Shrine of Stars

Chapter Tweleve The Last Flight of Dr. Dismas

He is here, the Shadow said, and with those words appeared above the bed as the eidolon of Derev. She was clinging to the ceiling with her fingers and toes and looking down at Yama through the fall of her feathery white hair. She was naked under her filmy shift. Her skin glowed with the soft green radiance sometimes seen on rotting wood.

“Transform,” Yama said wearily. The coin nagged at his attention, like the wink of sunlight on a far-off window. He knew that Pandaras was very close now, but he could no longer make use of a machine to search for the boy. The Shadow had taken away even that.

The eidolon squeezed its small breasts together with one hand. You do not like this?

Blue light flared beyond the big eye of the window, briefly illuminating the pentad of servants who stood around the bed. For a moment, Yama thought that the feral machine had returned for him.

Something wicked this way comes.

The double doors on the far side of the room crashed open, and the floating lights brightened. Dr. Dismas strode in, shouting wildly.

“Child! Dear child! Enobarbus is trying to murder us!”

Sit up, the Shadow said.

Yama obeyed without thinking and was astonished to find that he could move. “You are right,” he said. “It is time to go.”

Halfway across the room, Dr. Dismas stopped and stared in amazement, then drew out his energy pistol. He wore a silvery cloak over his black suit and a cap of silver on his head; Yama remembered that the apothecary had once confided to him that he wore a hat lined with metal to stop machines spying on him.

The Shadow, still in the form of Derev, was suddenly standing behind Dr. Dismas. It smiled and said, I have allowed your body to overcome the good doctor’s potion by a simple matter of physiology. It is not Enobarbus who is attacking us, by the way, but let the doctor think what he will. Besides, Enobarbus is on his way. He thinks that Dismas is attacking him. Many men have already died. Many more will die. It is quite exciting. Shall I show you?

Yama ignored this. He told Dr. Dismas, “A simple matter of physiology, Doctor,” and swung his legs over the side of the bed. One of the servants—the forest pygmy—placed a bundle of clothes at his feet. As Yama began to dress, he added, “It is time I made a move.”

“I want you to destroy Enobarbus’s machines,” Dr. Dismas said. “I hope I am speaking to the right person.”

We will not need to worry about the machines.

The eidolon of Derev vanished. Yama had a dizzy sense of doubled vision and discovered that he was once more a prisoner in his own body. It pulled on a loose white shirt, stepped into boots which fastened themselves around its ankles, and walked forward. He heard his voice, pitched an octave lower than normal, say, “You do not need that silly little weapon, Doctor. Not with me by your side.”

Dr. Dismas nodded, and lowered the pistol. He said, “You’re right, of course. I have armed the other servants. They are killing those of Enobarbus’s men I have not myself already killed. We must get you to a safe place. It is indeed time to move.” He snapped his stiff fingers, and one of the servants threw a silvery bundle on the bed. “That will shield you from pellets and from near misses of energy weapons.”

Yama tried to speak, but the Shadow had assumed complete control of his body. “I do not need such things,” it told Dr. Dismas. It flung out Yama’s right arm, and the servants collapsed.

Dr. Dismas raised the pistol again, pointing it at Yama’s head, and said angrily, “Restore them, you fool. This is not a time for tricks. We need them still.”

“Alas,” the Shadow said, “they are dead. I will kill the other hybrids too, once they have defeated Enobarbus’s men. Ah, I see why you wear that cap. It is more than it seems. But you will do as I say anyway. It is time we left, Doctor. Time we returned to our parent to complete our growth, to discard this frail shell. Time we took our place at the center of the world’s stage.”

Dr. Dismas stepped back two paces, still pointing the pistol at Yama. “I’ll shoot you if I have to. Put on the cloak, but do not think that it will protect you from a direct shot.”

A brilliant flash outside the big window momentarily filled the room with white light, fading to reveal the city spread directly below. The floating garden had tipped on its axis, although its local gravity still held.

Carrying Yama’s senses with it, the Shadow reached out to a machine speeding through the night a league away. The machine executed a crash stop, spun on its axis, and saw that the floating garden was standing at right angles above the basin of the city. There was fighting in the woods which covered most of the garden’s surface; the machine detected the pinpoint disturbances in the gravity fields caused by energy weapons, and flashes of intense light winked in the air all around. A flier shot toward its rocky keel, but must have hit some invisible obstruction, for it suddenly slammed to a halt and disintegrated in a blaze of white flame.

The floating garden slowly righted itself. And high above the far edge of the city, silhouetted against the orange glow of the sky, another garden tore away from an archipelago and began to move toward it.

The fighting in the camp did not last long. There was the confused noise of men and women shouting, a frantic staccato of small-arms fire, an explosion which lofted a ball of greasy yellow flame above the trees. Then a flash of blue light hit half the sky and there was a sudden shocking silence before the screams began, tearing the night air like ripsaws.

Pandaras paced up and down in distress. The screams pierced him to his marrow, and although he had resolved not to run it was very hard to stay where he was.

Tibor said, “Surely he will kill us, little master.”

“No. He needs me to—”

And then Prefect Corin stooped out of the night, like an owl on a mouse. He sprang from the floating disc and ran straight at Pandaras, knocking Tibor down when the hierodule tried to get in the way. He caught Pandaras and lifted him up and stared into his face. His left eye was covered by a white adhesive pad. A rifle was slung over his shoulder. “You have caused me such trouble, boy,” he said. “You should have stayed with me. You would not have lost your hand. Where is he?”

Pandaras’s ribcage was painfully compressed by Prefect Corin’s grip; he could scarcely catch his breath. He gasped, “Promise that you will not kill my friend.”

