Child of the River

Chapter Four Yamamanama

Yama remembered nothing of the circumstances of his birth, or of how he had arrived at Aeolis in a skiff steered by a man with a corpse at his feet and the blood of his own son fresh on his hands. Yama knew only that Aeolis was home, and knew it as intimately as only a child can, especially a child who has been adopted by the city’s Aedile and so wears innocently and unknowingly an intangible badge of privilege.

In its glory, before the Age of Insurrection, Aeolis, named for the winter wind that sang through the passes of the hills above the broad valley of the river Breas, had been the disembarkation point for the City of the Dead. Ys had extended far downriver in those days, and then as now it was the law that no one could be buried within its boundaries. Instead, mourners accompanied their dead to Aeolis, where funeral pyres for the lesser castes burned day and night, temples rang with prayers and songs for the preserved bodies of the rich and altars shone with constellations of butter lamps that shimmered amongst heaps of flowers and strings of prayer flags.

The ashes of the poor were cast on the waters of the Great River; the preserved bodies of the ruling and mercantile classes, and of scholars and dynasts, were interred in tombs whose ruined, empty shells still riddled the dry hills beyond the town. The Breas, which then had been navigable almost to its source in the foothills of the Rim Mountains, had been crowded with barges bringing slabs of land coral, porphyry, granite, marble and all kinds of precious stones for the construction of the tombs.

An age later, after half the world had been turned to desert during the rebellion of the feral machines, and the Preservers had withdrawn their blessing from Confluence, and Ys had retreated, contracting about its irreducible heart, funeral barges no longer ferried the dead to Aeolis; instead, bodies were launched from the docks and piers of Ys onto the full flood of the Great River, given up to caymans and fish, lammergeyers and carrion crows. As these creatures consumed the dead, so Aeolis consumed its own past. Tombs were looted of treasures; decorative panels and frescoes were removed from the walls; preserved bodies were stripped of their clothes and jewelry; the hammered bronze facings of doors and tomb furniture were melted down—the old pits of the wind-powered smelters were still visible along the escarpment above the little city.

After most of the tombs had been stripped, Aeolis became no more than a way station, a place where ships put in to replenish their supplies of fresh food on their voyages downriver from Ys. This was the city that Yama knew. There was the new quay which ran across the mudflats and stands of zebra grass of the old, silted harbor to the retreating edge of the Great River, where the fisherfolk of the floating islands gathered in their little coracles to sell strings of oysters and mussels, spongy parcels of red river moss, bundles of riverweed stipes, and shrimp and crabs and fresh fish. There were always people swimming off the new quay or splashing about in coracles and small boats, and men working at the fish traps and the shoals at the mouth of the shallow Breas where razorshell mussels were cultivated, and divers hunting for urchins and abalone amongst the holdfasts of stands of giant kelp whose long blades formed vast brown slicks on the surface of the river. There was the long road at the top of the ruined steps of the old waterfront, where tribesmen from the dry hills of the wild shore downriver of Aeolis squatted at blanket stalls to sell fruit and fresh meat, and dried mushrooms and manna lichen, and bits of lapis lazuli and marble pried from the wrecked facings of ancient tombs. There were ten taverns and two whorehouses; the chandlers’ godowns and the farmers’ cooperative; straggling streets of mud-brick houses which leaned toward each other over narrow canals; the one surviving temple, its walls white as salt, the gilt of its dome recently renewed by public subscription. And then the ruins of the ancient mortuaries, more extensive than the town, and fields of yams and raffia and yellow peas, and flooded paddies where rice and paeonin were grown. One of the last of Aeolis’s mayors had established the paeonin industry in an attempt to revitalize the little city, but when the heretics had silenced the shrines at the beginning of the war there had been a sudden shrinkage in the priesthood and a decline in trade of the pigment which dyed their robes. These days, the mill, built at the downriver point of the bay so that its effluent would not contaminate the silty harbor, worked only one day in ten.

Most of the population of Aeolis were of the same bloodline. They called themselves the Amnan, which meant simply the human beings; their enemies called them the Mud People.

