Shrine of Stars

Chapter Five Ophir

It had once been the most beautiful city on Confluence, prosperous and peaceful, its network of canals perfumed by water-lilies and lined by palms and flowering trees, its houses white as salt, with green gardens tumbling from their terraces, its main temple renowned for the wisdom of its avatar. Three bloodlines had lived there in harmony. It had been famous for its metalworkers, jewelers and weavers, and for the seminary where half the priests on the world were trained.

The war had transformed it. The population had been swollen to ten times its original size by soldiers and their followers, and by refugees who crowded the streets and made their encampments in the parklands and groves of citrus trees around the city. Fliers hung at the upriver edge of the city, some bigger than the carracks which disgorged a thousand soldiers at a time. The docks were clogged with carracks and other ships, the quays piled with supplies. The park around the great temple had been turned into a barracks. Illicit stalls flourished, supplying hundreds of fly-by-night bars. There were firefights between gangs dealing in drugs and prostitution, and between the gangs and the civil guards who tried to contain them. Dead bodies lay unclaimed by the sides of the busy streets, picked over by dholes and kit foxes, or floated amongst the flowering lilies in the wide canals, each attended by a retinue of green turtles and one or two pensive turkey vultures. There were rumors of heretic cults infiltrating the city; soon after they arrived, Pandaras and Tibor saw a woman run into a café which, a moment later, exploded in a ball of orange flame from which two or three burning figures staggered to collapse on the pavement.

Day and night the streets were full of soldiers and all those who fed off them: prostitutes of a hundred different bloodlines, hawkers, gamblers, grifters, gandy men, charlatans selling false blessings or fake charms or shirts guaranteed to repel the weapons of the heretics. Streams of wagons, rickshaws and tok-toks, the motorized bicycles particular to Ophir, wound through crowded streets noisy with the cries of hawkers and hordes of beggars, with music from bars and roadside food stalls, with bells and whistles and horns from the unceasing flow of traffic, with the roar of illegal generators. The canals were clogged with slow-moving boats, and at every intersection sampans were tied together to form impromptu water markets. At night, neon signs buzzed and flickered and cast colored shadows over the white walls of the buildings, and the noise and the crowds seemed to double and redouble, a restless unsleeping flood of people.

Pandaras sold the reaction motor and arbalest on the first day of their arrival, but he got very little for them; the city was glutted with weapons and equipment. He took up singing in the pavement cafés, performing two or three standard airs at each while Tibor collected a few small coins from the customers. When Tibor complained bitterly at this indignity, Pandaras pointed to the small girl who was moving from table to table and asking the customers if they wanted their boots cleaned, and then to her brothers, working by the door with cloths and polish, and said that there were worse ways of earning a living.

“I am a hierodule, little master,” Tibor said, with an air of wounded dignity. “I am not some street urchin. This is beneath me.”

“You are mine to command. You said so yourself. Your people allow themselves to be commanded by others as atonement for the sins of their ancestors. You make yourselves slaves, and so you make those around you slaves too, because they must take responsibility for you. How easy it must be to have others make all your decisions for you! How easy it is to be like a child! Well, now you must suffer the consequences. You cannot choose how you will serve. You must do as you are told. And you will do as I tell you, because we need money to buy passage downriver. Perhaps you do not understand that because you are a slave, and slaves have no need of money because their owners look after them. But we need money now if we are to find my master before I grow old. My bloodline burns brightly and briefly. I have no patience for the safe but slow way of doing things.”

“We will find the Weazel,” Tibor said. “Then all will be well. You will see. They think us dead, but they will be so happy to see us again.”

“They are dead! They are dead and destroyed and the ship is destroyed. Phalerus survived a little while because he was farther away from the center of the fire, but it would have been better for him if he had died at once, like the others. And that is what happened. Everyone but Phalerus was killed in one instant, and burned up into smoke in the next. They were killed by a weapon of war. You must understand that, Tibor. You must.”

“You could sell the book,” Tibor said, after a long silence.

Pandaras sighed. It was impossible to knock any sense into the hierodule’s round, hairless head. He said, “It is not mine to sell. It is my master’s, and I have sworn to return it to him.”

“Perhaps the Weazel will arrive soon,” Tibor said. “We have surely overtaken it, little master, but it will catch up with us by and by and put in at the docks. Everything that goes downriver to the war stops at Ophir.”

