Ancients of Days

Chapter Thirty The Edge of the World

A stair, entered by a narrow defile between two tall, roughly man-shaped outcrops that Eliphas called the Watchers of the Void, led down the vertical rock face at the edge of the world. It was broad enough for a decad of men to have descended abreast, but its steps, carved from naked keelrock, were steep and narrow and slippery. Yama discovered that he was terrified of falling, imagining himself plummeting through the cloud deck and continuing to fall until at last passing beyond the envelope of the world’s atmosphere and perishing, as Angel had perished in the embrace of a copy of her own self. Were their bodies still falling through the void beyond the world? He and Tamora clung to the carved face of the cliff as they followed Eliphas, finding comfort in the faces and bodies of the men and women and creatures that flowed under their fingertips.

The cook, Tibor, had stayed behind to dig for edible roots, and Pandaras had volunteered to help him. Yama had given the boy his book and coin, in case either drew the aspect of Angel to the shrine. Although the hell-hound had destroyed her, there might be other copies.

Tamora had insisted that it was her duty to watch over Yama. She thought that Eliphas was leading him into a trap. If she was right then neither her sword nor her bravery could save him, but Yama did not trouble to tell her that. There was a coldness growing in his heart; as he descended the stair it seemed to him that Tamora and Eliphas had become strangers, or worse, ghosts of strangers.

The world’s edge was a black vertical cliff that rose straight up from the sea of cloud and stretched away for thousands of leagues on either side. It was dark and cold; the only light was that reflected from the clouds far below.

Yama, Tamora and Eliphas were like mice descending a mountain, emmets crawling down a wall.

They descended a long way. At intervals, the stair opened out onto wide platforms or ledges, but always it continued downward. Once, a stream spurted from the cliff and arched above the stair, a muscular silvery braid shredded by wind as it fell toward the cloud deck. Wind buffeted them and whispered and whistled among the intricate carvings of the sheer cliff face. Eliphas’s straw hat was blown from his head and dwindled away into the infinite ocean of air.

Presently, light puddled around Yama’s feet. Tamora gasped and, five steps below, Eliphas turned and stared.

Pinpricks of light reflected in his silver eyes. A handful of fireflies had found Yama and crowned him with their cold blue-white fire. Soon afterward, the stair turned around a fold of rock. There was a wide ledge, and a tall, narrow arch cut into the adamantine keelrock of the cliff.

“The shrine!” Eliphas announced. “Some say it is the oldest in the world. You will learn much here, brother.”

“At least as much as from any other hole in the ground,” Tamora said.

A fugitive light glimmered inside the arch, and it brightened as Eliphas led Yama and Tamora toward it. It did not come from any source, but seemed to stain the air as pigments stain the water in which a painter dips his brushes.

The place beyond the arch did not seem to Yama to be a shrine at all. There was no black disc, no altar or sanctuary, nothing but featureless, slightly translucent walls that curved up and met high overhead. It was as if they had stumbled into a gigantic blown egg filled with sourceless light. While Tamora prowled around the perimeter of this lambent space, Eliphas told Yama, “When the shrine was in use, one of the priests would stand in the center and become possessed by the avatar. That is why there is no screen.”

Yama said boldly, “Are you hoping that I can awaken the avatar?”

He was excited by the idea. He had come so far, from the silent shrines of Ys to this, a shrine older than any on the nearside shore. He had learned the extent of his powers, and where his people might still live. He had mastered the hell-hound and destroyed Angel’s aspect. He suddenly felt that he had nothing to fear from anything in the world.

Eliphas’s eyes blankly reflected the even light. Nothing could be learned from his face. He said, “The woman should wait outside. She might spoil the reading.”

“I stay with Yama,” Tamora said. Her voice echoed from several points in the vaulted space. “If anything happens to him, old man, it will happen to you, too. I’ll make sure of it.”

“You could watch from the entrance as easily as from in here,” Eliphas said. “If you stay here, your presence may disturb the operation.”

Tamora crossed her arms. “Then why should I move? You give Yama airs, making him believe he can wake the dead. Those days are gone. We don’t need avatars to tell us what to do anymore.”

Eliphas said, “He stands there crowned with fireflies. Is that not sign enough for you?” He turned and asked Yama, “If the avatar came, brother, what would you ask it?”

Yama grinned. He no longer trusted Eliphas, but he did not fear him, either. He strode to the middle of the room. Immediately, the light thickened around him. Tamora and Eliphas dwindled into the light becoming shadows that frayed away and disappeared. Yama seemed to be standing inside a bank of glowing mist, and then the mist cleared and he saw a needle hung before the red swirl of the Eye of the Preservers.

