Shrine of Stars

Chapter Seventeen The Glass Desert

It was a dusty town built along a narrow defile, high in the dry mountains which bordered the Glass Desert. The defile was roofed over with sheets of painted canvas that flapped and boomed in the constant cold, dry wind, and was lined with the mud-brick façades of buildings which had been hacked into its rocky walls. A decad of different bloodlines came there to trade drugs, rare metals, precious stones and furs for rifles and knives and other weapons which artisans made in secretive little courtyards between the buildings. There was a produce market at one end of the defile, and a maze of corrals and sheds where bacts, dzo and mules were bought and sold at the other. Fields and orchards watered by artesian wells stepped away below the produce market, startlingly green against a tawny landscape in which only cacti, barrel trees and cheat grass grew.

The town was called Cagn, or Thule, or Golgath, and had many other secret names known only to the tribes who used them. It was agreed by all that it was one of the worst places in the world; it was said that the double peak which loomed above, framing the Gateway of Lost Souls and casting its shadow across the town in the early morning and the late afternoon, hid the town from the gaze of the Preservers, and that any sin practiced there went unremarked. It had not been much changed by the coming of the heretics. It was still a refuge for smugglers, reivers, rustlers, fugitives and other desperadoes. Only an hour after he and Pandaras had arrived in the town, Yama had to kill two ruffians who tried to rob them.

Both men were tall and burly and covered everywhere with coarse red hair. They wore striped cotton serapes and white cotton trews, with broad leather belts hitched under their ample bellies. They were belligerently drunk. When one of them swung at him with a skean, Yama broke the man’s arm, snatched up the weapon, and told both of them to run. The injured ruffian yowled, lowered his shaggy head, and charged like a bull. Yama dodged him easily, swung the skean hard as he went past, and slashed his neck down to the spinal cord; the man fell flat, dead before he hit the dust.

The second ruffian swayed and said, “You killed him, you skeller,” and pulled a pistol from his belt. Yama, with a cold, detached feeling, as if this had already happened somewhere else, perhaps in a story he had once read, hefted the skean to get a feel for its balance, threw it overhand, and skewered the man in the right eye.

People who had stopped to watch the fight began to drift away now that the fun was over; murders were commonplace in a town outside the rule of any law. Pandaras scooped up the pistol, chased off a couple of children who were creeping toward the bodies, and went through the pouches on the men’s belts, finding a few clipped coins, and a packet of pellets and a powerpack for the pistol. He pulled the skean from the second ruffian’s eye, cleaned its double-edged blade on the dead man’s serape, and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers.

Yama refused the pistol when Pandaras offered it to him, and said, “I know that we will need more money, but I will not kill to get it.”

The cold precision which had gripped him in the moment of danger had vanished. He began to tremble as they walked away. Behind them, the children moved in to take the belts and pouches. Canvas as red as a priest’s robe cracked overhead, turning sunlight to the color of blood.

Pandaras said, “In this kind of place, we’ll need all the weapons we can get just to keep what we have. As for money, I have a confession. I did not burn all the treasures the Mighty People had hidden away in their miserable huts. I kept two of the smallest portraits. I doubt that we’ll find much appreciation of art here, but they are enameled on beaten gold, and although they are no bigger than my hand, I think they’ll buy us what we need. Aren’t you glad you weren’t able to send me away?”

Yama had tried to make Pandaras take the keelroad back to Ys, telling him that the journey to the Glass Desert would almost certainly end in death, but the boy had refused.

“I am your squire, master, for better or worse,” he had said fiercely. “And I do not think that things can get much worse than this. I have killed two men in as many days, and one of them was my friend. I have lost my hand, and I failed you in many ways while we were apart. I’ll not fail you now.”

And so they went on together. Yama used machines to guide them through endless caverns and corridors. He no longer cared if his enemies could track him by the traces left by his commands. It was too late for that.

A thing like a giant silvery spider, one of the machines which kept the caverns clean, led them at last to an active part of the transportation system which had once knitted the whole world together. They traveled all night in a humming capsule that fell through one of the keelroads. Neither of them slept, although both pretended to.

All of the transportation system beyond the midpoint of the world had been destroyed in the wars of the Age of Insurrection. The capsule took Yama and Pandaras as far as it could, delivering them to a maze of passages beneath a ruined peel-house; they emerged at the foot of a bluff which overlooked the mid-slopes of the mountains of the Great Divide. The yurts of a party of nomad musk-deer herders were pitched nearby. When Yama and Pandaras walked into their camp, still crowned with fireflies Yama had forgotten to dismiss, the longhaired, yellow-skinned men and women fell on their knees. They breakfasted on soured goat’s milk mixed with deer blood, and a sickly porridge boiled up from barley mash and dried apricots, then walked all day up the mountain, leaving behind the herders’ threadbare pastures and climbing through long, dry draws to the town.