“We cannot stay here,” Pandaras said. “We must find my master.” The tiny spark in the coin had multiplied into a pattern of dots and dashes of light that was different every time Pandaras looked at it. They were nearer to Yama now, he thought, but not yet close.

For the first few nights Pandaras and Tibor lived on the streets, washing and drinking at the public standpipes, sleeping on a roof amongst clattering windmill generators in a nest of bubblewrap and plastic-foam packing bought from a scavenger. Everything in the city had its price. Weapons, armor and ammunition were cheap, but food and accommodation were ludicrously expensive, for this was a war economy.

Ophir was a long way from the war front in the fringe jungles of the Marsh of the Lost Waters, but on their third night in the city, Pandaras and Tibor were woken by a faint continuous thunder and flashes of blue light far downriver. It seemed to have woken the whole city, for people stood on every roof, watching the fugitive flashes. Suddenly a thread of white light split the black sky from top to bottom and for a moment it was everywhere as bright as day. The light winked out even as Pandaras raised his hands to shield his eyes, and several heartbeats later there was a long low rumble and the roof on which he and Tibor stood rolled like the deck of a ship. The palms that lined the street below doffed their heads, and all over the city bats and birds and big dragonflies took wing.

Once Pandaras had amassed enough money for a deposit, he rented a sleeping place in a house beside one of the canals. It was a subdivision of what had once been a graciously proportioned room, screened by paper stretched over bamboo frames, with barely enough space for a pair of raffia sleeping mats. Two families lived in the other parts of the room. One, of a quick, lithe, brown-skinned black-haired bloodline, ran a food stall, and the smell of hot oil and steamed vegetables always hung heavy in the air. Tibor helped them out, at first chopping vegetables, then graduating to making the sweet shrimp sauce and thin loaves which were served with every dish. The other family, five generations, from tiny hairless kit to toothless grandfather, lived on the income from three rickshaws. It was always noisy, for someone was always awake in one or another of the room’s subdivisions, mending one of the rickshaws or cooking, squabbling or playing cards or listening to a cassette of prayers, and all around was the mingled sound of hundreds of other lives lived in public.

It was the life from which Pandaras had run, first becoming a pot boy, and then self-appointed squire to Yama. He was as restless as Tibor and knew he could not make the money he needed by busking. That was only a stopgap until he came up with a plan. Amazingly, it was not possible to join the army here, or even become a cateran, as Yama had once wanted to do, although there were plenty of caterans roaming the city. Nor was it possible to hitch a ride downriver on the troopships; it was necessary to bribe one of the crew for passage, as did the gamblers, whores and other camp followers. Pandaras was confident that he could think of some way of making the money quickly. This was a place where someone with wit and cunning could make a great deal of money, as long as no one killed him first.

One of the sons of the family who ran the rickshaws, for instance, came and went at odd hours, always dressed in a sharply creased kilt and a clean white short-sleeved shirt. He had an arrogant air which humbled his parents and his grandfather. His eyes were masked by orange plastic wraparound shades, and a cigarette was always dangling from his lips. A gang member if ever there was one. Pandaras tried to follow him a couple of times, but the boy quickly and easily lost him in the crowded, noisy maze of alleys and passages behind the buildings which fronted the canal, and if he knew that he was being followed he gave no sign of it. But if there was any money to be made quickly, Pandaras thought, the boy or someone like him would be the key to it.

Two bravos had already tried to shake down Pandaras and Tibor, ambushing them one night outside the café where they had finished their final set and demanding all their money in return for a license to perform in this part of the city. Pandaras, who knew that showing any sign of weakness would mark you forever as prey, whipped out his poniard and cut one of the bravos on the arm and chased him away. Tibor grabbed the other around the neck and lifted him off the ground and gently took his butterfly knife and handed it to Pandaras, who flipped it open and closed in front of the bravo’s face and asked pleasantly why innocent entertainers should be worthy of the consideration of two fine brave gentlemen.

The man spat a long stream of yellow phlegm. Like his friend, he was very tall and very thin, wrapped from top to toe in overlapping spirals of gray rags. The little skin that showed was granular and hard and bone-white. The joints of his sticklike arms and legs were swollen; his head was small and flat, like a plate set on a corded neck, with a triangular mouth and a pair of black, mobile, wide-spaced eyes.

Pandaras wiped sticky phlegm from his face and put the blade of the butterfly knife against one of the man’s eyestalks. It shrank to a little bobble and the other eye bent around and stared anxiously at the blade. The man said, “You wouldn’t dare.”

