Shrine of Stars

Chapter Six The Shadow

As ever, Dr. Dismas was there when Yama woke, and almost at once Agnitus and Enobarbus came into the room, followed by a phalanx of officers and guards. The warlord had news of another great victory, but Yama was too full of joy to pay much attention at first. He had at last found Pandaras, and had rescued him from danger and lost him, all in a few hectic minutes. Pandaras was alive, and although he seemed to have fallen into deep trouble, Yama was certain that the boy was searching for him, for he wore Oncus’s fetish on his arm.

“There are great advances all across the front,” Enobarbus was saying. “In only a few days Yamamanama has gained more territory than we have won in the past year.”

Yama wondered if Pandaras knew that he had guided the machine which had knocked the gun from the hand of the ruffian in the alley. Yama had lost contact with the machine moments later, when the Shadow had withdrawn its control of a myriad machines along the warfront, but it did not matter. He had found Pandaras once, and he could find him again.

“Not exactly Yamamanama,” Dr. Dismas told Enobarbus.

“Could this be done without him?”

“That’s not the point, my dear Enobarbus.”

The two men stood on either side of Yama’s big, disordered bed. Yama could not move, but suddenly he had a dizzy vision of his paralyzed body from above; the Shadow had possessed one of the little machines which spun in the air, and was feeding him its optical output.

A pentad of officers with red capes falling around their battle armor stood behind Enobarbus. One of the officers was writing on a slate. Its green-and-white light flickered in flowing patterns tugged here and there by his stylus. Guards flanked the officers, clad from head to toe in black plastic like man-shaped beetles, their carbines held at port arms. They were there not to protect Yama, but to defend their commander in the event that Yama—or the Shadow—went mad and tried to destroy him. Enobarbus’s physician, black-cloaked, gray-maned Agnitus, stood just at the edge of the field of view, as patient as a carrion crow. There were servants in the room too, young men and women in tunics and tabards of gorgeous watered silks, or in fantastic uniforms of red leather kilts, golden cuirasses inlaid with intricate designs of black mother-of-pearl and plumed helmets that almost doubled their height, armed with ornately decorated gisarmes, pole-axes and sarissas which they held grounded before them. The servants and soldiers were all indigens. Some were frog-jawed fisherfolk, others lanky, rail-thin herders. There was a single sturdy forest pygmy a third the height of the others, with glossy black skin that shone as if oiled. They were all Dr. Dismas’s experimental subjects. Metal collars were embedded in their necks and their shaven scalps were marred by angry red lacerations crudely stitched with black thread. One had had the top of his skull sliced off and replaced with a disc of transparent plastic; cubes and pyramids and spheres nestled amongst what was left of his brain. He shook slightly and constantly; drool slicked his chin and stained the front of his red silk blouson.

And someone or something stood amongst the officers, guards and servants, insubstantial, shifting, barely glimpsed, the shadow of a shadow. It filled Yama with dread. He could not look directly at it, but he guessed that it was a new torment of the Shadow. Day by day it was growing stronger; day by day he was growing weaker. But now at least his hope was renewed. If he could find Pandaras again, and tell the boy where he was being held prisoner, he could at last begin to plan his escape.

Yama was paralyzed by an injection which Dr. Dismas had given him several hours before. Now, at an unseen signal, three of the servants stepped forward and tenderly lifted him from the bed and carried him to a canopied throne, propping him up amongst satin cushions. Dr. Dismas turned Yama’s bare arm over, stroked a vein in the crook of his elbow until it plumped up, a river of blue blood under pale skin, then with a swift underhand motion stabbed the hypodermic needle home. Yama blacked out for a moment, and then was back in every part of his body, dizzy and cramped and sick to his stomach.

One of the servants held Yama’s head while he vomited into a yellow plastic bowl. There was little but mucus to come up. Dr. Dismas took a square of linen from another servant and wiped the slick of chyme from Yama’s chin as deftly and gently as a mother tending her child. Yama suffered this silently, and allowed Agnitus to probe him with hard fingers.