It was the world. Not the representation which Angel’s aspect had shown him in the Temple of the Black Well, but the world as it was at that very moment. Yama discovered that if he stared at one spot long enough he flew directly toward it. He saw the brawling streets of Ys and the blackened ruins of Aeolis; the immemorial gardens and tombs of the City of the Dead, and the garden-topped crag where Beatrice and Osric lived. He saw the white contours of the ceramic shell of the holy city of Gond, and followed the course of the Great River toward the midpoint of the world. His gaze passed over a dozen different cities: a city of glass domes like nests of soap bubbles; a city of white cubes stacked over each other; a city built among trees; a city of spires that rose from a lake; a city carved into red sandstone cliffs above a curve of the river; a city of gardens and houses raised high on stilts. He saw the great forests that stretched for a thousand leagues above the Marsh of the Lost Waters, and the ruined cities along the forest shore. Smoke hung in tattered banners where cannon of the army of the Department of Indigenous Affairs were bombarding a fortified ridge.

Yama would have looked more closely at the forces of the heretics then, but he felt that someone among them was looking for him and he quickly turned away. The view unraveled to show the world entire again. He noticed a loose cloud of tiny lights that trailed behind it and at once the constant tug of the feral machine he had called down at the merchant’s house became more insistent. One of the lights grew until it eclipsed all the others, burning away the world and encasing him in its radiance.

If the machine spoke to Yama, he did not hear it. But across a great gulf he heard his own voice, apparently answering a series of questions.

Yes. Yes. I will. Yes.

He reeled backward, overwhelmed by light, and fell, and for an instant thought that he fell through the void beyond the edge of the world. Fell with Angel. Fell in her arms.

Something struck the length of his body with the weight of the whole world. Blood filled his mouth where he had bitten his tongue and cheeks; red and black pain filled his head.

Tamora lifted Yama’s head and cleared blood from his mouth with her fingers. She had a shallow cut on one arm.

Her sword lay beside her on the softly glowing floor. It was bloody to the hilt.

Yama discovered that he had urinated in his trousers; they clung unpleasantly to his thighs. Dried blood crusted his nostrils and his upper lip, and his head felt as if someone had tried to split it with a wedge. Little bits of fused metal and flaked carbon char were scattered in a circle around him—the remains of the fireflies which earlier had crowned him, now burned out and quite dead.

Eliphas was gone, but there were still three people in the shrine. Something was inside Yama, looking through his eyes. Sharing his thoughts. He knew now why he had eaten mud rotten with termites. For the metal in the bodies of the insects. For the metal needed to grow the machine under his skin.

Tamora got Yama to his feet and helped him walk about until he had recovered his sense of who and where he was. She told him that he had stood raptly in the center of the shrine for hours, his face turned up, his eyes rolled back so that only the whites showed. He tried to tell her what he had seen. The whole world, immense and particular, as the Preservers might see it.

“It is so strange,” he said. “So huge and yet so fragile.”

Then he laughed, and felt more laughter rising within him, wild and strong. He rose on it as on great wings. It might have possessed him entirely, but Tamora slapped his face and the sting of the slap sobered him.

He said, “The feral machine found me, as I once found it. Or perhaps it found me long ago, and has been bending my will toward it ever since. They are still there, Tamora, the rebel machines and avatars. They were banished from the world at the end of the Age of Insurrection, but they have not abandoned it. They spoke to me or to a part of me, but I cannot remember what they said…”

As amazed by this as by his laughter, he began to cry. “Hush,” Tamora said. “Hush.” She held Yama and rocked him.

“I serve evil ends,” he said. “I cannot be what I am not, and I have been made to serve evil ends. I am their creature.”

“You’re only what you are,” Tamora said helplessly. “Don’t try to be more than that, or you’ll destroy yourself.”

He asked what had happened to Eliphas, and she said grimly that the old man had escaped. “You were so long in your trance or your dream or whatever it was that after a while I sat down to rest. What happened then was my fault. I was watching you instead of watching Eliphas, and perhaps I slept for a moment. He came upon me suddenly and the silly fucker would have killed me if only he had kept silent. But he couldn’t stop himself yelling when he struck, and I turned in time to receive his blade on my arm instead of my neck. I cut his thigh with a backswing, but he got away.”

“I would have followed, Yama, but I could not leave you. He has not come back. I hope he has fallen off the edge of the world or has bled to death. But I didn’t feel my blade hit bone and I don’t think I cut any major blood vessels because there’s not enough blood on the floor. He’s probably still alive. Tell me that you’re all right and I’ll go look for him, and kill him when I find him.”

“He wanted to use me,” Yama said. He sat down, feeling suddenly dizzy. The pain in his head was expanding. Red and black rags of light seemed to flutter at the edge of his vision. He was diminishing, or the world was receding from him.

He said, “I thought that he wanted to help me, but I have been a fool. He wanted to use me, like most people I have met. You were right all along, Tamora. I apologize.”

“I was wrong, too. I thought he was working for Prefect Corin, when all along he had his own plans. This was his chance to master you, but he failed. Everything will be all right now.”

Light flooded the chamber. They both looked up. It came from the entrance, a harsh blinding glare that shriveled the soft radiance of the shrine. Tamora swept up her sword and ran straight through the arch into the light, and Yama followed as quickly as he could.

