“There might be other things down there,” Pandaras said. “Bats, for instance. I have a particular loathing of bats.”
Yama said, “I should have thrown a coin. I might have heard it hit.”
But a small part of his mind insisted that the fruit was still falling through black air toward the bottom, two leagues or more to the keel. He and Pandaras walked around the well, but apart from the smoking joss sticks there was no sign that Tamora or anyone else had been there recently, and the hushed air was beginning to feel oppressive, as if it held a note endlessly drawn out just beyond the range of hearing.
Pandaras said, “We should go on, master. She isn’t here.” He added hopefully, “Perhaps she has run off and left us.”
“She made a contract with me. I should think that is a serious thing for someone who lives from one job to the next. We will wait a little longer.” He took out the paper and read it again. “’The man you want—’ I wonder what she meant.”
“It’ll be dark soon.”
Yama smiled, and said, “I believe that you are scared of this place.”
“You might not believe in ghosts, master, but there are many who do—most of the people in the city, I reckon.”
“I might have more cause to believe in ghosts, because I was brought up in the middle of the City of the Dead, but I do not. Just because a lot of people believe in ghosts does not make them real. I might believe that the Preservers have incarnated themselves in river turtles, and I might persuade a million people to believe it, too, but that does not make it true.”
“You shouldn’t make jokes like that,” Pandaras said. “Especially not here.”
“Surely the Preservers will forgive a small joke.”
“There’s many who would take offense on their account,” Pandaras said stubbornly. He had a deep streak of superstition, despite his worldly-wise air. Yama had seen the care with which he washed himself in a ritual pattern after eating and upon waking, the way he crossed his fingers when walking past a shrine—a superstition he shared with the citizens of Aeolis, who believed that it disguised the fact that you had come to a shrine without an offering—and his devotion at prayer. Like the Amnan, who could not or would not read the Puranas and so only knew them secondhand through the preaching of priests and iconoclasts. Pandaras and the countless millions of ordinary folk of Ys believed that the Preservers had undergone a transubstantiation, disappearing not into the Eye but dispersing themselves into every particle of the world which they had made, so that they were everywhere at once, immortal, invisible and, despite their limitless power, quick to judge and requiring constant placation. It was not surprising, then, that Pandaras believed in ghosts and other revenants.
Pandaras said, “Ghosts are more like ideas than you might think. The more people believe in them, the more powerful they become. Listen! What was that?”
“I heard nothing,” Yama said, but even as he said it there was a faint brief rumble, as if the temple, with all its massy stones, had briefly stirred and then settled again. It seemed to come from the well, and Yama leaned over and peered into its depths. The wind which blew out of the darkness seemed to be blowing a little more strongly, and it held a faint tang, like heated metal.
“Come away,” Pandaras pleaded uneasily. He was shifting his weight from foot to foot, as if ready to run.
“We will look in the apses. If anything was going to happen, Pandaras, it would have happened by now.”
“If it does happen, it’ll be all the worse for waiting.”
“You go left and I will go right, and if we find nothing I promise we will go straight out of this place.”
“I’ll come with you, master, if you don’t mind. I’ve no liking for being left alone in this hecatomb.”
The archway which led into the apse to the right of the well was curtained by falls of fine black plastic mesh. Beyond was a high square space lit by shafts of dim light striking through knotholes that pierced the thick walls just beneath the vaulted roof. There was a shrine set in the center of the space, a glossy black circle like a giant’s coin or eyeglass stood on its side.
Statues three times the height of a man stood in recesses all around the four walls, although they were not statues of men, and nor were they carved from stone, but were made of the same slick, translucent stuff as ancient armor. Yama could dimly see shapes and catenaries inside their chests and limbs.
Pandaras went up to a statue and knocked his knuckles against its shin: it rang with a dull note. “There’s a story that these things fought against the Insurrectionists.”
“More likely they were made in the likeness of great generals,” Yama said, looking up at their grim visages.
“Don’t worry,” a woman’s voice said. “They’ve been asleep so long they’ve forgotten how to wake.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
The Woman in White
Yama turned, and streamers of blazing white light suddenly raced through the shrine’s black disc. He raised an arm to shade his eyes, but the white light had already faded into a swirling play of soft colors.
Pandaras’s clenched paw fluttered under his open mouth. He said, “Master, this is some horrid trick.”
Cautiously, Yama stepped through polychromatic light and touched the shrine’s slick, cold surface. He was possessed by the mad idea that he could slip into it as easily as slipping into the cool water of the river.
Like a reflection, a hand rose through swirling colors to meet his own. For a moment he thought that he felt its touch, like a glove slipping around his skin, and he recoiled in shock.
Laughter, like the chiming of small silver bells. Streaks and swirls and dabs of a hundred colors collapsed into themselves, and a woman was framed in the disc of the shrine.
Pandaras shouted and ran, flinging himself in a furious panic through the black mesh curtains which divided the apse from the main part of the temple.
Yama knelt before the shrine, fearful and amazed. “Lady . . . what do you want from me?”
“Oh do get up. I can’t talk to the top of your head.”
Yama obeyed. He supposed that the woman was one of the avatars of the Preservers, who, as was written in the Puranas, stood between the quotidian world and the glory of their masters, facing both ways at once. She was tall and slender, with a commanding, imperious gaze, and wore a white one-piece garment which clung to her limbs and body.
Her skin was the color of newly forged bronze, and her long black hair was caught in a kind of net at her right shoulder.
A green garden receded behind her: smooth lawns and a maze of high, trimmed hedges. A stone fountain sent a muscular jet of water high into the sunlit air.
“Who are you, domina? Do you live in this shrine?”
“I don’t know where I live, these days. I’m scattered, I suppose you could say. But this is one of the places where I can look out at the world. It’s like a window. You live in a house made of rooms. Where I live is mostly windows, looking out to different places. You drew me to this window and I looked out and found you.”
“Drew you? Domina, I did not mean to.”
“You wear the key around your neck. You have discovered that, at least.”
Yama lifted out the coin which hung on the thong around his neck, the coin which the anchorite had given him the spring night when Dr. Dismas had returned to Ys, and everything had changed. Yama had gone out to hunt frogs, and caught something far stranger. The coin was warm, but perhaps only because it had lain next to his skin.
The woman in the shrine said, “It works by light, and briefly talked with this transceiver. I heard it, and came here. Don’t be afraid. Do you like where I live?”