“As usual, he is febrile and dehydrated. Otherwise his muscle tone is good and his vital signs are stable.” Agnitus stared at Dr. Dismas. “You use him hard, Doctor. At this rate he may not last the course.”

Dr. Dismas met the physician’s lambent gaze. “Much is asked of him. I do my best.”

Enobarbus stepped up beside Agnitus. The warlord looked rumpled and tired, yet he was grinning broadly and his eyes were alive in his ruined face as he bent toward Yama. “Know that I am very pleased with you,” he said. “You have done great things. I have just flown back from an advance point beyond the Marsh of the Lost Waters. The positions which our enemies have held for a year are beginning to crumble beneath the new assaults. Their machines turn against them and they are much weakened because of it. Soon we will mount a push that will take us within sight of Ophir. I promise that I will march through her gates in less than twenty days.”

“You are talking to the wrong one,” Dr. Dismas said impatiently. “We won’t need him much longer. Not once the child of my paramour is fully integrated.”

Yama looked past the warlord and his physician, trying to see the thing which stood behind them, in the midst of the officers and servants and guards. A stain in the air in the shape of a man that gradually brightened and came into focus. A familiar, patient, careworn face with a fine pelt of gray hair, long-fingered hands folded over each other beneath the chin. It was the eidolon of a dead man, of Yama’s beloved stepfather, the Aedile of Aeolis.

Yama tried to turn away, but he was paralyzed once more, this time by the Shadow’s will. The eidolon spoke. Its words crawled across Yama’s brain like sparks over a log in a dying fire.

I am well pleased with you, my son. Do not listen to the doctor. I will not let you fade away. A part of you will always be with me.

The eidolon winked and faded. And then, horribly, Yama felt his tongue and jaw work. Something said in a hoarse, strangled voice, “I need him still, Doctor. Even when construction of the pseudo-cortex is complete there will be much to learn because there is much he does not yet know about himself.”

Dr. Dismas leaned over and wiped Yama’s cracked lips with a sponge and squeezed a trickle of water into his mouth. “There,” he said. He brushed Yama’s cheeks, kneading the plaques beneath the skin with stiff fingers. “This is a frail and stubborn vessel, but I will look after it for you. I will guard it with my life.”

The eidolon of Yama’s dead stepfather came back, more solid than ever. He thinks that he is our father, it said. He will pay for his mistake, by and by. He has wasted much time with his experiments and his foolish plots. He could have brought you to me years ago.

Yama found that he could move again. He said, “Yes, you would have preferred to take me when I did not know who I was and what I could do because you are not as powerful as you would like me to believe.”

“Ah, Yamamanama,” Dr. Dismas said, standing back from the bed. “You are still there.”

I grow, day by day. And day by day you shrink. I will not go away.

“Oh, no, dear Child of the River,” Dr. Dismas said. “You are mine.”

There is much we could do together, Child of the River. Why resist? We could be the ruler of this world, just as beginning. The battles I win now will bring an end to war ten thousand years old, but they are as nothing to those I will have to fight in the space inside the shrines after I have defeated the forces loyal to the Preservers. After that victory, she who is now our ally will try and destroy me. She will not succeed, of course, and if you help me you will learn much about the world and all the worlds beyond. She has her own plans for Confluence and soon I will possess them just as I possess you. Ask Dr. Dismas about the machinery of the keelways. Ask him about the heart of the world. The eidolon smiled, a sharp, cunning, rapacious grin that was not at all like the gentle smile of Yama’s stepfather. It said, Ask him why the Great River shrinks.

After the Aedile had died, Yama had found amongst his papers pages of notes about the fall of the level of the Great River. The Aedile had made measurements every decad for many years, and had calculated the likely date of the beginning of the river’s failure. Most believed that it had begun when the Ancients of Days had meddled with the space inside the shrines and deleted the avatars which had survived the wars of the Age of Insurrection. But the Aedile’s calculations showed that the fall in the level of the Great River had begun much later, in the year that Yama had been found by old Constable Thaw, a baby lying on the breast of a dead woman in a white boat cast adrift on the Great River.

