Shrine of Stars

Chapter Seven The Ironclads

“You will go around it,” Prefect Corin told the captain of the flying platform.

“But I will not,” the captain said firmly. He hung from a branch of the tree by an arm and a leg and glared unblinkingly at Prefect Corin. His eyes were large and black and perfectly round. He was smaller than Pandaras, and naked except for a tool belt. His fine silvery fur was touched with black at the tips of his ears and fingers and toes. Two decads of his crew hung from or stood on branches in the other trees at the edge of the little wood, watching silently. The captain said, “My orders I already have. You know them well, and you know that you cannot change them. This we have already discussed.”

Prefect Corin spoke softly; Pandaras could hardly hear him over the throbbing of the flier’s motors. He said, “You know who I am and what I can do.”

The captain grinned, showing needle-sharp white teeth. “We know that this platform you can’t fly. Beyond the pass no one flies, Prefect. Not while heretics hold high ground and the river.”

Prefect Corin laid a hand on Pandaras’s shoulder and said, “Show it to them.”

Reluctantly, Pandaras drew out the ceramic coin and held it up. Little flecks and dashes of light filled it from edge to edge, scuttling about each other like busy emmets. The captain glanced at it, then shrugged.

“The device shows that the man I seek is not here,” Prefect Corin said. The light of the disc set stars in the centers of his liquid black eyes. “He is farther downriver, amongst the heretics.”

“From us the heretics took our city, Prefect,” the captain said. “All we have left is this platform. Like to get our city back, we would, but far downriver it is, and higher than this we cannot fly. We try to go through, and from the tops of hills heretics fire down on us. Sweep us off the platform like bugs off a leaf. And the river’s worse; out there they have many gun platforms floating. No, Prefect. For ourselves we can’t do it, and for you we can’t do it either. As far as we can we have taken you. Enough talk. To berthing we must attend.”

The captain swung away into the dense green canopy. His crew turned as one and followed, disappearing in a flurry of shaken foliage.

Columns of soldiers were assembling at the debarkation points on either side of the flying platform’s wide black wedge. The big fan motors at its stern roared and roared as it began to turn into the wind. To port, ranges of mountains covered in dense forest saddled away, their peaks shining in the last light of the sun above valleys full of shadows; the river stretched to starboard, gleaming like pewter. It was only a decad of leagues wide here, its deep, swift flow pinched between the mountains. An advance force of heretics was attempting to take the city which had once dominated this narrows.

Pandaras and Prefect Corin had spent a day and a night and most of the next day on the flying platform, traveling steadily toward the front line. Like all the big lifting bodies, it warped the gravity field of the world so that it floated on the wind, and motors had been added so that it could be maneuvered. It had once supported a floating garden, but the little wood at the point of the platform where the crew lived and worked was all that remained; the rest of the surface was webbed with a complex of ropes and struts to which cargo or living quarters for passengers could be anchored.

Like the troops, Prefect Corin and Pandaras slept in the open and ate at one of the campfires, although Pandaras had little appetite and hardly slept at all, fearing that if he did the platform might tilt and he would wake tumbling through the air an instant before his death. The Prefect did not seem to sleep either. All night he sat cross-legged, with his hands turned up on his knees, watching the Eye of the Preservers as it rose high into the black sky before reversing its course and setting at the downriver vanishing point of the world, and all the next day he stood at the point of the platform, staring like a perched hawk waiting for a glimpse of its prey. Now and then, Pandaras tried to strike up a conversation, but he was not so much rebuffed as ignored.

None of the troops or their officers would go near them, and Pandaras had little idea of where they were being taken. Except that it was downriver, toward the war, and toward his master. That was some comfort, at least.

The note of the motors deepened; the platform was making headway against the wind as it moved toward the shore. Prefect Corin plucked his staff from the mossy ground and walked into the darkness beneath the trees. The little machine stung Pandaras’s neck and he trotted at Prefect Corin’s heels. Wind whipped them as they came out of the shelter of the little wood, and Prefect Corin put two fingers to the brim of his black hat. A huge baobab tree stood at the point of the platform, webbed with cables and hung with little platforms. The crew, a single family unit, was swarming everywhere, chattering in a high, rapid patois.