“A hierodule has his uses. Where?”

“Did you follow me all this way downriver? I am flattered.”

“I should have sunk the barge and killed everyone on board it. Where is he?”

“Surely you have heard of the great mage of this city, dominie.”

“I did not have time to question anyone. I was too busy looking for you. I know that he is close by. I can see the coin shining through your shirt.”

“Is that how you found me?”

“Alas, there are too many similar sources in this city.”

“So you started to search the camps, neh? I wondered why you did not come for us at the shrine, or when we were thrown off the lazaret. I suppose you killed all the poor soldiers in the camps, even though they were on your side.”

“A few fled, but many more fought, and I had to kill most of them. A legless woman told me where you were before she died. Many have died because you ran from me, and all for no purpose, because I have you again. Where is he, boy?”

“This time you are here on my terms.”

“Tell me.”

The pressure of Prefect Corin’s grip increased; knives ground in Pandaras’s chest. He said breathlessly, “We could go there directly on your floating disc.”

“One of the gardens, then. I thought so, although I was not sure which one. They are all heavily guarded.” Prefect Corin dropped Pandaras and strode toward Tibor, who was still lying on his back. There was a brief flash of light, and Prefect Corin told the hierodule to get up. Tibor stood, slowly and clumsily, his pale, round face perfectly blank, and Prefect Corin whispered in his ear.

“You command many things,” Pandaras said. He massaged his ribs. None were broken, but all were bruised. “You are becoming like my master.”

“No, not like him. Never like him. There will be anther disc here in a moment, and then you will take me to Yamamanama.”

“I want only the best for my master. I’m sure that he is a prisoner, or else he would have come to me by now. You can help free him, and then he’ll deal with you.”

“You have a monstrous ego, boy.”

A floating disc dropped down beside the first, hovering a handspan above the rock. Prefect Corin stepped onto it. “You will ride with the hierodule. Tell the disc which way to go; I will follow. Do not think of escaping, for the hierodule will break your neck.”

“If you kill me you will never find him.”

“You will be paralyzed, not killed. The coin will still work, I think.”

“You must promise that you will not kill my master.”

“Of course not. Go now.”

At first it was exhilarating. Because the disc warped gravity, it was as if the world tipped and tilted around Pandaras as, with Tibor at his back and Prefect Corin following, he sped through the black air toward the floating island and his master. For a moment, Pandaras forgot that Tibor was no longer his to command, forgot the danger he was in, forgot that he was betraying his master to his worst enemy.

As they drew near, Prefect Corin’s disc accelerated and swept ahead, making a long arc toward the rocky keel of the floating garden. Specks of light flew up from the orange glow of the city in long straight streams that began to bend as they tried to track Prefect Corin, who suddenly shot away at right angles. The disc which carried Tibor and Pandaras followed him. Pandaras ordered it to turn back, but it continued on its new course.

A string of floating gardens lay ahead, linked to each other by catenaries and arched bridges. A chunk of rock hung above this cluster, a round lake gleaming darkly on its flat top, ringed by scattered clumps of pines. Streams of water spilled over its edge at several points and fell toward the gardens below; as Pandaras was carried toward it he saw that the water in one of these streams was actually rising.

The floating disc settled at the landing of the rock, on an apron of lichen-splashed stone. Tibor gripped Pandaras’s arm and dragged him off the disc. A moment later Prefect Corin landed beside them.

“We will need cover,” he said. “Yamamanama is too well defended. I thought it prudent to save you.” Machines flew out of the darkness from every direction, a hundred tiny sparks settling around him like a cloak. “The spirits of the place,” he said. “I have assumed control of them.”

The floating rock shuddered. The light of the little machines around Prefect Corin intensified, a robe of blazing light. A shallow wave of cold water rippled across the apron of bare stone; then another, waist-high this time. Pandaras clung to Tibor, for otherwise he would have been washed over the edge. The rock was slowly accelerating toward the floating garden where Yama was being held prisoner. Ragged flowers of red and yellow flame bloomed in the sky all around it.

“Now it ends,” Prefect Corin said. He stretched out his arm. Something began to spin in the air in front of his fingertips, shrieking like a banshee as it gathered light and heat around itself.

The Shadow walked beside Dr. Dismas across a wide space of charred grass. They both wore silvery cloaks with flowing hems that brushed the ground. Human-shaped animals loped along on all fours on either side. One of the nearest turned its head toward them and grinned. It was a naked woman, her elongated jaws holding racks of long white teeth slick with saliva, her eyes blazing yellow. Ahead, tall trees burned like candles. Above, a fist-sized shadow was growing larger against the sky-glow.

Yama was helpless, paralyzed somewhere behind his own eyes. It was as if he were caught in a fever dream where monsters ran free.

Derev suddenly was walking beside the woman-thing, her slim body glowing like a candle through her robe. There is a problem, the Shadow said. You will help us now, if you wish to live.

“You cannot harm me without harming yourself.”

“You’re back, my boy,” Dr. Dismas said, with surprise. “We are at last breaking free and heading upriver, but someone is chasing us. I do not think that it is Enobarbus.”

The shadow in the sky was as big as Yama’s outstretched hand now. It was another floating garden. He thought that he knew who was chasing them. He said, “I am sure that you have many enemies, Doctor.”

“I try and kill them before they can cause trouble, my boy. You should know that. I do not know who is following us, but he is powerful.”

Someone who can strip machines of their power.

“I can see why that would frighten you,” Yama said. That was why the Shadow still needed him, why it had allowed him to reoccupy his own body.