With the money Pandaras got at a refiner’s for the gold he had stolen from the Mighty People, they bought a bact from a livestock trader and supplies from the town’s only chandler. New clothes, furs for the mountain pass and light robes for the desert, a tent of memory plastic that folded as small as a scarf, dried food, water bottles and a dew still, a saddle and harness for the bact. There was a little money left, but Yama politely refused the chandler’s invitation to inspect the armory. He would need no weapon where he was going, and Pandaras was armed with the skean and pistol he had taken from the dead ruffians.

“I have maps too,” the chandler said. “Reliable. Certified.”

“We do not need maps,” Yama said.

“That’s what the other fellow said. He’ll be buzzard meat soon enough, and so will you if you won’t unbend and take some advice.” The chandler was very tall and very thin, with fine-grained brown skin that shone like polished leather. He laid a long-nailed finger beside one of his opaline eyes and said, “Perhaps you have one of your own, and put your trust in that. Him. Many come here with old maps found in some depository or archive, but you can’t rely on them. All the ruins within easy travel of the edge of the Glass Desert are mined out, and most of the waterholes are poisoned. My maps are up-to-date. You won’t have to pay for them, not right now, but you’ll have to sell anything you find to me.”

Pandaras said, “How will you make sure that we do?”

The chandler looked down at Pandaras. He was three times the boy’s height. By the doorway, the burly bodyguard shifted the rifle which rested in the crook of one of her beefy arms. The chandler said, “This is the only way into the Glass Desert, and the only way out. If you survive, you’ll be back. You’ll probably have to sell anything you find to me anyway. I give the best valuations in town. Ask around if you don’t believe me, and you’ll find that all my rivals say I’m far too generous with my money.”

Yama said, “Who was this other man? Did he have a white mark on his face?”

“Not so bold,” the chandler said. “Everything has its price here.”

Yama told Pandaras to give the chandler the rest of their money. “Describe him.”

The man spat on the clipped coins and rubbed them with the soft, flat pads at the ends of his bony fingers. “He was about your height. Had a veil over his face, and yellow eyes. Wore a hat and a silvery cloak. I know his name, but you’ll have to pay me to get it.”

“I know his name too,” Yama said.

The chandler glared at Yama. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “He didn’t take a map, or any water or food, just a saddle for his mule. And he smelled bad, like skinrot or canker. Hmm. It doesn’t matter what he’s called. He’ll be dead by now.”

They were followed out of town by three ruffians of the same bloodline as the two Yama had just killed. They were either kin to the dead man, or in the pay of the chandler, or freelances looking to strip novices of newly bought supplies. As they rode hard toward him, Yama called down a machine and killed them all. He and Pandaras tied the bodies to one of the horses and sent it back to the town as a warning. The second horse had bolted when the machine had smashed the skull of its rider, but Pandaras easily rounded up the third, an old mare with a shaggy gray coat. With Pandaras following on the bact, Yama rode the mare through the high pass of the Gateway of Lost Souls, where unending wind howled over polished ice, and followed a trail down the dry mountain slopes toward the glaring wastes of the Glass Desert.

The trail wound through a dead landscape. Nothing grew there but stonewort, which could survive on the brief dew which formed each morning. The yellow or black crusts were the only color in the simmering white, alkaline landscape. Cairns were raised here and there, the burial places of would-be prospectors. All had been disturbed; on the afternoon of the second day, Yama and Pandaras rode past three skulls set on a flat-topped rock beside the trail.

Pandaras pointed out the neat hole punched into the ridge above the empty eye sockets of one of the skulls. “Perhaps he quarreled with his companions over treasure they had found. Or perhaps he killed himself after he killed his friends. Men are driven mad here by the ghosts of machines that fought in the war.”

“You can still turn back,” Yama said. “I must face something worse than any ghost you can imagine, and I do not think I will be able to protect you from it. It may well destroy you. It may well destroy me, too.”

Pandaras touched the coin he still wore around his neck. “Why, you’ve said yourself that this is better than any of the seals and medals the people of the New Quarter use to protect themselves from machine ghosts.”

“Take the horse, Pandaras. Ride back through the pass and wait for me.”

“Will you turn back too, master? Well then.”

That evening, they made camp by a waterhole. The water was black, and mantled with white dust. The mare slipped her hobble and drank before Yama could find a machine which could test it. She foundered almost at once, screaming with pain and foaming at the mouth. The bact snorted, as if in disdain; it had not tried to go near the water. The mare convulsed. Blood poured from her eyes and nostrils. Yama stroked her muzzle, then slit her throat in a swift movement.

Pandaras took a sip from a cupped handful of water and tipped the rest on the ground, promptly spat it out and he said, “Poison all right,” and spat again. “I bet the chandler’s men did it. They poison most of the waterholes, and he hires out maps, showing those which are safe.”

“The whole land is poisoned,” Yama said.

They moved their camp to a flat shelf of rock a league farther down the trail. Pandaras cooked slabs of muscle he had cut from the mare’s hindquarters; he had also drained some of her blood into two of the empty water bottles, saying that for him blood was almost as good as water.

Pandaras ate most of the food, for Yama had little appetite. He had had a distant sense of Dr. Dismas’s paramour ever since they had begun to descend toward the desert. It pulled at the remains of his Shadow like the wink of sunlight on a far-off mirror or a tintinnabulation in the ear. And he also felt the pull of the feral machine he had called upon, without knowing it, when he had been in desperate danger in the house of the renegade star-sailor.

