Ancients of Days

Chapter Eight The King of the Corridors

Moments after it had fallen into place behind Yama the hatch rang with a pure, deep note and a smell of scorched metal began to fill the narrow space in which he stood, pressed close to Eliphas and the gambler.

“Put up your knife, dominie,” the gambler said. “You’re with friends here. Follow me, follow me now. The hatch is crystalline iron, but it won’t hold for long.”

The gambler’s stiff red coxcomb, with its single dim firefly, brushed the low ceiling. He wore bright red leggings and a baggy black shirt that came to his knees.He had a pungent but not unpleasant odor, like that of a wet dog.

“I am at your service,” Yama said. His blood was still thrilling from the near escape. When Eliphas took his arm, he realized that he was trembling so much that he could hardly stand.

“It is my turn to help you, brother,” Eliphas said, and put his shoulder under Yama’s arm to support him as they followed the gambler down the tunnel.

Yama said, “What is this place?”

“The service corridors,” Eliphas said. “They’re supposed to run through every part of the Palace, even to the offices of the Hierarchs. But there are no maps to their maze, and few use them now.”

The gambler glanced at them over his shoulder. His long pale face gleamed in the combined light of their fireflies. He said, “Most of that’s true, but more use these corridors than you might reckon, and not everything has been forgotten. Speaking of which, do you remember me, dominie?”

“You were playing the shell game yesterday. You were wearing a silver shirt then.”

“You’re as sharp as they say you are,” the gambler said. “I’m Magon, and I’m here to help you. We’ve been on the lookout for you, dominie. You ran the wrong way yesterday, and it’s my luck to have found you again. Do you know what it is that you wakened? You did wake it, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I did. It was in a shrine.”

“In the temple of a latriatic cult? We hadn’t thought that one was still functional—well, it isn’t functional now, of course. The shrine was destroyed when the hell-hound broke through.”

Yama touched the coin that hung at his chest. The gambler, Magon, saw the gesture, and said, “That won’t help you, dominie. It isn’t a charm.”

“I was wondering if it had woken the thing.”

The woman in the shrine of the Temple of the Black Well had said that the coin had drawn her to him.

Magon said, “You did that yourself, I reckon. Lucky you were brought up where you were, in the City of the Dead, and not in Ys. There are too many shrines in Ys, and more remain functional than most folk think. If you had been brought up in Ys, it is likely that a hell-hound would have scented you before you were ready for it. But that would be a different world, and I wouldn’t have the good fortune of talking with you here and now.”

“You seem to know a lot about me,” Yama said.

“Lucky for you that I do,” Magon said jauntily.

“And you know about the hell-hound.”

“A little, dominie.”

“It seemed to be made of light,” Yama said.

“Something very like it,” Eliphas said, eager to explain something he understood. “Light is only matter in another form, and it can be bound for a while. If we can keep away from it, brother, the hell-hound will collapse when its binding energy sinks below a certain level, or it will find a functioning shrine and upload itself and return to the place for which shrines are windows. They are terrible things. They can live in the space inside the shrines, and in our world, too. They pass through our world from one shrine to another like an arrow through air, if an arrow could make itself into air in its flight and remake itself when it hits its target. They were sent after avatars, originally.”

Yama said, “And this one came for me.”

“That was bad luck, and not just for you,” Magon said. “It must have been bound in the shrine. No doubt that’s why the monastery was built around the shrine. It’s all too easy to mistake the stirring of a hell-hound for the intimation of an avatar. Those poor monks, praying for thousands of years to a weapon of their enemies! There’s irony for you, eh, dominie? Well, they’ll worship the shrine no longer. The hell-hound stole the residue of the shrine’s potential energy when it manifested.”

“It seemed to grow stronger in sunlight,” Yama said.

He had the horrible thought that whoever had fired at the hell-hound with a pistol would have fed its strength. He added, “Perhaps darkness would kill it.”

“It was never alive,” Magon said, “So killing and dying don’t apply.”