“It is a question of contingency,” Dr. Dismas said. “I do not like complicated situations, Yamamanama.” Yama and the apothecary walked between two of the burning trees. Heat beat at them from either side; the air was full of resinous smoke. Beyond was a small lake which had been struck by some kind of energy weapon. The water had evaporated, leaving a basin of dry, cracked mud. The man-animals broke away left and right, but Dr. Dismas strode straight across the basin and Yama followed him. The eidolon flowed beside him. It was flickering now, as faint as a firefly near the end of its life. Beyond the top of the slope the other floating garden was growing larger against the sky glow, a flat-topped rock with a jagged keel.

“Where are we going, Doctor?”

“Why, to my paramour, of course. I thought we had discussed this. I have been betrayed by those I tried to help, Yamamanama, and I will have my revenge.”

We will gain so much.

“And I will be destroyed.”

We can work together, Yamamanama. Do not listen to what I tell the doctor.

“It is a question of transfiguration,” Dr. Dismas said. “If something new is made, is the old destroyed? No, it is changed into another form. I should know, Child of the River. I was transformed in the Glass Desert. I am neither man nor machine but something more, yet I still remember what I was and what I wanted, just as a man fondly remembers the foolish fantasies of his childhood.”

“Why do you take the drug, Doctor? What pain are you trying to escape?”

“Fusion was not quite complete. The drug completes it. It will be different in your case, Yamamanama. Trust me.”

We will become more than either of us can imagine, Yamamanama. And more than the doctor can ever dream of.

“As far as I am concerned, I am a long way from trust.”

“We will be there inside a day, Yamamanama. But first we must rid ourselves of this small problem.”

They climbed up the slope on the far side of the dry lake, charred vegetation giving way to steeper rock that burned the thin soles of Yama’s slippers. It was the edge of the island. Dr. Dismas turned to Yama. A white star shone at his forehead—a machine clung there. The flat-topped rock was so close now that Yama could see the sheets of water which spilled from its side and were torn into spray. It was moving toward them at a slant, and gaining perceptibly. Something shone at its leading edge, a point of white light as intense as any star cluster within the Galaxy. The city had fallen far behind, a lake of dull orange light embraced by the dark jungle.

“Something is affecting the gravity fields,” Dr. Dismas said. “We are falling too slowly.”

Yama remembered one of Zakiel’s lessons. The librarian had used a banyan seed and a lead ball he had taken from the armory. He said, “Surely all things fall at the same rate.”

“We fall down the length of the world because a machine in the keel of the garden manipulates gravity fields to suit our purpose. But the machine is failing. The nearer that rock gets, the slower we fall. There is something draining the energy grid. You must put a stop to it.”

Yama said, “Surely the rock chasing us would also fall more slowly too.”

“Yes, Yes,” Dr. Dismas said impatiently. “It is slowing, but it was moving faster than us in the first place. We have only a few minutes before it reaches us, Yamamanama. You must act quickly!”

The eidolon had disappeared when Yama had followed Dr. Dismas up the slope, but now it came back. Its eldritch glow was so weak that Yama could see right through it. Its eyes were dark holes in the mask of its face; its hair a pale flicker.

You know the man, it said, its words raveling weakly across Yama’s brain. Stop him or we will lose our advantage…

The eidolon flickered and faded, but Yama had the sense that its eyes were still there, like holes burnt into the fabric of the night. The glow of the machine which clung to Dr. Dismas’s forehead faded too, and the apothecary plucked it off with his stiff fingers and crushed it.

“I have just lost control of the garden. If I do not regain it we will intersect the surface of the world in forty minutes. But there is still much we can do. You are not a machine, Yamamanama. Or not entirely. Neither are my children. My hybrids were destroyed by Enobarbus’s guards, but I still have many purely biological specimens. Chimeras, crossbreeds and the like. My children of the night. We do not need machines.”

“And you, Doctor?”

“Oh, as for me, I will have to rely on my purely human part.” Dr. Dismas said this casually, but in the half-light Yama saw the gleam of sweat on those parts of his face not affected by the plaques of his disease. He knelt, cast a handful of plastic straws on the ground, and peered closely at them. “I will not die,” he said. “That was part of the promise made to me, and I will see that it is kept.”

He stood and raised his arm toward the rock that eclipsed a quarter of the sky now. His energy pistol flared so brightly that dawn might have touched the tops of the Rim Mountains.

Yama ran.

The machine which Prefect Corin had set in the air was spinning so quickly now that its shriek had passed beyond the range of even Pandaras’s hearing. It glowed so brightly that it hurt to look at, and had begun to melt the rock beneath it. Prefect Corin, Pandaras and Tibor retreated from it to the far side of the lake. Prefect Corin uncoiled a length of fine cord and looped it around a pine tree which stood at the edge of the rock.

The spinning machine was draining the local grid on which all machines fed, turning the energy into heat and noise. The cloak of machines had fallen away from Prefect Corin; the lights had died in the ceramic coin. Tibor was affected too; he sat with his arms wrapped around his head, rocking from side to side.

And the rock was slowly sinking through the air like a stone through water, pitching this way and that as it fell. Pandaras clung to the pine tree, his cheek pressed against its dry resinous bark. Branches soughed above him.

“Have courage, boy. Have dignity.”

“You are going to kill us all!”

“Nonsense. I have calculated that we will pass a few chains above our target. Our keel may brush a few treetops, no more. Perhaps you have been wondering why I fastened the rope to the tree. Soon you will understand.” Prefect Corin’s one good eye searched Pandaras’s face. “You are a coward, like all your race, small-souled and small-brained. Only a few chosen bloodlines will inherit this world when this war is done. Others will serve, or perish.”

