Child of the River

Chapter Ten The Curators of the City of the Dead

The room was in some high, windy place. It was small and square, with whitewashed stone walls and a ceiling of tongue-and-groove planking painted with a hunting scene. The day after he first woke, Yama managed to raise himself from the thin mattress on the stone slab and stagger to the deep-set slit window. He glimpsed a series of stony ridges stepping away beneath a blank blue sky, and then pain overcame his will and he fainted.

“He is ill and he does not know it,” the old man said.

He had half-turned his head to speak to someone else as he leaned over Yama. The tip of his wispy white beard hung a finger’s width from Yama’s chin. The deeply wrinkled skin of his face was mottled with brown spots, and there was only a fringe of white hair around his bald pate. Glasses with lenses like small mirrors hid his eyes. Deep, old scars cut the left side of his face, drawing up the side of his mouth in a sardonic rictus. He said, “He does not know how much the knife took from him.”

“He’s young,” an old woman’s voice said. She added, “He’ll learn by himself, won’t he? We can’t—”

The old man curled and uncurled the end of his wispy beard around his fingers. At last, he said, “I cannot remember.”

Yama asked them who they were, and where this cool white room was, but they did not hear him. Perhaps he had not spoken at all. He could not move even a single fingertip, although this did not scare him. He was too tired to be scared.

The two old people went away and Yama was left to stare at the painted hunting scene on the ceiling. His thoughts would not fit together. Men in plastic armor over brightly colored jerkins and hose were chasing a white stag through a forest of leafless tree trunks. The turf between the trees was starred with flowers. It seemed to be night in the painting, for in every direction the slim trunks of the trees faded into darkness. The white stag glimmered amongst them like a fugitive star. The paint had flaked away from the wood in places, and a patch above the window was faded. In the foreground, a young man in a leather jacket was pulling a brace of hunting dogs away from a pool. Yama thought that he knew the names of the dogs, and who their owner was.

But he was dead.

Some time later, the old man came back and lifted Yama up so that he could sip thin vegetable soup from an earthenware bowl. Later, he was cold, so cold that he shivered under the thin gray blanket, and then so hot that he would have cast aside the blanket if he had possessed the strength.

Fever, the old man told him. He had a bad fever. Something was wrong with his blood. “You have been in the tombs,” the old man said, “and there are many kinds of old sicknesses there.”

Yama sweated into the mattress, thinking that if only he could get up he would quench his thirst with the clear water of the forest pool. Telmon would help him.

But Telmon was dead.

In the middle of the day, sunlight crept a few paces into the little room before shyly retreating. At night, wind hunted at the corners of the deep-set window, making the candle gutter inside its glass sleeve. When Yama’s fever broke it was night. He lay still, listening to the wuthering of the wind.

He felt very tired but entirely clearheaded, and spent hours piecing together what had happened.

Dr. Dismas’s tower, burning like a firework. The strange cage, and the burning ship. The leonine young war hero, Enobarbus, his face as ruined as the old man’s. The ghost ship, and his escape—more fire. The whole adventure seemed to be punctuated by fire. He remembered the kindness of the fisherman, Caphis, and the adventure amongst the dry tombs of the Silent Quarter, which had ended in Lud’s death. He had run from something terrible, and as for what had happened after that, he remembered nothing at all.

“You were carried here,” the old woman told him, when she brought him breakfast. “It was from a place on the shore somewhere downstream of Aeolis, I’d judge. A fair distance, as the fox said to the hen, when he gave her a head start.”

Her skin was fine-grained, almost translucent, and her white, feathery hair reached to the small of her back. She was of the same bloodline as Derev, but far older than either of Derev’s parents.

Yama said, “How did you know?”

The old man smiled at the woman’s shoulder. As always, he wore his mirrored lenses. “Your trousers and your shirt were freshly stained with river silt. It is quite distinctive. But I believe that you had been wandering in the City of the Dead, too.”

Yama asked why he thought that.

“The knife, dear,” the woman said.

The old man pulled on his scanty white beard and said, “Many people carry old weapons, for they are often far more potent than those made today.”

Yama nodded, remembering Dr. Dismas’s energy pistol.