Eliphas said, “Even in sunlight it loses binding energy. Sunlight’s energy is too dilute to sustain it, just as we would gasp for air at the peaks of the Rim Mountains. I imagine that it is imprinted on you, brother. It will follow as long as it can. We must escape it.”

Magon said, “It’s a terrible thing, but it’s old and easily confused. If we’re lucky it will give up, or lose track or memory of you, and dissipate when its binding energy drops below a sustainable level.”

“We have had little in the way of luck so far,” Yama said. “I think that I will have to find a way of destroying it.”

“As for that,” Magon said, “some ways are better than others, as the fox said to the hen lost in the forest. We’ll go through here. Don’t worry about the water. It’s dry on the other side.”

They had reached the base of a kind of well or shaft. A patch of pale daylight showed high above and a sheet of water fell down one side and drained away through grids in the floor. Behind the water three corridors radiated away at sixty degrees to each other. Magon plunged through the water and trotted down the middle corridor.

When Yama and Eliphas followed—the water was as warm as soup—they found the gambler waiting at the other end, where a slim metal bridge arched across a narrow, half-flooded cavern. Green lights flickered deep beneath the water. Waves clashed and broke against the stone walls, casting shivering shadows on the arched ceiling.

Magon stepped quickly and lightly across the bridge’s span and turned at the other side and beckoned to Yama and Eliphas. As he crossed, Yama saw shapes move swiftly just beneath the water’s restless surface, things with sleek, arrowhead-shaped bodies that ended in knots of long, twining limbs: creatures like the polyps which swarmed in the river at midsummer, but grown to the size of a man.

Eliphas saw them too. He grasped the rail of the bridge and looked down into the water and said, “There are more things forgotten in the Palace than anyone could dream of in a lifetime of sleep.”

“Not forgotten by everyone,” Magon called from the other end of the bridge. “They come up from the Great River through flooded passages beneath the streets of the city. Lupe says they might have had a purpose once upon a time, but that’s long forgotten. They come here by habit now.” He told Yama, “We should press on, dominie. Lupe is eager to meet you.”

Eliphas said, “Begging your pardon, Magon, but I always understood that no one lives inside the walls of the Palace but thieves and cutthroats.”

Magon flashed his crooked smile and said, “Their kind doesn’t last long. We see to that. It isn’t far now, I promise. Lupe is waiting for you, dominie, and your friend is welcome too. We know him.”

“You know everyone, it seems,” Yama said. He leaned beside Eliphas. Below, the reflected stars of his crown of fireflies were drawn apart and flung back together on the shivering surface of the water. The sleek shapes were gathering beneath the bridge. Their bodies were limned by patches and dots and lines of green luminescence. Something like a snake rose up, a pale, glistening rope that sinuously elongated in the air. It caught hold of the middle of the bridge’s high arch for a moment, then fell back.

Magon said, “It isn’t safe to tarry here, dominie.”

There was a note of pleading in his voice now.

Yama did not trust the gambler. His ready smile and quick wit seemed assumed, a mask, an act. He said, “Before we move on, Magon, tell me how you know who I am. It is not just because I saw through your sleight of hand, is it?”

Magon said, “Of course not. Please, dominie, we must go. You don’t know the dangers here.” His calm, knowing pose had dissolved. His hands writhed in a knot before his chest. “You shouldn’t play with poor Magon. Lupe can answer your questions. I am to take you to him at once.”

“You are not a gambler at all, are you? That is just a cover for what you really are. So, who are you? And why do you know so much about me?”

There was a loud splash out in the darkness, as if something big had lifted itself out of the water and fallen back. Magon’s left hand darted to his hip, where something made a shape under his loose shirt. He said, “Lupe said to bring you direct, and you want me to answer your questions. I’ve tried to do my best, but I can’t do both, dominie.”

Eliphas told Magon, “Keep your hand away from your side, brother. You’ve something hidden there—a knife in your belt, most likely, and no doubt there’s another in your boot. I know those footpad tricks.”

Yama said, “How long have your people been watching me?”

“You were supposed to go to the Department of Indigenous Affairs, but your escort arrived without you. That’s when we started looking, but we didn’t catch sight of you until after you called down the feral machine.”