They had bulky but well-muscled bodies and baggy gray or brown skin. Clumsy on land, they were strong swimmers and adept aquatic predators, and had hunted giant otters and manatees almost to extinction along that part of the Great River. They had preyed upon the indigenous fisherfolk, too, before the Aedile had arrived and put a stop to it. More women were born than men, and sons fought their fathers for control of the harem; if they won, they killed their younger brothers or drove them out. The people of Aeolis still talked about the fight between old Constable Thaw and his son. It had lasted five days, and had ranged up and down the waterfront and through the net of canals between the houses until Thaw, his legs paralyzed, had been drowned in the shallow stream of the Breas.

It was a barbaric custom, the Aedile said, a sign that the Amnan were reverting to their bestial nature. The Aedile went into the city as little as possible—rarely more than once every hundred days, and then only to the temple to attend the high day service with Yama and Telmon sitting to the right and left side of their father in scratchy robes, on hard, ornately carved chairs, facing the audience throughout the three or four hours of obeisances and offerings, prayer and praisesongs. Yama loved the sturdy square temple, with its clean high spaces, the black disc of its shrine in its ornate gilded frame, and walls glowing with mosaics picturing scenes of the end times, in which the Preservers (shown as clouds of light) ushered the re-created dead into perfect worlds of parklands and immaculate gardens. He loved the pomp and circumstance of the ceremonies, too, although he thought that it was unnecessary. The Preservers, who watched all, did not need ritual praise; to walk and work and, play in the world they had made was praise enough. He was happier worshipping at the shrines which stood near the edge of the world on the far side of the Great River, visited every year during the winter festival when the triple spiral of the Home Galaxy first rose in its full glory above the Great River and most of the people of Aeolis migrated to the far-side shore in a swarm of boats to set up camps and bonfires and greet the onset of winter with fireworks, and dance and pray and drink and feast for a whole decad.

The Aedile had taken Yama into his household, but he was a remote, scholarly man, busy with his official duties or preoccupied with his excavations and the endless measurements and calculations by which he tried to divide everything into everything else in an attempt to discover the prime which harmonized the world, and perhaps the Universe. It left him with little in the way of small talk. Like many unworldly, learned men, the Aedile treated children as miniature adults, failing to recognize that they were elemental, unfired vessels whose stuff was malleable and fey.

As a consequence of the Aedile’s benign neglect, Yama and Telmon spent much of their childhood being passed from one to another of the household servants, or running free amongst the tombs of the City of the Dead. In summer, the Aedile often left the peel-house for a month at a time, taking most of his household to one or another of his excavation sites in the dry hills and valleys beyond Aeolis. When they were not helping with the slow, painstaking work, Yama and Telmon went hunting and exploring amongst desert suburbs of the City of the Dead, Telmon searching for unusual insects for his collection, Yama interrogating aspects—he had a knack for awakening them, and for tormenting and teasing them into revealing details of the lives of the people on whom they were based, and for whom they were both guardians and advocates.

Telmon was the natural leader of the two, five years older, tall and solemn and patient and endlessly inquisitive, with a fine black pelt shot through with chestnut highlights. He was a natural horseman and an excellent shot with bow, arbalest and rifle, and often went off by himself for days at a time, hunting in the high ranges of hills where the Breas ran white and fast through the locks and ponds of the old canal system.

He loved Yama like a true brother, and Yama loved him in turn, and was as devastated as the Aedile by news of his death.

Formal education resumed in winter. For four days each decad Yama and Telmon were taught fencing, wrestling and horsemanship by Sergeant Rhodean; for the rest, their education was entrusted to the librarian, Zakiel. Zakiel was a slave, the only one in the peel-house; he had once been an archivist, but had committed an unspeakable heresy. Zakiel did not seem to mind being a slave. Before he had been branded, he had worked in the vast stacks of the library of the Palace of the Memory of the People, and now he was librarian of the peel-house. He ate his simple meals amongst dusty tiers of books and scrolls, and slept in a cot in a dark corner under a cliff of quarto-sized ledgers whose thin metal covers, spotted with corrosion, had not been disturbed for centuries. All knowledge could be found in books, Zakiel declared, and if he had a passion (apart from his mysterious heresy, which he had never renounced) it was this. He was perhaps the happiest man in the Aedile’s household, for he needed nothing but his work.

“Since the Preservers fully understand the Universe, and hold it whole in their minds, then it follows that all texts, which flow from minds forged by the Preservers, are reflections of their immanence,” Zakiel told Yama and Telmon more than once. “It is not the world itself we should measure, but the reflections of the world, filtered through the creations of the Preservers and set down in these books. Of course, boys, you must never tell the Aedile I said this. He is happy in his pursuit of the ineffable, and I would not trouble him with these trivial matters.”