Then bolts from Dr. Dismas’s energy pistol struck the leading edge of the rock, and chunks of white-hot stone flew up. Most splashed into the lake, sending up spouts of steam and hot water, but one fragment tumbled amongst a stand of pines, which immediately burst into flame.

Prefect Corin turned to look at the burning trees and Pandaras shrieked and lashed out. He caught the Prefect with his one hand and both feet, clamped his mouth on the man’s thigh and twisted, coming away with a mouthful of cloth and bloody meat. And then he was flying through the air. His hip and shoulder smashed hard against stone, but he rolled and got to his feet. He was right at the edge of the floating rock. Prefect Corin was limping through fire-lit shadows toward him. Tibor stood up, his normally placid face twisted in a snarl, his big hands opening and closing. Pandaras turned and looked down, and then gave himself to the air.

The first of the man-animals attacked Yama when he reached the burning trees. He pulled off his silvery cloak and threw it over the creature, and in the moment it took to shake off the cloak snatched up a burning branch and jabbed it in the thing’s face. It was not afraid of fire and sprang straight at him and knocked him down, but Yama discovered that his attacker had only a child’s strength. Unlike the other servants, the man-animals had been grown rather than surgically transformed, and Dr. Dismas had not had time to bring them to maturity. Enveloped in rank stench and feverish body-heat, sharp teeth snapping a finger’s width from his face, he got his thumbs on the creature’s windpipe and stood up, lifting the man-animal with him, and pressed and pressed until its eyes rolled back, then put his palm under its jaw and snapped its neck.

Two more man-animals skulked around him, but when he picked up the burning branch they turned tail and ran. He yelled and threw the branch after them.

The floating rock was very close now, blocking half the black sky.

Yama ran. The sally port where fliers docked with the floating garden was near the mansion in which he had been kept. Perhaps one of the fliers which had brought Enobarbus’s men was still intact. He was halfway there when the rock passed overhead.

Its keel scraped the crag where Dr. Dismas had taken him, and came on, breaking the tops from trees and dropping a shower of rocks and gravel. A tree toppled across Yama’s path, burning from top to bottom. He skidded and fell down amidst a storm of burning fragments. For a moment he thought that he might faint, that something was trying to pluck his soul from his body, and then it passed and he picked himself up and ran on. He knew that he had only a little time now.

A big semicircular amphitheater sloped down toward the platforms of the sally port. It had been lit by decads of suspensor lamps, but only a few were still working, fitfully illuminating the remains of a terrible battle. Gardens of stone and miniature cedars and clumps of bamboos had been trampled and broken and burnt. There were numerous fires, and patches of scorched stone radiated fierce heat and sent up drifts of choking white smoke. Yama found many corpses, men and things like men, sprawled alone or entangled in a final embrace. Many were so badly burnt that they were little more than charcoal logs, arms and legs drawn up to their chests in rictus, bones showing through charred flesh. Yama armed himself with a gisarme and was about to pluck a pellet pistol from a dead soldier’s grasp when someone ran at him. He made a wild swipe with the gisarme, then saw who it was and managed to turn the blow so that the pointed axe-head thumped into the ground.

A moment later, Yama and Pandaras threw their arms around each other and whirled around their common axis. The boy began to babble his story, beginning with the way he had escaped Prefect Corin when the two floating gardens had passed each other, but Yama hushed him and explained what Pandaras must do for him.

“Master, I cannot—”

“I should have had you do it as soon as I discovered them growing under my skin, Pandaras. I should have guessed then what Dr. Dismas had done to me.”

“Prefect Corin was not drowned, master. He has come to kill you. He used me to find you. He sends machines to sleep. You will need all your strength to face him.”

“He will not try to kill me straightaway, I think. And this will make me stronger, not weaker. We must be quick, Pandaras. The thing which stops machines working was on the floating garden you fell from, was it not?”

“Unless Prefect Corin brought it with him. I’m sure he followed me here. But it had grown very hot and very bright.”

“Because it was drawing energy from a wide area. The machines here will begin to work once it has passed out of range. You must do it now and do it quickly. No time for fine surgery.” Yama noticed for the first time that the boy had lost his left hand. He said, “I am sorry, Pandaras. There will be more pain, if you stay with me.”

Pandaras drew himself up. He was very ragged and had a haunted, starved look, but he met Yama’s gaze and said, “I am your squire, master. I lost you for a while, it’s true, but now I have found you I will not let you escape me so easily again. What do you want me to do?”

They could not find a knife amongst the dead around them, so Yama broke off the tip of a sword. Pandaras wrapped the broken end in a strip of cloth. Yama sat with his back pressed against a rough boulder, his hands braced against his thighs and a sliver of wood between his teeth. The pain was not as bad as he had feared, and at first there was only a little blood. The plaques lay just beneath his skin, and Pandaras had to cut away only a little flesh to expose them.

“It’s a queer kind of stuff, master,” Pandaras said. “Like plastic and metal granules that have been melted together. I can see things like roots. Should I cut out those, too?”

Yama nodded.

The pain was suddenly sharper. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. An intimate scraping, metal on bone. Red and black flashes in his eyes. Hot blood dripped from the point of his chin. Pandaras pushed his head down, and there was a sharp slicing pain in his neck.

“It’s done, master,” Pandaras said. He held a decad of small, irregular shapes in his bloody hand. Wire-like whiskers stuck out from their corners.

“Throw them away,” Yama said. “If I start behaving in a strange way, knock me out and tie me up. Do not let me near any dirt. There is metal in dirt. Do you understand?”

