Child of the River

Chapter Six The Mouse of Ghost Lanterns

Lud took Yama’s knife and stuck it in his belt beside his own crooked blade. “Don’t go shouting for help,” he said, “or we’ll tear out your tongue.”

People were making a hasty retreat toward the gate in the city wall. Lob and Lud gripped Yama’s arms and carried him along with them. The tower was burning furiously, a roaring chimney belching thick red fumes that, with the smoke of the burning wagon and countless lesser fires, veiled the sun.

Several horses had thrown their riders and were galloping about wildly. Sergeant Rhodean strode amidst the flames and smoke, organizing countermeasures; already, soldiers and militiamen were beating at small grass fires with wet blankets.

The fleeing crowd split around Ananda and the priest. They were kneeling over a man and anointing his bloody head with oil while reciting the last rites. Yama turned to try and catch Ananda’s eye, but Lud snarled and cuffed his head and forced him on.

The fumes of the burning tower hung over the crowded flat roofs of the little city. Along the old waterfront, peddlers were bundling wares into their blankets. Chandlers, tavern owners and their employees were locking shutters over windows and standing guard at doors, armed with rifles and axes.

Men were already looting the building where Dr. Dismas had his office. They dragged furniture onto the second-floor veranda and threw it into the street; books rained down like broken-backed birds; jars of samples smashed on the concrete, strewing arcs of colored powder. A man was methodically smashing all the windows with a heavy iron hammer.

Lob and Lud marched Yama through the riot and turned down a side street that was little more than a paved walkway above the green water of a wide, stagnant canal. The single-story houses which stood shoulder to shoulder along the canal had been built with stone looted from older, grander buildings, and their tall, narrow windows were framed by collages of worn carvings and broken tablets incised with texts in long-forgotten scripts. Chutes led down into the scummy water; this part of the city was where the bachelor field laborers lived, and they could not afford private bathing places.

For a moment, Yama thought that the two brothers had dragged him to this shabby, unremarked side street so that they could punish him for interfering with their fun with the anchorite. He braced himself, but was merely pushed forward.

With Lud leading and Lob crowding behind, he was hustled through the street doorway of a tavern, under a cluster of ancient ghost lanterns that squealed and rustled in the fetid breeze.

A square plunge pool lit by green underwater lanterns took up half the echoing space. Worn stone steps led down into the slop of glowing water. An immensely fat man floated on his back in the middle of the pool; his shadow loomed across the galleries that ran around three sides of the room. As Lob and Lud hustled Yama past the pool, the man snorted and stirred, expelling a mist of oily vapor from his nostrils and opening one eye. Lob threw a coin. The fat man caught it in the mobile, blubbery lips of his horseshoe-shaped mouth. His lower lip inverted and the coin vanished into his maw. He snorted again and his eye closed.

Lud jabbed Yama with the point of his knife and marched him around a rack of barrels and along a narrow passage which opened into a tiny courtyard. The space, roofed with glass speckled and stained by green algae and black mold, contained a kind of cage of woven wire that fitted inside the whitewashed walls with only a handsbreadth to spare on either side. Inside the cage, beneath its wire ceiling, Dr. Dismas was hunched at a rickety table, reading a book and smoking a clove-scented cigarette stuck in his bone cigarette holder.

“Here he is,” Lud said. “We have him, doctor!”

“Bring him inside,” the apothecary said, and closed his book with an impatient snap.

Yama’s fear had turned to paralyzing astonishment. Lob roughly pinioned his arms behind his back while Lud unlocked a door in the cage; then Yama was thrust through and the door was closed and locked behind him.

“No,” Dr. Dismas said, “I am far from dead, although I have paid a heavy price for this venture. Close your mouth, boy. You look like one of the frogs you are so fond of hunting late at night.”

Outside the cage, Lud and Lob nudged each other. “Go on,” one muttered, and the other, “You do it!” At last, Lud said to Dr. Dismas, “You’ll pay us. We done what you asked.”

“You failed the first time,” Dr. Dismas said, “and I haven’t forgotten. There’s work still to be done, and if I pay you now you’ll turn any money I give you into drink. Go now. We’ll start on the second part of this an hour after sunset.”

After more nudging, Lob said, “We thought maybe we get paid for the one thing, and then we do the other.”

“I told you that I would pay you to bring the boy here. And I will. And there will be more money when you help me take him to the man who has commissioned me. But there will be no money at all unless everything is done as I asked.”

“Maybe we only do the one thing,” Lob said, “and not the other.”

“I would suggest it is dangerous to leave something unfinished,” Dr. Dismas said.