“My escort? You mean Prefect Corin?”

For a moment, Yama thought that Magon was in league with the Prefect.

“I wouldn’t know his name,” the gambler said, “but someone in the Department of Indigenous Affairs isn’t happy he lost track of you. He’ll be searching for you hard, now you’ve been spotted in the Palace. We’ll make sure you’re safe, dominie.”

Magon did not meet Yama’s gaze as he answered these questions, but looked from side to side as things splashed in the darkness on either side of the bridge’s span. When a nest of pale tentacles rose from the water directly beneath the bridge, he gave a cry and took a step backward. Yama said, “I will not go with you until you have answered all my questions. How long have your people been looking for me?”

“When you fought the thing in the Temple of the Black Well, we knew for sure. Lupe said that you were the one foretold. You don’t have to worry about the little interdepartmental dispute you’ve become involved with, dominie. We’ll always be here to see you right.”

“And my friends?”

Out in the darkness beyond the bridge, something huge surfaced with a loud splash. Big waves clashed beneath the bridge; spray wet the walls of the chamber. Magon said, the note of pleading in his voice stronger now. “Dominie, you’ll have to ask Lupe these questions. That’s why I’m to bring you to him. Truly, it is not safe—”

Yama said, “This is not the first time I have met people who claim more for me than I would ever claim for myself. And I have business elsewhere today.”

This was the day that the Department of Vaticination opened its doors for public inquisition of its pythonesses.

It was the day of the assassination plot, in which, Yama suspected, Brabant, the servant with the keys to the kitchens of the House of Twelve Front Rooms, was Prefect Corin’s agent, doing double duty after he had led Yama to the Prefect. Yama still did not know who was the target of the plot, but that did not matter as long as Brabant was unmasked.

“You’ll have to talk with Lupe, dominie. Please, I really am no more than a player of games. We’re at the service of the workers in the Palace, and that’s how I make my living. You might say that if we had a department, it would be the oldest of all.”

Eliphas caught Yama’s arm and whispered, “I know his kind now. Thieves and cutthroats, brother, no better than the husbandmen.”

Yama whispered back, “Unless you know the way out, we have no choice but to follow him.”

Magon cocked his head, his eyes bright as he looked from Eliphas to Yama. He said, “You don’t trust me, and I guess that if I was in your position I’d feel the same. I don’t have the answers you want, dominie. I’m just here to bring you to Lupe. Lupe will answer your questions. We must leave here. The hell-hound is still at your back, and the big fish get restless after a while, and start questing about with their arms to see if they can catch you. We—” Blue light was suddenly reflected in Magon’s eyes.

Yama turned. The hell-hound stood at the end of the bridge. It was smaller now, but burned as brightly as ever.

Yama unsheathed his knife. Its curved blade kindled with blue flame, as if to challenge the hell-hound’s unworldly light.

The hell-hound slid forward, elongating through black air as it climbed the arch of the narrow bridge. Yama and Eliphas retreated step by step. They had scarcely reached the far end when something hit the underside of the bridge so hard that it hummed like a plucked string. Magon and Eliphas screamed. Nests of pale tendrils rose up on either side of the bridge’s arch, slithering around the slender railings. The hell-hound stopped, bending back and forth as more tentacles quested up out of the water.

Yama guessed that there must be a decad or more of the giant polyps beneath the bridge. The undersides of the tentacles bore rows of fleshy suckers which stuck and unstuck to the metal span with wet noises; their ends were frayed into feathery palps which continually tasted the air.

Then the water under the bridge boiled and the forest of tentacles which gripped the railings tensed. The bridge groaned but held, and the tentacles coiled more tightly and tensed again, quivering with effort. One of the giant polyps was half-lifted out of the water. Under its white mantle, a huge blue eye with a golden pupil revolved and fixed its gaze on Yama.

The bridge groaned again and then the central section gave way with a sudden sharp crack that echoed and reechoed from the cavern’s wet walls. On the other side of the broken bridge, the hell-hound flared brilliantly and whirled around and fled into the tunnel, and Yama and Eliphas cheered.