Tibor said, “I will let him go, little master. I am sure he will not bother us again after this mistake.”

“First he’ll tell us who he works for.”

The man’s triangular mouthparts flexed and he spat again, this time at Pandaras’s feet. He said, “You’ve made the mistake. I’m Pyr’s. So are you and all street trash like you, except you don’t know it.”

“This Pyr runs things, eh? And I thought that the Department of Indigenous Affairs had charge of the city.”

“You mean the army?” The man’s mouthparts chattered: laughter. He said, “How long have you been here? The army looks toward the war, not the streets. We keep out of its way and it doesn’t trouble us. Let me give you some advice. We’re not like the army. We like things tidy. People who don’t fit in with the way things are run are removed. You’re handy with a blade, but maybe next time we come back with pistols.”

“Maybe I should speak with Pyr. I have a great deal he might want to know.” Pandaras signaled to Tibor, who released the man.

“If Pyr wants to speak with you, she’ll send for you. Pray she doesn’t, though.” The man adjusted his disarranged winding cloths, spat a third time, and stalked off.

Despite this threat, Pandaras and Tibor were not troubled again on their nightly rounds of the cafés, but Pandaras knew that sooner or later there would be a comeback. There always was. He just had to be ahead of it, to think of what they might do and be ready.

Pandaras became friendly with the grandfather of the rickshaw family. Memoth was a distinguished old man who spent his days at one of the major intersections of the city, pumping up the pneumatic tires of rickshaws or tok-toks for a penny a time. It was hard work, and Pandaras massaged Memoth’s aching shoulders with clove oil in the evenings and listened to the gossip the old man brought back from the rickshaw drivers, who were the eyes and ears of the city.

Memoth’s family was one of three bloodlines which had inhabited Ophir before the war. They were a spidery people with short bodies and long arms and legs, given to abrupt, jerky movements. Memoth’s skull was bony, with a pronounced crest and a jutting shelf of a brow from which his lively brown eyes peered. He wore only an oil-stained kilt and a belt hung with little tools. Like all his people, many of whom worked at the docks, assembling or repairing weapons, he was handy with machines. His coarse pelt was striped yellow and brown, and his plaited mane was white. That would have been a sign of his status in the days before the war, but now he had to humble himself before his arrogant gangster grandson and accept his charity.

Memoth had once owned several houses, but they had all been requisitioned by the army, and now his family made their living as best they could. But he was not bitter; indeed, he was the most patient and good-natured man Pandaras had ever met. He told Pandaras stories about his bloodline, of how before they were changed they had lived in a wide plain of tall grasses along the edge of the foothills of the Rim Mountains, the men hunting small game, the women gathering roots and fruit. At the end of each summer, when the Eye of the Preservers set for the last time, the wild grasses ripened and the women threshed the grain and ground it into coarse flour to make bread, and brewed a kind of beer from the husks. It was only thirty generations ago, Memoth said, but only now did they realize how rich they had been.

“We worked only a few hours a day. The rest of the time we sang or told stories, or made pictures on flat rocks or made patterns with the rocks themselves to please the Preservers. But now we must work all the hours we are awake, and still go hungry. What profits a bloodline to change?”

“Because unless they are changed, men are not free.” His master would have a better answer, Pandaras thought, for Yama was always thinking about these matters.

It did not satisfy Memoth. He said, “Free, yes. Free to starve. Free to become the slaves of other men.”

“We say in Ys that people like us are the strength of the city.”

“So I have heard,” Memoth said, “but I think the ordinary populace of Ys are as oppressed as we are here. The Preservers lay a heavy burden upon us. Perhaps men like us are unworthy of their gifts.”

“We must always hope our children may do better,” Pandaras said, but Memoth did not answer this. Few in the city believed this fundamental creed. In their despair, they had forgotten the charity of the Preservers.

As usual, they were sitting outside the door of the partitioned room, Memoth on a plastic chair, Pandaras at his feet. On the other side of the canal, which was choked with the dark green leaves of water hyacinth, women of the same bloodline as the bravos who had ambushed Yama and Tibor were washing clothes, squatting by the water’s edge and gossiping as they beat dirt from wet cloth with smooth stones. Someone was playing a cassette of prayers very loudly in one of the buildings that loomed above, and someone else was shouting angrily. It had just rained and the air was still fresh. The webs of electrical cables that sagged high above the canal crackled and spat as water dripped from them. All this reminded Pandaras of his childhood home in Ys, except that it was hotter and more humid.