The foothills of the mountains came down to the edge of the river. The city stretched along the narrow ribbon of flat land at their margin. It was in ruins. Not a single building was intact, although the grid of the streets was still visible. The stumps of several huge towers stood at the shore like a cluster of melted candles. The air swarmed with glittering clouds of tiny machines that blew back and forth above the ruined city, twisting about each other but never quite meeting. Pandaras saw that there were many burnt places, and craters of different sizes on the forested hills, and thousands of trees had been blown down along one high ridge.

The flying platform was maneuvering above the encampment of the defending army, townships of tents and domes knitted together by roads that crawled with traffic and marching columns of soldiers. Hundreds of men worked on huge machines folded into pits and surrounded by cranes and scaffold towers.

As the platform neared the ruined city, edging toward a series of flat-topped pylons, bright sparks shot up from the slopes of the foothills as if in greeting, and puffs of white smoke bloomed in the darkening sky, seemingly as innocent as daisies. A rapid popping started up somewhere beneath the platform and streams of fiery flecks curved in to the source of the display; gunners strapped in blisters on the underside were replying to the heretic bombardment.

Even as the platform was being tied down, the troops began to swarm down hundreds of ropes. Equipment was lowered in slings and nets. A disc swooped out of the dusk and came to rest a handspan beyond the point of the platform’s prow. Prefect Corin took Pandaras by the arm and they stepped onto the disc, which immediately dropped toward the ground. Pandaras thought that he knew now how Prefect Corin had escaped when the giant polyps had sunk his ship. Because the disc warped gravity, there was no sensation of falling. Rather, it was as if the world tilted about the disc’s fixed point and jumped forward to embrace them. Before Pandaras could begin to feel dizzy, they were down.

Prefect Corin strode off at once. Pandaras had no choice but to follow him, for the pain caused by the little machine fastened to his neck increased in proportion to its distance from its master. Prefect Corin walked quickly and Pandaras had to half-trot, half-run to keep up with him.

“This is a great shambles,” he said breathlessly, dodging to one side as two columns of men in black resin armor jogged past. They were following the traffic that streamed along a wide muddy road. Crackling arc lights made islands of harsh white glare in the gathering darkness. There was noise everywhere, the braying of draft animals and the shouts of men, the roar of motors and the constant thunder of distant explosions, and snatches of wild music carried on the wind. Pandaras said, “Where have you brought me, dominie? Is this part of your plan? Will we become caterans?”

“We will not be here long,” Prefect Corin said, and stepped into the dazzle of the headlights of an oncoming steam wagon and raised his staff.

The wagon slowed to a stop, belching a huge cloud of black smoke. Prefect Corin swung up on the bench by the driver and said something in his ear. Pandaras hastily clambered onto the loadbed as the wagon started up again, and was thrown amongst loosely stacked rolls of landscape cloth as it swerved away from the road and bounced across churned ground toward the battlefront.

The city had been built from land coral. Here and there patches which were still alive had thrown up spires and brain-like hummocks and had smothered one of the tower stumps in a lattice of red threads, but most of the city was dead, piled in heaps of rubble that bordered the cleared streets. Trenches had been dug everywhere, lit by dabs of foxfire or strings of red or green electric lights. Soldiers squatted around heat boxes or campfires; a few scouts stood on platforms behind sandbags, scanning the enemy lines, which were only two leagues distant.

When the wagon stopped Pandaras jumped down and trotted after Prefect Corin in near-darkness. They skirted a trio of overlapping craters filled with muddy water and climbed to the top of a low rise. A series of bunkers was dug into the reverse side of the slope. A man in a long black leather coat came out of a curtained doorway and greeted the Prefect. He was the commander of the defensive forces, a lean, nervous man of Prefect Corin’s bloodline. His name was Menas. A decad of little machines hovered around him; the largest shed a fitful yellow light by which Menas consulted a timepiece as large as an onion and studded with an even decad of dials.

“You are just in time, brother,” Menas said, and put away his timepiece and embraced Prefect Corin. “The duel is about to begin. Listen. Do you hear the thunder?”

Pandaras had thought that it was distant artillery fire, but when he looked at where Menas pointed, he saw heavy thunderclouds rolling across the dark sky. Lightning strobed between clouds and the edge of the river.

