“My ship hailed theirs, as it fell through the void toward the Eye of the Preservers. They had seen the Eye’s construction by ancient light while hundreds of thousands of years out, and were amazed to discover that organic intelligent life still existed. We merged our mindscapes and talked long there, and I followed them out into the world. And here I am. It is remarkably easy to make a fortune in these benighted times, but I’m finding that merely satisfying sensual appetites is not enough. If you’re truly a Builder, and I am not quite convinced that you are, then perhaps you can help me. I have plans.”
“I believe that I am no man’s servant. I cannot serve you as Iachimo did.”
The merchant laughed. “I would hope not. You will have to unlearn your arrogance to begin with; then I will see what I can make of you. I can teach you many things, boy. I can realize your potential. There are many like Iachimo in the world, intelligent and learned and quite without the daring to act on their convictions. There is no end to natural followers like him. You are something more. I must think hard about it, and so will you. But you will serve, or you will die, and so will your friends.”
The twisting scarves of color in the light sculpture ran together into a steely gray and widened into a kind of window, showing Tamora and Pandaras kneeling inside tiny cages suspended in dark air.
For a moment, Yama’s breath caught in his throat. He said, “Let them go, and I will serve you as I can.”
The merchant shifted his immense oiled bulk. “I think not. I’ll give you a taste of their fate while I decide how I can make use of you. When you can make that promise from your heart, then we can talk again.”
The two guards turned toward Yama, who stared in sudden panic into their blank, blind faces. His panic inflated into something immense, a great wild bird he had loosed, its wings beating at the edges of his sight. In desperation, quite without hope, his mind threw out an immense imploring scream for help.
The merchant pawed at his head and far down the room something struck the glass ceiling with a tremendous bang.
For a moment, all was still. Then a line of spray sheeted down, and the glass around it gave with a loud splintering crash. The spray became a widening waterfall that poured down and rebounded from the floor and sent a tawny wave flooding down the length of the room, knocking over pillars and statues and sweeping tables and couches before it.
The merchant’s couch lurched into the air. The woman gave a guttural cry of alarm, and clung to her master’s flesh as a shipwrecked sailor clings to a bit of flotsam. Yama dashed forward through surging water (for a moment, Iachimo’s corpse clutched at his ankles; then it was swept away), made a desperate leap and caught hold of one end of the rising couch. His weight rocked it on its long axis, so violently that for one moment he hung straight down, the next tipped forward and fell across the merchant’s legs.
The merchant roared and his woman clawed at Yama with sudden fury, her long nails opening his forehead so that blood poured into his eyes. The couch turned in a dizzy circle above the guards as they struggled to stay upright in the seething flood. The merchant caught at Yama’s hands, but his grasp was feeble, and Yama, half-blinded, grabbed the golden circlet around the man’s fleshy scalp and pulled with all his strength.
For a moment, he feared that the circlet would not give way. Then it snapped in half and unraveled like a ribbon.
All the lights went out. The couch tipped and Yama and the merchant and the woman fell into the wash of the flood.
Yama went under and got a mouthful of muddy water and came up spitting and gasping.
The guards had fallen; so had all the machines.
Yama asked a question, and after a moment points of intense white light flared down the length of the room, burning through the swirling brown flood. Yama wiped blood from his eyes. The current swirled around his waist. He was clutching a tangle of golden filaments tipped with stringy fragments of flesh.
At the far end of the huge room, something floated a handspan above the water, turning slowly end for end. It was as big as Yama’s head, and black, and decorated all over with spikes of varying lengths and thickness, some like rose thorns, others long and finely tapered and questing this way and that with blind intelligence. The thing radiated a black icy menace, a negation not only of life, but of the reality of the world. For a moment, Yama was transfixed; then the machine rose straight up, smashing through the ceiling. Yama felt it rise higher and higher, and for a moment felt all the machines in Ys turn toward it—but it was gone.
The merchant sprawled across the fallen couch like a beached grampus. A ragged wound crowned his head, streaming blood; he snorted a jelly of blood and mucus through his nose. The woman lay beneath him, entirely submerged. Her head was twisted back, and her eyes looked up through the swirling water. Up and down the length of the room, the guards were dead, too.
Yama held the frayed remnants of the circlet before the merchant’s eyes, and said, “Iachimo told me about this with his last breath, but I had already guessed its secret. I saw something like it on the lighter.”
“The Preservers have gone away,” the merchant whispered.
The floodwaters were receding, running away into deeper levels of the sunken house. Yama knelt by the couch and said, “Why am I here?”
The merchant drew a breath. Blood ran from his nostrils and his mouth. He said wetly, “Serve no one.”
“If the Preservers are gone, why was I brought back?”
The merchant tried to say something, but only blew a bubble of blood. Yama left him there and went to find Tamora and Pandaras.
Chapter Twenty-One
The Fierce People
Tamora came back to the campfire at a loping run. She was grinning broadly and there was blood around her mouth. She threw a brace of coneys at Yama’s feet and said proudly, “This is how we live, when we can. We are the Fierce People, the Memsh Tek!”
Pandaras said, “Not all of us can live on meat alone.”
“Your kind have to exist on leaves and the filth swept into street gutters,” Tamora said, “and that is why they are so weak. Meat and blood are what warriors need, so be glad that I give you fine fresh guts. They will make you strong.”
She slit the bellies of the conies with her sharp thumbnail, crammed the steaming, rich red livers into her mouth and gulped them down. Then she pulled the furry skins from the gutted bodies, as someone might strip gloves from their hands, and set about dismembering them with teeth and nails.
She had attacked the merchant’s carcass with the same butcher’s skill, using a falchion taken from one of the dead guards to fillet it from neck to buttocks and expose the thing which had burrowed into the fatty flesh like a hagfish. It was not much like the bottled creature Yama had seen on the lighter. Its mantle was shrunken, and white fibers had knitted around its host’s spinal column like cords of fungus in rotten wood.
Tamora kept most of the coney meat for herself and ate it raw, but she allowed Yama and Pandaras to cook the haunches over the embers of the fire. The unsalted meat was half-burned and half-raw, but Yama and Pandaras hungrily stripped it from the bones.
“Burnt meat is bad for the digestion,” Tamora said, grinning at them across the embers of the fire. She wore only her leather skirt. Her two pairs of breasts were little more than enlarged nipples, like tarnished coins set on her narrow ribcage. In addition to the bird burning in a nest of fire on her upper arm, inverted triangles were tattooed in black ink on her shoulders. There was a bandage around her waist; she had been seared by backflash from a guard’s pistol shot. She took a swallow of brandy and passed the bottle to Yama. He had bought the brandy in a bottleshop and used a little to preserve the filaments Tamora had filleted from the merchant’s body and placed in a beautiful miniature flask, cut from a single crystal of rose quartz, which Yama had found in the wreckage left by the flood when he had been searching for his copy of the Puranas.