A flier passed slowly overhead, its underside bristling with gun emplacements that seemed to brush the rooftops. The whole quarter throbbed with the noise of its generators; the air seemed to grow colder in its shadow. Everyone stopped to watch it. When it was gone, Memoth stirred and said that the war was getting nearer, and it was going badly.

Pandaras nodded and sipped from his bowl of mint tea, waiting for the old man to expand on his theme. He had heard much about the war since he had arrived in Ophir. It had always been distant in Ys. People mostly did not trouble to think about it. They accepted the news disseminated by licensed storytellers who sang songs and told tales of great heroism and tremendous victories to any who bothered to listen. But here the war was almost next door and everyone had their own story to tell. And most of the stories were about a sudden surge of advances by the heretics, of the army’s weapons failing mysteriously, of its machines falling from the sky. There was talk of a new general or leader amongst the rabble of the heretics. There was talk of sudden, harrowing defeats, of bitter retreats.

Memoth said that you could tell that something was wrong because almost no one followed the soldiers to war now. The gamblers and whores knew that there was no profit to be had from defeat.

“My people should leave the city,” he said. “We should go back to our high plains, back to the old life. Except that we cannot be other than that which we have become. We are human now, and we have lost the facility to be like animals and let only our instincts guide us. We are each of us alone in our own heads.”

It grieved Pandaras to hear this despairing complaint, for he liked the old man. He asked, “What does your grandson say?”

Memoth did not reply at once. He drank his tea, straining the last of it with his big front teeth and spitting out bits of twig. At last, he said, “He is not of my family. Not anymore. Now he is Pyr’s.”

Pandaras wanted to know more, but Memoth would not say anything else about her or his grandson. No one who worked in the cafés wanted to talk about her either, warding off Pandaras’s inquiries with fingers touched to throat or eyes or forehead, telling him that he should not trouble himself with people like her, who caused only harm to people like him. Without specific knowledge, Pandaras constructed grandiose and impossibly complicated plans about swindling or duping the gangster leader, and knew that they were no more than dreams. He was growing desperate, because after two decads in the city he had saved hardly any money. Money here was like air, necessary to sustain every moment of life, and as difficult to catch or keep hold of.

And then the soldiers came for Tibor.

It was near dawn. Pandaras was woken by a boot in his ribs. The tiny sleeping space was full of soldiers. He came up fighting and was lifted and flung aside. In another part of the subdivided room, two women were screaming at different pitches and a man was shouting angrily. One of the soldiers threw down a bit of paper, kicked Pandaras hard, and followed his companions.

Tibor was gone. Pandaras ran outside as a flat-bottomed boat with a rear-mounted fan motor roared away in the gray half-light. Its wake washed over the sides of the canal and lifted and dropped the sampans clustered at the intersection. Someone fired a carbine into the air; then the boat slewed around a bend and was gone. Pandaras gave chase, but had to stop, winded, after half a league. He walked back, holding his side. His ribs hurt badly and everything he owned, including Yama’s precious book, was in the room.

The paper was a note of requisition for… a certain hierodule, known by the name of Tibor. A receipt for two hundred and fifty units of army scrip was stapled to it. Pandaras tore the requisition and the receipt to pieces and threw them at the children who had crept to the doorway to see what he was doing. Army scrip was almost worthless. Two hundred and fifty units would not even buy a cigarette.

His ribs still hurt: sharp stabbing pains if he breathed too deeply. He tore a strip of cloth from the tail of his worn shirt and bound it around his chest. Memoth was sitting by the door, and called to Pandaras when he went outside.

“They will have taken your friend out of the city,” the old man said. “They will have taken him to the war. There is talk of a big battle and many casualties. A hierodule would be of much use there. The hierodules of our temple were taken long ago to tend the lazarets.”

“There is a lazaret here,” Pandaras said stupidly.

“That’s for civilians, and it is virtually closed down because there are no supplies to be had by the normal channels. They don’t bring wounded soldiers to the city. It would be bad for the morale of those who have just arrived and have yet to fight. Besides, many of the wounded would die of the journey. No, they are treated in floating lazarets close to the front line. That is where your friend has been taken, I expect. Are you going too, Pandaras?”

“I have an obligation,” Pandaras said, and saw, without surprise, Memoth’s grandson coming along the path by the canal, his smile wide beneath his wraparound orange shades. The two bravos who had ambushed Pandaras and Tibor at the café were behind him.