“They manipulate the weather,” Menas said. “They like to set the stage for the nightly duel. So far it is stalemate, for by the grace of the Preservers our mages have built an ironclad which is the match of their champion. Come with me. Come on! We do not have much time!”

A pentad of staff officers went with them, each followed by his own flock of little machines. Menas was filled with so much energy that he could not keep still or follow the thread of any conversation for more than a minute; he kept breaking off to run over to this or that group of soldiers, to ask how they were and where they were from and if they were ready to fight. It was clear that the soldiers loved him. All of them cheered his approach and offered him libations of beer and wine.

“We will show them this time, boys,” Menas shouted. “We will push them back into the river!” He whirled about and ran back up the slope to where Prefect Corin waited. “They are in good heart,” he said breathlessly. “The best men we have, the bravest fighters.”

“I see no fighting here,” Prefect Corin said coldly.

“Soon enough,” Menas said, and once again took his complicated timepiece from his coat pocket and held it up to the light of one of the machines which hung above his head. “We satisfy their need for drama, but it is a matter of precise timing.” He put away the timepiece and added more soberly, “Some day they will decide to move forward, and we will not be able to stop them.”

Prefect Corin looked at Menas and said, “Perhaps you have been too close to the heretics for too long, brother.”

“This is not Ys,” Menas said. “This is the war, the real war. I do not tell lies to my soldiers, I tell them the truth. There are no lies here, no stories to comfort the general population. The heretic forces have grown stronger over the years, and in the last handful of days they have grown very bold indeed. I hear that things go badly in the marshes. I hear that our machines are failing there and I believe that the heretics could take this city whenever they wish, but instead they play a game with us. We can hold our present position as long as we cooperate with them. We must strive to match them. If not, there are horrors…”

His voice had dropped to a whisper. Pandaras shuddered, realizing that the man’s hectic energy barely concealed his terror. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his hands trembled; he thrust them in the pockets of his long, black-leather overcoat and leaned closer to Prefect Corin and whispered, “They bring back the dead.”

Prefect Corin eyed Menas with distaste. He said, “We must cross their lines. The captain of the flying platform refused me. I hope that you will not.”

Menas shrugged. “We send in scouts all the time. Sometimes they come back. Usually turned. They pass all the tests we can devise and then, a few days later, they walk into a crowded bunker and burst into flame.”

Pandaras remembered the explosion in the café moments after the young woman had run into it.

Prefect Corin said, “It is not the first time I have done this.”

“Things have changed. They turn our machines against us somehow. The mages cannot explain it, but at least their new devices are proof against heretic trickery. At least, for the time being.”

Prefect Corin nodded. “It is because things have changed that I must cross the lines.”

“There will be a scouting party going out soon, I expect. One of my staff can advise you.” Menas looked at Pandaras. “Is this boy going with you? Who is he? Is he your servant?”

“He will lead me to my prize.”

“I have my own reasons,” Pandaras said, and dodged away when Prefect Corin struck at him with his staff. “I am a seeker after truth, like my master!”

The machine on his neck stung him hard and he cried out and fell down. Two of the staff officers laughed. Pandaras picked himself up and cursed their ancestry all the way back to the slimes from which they had been mistakenly raised by the Preservers. The machine stung him again, forcing him to run after Prefect Corin and Menas, who were walking toward a glow in the distance.

Pandaras was astonished to see that it was a shrine, a big disc standing on its edge at an intersection of two broad streets. But perhaps it was not astonishing after all, for shrines were only partly of this world, and were immune to energies that would evaporate ordinary matter. Perhaps this place had once been the site of a temple which now lay in ruins on every side, with only its heart left intact.

Soldiers had gathered in front of the shrine, and the glow which beat from its disc made their faces shine and polished their prickly black resin corselets. Pandaras approached it reluctantly, remembering the woman in white who had appeared inside the shrine of the Temple of the Black Well. But as he followed Prefect Corin through the ranks of soldiers, he realized that this shrine was a fake, an enlarged version of the disc of cheap half-silvered glass which his mother had kept on a high shelf in their room. She had lit a candle behind it on holy days so that light moved within it like an echo of those avatars which, before the heretics had swept them away, had haunted certain shrines in the city. A similar trick was being played here, although the source of light was far brighter than a mere candle, and it was somehow bent and split so that circles of primary colors continually expanded from the brilliant white point at the center and seemed to ripple out into the darkening air.