“Not entirely, master, but I’ll get rid of these at once.” Pandaras ripped up the cloak of a dead soldier and placed a pad of cloth over the left side of Yama’s face and held it in place with a strip tied around his jaw and the top of his head. Yama’s face was numb, but there was a feeling of fire at the edge of the numbness. The wound on the back of his neck was more trivial, but it was bleeding badly.

“We’re getting near the river now,” Pandaras said. “And look, the coin is beginning to glow again.”

He held it up: it showed a faint, grainy light.

“Arm yourself,” Yama said. He got to his feet and took a step, then another, but stumbled on the third.

Instantly, Pandaras was by his side. He made Yama sit down, untied the cloth around his head, and whistled. “I cut a vein in there, I think. I’m sorry, master, I am not much of a sawbones. I learned a little of it from one of my uncles, who worked at one of the fighting pits, but not enough, it seems. I should stitch the wound, but I don’t have any tackle. I could put a compress in—”

“Cauterize it.”

“It will leave a scar. Of course, the jacks who worked the pits liked that kind of thing. It made them look fiercer, neh? But you do not want that, master. A compress—”

Yama picked up the bit of sword and stumbled over to a man-sized machine which had broken apart and was burning with a fierce, steady flame. He thrust the tip of the sword into the center of the fire.

“We do not have time for niceties,” he said. “I must be able to fight.”

“You couldn’t fight a puppy the way you are,” Pandaras said. He wrapped a bit of cloth around his hand and drew the broken sword tip from the white heart of the burning machine. “Cry out if you want. They say it helps the pain. And hold onto my arm, here.”

Yama did not cry out, because it might bring his enemy to him, but he almost broke Pandaras’s left arm when the boy thrust the point of the hot metal into the wound in his cheek. The smell of his own blood burning was horrible.

“Done,” Pandaras said. He was crying, but his hand was steady and deft as he packed Yama’s wound. He retied the strip of cloth around Yama’s head, then tied another around his neck and under his arm to hold a compress against the lesser wound in his neck.

The coin was burning brighter. Pandaras held it up and said, “Shall I throw this away? He knows how to find it; it is how he found me and it is why he kept me alive, so that he could find you. In any case, we should run now, master. If the coin is working again, then surely you can command some machine to take us away.”

“I want Prefect Corin to find us,” Yama said. “He destroyed my home. He was responsible for the death of my stepfather. I will have an accounting.”

“He will kill you.”

“I do not think he has come here to do that. If I do not confront him, Pandaras, then I will never be able to rest, for he will not.”

“That’s as may be, but I don’t know if you can kill him. Those monsters you called up from the depths couldn’t. I think he jumped on a floating disc and sailed away from them.”

“I do not know if I want to kill him, Pandaras. That is why I want to see him.”

Yama took the gisarme and Pandaras found a short ironwood stave. They armed themselves with pellet pistols too. As they climbed out of the sally port’s amphitheater, some of the dead began to stir and twitch. The machines in Dr. Dismas’s servants were awakening in bodies too mutilated to control. Yama found a legless torso trying to drag itself along, its guts trailing behind it, and dispatched it with the spike of the gisarme.

Yama began to call out to Prefect Corin as he and Pandaras walked toward the far edge of the island, through near darkness lit only by burning trees. But the Shadow found him first, suddenly gliding beside him at the edge of his vision. As before, it took the form of Derev, but this time her likeness was distorted to resemble one of Dr. Dismas’s man-animals, naked and on all fours. Its voice was a faint hiss, like the last echo of creation.

You cannot destroy me, Child of the River. I am wrapped around every neuron in your brain.

“I do not want to destroy you. I want you to help me understand what I am.”

Pandaras said, “What is it, master? Is he here?”

“No, not yet. It is the thing in my head.”

You are a fool to deny what we can become. A worm, a weakling. How I will torment you.

It tipped back its head, its throat elongating, and howled like a dervish. Something like a faint wash of flame passed across Yama’s mind. He bore it easily.

Pandaras said, “But I cut it out!”

“Not all of it. Just those parts which drew power from the world’s energy grid. It will be no more powerful than me now, unless it can regrow those parts.”

I will take the iron from your blood, you fool! I will weave myself so tightly against your every nerve that you will never be rid of me.

But the sparks of the Shadow’s words flickered so faintly that they were easier to ignore than the growing sense of the weave of machines which mapped the dark world all around. It was stronger than ever, an overlapping babble of voices near and far. Yama called upon one of the machines which served the garden, and it explained in a rapid, agitated staccato that the gravithic grids of the platform—it meant the floating garden—were exhausted, and that it was falling in an irrecoverable trajectory.

Pandaras squinted at the glowing thing that beat before Yama’s face on a blur of vanes. “They work for Prefect Corin,” he said.

“Not here. It wants us to evacuate this place. It seems we will strike the world in a handful of minutes.”

“But you will save us, master.”

“No.”

“But you must!”

“I cannot.” The machine was trying to explain about realignment and repolarization, but Yama asked it to be quiet, and told Pandaras, “There is not enough time for the garden to soak up enough energy to regain its lift.”

The machine added something tartly, and with a shrill whir of vanes flew up into the night.

“Apparently, the other garden will strike the world first,” Yama told Pandaras.

“As if that makes any difference. What’s that?” Yama heard it a moment later. An animal frenzy of howls and yips, and then a stutter of rifle fire.

Yama ran, feeling the cauterized wound in his cheek pull open at every step. He ran through the burning trees, across the cracked basin of the lake, and up the rocky slope. His head was full of voices. His face was a stiff mask with hot needles pushed through it into his skull, and his legs were rubbery, but as he leapt from rock to rock in the near dark, he called upon skills he had learned as a child while clambering about the steep dry slopes of the City of the Dead, and did not stumble.

