow in plastic armor over a leather kirtle. An energy pistol was tucked into the bandolier that crossed his transparent breastplate.

Yama waited until they were quiet, until they were looking at him again, wondering how he would reply. He let the moment stretch before he said, “I am wanted by Prefect Corin because I am important to him. He wants me to work with him, for the good of the Department. If you kill my friend that is what I will do. I will become a loyal soldier, and one day I will find you and kill you.”

The lieutenant spat and ground the oyster of phlegm into the dust with the toe of his boot. “Oh, I will not kill her,” he said. “There are worse things than death. Prefect Corin will probably give her to Nergal here. Then you will wish that you had allowed me to give her a clean death. A soldier’s death. Nergal’s machines are cruel, and these are the least of them.”

The remaining spiders were grouped behind the soldiers, holding up electric lamps which had drawn hundreds of moths from the darkness beyond. They were crude affairs, racks of aluminum tubing, electric motors and sensors raised high on three pairs of jointed legs. A decad of long, continually questing tentacles, made of jointed rings of metal and tipped with claw-like manipulators, sprouted between the front pair of legs.

The tentacles of the spider which held Yama were wrapped tightly around his arms and legs. They pressed painfully into his skin and tingled with a faint electrical charge. He had no sense of these machines. They were controlled by the mage, Nergal, a man with black skin that had a faint scaly iridescence in the distilled glare of the electric lamps, and large round eyes as dead as stones.

He wore a long robe of metallic mesh, a tight-fitting copper skullcap. Close-fitting white plastic gloves sleeved his arms to the elbows, “They are not susceptible to your power,” Nergal told Yama. He made shapes with his gloved left hand, and the machine which held Yama swung to the right, then centered itself again. Yama could feel the shapes made by the mage in his head, and allowed himself a faint hope.

Nergal said, “These are a new class of machine, the first new machines to be built since the world was created. They dance for me and no one else.”

“They have no minds,” Yama said, “so how can they be truly useful?”

“They caught you, Yamamanama, and they hold you now. That is useful enough to begin with. They have as much logic as any insect. They do not need to think. Thinking is a luxury, as any laborer well knows.”

“Enough talk,” the lieutenant said. “We will get this prize back to the peel-house. I have little liking for this bone orchard.”

“Quite right,” Yama said. “The dead can be dangerous.”

“Hold your yap, or I will have you gagged,” the lieutenant said. “You will be amongst the dead soon enough, and you can try and scare me then.” When he laughed again the soldiers around him did not join in. He glared at them and said sharply, “Fall in. There is nothing here that we cannot deal with.”

Marshaled by the shapes Nergal made in the air with his gloves, the machines which held Yama and Tamora walked amidst their fellows with a whine of servo motors and a clanking of hydraulic joints. The soldiers ambled on either side, rifles held at port.

“Make these things go faster,” the lieutenant said. “These two might have friends.”

“I thought you had driven them out,” Nergal said. “Most fled downriver.”

“We cannot guarantee safety outside our perimeter,” the lieutenant said. “Have these things pick up speed.”

“Once we reach the paved road they will be able to go faster. The question of balance on rough terrain is very complex, and requires much processing power.”

“Any trouble, and we leave the machines behind,” the lieutenant said.

“As you have told me repeatedly. I will reply as before. Any trouble, and my machines will deal with it. Their processors and servos are battle-hardened, and they have infrared sights on guns which fire at the rate of a thousand slugs a minute. Soon, all our armies will be composed of these machines, lieutenant. Imagine it! Combined with Yamamanama’s powers, we will drive the heretics over the end of the river.”

The lieutenant said, “That is not to be spoken of in front of the men.”

Yama said, “I am pleased to meet one of those who were testing me when I was briefly a guest in the Palace of the Memory of the People. I owe you much, Nergal.”

The patrol was approaching one of the wide, white thoroughfares of the City of the Dead. Many merchants had been buried here. Their crowded tombs glimmered in the near darkness. They were marked by ornate pyramids, steles and statues; even in death, the merchants had competed with their rivals.

“You will be our guest again,” Nergal said.

“He’ll kill you all long before then,” Tamora said. “You should let him go now.”

