Child of the River

Chapter Eighteen The Thing in the Bottle

“They are yours by right of arms,” Tamora, the red-haired cateran, said. “The sword is too long for you, but I know an armorer who can shorten and rebalance it so sweetly you’d swear afterwards that it was first forged. The corselet and the greaves can be cut down to suit, and you can sell the trimmings. That way it pays for itself. Old armor is expensive because it’s the best. Especially plastic armor, because no one knows how to make the stuff anymore. You might think my breastplate is new, but that’s only because I polished it this morning. It’s a thousand years old if it’s a day, but even if it’s better than most of the clag they make these days, it’s still only steel. But, see, these greaves are real old. I could have taken them, but that wouldn’t be right. Everyone says we’re vagabonds and thieves, but even if we don’t belong to any department, we have our traditions. So these are your responsibility now. You won them by right of arms. You can do what you want with them. Throw them in the river if you want, but it would be a fucking shame if you did.”

“She wants you to give them back to her as a reward for giving them to you,” Pandaras said.

“I talk to the master,” Tamora said, “not his fool.”

Pandaras struck an attitude. “I am his squire.”

“I was the fool,” Yama said to Tamora, “and because I was a fool your friend died. That is why I cannot take his things.”

Tamora shrugged. “Cyg was no friend of mine, and as far as I’m concerned he was the fool, getting himself killed by a scrap of a thing like you. Why, you’re so newly hatched you probably still have eggshell stuck to your back.”

Pandaras said, “If this is to be your career, then you must arm yourself properly, master. As your squire, I strongly suggest it.”

“Squire, is it?” Tamora cracked open another oyster with her strong, ridged fingernails, slurped up the flesh and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The cateran’s bright red hair, which Yama suspected was dyed, was cut short over her skull, with a long fringe in the back that fell to her shoulders. She wore her steel breastplate over a skirt made of leather strips and a mesh shirt which left her muscular arms bare. There was a tattoo of a bird sitting on a nest of flames on the tawny skin of her upper arm, the flames in red ink, the bird, its wings outstretched as if drying them in the fire which was consuming it, in blue.

They were sitting in the shade of an umbrella at a table by a food stall on the waterfront, near the causeway that led from the shore to the island of the Black Temple. It was sunstruck noon. The owner of the stall was sitting under the awning by the ice-chest, listening with half-closed eyes to a long antiphonal prayer burbling from the cassette recorder under his chair.

Tamora squinted against the silver light that burned off the wet mudflats. She had a small, triangular, feral face, with green eyes and a wide mouth that stretched to the hinges of her jaw. Her eyebrows were a single brick-red rope; now the rope dented in the middle and she said, “Caterans don’t have squires. That’s for regular officers, and their squires are appointed from the common ranks. This boy has leeched onto you, Yama. I’ll get rid of him if you want.”

Yama said, “It is just a joke between the two of us.”

“I am his squire,” Pandaras insisted. “My master is of noble birth. He deserves a train of servants, but I’m so good he needs no other.”

Yama laughed.

Tamora squinted at Pandaras. “You people are all the same to me, like fucking rats running around underfoot, but I could swear you’re the pot boy of the crutty inn where I stayed the night.” She told Yama, “If I was more suspicious, I might suspect a plot.”

“If there was a plot, it was between your friend and the landlord of the inn.”

“Grah. I suspected as much. If I survive my present job, and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t, then I’ll have words with that rogue. More than words, in fact.”

Tamora’s usual expression was a sullen, suspicious pout, but when she smiled her face came to life, as if a mask had suddenly dropped, or the sun had come out from behind a cloud. She smiled now, as if at the thought of her revenge.

Her upper incisors were long and stout and sharply pointed.

Yama said, “He did not profit from his treachery.”

Pandaras kicked him under the table and frowned.

Tamora said, “I’m not after your fucking money, or else I would have taken it already. I have just now taken on a new job, so be quick in making up your mind on how you’ll dispose of what is due to you by right of arms. As I said before, you can throw it in the river or leave it for the scavengers if you want, but it’s good gear.”

