Suddenly, the room brightened: white light flashed beyond the lake which hung above the long room. Rafts of water-lily pads swung wildly on clashing waves and there was a deep, heavy muffled sound, as if a massive door had slammed in the keel of the world.
The merchant said, “No hope there, boy. You put some of my guards to sleep, but they’re all under my control again, and almost have your two friends. Iachimo, you did not say that one of them was a cateran.”
“There was another boy, master. I knew of no other.”
The merchant closed his eyes. For a moment, Yama felt that a thousand intelligences lived in his head. Then the feeling was gone and the merchant said, “She has killed several guards, but one caught a glimpse of her. She’s of the Fierce People, and she’s armed with one of the gatekeeper’s pistols.”
“There are still many guards, master, and many machines. Besides, the lake will absorb any blast from the pistol.”
The merchant pulled the woman close to him. “He’s an assassin’s tool, you idiot! Why else would a cateran come here? You know I have been expecting this ever since my old ship returned through the manifold.”
“There was the man who broke into the godown,” Iachimo said, “but we dealt with him easily enough.”
“It was just the beginning. They won’t rest—”
There was another flash of white light. A portion of water above the glass ceiling seethed into a spreading cloud of white bubbles, and the glass rang like a cracked bell. The merchant closed his eyes briefly, then relaxed and drew the naked woman closer. “Well, it doesn’t matter now. There’s a weapon in his satchel, Iachimo. Take it out and give it to me.”
The white-haired man lifted out the sheathed knife and said, “It is only a knife, master.”
“I know what it is. Bring it here.”
Iachimo offered the sheathed knife, hilt-first. Yama implored it to manifest the horrible shape which had frightened Lob and the landlord of The Crossed Axes, but he was at the center of a vast muffling silence. The merchant squinted at the knife’s goatskin sheath, and then the woman drew it and plunged it into Iachimo’s belly.
Iachimo grunted and fell to his knees. The knife flashed blue fire and the woman screamed and dropped it and clutched her smoking hand. The knife embedded itself point-first in the grass, sizzling faintly and emitting a drizzle of fat blue motes. Iachimo was holding his belly with both hands.
There was blood all over his fingers and the front of his black tunic.
The merchant looked at the woman and she fell silent in mid-scream. He said to Yama, “So die all those who think to betray me. Now, boy, you’ll answer all my questions truthfully, or you’ll join your two friends. Yes, they have been captured. Not dead, not yet. We’ll talk, you and I, and decide their fate.”
Iachimo, kneeling over the knife and a pool of his own blood, said something about a circle, and then the guards seized him and jerked him upright and cut his throat and lifted him away from the merchant, all in one quick motion.
They dropped the body onto the neatly trimmed grass beneath the light sculpture and returned to their position behind the merchant’s couch.
“You’re trouble, boy,” the merchant said. The woman tremblingly placed the mouthpiece of a clay pipe between his rosebud lips and lit the scrap of resin in its bowl. He drew a long breath and said, dribbling smoke with the words, “Your people were the first. The rest came later, but you were the first. I had never thought to see your kind again, but this is an age of wonders. Listen to me, boy, or I’ll have you killed too. You see how easy it is.”
Yama was holding the wine goblet so tightly that he had reopened the wound in his palm. He threw it away and said as boldly as he could, “Will you spare my friends?”
“They came to kill me, didn’t they? Sent by my crewmates, who are jealous of me.”
Yama could not deny it. He stared in stubborn silence at the merchant, who calmly drew on his pipe and contemplated the wreaths of smoke he breathed out. At last, the merchant said, “The woman is a cateran, and their loyalty is easily bought. I might have a use for her. The boy is no different from a million other river-rats in Ys. I could kill him and it would be as if he had never been born. I see that you want him to live. You are very sentimental. Well then. You must prove your worth to me, and perhaps the boy will live. Do you know exactly what you are?”
Yama said, “You say that I am of the bloodline of the Builders, and I have seen an ancient picture showing one of my kind before the world was made. But I also have been told that I might be a child of the Ancients of Days.”
“Hmm. It’s possible they had something to do with it. In their brief time here they meddled in much that didn’t concern them. They didn’t achieve anything of consequence, of course. For all that they might have appeared as gods to the degenerate population of Confluence, they predated the Preservers by several million years. Their kind were the ancestors of the Preservers, but with about as much relation to them as the brainless plankton grazers which were the ancestors of my own bloodline have to me. It is only because the Ancients of Days were time-shifted while traveling to our neighboring galaxy and back at close to the speed of light that they appeared so late, like an actor delayed by circumstance who incontinently rushes on stage to deliver his lines and finds that he has interrupted the closing soliloquy instead of beginning the second act. We are in the end times, young builder. This whole grand glorious foolish experiment has all but run its course. The silly little war downriver begun by the Ancients of Days is only a footnote.”
The merchant seemed exhausted by this speech, and drank more wine before he continued. “Do you know, I haven’t thought about this for a long time. Iachimo was a very clever man, but not a brave one. He was doomed to a servant’s role, and resented it. I thought at first you were some scheme of his, and I haven’t fully dismissed the thought from my mind. I do not believe that it was through simple carelessness that he allowed the cateran to roam free, or that you were allowed to carry a knife into my presence.”
“I have never seen him before tonight. I am not the servant of any man.”
The merchant said, “Don’t be a fool. Like most here, your bloodline was created as servants to the immediate will of the Preservers.”
“We all serve the Preservers as we can,” Yama said.
“You’ve been in the hands of a priest,” the merchant said. His gaze was shrewd. “You parrot his pious phrases, but do you really believe them?”
Yama could not answer. His faith was never something he had questioned, but now he saw that by disobeying the wishes of his father he had rebelled against his place in the social hierarchy, and had not that hierarchy proceeded from the Preservers? So the priests taught, but now Yama was unsure. For the priests also taught that the Preservers wanted their creations to advance from a low to a high condition, and how could that happen if society was fixed, eternal and unchanging?
The merchant belched. “You are just a curiosity, boy. A revenant. An afterthought or an accident—it’s all the same. But you might be useful, even so. You and I might do great things together. You asked why I am here. It is because I have remembered what all others of my kind have long forgotten. They are lost in ascetic contemplation of the mathematics of the manifolds and the secrets of the beginning and end of the cosmos, but I have remembered the pleasures of the real world, of appetite and sex and all the rest of the messy wonderful business of life. They would say that mathematics is the reality underlying everything; I say that it is an abstraction of the real world, a ghost.” He belched again. “There is my riposte to algebra.”
Yama made a wild intuitive leap. He said, “You met the Ancients of Days, didn’t you?”