Yama drank and passed the bottle to Pandaras, who was cracking coney bones between his sharp teeth.
“Drink,” Tamora said. “We fought a great battle today.”
Pandaras spat a bit of gristle into the fire. He had already made it clear how unhappy he was to be in the Fierce People’s tract of wild country, and he sat with his kidney puncher laid across his lap and his mobile ears pricked. He said, “I’d rather keep my wits about me.”
Tamora. laughed. “No one would mistake you for a coney. You’re about the right size, but you can’t run fast enough to make the hunt interesting.”
Pandaras took the smallest possible sip from the brandy bottle and passed it back to Yama. He told Tamora, “You certainly ran when the soldiers came.”
“Grah. I was trying to catch up with you to make sure you went the right way.”
“Enough stuff to set a man up for life,” Pandaras said, “and we had to leave it for the city militia to loot.”
“I’m a cateran, not a robber. We have done what we contracted to do. Be happy.” Tamora grinned. Her pink tongue lolled amongst her big, sharp teeth. “Eat burnt bones. Drink. Sleep. We are safe here, and tomorrow we are paid.”
Yama realized that she was drunk. The bottle of brandy had been the smallest he could buy, but it was still big enough, as Pandaras put it, to drown a baby. They had needed only a few minims to fill the crystal flask, and Tamora had drunk about half of what was left.
“Safe?” Pandaras retorted. “In the middle of any number of packs of bloodthirsty howlers like you? I won’t sleep at all tonight.”
“I will sing a great song of our triumph, and you will listen. Pass that bottle, Yama. It is not your child.”
Yama took a burning swallow of brandy, handed the bottle over, and walked out of the firelight to the crest of the ridge.
The sandy hills where the Fierce People maintained their hunting grounds looked out across the wide basin of the city toward the Great River. The misty light of the Arm of the Warrior was rising above the far-side horizon. It was past midnight. The city was mostly dark, but many campfires flickered amongst the scrub and clumps of crown ferns, pines and eucalyptus of the Fierce People’s hunting grounds, and from every quarter came the sound of distant voices raised in song.
Yama sat on the dry grass and listened to the night music of the Fierce People. The feral machine still haunted him, like a ringing in the ears or the afterimage of a searingly bright light. And beyond this psychic echo he could feel the ebb and flow of the myriad machines in the city, like the flexing of a great net. They had also been disturbed by the feral machine, and the ripples of alarm caused by the disturbance were still spreading, leaping from cluster to cluster of machines along the docks, running out toward the vast bulk of the Palace of the Memory of the People, clashing at the bases of the high towers and racing up their lengths out of the atmosphere.
Yama still did not know how he had called down the feral machine, and although it had saved him he feared that he might call it again by accident, and feared too that he had exposed himself to discovery by the network of machines which served the magistrates, or by Prefect Corin, who must surely still be searching for him. The descent of the feral machine was the most terrifying and the most shameful of his adventures. He had been paralyzed with fear when confronted with it, and even now he felt that it had marked him in some obscure way, for some small part of him yearned for it, and what it could tell him. It could be watching him still; it could return at any time, and he did not know what he would do if it did.
The merchant—Yama still found it difficult to think of him as the parasitic bundle of nerve fibers burrowed deep within that tremendously fat body—had said that he was a Builder, a member of the first bloodline of Ys. The pilot of the voidship had said something similar, and the slate that Beatrice and Osric had shown him had suggested the same thing. His people had walked Confluence in its first days, sculpting the world under the direct instruction of the Preservers, and had died out or ascended ages past, so long ago that most had forgotten them. And yet he was here, and he still did not know why; nor did he know the full extent of his powers.
The merchant had hinted that he knew what Yama was capable of, but he might have been lying to serve his own ends, and besides, he was dead. Perhaps the other star-sailors knew—Iachimo had said that they were very long-lived—or perhaps, as Yama had hoped even before he had set out from Aeolis, there were records somewhere in Ys that would explain everything, or at least lead him to others of his kind.
He still did not know how he had been brought into the world, or why he had been found floating on the river on the breast of a dead woman who might have been his mother or nurse or something else entirely, but surely he had been born to serve the Preservers in some fashion. After the Preservers had fallen into the event horizon of the Eye, they could still watch the world they had made, for nothing fell faster than light, but they could no longer act upon it. But perhaps their reach was long—perhaps they had ordained his birth, here in what the merchant had called the end times, long before they had withdrawn from the Universe. Perhaps, as Derev believed, many of Yama’s kind now walked the world, as they had at its beginning. But for what purpose? All through his childhood he had prayed for a revelation, a sign, a hint, and had received nothing. Perhaps he should expect nothing else.
Perhaps the shape of his life was the tip he sought, if only he could understand it.
But he could not believe he was the servant of the feral machines. That was the worst thought of all.
Yama sat on a hummock of dry grass, with the noise of crickets everywhere in the darkness around him, and leafed through his copy of the Puranas. The book had dried out well, although one corner of its front cover was faintly but indelibly stained with the merchant’s blood. The pages held a faint light, and the glyphs stood out like shadows against this soft effulgence. Yama found the sura which Iachimo had quoted, and read it from beginning to end.
The world first showed itself as a golden embryo of sound. As soon as the thoughts of the Preservers turned to the creation of the world, the long vowel which described the form of the world vibrated in the pure realm of thought, and re-echoed on itself. From the knots in the play of vibrations, the crude matter of the world curdled. In the beginning, it was no more than a sphere of air and water with a little mud at the center.
And the Preservers raised up a man and set on his brow their mark, and raised up a woman of the same kind, and set on her brow the same mark. From the white clay of the middle region did they shape this race, and quickened them with their marks. And those of this race were the servants of the Preservers. And in their myriads this race shaped the world after the ideas of the Preservers.
Yama read on, although the next sura was merely an exhaustive description of the dimensions and composition of the world, and he knew that there was no other mention of the Builders, nor of their fate. This was toward the end of the Puranas. The world and everything in it was an afterthought at the end of the history of the Galaxy, created in the last moment before the Preservers fell into the Eye and were known no more in the Universe. Nothing had been written about the ten thousand bloodlines of Confluence in the Puranas; if there had been, then there would have never been a beginning to the endless disputations amongst priests and philosophers about the reason for the world’s creation.