Outside, the light was as bright as the sun. Every figure in the intricate friezes which covered the cliff wall stood beside its own shadow. The wide steep steps shone like ice. With one hand raised to shade his eyes, Yama saw that Tamora was standing at the foot of the stair, gazing up at the huge shadow that floated behind the flood of light. It was as big as the Weazel, and shaped like a claw. It floated only a chain from the edge of the stair, a hundred or so steps above the entrance to the shrine. Figures moved on its upper surface, bleached shadows within the nimbus of brilliant light that shone from it.

It was a flyer, Yama realized, and he knew then why Eliphas had brought him to the edge of the world. He shouted a warning to Tamora, but she was already bounding forward, taking the steps two at a time. She was running toward Eliphas, who had crept out of his hiding place between two carved figures and begun to climb toward the flyer. The old man had ripped the sleeve from his shirt and tied it around his wounded leg, which dragged behind him as he climbed. He held the little black box to his mouth. He was shouting prayers into the box and when Tamora was almost upon him he turned and raised it as if in a warding gesture. Her sword went under his arm and he jerked and tried to hold onto the blade at the place where it pierced his body.

For a moment, they stood still, joined by the sword. Then there was a flash of fierce red light and a wave of nauseous heat.

“Yamamanama,” a voice said.

Yama was wedged against the feet of a carved man. He looked up, blinking blood from his eyes. When he tried to speak a bubble of blood swelled inside his mouth and broke over his teeth and his lips. All of his muscles had turned to water.

The black, bent figure of Dr. Dismas stood over him. The apothecary had a pistol in his left hand, its blunt muzzle laid along his thigh. In his right he held a little black box, the twin of the one Eliphas had carried. Behind him, the flyer floated down and grounded against the ledge at the entrance to the shrine, just as the floating island Yama and Telmon had seen on the far-side shore had grounded against the edge of the world. Above the flyer, the stair rose between the black cliff and the sky, scorched clean by fire.

“It was ordained we should meet again, dear boy,” Dr. Dismas said. “How pleased I am to see you.”

Yama spat a mouthful of blood. “It was you,” he said. “All the time it was you.”

The light around them was very bright. He could clearly see the edges of the plaques under the skin of Dr. Dismas’s hands. The same sharp-edged shapes that lay under his own scalp.

Yama said, “How? How did you infect me?”

“At The House of Ghost Lanterns,” Dr. Dismas said.

“In the beer. Or the food…”

“Good! Very good! Yes. Little builders. They have been working ever since. You are strong. Yamamanama. You resisted them for a very long time.”

Yama spat more blood. So much blood. First Lud, and then Lob and Unprac, the landlord of The House of Ghost Lanterns. The palmers and the bandits, the cateran who had tried to kill him, Iachimo and the rogue star-sailor and its creatures, the two pythonesses of the Department of Vaticination, the old guard, Coronetes, and all the clerks and soldiers in the Department of Indigenous Affairs, the mage and the soldiers who had taken the peel-house, the traitor Torin, the Constable of Aeolis and his sons and the mob, Prefect Corin and the crew of the picketboat, Dr. Dismas’s man and the boy, Pantin. And the Aedile, his heart broken, and now Tamora and Eliphas. All dead. All because of him.

Yama said. “Tamora thought that Eliphas was in league with Prefect Corin. But all the time he was working for you.”

Dr. Dismas waggled the little black box. “He kept in touch using the twin of this, right until the end. A pity he had to be killed. He was a useful servant. He was turned long ago, in one of the chambers beneath the surface of the world. He was looking for old texts to sell, but found something far more valuable. Or rather, it found him.”

“I thought that he was praying to that little box.”

Surreptitiously, Yama pulled the fetish from his wrist. When Pandaras came to look for him, he would find it, and know that his master was still alive.

“Long wavelength light,” Dr. Dismas said. “Bounced off one of us a million leagues above the plane of the world. You will soon understand everything, Yamamanama.”

Yama felt very cold. He was badly hurt, and the thing in his head had turned his heart to ice. He said, “My people. Eliphas found where…”

“The map and the scavenger’s account? My dear Yamamanama, they were forgeries, and not even very good forgeries. But they did not have to be, because you wanted so very much to believe in them. No, your people died out long ago. All are dead except you, and even we do not know where you came from. Once I realized what you were, I went to Ys to search for your origin. Eliphas helped me then, but we found nothing and I came back empty-handed. It does not matter. All that matters is that you are here, and that you will join us. You are my creature, Yamamanama. We will do wonderful things together. To begin with, we will form an alliance with the heretics, and save the world.”

Men walked out of the light toward them. Yama was lifted up. Light swept over him, and then a warm darkness. Presently, the flyer tilted away from the side of the cliff and rose above the edge of the world. There was a small business to attend to, a few witnesses to be removed. It did not take long, and when it was done the flyer shot away downriver, toward the war.