Pandaras looked away, for he had the dizzy feeling that he might fall into the light and never escape. No doubt his master would have said that this was how the Preservers had felt as they had begun their infinite fall into the Eye, and would have constructed some keen analogy between the conditions required for prayer and the Preservers’ state of grace, but the play of light simply made Pandaras nauseous.

“A little invention of the mages,” Menas told Prefect Corin boastfully. “They call it an ipseorama. You do not yet have them in Ys, but the time will come soon enough. It induces a peculiar state in the nervous system of men, similar to the rapture induced by the presence of the avatars. It calms and empties the mind and prepares it for the immanence of the Preservers.”

Pandaras shaded his eyes and saw that a pentad of priests was gathered to one side of the shrine. They wore robes of shaggy pelts and were crowned with high, pointed hats. One was casting incense into a brazier of glowing coals; the others shook their hands above their heads as they prayed.

Prefect Corin told Menas in his dry, forthright manner, “I have no time for silly conjurations. At best this is a foolishness; at worst it is heresy, pure and simple.”

“It is a matter of regulating prayer,” Menas said. The light of the ipseorama flickered over his rapt face and turned each of his machines to a little star. “Regulation is important. Just as men marching in step across a bridge can find the right harmonic to shiver it to pieces, so ten thousand prayers, properly focused and synchronized, can blaze in the minds of the Preservers. How can they refuse such a plea?”

“No man should be forced to pray; such prayers are worthless.” Prefect Corin raised his staff. For a moment Pandaras thought that he would stride forward and smash the false shrine, but he merely grounded it again and said, “This is a dangerous experiment, Menas, and you will gain nothing from it.”

Menas did not seem to have heard the Prefect. He said, “Regulation of prayer is as important as regulation of firepower. By calling upon the grace of the Preservers we have survived here for more than a hundred days.” He cocked his head and drew out his timepiece again. “Listen! Ah, listen!”

The brassy sound of trumpets drifted across from the enemy lines, the noise doubling and redoubling in horrendous discords. Pandaras pressed his hands over his ears.

Menas shouted at Prefect Corin, “Sometimes they focus the sound! It can burst a man like an overripe fruit!” He signaled to one of the staff officers as the noise died away and told him, “They are two hundred twenty-eight seconds early tonight. Make a note. It may signify.”

All around, the soldiers bent in prayer as one of the priests began to declaim a praise song. Pandaras found himself mumbling the responses with the rest of the congregation. Now in the moment of our death is the moment of our rebirth into eternal life. He was very scared, convinced that his last hour was at hand, angry that he had thrown away all that he had been entrusted with, that he had so badly failed his master. How could he ever have thought that he could find Yama in the middle of this madness?

The priests began to move through the ranks of kneeling soldiers, asperging them with rose water from brass censers which they whirled about them on long chains, as indigen hunters whirl bolas around their heads before letting fly at their target.

Menas set off again, shouting that there was little time.

The party climbed a slope of rubble, leaning against a strengthening wind. The first fat drops of rain flew through the air, as hard as pistol shot. Menas bounded to the top and pointed. “There! The duel of the ironclads begins!”

Two leagues off, something was moving through the dark forest behind the enemy lines. Its passage, marked by a wave of toppling trees, was fitfully caught in overlapping searchlight beams. At first Pandaras thought that it must be a herd of megatheres, but then the machine reared up, twice as high as the tallest of the trees. It swayed forward, doubling its height again. As it came out of the forest, the focus of decads of lights, Pandaras saw that its sinuous body was supported by six cantilevered legs and counterbalanced by a long, spiked tail, like a snake carried by a scorpion. Smaller machines whirled about it, an agitated cloud of white sparks blowing back and forth like a flock of burning birds. Something glittered for a moment at the edge of Pandaras’s vision and he dashed a hand at it with no more thought than he would give a fly, watching with rapt amazement as the ironclad lumbered on.