“However, the knife you carried has a patina of corrosion that suggests it had lain undisturbed in some dark, dry place for many years. Perhaps you have carried it around without scrupling to clean it, but I think that you are more responsible than that. I think that you found it only recently, and did not have time to clean it. You landed at the shore and began to walk through the City of the Dead, and at some, point found the knife in an old tomb.”

“It’s from the Age of Insurrection, if I’m a judge,” the woman said. “It’s a cruel thing.”

“And she has forgotten a good deal more than I ever knew,” the old man said fondly. “You will have to learn its ways, or it could kill you.”

“Hush!” the old woman said sharply. “Nothing should be changed!”

“Perhaps nothing can be changed,” the old man said.

“Then I would be a machine,” the old woman said, “and I don’t like that thought.”

“At least you would not need to worry. But I will be careful. Pay no attention to me, youngster. My mind wanders these days, as my wife will surely remind you at every opportunity.”

They had been married a long time. They both wore the same kind of long, layered shifts over woolen trousers, and shared the same set of gestures, as if love were a kind of imitation game in which the best of both participants was mingled. They called themselves Osric and Beatrice, but Yama suspected that these were not their real names. They both had an air of sly caution which suggested that they were withholding much, although Yama felt that Osric wanted to tell him more than he was allowed to know. Beatrice was strict with her husband, but she favored Yama with fond glances, and while he had been stricken with fever she had spent hours bathing his forehead with wet cloths infused with oil of spikenard, and had fed him infusions of honey and herbs, crooning to him as if he were her child. While Osric was bent by age, his tall, slender wife carried herself like a young dancer.

Later, husband and wife sat side by side on the ledge beneath the narrow window of the little room, watching Yama eat a bowl of boiled maize. It was his first solid food since he had woken. They said that they were members of the Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead, an office of the civil service which had been disbanded centuries ago.

“But my ancestors stayed on, dear,” Beatrice explained. “They believed that the dead deserved better than abandonment, and fought against dissolution. There was quite a little war. Of course, we’re much diminished now. Most would say that we had vanished long ago, if they had heard of us at all, but we still hold some of the more important parts of the city.”

“You might say that I am an honorary member of the department, by marriage,” Osric said. “Here, I cleaned the knife for you.”

Osric laid the long, curved knife at the foot of the bed.

Yama looked at it and discovered that although it had saved his life he feared it; it was as if Osric had set a live snake at his feet. He said, “I found it in a tomb in the cliffs by the river.”

“Then it came from somewhere else,” Osric said, and laid a bony finger beside his nose. The tip of the finger was missing. He said, “I used a little white vinegar to take the bloom of age from the metal, and every decad or so you should rub it down with a cloth touched to mineral oil. But it will not need sharpening, and it will repair itself, within limits. It had been imprinted with a copy of the personality of its previous owner, but I have purged that ghost. You should practice with it as often as you can, and handle it at least once a day, and so it will come to know you.”

“Osric—”

“He needs to know,” Osric told his wife. “It will not hurt. Handle it often, Yama. The more you handle it, the better it will know you. And leave it in the sunlight, or between places of different temperature—placing the point in a fire is good. Otherwise it will take energy from you again. It had lain in the dark a long time—that was why you were hurt by it when you used it. I would guess it belonged to an officer of the cavalry, dead long ages past. They were issued to those fighting in the rain forests two thousand leagues downriver.”

Yama said stupidly, “But the war started only forty years ago.”

“This was another war, dear,” Beatrice said.

“I found it by the river. In a tomb there. I put out my hand in the dark.”

Yama remembered how the knife had kindled its eldritch glow when he had held it up, wonderingly, before his face.

But when Lob had picked it up, the horrible thing had happened. The knife was different things to different people.

Yama had been brought a long way from the river. This was the last retreat of the last of the curators of the City of the Dead, deep in the foothills of the Rim Mountains. He had not realized until then the true extent of the necropolis.

“The dead outnumber the living,” Osric said, “and this has been the burial place for Ys since the construction of Confluence. Until this last, decadent age, at least.”

Yama gathered that there were not many curators left now, and that most of those were old. This was a place where the past was stronger than the present. The Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead had once been responsible for preparation and arrangement of the deceased, whom they called clients, and for the care and maintenance of the graves, tombs and memorials, the picture slates and aspects of the dead. It had been a solemn and complex task. For instance, Yama learned that there had been four methods of dealing with clients: by interment, including burial or entombment; by cremation, either by fire or by acids; by exposure, either in a byre raised above the ground or by dismemberment; and by water.