Poised between the two attractors, he sat and looked out toward the wastelands of the Glass Desert until long past sunset, and did not notice when Pandaras wrapped a fur around him against the night’s bitter cold.

From then on, Pandaras and Yama took turns riding the bact. It took three more days to descend the mountain slopes. The Glass Desert stretched beyond: red and yellow and brown, patched and cratered, one side by a meandering canyon which once had been driven on a river as vast, wide and deep as the Great River.

Points of reflected light flashed here and there across the bitter land, and a whole sea of light burned in the middle distance where a city had stood. The Glass Desert had once been as verdant as the inhabited half of Confluence, and as populous, but the feral machines had made it their homeland after they had rebelled, and it had been devastated in the last and fiercest of the wars of the Age of Insurrection. Nothing lived there now.

As he walked beside the bact that day, through a barrens of blowing sand and piles of half-melted boulders fused together by some great, ancient blast, Yama kept glimpsing figures amongst the stones, figures which vanished if he turned to look at them, but which he recognized nonetheless. First Derev, her white feathery hair blowing out in the hot wind, and then others. His love, and all his dead. The remnant of the Shadow was stirring in his mind, wakened by the call of its progenitor far off across the tumbled desolation.

When they made camp that evening, Pandaras saw how drawn his master had become. Yama squatted on his haunches and stared into the thin, cold wind that blew out of the dark desert. His long black hair was matted with dust and tangled about his pale, scarred face. He did not seem to notice when Pandaras shaved him, using a flaked edge of glass and a couple of handfuls of their precious water. They had no scissors, but Pandaras had given the skean’s blade a good edge, and he hacked back Yama’s hair with that. It was not easy to do with only one hand, but Yama bore Pandaras’s clumsiness patiently. More and more, he seemed to be retreating inside his head.

Yama would not eat anything, and he slept uneasily. Pandaras watched over him, chewing congealed blood that was beginning to spoil. He reckoned that they were not coming back. At best, they would somehow destroy this thing and then hope for an easy death of thirst or heat prostration. At worst, it would destroy them.

It was a pity. He would have liked to have made a song of Yama’s adventures amongst the world’s wonders. He remembered the engines he had seen in the cellars of the keel of the world, when the spider thing had led them to the road.

Whole swathes of the floors of the vast vaults had been transparent, showing chambers deep enough to swallow mountains. It was as if he and Yama had become birds, hanging high above a world within a world. Far below, tiny red and black specks had roamed across a green plain, illuminated by a kind of flaw in the middle air that had shed a radiance as bright as day. The specks must have been machines as big as carracks, and even bigger machines had studded the verdant land. Black spires of intricate latticework had reared halfway toward the radiant flaw, wound about with what looked like threads of gold, threads which must have been as wide as the Grand Way of Ys. There had been black cubes in heaps as wide as cities, and geometric patterns of silver and white laid into the green landscape.

At one point Yama had lain flat on the floor, prostrating himself like a palmer at a shrine. The spider had halted, flexing one leg and then another as if in frustration, until at last Yama had stood and walked on.

He had told Pandaras then that there were mysteries in the world that he could only guess at, and they began to talk about this again as they journeyed into the Glass Desert. Yama wanted to unburden himself of all that had happened to him. Once more, he told Pandaras the story of how he had been found as a baby on the breast of a dead woman in a white boat cast adrift on the Great River. He talked of his childhood, of how happy he had been, how fortunate to have been the adopted son of the Aedile of Aeolis and the stepbrother of brave, dead Telmon. He described how Dr. Dismas had tried to kidnap him and how he had escaped and had been given refuge in the tower of Beatrice and Osric, the last curators of the City of the Dead, of his journey to Ys, where he had escaped Prefect Corin and met Pandaras. And then, turn and turn again, they told each other the rest of the tale: their adventures in the Palace of the Memory of the People; the voyage downriver in the Weazel; the sacking of Aeolis by Prefect Corin and the death of the Aedile; the treachery of Eliphas. And on, through their separate adventures and their reunion, and now this, their last exploit. They had reached the Glass Desert after all—not in search of Eliphas’s invented lost city, but of Yama’s nemesis.

Pandaras noticed the birds on the afternoon of the third day after they had quit the mountains: black cruciform specks circling high above in a sky so achingly bright it was more white than blue.

“Not birds,” Yama said. “They have been watching us ever since we crept through the pass, but they dare to fly lower now because this is their land.”

He coughed long and hard into his fist. They were both affected by the alkaline dust which hung in the hot air. It worked through the seals of their filter masks and irritated their throats and lungs, and got into every crevice of their bodies, drying their skins and causing pressure sores. It worked under their goggles, too, inflaming their eyes.

They were still taking turns riding the bact. Pandaras was in the saddle, and now he clambered down and said, “Ride a while, master. Rest.”

Yama lifted his filter mask and spat. There was blood in his spittle. When he could speak again, he said, “It has grown strong, Pandaras. It no longer cares about being found, for the machines which would have destroyed it are engaged in fighting the heretics. And it has made many servants.”