“I don’t know if this is right,” Lud said. “We did what you asked—”

Dr. Dismas said sharply, “When did I ask you to begin the second part of your work?”

“Sunset,” Lob said in a sullen mumble.

“An hour after. Remember that. You will suffer as much as I if the work is done badly. You failed the first time. Don’t fail again.”

Lud said sulkily, “We got him for you, didn’t we?”

Lob added, “We would have got him the other night, if this old culler with a stick hadn’t got in the way.”

Yama stared at the brothers through the mesh of the cage. They would not meet his eyes. He said, “You should allow me to go. I will say you rescued me from the mob. I do not know what Dr. Dismas promised, but my father will pay double to have me safe.”

Lud and Lob grinned, nudging each other in the ribs. “Ain’t he a corker,” Lud said. “Like a proper little gentleman.”

Lob belched, and his brother sniggered.

Yama turned to Dr. Dismas. “The same applies to you, doctor.”

“My dear boy, I don’t think the Aedile can afford my price,” Dr. Dismas said. “I was happy in my home, with my research and my books.” He put a hand on his narrow chest and sighed. He had six fingers, with long nails filed to points. “All gone now, thanks to you. You owe me a great deal, Yamamanama, and I intend to have my price in full. I don’t need the Aedile’s charity.”

Yama felt a queer mixture of excitement and fear. He was convinced that Dr. Dismas had found his bloodline, if not his family. “Then you really have found where I came from! You have found my family—that is, my real family—”

“Oh, far better than that,” Dr. Dismas said, “but this is not the time to talk about it.”

Yama said, “I would know it now, whatever it is. I deserve to know it.”

Dr. Dismas said with sudden anger, “I’m no house servant, boy,” and his hand flashed out and pinched a nerve in Yama’s elbow. Yama’s head was filled with pain as pure as light. He fell to his knees on the mesh floor of the cage, and Dr. Dismas came around the table and caught Yama’s chin between long, stiff, cold fingers.

“You are mine now,” he said, “and don’t forget it.” He turned to the twins. “Why are you two still here? You have your orders.”

“We’ll be back tonight,” Lud said. “See you pay us then.”

“Of course, of course.” Once the twins had gone, Dr. Dismas said to Yama in a confiding tone, “Frankly, I would rather work alone, but I could hardly move amongst the crowd while everyone thought I was in the tower.” He got his hands under Yama’s anus and hauled him up. “Please, do sit. We are civilized men. There, that’s better.”

Yama, perched on the edge of the flimsy metal chair, simply breathed for a while until the pain had retreated to a warm throb in the muscles of his shoulder. At last he said, “You knew the Aedile was going to arrest you.”

Dr. Dismas resumed his seat on the other side of the little table. As he screwed a cigarette into his bone holder, he said, “Your father is a man who takes his responsibilities seriously. Very properly, he confided his intentions to the Council for Night and Shrines. One of them owed me a favor.”

“If there is any problem between you and my father, I am sure it can be worked out, but not while you hold me captive. Once the fire in the tower burns out, they will look for a body. When they do not find one, they will look for you. And this is a small city.”

Dr. Dismas blew a riffle of smoke toward the mesh ceiling of the cage. “How well Zakiel has taught you logic. It would be a persuasive argument, except that they will find a body.”

“Then you planned to burn your tower all along, and you should not blame me. I expect you removed your books before you left.”

Dr. Dismas did not deny this. He said, “How did you like the display, by the way?”

“Some are convinced that you are a magician.”

“There are no such creatures. Those who claim to be magicians delude themselves as much as their clients. My little pyrotechnic display was simply a few judiciously mixed salts ignited by electric detonators when the circuit was closed by some oaf stepping on a plate I’d hidden under a rug. No more than a jape which any apprentice apothecary worthy of the trade could produce, although perhaps not on such a grand scale.” Dr. Dismas pointed a long forefinger at Yama, who stifled the impulse to flinch. “All this for you. You do owe me, Yamamanama. The Child of the River, yes, but which river, I wonder. Not our own Great River, I’m certain.”

“You know about my family.” Yama could not keep the eagerness from his voice. It was rising and bubbling inside him—he wanted to laugh, to sing, to dance. “You know about my bloodline.”

Dr. Dismas reached into a pocket of his long coat and drew out a handful of plastic straws. He rattled them together in his long pale hands and cast them on the table. He was making a decision by appealing to their random pattern; Yama had heard of this habit from Ananda, who had reported it in scandalized tones.

Yama said, “Are you deciding whether to tell me or not, doctor?”