“I think not,” Nergal said. “There is much to discover. There is a peculiarity of your brain, Yamamanama, or perhaps of your nervous system, which allows you to interface with the old machines. We will find it, even if we have to open up your skull and slice you up bit by bit. But I hope that will not be necessary. Much easier if you cooperate. Much easier if you tell us how it is done.”

“I do not know if I can tell you,” Yama said, “but I am sure that I can show you.”

“We will find out how to control the machines usurped by the heretics,” Nergal said. “We will control all machines and so control the world. As a beginning, at least.”

They were amongst the first of the tombs, now. The soldiers moved out on either flank and the machines picked up their pace as they stepped on to the paved road, shining their lamps this way and that. The tombs here were as big as houses, but crudely made. Further along, amongst the older, finer tombs, Yama felt a congregation waking and turning toward him. He told them what to do.

And the night came alive with the light of the past.

The soldiers began firing in panic as the dead reached for them. Yama had delved into the roots of the aspects and changed them all. No longer men and women smiling, beckoning, eager to tell to anyone who listened the life stories of the dead they represented; instead, grim, withered faces and blazing eyes, or no eyes at all but black pits in fleshless skulls. Skin like leather shrunken on long bones, bony fingers clutching at faces. Mad laughter, screeches, a rumbling subsonic that Yama could feel through the struts of the machine which clasped him so tightly. A white mist fell like a curtain, filled with half-glimpsed nightmare shapes. The soldiers vanished into it; not even the muzzle-flashes of their rifles could be seen, although their dismayed shouts and the rattle of rifle shots echoed sharply.

Somewhere in the mist, the lieutenant shouted an order to cease firing, shouted that this was no more than a trick.

But each soldier was lost to every other, blinded by glowing mist and surrounded by the throng of the dead. Nergal’s machines halted in the middle of what seemed to be a foggy street where skeletons of draft animals drew carts piled with rotting bodies that stirred with a feeble half-life. Pale things with burning eyes peered from the narrow windows of the houses. Below Yama, who was still clasped tightly by the spider, the mage sank to his knees.

His gloved hands flexed at his throat, tightening inexorably. He stared at Yama with wide eyes. His mouth gaped as he tried and failed to draw air.

Yama felt a terrible, gleeful triumph. He would not relent.

“I cannot control your machines,” he shouted, “but I can control what you use to control them. You fool! You used old technology to control the new!”

Nergal did not hear him. Although still kneeling, he was dead, strangled by feedback. His head tipped forward until his brow struck the ground and his body relaxed and slumped sideways. The tentacles which held Yama lost their tension and he dropped to the ground. All around, the spiders collapsed in a clatter of metal.

The soldiers were still shooting at ghosts when Yama and Tamora reached the old stair. Yama had woken every aspect in the City of the Dead. The low hills, crowded with tombs and monuments, were half-drowned in a lake of eldritch mist. Tamora carried a rifle taken from a soldier she had killed; she had not found the man who had taken her saber, and grumbled about the loss.

“I have already lost my own sword to the Department of Indigenous Affairs. It had a fine and bitter blade, but it cost me dear enough. I would not be here if I had not been in debt with Gorgo because of it. And now they have taken its replacement.”

“I will find you another,” Yama said. “There are many in the armory.” He told her that the narrow stair they were climbing, its stone steps worn in the middle and sometimes missing, went all the way up the sheer side of the bluff. It was used by the kitchen staff of the peel-house. “There are certain herbs which grow only by graves. The dead impart a quality to the soil which they require. When I was much younger, I used to go with the youngest kitchen boy early every morning to pick them.”

“You have had a strange childhood, Yama. Not many would think to use a graveyard as a kitchen garden.”

“Fortunate for us that I know it so well. The soldiers are lost in the illusion spun by the tombs, but I brought us here by the quickest and straightest route.”

“I’m glad Nergal is dead. Those things he made were evil.”

The triumphant glee Yama had felt when he had murdered Nergal was now gone. It was as if something had woken in him and then returned to sleep. But it was done, and perhaps it was better that the mage was dead, or he would be another enemy pursuing Yama.

He said, “Surely Nergal’s spiders were no more evil than your rifle, or a tiger snake. Like them, the spiders had no consciousness, and so no capacity to distinguish between good and evil. Only by consciously rejecting good can evil be done.”