Yama picked up the sword. Its broad blade was iron and had seen a lot of use. Its nicked edge was razor-sharp. The hilt was wound with bronze wire; the pommel an unornamented plastic ball, chipped and dented. He held the blade up before his face, then essayed a few passes. The cut on his forearm stickily parted under the crude bandage he had tied and he put the sword down. No one sitting at the tables around the stall had looked at the display, although he had hoped that they would.

He said, “I have a knife that serves me well enough, and the sword is made for a strong unsubtle man more used to hewing wood than fighting properly. Find a woodsman and give it to him although I suspect he would rather keep his axe. But I will take the armor. As you say, old armor is the best.”

“Well, at least you know something about weapons,” Tamora said grudgingly. “Are you here looking for hire? If so, I’ll give some advice for free. Come back tomorrow, early. That’s when the best jobs are available. Condottieri like a soldier who can rise early.”

“I had thought to watch a duel or two,” Yama said.

“Grah. Exhibition matches between oiled corn-fed oafs who wouldn’t last a minute in real battle. Do you think we fight with swords against the fucking heretics? The matches draw people who would otherwise not come, that’s all. They get drunk with recruiting sergeants and the next day find themselves indentured in the army, with a hangover and the taste of the oath like a copper penny in their mouth.”

“I am not here to join the army. Perhaps I will become a cateran eventually, but not yet.”

“He’s looking for his people,” Pandaras said.

It was Yama’s turn to kick under the table. It was green-painted tin, with a bamboo and paper umbrella. He said, “I am looking for certain records in one of the departmental libraries.”

Tamora swallowed the last oyster and belched. “Then sign up with the department. Better still, join the fucking archivists. After ten years’ apprenticeship you might just be sent to the Palace of the Memory of the People; more likely you’ll be sent to listen to the stories of unchanged toads squatting in some mudhole. But that’s a better chance than trying to bribe your way into their confidence. They’re a frugal lot, and besides, if any one of them was caught betraying his duty he’d be executed on the spot. The same penalty applies to any who try to bribe them. Those records are all that remains of the dead, kept until they’re resurrected at the end of time. It’s serious shit to even look at them the wrong way.”

“The Puranas say that the Preservers need no records, for at the end of time an infinite amount of energy becomes available. In the last instant as the Universe falls into itself all is possible, and everyone who ever lived or ever could have lived will live again forever, in that eternal now. Besides, the records I am looking for are not in the Palace of the Memory of the People, but in the archives of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons.”

“That’s more or less the same place. On the roof rather than inside, that’s all.”

“Just as I told you, master,” Pandaras said. “You don’t need her to show you what I already know.”

Tamora ignored him. “Their records are maintained by archivists, too. Unless you’re a sawbones or a sawbones’ runner, you can forget about it. It’s the same in all the departments. The truth is expensive and difficult to keep pure, and so getting at it without proper authority is dangerous.” Tamora smiled. “But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways of getting at it.”

Pandaras said, “She is baiting a hook. Be careful.”

Yama said to Tamora, “Tell me this. You have fought against the heretics—that is what the tattoo on your arm implies, anyway. In all your travels, have you ever seen any other men and women like me?”

“I fought in two campaigns, and in the last I was so badly wounded that I took a year recovering. When I’m fit I’ll go again. It’s better pay than bodyguard or pickup work and more honorable, although honor has little to do with it when you’re there. No, I haven’t seen anyone like you, but it doesn’t signify. There are ten thousand bloodlines on Confluence, not counting all those hill tribes of indigens, who are little more than animals.”

“Then you see how hard I must search,” Yama said.

Tamora smiled. It seemed to split her face in half. “How much will you pay?”

“Master—”

“All I have. I changed two gold rials for smaller coins this morning. It is yours, if you help me.”

Pandaras whistled and looked up at the blue sky.

“Grah. Against death, that is not so much.”

Yama said, “Do they guard the records with men, or with machines?”

“Why, mostly machines of course. As I said, the records of any department are important. Even the poorest departments guard their archives carefully—often their archives are all they have left.”

“Well, it might be easier than you suppose.”

Tamora stared at Yama. He met her luminous green gaze and for a long moment the rest of the world melted away.

Her pupils were vertical slits edged with closely crowded dots of golden pigment that faded to copper at the periphery.

Yama imagined drowning in that green-gold gaze, as a luckless fisherman might drown in the Great River’s flood. It was the heart-stopping gaze that a predator turns upon its prey.