“You’re a brave boy to ask after forbidden knowledge, so you deserve some sort of answer.” Dr. Dismas tapped ash from his cigarette. “Oxen and camels, nilgai, ratites and horses—all of them work under the lash, watched by boys no older than you, or even younger, who are armed with no more than fresh-cut withes to restrain their charges. How is this? Because the art in those animals which yearns for freedom has been broken and replaced by habit. No more than a twitch of a stick is required to reinforce that habit; even if those beasts were freed of their harness and their burden, they would be too broken to realize that they could escape their masters. Most men are no different from beasts of burden, their spirits broken by fear of the phantoms of religion invoked by priests and bureaucrats. I work hard to avoid habits. To be unpredictable—that is how you cheat those who would be the masters of men.”

“I thought you did not believe in the Preservers, doctor.”

“I don’t question their existence. Certainly they once existed. This world is evidence; the Eye of the Preservers and all the ordered Galaxy are evidence. But I do question the great lie with which the priests hypnotize the population, that the Preservers watch over us all, and that we must satisfy them so that we can win redemption and live forever after death. As if creatures who juggled stars in their courses would care about whether or not a man beats his wife, or the little torments one child visits upon another! It is a sop to keep men in their places, to ensure that so-called civilization can run on its own momentum. I spit on it.”

And here Dr. Dismas did spit, as delicately as a cat, but nevertheless startling Yama.

The apothecary fitted his cigarette holder back between his large, flat-topped teeth. When he smiled around the holder, the plaques over his cheekbones stood out in relief, their sharp edges pressing through brown skin with the coarse, soft grain of wood-pulp.

Dr. Dismas said, “The Preservers created us, but they are gone. They are dead, and by their own hand. They created the Eye, and fell through its event horizon with all their worlds. And why? Because they despaired. They remade the Galaxy, and could have remade the Universe, but their nerve failed. They were cowardly fools, and anyone who believes that they watch us still, yet do not interfere in the terrible suffering of the world, is a worse fool.”

Yama had no answer to this. There was no answer. Ananda was right. The apothecary was a monster who refused to serve anyone or anything except his own swollen, pride.

Dr. Dismas said, “The Preservers are gone, but machines still watch us, and regulate the world according to out-of-date precepts. Of course, the machines can’t watch everything at once, so they build up patterns and predict the behavior of men, and watch only for deviation from the norm. It works most of the time for most of the people, but there are a few men like me who defy their predictions by basing important decisions on chance. The machines cannot track our random paths from moment to moment, and so we become invisible. Of course, a cage such as the one in which we sit also helps hide us from them. It screens out the probing of the machines. I wear a hat for the same reason—it is lined with silver foil.”

Yama laughed, because Dr. Dismas confessed this ridiculous habit with complete solemnity. “So you are afraid of machines.”

“Not at all. But I am deeply interested in them. I have a small collection of parts of dead machines excavated from ruins in the deserts beyond the midpoint of the world—one is almost intact, a treasure beyond price.” Dr. Dismas suddenly clutched his head and shook it violently for a moment, then winked at Yama. “But that’s not to be spoken of. Not here! They might hear, even in this cage. One reason I came here is because machine activity is higher than anywhere else on Confluence—yes, even Ys. And so, my dear Yamamanama, I found you.”

Yama pointed at the straws scattered on the table. They were hexagonal in cross-section, with red and green glyphs of some unknown language incised along their faces. He said, “You refuse to acknowledge the authority of the Preservers over men, yet you follow the guidance of these bits of plastic.”

Dr. Dismas looked crafty. “Ah, but I choose which question to ask them.”

Yama had only one question in his mind. “You found something about my bloodline in Ys, and told my father what you had learned. If you will not tell me everything, will you at least tell me what you told him? Did you perhaps find my family there?”

“You will have to look farther than Ys to find your family, my boy, and you may be given the opportunity to do so. The Aedile is a good enough man in his way, I suppose, but that is to say he is no more than a petty official barely capable of ruling a moribund little region of no interest to anyone. Into his hands has fallen a prize which could determine the fate of all the peoples of Confluence—even the world itself—and he does nothing about it. A man like that deserves to be punished, Yamamanama. And as for you, you are very dangerous. For you do not know what you are.”

“I would like very much to know.” Yama had not understood half of what Dr. Dismas had said. With a sinking heart, he was beginning to believe that the man was mad.

“Innocence is no excuse,” Dr. Dismas said, but he appeared to be speaking to himself. He moved the plastic straws about the tabletop with a long, bony forefinger, as if seeking to rearrange his fate. He lit another cigarette and stared at Yama until Yama grew uncomfortable and looked away.