Yama could not tell if the Shadow really knew what linked these two events, or if it was merely tormenting him with its stolen knowledge, but it had touched upon his greatest fear, that he might not be the savior of the world, as so many claimed, but might instead be its unwitting nemesis. He reached out and gripped Dr. Dismas’s claw-like left hand and said, “There is much we can do together, Doctor. I think that together we can save the world, but first we must stop the war.”

“Ah, but we will, Yamamanama. We will.” Dr. Dismas was smiling as he tried and failed to free his hand from Yama’s grip. He looked at Agnitus and said, “Help me, damn you.”

Help me, the eidolon said. Ask him the question. It will cause much trouble, I promise you. I am on your side, Yamamanama. How could I not be? I depend upon you for my life and for my powers. In one sense I am becoming you. But soon things will change, and you will depend upon me. We will have to reach an agreement, or you will dwindle to no more than a remnant. Would you work with me as an equal part of a gestalt, or would you be worse than any of the good doctor’s experimental subjects? I could bury you so deep that all the light and the glory of the world would be no more than a mute spark, as dim and distant as the farthest star. I could subject you to torments worse than even the good doctor can imagine, without cease. Choose.

“He is in your care,” Agnitus told Dr. Dismas, “as you delight in telling us.”

“You tell us that you control him,” Enobarbus said. “Sometimes I wonder how true it is. We must talk about it.”

“It is the child of my paramour that controls him,” Dr. Dismas said. He was still struggling to free himself from Yama’s grip. “It still grows.”

An age ago, Yama and his stepbrother, Telmon, had liked to listen to Sergeant Rhodean’s stories about the battles at the midpoint of the world. This had been in the gymnasium of the peel-house, and the old soldier had scratched the positions and lines of attacking and opposing armies in the packed red clay of the floor with the point of an old javelin. He had taught Yama and Telmon that the best commanders overcame their enemies by wisdom as much as by force. Indeed, it was better to subdue an enemy without fighting: to enter into battle was a last resort. For that reason, knowledge of the enemy was paramount. Not just the character and strength of the opposing army, but the morale and training of its ordinary men and its officers, the severity of punishments inflicted on miscreants, the state of its supplies, the nature of the terrain it occupied, the disposition of conquered peoples toward the occupiers, and the present and predicted weather. The best policy was to understand the enemy’s strategy and then to seek to undermine it, to always grasp the initiative and to be flexible, to attack where the enemy felt itself to be invulnerable and thus to bring about a decisive change. Sergeant Rhodean had shown his pupils that even a weaker force can overwhelm a strong enemy if it seizes the opportunity and strikes with precision and overwhelming momentum.

More than ever, Yama knew that he had to draw on the lessons of the kindly old soldier. He was a prisoner in the center of the empire of the heretics, surrounded by the servants and machines of Dr. Dismas and the soldiers of Enobarbus, with a jungle and armies of heretics separating him from the unconquered regions a thousand leagues upriver, and only the hope that a former pot boy could come to his rescue. Worse, he was a prisoner in his own body, struggling against the growing power of the Shadow which Dr. Dismas had introduced into his body. But now he saw that by allying himself with his most immediate threat he could exploit the divisions of those who held him prisoner.

“The keelways,” he said. “Tell me the truth about how the world works, Doctor.”

You are mine! The eidolon tipped back its head and howled, twisting the mild face of Yama’s stepfather into something coarse and lupine. Its eyes burned with a feral red light, as if a balefire had been kindled inside its skull. The soldiers and servants around it took no notice, of course.

“The boy is fevered,” Dr. Dismas said, and at last managed to wrench away from Yama’s grip. He kneaded the stiff claw of his left hand with his right, as if comforting an injured pet, and smiled at Enobarbus and Agnitus. “I have him, gentlemen. I assure you.”

“I belong to no one,” Yama said. “Tell me about the keelways, Doctor. Tell me about the machines down there. It is possible that I can control them? Is that what you want of me, once the war is over?”

“I want nothing of you, Yamamanama,” Dr. Dismas said quickly. “I have brought you here as a gift to Enobarbus, a weapon to bring a swift end to the war. Ask him what he wants. Do not ask me.”

“Yet somehow he has an idea that you do want something, Dismas,” Enobarbus said. “We’ll talk of this, I think.”