Dr. Dismas stood at the far edge of the crag, his silvery cloak and cap glimmering in the fire-lit dark. A pentad of his naked man-animals cowered around him. Their round eyes glowed green or red, reflecting the light of the decads of tiny machines which swarmed around the man who leaned on his staff a hundred paces away.

“Yamamanama,” Prefect Corin said, without looking away from Dr. Dismas. “You have come to me as I knew that you would.” A rifle was slung over his shoulder, and Dr. Dismas’s energy pistol was tucked into his belt. The pale-skinned hierodule, clad only in ragged trews, squatted beside the Prefect, and bared his teeth when Pandaras called to him.

Yama’s face hurt when he spoke. He said, “Not at all. Instead, you have come to me.”

“You are still a vain and foolish boy,” Prefect Corin said chidingly. “While we travel back to Ys you will dwell on all the hurt you have caused, the deaths you must already count as yours and those which are to come when you undo your mischief.”

Dr. Dismas said, “Kill him, Yamamanama. Do it quickly. We have far to go.”

“You will be quiet, old man,” Prefect Corin said in his calm, soft voice, “or I will take your eyes and tongue. You have much to answer for, too. Taking away your little realm is only the beginning of the reckoning.”

“The laboratories are nothing,” Dr. Dismas said, and tapped the side of his head. “It is all in here.”

Prefect Corin told Yama, “A flier will be here in a moment. Unless of course you can save this garden. One way or another, we will be in the heart of our Department by dawn. There will be a new beginning. Frankly, you need it. You look bad, Yamamanama, bloody and ill-used. I will see that you get all the medical attention you so clearly have not had here.”

Yama said, as steadily as he could, “I will not serve.”

Prefect Corin looked at him for the first time. He said, “We all serve, Child of the River. We are all servants of the Preservers.”

Yama remembered what Sergeant Rhodean had told him outside the marquee where the Aedile had lain dying, on the far-side shore after the sack of Aeolis, and saw now what Prefect Corin was. Saw that the man’s reserve was not a discipline, but a denial that he was like other men. That his humble air was a mask which hid his hunger for all the world’s powers, all its riches. Yama had thought that his hatred of Prefect Corin would be too much to bear, but now he felt pity as much as hate, and pity diminished the man.

He found that he was able to meet and hold Prefect Corin’s gaze. He said, “The Preservers do not ask for servants. They ask nothing of us but that we become all we can be.”

“You have been too long amongst the heretics, Child of the River,” Prefect Corin said. There was a note of harshness in his voice now. “That will be corrected too.”

“I am not a heretic,” Dr. Dismas said. “For that alone you should kill him, Yamamanama.”

Prefect Corin ignored the apothecary, concentrating his mild gaze on Yama. A worm of blood was trickling along the angle of Yama’s jaw. He said, “The world is not a ledger, Corin, with good and evil in separate tallies. There is no division into good and evil. It is all one thing, light and shadow in play together. No one can set themselves aside from it unless they remove themselves completely.”

He had never been so certain as at that moment, there on the highest point of a rock slowly falling out of the sky. He was aware of everything around him—the wind which carried the harsh stink of burning, the trajectory of the garden and of the rock ahead of it, the myriads of machines in the cities along the shrinking shore of the Great River, the flier that was speeding toward the garden, still a hundred leagues off.

He made a few adjustments.

At the same moment Prefect Corin struck down with the point of his staff. Rock broke around it, cracks running outward from where he stood to every point of the crag, and the whole garden shivered like a whipped animal.

Pandaras fell down; the hierodule raised his head and howled, Dr. Dismas snickered. His man-animals hunched around him. “You’ve made him lose his temper, Yamamanama.”

Prefect Corin pointed his staff at him and said, “Be quiet, devil! Except for pain and repentance, your part in this is over.” The machines whirled up in a brilliant blaze above his head.

“You’re as bad as the heretics,” Dr. Dismas said, and turned his back in disgust. The hierodule was still howling, his muscles straining against each other under his flabby skin.

Yama told Pandaras, “Hold up the coin. Do not be afraid.” He saw the knot in the hierodule’s mind and loosened it, and said, “Be quiet, Tibor. He will not use you anymore. Come to me.”

The hierodule blinked and fell silent. The cloud of machines around Prefect Corin suddenly spun away in every direction, leaving the crag lit only by firelight and the dim red glow of the Eye of the Preservers. The Prefect reversed his grip of the staff and began to beat the hierodule about his shoulders. “Do not listen, you fool! Obey your master! Obey! Obey!”

Dr. Dismas was laughing. The man-animals crouched as his feet made little excited yips and howls.

“You will not use him,” Yama said. “It is all right, Tibor. Come to me.”

Tibor ducked away from Prefect Corin’s blows and stood up. He said, “It is good to see you again, master. I thought you had fallen over the edge of the world.”

“Not yet,” Yama said. The words were compelled from him by Tibor’s mild stare; they seemed to come from somewhere in the babble of voices in his head. He remembered the dream he had had in the tomb in the Silent Quarter of the City of the Dead, and then remembered Luria, the true pythoness in the Department of Vaticination. A truth came to him, brilliant and many-splendored. It was like the peacock, but he could bear it now. Lifted on great wings of exhilaration, he felt that he could bear anything.