“Which I understand is the only method used these days,” Osric said. “It has its place, but many die a long way from the Great River, and besides, many communities are too close together, so that the corpses of those upriver foul the water of those below them. Consider, Yama. Much of Confluence is desert or mountain. Interment in the soil is rare, for there is little enough land for cultivation. For myriad upon myriad days, our ancestors built tombs for their dead, or burned them on pyres or dissolved them in tanks of acid, or exposed them to the brothers of the air. Building tombs takes much labor and is suitable only for the rich, for the badly constructed tombs of the poor are soon ransacked by wild animals. Firewood is in as short supply as arable land, for the same reasons, and dissolution in acid is usually considered aesthetically displeasing. How much more natural, in the circumstances, to expose the client to the brothers of the air. It is how I wish my body to be disposed, when my time comes. Beatrice has promised it to me. The world will end before I die, of course, but I think there will still be birds . . .”

“You forgot preservation,” Beatrice said sharply. “He always does,” she told Yama. “He disapproves.”

“Ah, but I did not forget. It is merely a variation on interment. Without a tomb, the preserved body is merely fodder for the animals, or a curiosity in a sideshow.”

“Some are turned into stone,” Beatrice said. “It is mostly done by exposing the client to limy water.”

“And then there is mummification and desiccation, either by vacuum or by chemical treatment, and treatment by tar, or by ice.” Osric ticked off the variations on his fingers. “But you know well that I mean the most common method, and the most decadent. Which is to say, those clients who were preserved while still alive, in the hope of physical resurrection in ages to come. Instead, robbers opened the tombs and took what there was of value, and threw away the bodies for wild animals to devour, or burned them as fuel, or ground them up for fertilizer. The brave cavalry officer who once wielded your knife in battle, young Yama, was in all probability burned in some furnace to melt the alloy stripped from his tomb. Perhaps one of the tomb robbers picked up the knife, and it attacked him. He dropped it where you would find it an age later. We live in impoverished times. I remember that I played amongst the tombs as a child, teasing the aspects who still spoke for those beyond hope of resurrection. There is a lesson in folly. Only the Preservers outrun time. I did not know then that the aspects were bound to oblige my foolishness; the young are needlessly cruel because they know no better.”

Beatrice straightened her back, held up her hand, and recited a verse:

Yama guessed that this was from the Puranas, but Beatrice said that it was far older. “There are too few of us to remember everything left by the dead,” she said, “but we do what we can, and we are a long-lived race.”

There was much more to the tasks of the curators than preparation of their clients, and in the next two days Yama learned something about care of tombs and the preservation of the artifacts with which clients had been interred, each according to the customs of their bloodline. Osric and Beatrice fed him vegetable broths, baked roots and succulent young okra, corn and green beans fried in airy batter.

He was getting better, and was beginning to feel a restless curiosity.

He had not broken any bones, but his ribs were badly bruised and muscles in his back and arms had been torn. There were numerous half-healed cuts on his limbs and torso, too, and the fever had left him very weak, as if most of his blood had been drained.

Beatrice cleaned out the worst of his wounds; she explained that the stone dust embedded in them would otherwise leave scars. As soon as he could, Yama started to exercise, using the drills taught him by Sergeant Rhodean.

He practiced with the knife, too, mastering his instinctive revulsion. He handled it each day, as Osric had suggested, and otherwise left it on the ledge beneath the narrow window, where it would catch the midday sun. To begin with, he had to rest for an hour or more between each set of exercises, but he ate large amounts of the curators’ plain food and felt his strength return. At last, he was able to climb the winding stairs to the top of the hollow crag.

He had to stop and rest frequently, but finally stepped out of the door of a little hut into the open air under an achingly blue sky. The air was clean and cold, as heady as wine after the stuffy room in which he had lain for so long.

The hut was set at one end of the top of the crag, which was so flat that it might have been sheared off by someone wielding a gigantic blade. Possibly this was more or less what had been done, for during the construction of Confluence, long before the Preservers had abandoned the ten thousand bloodlines, energies had been deployed to move whole mountains and shape entire landscapes as easily as a gardener might set out a bed of flowers.