Dr. Dismas laughed, and with sudden energy took out a little leather case and opened it out on the table. Inside, held by elastic loops, were a glass syringe, an alcohol lamp, a bent silver spoon, its bowl blackened and tarnished, a small pestle and mortar, and several glass bottles with rubber stoppers. From one bottle Dr. Dismas shook out a single dried beetle into the mortar; from another he added a few drops of a clear liquid that filled the room with the smell of apricots.

Dr. Dismas ground the beetle into a paste with finicky care and scraped the paste into the bowl of the spoon.

“Candiarides,” he said, as if that explained everything. “You are young, and will not understand, but sometimes the world becomes too much to bear for someone of my sensibilities.”

“My father said this got you into trouble with your department. He said—”

“That I had sworn to stop using it? Oh yes, of course I said that. If I had not said that, they would not have let me return to Aeolis.”

Dr. Dismas lit the wick of the alcohol lamp with a flint and steel and held the spoon over the blue flame until the brown paste liquefied and began to bubble. The smell of apricots intensified, sharpened by a metallic tang. Dr. Dismas drew the liquid into the hypodermic and tapped the barrel with a long thumbnail to loosen the bubbles which clung to the glass. “Don’t think to escape,” he said. “I have no key.”

He spread his left hand on the tabletop and probed the web of skin between thumb and forefinger until he hit a vein.

He teased back the syringe’s plunger until a wisp of red swirled in the thin brown solution, then pressed the plunger home.

He drew in a sharp breath and stretched in his chair like a bow. The hypodermic dropped to the table. For a moment, his heels drummed an irregular tattoo on the mesh floor, and then he relaxed, and looked at Yama with half-closed eyes.

His pupils, smeary crosses on yellow balls, contracted and expanded independently. He giggled. “If I had you long enough . . . ah, what I’d teach you . . .”

“Doctor?”

But Dr. Dismas would say no more. His gaze wandered around the cage and at last fixed on the spattered glass which roofed the courtyard. Yama tested the cage’s wire mesh, but although he could deform its close-woven hexagons, they were all of a piece, and the door was so close-fitting Yama could not get his fingers into the gap between it and its wire frame. The sun crept into view above the little courtyard’s glass ceiling, filling it with golden light, and began its slow reversal.

At last, Yama dared to touch the apothecary’s outstretched hand. It was clammy, and irregular plates shifted under the loose skin. Dr. Dismas did not stir. His head was tipped back, his face bathed by the sunlight.

Yama found only one pocket inside the apothecary’s long black coat, and it was empty. Dr. Dismas stirred as Yama withdrew his hand, and gripped his wrist and drew him down with unexpected strength. “Don’t doubt,” he murmured. His breath smelt of apricots and iron. “Sit and wait, boy.”

Yama sat and waited. Presently the immensely fat man he had seen floating in the tavern’s communal pool shuffled down the passage. He was naked except for blue rubber sandals on his broad feet, and he carried a tray covered with a white cloth.

“Stand back,” he told Yama. “No, further back. Behind the doctor.”

“Let me go. I promise you will be rewarded.”

“I’ve already been paid, young master,” the fat man said.

He unlocked the door, set the tray down, and relocked the door. “Eat, young master. The doctor, he won’t want anything. I never seen him eat. He has his drug.”

“Let me go!” Yama banged at the cage’s locked door and yelled threats at the fat man’s retreating back before giving up and looking under the cloth that covered the tray.

A dish of watery soup with a cluster of whitened fish eyes sunk in the middle and rings of raw onion floating on top; a slab of black bread, as dense as a brick and almost as hard; a glass of small beer the color of stale urine.

The soup was flavored with chili oil, making it almost palatable, but the bread was so salty that Yama gagged on the first bite and could eat no more. He drank the sour beer and somehow fell asleep on the rickety chair.

He was woken by Dr. Dismas. He had a splitting headache and a foul taste in his mouth. The courtyard and the cage was lit by a hissing alcohol lantern which dangled from the cage’s wire ceiling; the air beyond the glass that roofed the courtyard was black.

“Rise up, young man,” Dr. Dismas said. He was filled with barely contained energy and hopped from foot to foot and banged his stiff fingers together. His shadow, thrown across the whitewashed walls of the courtyard, aped his movements.

“You drugged me,” Yama said stupidly.

“A little something in the beer, to take away your cares.”

Dr. Dismas banged on the mesh of the cage and shouted, “Ho! Ho! Landlord!” and turned back to Yama and said, “You have been sleeping longer than you know. The little sleep just past is my gift to make you wake into your true self. You don’t understand me, but it doesn’t matter. Stand up! Stand up! Look lively! Awake, awake, awake! You venture forth to meet your destiny! Ho! Landlord!”