He said, “The coin Pandaras has faithfully carried for so long enables access to the space inside the shrines, just like the induction loop in a hierodule like Tibor. And one can talk with the other. My father was fascinated by the past, and his excavations turned up many coins like it. I think that in the Age of Enlightenment people used them as commonly as we use money, but they did not use them to buy the stuff of everyday life. Instead, they bought access to the shrines. Anyone could consult the aspects then, without mediation of priests or hierodules.” He turned to Pandaras and grasped the boy’s hand. “Do you remember, Pandaras, when we walked toward the Temple of the Black Well? Do you remember the medallions in the windows of those poor shops, the medallions people hung on their walls to ward off the ghosts of dead machines? I thought then that I recognized the engravings on their surfaces, and now I see that they are similar to the patterns of light in this coin. The people remember, even if they do not understand what they remember. They are the strength of the city, Pandaras! The strength of the world!”

“Master, you are hurting me,” Pandaras said. There was fear in his eyes.

Yama realized how tightly he was gripping the boy’s hand, and apologized and let go. But his joy did not diminish. It grew as the babble of voices in his head grew: he was dissolving into it, forgetting his fear, his anger, the agony of Pandaras’s hasty surgery.

“I forgive your ravings,” Prefect Corin said dryly. “Your father is ages dead, and the Aedile of Aeolis was a foolish man who looked only to the past.”

Yama said, “You carry something made by the mages which acts like the coin, I think. But it cannot work as well as that which it tries to imitate.”

“The Aedile was the beginning of your corruption, Yamamanama, and I will be the end of it. No more talk now. Perhaps you think to convince me by reason, but I am proof against your reason. Perhaps you came to duel with me, thinking to decide the fate of the world in the way of the old stories, but they are only stories. I could kill you now, and there would be an end to it.”

Yama laughed. He threw the gisarme to one side, pulled the pellet pistol from his waistband and threw that away too. He spread his empty hands. “Those were for Dr. Dismas’s servants. But I see that only a few are left.”

Dr. Dismas turned and said, “Enough for my purposes.” He made no signal, but the man-animals leaped toward Prefect Corin in a single fluid movement. There was a wash of flame. Yama turned away from the searing heat and light, but thought that he glimpsed Dr. Dismas falling beyond the edge of the crag, globed by fire which beat at the mirror of his silvery cloak. When he turned back, the stones of the place where Dr. Dismas had been standing were glowing with a dull red heat, and Prefect Corin was pointing the energy pistol at him.

“If you thought that he would kill me,” the Prefect said steadily, “then you were wrong. I will use this against you if I have to, and at its full setting.”

Yama said, “I came here to see what kind of man you were. Now I know.”

“I am a servant of something greater than you think you are, boy.”

“I once feared you because of the authority you embodied, but then you burnt down Aeolis and killed my father and I knew that you misused your authority for your own ends. You are not my nemesis, Corin.”

Prefect Corin leaned on his staff, attempting to command Yama and Pandaras and Tibor with his gaze.

“Talk on, boy. You have a few minutes.”

“Fewer than you think, perhaps.”

“You do not command here. The garden is mine.” Prefect Corin set something in the air before him. It was a sketch of a solid object that was neither a sphere nor a cube but somehow both at once; it seemed far bigger than the space which contained it. Prefect Corin said, “If I start this spinning it will draw away the energy from machines everywhere and there will be no help for you.”

“The flier will not come, and the world is rushing toward us.”

“I can stop the machine a moment before the flier arrives. Meanwhile, your little tricks will come to nothing.”

“You have thought of everything,” Yama said, “but it does not mean that you are right.”

“I have right on my side, boy.”

Yama’s heart quickened. Although he strove to keep his face calm, his hands were trembling. Let Prefect Corin think it was fear. The moment was approaching. He had only to finish this.

He took a deep breath and said, “The Department of Indigenous Affairs once served in harmony with the other departments of the civil service, to keep the world as it always was. In this way the civil service is like the heretics, for both abhor change. One struggles to knit society together at the expense of individual destiny; the other wants to destroy society so that a few lucky individuals might live forever; both deny change. But life is change. The Preservers taught us that when they created this world and its inhabitants, when they shaped the ten thousand bloodlines. And the Preservers changed too, and changed so much that they could no longer bear this universe. All of life is change.”

Prefect Corin said, “You have learned nothing, or unlearned all you were taught. If not for the civil service, the ten thousand bloodlines would have warred against each other and destroyed the world long ago. The civil service maintains a society in which every man has a place, and is happy in that place. The Great River which sustains this world is the first lesson, for it is always changing and always the same. And so with society, in which individuals live and die. Even bloodlines change and rise toward the nothingness of enlightenment and pass away from this world, but the world remains as it is. There are always more individuals, and always more bloodlines.”

“The Great River is failing,” Yama said. He was aware of a voice at the forefront of the crowd of voices which yammered and babbled inside his head. It was counting down the seconds. There was only a little more time. He said, “Even the indigenous races know that the river fails. Your department has decided that it speaks for the Preservers, and in its arrogance it has lost its way. For no one in this world can speak for the Preservers, who are no longer of this world. We can only repeat the words the Preservers left us, and nothing new can come of those words.”

“We need nothing more than their words. All good men are guided by them. How badly you have strayed, Yamamanama. But I will save you.”

“The Department of Indigenous Affairs has become what it fights against. I do not blame it, because it was inevitable. There has to be one strong department to lead the war against the heretics, but its strength means the destruction of the consensus which sustained the civil service. For if the war is won then the Department will assume all the powers of the civil service, as it has already assumed the territories of the departments which border upon it within the Palace of the Memory of the People. And it will become a greater tyranny than the heretics could ever be.”

“We will win, and things will be as they were.”

“Why then are you here?”

“I am a voice and an arm of the Department.”