The flat top of the crag was no bigger than the Great Hall of the peel-house, and divided into tiny fields by low drystone walls. There were plots of squash and yams, corn and kale and cane fruits. Little paths wandered between these plots, and there was a complicated system of cisterns and gutters to provide a constant supply of water to the crops. At the far end, Beatrice and Osric were feeding doves which fluttered around a round-topped dovecote built of unmortared stone.

The crag stood at the edge of a winding ridge above a gorge so deep that its bottom was lost in shadow. Other flat-topped crags stood along the ridge, their smooth sides fretted with windows and balconies. There was a scattering of tombs on broad ledges cut into the white rock of the gorge’s steep sides, huge buildings with blind, whitewashed walls under pitched roofs of red tile that stood amidst manicured lawns and groves of tall trees. Beyond the far side of the gorge, other ridges stepped up toward the sky, and beyond the farthest ridge the peaks of the Rim Mountains seemed to float free above indistinct blue and purple masses, shining in the light of the sun.

Yama threaded the winding paths to the little patch of grass where Beatrice and Osric were scattering grain. Doves rose up in a whir of white wings as he approached. Osric raised a hand in greeting and said, “This is the valley of the kings of the first days. Some maintain that Preservers are buried here, but if that is true, the location is hidden from us.”

“It must be a lot of work, looking after these tombs.”

The mirror lenses of Osric’s spectacles flashed light at Yama. “They maintain themselves,” the old man said, “and there are mechanisms which prevent people from approaching too closely. It was once our job to keep people away for their own good, but only those who know this place come here now.”

“Few know of it,” Beatrice added, “and fewer come.”

She held out a long, skinny arm. A dove immediately perched on her hand, and she drew it to her breast and stroked its head with a bony forefinger until it began to coo.

Yama said, “I was brought a long way.”

Osric nodded. His wispy beard blew sideways in the wind. “The Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead once maintained a city that stretched from these mountains to the river, a day’s hard ride distant. Whoever brought you here had a good reason.”

Beatrice suddenly flung out her hands. The dove rose into the wind and circled high above the patchwork of tiny fields.

She watched it for a minute and then said, “I think it’s time we showed Yama why he was brought here.”

“I would like to know who brought me here, to begin with.”

“As long as you do not know who saved you,” Osric said, “there is no obligation.”

Yama nodded, remembering that after he had saved Caphis from the trap, the fisherman had said that his life was forever in Yama’s care. He said, “Perhaps I could at least know the circumstances.”

“Something had taken one of our goats,” Beatrice said. “It was in a field far below. We went to look for her, and found you. It is better if you see for yourself why you have been brought here. Then you’ll understand. Having climbed so high, you must descend. I think that you are strong enough.”

Descending the long spiral of stairs was easier than climbing up, but Yama felt that if not for him, Osric and Beatrice would have bounded away eagerly, although he was so much younger than they. The stairs ended at a balcony that girdled the crag halfway between its flat top and its base. A series of arched doorways opened off the balcony, and Osric immediately disappeared through one. Yama would have followed, but Beatrice took his arm and guided him to a stone bench by the low wall of the balcony. Sunlight drenched the ancient stone; Yama was grateful for its warmth.

“There were a hundred thousand of us, once,” Beatrice said, “but we are greatly reduced. This is the oldest part of all that still lies within our care, and it will be the last to fall. It will fall eventually, of course. All of Confluence will fall.”

Yama said, “You sound like those who say that the war at the midpoint of the world may be the war at the end of all things.”

Sergeant Rhodean had taught Yama and Telmon the major battles, scratching the lines of the armies and the routes of their long marches in the red clay floor of the gymnasium.

Beatrice said, “When there is a war, everyone believes that it will end in a victory that will bring an end to all conflict, but in a series of events there is no way of determining which is to be the last.”

Yama said stoutly, “The heretics will be defeated because they challenge the word of the Preservers. The Ancients of Days revived much old technology which their followers use against us, but they were lesser creatures than the Preservers because they were the distant ancestors of the Preservers. How can a lesser idea prevail against a greater one?”