Dense squalls of rain drove across the ruins, striking with a sudden fury and obscuring the monstrous machine. Pandaras was soaked to his pelt in an instant and he sought shelter behind a stub of stone. As he crouched there, cold and miserable and scared, he felt a warmth spreading across his chest. The coin was glowing so brightly that it shone through the worn weave of his ragged shirt. He closed his fingers around it to hide its light and whispered with sudden wild hope, “Save me, master. If ever you loved me, come and save me now.”

Prefect Corin and Menas were facing into the storm. The Prefect clasped the rim of his hat with one hand and gripped his staff with the other. The tail of his cloak blew out behind him. The terrible noise of the trumpets began again and fireworks shot up—real fireworks, bursting in white flowers beneath the low, racing clouds. Lights shone out, brilliant threads of scarlet and green that struck across the wasteland of the city and glittered on the ironclad’s hide.

Something flashed in Pandaras’s vision again. It was a little machine no bigger than a beetle, with a body of articulated cubes and delicate mica vanes which beat in a blur of golden light. It hovered for a moment, then darted forward. Pandaras slapped at the sudden pain at the side of his neck—and with amazement found that the ward Prefect Corin had fastened there was gone.

The tiny machine flew up and described a circle around Pandaras’s head. “Master,” Pandaras whispered. He was astonished and afraid. Every hair of his pelt was trying to stand away from its fellows. The coin burned inside his clenched fist. “Master, it’s you, isn’t it? Why didn’t you come before? Why did you abandon me?”

The machine’s golden glow brightened for a moment; then it flicked its vanes and was gone.

Menas whirled around as fireworks rose from his own lines and yelled into the face of one of the staff officers who crouched behind him. “There is no response from the third quarter!”

The man plucked one of his machines from the air and said, “I will signal—”

Menas clapped his hands together. Rain had plastered his black pelt to his skull. He looked ready to kill everyone around him, Pandaras thought. Not because he was angry, but because he was scared, and as desperate as only a truly scared man can be. He had put so much faith in his rituals that now they ruled him completely. Menas shouted over the howl of wind and rattle of rain, “Never mind! Together or not at all! Get over there, find the officer responsible and execute him and two of his maniple chosen at random. By the black blood of the Preservers, I will have order here! Why are you waiting, man? Time is all we have!”

The officer saluted and disappeared into rainy dark. Menas wiped rain from the pelt of his face, took a deep breath, and told Prefect Corin, “We must have order here. Order and regulation.”

“They have made you a puppet,” Prefect Corin said.

“It is a dance.” Menas lowered his voice and said, “A precisely choreographed dance on the edge of a razor blade.”

Prefect Corin made no reply. Menas glanced at his timepiece and turned back to watch the advance of the heretics’ monstrous machine. “Where is our fanfare, Golas?”

One of the staff officers grabbed a machine from the air and stuck it in his ear, then shook out a sheet of plastic; lines of script raced across it, glowing green like the river fire which sometimes burned in the water around the floating docks of Ys. He said in a high, trembling voice, “They are enabling now. Start-up sequence in five, four, three, two, one—”

Tinny trumpets squealed discords in the distance and something the size of a small hill began to move through the squalls of rain. The heretics’ ironclad doubled its pace, loping forward as eagerly as a hound scenting its prey and lashing its spiky tail from side to side. Its footsteps sounded like thunder. The stones beneath Pandaras’s rump trembled.

The second ironclad was squat and armored like a turtle. Things like flies danced on a hundred stumpy legs and pounded on along in the air above it—no, they were men riding floating discs. They slipped sideways and vanished into the darkness as the ironclads closed the distance between themselves.

They met like two mountains colliding. The heretics’ scorpion-snake sidestepped the turtle’s rush and lashed it with its armored tail. The tremendous blow slewed the turtle half-around. It stood its ground when struck a second time, and fans of metal unfolded along the edges of its shell. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion.

“The vanes are tipped with diamond,” Menas told Prefect Corin. “They vibrate, and will cut the enemy’s legs from beneath it. Watch.”

“I have seen enough,” Prefect Corin said, and extended his arm.

For a moment, a thread of light split the dark air above the ruined town. It touched the heretics’ ironclad and a ball of flame blossomed, doubling and redoubling in size. The machine broke in two. The upper part toppled forward, writhing as it fell, and smashed down across the broad back of the turtle. The ground shook and there was a noise like the hinge of the world slamming shut. Heat washed across the ruins as if a furnace door had been opened, blowing rain aside.