Pandaras went with them. He had no choice. They allowed him to keep the ivory-handled poniard and Yama’s book, but reclaimed the butterfly knife and took all the money he had saved. As they passed through the spice market he said, “You told them, didn’t you?”

The boy’s grin widened. He had a cocky walk, and people made way for him. His crisp white shirt glimmered in the green shade beneath the tamarisk trees where the spice merchants had set out their tables. He said in his soft, hoarse voice, “Many have seen you with the hierodule. It was a good trick, eh? People give you extra money because of him. Don’t deny it. It made the other jongleurs jealous. Perhaps one of them told the soldiers about your slave. Also, I hear someone was looking for you. Maybe he did it, eh? Don’t be sore. Maybe there’s something else you can do.”

“I want to talk with Pyr.”

Pandaras felt very alert. His anger was quite gone. In a curious way it was a relief that what he had feared for so long had finally happened, but he knew that he had to be very careful now. If he failed at this, he failed both Tibor and his master.

The boy laughed, and patted Pandaras on the shoulder with a curiously tentative touch. He said, “These things take time.”

“Who is it that is looking for me?”

“He talks too much,” one of the bravos said. It was the one Pandaras had wounded. “I’ll clip his tongue.”

“You’ll leave him alone,” the boy said.

“How is your arm?” Pandaras asked.

The bravo made a hissing sound and touched the butt of the pistol which was tucked amongst the gray rags wound around his lanky body.

The boy said, “It is one of the bureaucrats who is looking for you. Not the army, but one of those who run the army. Tall, with a staff. Black hair, and a stripe of white, here.”

The boy ran a finger down the left side of his face, and Pandaras knew at once who it must be, even though the man had surely been killed. Every hair on his head rose, prickling. He said, “Then I must see Pyr. At once.”

“First you prove yourself,” the boy said. “Then, maybe you see her. She is very busy. She has much business.”

Pandaras was kept for three days in a small, hot room on the top floor of a six-story house which overlooked one of the city’s squares. Crowds and traffic noise all day and all night; the smell of burnt alcohol mixed with the scent of the flowering vine that twisted around the balcony outside the window. A transformer on a pole beneath the balcony hummed and hissed to itself. Water dripped from a broken pipe into a plastic bowl in the center of the room. A gecko kept Pandaras company, clinging to one or another of the walls for hours at a time, with only a faint pulse in its throat to show that it was alive, before suddenly stirring and making a swift dart at a roach or click beetle. There was no furniture in the room. Pandaras slept on the balcony and spent most of his waking hours looking at the pictures in the copy of the Puranas or watching traffic which swarmed around the stands of giant bamboos in the center of the square. He knew that he must not lose his nerve. He must keep his resolve.

The coin was still displaying its shifting pattern of sparks.

The boy and the two bravos visited Pandaras each morning and evening. They brought food from the fry stall at the corner, rice and shrimp and green chillies in a paper bag, the edges of which were translucent with oil. The boy squatted by the window and watched as Pandaras ate, humming to himself and cleaning his broad nails with a pocketknife; the bravos lurked by the door, talking to themselves in a dialect of stuttering clicks. The boy had a percussion pistol in the back of the waistband of his creased trousers, with his shirttail out to cover it, and the bravos had pistols too.

The boy’s name was Azoth. Although he was older than Pandaras, his bloodline was long-lived and he was still a child, with the calculating cruelty of one who has never been truly hurt, who believes that he will never die or that death is nothing. He never took off his orange plastic shades and would not answer any of Pandaras’s questions, but instead talked about the war for ten minutes or half an hour before, without warning, standing up and leaving, followed by the bravos.

The door was unlocked, but Pandaras knew better than to try and walk away. On the evening of the third day he was roughly hustled downstairs by the two bravos and forced to stand at the edge of the road. Passersby made wide diversions around them; traffic roared past a handsbreadth in front of them. A rickshaw stood in the shade of the giant bamboos. Pandaras saw someone inside the rickshaw lean forward and say something to the driver, who nodded and stood up on his pedals. As the rickshaw pulled away, Pandaras got another glimpse of its passenger: a woman in a red silk dress, much smaller than him, with the large eyes of a nocturnal bloodline and long, lustrous black hair.

On the way back up the stairs he asked the boy, Azoth, if the woman he had seen was Pyr.

“Mind your questions,” one of the bravos said.

“I don’t talk with you,” Pandaras said. “You know nothing.”

“Pyr is interested in you,” Azoth said.