“I forget that you are young,” Beatrice said, smiling. “You still have hope. But Osric has hope, too, and he is a wise man. Not that the world will not end, for that is certain, but that it will end well. The Great River fails day by day, and at last all that my people care for will fall away.”

“With respect, perhaps you and your husband live for the past, yet I live for the future.”

Beatrice smiled. “Ah, but which future, I wonder? Osric suspects that there might be more than one. As for us, it is our duty to preserve the past to inform the future, and this place is where the past is strongest. There are wonders interred here which could end the war in an instant if wielded by one side, or destroy Confluence, if used by both against each other.”

“The living bury the dead and move on, and forget. We remember. Above all, that is our duty. There are record keepers in Ys who claim to be able to trace the bloodlines of Confluence back to their first members. My family preserves the tombs of those ancestors, their bodies and their artifacts. The record keepers would claim that words are stronger than the phenomena they describe, and that only words endure while all else fails, but we know that even words change. Stories are mutable, and in any story each generation finds a different lesson, and with each telling a story changes slightly until it is no longer the thing it was. The king who prevails against the hero who would have brought redeeming light to the world becomes after many tellings of the story a hero saving the world from fire, and the light-bringer becomes a fiend. Only things remain what they are. They are themselves. Words are merely representations of things; but we have the things themselves. How much more powerful they are than their representations!”

Yama thought of the Aedile, who put so much trust in the objects that the soil preserved. He said, “My father seeks to understand the past by the wreckage it leaves behind. Perhaps it is not the stories that change but the past itself, for all that lives of the past is the meaning we invest in what remains.”

Behind him, Osric said, “You have been taught by a record keeper. That is just what one of those beetle-browed nearsighted bookworms would say, bless them all, each and every one. Well, there is more of the past than can be found in books. That is a lesson I had to learn over and over, young man. All that is ordinary and human passes away without record, and all that remains are stories of priests and philosophers, heroes and kings. Much is made of the altar stones and sacraria of temples, but nothing of the cloisters where lovers rendezvoused and friends gossiped, and the courtyards where children played. That is the false lesson of history. Still, we can peer into random scenes of the past and wonder at their import. That is what I have brought you.”

Osric carried something square and flat under his arm, covered with a white cloth. He removed the cloth with a flourish, revealing a thin rectangle of milky stone which he laid in a pool of sunlight on the tiled floor of the balcony.

Yama said, “My father collects these picture slates, but this one appears blank.”

“He collected them for important research, perhaps,” Osric said, “but I am sorry to hear of, it. Their proper resting place is not in a collection, but in the tomb in which they were installed.”

“I have always wondered why they need to drink sunlight to work, when they were buried away in darkness.”

“The tombs drink sunlight, too,” Osric said, “and distribute it amongst their components according to need. The pictures respond to the heat given off by a living body, and in the darkness of the tomb would waken in the presence of any watcher. Outside the tomb, without their usual power source, the pictures also require sunlight.”

“Be quiet, husband,” Beatrice said. “It wakens. Watch it, Yama, and learn. This is all we can show you.”

Colors mingled and ran in the slate, seeming to swirl just beneath its surface. At first they were faint and amorphous, little more than pastel flows within the slate’s milky depths, but gradually they brightened, running together in a sudden silvery flash.

For a moment, Yama thought that the slate had turned into a mirror, reflecting his own eager face. But when he leaned closer, the face within the slate turned as if to speak to someone beyond the frame of the picture, and he saw that it was the face of someone older than he was, a man with lines at the corners of his eyes and grooves at either side of his mouth. But the shape of the eyes and their round blue irises, and the shape of the face, the pale skin and the mop of wiry black hair: all these were so very like his own that he cried out in astonishment.

The man in the picture was talking now, and suddenly smiled at someone beyond the picture’s frame, a frank, eager smile that turned Yama’s heart. The man turned away and the view slid from his face to show the night sky. It was not the sky of Confluence, for it was full of stars, scattered like diamond chips carelessly thrown across black velvet. There was a frozen swirl of dull red light in the center of the picture, and Yama saw that the stars around it seemed to be drawn into lines that curved in toward the red swirl. Stars streaked as the viewpoint of the picture moved, and for a moment it steadied on a flock of splinters of light hung against pure black, and then it faded.