Yama and Telmon were supposed to be taught the Summalae Logicales, the Puranas and the Protocols of the Department, but mostly they listened to Zakiel read passages from selected works of natural philosophy before engaging in long, formal discussions. Yama first learned to read upside-down by watching Zakiel’s long, ink-stained forefinger tracking glyphs from right to left while listening to the librarian recite in a singsong voice, and later had to learn to read all over again, this time the right away up, to be able to recite in his turn. Yama and Telmon had most of the major verses of the Puranas by heart, and were guided by Zakiel to read extensively in chrestomathies and incunabulae, but while Telmon dutifully followed the program Zakiel set out, Yama preferred to idle time away dreaming over bestiaries, prosopographies and maps—most especially maps.

Yama stole many books from the library. Taking them was a way of possessing the ideas and wonders they contained, as if he might, piece by piece, seize the whole world. Zakiel retrieved most of the books from various hiding places in the house or the ruins in its grounds, using a craft more subtle than the tracking skills of either Telmon or Sergeant Rhodean, but one thing Yama managed to retain was a map of the inhabited half of the world. The map’s scroll was the width of his hand and almost twice the length of his body, wound on a resin spindle decorated with tiny figures of a thousand bloodlines frozen in representative poses. The map was printed on a material finer than silk and stronger than steel. At one edge were the purple and brown and white ridges of the Rim Mountains; at the other was the blue ribbon of the Great River, with a narrow unmarked margin at its far shore. Yama knew that there were many shrines and monuments to pillar saints on the far-side shore—he visited some of them each year, when the whole city crossed the Great River to celebrate with fireworks and feasting the rise of the Galaxy at the beginning of winter—and he wondered why the map did not show them. For there was so much detail crammed into the map elsewhere. Between the Great River and the Rim Mountains was the long strip of inhabited land, marked with green plains and lesser mountain ranges and chains of lakes and ochre deserts. Most cities were scattered along the Great River’s nearside shore, a thousand or more which lit up with their names when Yama touched them. The greatest of them all stood below the head of the Great River: Ys, a vast blot spread beyond the braided delta where the river gathered its strength from the glaciers and ice-fields which buried all but the peaks of the Terminal Mountains.

When the map had been made, Ys had been at the height of its glory, and its intricate grids of streets and parks and temples stretched from the shore of the Great River to the foothills and canyons at the edge of the Rim Mountains. A disc of plain glass, attached to the spindle of the map by a reel of wire, revealed details of these streets. By squeezing the edges of the disc, the magnification could be adjusted to show individual buildings, and Yama spent long hours gazing at the crowded rooftops, imagining himself smaller than a speck of dust and able to wander the ancient streets of a more innocent age.

More and more, as he came into manhood, Yama was growing restless. He dreamed of searching for his bloodline.

Perhaps they were a high-born and fabulously wealthy clan, or a crew of fierce adventurers who had sailed their ships downstream to the midpoint of the world and the end of the Great River, and fallen from the edge and gone adventuring amongst the floating islands; or perhaps they belonged to a coven of wizards with magic powers, and those same powers lay slumbering within him, waiting to be awakened. Yama elaborated enormously complicated stories around his imagined bloodline, some of which Telmon listened to patiently in the watches of the night, when they were camped amongst the tombs of the City of the Dead.

“Never lose your imagination, Yama,” Telmon told him. “Whatever you are, wherever you come from, that is your most important gift. But you must observe the world, too, learn how to read and remember its every detail, celebrate its hills and forests and deserts and mountains, the Great River and the thousands of rivers that run into it, the thousand cities and the ten thousand bloodlines. I know how much you love that old map, but you must live in the world as it is to really know it. Do that, and think how rich and wild and strange your stories will become. They will make you famous, I know it.”

This was at the end of the last winter Telmon had spent at home, a few days before he took his muster to war. He and Yama were on the high moors three days’ ride inland, chasing the rumor of a dragon. Low clouds raced toward the Great River ahead of a cold wind, and a freezing rain, gritty with flecks of ice, blew in their faces as they walked at point with a straggling line of beaters on either side. The moors stretched away under the racing clouds, hummocky and drenched, grown over with dense stands of waist-high bracken and purple islands of springy heather, slashed with fast-running peaty streams and dotted with stands of wind-blasted juniper and cypress and bright green domes of bog moss. Yama and Telmon were walking because horses were driven mad by the mere scent of a dragon. They wore canvas trousers and long oilcloth slickers over down-lined jackets, and carried heavy carbon-fiber bows which stuck up behind their heads, and quivers of long arrows with sharply tapered ceramic heads. They were soaked and wind-blasted and utterly exhilarated.