The water boiled with activity. Green lights flashed furiously under its foaming surface. One, then another, then two more: the great polyps lifted the edges of their mantles out of the water and stared at Yama. Eliphas and Magon shouted in alarm, but Yama, guessing wildly, lifted the coin from his shirt and held it up. Satisfied, the polyps sank back one by one. The water boiled up once more and then darkened as the living lights beneath its surface faded away.

“Nothing will follow us now,” Yama said.

“The hell-hound will find another way to follow you,” Magon said. “That’s what it does.” He was very scared, but he had stood firm, and Yama liked him better for that.

Eliphas took a deep, trembling breath, then another. “Lead on, brother. And remember we trust you only slightly more than we trust your fishy friends.”

The narrow corridor which led away from the flooded cavern was circular in cross-section and lined with fused rock that dully reflected the lights of the fireflies of Yama and Eliphas. As it rose and turned, Yama was certain that its gravity changed direction, too, so that they were no longer walking on its floor but along its wall, rising vertically through the heart of the mountain. Occasionally, other corridors opened to either side and above; gusts of warm air blew from these openings, sometimes bringing the sound of distant machinery.

Magon soon regained his jaunty confidence, and boasted that these were the old skyways which only his people knew.

“You might say that there’s a Palace within a Palace, each twined around the other like a vine around a tree until you can’t tell whether the tree is holding up the vine, or the vine the tree. We were here from the beginning. Departments come and go. They fight each other and are destroyed or absorbed, yet we are still here. We will be here until the end.”

Eliphas said, “I suppose this is the teaching of your master, this Lupe.”

“It’s our history,” Magon said. “It’s passed on in song and dance from father to son, from mother to daughter. Just because it’s not written in books doesn’t mean it isn’t true, though for someone like yourself, who has breathed so much book dust he is mostly book himself, that might be hard to believe. We are always here to serve. It’s what we do. Whoever owns the Palace becomes our master, whether they know it or not.”

“And you want to help me?”

What struck Yama now was that in his posturing and anxious capering, his hypersensitivity to moods and eagerness to please, Magon was just like the kind of lap dog that childless gentlewomen keep.

Magon said, “You are come at last, dominie. Lupe said he had not expected it, although it was foretold by an anchorite years before. But Lupe will tell you himself.”

The corridor turned around itself again. Warm, humid air, laden with a rich organic stink, blew into their faces, and then the corridor opened out into a long, low room. Its bare rock walls ran with condensation; its floor was strewn with heaps of black soil in which frills of fungus grew; dead-white, blood-red, a yellow so shiny it might have been varnished. At the other end of the room, Magon parted layers of nylon-mesh curtains and ushered Yama and Eliphas into a barrel-vaulted cave lit by shafts of sunlight that fell from vents in the rock ceiling far above.

“Our home,” Magon said. “It is the capital of my people, for Lupe lives here.”

There were little gardens, and patchwork shacks built of plastic or cardboard sheeting, or of translucent paper stretched across bamboo framing. People drew around Yama and Eliphas as they followed Magon across the cavern, and they quickly became the center of a procession.

There were clowns and jugglers, mummers and mimes, weightlifters and agonists, fakirs with steel pins through their cheeks and eyelids. Acrobats walked on wires strung everywhere across the midway of the cavern. There were men dressed in richly embroidered dresses of faded silk stiff with brocade and silver and gold thread, with white-painted faces and black makeup that exaggerated their eyes, transvestites that burlesqued the sacred temple dancers. There were musicians and gamblers, and prostitutes of all four sexes and seemingly of every imaginable bloodline.

Eliphas looked around uneasily, but Yama knew that they would not be harmed. Not here. “They exist to serve!” he said, and took the old man’s arm to reassure him.

The gorgeous, motley procession crossed the length of the cavern. A fakir smashed a bottle on his head and rubbed a handful of broken glass over his bare chest; another pressed metal skewers through folds of skin pinched up from his arms. Musicians played a solemn march; clowns knocked each other down and breathed out gouts of fire or blew fountains of sparkling dust high into the air; men and women held up their children, who laughed, and clapped their hands.