“No. You are a man who wants power within the Department. I am a way to that power. There are other men like you. When the war is over, you and your kind will fight each other. Perhaps not at once, perhaps not for ten thousand years, but it will happen at last, and the Department will destroy itself. In making the assumption that anything you do is for the good of the world, you excuse all your actions, good and bad, until you can no longer distinguish between them. But I think that is enough. You do not listen to me.”

“There will be all the time in the world for that, Yamamanama. At my leisure, in the Palace of the Memory of the People. But I will talk then, and you will listen. All you make now are animal noises. Noises which mean nothing.”

“There is no more time. The flier will not come. I ordered it away.”

“It is almost here,” Prefect Corin said.

“A machine tells you that. Do not rely on machines, Corin.”

“Enough of your tricks,” Prefect Corin said, and the thing in the air in front of him began to spin, gathering itself into a soft red haze that at once began to brighten toward the color and intensity of the sun, and shrieking like the world’s last end.

The voices in Yama’s head died away. He took up their count. Twelve.

Pandaras cried out in alarm and dismay. “Master! Would you kill us?”

“Would you die to save the world, Pandaras?” Seven.

“What kind of question is that, master? If I refused that sacrifice then the world would die and I would die anyway. Or the world would live and again I would die. In any case, I do not like this talk of dying.”

Two. One.

“Then follow me,” Yama said. Now.

Impossibly, the sun rose downriver. No, it could not be the sun, for as the blister of light spread out horizontally it suddenly redoubled in brightness, and redoubled again. It was so bright that Yama could see the bones of the hand he flung up to save his eyes.

The floating rock had struck the river, and the first machine Prefect Corin had set spinning to draw energy from the local grid had finally collapsed, and released all its stored energy at once.

For an instant, Yama existed at every point of machine consciousness in the world. And then the concussion of the impact arrived in a blast of air and thunder, and he was knocked down by a howling gale full of water and bits of debris, as if the distinction between air and river had been abolished. Tibor was struggling with Prefect Corin, trying to force down the Prefect’s outflung arm. Yama got to his feet, swept up Pandaras and yelled at Tibor to follow them, and ran straight over the edge of the crag.

A violent gust caught them, and for a moment they hung in the midst of a hard, driving rain. A double shadow at the edge of the crag might have been Prefect Corin and Tibor. Then the gust failed. Yama and Pandaras fell past the edge of the floating garden as a blade of light broke the sky in half.

They did not fall far—the world had risen very close to the floating garden—but the impact was still unforgiving. Yama plunged down and down in roaring dark water. Pandaras was torn from his grasp. He let himself float for a moment to get his orientation and then struck upwards, breaking the surface and drawing in a great gasping breath that was half air, half water.

Despite the storm, it was as bright as day, although the light was sulfur-yellow and came from the wrong quarter of the sky. Above, the floating garden was sliding away like a great ship, a solid shadow against a nimbus of achingly bright light. Something was climbing up from that intolerable light. A stalk or pillar of black smoke and ordinary fire that rose higher and higher and blossomed at last in the upper reaches of the atmosphere as a great thunderhead. Brilliant stitches of lighting blinked continuously around it.

Yama kicked against the flood, turning in a complete circle as waves lifted and dropped him. The wounds in his face and neck were ablaze with pain. As he rose for the fourth time he saw something between two waves close by and swam strongly toward it. It was Pandaras. Yama caught the boy by the scruff of his neck and he tried to climb up him in blind panic. Yama asked forgiveness and knocked him out with a swift clean punch, and got an arm around his chest to support him.

As Yama and Pandaras were lifted and dropped by line after line of waves that marched away upriver, something came walking across the water toward him, small and sharply focused at first, but becoming more and more indistinct as it neared.

Derev. Yama roared into wind and rain. “Get out of my mind!”

She was a giant, transparent as smoke. Her great wings unfurled far into the storm. She stooped toward him, and her face writhed and became a horror of snakes and scorpions, and then she seemed to be blown away in rags and tatters by the wind.

Pandaras stirred, and then came awake and at once began to struggle again. “Quiet,” Yama said, “or I will have to hit you a second time.”

“I can’t swim properly! Not with only one arm!”

“There is no point trying to swim! The second wave will be here soon! I will save us, Pandaras. Do not be afraid!”

They were shouting into each other’s ears against the tremendous howl of wind and rain and the roar of clashing waves.

Pandaras turned his face upward. “Master! The rain is growing warmer!”

Yama said, “The second wave!”

“When the other garden hits, master?”

“No, from the first. From Prefect Corin’s machine. First it was light, then sound. Sound carries the most energy—that is why the floating garden was knocked over. But it comes in two stages, because energy travels more slowly through water than through air.”

They rose on the crest of another wave. For a moment, wind swept aside curtains of rain. The Great River dwindled away ahead of them, hatched by lines of waves driven by the strong warm wind. The floating garden had vanished—perhaps it too had finally struck the river. The false sunrise had faded, but the pillar of burning smoke still stood at the vanishing point where the nearside and far-side edges of the world seemed to meet, The cloud at its top was spreading out and its light was changing to a ghastly red, but it did not appear to be any dimmer.

Yama wondered how much energy Prefect Corin’s machine had managed to store before it had been dissipated on the moment of impact. Prefect Corin had not understood the power of the things he thought he controlled.

The first machine arrived, plucking at the yoke of Yama’s loose shirt. Then another, and a decad more. The largest was a kind of wire-thin dragonfly as long as his arm, but most were much smaller. Together, they pulled Yama and Pandaras a handspan above the clashing wave-tops, and then more arrived, lifting them higher into the rain-filled wind.

Above the noise of the storm, there was a sound like a tremendous cannonade. Far away down the length of the world, the river seemed to be tilting into the sky.