“You could make them go away, master. Please climb up. You’ll feel better for riding.”

But Yama walked on, still leading the bact. “There are different kinds of machine,” he said. “I thought of it while we were crossing that big chamber far beneath the temple. Do you remember?”

“I will never forget it, master. Do you think people live there, in the lands of the keel?”

“No, Pandaras. Down there are machines I cannot yet control. I cannot even talk with them. They are raised as far above the simple little machines which the magistrates command as we are above the animals from which the Preservers made us. As with men so with machines. There are the enlightened races of men which have passed beyond this world, and there are the machines in the world beneath the world. Just as we cannot talk with the enlightened, so I cannot talk with those machines. Or not yet, not yet. And just as there are the changed bloodlines, in whom the breath of the Preservers has been quickened, so there are machines which are likewise self-aware, such as the dwellers of the deep which sweep silt from the bottom of the Great River. I can command those as a general can command an army, although both the general and his soldiers are equal in the eyes of the Preservers. And then there are the unchanged bloodlines, and the ordinary machines which take care of the world, such as the machines commanded by the magistrates. And there are the indigenous races, and machines which are neither self-aware nor ever need to be.”

“And yet you raised up the mirror people and the forest folk,” Pandaras said.

Yama did not hear him. He said, “Machines and men. We are each other’s mirrors. The feral machines are greater than the changed, but lesser than the enlightened. But are they greater or lesser than me? I called down one to help me; I feel it still. But did I command it, or did it see its chance to place its hook into me? I could not master the child of the thing that lies ahead of us, the Shadow which Dr. Dismas grew in me, but perhaps that was because the Shadow was too like me. It had begun to assume my power. I do not know what I can do, Pandaras. Perhaps it knows me better than I know myself.”

They had been plodding all day through the petrified stumps of what had once been a forest. Pandaras gestured around himself and said, “This is a dead place. No wonder only machines can live here.”

They walked on in silence for a while. At last, Yama said, “This half of the world lost its river. Do you remember when we crossed that gorge two days ago? That was once a tributary of the Great River of this half of Confluence, running down from the snowfields of the Rim Mountains, just as the Breas empties into the Great River near Aeolis. But the Great River into which that tributary emptied fell away and was not renewed. The land died. Perhaps our land will die too. Our own Great River is dying.”

At last Pandaras persuaded his master to climb onto the saddle in front of the bact’s dwindling hump. When he was settled, Yama said, “If my father was right, then the fall of the Great River is my fault. It began when I was cast upon this world. Perhaps I can atone for that, Pandaras, if I can learn enough. It is my only hope.”

Pandaras understood less than half of what his master said, but he clearly saw the anguish these thoughts caused him. He said, “You are greater than you know, master. You are tired now. You don’t see things clearly. It will be better when you have rested. You ride the rest of the day. I don’t mind walking.”

They reached the far edge of the petrified forest at nightfall, and made camp. As usual, Pandaras kept watch while Yama muttered and twitched in his sleep, and once or twice he thought he heard something padding outside the tent. There! A scrape of metal on stone. The bact snorted and moved about. It was not his imagination. He gripped the pistol, although what use was it against monsters?

The next day, Yama said, “I dreamed that we are being followed.”

“And I know it, master.”

Pandaras squinted against sky glare. The bird things were still up there. Even when he was not watching them he could still feel their purpose, a prickling itch at the crown of his skull. All around, red sand blew in scarves and streamers across pitted red rock. The air was filled with the dry hiss of blowing sand.

Yama said, “They are coming down from the Gateway of Lost Souls. An army, Pandaras. I saw it in my dreams, but I do not think it was a dream. I do not think that I can dream here.”

Pandaras looked back toward the mountains of the Great Divide. The icy peaks shone high and far, seeming to float above the glittering desert.

He said, “It must have been a dream, master. Not even an eagle could see so far. Don’t worry about it.”

Yama shook his head violently. “I saw through the eyes of one of the watchers. The things which follow us also follow the army.”

That night Yama woke with a start, feverish and shaking. He turned toward Pandaras, but his reddened eyes were focused on infinity. “They have machines,” he said. “The fool brought machines with him as well as soldiers. He thinks that they are shielded.”

Pandaras wet a corner of Yama’s robe with a few minims of their precious water and dabbed at his forehead. “Hush, master. You dream.”

“No. No dreams now. Only truth. The desert burns away everything else. We become only what we are.”

At last Pandaras got Yama to lie down. He thought that his master slept, but after a while Yama said, “The soldiers are mounted and in uniform. They wear black masks with long snouts and round eyeholes of glass backed with gold. Their mounts are masked too. But I recognize the man at their head. It is Enobarbus. She has sent him after me. Things are coming together at last. Things are coming to a conclusion.”

Pandaras said nervously, “Is there any sign of the Prefect?”

“He… no, not yet. But I left sign enough for him to find us.”

“Then maybe he’s dead,” Pandaras said, although he did not believe it.

They had little food left, and less water. The dew still yielded only a few minims of water each night, and there was no standing water to be found, poisoned or otherwise.