“Is she scared to speak with me?”

“She does not know if you are worth the trouble,” Azoth said. He put his hand on the pistol hidden beneath his shirttail when he entered the room, and crossed to the window and leaned at it and looked down at the bustling street below.

“Something is troubling you,” Pandaras said.

“We look after our own,” Azoth said, without turning around. “Prove yourself, and you are ours, and we are yours.”

“He’s still looking for me, isn’t he? And I know he is a dangerous man.”

“Perhaps we should give you to him. Would you like that?”

“Then he does not offer money, or I think that you would have done that already.”

“He makes threats. We don’t like that. Pyr will find him, by and by, and deal with him.” Azoth turned and stared rudely at Pandaras. “Who are you?”

“A loyal servant.”

Azoth nodded. “We wondered why you had a hierodule, and why you are so eagerly sought. Where is your master?”

“I have lost him.”

Azoth smiled. “Don’t worry. Masters are easy to find for the likes of you.”

Later, as the boy was leaving, Pandaras said, “Tell Pyr I know many things.”

The bravos made their chattering laughter. Azoth said, “Don’t make yourself more than you are, and you’ll do fine.”

Pandaras thought about that as he sat on the narrow balcony and watched the street below. Perhaps he was no more than he had been before he had met Yama, a mere pot boy with a talent for telling stories and getting into trouble. Perhaps he had caught himself in one of his stories. And yet he had survived adventures which no ordinary person had ever faced. Even if he had begun his travels as an ordinary man, one of the unremarked swarm of his bloodline, then he was ordinary no more, for extraordinary things had happened to him. And now he was being hunted by Prefect Corin, who must be more than a man to have survived the destruction of his ship by the monstrous polyps Yama had called up from the depths of the river. Pandaras shivered, remembering how one of the polyps had torn poor Pantin apart with a contemptuous flick of its tentacles. He touched the fetish and then the coin and promised his master that he would not fail.

“I have fallen into trouble, but I will find my way out,” he whispered. “And I will find you and rescue you from whatever harm you have fallen into. My life is short, and worth little to anyone but me, but I swear on it now.”

Pandaras could not sleep for thinking of all he had to do and of what Azoth might want of him. He leafed through the copy of the Puranas, and found that the more he looked at the pictures the more they seemed to contain. They were saturated with meaning, and now he was beginning to fully understand the story they told.

The Ancient of Days who had escaped her ship had fled the length of the world, ending up in an obscure city at the place where the Great River fell over the edge of the world. The bloodline which lived there was unchanged, and she had taken control of them despite the efforts of the city’s Commissioner and its Archivist. She had learned something in the shrines by the fall of the Great River and had quickened the minuscule machines in the brains of some of the inhabitants of the city. They had been reborn as individuals. They had been changed. And then the ship of the Ancients of Days had arrived in the middle of the civil war between changed and unchanged, having traveled the length of the Great River from its landfall at Ys. She had tried to destroy her crewmates, but they had killed her. Yet her ideas had survived. The Archivist of Sensch had escaped from the ship of the Ancients of Days. He had been the first of the heretics who even now strove to overturn the word of the Preservers.

Pandaras began to feel that perhaps the heretics might be right, or might at least have guessed the truth about some things. It was as if a voice had woken inside his head: the book had woken it, or planted it there. The world had turned away from the path ordained by the Preservers. It had become static and stratified, weighed down by ritual and custom. No one was free to choose their own destiny.

He shuddered, a single quick convulsion like a sneeze—his mother would have said that a ghoul had been sniffing around his grave. The book was valuable to his master, but it was dangerous. He must not look in it again, he thought, but a small part of him, that whispering voice perhaps, knew that he would.

It was long after midnight. The Eye of the Preservers was beginning to set over the roofs and treetops of the city. Its red swirl was dimmed by the city’s neon glare, but the pupil at its center was quite distinct, the pinprick void swept clean by the black hole into which the Preservers had vanished and from which they would not emerge until the end of time. Could the heretics dare take the war there, if they conquered the world the Preservers had left behind?

Pandaras shuddered again. “I will not fail you, master,” he whispered.

The next morning, Azoth and the two bravos did not bring Pandaras’s breakfast. Instead, Azoth said, “Come with us. No, leave your things here. They will be safe.”

“Are you going to take me to Pyr?”

The bravos made their chattering laugh.

Azoth said, “Perhaps soon. First you must prove yourself.”