The path ended at a round gilt frame twice Yama’s height. It might once have held a shrine. The crowd parted to let Yama and Eliphas follow Magon through this gateway.

The room beyond was swagged in faded tapestries and bunched silks stained with dust. The wrack of ten thousand years lay everywhere in an indiscriminate jumble. Lapidary icons were heaped like beetles in a green plastic bowl; a cassone, its sides painted with exquisitely detailed scenes from the Puranas, its top missing, was filled with filthy old boots; ancient books lay in a tumbled heap next to neat rolls of plastic sheeting.

A man sprawled amongst cushions on a sagging bed beneath a canopy of cloth-of-gold. Magon capered forward and jumped onto the bed, raising a cloud of dust from the yellowed linen sheets, and laid his head next to the man’s bare feet, gazing up with unqualified adoration, for all the world like a faithful puppy gazing at its master.

Without doubt, the man on the bed was Lupe, the king of the Palace within the Palace. He was a big man; he was an old man. Skin hung in mottled flaps from his arms. His face was scored deeply with lines and wrinkles. He wore a long brocade dress so stiff with dirt that it was impossible to tell what color it might once have been; an elaborate headdress of gold wire woven in a tall cone and studded with bits of colored glass was planted on top of tangled gray hair that fell to his broad shoulders. His feet were bare and his toenails were painted red; the nails of his big, strong hands, like those of certain mendicants, had been allowed to grow around each other in long corkscrews. His lips had been stained with cochineal and his eyes were made up like the wings of a blue butterfly. His pupils were capped with frost, and from the way he held his head Yama knew he was blind. He did not look absurd in his costume, but wore it with a grave, sacerdotal majesty.

Lupe turned his face toward Yama and Eliphas, and said in a soft, hoarse voice, “Come closer, dominie.”

Eliphas said, “What is this place?”

Lupe raised his head and turned it from side to side, as if sniffing the air. “Who is this stranger, Magon?”

“A companion of the one foretold, Lupe.”

“Then he is welcome,” the old man said. “As are you, dominie. Welcome and twice welcome. It is my honor to welcome you. I had thought that I would die before you came, and it is with all my heart that I convey the treasure house of my sentiments, which have been stored up for so long against this wonderful day.”

“It seems that I am expected,” Yama said.

“You are the one who is foretold,” Lupe said. His blind eyes were turned toward Yama’s face. “Please, dominie. Please sit at our table! All that we have is yours!” Three beautiful girls, arrayed in layers of splendid silks that left only their arms and faces bare, stepped through a curtain. Their delicate oval faces were painted white; their full lips were stained black. They carried trays of sweetmeats and candied fruits arranged on plantain leaves or in tiny bowls of translucent porcelain. Their eyes shone with excitement and they giggled as they fussed about Yama, seating him in a nest of dusty cushions and setting the food before him. One sat Eliphas beside Yama; the other two helped Lupe from the bed, sat him on a low stool, and settled the full skirt of his dress around him.

Yama took a bowl of tea from one of the girls and, after a hesitation, Eliphas followed suit. Another girl raised a bowl to Lupe’s lips; the old man’s fingernails were so long that he could not possibly feed himself. The three men slurped companionably, and Lupe belched gravely.

While one of the girls fed Lupe with chopsticks, Yama picked at diced squares of candied yam. He had not eaten since the meal in the Strangers’ Lodge of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons, but he was too excited and nervous to have much of an appetite.

At last, he said to Lupe. “You know of me, master. Where does that knowledge come from?”

“Please, dominie, I am not your master! I am Lupe, no more than Lupe and no less, and completely at your service. All my people are at your service. All this was foretold and we have made many songs and poems and dances in your honor. Not all our dances are lewd or comic. Those are for our public, but we have our own dances. Once I could dance them, but now, alas, I can only remember them.” Lupe tapped his wrinkled brow with his knuckles. “All our history is there, in the dances, and so are you.”