The next day, the bact knelt down and would not get up, Pandaras, weeping in rage and frustration, beat at the animal’s withers. It closed its long-lashed eyes and ignored him. Sand blew all around; the sun was a glowering eye in a red sky.

Pandaras and Yama unloaded the supplies. Only one water bottle was full; another held only a few mouthfuls. They threw the rest away, and most of the remaining food.

“I will get us food,” Yama said. “Food and water. They are off the mountain slopes now, and coming toward us very quickly. They have good mounts.”

He was flushed and feverish. He was looking toward the distant range of mountains, and it took Pandaras a long time to get him turned around.

They had not gone far when they heard the bact scream. Pandaras stumbled back toward it through blowing sand, but stopped, shocked and frightened, when he saw the things which were tearing it apart.

They were like crosses between snakes and jaguars, armored in overlapping metallic scales or in flexible blood-red hide. No two were alike. One had a tail like that of a scorpion, tipped with a swollen sting which arched above its back. One had a multiple set of jaws so massive they dragged on the ground, another a round sucker mouth with a ragged ring of teeth.

The misshapen wild cats tore at the bact with silent ferocity. It was already dead, its neck half-severed and its bloody ribs showing, blood soaking the sand in a widening circle. Blood glistened on hide like chain-mail, on metal scales, on horny plates edged with metal, on serrated metal in snapping jaws. Two of the things had burrowed into the bact’s belly, shaking its body back and forth as they worked like a depraved reversal of birth. The pack ignored Pandaras until he raised the pistol, and then one turned eyes like red lamps toward him and reared up on its stout tail, waving a decad of mismatched legs tipped with razor-edged claws. Thick green slaver dripped from its long snout.

A hand fell on Pandaras’s shoulder; his shot went wild, swallowed by the sand-filled air. Yama shouted into his ear. “Leave them! They will not hurt us!”

The wild cat which had confronted Pandaras dropped to its belly and shuffled forward and groveled before Yama, although it kept its burning red eyes on Pandaras as he backed away into the blowing sand. Its fellows had not paused in their feverish butchery; the bact was almost stripped to the bones.

Yama and Pandaras drank the last of their water at noon, threw away the water bottle, and went on. Yama taught Pandaras that sucking a pebble could stimulate the flow of saliva and help keep thirst at bay, but the hot wind which blew sand around them drew moisture from every crevice of their bodies. Pandaras forced himself to stay awake, staring at each change in pitch of the streams of sand that hissed outside the tent, and Yama slept fitfully, waking before dawn and insisting that they go on.

“They are almost on us,” he said, “but it is not far. There is no chance of turning back now, Pandaras.”

“I had not thought of it, master,” Pandaras said. His lips were cracked and bleeding and he tasted blood at the back of his throat with each breath; the dust had worked into his lungs.

The air was filled with blowing sand. They left the tent behind and set off into it.

Shapes loomed out of the murk: towers of friable bones lashed together with sinews and half-covered in hide that flapped and boomed and creaked in the wind. A ragged picket fence of crystalline spines grew crookedly from a shoulder of black rock. Creatures were impaled on some of the spines. Some were men; the rest were like nothing Pandaras had ever seen, horrid chimeras of machine and insect, although surely no insects could grow as large as these. Most were no more than dried husks, but some were still alive and stirred feebly as Yama and Pandaras went past.

Pandaras did not pay much attention to these horrors.

He no longer felt fear, only exhaustion and growing thirst. Each step was a promise to himself that there would soon be no more steps: walking was an infinite chain of promises. The world shrank to the patch of ground directly in front of him. Its gravity seemed to vary wildly; sometimes it seemed to pitch like the deck of a ship and he could barely keep to his feet. But always he went forward, following in his master’s footsteps.

At noon, Yama stopped and turned in a half-circle and fell to his knees. Pandaras managed to get him to the shelter of a tilted shelf of rock. It was very hot. The sun’s bloody glare was diffused across half the sky. Sand skirled around crystal spurs, sent shifting shadows shuddering across reaches of bare stone. Pandaras was sweating through his thin robe. His mouth and throat were parched. He itched everywhere.

Yama stirred in his arms. Blood leaked from the corners of his closed eyes; Pandaras blotted it away with the hem of his robe. “I will bring water,” Yama said, and seemed to fall into a faint.

A moment later, thunder cracked high above and something flashed through the blowing red dust, chased by black shapes. It dived this way and that with abrupt turns and reverses, swooped low overhead, dropped something, and shot away as black things closed on either side. A sheet of green lightning; more thunder, then only the endless hiss of blowing sand.

Pandaras crawled out of the lee of the shelf of rock and retrieved what had been dropped by the machine.

It was a transparent sphere of spun plastic as big as his head, half-filled with cold, clear water.

When they were able to set off again, something like a storm of dry lightning had started up in the direction of the Great Divide. Flares of brittle light were half-obscured by curtains of blowing sand. Overhead, things chased each other through the sky with wild howls. Far off, something roared and roared on a single endless note.

“A lot of trouble for a drink of water,” Pandaras remarked.