“I will go with you,” Yama said. “I will go to war, and fight by your side and write an epic about our adventures that will ring down the ages!”

Telmon laughed. “I doubt that I will see any fighting at all!”

“Your muster will do the town honor, Tel, I know it.”

“At least they can drill well enough, but I hope that is all they will need to do.”

After the Aedile had received the order to supply a muster of a hundred troops to contribute to the war effort, Telmon had chosen the men himself, mostly younger sons who had little chance of establishing a harem. With the help of Sergeant Rhodean, Telmon had drilled them for sixty days; in three more, the ship would arrive to take them downriver to the war.

Telmon said, “I want to bring them back safely, Yama. I will lead them into the fighting if I am ordered, but they are set down for working on the supply lines, and I will be content with that. For every man or woman fighting the heretics face to face, there are ten who bring up supplies, and build defenses, or tend the wounded or bury the dead. That is why the muster has been raised in every village and town and city. The war needs support troops as desperately as it needs fighting men.”

“I will go as an irregular. We can fight together, Tel.”

“You will look after our father, first of all. And then there is Derev.”

“She would not mind. And it is not as if—”

Telmon understood. He said, “There are plenty of metic marriages, if it does become that serious.”

“I think it might be, Tel. But I will not get married before you return, and I will not get married before I have had my chance to fight in the war.”

“I’m sure you will get your chance, if that is what you want. But be sure that you really want it.”

“Do you think the heretics really fight with magic?”

“They probably have technology given to them by the Ancients of Days. It might seem like magic, but that is only because we do not understand it. But we have right on our side, Yama. We are fighting with the will of the Preservers in our hearts. It is better than any magic.”

Telmon sprang onto a hummock of sedge and looked left and right to check the progress of the beaters, but it was Yama, staring straight ahead with the rain driving into his face, who saw a little spark of light suddenly blossom far out across the sweep of the moors. He cried out and pointed, and Telmon blew and blew on his silver whistle, and raised both arms above his head to signal that the beaters at the far end of each line should begin to walk toward each other and close the circle. Other whistles sounded as the signal was passed down the lines, and Yama and Telmon broke into a run against the wind and rain, leaping a stream and running on toward the scrap of light, which flickered and grew brighter in the midst of the darkening plain.

It was a juniper set on fire. It was burning so fiercely that it had scorched the grass all around it, snapping and crackling as fire consumed its needle-laden branches and tossed yellow flame and fragrant smoke into the wind and rain. Telmon and Yama gazed at it with wonder, then hugged and pounded each other on the back.

“It is here!” Telmon shouted. “I know it is here!”

They cast around, and almost at once Telmon found the long scar in a stand of heather. It was thirty paces wide and more than five hundred long, burnt down to the earth and layered with wet black ashes.

“It was a lek,” Telmon said. “The male makes it to attract females. The size and regularity of it shows that he is strong and fit.”

“This one must have been very big,” Yama said. The excitement he had felt while running toward the burning tree was gone; he felt a queer kind of relief now. He would not have to face the dragon. Not yet. He paced out the length of the lek while Telmon squatted with the blazing tree at his back and poked through the char.

“Four hundred and twenty-eight,” Yama said, when he came back. “How big would the dragon be, Tel?”

“Pretty big. I think he was successful, too. Look at the claw marks here. There are two kinds.”

They quartered the area around the lek, moving quickly because the light was going. The tree had mostly burned out when the beaters arrived and helped widen the search. But the dragon was gone.

Three days later, Telmon and the muster from Aeolis boarded a carrack that had anchored at the floating harbor on its way from Ys to the war at the midpoint of the world.

Yama did not go to see Telmon off, but stood on the bluff above the Great River and raised his fighting kite into the wind as the little flotilla of skiffs, each with a decad of men, rowed out to the great ship. Yama had painted the kite with a red dragon, its tail curled around its long body and fire pouring from its crocodile jaws, and he flew it high into the snapping wind and then lit the fuses and cut the string. The kite sailed out high above the Great River, and the chain of firecrackers exploded in flame and smoke until the last and biggest of all set fire to the kite’s wide diamond, and it fell from the sky.