“That’s what I meant. What he wanted to do with them was evil. So was what he wanted to do with you. Can you really bend every machine in the world to your will, Yama?”

“I hope it was merely one of Nergal’s boasts. But I do not know.”

They heard men shouting as they neared the top of the stair. Further off, dogs were barking eagerly.

Tamora’s grin was a pale flash in the near dark. “And I suppose that you can silence the watchdogs, just as you did in the merchant’s house.”

“They know me,” Yama said. “It was the second trick I learned.”

“And what was the first?”

“You have just seen it. Although I thought then that the aspects of the dead took no more than an ordinary interest in me, I know now that I drew them to me. I learned much from them, as they pleaded for the memory of those they represented.”

“Nothing you do is ordinary,” Tamora said, and Yama heard in her voice the same note he had heard two days ago, when she had pledged her life to his.

There were two soldiers at the gate. Tamora whispered to Yama that they were hers. He squatted in bushes by the shoulder of the road and watched the play of lights within the lake of mist far below. It now covered all but the tallest monuments of the City of the Dead. There were watchdogs nearby, and he talked briefly with them before settling down to await Tamora’s return.

She came so silently that it was as if she had stepped out of a secret door in the darkness. She had slung the rifle over her shoulder and carried a short stabbing sword.

When she squatted beside Yama she licked blood from its broad blade with her rough tongue before she spoke.

“I killed the first with my hands, and the second with the sword I took from the first. Are you going to sit there all night, or are we going to try and make the rendezvous? That is, if that fat seal of a captain bothers to come back.”

“She will. Pandaras will see to it, or he will sink her ship trying. But I do not think that she will need persuasion. She is a good woman.”

“Grah. You trust people too much. It will be your downfall.”

As they went through the gate, Yama called the watchdogs to him, and they ran eagerly out of the trees and across the wide lawn. Tamora stood her ground, her sword raised above her head, while Yama greeted each by name and let them smell his wrists. Light from the windows of the peel-house glinted on their shoulder plates, glistened on wet muzzles and set sparks in black eyes.

“They will not hurt you,” he told Tamora. “I have told them that you are my friend.”

“I have no liking for dogs. Even yours. Where is the door to this place?”

Accompanied by a tide of watchdogs, they went around two sides of the peel-house and crossed the courtyard where Yama had so recently said farewell to the Aedile and the household, where he had never expected to step again. The guardhouse and Sergeant Rhodean’s quarters were dark.

“They’ll be out looking for us,” Tamora said, grinning.

“The watchdogs killed all the soldiers in the grounds,” Yama said. “The two at the gate were yours; a decad more were mine.”

They went through the kitchen garden. It was much trampled. Broken furniture was scattered around an ashy fire. Every bit of glass in the forcing houses had been smashed.

Yama expected more destruction in the kitchens, but when he kicked open the door nothing seemed to have changed. By the big fireplace, people pushed back chairs and stood, their faces pale in the flickering light of rush lamps. They were the household servants.

“You are in danger, young ma-ma-master,” Parolles, the tall, cadaverous master of the wine, said. He was the most senior of the servants who remained, and took it upon himself to speak for all of them. “You have seen the ca-ca-candle lit in the town, and you have been drawn to it as he said you would. Go! Go now! Before his soldiers find you.”

“I have already found them, with the help of my friend, Tamora. How is my father, Parolles? What have they done with him?”

The flame of the stout candle Parolles held put pinpricks of light in the center of his slitted irises. Now these pinpricks grew softer, and suddenly a chain of little lights spilled down the old servant’s hollow cheeks and began to drip from the end of his sharp chin. He said slowly, “Your father is no longer here, young ma-master. He fled just last night, with the help of Sergeant Rho-rho-dean. There was a small rebellion.”

“We think they have gone across the river,” Bertram said. He was the pastry cook, half the height of Parolles and more than twice as wide. He held a big ladle at his shoulder like a club.

Parolles blotted his cheeks with the back of a hand. He said, “At least, we think that is where he has gone. We cannot he sure. Some of the do-do-domestic staff escaped too, but not, alas, all. Those you see here, and the librarian.”