Azoth hailed a rickshaw and they rode a long way through the brawling streets. The bravos fixed their mobile eyes on Pandaras as he stared out and asked Azoth many questions about the places they passed. They got off in a narrow street somewhere near the docks. The masts of many ships pricked the blue sky beyond the flat roofs on the godowns. As they walked past a chandler’s, Azoth pinched Pandaras’s arm and said to take notice, because that was the place he would firebomb.

“Why?”

“Because you’ll do what you’re told,” one of the bravos said.

“Because Pyr wants it,” Azoth said, with a shrug. “It’s just business.”

A small boy was hawking fuel alcohol at the dusty intersection at the end of the street. Azoth threw money at him and told him to go away. The boy snatched up the coins, knuckled his forehead, and said he would like to see the show.

“Fill two of your bottles, then,” Azoth said. “One word to anyone and I’ll cut out your eyes and tongue. Understand? Why are you smiling?”

“Because nothing exciting ever happens here,” the boy said. He was still smiling, but his hands were trembling and he splashed purple alcohol on the pavement as he filled the bottles.

One of the bravos took out a piece of cloth and tore it into long thin strips which he twisted up and stuck in the necks of the bottles. “You tip the bottle to wet the wick,” Azoth told Pandaras. “Light the very end and keep the bottle upright when you throw it. Throw the bottles hard and make sure they hit something that will smash them. Make sure you throw them through the door, too.”

“I know how it’s done,” Pandaras said. He was not scared, but there was a hollowness in his belly. It was the feeling he always had in the quiet moments before something violent happened. He picked up the two bottles. The rags in their necks stank sharply of sugar alcohol.

One of the bravos had a lighter. He waved its little flame at Pandaras, who stepped back in alarm, the two bottles and their sopping wicks clutched to his chest.

“Stop that,” Azoth said sharply, and held out his hand.

The bravo gave him the lighter; he flicked it twice to show how the flame was struck and put it in Pandaras’s shirt pocket. “Do it now,” he said, “and come straight back.”

It was early in the morning, but the street was already busy. Although no one seemed to take any notice of him, Pandaras felt that he was watched by a thousand pairs of eyes as he walked to the chandler’s, with the heavy bottles clutched to his chest and the stink of alcohol burning in his nostrils. The shutters of the shop were only half raised; someone was moving about inside, whistling a cheerful tune. On the other side of the street, his heart beating quickly and lightly, Pandaras set down the bottles and lit the wick of one of them. He put the lighter away and picked up the bottle and threw it at the pavement outside the chandler’s door. As glass smashed and flames bloomed he snatched up the other bottle and ran.

Not toward Azoth and the bravos, but in the other direction. People made way for him. He ran in front of a cart (the nilagai pulling it reared in its traces, raking the air with its clawed forelegs), dodged a soldier who grabbed at him, and ran into a crooked passage between two godowns, turning three corners before stopping, still clutching the bottle to his chest and listening to his hammering pulse and rasping breath.

Shrill whistles and an insistent bell somewhere in the distance, and beyond these bright noises the city’s constant roar. Pandaras still had not got his breath back when he heard footsteps approaching. He ducked low and glanced around the corner, ducked back and lit the wick of the bottle, fearful that the snick of the lighter would give him away, and stepped out.

The two bravos stopped and looked at each other. Azoth was not with them. Their mouthparts clattered together in brief laughter; then they saw what Pandaras held. One raised his pistol and there was a flash and it flew from his hands—a misfire, Pandaras thought, and lobbed the flaming bottle as hard as he could. It smashed at the feet of the bravos and they were at the center of a sudden tall blossom of blue flames. They shrieked and twisted in the flames and although people presently crept down the passage and poured water on them, they were already dead, and Pandaras was far away.

It took Pandaras the rest of the day to cross the city and reach the building where he had been kept prisoner. He kept up a monologue all the way, telling himself that he was a fool to go back because Azoth would certainly be waiting there, that Tibor had been right and they should have left the city days and days ago. Better to live on grubs and leaves than be in the thrall of some gangster like Pyr.

But it was the city which had caught him, not Pyr. There were plenty like Pyr in Ophir; he could have fallen in with any of them once he had allowed himself to be seduced by the city’s song. How well he knew that song, and what it promised! It was in his blood, the song that seduces all who are born in a city or who come to live in one.

Azoth had had it right. The city had made Pandaras think that he could be more than he was. He thought that he could win a fortune from it and rescue his master in style, and it had nearly cost him all he had. But he could not afford to lose the book. It was not his. Not his to sell, not his to lose.