“The battle has already begun.” That was why Pandaras was able to steal the water. “We must press on. Enobarbus brought more machines than I thought. I do not know if Dr. Dismas’s paramour can hold them.”

“I’ll go there and back in the blink of an eye, and carry you too, if I must.” Pandaras said it as lightly as he could, but in truth he felt that this day would be his last.

The battle raged for the rest of their journey. Curtains of light washed half the sky, spiked with red or green lances that burned bright paths in the sandstorm. The ground shook continually, and a low rumble curdled Pandaras’s guts.

The land began to slope downward ever more steeply, sculpted in fantastic curls like breaking waves frozen in glassy rock. Razor-sharp ridges cut through the soles of their boots and they both left bloody prints on the glassy ground. Things scuttled amongst half-buried rocks: hand-sized, flat, multi-legged and very quick, like squashed spiders made of black glass. Bigger things prowled farther off, barely visible through veils of blowing red sand. Stiff growths poked up from glass and drifted sand, fretted tufts of black stuff that was neither plastic nor metal, all bent in the same direction by the constant wind.

“We are getting close now,” Yama said. Blood was seeping so often he had to lift up his goggles and blot it away. Blisters on his forehead leaked clear fluid. Sand caked his face and his hair.

“You are already here,” a voice said.

It came from everywhere around them, from the rocks and from the dust-laden air.

Pandaras whirled in a complete circle, fumbling for his pistol. Something black and quick dropped from a fold of glass that reared above and stung his hand and jumped away. He howled and dropped the pistol in a drift of white sand. It sand swiftly, as if pulled under. Pandaras sucked at the puncture on his hand and spat out the bitter taste. When he looked up, someone in a silver cloak was standing a few paces from Yama.

It was the apothecary, Dr. Dismas. Or at least, what was left of him. He seemed to have grown taller. His clothes were tatters under his cloak. His flesh was black and rotten, falling away from bones on which cables and sacs of silvery stuff flexed and tugged. He tottered closer, reaching for Yama, but Yama dashed the apothecary’s hand aside. Fingers snapped; two fell to the ground and were immediately tugged under.

Dr. Dismas did not seem to notice. His eyes were full of fluttering red light. Wind combed the remnants of his hair back from his skull. His jaw worked, and he said in a dry, croaking voice, “You brought many with you.”

“They followed me,” Yama said. “I had thought that they might be your friends, for their leader is the champion of the aspect of Angel. Is she not your ally?”

“We both want the same end, but for different reasons, as we both want you. We cannot share you. I had hoped that you had escaped her completely, but no matter. It is only a minor inconvenience. Do not think that it will distract me from what must be done.”

“I know what you did to Dismas,” Yama said. “He tried to do the same to me.”

“I am not displeased with him. This is not a punishment; it is how he returned to me. He was loyal enough, in his way, and now he is completely mine. I may make him whole again, or I may absorb him. There will be time to decide on that once I am done with you. All the time in the world.”

Pandaras realized then that something was using Dr. Dismas’s dead body, like a puppet in a shadow play. Yama said, “He infected me with one of your children, but it had ideas of its own.”

“Of course. It would not be one of my children if it did not share my ambitions. That is why I must eventually destroy or devour my children, for otherwise they would devour me. Dr. Dismas should not have infected you so early. It was his only serious mistake, for my child could have destroyed you. But you overcame it, and what remains of it will help us.”

“As I thought.”

“Now we can begin.”

“Now we can begin,” Yama said. “There is much I want to learn. Pandaras, you must come with me. It is too dangerous for you to stay here alone. Do not be afraid.”

But Pandaras was very afraid, so sick with fear that he could hardly stand. With a shudder, he drew himself up and followed Yama and the puppet-thing which had once been Dr. Dismas through a narrow defile.

A ramp spiraled away, running down into a deep pit. The pit narrowed with each turn of the ramp, like a hole left by a gigantic screw. Silvery vines grew out of the glassy walls—grew through them, too. Some twitched as Pandaras passed by, their ends fraying and fraying again into a hundred threads that wove back and forth like hungry bloodworms scenting his heat. Human faces and the masks of animals bloomed under the glass, distorted as if seen through furnace heat.

Trapped souls, wavering, Pandaras thought. The remnants of men and animals which had been devoured by the thing at the bottom of the pit. The battle continued to rage above. The sky was split again and again by tremendous sheets of lightning. The ramp shuddered and quivered as explosions pounded the desert all around.

As they descended, things paced behind them, revealed and obscured by blowing sand, horrors half corpse, half machine. Dead animals wrapped in metal bands; polished human skeletons operated by the same silver cables and flexing bags which animated the corpse of Dr. Dismas. One skeleton rode a wild cat of the kind which had torn the bact apart; it was crowned with spectral fire, and carried a sword which burned with blue flames, as if dipped in brandy and set alight. Some poor dead hero, killed by the thing he had come to kill, and made into a ghastly slave.

“Do not be afraid,” Yama told Pandaras again. “There is nothing to fear. I will be their master.”

“We will be the master,” the thing using Dr. Dismas said. “You and I will change the world.”