Yama felt a swelling sense of relief. He had feared the worst, but that weight had been taken from him. He said, “Then my father is alive, at least. And the merchant’s daughter, Derev? Did her family seek safety here?”

“I have not seen her,” Bertram said. “I am sorry, young master.”

“They treated your father grievously, young ma-ma-master,” Parolles said. “Set the traitor in his place, and put him to question using monstrous ma-ma-machines when he stood up to them over the matter of the burning of the town.”

“I have had some revenge,” Yama said. “The mage is dead.”

“But the viper still lives. When he saw the lights in the City of the Dead, he grew mighty sc-sc-scared, and ordered us locked up here.”

“When you burst in, young master,” Bertram said, “we thought our time had come.”

“I will talk with this viper,” Yama said grimly.

“We will come with you, young ma-ma-master. We have no weapons beyond some kitchen tools, but we will do all we can. These are terrible times. The Department fights against itself.”

“I hope it will end soon,” Yama said. “Now, who is with me?”

They all were.

There were two soldiers in the minstrels’ gallery of the Great Hall, where Yama had once spied on his father and Dr. Dismas, but only one got off a shot before Tamora raked them with rifle fire. One man fell back; the other tumbled over the railing and landed on the long, polished table with a heavy, wet sound, kicked once, and was still. “The banners are gone,” Yama said, looking up at the high, vaulted ceiling. The hall looked larger and dustier without them.

“Burned,” Parolles said. “A terrible burning they had. A bonfire of the vanities, the Prefect called it. He ma-ma-made your father watch. A more terrible punishment than the machines, I think.”

Yama and Tamora led the pack of watchdogs and the servants through the Great Hall toward the tall double doors of the receiving chamber. Two more soldiers stood there. One fled; the other died cursing his comrade’s cowardice. Yama and Tamora flung open the doors. The tall square room beyond was blazing with light, but empty.

Although the four great tapestries were gone from the walls, the canopied chair on the central dais on which the Aedile had customarily sat while holding audience was still there.

Yama went around the dais and ducked through the little door and went up the narrow stair that led to the Aedile’s private chambers. No need for subtlety; the alarms have been raised by now, and the cheering of the servants and the clatter of the armor of the watchdogs against the curved stone walls made a tremendous racket.

With Yama at their head, they burst into the corridor.

Some of the servants were beating against the walls or stamping their feet, calling for the traitor to come out. If there had been any guards, they had fled. The door to the Aedile’s chambers was locked, but Tamora shot off the mechanical lock and kicked the door open in a single smooth motion.

The room was hot and stuffy. It stank of sex and spilled wine and cigarette smoke, and was lit by hundreds of candles, stuck to every surface by shrouds of their own melted wax. Papers were strewn everywhere amongst a litter of empty bottles and bowls of untouched food. The brass alembic was overturned, its mechanism spilled across a carpet sodden with wine.

The man on the bed raised a pistol, holding it in both hands as he took aim at Yama. He was naked under the rumpled, filthy sheet, and so was the woman who clutched a bolster to her breasts—one of the whores from the town, her tall blue wig askew, her face caked with white makeup, black pigment smeared about her mouth like a bruise and more black pigment around her wide eyes.

“Do not think I will not use this,” Torin said, and showed a mouthful of white, needle teeth. His humped back was pressed against the carved bedhead; his shaven head gleamed with sweat. “You came back, just as Corin said you would. And now you are mine. Dismiss the rabble and we will talk, boy.”

“Do not li-li-listen to him, young ma-ma-master,” Parolles said.

Bertram added, “He cannot kill us all.”

“He will do nothing.” Yama said. “He knows that the soldiers are scattered, and that he cannot call upon Prefect Corin. How long have you been in his employ, Torin?”

“He will burn you like the town, if he has to.” The pistol wavered when Torin spoke, and he squinted down its short, stubby barrel and centered it on Yama’s chest again. He was very drunk.

“Then you will burn too. It saddens me to see you like this, Torin. You were a good friend to my father.”

“I was always a good servant to the Department. Your father was a traitor. He hid all he knew about you, even from Prefect Corin. But like the fool that he was, he wrote it all down. It is all here, somewhere. If he did not know what he had he is a fool. If he did, then he is the blackest traitor in our history.”