Then darkness. A rush of cold air swept in and the rain came back with redoubled fury. The searchlights had gone out; the last of the fireworks burst and their sparks fell and faded. And then, raggedly at first, but steadily growing, gunfire started along the fronts of the opposing armies.

Menas screamed in fury, turning to one officer after another, shouting that they must kill the traitor. He meant Prefect Corin, who held something like a polished pebble in his upturned hand. It was an energy pistol: a real one, an old one, a hundred times more powerful than the hot light pistols made in the Age of Insurrection.

The Prefect put the pistol away, said softly, “I have ended it,” and made an abrupt gesture.

The machines around Menas and his officers dropped from the air.

“Go now,” Prefect Corin said. “You are done here.” The officers walked away without a word. Menas chased after them, the wings of his black-leather overcoat flapping around him, then ran back and started hurling handfuls of mud at Prefect Corin, screaming incoherently.

Prefect Corin ignored him. He bent over Pandaras and said, “Follow me,” and walked off down the hill toward the burning machines.

Pandaras looked at Menas, who had fallen to his knees and turned his face up to the rain. “I’m sorry, master,” he said, and ran after Prefect Corin. He did not want to find a way through the battlefield on his own.

Prefect Corin walked steadily down the middle of what had been a wide avenue. Pandaras scampered along close behind him, as if his shadow was some kind of protection. White threads flicked out from the heretics’ lines and fire blossomed wherever they touched. Things moved to and fro behind flaring sources of light—things like giant insects, all jointed legs and tiny bodies. A lucky shell hit one; its body blew in a flare of greasy yellow light and then threw out a second explosion that for a moment lit the entire battlefield and turned every falling raindrop into a diamond.

Chains of little bomblets walked back and forth across the ruins; Pandaras threw himself flat when one whistled down close by and blew a fountain of earth and land-coral slivers into the air, but Prefect Corin merely kneeled, with his hand holding the brim of his hat, then got up and walked on.

Pandaras said, “Where are we going?”

“Through their lines.”

“You meant this to happen!”

“The confusion will help us.”

“Menas will lose the city.”

“We seek a greater prize, boy.” Prefect Corin stared into Pandaras’s face for a moment and said, “Yes, you know it,” and abruptly cut to the left and climbed a slope of rubble where in its dying throes a mass of coral had thrown up a glade of smooth white spikes twice Pandaras’s height, like a parade of soldiers frozen forever, or the pieces of a game of chess abandoned halfway through.

Lights flickered and flared all around, from the pinpoint flashes of rifles and carbines to the glare of energy weapons and the brief burning flowers of mortar and bomblet explosions. Soldiers were advancing through the ruins toward the heretic positions. Phalanxes of myrmidons marched in perfect formation, not even hesitating when mortar fire blew holes in their ranks. The officers who controlled them swooped overhead on floating discs. Toward the rear, armored vehicles rumbled forward in a line a league long. Amidst the thunder of explosions came the sound of trumpets, a slow drumbeat, and the screams of men and beasts. Pandaras’s fear grew as he watched Prefect Corin scanning the battlefield with what appeared to be perfect self-control, satisfied by the carnage and confusion he had caused by a single shot. And then Pandaras saw something which gave him a small measure of hope. High above, in the distance, a small golden spark hung beneath the racing rain clouds.

“Come to me, master,” Pandaras whispered. “Save me.” But the spark did not move. Perhaps it was afraid that Prefect Corin would knock it out of the air if it came too close.

Prefect Corin pointed with his staff at some weakness in the heretics’ line, then saw that Pandaras was not looking at him. He came over and squatted down and said, almost kindly, “We will walk straight through this. We count for nothing in the battle, and so we will be safe. Do you understand me?”

“I know that you are mad.”

“No. All this around us is madness, certainly. And Menas is mad, too—he has to be mad to be able to function at all—but I am quite sane. If you wish to survive, you must follow me.”

“If we wait here, then the heretics will come to us.”

“It is not the heretics we are seeking.” Prefect Corin’s hand suddenly shot out and gripped the side of Pandaras’s neck. “He was here. Do not deny it. I know that he was here because he has taken away the ward.”