Eliphas said to Yama, “Ask him how we can destroy the hell-hound, brother. Ask him to show us the way back to the roof of the Palace, so I can help you find what you seek.”

Lupe cocked his head, and said, “Anything you wish, dominie. Anything within our powers. We are yours to command.”

Yama said, “How is it that you know me?”

He did not feel afraid here—he realized that this was the first time since he had left his home in Aeolis that he did not feel some measure of fear. But he could not stay long. The gates of the Department of Vaticination would open to petitioners at noon; the assassin would be sharpening his covert blade or preparing his vial of odorless poison. But this was an opportunity that might not come again, and he was intensely eager to discover all that Lupe knew—or believed he knew—about him.

Lupe did not answer Yama’s question at once. Instead, he motioned to his attendants. One of the girls squatted beside him and refilled his tea bowl; another held it to his lips. When the old man had drained his tea, he wiped his red-stained lips on the back of his hand and said, “We have always served, dominie. We were put into the world to serve and to bring pleasure. Thus, while our bloodline is of the lowest order, the nature of our service calls upon the highest arts. For while we might be counted as beggars who dance, make mock or make love for a paltry slew of coinage, our reward is not in the money but in the pleasure our performances bring to our clients. We are a simple people. We do not need money, except to buy cloth and beads and metal wire for our costumes. Your friend looks among the trinkets stored here, and wonders perhaps that I can claim to be poor, yet live with all these riches heaped about me.” (Eliphas held up a mildewed leather cap embroidered with silver wire, and made a face.) “But these riches are all gifts from grateful clients,” Lupe said. “We have saved them out of sentiment, not avarice. We are a simple people, and yet, dominie, we have survived longer than any other bloodline. We are too simple to know how to change, perhaps, but we do remember. It is our other virtue. We remember your people, dominie. We remember how great and good they were. We remember how we feared and adored them. They have been gone a long time, but we have always remembered them.”

Yama leaned forward, his entire attention on Lupe’s grave, blind face.

He said, “And are my people still in the world?”

“They are not in the Palace, dominie, and so we have always believed that they are no longer of the world. How could it be otherwise? For they were the Builders, and this is their place. It was here that they commanded the world, in their day. If they are not here, then surely they live nowhere else.”

“Perhaps this is no longer their day. Perhaps they are dwindled.”

Lupe shook his head. “Ah, dominie, how you tease me! You know I cannot speak of that. We know the Palace. We know something of Ys. The world is another place entirely.”

“Then they are not in Ys,” Yama said. He had guessed it, but this was still hard to bear. “Do you believe that they might return?”

Lupe said, “An anchorite came to me seventeen years ago and told me that one day you would seek help from my people. And here you are. So you might say that your people have returned.”

Seventeen years ago Yama had been found afloat on the river, a baby lying on the breast of a dead woman in a white boat. For a moment, Yama was so excited that he could not speak. He touched the coin which hung inside his shirt. An anchorite had given it to him in Aeolis, at the beginning of his adventures. Derev had said that the man was of his bloodline.

At last, he said, “What did he look like? Was he scarred about the face, and dumb?”

“He had a gentle, hoarse voice. As for what he looked like, I could not tell you, dominie. I was blind then as now, and he came to me when I was alone. It was deepest night, and those of my people not working were asleep. He told me that one day, near the end of the world, a Builder would come to Ys, and that he would need our help. He told me where you would come from, and when. My people have been watching the docks for a hundred days now. I thought that you would not come, but here you are.”

“I came by the road, not the river.”

“And yet you are the Child of the River, and the end of the world seems near. The departments have been perpetually at war with each other since the Hierarchs fell from power, and now one department threatens to destroy the rest in the name of the war against the heretics. If it wins, then such a tyranny may rise that could hold the world in its grip forever, wielding power in the name of the Preservers, but serving only itself. I have feared this for a very long time, but now I know, dominie. Now I know! How glad I am that these terrible days are the last!”