“I will not be the Department’s weapon,” Yama said.

“Then you are as much a fool and a traitor as the Aedile. I should burn you where you stand.”

Yama relaxed. He knew then that Torin could not kill him. He said, “I will fight against the heretics like any other man. But I fear that Prefect Corin has other plans for me. He would use me to destroy the other departments. He would use me to take the world, if he could. Give me the pistol, Torin, and I will see that you leave here unharmed.”

“You keep away! Keep away!” Torin pulled the naked woman in front of him and jammed the pistol at her head. “I will kill her and the rest of you! I will burn this fucking pile of stones to the ground!”

The woman got an elbow under Torin’s narrow jaw with surprising force. His needle teeth clicked closed on his lower lip; he howled with pain and the pistol went off, its searing red beam missed his face by a fingersbreadth, burned through the canopy of the bed and reflected from the ceiling. The canopy burst into flame and Tamora crossed the room in a bound and broke Torin’s arm with a single blow.

Torin, his face badly burned by the near miss, refused to answer any of Yama’s questions. Yama left him to the tender mercy of the other servants and went with Tamora to find Zakiel.

The tall, gaunt librarian was in the library. He had been shackled around his neck, and a heavy chain looped up to a sliding clip on an overhead rail. There was a new, raw brand on his cheek. He watched calmly, his black eyes inscrutable, as Tamora hacked without effect at the chain with her sword.

“It is tempered steel,” he said. “Quenched in the blood of oxen, I believe. You will damage the edge of your weapon, domina.”

“It’s a piece of shit anyhow,” Tamora said, but she tossed the sword onto Zakiel’s neatly made cot, which stood as always beneath the racks of large, aluminum-covered ledgers, jumped up and swung from one of the studs which fastened the rail to the ceiling until it came away in a shower of plaster and dust. She slid the clip over the end of the rail and the free end of the chain dropped at Zakiel’s long, bare feet.

The librarian wiped dust from the tops of the ledgers with the wide sleeve of his robe. He said, “It might have been better if you had left me chained, young master. Torin may have received the rough justice he deserved, but those he serves will soon return.”

“You should come with us,” Yama said.

“I will not, as you well know. The books are in my care, and I do not think that I can carry them all with me. And if I could, how would I keep them safe? I trust you still have the copy of the Puranas.”

“I have always kept it beside me.”

Zakiel picked up the heavy chain and draped it over one arm. “It will teach you much, in the right circumstances. I am pleased that you have returned, young master, but I fear that you have far to go.”

“How much did my father know about me, Zakiel? How much did he hide from the Department?”

“And hide from you?” Zakiel smiled. “He has told you the circumstances of how you came to Aeolis. As for the rest, he should tell you, not I, for he knows it better. He has been taken across the river by Sergeant Rhodean and his merry crew of guards. The good Sergeant wanted me to go, too, but alas—”

Yama smiled. “You could not leave the books.”

“Precisely. If I am a slave, it is not to the Department, but to my duty as Librarian of the peel-house. And that is as it should be, for I am merely honoring the oath I once broke when I was younger than you are now. When I was your age, I thought in my blind pride that I knew better than those whom I served, but now I know better. Age gives a certain perspective. It is like climbing a peak of the Rim Mountains. At last you run out of air, but how wonderful the view! These books are my life, young master, and I cannot leave them.”

“Do you know what happened to the Amnan?”

“Many fled across the river. But Derev and her family left a day before the warship took anchor in the bay. Some said that they were spies, fleeing to safety, but I do not believe it.”

Yama’s heart turned over. He felt that he could float to the ceiling. He grinned and said, “She is safe.”

He thought that he knew where she had gone. She would be with Beatrice and Osric in the oldest part of the City of the Dead, in the foothills of the Rim Mountains.

Zakiel said, “Perhaps she will return. Perhaps you might have a message for her.”

“Tell her that I go downriver, but that I will come back.”

“Is that all? Well, I will tell her, when I see her.”

“I will miss you, Zakiel.”

“We have already said our goodbyes. Do not worry about me, or the books. Torin held many grievances against the peel-house, for he believed himself better than he was, but Prefect Corin’s grievance is against you.”

“We must go,” Tamora said. “There is less than an hour to the rendezvous.”