Osric wrapped the white cloth around the slate. Immediately Yama wanted to strip the cloth away and see the picture blossom within the slate again, wanted to feast on the stranger’s face, the stranger who was of his bloodline, wanted to understand the strange skies under which his long-dead ancestor had stood. His blood sang in his ears.

Beatrice handed him a square of lace-trimmed cloth. A handkerchief. Yama realized then that he was weeping.

Osric said, “This is the place where the oldest tombs on Confluence can be found, but the picture is older than anything on Confluence, for it is older than Confluence itself. It shows the first stage in the construction of the Eye of the Preservers, and it shows the lands which the Preservers walked before they fell into the Eye and vanished into the deep past or the deep future, or perhaps into another universe entirely.”

“I would like to see the tomb. I want to see where you found this picture.”

Osric said, “The Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead has kept the picture a long time, and if it once rested in a tomb, then it was so long ago that all records of that tomb are lost. Your bloodline walked Confluence at its beginning, and now it walks it again.”

Yama said, “This is the second time that someone has hinted that I have a mysterious destiny, but no one will explain why or what it is.”

Beatrice told her husband, “He’ll discover it soon enough. We should not tell him more.”

Osric tugged at his beard. “I do not know everything. What the hollow man said, for instance, or what lies beyond the end of the river. I have tried to remember it all over again, and I cannot!”

Beatrice took her husband’s hands in her own and told Yama, “He was hurt, and sometimes gets confused about what might happen and what has happened. Remember the slate. It’s important.”

Yama said, “I know less than you. Let me see the slate again. Perhaps there is something—”

Beatrice said, “Perhaps it is your destiny to discover your past, dear. Only by knowing the past can you know yourself.”

Yama smiled, because that was precisely the motto which Zakiel used to justify his long lessons. It seemed to him that the curators of the dead and the librarians and archivists were so similar that they amplified slight differences into a deadly rivalry, just as brothers feuded over nothing at all simply to assert their individuality.

“You have seen all we can show you, Yama,” Osric said. “We preserve the past as best we can, but we do not pretend to understand everything we preserve.”

Yama said formally, “I thank you for showing me this wonder.” But he thought that it proved only that others like him had lived long ago—he was more concerned with discovering if they still lived now. Surely they must—he was proof of that—but where? What had Dr. Dismas discovered in the archives of his department?

Beatrice stood with a graceful flowing motion. “You cannot stay, Yama. You are a catalyst, and change is most dangerous here.”

Yama said, “If you would show me the way, I would go home at once.”

He said it with little hope, for he was convinced that the two curators were holding him prisoner. But Beatrice smiled and said, “I will do better than that. I will take you.”

Osric said, “You are stronger than you were when you arrived here, but not, I think, as strong as you can be. Let my wife help you, Yama. And remember us. We have served as best we can, and I feel that we have served well. When you discover your purpose, remember us.”

Beatrice said, “Don’t burden the poor boy, husband. He is too young. It is too early.”

“He is old enough to know his mind, I think. Remember that we are your friends, Yama.”

Yama bowed from the waist, as the Aedile had taught him, and turned to follow Beatrice, leaving her husband sitting in a pool of sunlight, his ravaged face made inscrutable by the mirror lenses of his spectacles, the blue uncharted mountain ridges framed by the pillars behind him, and the picture slate, wrapped in white cloth, on his lap.

Beatrice led Yama down a long helical stair and through chambers where machines as big as houses stood half-buried in the stone floor. Beyond these were the wide, circular mouths of pits in which long narrow tubes, made of a metal as clear as glass, fell into white mists a league or more below. Vast slow lightnings sparked and rippled in the transparent tubes. Yama felt a slow vibration through the soles of his feet, a pulse deeper than sound.

He would have stayed to examine the machines, but Beatrice urged him past and led him down a long hall with black keelrock walls, lit by balls of white fire that spun beneath a high curved ceiling. Parts of the floor were transparent and Yama saw, dimly, huge machines crouched in chambers far below his feet.

“Don’t gawp,” Beatrice said. “You don’t want to wake them before their time.”

