It was the Aedile’s hope that Dr. Dismas had discovered the truth about the bloodline of his adopted son, but he did not trust the man, and was troubled by speculations about the ways in which Dr. Dismas might misuse his findings. It was Dr. Dismas, after all, who had proposed that he take the opportunity offered by his summons to Ys to undertake research into the matter of Yama’s lineage. That this trip had been forced upon Dr. Dismas by his department, and had been entirely funded from the Aedile’s purse, would not reduce by one iota the obligation which Dr. Dismas would surely expect the Aedile to express.
Dr. Dismas disappeared behind the tipped white cube of one of the empty tombs which were scattered beneath the brow of the hill like beads flung from a broken necklace—tombs of the dissolute time after the Age of Insurrection and the last to be built in the City of the Dead, simple boxes set at the edge of the low, rolling hills, crowded with monuments, tombs and statues of the ancient necropolis. Presently, Dr. Dismas reappeared almost at the Aedile’s feet and labored up the last hundred paces of the steep, rough path. He was breathing hard. His sharp-featured face, propped amongst the high wings of his black coat’s collar and shaded by a black, broad-brimmed hat, was sprinkled with sweat in which, like islands in the slowly shrinking river, the plaques of his addiction stood isolated.
“A warm day,” the Aedile said by way of greeting.
Dr. Dismas took out a lace handkerchief from his sleeve and fastidiously dabbed sweat from his face. “It is hot. Perhaps Confluence tires of circling the sun and is falling into it, like a girl tumbling into the arms of her lover. Perhaps we’ll be consumed by the fire of their passion.”
Usually, Dr. Dismas’s rhetorical asides amused the Aedile, but this wordplay only intensified his sense of foreboding.
He said mildly, “I trust that your business was successful, doctor.”
Dr. Dismas dismissed it with a flick of his handkerchief, like a conjuror.
“It was nothing. Routine puffed up with pomp. My department is fond of pomp, for it is, after all, a very old department. I am returned, my Aedile, to serve, if I may, with renewed vigor.”
“I had never thought to withdraw that duty from you, my dear doctor.”
“You are too kind. And more generous than the miserable termagants who nest amongst the dusty ledgers of my department, and do nothing but magnify rumor into fact.”
Dr. Dismas had turned to gaze, like a conqueror, across the dry slope of the hill and its scattering of abandoned tombs, the patchwork of flooded fields along the Breas and the tumbled ruins and cluster of roofs of Aeolis at its mouth, the long finger of the new quay pointing across banks of green mud toward the Great River, which stretched away, shining like polished silver, to a misty union of water and air. Now he stuck a cigarette in his holder (carved, he liked to say, from the finger-bone of a multiple murderer; he cultivated a sense of the macabre), lit it and drew deeply, holding his breath for a count of ten before blowing a riffle of smoke through his nostrils with a satisfied sigh.
Dr. Dismas was the apothecary of Aeolis, hired a year ago by the same council which regulated the militia. He had been summoned to Ys to account for several lapses since he had taken up his position. He was said to have substituted glass powder for the expensive suspensions of tiny machines which cured river blindness—and certainly there had been more cases of river blindness the previous summer, although the Aedile attributed this to the greater numbers of biting flies which bred in the algae which choked the mud banks of the former harbor. More seriously, Dr. Dismas was said to have peddled his treatments amongst the fisherfolk and the hill tribes, making extravagant claims that he could cure cankers, blood cough and mental illness, and halt or even reverse aging. There were rumors, too, that he had made or grown chimeras of children and beasts, and that he had kidnapped a child from one of the hill tribes and used its blood and perfusions of its organs to treat one of the members of the Council for Night and Shrines.
The Aedile had dismissed all of these allegations as fantasies, but then a boy had died after bloodletting, and the parents, mid-caste chandlers, had lodged a formal protest.
The Aedile had had to sign it. A field investigator of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons had arrived a hundred days ago, but quickly left in some confusion. It seemed that Dr. Dismas had threatened to kill him when he had tried to force an interview. And then the formal summons had arrived, which the Aedile had had to read out to Dr. Dismas in front of the Council of Night and Shrines. The doctor had been commanded to return to Ys for formal admonishment, both for his drug habit and (as the document delicately put it) for certain professional lapses. The Aedile had been informed that Dr. Dismas had been placed on probation, although from the doctor’s manner he might have won a considerable victory rather than a reprieve.
The apothecary drew deeply on his cigarette and said, “The river voyage was a trial in itself. It made me so febrile that I had to lie in bed on the pinnace for a day after it anchored before I was strong enough to be taken ashore. I am still not quite recovered.”
“Quite, quite,” the Aedile said. “I am sure you came here as soon as you could.”
But he did not believe it for a moment. The apothecary was up to something, no doubt about it.
“You have been working with those convicts of yours again. Don’t deny it. I see the dirt under your nails. You are too old to be kneeling under the burning sun.”
“I wore my hat, and coated my skin with the unguent you prescribed.” The sticky stuff smelled strongly of menthol, and raised the fine hairs of the Aedile’s pelt into stiff peaks, but it seemed uncharitable to complain.
“You should also wear glasses with tinted lenses. Cumulative ultraviolet will damage your corneas, and at your age that can be serious. I believe I see some inflammation there. Your excavations will proceed apace without your help. Day by day, you climb down into the past. I fear you will leave us all behind. Is the boy well? I trust you have taken better care of him than of yourself.”
“I do not think I will learn anything here. There are the footings of a tower, but the structure itself must have been dismantled long ago. A tall tower, too; the foundations are very deep, although quite rusted away. I believe that it might have been made of metal, although that would have been fabulously costly even in the Age of Enlightenment. The geomancer may have been misled by the remains into thinking that a larger structure was once built here. It has happened before. Or perhaps there is something buried deeper. We will see.”
The geomancer had been from one of the hill tribes, a man half the Aedile’s age, but made wizened and toothless by his harsh nomadic life, one eye milky with a cataract which Dr. Dismas had later removed. This had been in winter, with hoarfrost mantling the ground each morning, but the geomancer had gone about barefoot, and naked under his red wool cloak. He had fasted three days on the hilltop before scrying out the site with a thread weighted with a sliver of lodestone.
Dr. Dismas said, “In Ys, there are buildings which are said to have once been entirely clad in metal.”
“Quite, quite. If it can be found anywhere on Confluence, then it can be found in Ys.”
“So they say, but who would know where to begin to look?”
“If there is any one person, then that would be you, my dear Dr. Dismas.”
“I would like to think I have done my best for you.”
“And for the boy. More importantly, the boy.”
Dr. Dismas gave the Aedile a quick, piercing look. “Of course. That goes without saying.”
“It is for the boy,” the Aedile said again. “His future is constantly in my thoughts.”