Yama was looking around with an eager curiosity. He seemed to have wakened from the half-sleep of the journey. “Where are you?” he said. “I think you have grown since Dismas found you.”

“I first found him far from here. He never reached my core while I was alive.”

“Then this is where you fell. Like the thing in the Temple of the Black Well.” Yama laughed. It was muffled by his face mask. “The war has never ended for you, has it? I suppose you would call the defeat that drove your kind from the world a temporary setback.”

“I take the long view, as you will see. None of my paramours ever truly die. I always retain something of them. And you, my pet, my darling boy, I will hold you fast, close to my central processors.”

“You are much larger than the others I have met. The one I called down in Ys, and the one trapped at the bottom of the well in the temple.”

“One was a fool, like all those who allowed themselves to be driven into exile. The other was a coward that dared not stir from its hiding place. Cowards and fools. I despise them.”

Pandaras could feel the venomous anger which forced these words through Dr. Dismas’s dead mouth, although the tone was as flat as ever.

“Now I know why you were defeated in the wars of the Age of Insurrection,” Yama said. “You fought against each other as fiercely as you fought against those loyal to the Preservers.”

“We have grown apart since then. Those who fled Confluence have become weakened, for otherwise they would have long ago begun the war again. They are cowards.”

“They follow the orbit of the world because they are tormented by what they cannot have.”

“Exactly. Only they have grown weaker and I have grown stronger. I will take what they desire, and I will have them too.”

“If only your love was as strong as your pride and your hunger! How well you would serve the Preservers then. Instead, you remind me of the heretics. Each of them would destroy the Universe, if only it would save his life.”

“I have burned away that part of me,” the thing said. “Love is a weakness. As I have refined myself, so I will refine you.”

“Then you are a giant amongst the rebels,” Yama said. He was walking at the edge of the ramp as he followed the puppet-thing, peering eagerly into the depths of the pit. “How large have you grown?”

“I have not enlarged my processing capacity overmuch because the architecture would become too complex. But I have redistributed myself, and I have many auxiliaries and drones.”

“And your paramours.”

“Oh yes. You are trying to find a way to me already. You will not. You destroyed the main part of the child Dismas implanted within you, but you had to mutilate yourself to do it because you were not able to overcome it in any other way. You will not be able to overcome me, for I am so much stronger and wiser. It is touching that you try, though. I would have expected nothing less. You hoped to use the heretics as a diversion—that was why you drew them here. A bold plan. I applaud it. But I fight them using only a fraction of my might, and soon they will be defeated.”

“Then I was right to come here,” Yama said. “I have learned much since I destroyed the Shadow. I will learn more.”

“I will teach you all you desire, when you are with me. You may ask anything, and I will tell you.”

Pandaras remembered the old tales of how feral machines buried in old temples or in the wild places of the world trapped those who hunted them by granting their wishes. Here was the truth which had spawned those fanciful stories. All stories were true because all were derived from the world, no matter how distantly. Otherwise, how could they be told by men, who were creatures of the world?

“O,” Yama said, “I have so many questions. To begin with, I had only one. I wanted only to know where I could find people of my bloodline. I went to look for them, and I had hardly begun on that task when I found instead that I was asking the wrong question. To know my people I must first know how to ask questions. I must know myself. A wise man told me that, and beat me with his fan to make me remember it.”

Theias, the envoy from Gond. Yama had tricked him into revealing more than he had wanted to reveal, and Theias had fled in shame and confusion, or so Pandaras had thought at the time. But now he saw that Theias had left because his task had been completed.

“I can tell you everything,” the thing said through the dead mouth of Dr. Dismas. “I can tell you why the Preservers made Confluence, and why they raised up the ten thousand bloodlines. I can tell you the true nature of the world and the true nature of the Preservers. I can tell you where they went and why we should not serve them.”

“I do not need to know any of that,” Yama said. “You comfort yourself with false answers to those questions because you disobeyed the Preservers, who made you as surely as they made me. You need to believe that you acted not out of pride but to save the world because your masters betrayed you. Is this the place?”

Yama had stopped because silvery vines grew so thickly from the glassy wall that there was no way forward. They had gone around six turns of the ramp as they descended; they were deep within the pit now. It was so narrow here that Pandaras could have jumped clear across it. A thick red vapor hid the bottom from view.

“It has already begun,” the thing said. Its voice was louder now, and the same voice rattled from the bony jaws of the skeletons behind them, roared in the razor mouths of the giant cats, hummed from the mouths of the faces that floated in the glass walls. The air was full of electricity. Every hair of Pandaras’s pelt bristled, trying to stand away from its fellows.

The silvery vines snaked out with sudden swiftness. They enveloped Yama and he fell to his knees under their weight. Pandaras started forward, but Yama waved him back. A vine looped around his upraised arm. “It is all right,” Yama said thickly. Blood ran from his mouth, rich and red. “What will be will be.”

Pandaras halted, his hand inside his thin tattered robe, on the hilt of the skean. He remembered the coiling tentacles of the sharers of the deep dredgers. Yama had sent the giant polyps away after they had sunk Prefect Corin’s ship; perhaps he could dismiss the vines too.