After the news of the death of Telmon, Yama began to feel an unfocused restlessness. He spent long hours studying the map or sweeping the horizons with the telescope in the tower which housed the heliograph, most often pointing it upriver, where there was always the sense of the teeming vast city, like a thunderstorm, looming beyond the vanishing point.

Ys! When the air was exceptionally clear, Yama could glimpse the slender gleaming towers rooted at the heart of the city. The towers were so tall that they rose beyond the limit of visibility, higher than the bare peaks of the Rimwall Mountains, punching through the atmosphere whose haze hid Ys itself. Ys was three days’ journey by river and four times that by road, but even so the ancient city dominated the landscape, and Yama’s dreams.

After Telmon’s death, Yama began to plan his escape with meticulous care, although at first he did not think of it as escape at all, but merely an extension of the expeditions he had made, first with Telmon, and latterly with Ananda and Derev, in the City of the Dead. Sergeant Rhodean was fond of saying that most unsuccessful campaigns failed not because of the action of the enemy but because of lack of crucial supplies or unforeseeable circumstances, and so Yama made caches of stolen supplies in several hiding-places amongst the ruins in the garden of the peel-house. But he didn’t seriously think of carrying out his plans until the night after the encounter with Lud and Lob, when Dr. Dismas had an audience with the Aedile.

Dr. Dismas arrived at the end of the evening meal. The Aedile and Yama customarily ate together in the Great Hall, sitting at one end of the long, polished table under the high, barrel-vaulted ceiling and its freight of hanging banners, most so ancient that all traces of the devices they had once borne had faded, leaving only a kind of insubstantial, tattered gauze.

They were the sigils of the Aedile’s ancestors. He had saved them from the great bonfires of the vanities when, after coming to power, the present administration of the Department of Indigenous Affairs had sought to eradicate the past.

Ghosts. Ghosts above, and a ghost unremarked in the empty chair at the Aedile’s right hand.

Servants came and went with silent precision, bringing lentil soup, then slivers of mango dusted with ginger, and then a roast marmot dismembered on a bed of watercress. The Aedile said little except to ask after Yama’s day.

Yama had spent the morning watching the pinnace which had anchored downriver of the bay three days ago, and now he remarked that he would like to take a boat out to have a closer look at it.

The Aedile said, “I wonder why it does not anchor at the new quay. It is small enough to enter the mouth of the bay, yet does not. No, I do not think it would be good for you to go out to, it, Yama. As well as good, brave men, all sorts of ruffians are recruited to fight the heretics.”

For a moment, they both thought of Telmon. Ghosts, invisibly packing the air.

The Aedile changed the subject. “When I first arrived here, ships of all sizes could anchor in the bay, and when the river level began to fall I had the new quay built. But now the bigger ships must use the floating harbor, and soon that will have to be moved farther out to accommodate the largest of the argosies. From its present rate of shrinkage I have calculated that in less than five hundred years the river will be completely dry. Aeolis will be a port stranded in a desert plain.”

“There is the Breas.”

“Quite, quite, but where does the water of the Breas come from, except from the snows of the Rim Mountains, which in turn fall from air pregnant with water evaporated from the Great River? I have sometimes thought that it would be good for the town to have the old locks rebuilt. There is still good marble to be quarried in the hills.”

Yama mentioned that Dr. Dismas was returned from Ys, but the Aedile only said, “Quite, quite. I have even talked with him.”

“I suppose he has arranged some filthy little clerkship for me.”

“This is not the time to discuss your future,” the Aedile said, and retreated, as was increasingly his habit, into a book.

He made occasional notes in the margins of its pages with one hand while he ate with the other at a slow, deliberate pace that was maddening to Yama. He wanted to go down to the armory and question Sergeant Rhodean, who had returned from his patrol just before darkness.

The servants had cleared away the great silver salver bearing the marmot’s carcass and were bringing in a dish of iced sherbet when the majordomo paced down the long hall and announced the arrival of Dr. Dismas.

“Bring him directly.” The Aedile shut his book, took off his spectacles, and told Yama, “Run along, my boy. I know you want to quiz Sergeant Rhodean.”