Tamora’s voice said from far away, “Before I help you, if I do help you, you must prove yourself.”

Yama said faintly, “How?”

“Don’t trust her,” Pandaras said. “If she really wanted the job, she’d have asked for all your money. There are plenty like her. If we threw a stone in any direction, we’d hit at least two.”

Tamora said, “In a way, you owe it to me.”

Yama was still looking into Tamora’s gaze. He said, “Cyg was going to partner you, I think. Now I know why you came here. You were not looking for me, but for a replacement. Well, what would you have me do?”

Tamora pointed over his shoulder. He turned, and saw the black, silver-capped dome of the voidship lighter rising beyond the flame trees of the island of the Black Temple. The cateran said, “We have to bring back a star-sailor who jumped ship.”

They sold the sword to an armorer for rather more than Yama expected, and left the corselet and the greaves with the same man to be cut down. Tamora insisted that Yama get his wounds treated by one of the leeches who had set up their stalls near the dueling arena, and Yama sat and watched two men fence with chainsaws (“Showboat juggling,” Tamora sneered) while the cut on his forearm was stitched, painted with blue gel and neatly bandaged. The shallow cut on Yama’s palm should be left to heal on its own, the leech said, but Tamora made him bandage it anyway, saying that the bandage would help Yama grip his knife. She bought Pandaras a knife with a long thin round blade and a finger-guard chased with a chrysanthemum flower; it was called a kidney puncher.

“Suitable for sneaking up on someone in the dark,” Tamora said. “If you stand on tiptoe, rat-boy, you should be able to reach someone’s vitals with this.”

Pandaras flexed the knife’s blade between two clumsy, clawed fingers, licked it with his long, pink tongue, then tacked it in his belt. Yama told him, “You do not have to follow me. I killed the man who would have helped her, and it is only proper that I should take his place. But there is no need for you to come.”

“Well put,” Tamora said.

Pandaras showed his small sharp teeth. “Who else would watch your back, master? Besides, I have never been aboard a voidship.”

One of the guards escorted them across the wharf to the voidship lighter. Cables and flexible plastic hoses lay everywhere, like a tangle of basking snakes. Laborers, nearly naked in the hot sunlight, were winding a cavernous pipe toward an opening which had dilated in the lighter’s black hull. An ordinary canvas-and-bamboo gangway angled up to a smaller entrance.

Yama felt a distinct pressure sweep over his skin as, following Tamora up the gangway, he ducked beneath the port’s rim. Inside, a passageway sloped away to the left, curving as it rose so that its end could not be seen. Yama supposed that it spiraled around the inside of the hull of the lighter like the track a maggot leaves in a fruit. It was circular in cross-section, and lit by a soft directionless red light that seemed to hang in the air like smoke. Although the lighter’s black hull radiated the day’s heat, inside it was as chilly as the mountain garden of the curators of the City of the Dead.

Another guard waited inside. He was a short, thickset man with a bland face and a broad, humped back. His head was shaven, and ugly red scars crisscrossed his scalp. He wore a many-pocketed waistcoat and loose-fitting trousers, and did not appear to be armed. He told them to keep to the middle of the passageway, not to touch anything, and not to talk to any voices which might challenge them.

“I’ve been here before,” Tamora said. She seemed subdued in the red light and the chill air of the passageway.

“I remember you,” the guard said, “and I remember a man with only one eye, but I do not remember your companions.”

“My original partner ran into something unexpected. But I’m here, as I said I would be, and I vouch for these two. Lead on. This place is like a tomb.”

“It is older than any tomb,” the guard said.

They climbed around two turns of the passageway. Groups of colored lights were set at random in the black stuff which sheathed the walls and ceiling and floor. The floor gave softly beneath Yama’s boots, and there was a faint vibration in the red-lit air, so low-pitched that he felt it more in his bones than in his ears.

The guard stopped and pressed his palm against the wall, and the black stuff puckered and pulled back with a grating noise. Ordinary light flooded through the orifice, which opened onto a room no more than twenty paces across and ringed round with a narrow window that looked out across the roofs of the city in one direction and the glittering expanse of the Great River in the other. Irregular clusters of colored lights depended from the ceiling like stalactites in a cave, and a thick-walled glass bottle hung from the ceiling in the middle of the clusters of lights, containing some kind of red-and-white blossom in turgid liquid.