Many narrow corridors led off the hall. Beatrice ushered Yama down one of them into a small room which, once its door slid shut, began at once to hum and shake. Yama felt for a moment as if he had stepped over a cliff, and clutched at the rail which ran around the curved walls of the room.

“We fall through the keelways,” Beatrice said. “Most people live on the surface now, but in ancient times the surface was a place where they came to play and meet, while they had their dwelling and working places underground. This is one of the old roads. It will return you to Aeolis in less than an hour.”

“Are these roads everywhere?”

“Once. No more. We have maintained a few beneath the City of the Dead, but many more no longer function, and beyond the limits of our jurisdiction things are worse. Everything fails at last. Even the Universe will fall into itself eventually.”

“The Puranas say that is why the Preservers fled into the Eye. But if the Universe will not end soon, then surely that is not why they fled. Zakiel could never explain that. He said it was not for me to question the Puranas.”

Beatrice laughed. It was like the tinkling of old, fragile bells. “How like a librarian! But the Puranas contain many riddles, and there is no harm in admitting that not all the answers are obvious. Perhaps they are not even comprehensible to our small minds, but a librarian will never admit that any text in his charge is unfathomable. He must be the master of them all, and is shamed to admit any possible failure.”

“The slate showed the creation of the Eye. There is a sura in the Puranas, the forty-third sura, I think, which says that the Preservers made stars fall together, until their light grew too heavy to escape.”

“Perhaps. There is much we do not know about the past, Yama. Some have said that the Preservers set us here for their own amusement, as certain bloodlines keep caged birds for amusement, but I would not repeat that heresy. All who believed it are safely dead long ago, but it is still a dangerous thought.”

“Perhaps because it is true, or contains some measure of the truth.”

Beatrice regarded him with her bright eyes. She was a head taller than he was. “Do not be bitter, Yama. You will find what you are looking for, although it might not be where you expect it. Ah, we are almost there.”

The room shuddered violently. Yama fell to his knees. The floor was padded with a kind of quilting, covered in an artificial material as slick and thin as satin.

Beatrice opened the door and Yama followed her into a very long room that had been carved from rock. Its high roof was held up by a forest of slender pillars and wan light fell from narrow slits in the roof. It had once been a stonemasons’ workshop, and Beatrice led Yama around half-finished carvings and benches scattered with tools, all abandoned an age ago and muffled by thick dust. At the door, she took out a hood of black cloth and said that she must blindfold him, “We are a secret people, because we should not exist. Our department was disbanded long ago, and we survive only because we are good at hiding.”

“I understand. My father—”

“We are not frightened of discovery, Yama, but we have stayed hidden for so long that knowledge of where we are is valuable to certain people. I would not ask you to carry that burden. It would expose you to unnecessary danger. If you need to find us again, you will. I can safely promise that, I think. In return, will you promise that you won’t mention us to the Aedile?”

“He will want to know where I have been.”

“You were ill. You recovered, and you returned. Perhaps you were nursed by one of the hill tribes. The Aedile will be so pleased to see you that he won’t question you too closely. Will you promise?”

“As long as I do not have to lie to him. I think that I am done with lies.”

Beatrice was pleased by this. “You were honest from the first, dear heart. Tell the Aedile as much of the truth as is good for him, and no more. Now, come with me.”

Blinded by the soft, heavy cloth of the hood, Yama took Beatrice’s hot, fine-boned hand, and allowed himself to be led once more. They walked a long way. He trusted this strange old woman, and he was thinking about the man of his bloodline, dead ages past.

At last she told him to stand still. Something cold and heavy was placed in his right hand. After a moment of silence Yama lifted the hood away and saw that he was in a dark passageway walled with broken stone blocks, with stout tree roots thrust between their courses. A patch of sunlight fell through a narrow doorway at the top of a stair whose stone treads had been worn away in the center. He was holding the ancient metal knife he had found in the tomb by the river’s shore—or which had found him. A skirl of blue sparks flared along the outer edge of its blade and sputtered out one by one.

Yama looked around for Beatrice and thought he saw a patch of white float around the corner of a passageway. But when he ran after it, he found a stone wall blocking his way.

He turned back to the sunlight. This place was familiar, but he did not recognize it until he climbed the stair and stepped out into the ruins in the Aedile’s garden, with the peel-house looming beyond masses of dark green rhododendrons.