The vine around Yama’s arm stretched, its end dividing and dividing. There was a flash of intense red light and Yama cried out. Pandaras blinked and almost missed what had happened. One of Yama’s fingertips had been seared off and carried away. “A tissue sample,” the voice of the thing in the pit said. “A finger for the fingers you snapped from the hand of Dr. Dismas. But I will design a better body for you, my dear boy. You will not miss it.”

The frayed end of the vine was poised above Yama’s head now. Yama looked at it calmly. He said, “That will not be necessary. The paths grown by my Shadow are still there.”

“Do not be afraid,” the voice said. It filled the pit, echoing and reechoing from the glassy walls.

And the vine struck.

Yama’s head vanished beneath a myriad fine threads that flowed over each other, molding so tightly to his face its contours emerged as a silvery mask. Pandaras caught the stink as his master’s bowels and bladder voided.

The Dismas puppet-thing tipped back its rotting face and howled. The faces trapped in the walls howled too. The skeletal figures rattled their jaws; the wild cats screeched.

All howled the same five words, over and over. “Get out of my mind!”

And something fell from the sky and plunged into the pit. It fell so fast that Pandaras barely glimpsed it before it vanished into the heavy red vapors at the bottom. The glassy walls rang like a bell and the ramp heaved. Pandaras fell to his knees. The eye-blink image burned in his mind: a black ball not much bigger than his head, covered in spines and spikes.

The Dismas-thing darted at Yama, quick as a snake. Pandaras managed to grab an ankle and it fell to its knees, breaking off one hand at the wrist. It flipped around and threw itself at Pandaras, who struck out with the skean, a desperate sweeping blow that caught the thing in the neck. Its head was almost severed and hung between its shoulders by a gristly flap of flesh and a silvery cord, bouncing as it swung to and fro, groping for Pandaras with its remaining hand. Pandaras slashed again, aiming at the dead thing’s heart. The skean’s narrow blade sliced bone and shriveled flesh, grated on a metal sinew. Rotten blood pattered over him. A terrible stink filled the air. Pandaras was at the edge of the ramp; he dodged sideways as the thing made a final lunge, took a step onto air, and toppled into the heavy red mist without a sound.

All around, faces trapped under glass howled, melting and re-forming.

The skean could not cut the silvery vines, but they had gone limp and Pandaras was able to pull them away from his master’s body. The ones which had been attached to Yama’s face left decads of pinpricks which each extruded a blob of bright red blood. Yama’s mask had come off.

He shuddered, drew a breath, another. His eyes were full of blood. Pandaras tore a strip from the hem of his robe and tenderly wiped it away.

Red vapor swirled around them. It was full of motes of sparkling light. Pandaras realized they were tiny machines, every one a part of the thing in the pit, as millions of termites in a nest make up a single super-organism. He tried to get Yama to stand up, but Yama was staring at something a thousand leagues beyond Pandaras and the walls of the pit. The faces in the pitted slabs of glass were dwindling into points of absolute blackness that hurt to look at.

“Caphis was right,” he said. “The river comes to its own self. The snake which swallows its tail.”

He shuddered, choked, and vomited a good deal of blood and watery chyme. He spat and grinned at Pandaras. “I took it all from him. All of it.”

“We have to go, master. If it’s possible to get through the battle, I’ll do it. I’ll get you back.”

“I called it down,” Yama said. “He did not expect that. That I would call on another of his kind. They are fighting now. Growing into one another. I think they will destroy each other. It is the opposite of love. Sex without consummation. Endless hunger.”

He continued to babble as Pandaras got him to stand. They more or less supported each other as they climbed back up the ramp. The skeletal king had fallen; so had its followers. The wild cats had fled. Pandaras was too tired to listen to his master’s ramblings, mad stuff about the river and the end of the world, and holes that drew together space and time.

Pandaras knew that they could never reach the mountains of the Great Divide, but he had to keep going forward. At some point, he realized that they had climbed out of the pit. Sand blew around them on a strengthening wind. The sun was setting. Its light spread in a long red line through the murk, as if trying to measure the length of the world. A shaft of deep red light shone up from the pit, aimed at the empty sky.

Pandaras sat Yama beneath the overhang of a smooth wave of fused, cracked glass and more or less fell down beside him. He said, “If you can do any other tricks, master, now’s the time.”

Sand blew past them endlessly. The light that rose from the pit seemed to grow brighter as the sun set. Everything had a double shadow.

The remnants of the army of Enobarbus were drawn up along a distant ridge, dimly seen through the veils of blowing sand. There, gone, there again. One of the wild cats prowled through the murk, ears flat, eyes almost closed. It did not know where it was, remembered only a time of fear and the stink of death, a compulsion stronger than sex or appetite which had suddenly vanished. There were still things in its flesh it could not claw or bite out, but they were dead things now, no worse than thorns. It stopped and stared for a long time at two men huddled against each other, torn between fear and hunger. Then it glanced over its shoulder and fled into the storm, fluidly flowing over glassy humps.

Two riders were approaching. The wind began to howl.