When he reached the square, he stood for a long time on the far side of the stands of giant bamboos. The window of the room in which he had been kept was dark, but that signified nothing. He was very hungry—he had tried to snatch a hand of red bananas from a stall, but had been chased off—and very nervous. He walked around the block and came back to the square from another direction, did it again and thought he had located two people who were watching the building, one loitering by the food stall on the corner, the other at a roadside shrine, alternately wafting smoke from an incense cone and staring at the swarming passersby.

In the end, Pandaras went into the building next door and climbed its staircase to the roof, coming out amongst a small forest of clattering wind generators. An old man, drunk or drugged, lay on his back, waving his long arms and legs in the air like a beetle. Two more, wrapped in winding gray rags, turned their stalked eyes toward Pandaras, but they were only drunkards, sharing a plastic blister of an oily white liquor.

Pandaras marked his spot and took a short run and jumped the gap between the two buildings. He walked around the edge of the roof until he spied the balcony of the room where he had been kept, then took out his poniard and sawed at a sagging spot in the asphalted roof, exposing a lathe and plaster ceiling below.

There were wind generators on this roof too. He pried the heavy battery from one and threw it into the hole he had made and jumped after it, yelling like a crazy man and holding his poniard high above his head.

He landed in a pile of rubble and dust and fell over. There were three men in the room, but Pandaras only saw two of them at first. One was dead, lying on his back in the middle of the room with not a mark on him. The other was Azoth. He sat beneath the window, the copy of the Puranas open in his lap, faint light from a picture shining eerily under his narrow chin. His orange wraparound shades had fallen off; he stared down at the book in his lap with unblinking eyes and did not move when Pandaras dared to take a step toward him.

“He was like that when I arrived,” someone said.

Pandaras recognized the man’s soft voice at once. He had been interrogated by him after the fall of the Department of Vaticination in the Palace of the Memory of the People. Without turning around, he said, “And the other?”

“Drowned, I fear, in the bowl of water conveniently left in the middle of the floor. How easy death is to find. Throw down your knife, boy, or it will find you in the next instant.”

Pandaras dropped his poniard at his feet. He said, “Death finds some more easily than others. All the waters of the Great River were not enough to drown you.”

“Where is he?”

It took a great effort not to turn around. “Not here. Downriver, I think.”

“Hmm. You will tell me all you know. Ah, do not bother to deny it. You know that you will. But not here, not now. I do not have time to kill all the gangsters in this city. Close the book, boy. We will bring it with us.”

Pandaras said, “What happened to Azoth?”

“Is that his name? He needs it no longer. The book is dangerous, boy. It has been changed. It takes the soul of any unwary enough to look into it.”

“It did not take mine,” Pandaras said, taking the book from Azoth’s unresisting fingers. The boy continued to stare at his empty hands. A slick of drool glistened on the brown pelt of his chin.

“Perhaps it already has taken you. We will see.” Prefect Corin stepped out of the shadows by the door, the white stripe on the left side of his face catching the light from the book Pandaras held open toward him. He said, “That will not affect me. I believe that you have a token of the man I am seeking.”

Pandaras could not move. The book slipped from his numbed fingers and fell at his feet. Every hair on his body rose, prickling; the muscles of his arms and legs were painfully locked.

Prefect Corin said, “You have a little talent for music, like many of your kind, so you might find it amusing to know that I hold you with a tightly focused beam of sound. It is a single note pitched higher than you or I can hear, but your muscles hear it.”

He crossed the room in three strides, reached inside Pandaras’s shirt and lifted out the coin. With an abrupt motion he pulled the doubled thong over Pandaras’s head.

He stared at the coin for a long moment, then pressed it against Pandaras’s forehead. Pandaras felt it burning there. Prefect Corin exhaled, slipped the thong back over Pandaras’s head, and extended his arm toward Azoth. There was a flash of blue light; Azoth’s head exploded in pink mist. The boy’s body pitched forward, throwing a long spurt of rich red blood from its neck stump, kicked out twice, and lay still.

“Yamamanama has learned much,” Prefect Corin said. “Or he is well advised. The coin has attuned itself to him and he has attuned it to you. You can find him by using it, or he can find you. No one else. Very well then.”

Suddenly Pandaras could move again. He fell to his hands and knees and bent his head and vomited.

Prefect Corin said, “You will live, boy. Come now. With me. We have far to go, I fear.”