Lupe’s milky eyes shone with tears. Magon crept from the bed and with his long, crafty fingers tenderly blotted the tears from his master’s withered, rouged cheeks. “It’s true,” the gambler said, looking boldly at Yama. “Everything Lupe says is true. He remembers more than anyone else. It is why he is our king.”

Lupe composed himself and said, “I weep from joy, dominie, that you have come again. There will be new songs and dances made out of this wonderful moment.”

“I understand,” Yama said, although it seemed to him that he had mistakenly stumbled into the middle of a myth.

Lupe’s story had set a hundred questions tumbling through his head. Who was the anchorite? Was it the same man who had given him the coin? Why had he been set adrift on the river in the first place?

He said, “I am grateful for your hospitality, Lupe, and for your help. But you know that I cannot stay.”

Magon said, “They have business with one of the fading flowers, Lupe. I told them that they need not concern themselves with it any longer.”

“Forgive my servant,” Lupe said. “He is young and eager, but he means well. If you have business to attend to, dominie, then that is what you must do. My servant will take you where you need to go.”

Eliphas said, “Then you will let us go?”

“Wherever you are in the Palace, we are with you,” Lupe said. “But before you go, walk with me. Show my people that you are my friend, and so the friend of us all.”

Lupe led Yama and Eliphas through the kingdom of his cavern. A hundred brightly costumed clowns, dancers, and whores followed at a respectful distance while Lupe gravely introduced Yama to each of the elders who stood in shabby finery outside their painted shacks.

Yama asked many questions, and although Lupe answered every one, often at length, he learned little more, except that much was expected of him. Lupe was too polite, or too cunning, to state exactly what this was, but Yama slowly began to realize that there was only one thing these people could desire. For they were indigens, and unlike the changed and unchanged bloodlines they were untouched by the breath of the Preservers. They were creatures which had borrowed human form; perhaps even their intelligence was borrowed, a trick or skill they had learned like tumbling, fire-eating, or prestidigitation. Everything they possessed had come to them from other hands, and they accepted these gifts without discrimination. Fabulous treasures were tipped carelessly amongst the rubbish that had formed great drifting piles in Lupe’s apartments; a beautiful boy carrying nightsoil to the gardens at the edge of the caverns might be wearing a priceless dress; a dancer made up as fabulously as a courtesan might be clad in a glittering costume that, on close inspection, was constructed of sacking decorated with a magpie’s nest of scraps of plastic and aluminum.

The only thing which was truly theirs was the art of simulation, which they used without guile to enhance the pleasure of their clients. Watching closely, Yama saw that the three girls who attended Lupe were not beautiful at all—or rather, that their beauty was a trick of poise and muscle tone and expression, sustained by constant vigilance. They could become passable imitations of most bloodlines by synthesizing and exaggerating with a little makeup the two or three features by which each was distinguished from the others. And so with beauty, for beauty is only an exaggeration of the ordinary. Just as a transvestite exaggerates those features which make a woman attractive, Lupe’s people achieved beauty through burlesque. These people could, through their art, appear to be anything that their clients might desire.

The only thing they could not be was themselves.

Many, like Eliphas, believed that the indigenous races were no more than animals. Yama thought otherwise. For if everything in the world had proceeded from the minds of the Preservers, then surely the indigenous races had not been brought here simply to be despised and persecuted.

Surely they too had their place.

It was almost noon by the time Yama and Lupe finally completed the circuit of the cavern and returned through the gilt frame to Lupe’s chambers. Somewhere high above, the Gate of Double Glory would be admitting those who wished to participate in the public inquisition at the Department of Vaticination. The two pythonesses would soon appear before their clients, arrayed in ancient splendor.

“I do not forget that you have business elsewhere,” the dignified old man said. He covered Yama’s hands with his own. “You can leave by a hidden way, and the people will think you stay here to talk with me. The more important they think I am, the easier it is to keep order. We are a fractious people, dominie. We get too many ideas from others.”

“You have been very generous,” Yama said.

“We have done all we can, but I fear that it is little enough.”

“You have given me my life, and hope that my people still live,” Yama said. “I will try to return when I can.”