He turned and swept out of the room, his guards on either side and the pentad of officers following behind in a swirl of red capes. The eidolon moved through them like smoke and stood at Agnitus’s shoulder.

I am proud of you, my child, it said. We have already done much together, you and I, and with your help we will do much more.

“Tell me about the machines in the keelways,” Yama said. He stood up, his legs prickling with pins and needles, and limped across the room to the great blister of the window, struggling to compose his thoughts and to conceal his great excitement. If the Shadow wanted his help, then it was not as strong as it claimed. Or perhaps he was stronger, if only he knew it.

Behind him, Agnitus asked Dr. Dismas, “How great are his powers, Dismas?”

The apothecary was fitting another cigarette into his carved bone holder and did not reply until he had it lit; Yama smelled the clove-scented smoke. “He’ll have been told about the keelways by the child of my paramour. Who knows what they talk about inside the skull they presently have in common? It is of no moment, Agnitus, because soon enough the boy will be redundant. Remember to tell your master that.”

A black speck floated far off in the blue sky, high above the patchwork woods of the city of trees, far beyond the archipelagos of floating gardens.

Yama said, “And do not forget to tell him that I have been in the keelways, too. It was after I escaped from you the first time, Doctor. I fetched up in the Silent Quarter and entered the keelways after I got away from the poor fools you employed. I learned much, then.”

The speck was a bird, perhaps, a lammergeyer which had wandered far from the slopes of the Rim Mountains. Yama watched it with growing apprehension.

Dr. Dismas said dismissively, “The keelways are hardly a secret.”

Agnitus said, “You did not answer my question, Dismas.”

“The records are vague, a single sura in the Puranas. Yamamanama’s bloodline built the world under instruction from the Preservers. Why should they not know all about it? But the boy is ignorant, Agnitus, brought up by a disgraced civil servant in a wretched backwater, with hardly any experience of the world. We proceed by experiment. Of course, if your master is frightened, I can leave and take the boy elsewhere. There are many who would be glad of his services.”

“I think not,” Agnitus said.

“That Enobarbus is not frightened? Or that I cannot leave? Take care, Agnitus,” Dr. Dismas said sharply. “I have powerful allies.”

Not a bird. It was too big to be a bird. It came on steadily. Yama could not look away from it and, although he told himself that it was only an illusion, his skin crawled with horror.

Agnitus told Dr. Dismas, “Your allies fight amongst each other even as they try to conquer the world. That is why they were defeated in the wars of the Age of Insurrection, and that is why they cannot prevail without our help. That is why you are here, Dismas. Do not forget that.”

“I’ll hear that from Enobarbus, not his creature.”

Agnitus’s laugh was a low, rumbling growl. He said, “You’re a fool, Dismas. You think everyone should be owned by someone else because you are yourself something’s creature.”

The thing beat the air outside the great bubble of the window with wide leathery wings. It was triple-headed, and each head was set on a long, flexible neck, and their faces were triangulated upon Yama. They were brute-like distortions of the people he knew and loved and had lost: his stepfather, the Aedile of Aeolis; his stepbrother, Telmon, killed in the war against the heretics; and Tamora, the cateran who had been killed by Dr. Dismas on the stair outside the shrine cut into the edge of the world. He bore their gaze, although it was very hard. Their voices crept into his brain.

Nothing ever dies, Yamamanama. I can bring them back. Help me, and I will let them live again.

“I will serve only on my own terms.”

Behind him, Dr. Dismas said sharply, “It’s a last vestige, Agnitus. It will soon pass, and he will be gone forever.”

Foolish creature! We do not need him, Yamamanama, or the old, broken, and insane thing which changed him. Together, we make something new in the world.

“Together,” Yama said.

O yes. Together. Together, we will change everything.

The creature’s human heads opened their mouths wide and blew gouts of flame which washed over the eye of the window. Yama stood his ground. It was only a foolish gesture, a sign of the Shadow’s vanity. And vanity was a weakness.

The flames faded. The creature was gone. Inside Yama’s skull, a voice whispered eagerly.

Soon.