Yama whispered to Tamora, “Where is the captain?”

He had read several of the old romances in the library of the peel-house, and expected a tall man in a crisp, archaic uniform, with sharp, bright eyes focused on the vast distances between stars, and skin tanned black with the fierce light of alien suns.

Pandaras snickered, but fell silent when the guard looked at him.

The guard said, “There is no captain except when the crew meld, but the pilot of this vessel will talk with you.”

Tamora said, “The same one I talked with two days ago?”

“Does it matter?” the guard said. He pulled a golden circlet from one of his pockets and set it on his scarred scalp.

At once, his body stiffened. His eyes blinked, each to a different rhythm, and his mouth opened and closed.

Tamora stepped up to him and said, “Do you know who I am?”

The guard’s mouth hung open. Spittle looped between his lips. His tongue writhed behind his teeth like a wounded snake and his breath came out as a hiss that slowly shaped itself into a word.

“Yessss.”

Pandaras nudged Yama and indicated the bottled blossom with a crooked thumb. “There’s the star-sailor,” he said. “It’s talking through the guard.”

Yama looked more closely at the thing inside the bottle. What he had thought were fleshy petals of some exotic flower were the lobes of a mantle that bunched around a core woven of pink and gray filaments. Feathery gills rich with red blood waved slowly to and fro in the thick liquid in which they were suspended. It was a little like a squid, but instead of tentacles it had white, many-branching fibers that disappeared into the base of its bottle.

Pandaras whispered, “Nothing but a nervous system. That’s why it needs puppets.”

The guard jerked his head around and stared at Yama and Pandaras. His eyes were no longer blinking at different rates, but the pupil of the left eye was much bigger than that of the right. Speaking with great effort, as if forcing the words around pebbles lodged in his throat, he said, “You told me you would bring only one other.”

Tamora said, “The taller one, yes. But he has brought his . . . servant.”

Pandaras stepped forward and bowed low from the waist. “I am Yama’s squire. He is a perfect master of fighting. Only this night past he killed a man, an experienced fighter better armed than he, who thought to rob him while he slept.”

The star-sailor said through its puppet, “I have not seen the bloodline for a long time, but you have chosen well. He has abilities you will find useful.”

Yama stared at the thing in the bottle, shocked to the core.

Tamora said, “Is that so?”

“I scanned all of you when you stepped aboard. This one—” the guard slammed his chest with his open hand—“will see to the contract, following local custom. It will be best to return with the whole body, but if it is badly damaged then you must bring a sample of tissue. A piece the size of your smallest finger will be sufficient. You remember what I told you.”

Yama said, “Wait. You know my bloodline?”

Tamora ignored him. She closed her eyes and recited, “’It will be lying close to the spine. The host must be mutilated to obliterate all trace of occupation. Burn it if possible.’”

She opened her eyes. “Suppose we’re caught? What do we tell the magistrates?”

“If you are caught by your quarry, you will not live to tell the magistrates anything.”

“He’ll know you sent us.”

“And we will send others, if you fail. I trust you will not.”

“You know my bloodline,” Yama said. “How do you know my bloodline?”

Pandaras said, “We aren’t the first to try this, are we?”

“There was one attempt before,” Tamora said. “It failed. That is why we’re being so well paid.”

The guard said, “If you succeed.”

“Grah. You say I have a miracle worker with me. Of course we’ll succeed.”

The guard was groping for the circlet on his head. Yama said quickly, “No! I want you to tell me how you know my bloodline!”

The guard’s head jerked around. “We thought you all dead,” he said, and pulled the circlet from his scalp.

He fell to his knees and retched up a mouthful of yellow bile which was absorbed by the black floor, then got to his feet and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his tunic. He said in his own voice, “Was it agreed?”

Tamora said, “You’ll make the contract, and we put our thumbs to it.”

“Outside,” the guard said.

Yama said, “He knew who I was! I must talk with him!”

The guard got between Yama and the bottled star-sailor.

He said, “Perhaps when you return.”

“We should get started straightaway,” Tamora said. “It’s a long haul to the estate.”

The door ground open. Yama looked at the star-sailor in its bottle, and said, “I will return, and with many questions.”