The guard was groping for the circlet on his head. Yama said quickly, “No! I want you to tell me how you know my bloodline!”
The guard’s head jerked around. “We thought you all dead,” he said, and pulled the circlet from his scalp.
He fell to his knees and retched up a mouthful of yellow bile which was absorbed by the black floor, then got to his feet and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his tunic. He said in his own voice, “Was it agreed?”
Tamora said, “You’ll make the contract, and we put our thumbs to it.”
“Outside,” the guard said.
Yama said, “He knew who I was! I must talk with him!”
The guard got between Yama and the bottled star-sailor.
He said, “Perhaps when you return.”
“We should get started straightaway,” Tamora said. “It’s a long haul to the estate.”
The door ground open. Yama looked at the star-sailor in its bottle, and said, “I will return, and with many questions.”
Chapter Nineteen
Iachimo
When the giant guard went past the other side of the gate for the third time, Tamora said, “Every four hundred heartbeats. You could boil an egg by him.”
She lay beside Yama and Pandaras under a clump of thorny bushes in the shadows beyond the fierce white glare of a battery of electric-arc lamps that crackled at the top of the wall. The gate was a square lattice of steel bars set in a high wall of fused rock, polished as smoothly as black glass. The wall stretched away into the darkness on either side, separated from the dry scrub by a wide swathe of barren sandy soil.
Yama said, “I still think we should go over the wall somewhere else. The rest of the perimeter cannot be as heavily guarded as the gate.”
“The gate is heavily guarded because it’s the weakest part of the wall,” Tamora said. “That’s why we’re going in through it. The guard is a man. Doesn’t look it, but he is. He decides who to let in and who to keep out. Elsewhere, the guards will be machines or dogs. They’ll kill without thinking and do it so quick you won’t know it until you find yourself in the hands of the Preservers. Listen. After the guard goes past again, I’ll climb the wall, kill him, and open the gates to let you in.”
“If he raises the alarm—”
“He won’t have time for that,” Tamora said, and showed her teeth.
“Those won’t do any good against armor,” Pandaras said.
“They’ll snap off your head if you don’t swallow your tongue. Be quiet. This is warrior work.”
They were all tired and on edge. It had been a long journey from the waterfront. Although they had traveled most of the distance in a public calash, they had had to walk the final three leagues. The merchant’s estate was at the top of one of a straggling range of hills that, linked by steep scrub-covered ridges, rose like worn teeth at the edge of the city’s wide basin. An age ago, the hills had been part of the city. As Yama, Tamora and Pandaras had climbed through dry, fragrant pine woods, they had stumbled upon an ancient paved street and the remains of the buildings which had once lined it They had rested there until just after sunset. Yama and Pandaras had eaten the raisin cakes they had bought hours before, while Tamora had prowled impatiently amongst the ruins, wolfing strips of dried meat and snicking off the fluffy seeding heads of fireweed with her rapier.
The merchant who owned the estate was a star-sailor who had jumped ship the last time it had lain off the edge of Confluence, over forty years ago. He had amassed his wealth by surreptitious deployment of technologies whose use was forbidden outside the voidships. For that alone, quite apart from the crime of desertion, he had been sentenced to death by his crewmates, but they had no jurisdiction outside their ship and, because of the same laws which the merchant had violated, could not use their powers to capture him.
Tamora was the second cateran hired to carry out the sentence. The first had not returned, and was presumed to have been killed by the merchant’s guards. Yama thought that this put them at a disadvantage, since the merchant would be expecting another attack, but Tamora said it made no difference.
“He has been expecting this ever since his old ship returned. That’s why he has retreated to this estate, which has better defenses than the compound he maintains in the city. We’re lucky there aren’t patrols outside the walls.”
In fact, Yama had already asked several machines to ignore them as they had toiled up the hill through the pine woods, but he did not point this out. There was an advantage in being able to do something no one suspected was possible.
He already owed his life to this ability, and it was to his benefit to have Tamora believe that he had killed the cateran by force of arms rather than by lucky sleight of hand.
Now, crouched between Tamora and Pandaras in the dry brush, Yama could faintly sense other machines beyond the high black wall, but they were too far away to count, let alone influence. He was dry-mouthed, and his hands had a persistent uncontrollable tremor. All his adventures with Telmon had been childhood games without risk, inadequate preparation for the real thing. His suggestion to try another part of the wall was made as much from the need to delay the inevitable as to present an alternative strategy.
Pandaras said, “I have an idea. Master, lend me your satchel, and that book you were reading.”
Tamora said fiercely, “Do as I say. No more, no less.”
“I can have the guard open the gates for me,” Pandaras said. “Or would you rather break your teeth on steel bars?”
“If you insist that we have to go through the gate,” Yama told Tamora, as he emptied out his satchel, “at least we should listen to his idea.”
“Grah. Insist? I tell you what to do, and you do it. This is not a democracy. Wait!”
But Pandaras stood up and, with Yama’s satchel slung around his neck, stepped out into the middle of the asphalt road which ran through the gateway. Tamora hissed in frustration as the boy walked into the glare of the arc lights, and Yama told her, “He is cleverer than you think.”
“He’ll be dead in a moment, clever or not.”
Pandaras banged on the gate. A bell trilled in the distance and dogs barked closer at hand. Yama said, “Did you know there were dogs?”
“Grah. Dogs are nothing. It is easy to kill dogs.”
Yama was not so sure. Any one of the watchdogs of the peel-house could bring down an ox by clamping its powerful jaws on the windpipe of its victim and strangling it—and to judge by the volume and ferocity of the barking there were at least a dozen dogs beyond the gate.
The guard appeared on the other side of the gate in his augmented armor, painted scarlet as if dipped in fresh blood, he was more than twice Pandaras’s height. His eyes were red embers that glowed in the shadow beneath the bill of his flared helmet. Energy pistols mounted on his shoulders trained their muzzles on Pandaras and the guard’s amplified bass voice boomed and echoed in the gateway.
Pandaras stood his ground. He held up the satchel and opened it and showed it to the guard, then took out the book and flipped through its pages in an exaggerated pantomime.
The guard reached through the gate’s steel lattice, his arm extending more than a man’s arm should reach, but Pandaras danced backward and put the book back in the satchel and folded his arms and shook his head from side to side.
The guard conferred with himself in a booming mutter of subsonics; then the red dots of his eyes brightened and a bar of intense red light swept up and down Pandaras. The red light winked out and with a clang the gate sprang open a fraction. Pandaras slipped through the gap. The gate slammed shut behind him and he followed the monstrously tall guard into the shadows beyond.