Yama had used the telescope to spy on the Aedile and Dr. Dismas that afternoon, when they had met and talked on the dusty hillside at the edge of the City of the Dead. He was convinced that Dr. Dismas, had been to Ys to arrange an apprenticeship in some dusty corner of the Aedile’s department.

And so, although he set off toward the armory, Yama quickly doubled back and crept into the gallery just beneath the Great Hall’s high ceiling, where, on feast days, musicians hidden from view serenaded the Aedile’s guests. Yama thrust his head between the stays of two dusty banners and found that he was looking straight down at the Aedile and Dr. Dismas.

The two men were drinking port wine so dark that it was almost black, and Dr. Dismas had lit one of his cigarettes.

Yama could smell its clove-scented smoke. Dr. Dismas sat stiffly in a carved chair, his white hands moving over the polished surface of the table like independently questing animals. Papers were scattered in front of him, and patterns of blue dots and dashes glowed in the air. Yama would have dearly loved to have had a spyglass just then, to find out what was written on the papers, and what the patterns meant.

Yama had expected to hear Dr. Dismas and the Aedile discuss his apprenticeship, but instead the Aedile was making a speech about trust. “When I took Yama into my household, I also took upon myself the responsibility of a parent. I have brought him up as best I could, and I have tried to make a decision about his future with his best interests in my heart. You ask me to overthrow that in an instant, to gamble my duty to the boy against some vague promise.”

“It is more than that,” Dr. Dismas said. “The boy’s bloodline—”

Yama’s heart beat more quickly, but the Aedile angrily interrupted Dr. Dismas. “That is of no consequence. I know what you told me. It only convinces me that I must see to the boy’s future.”

“I understand. But, with respect, you may not be able to protect him from those who might be interested to learn of him, who might believe that they have a use for him. I speak of higher affairs than those of the Department of Indigenous Affairs. I speak of great forces, forces which your few decads of soldiers could not withstand for an instant. You should not put yourself between those powers and that which they may desire.”

The Aedile stood so suddenly that he knocked over his glass of port. High above, Yama thought that for a moment his guardian might strike Dr. Dismas, but then the Aedile turned his back on the table and closed his fist under his chin. He said, “Who did you tell, doctor?”

“As yet, only you.”

Yama knew that Dr. Dismas was lying, because the answer sprang so readily to his lips. He, wondered if the Aedile knew, too.

“I notice that the pinnace which brought you back from Ys is still anchored off the point of the bay. I wonder why that might be.”

“I suppose I could ask its commander. He is an acquaintance of mine.”

The Aedile turned around. “I see,” he said coldly. “Then you threaten—”

“My dear Aedile, I do not come to your house to threaten you. I have better manners than that, I would hope. I make no threats, only predictions. You have heard my thoughts about the boy’s bloodline. There is only one explanation. I believe any other man, with the same evidence, would come to the same conclusion as I, but it does not matter if I am right. One need only raise the possibility to understand what danger the boy might be in. We are at war, and you have been concealing him from your own department. You would not wish to have your loyalty put to the question. Not again.”

“Be careful, doctor. I could have you arrested. You are said to be a necromancer, and it is well-known that you indulge in drugs.”

Dr. Dismas said calmly, “The first is only a rumor, and while the second may be true, you have recently demonstrated your faith in me, and your letter is lodged with my department. As, I might add, is a copy of my findings. You could arrest me, but you could not keep me imprisoned for long without appearing foolish or corrupt. But why do we argue? We both have the same interest. We both wish no harm to come to the boy. We merely disagree on how to protect him.”

The Aedile sat down and ran his fingers through the gray pelt which covered his face. He said, “How much money do you want?”

Dr. Dismas laughed. It was like the creaking of old wood giving beneath a weight. “In one pan of the scales is the golden ingot of the boy; in the other the feather of your worth. I will not even pretend to be insulted.” He stood and plucked his cigarette from the holder and extinguished it in the pool of port spilled from the Aedile’s glass, then reached into the glowing patterns. There was a click: the patterns vanished. Dr. Dismas tossed the projector cube into the air and made it vanish into one of the pockets of his long black coat. He said, “If you do not make arrangements, then I must. And believe me, you’ll get the poorer part of the bargain if you do.”

When Dr. Dismas had gone, the Aedile raked up the papers and clutched them to his chest. His shoulders shook. High above, Yama thought that his guardian might be crying, but surely he was mistaken, for never before, even at the news of Telmon’s death, had the Aedile shown any sign of grief.