“Of course you will return,” Lupe said. “And so I will not say farewell, for in reality you will not have left.”

As they followed Magon up a long stairway, Eliphas said, “This is a day of wonders, brother. I had not known that the mirror people stored up their loot. Amongst all that rubbish is an edition of the Book of Blood that I had known only by repute. It is badly damaged, but a man could live for a year from the sale of only a few intact pages. Will you return?”

Yama shook his head, meaning that he did not know. Yet he did feel a prick of obligation. Not because Lupe’s people had saved his life; Lupe had made it clear that there was no debt to be paid, and Yama was ready to take him at his word. But there was the other matter. There was Lupe’s impossible dream, the promise of the anchorite, the prophecy fulfilled.

No wonder my people have hidden themselves, he thought, for the world holds a store of their unpaid debts and I seem to be fated to redeem them all.

He said with sudden bitterness, “I wish I had never come to Ys! I only hurt myself, and those who expect things from me. I should have gone downriver with Dr. Dismas and accepted my fate!”

But as soon as he said it, he knew that the words came from his dark half, the part of him that dreamed of easy glory and power without responsibility. The part that had been touched by the woman in the shrine, the aspect whose original had begun the heresy which threatened to consume the world.

Magon glanced over his shoulder, his pale face thrown into sharp relief by the lights cast by the fireflies of Yama and Eliphas. There was no other light in the long stair, and Yama wondered how those who lived in the Palace could stand it. Except in places at the edge of things, they inhabited little bubbles of light surrounded by vast expanses of uncharted shadow; Lupe’s people, who possessed only the dimmest of fireflies, if any, must navigate the maze of passages and tunnels in near darkness.

Yama said, “How far is it, Magon?”

“Not far, dominie. We use the straightest route.”

Eliphas whispered, “You should feel no obligation, brother. They are shadows. Thieves and tricksters and whores who live off the crumbs of those engaged in honest toil. They are like the indigens of the roof gardens—except those are more useful. Would you be the savior of such as they?”

“I suppose that if one was to attempt to emulate the Preservers, then one must start somewhere, and better to start in a low place than in a high one. But I aspire to no such thing. I see that you are a pragmatic man, Eliphas. You prize things for their utility.”

“Brother, things are what they are. The mirror people were created for the amusement and wonder of the bloodlines of men, nothing more. They spin fantasies, but they should not be taken seriously.”

“Yet they dream, Eliphas. They believe that I belong in their dreams.”

“They remember their creators, brother, as men remember their mothers and fathers. But once we are grown up we cannot continue to depend upon our parents. We must face the world ourselves.”

“If Lupe’s people are still as children,” Yama said, “then I envy them.”

They fell silent for a while, following Magon up the stairway to a dark, narrow tunnel which, binding gravity about itself, rose vertically through the Palace. At last, Magon stopped and said, “It is not far, dominie. You follow the way until you reach a place where it branches into two. Take the right-hand branch and you will find yourself in a throughway near the Gate of Double Glory.”

“I owe you much, Magon.”

The ragamuffin gambler bobbed and bowed. “You have repaid me a thousandfold, dominie, by allowing me to bring you to my people. I will watch for your return.”

When Magon’s footsteps had faded into the darkness, Yama said, “Whatever my intentions, it may fall out that I am never able to return.”

“Because of the territorial dispute,” Eliphas said. “It is no secret, brother. The whole Palace knows the plight of the Department of Vaticination. Many hope it survives, for that will check the growth of the Department of Indigenous Affairs.”

“It’s a pity that there’s only hope and no help.”

“No one wishes to anger the Department of Indigenous Affairs, for lately it has grown very powerful, and careless of the ancient protocols. That is why it has been able to pick off lesser departments one by one.”

“And there is the hell-hound. We cannot be certain that it has lost my trail. You do not have to follow me, Eliphas. It will not be an easy time. You could go back to the library and your friend, if you wish, and wait for me there.”

The old man smiled. “And suppose the hell-hound finds me? No, I will stay with you, brother. Besides, I made a pledge. Lead on, and I will help as best I can.”