Pandaras shook his head a fraction. He wanted to look up, to appeal to that golden spark, but to do so would be to betray his master. Instead he stared straight into Prefect Corin’s black eyes as the man’s grip tightened on his neck.

“You will tell me,” Prefect Corin said. “By the Preservers you will tell me or I will squeeze out your miserable life…” He had lifted his other hand above his head. Now he lowered it, and let go of Pandaras’s neck. He said, “I know that he was here. You could not have removed the ward by yourself. Think hard about whether you want to survive this, boy. If you tell me how Yamamanama removed the ward it might be possible. We both want the same thing. We both want to rescue him.”

Pandaras rubbed his bruised neck. He said, “I believe that we have different ideas about my master’s fate.”

Prefect Corin drew a length of cord from his tunic and tied one loop around Pandaras’s wrist and another around his own. “We are joined,” he said. “For better or worse we are joined hand to hand, fate to fate. Let nothing put us asunder.” He stood up, jerking hard on the cord so that Pandaras was forced to rise too. “There are threads of plastic through the cord,” Prefect Corin said. “They can dull the keenest blade, and they have a certain low intelligence. Try to tamper with the knot and it will tighten its grip, and by and by cut off your hand.”

The cord which hung between them was no longer than the Prefect’s arm. It would have to be enough. Pandaras turned right when the Prefect turned left, threw himself around a smooth spike of land coral so that the cord was stretched across it, and shouted into the rainy dark. “Now, Yama! If you have ever loved me! Now!”

The spike shuddered and Pandaras fell backward. He picked himself up at once. The cord hung from his wrist. It had been cut in half. Something with a dying golden glow was buried in a splintered crater in the land coral. Prefect Corin was bent over, his right hand pressed to his left eye. Blood ran down his cheek and dripped from the point of his jaw.

Pandaras took to his heels. He heard Prefect Corin shouting behind him, but did not look back. He turned right and left at random through the maze of land-coral spikes, always choosing the narrowest path. The land coral had spread through the rubble downslope, forming a maze of arches and tunnels and caves. Pandaras scrambled down a narrowing funnel of rough stone, splashed through a bubble half full of stinking water, slid down a chute of stone slick as soap, and landed breathlessly at the edge of a road.

All around was the sound of giants walking the land. Flashes lit the underbellies of the sagging clouds. A big machine covered in spines skittered by in the distance. Whips of light flicked from its tiny head and raised pillars of fire and smoke wherever they touched. Pandaras picked himself up and ran on. He did not doubt that Prefect Corin would do everything in his power to find him.

There was a slow and steady drumbeat ahead, the crack and whir and whistle of rifle pellets and arbalest bolts all around. Suddenly soldiers were running down the road toward Pandaras. He raised his hands above his head, feeling as broad and wide as a house. But the soldiers were running full-tilt in retreat and went straight past him. One, his dirty yellow face narrow as a knife blade, turned and yelled, “The dead! The dead!” and then they were gone.

Pandaras stopped. He was at a crossroads. Rubble slumped at its four corners. Rain poured down out of a black sky, intermittently lit by white and red and green threads of light. The slow, muffled drumbeat was coming closer. He could not tell where it was and chose a direction at random and ran. Prefect Corin had taken his poniard; Pandaras missed it like a lost arm. The Prefect had the copy of the Puranas, too. All Pandaras had left was the fetish which the leader of the fisherfolk had given Yama, the ceramic coin, and his life.

Something flashed overhead and hit the long street ahead. Pandaras stopped, heartsick.

Far down the street, a column of naked men was marching stiffly in time to the slow, steady beat of a drum. Most of the men were horribly mutilated. Silvery spikes jutted from the tops of their skulls. One was headless, and the spike jutted from his breastbone instead.

It was a maniple of the dead, come back to fight their living comrades.

A sudden blade of fire blew a land-coral formation to fiery ruin to the left flank of the column. Some brave gunner was trying to find the range. A handful of the naked dead fell and were trampled by their unheeding companions. Pandaras ran to the right. He scrambled over the crest of a slope and tumbled into a sandbagged pit where two soldiers stared at him in horror. One swung the bell-like muzzle of his balister toward Pandaras, and then there was a wave of earth and fire which tore the world away.