“I can see that you don’t trust newcomers.”
“We’re still at war,” Calpa said. “There are many traps and pitfalls around the camp, and we move them about. You’ll likely be killed if you try and run away, and so we will be rid of you. If you choose to stay, you’ll have made a good start at helping us. Keep a sharp lookout. They come for us most nights.”
Pandaras and Tibor were given javelins tipped with flaked stone points and a gourd that, filled with hard seeds and strung on a leather thong, made a passable noisemaker, and were escorted to a rocky promontory which jutted above a dense belt of fern trees and looked out across the city. The Eye of the Preservers stood high above the river and the floating garden Calpa had pointed out was silhouetted against its dull red swirl. Their escort showed them the positions of the lookouts on either side, and said he would be back at dawn.
When the man had gone, Pandaras hefted his javelin and threw it as hard as he could into the crowns of the fern trees below, and threw the gourd after it. “Get rid of yours, too,” he told Tibor. “This place isn’t for us.”
“They have food and shelter, little master, both of which we failed to find in the city.”
“We are not safe here. Calpa believes that she is still fighting the war, but she can only lose. I’ll bet the armies she thinks are ranged against her are just bravos out for sport. If they catch us with weapons they’ll kill us for sure. If they find us alone and unarmed, they might spare us.”
“Calpa said that there are many traps.”
“That fellow won’t be back for us before dawn, and there will be light in the sky before then to pick a way. I can see well enough in what other bloodlines would consider to be pitch-darkness. This is almost as bright as day to me.” An exaggeration, but Pandaras could clearly see Tibor’s quizzical expression by the dim red light of the Eye. “I’ll spot any traps long before we’re near them, or I’ll sniff them out. Besides, I don’t think they’ll spend much time looking for us. Calpa hinted that many who come here run away, and I doubt that she bothers to chase after them. The way the war is going there will always be more prisoners and she has only to wait for them to come to her.”
After a moment, Tibor nodded and broke the shaft of his javelin over his knee and tossed the two halves over the edge of the promontory. He said, “How will we get to him?”
“I wondered if you’d catch on.”
“I may be slow, little master,” Tibor said, with a touch of his unassailable dignity, “but I am not stupid. The mage Calpa mentioned must surely be your master. But we cannot fly through the air, and Calpa said that there are many soldiers guarding him.”
“Perhaps he’ll find us. I’m certain that he is a prisoner of whoever it was that Eliphas betrayed him to. Calpa said that he was helping the heretics, and I know that my master would not help them unless forced. But although he is a prisoner, he can still call upon machines to help him. He saved me before by using a machine to cut me free from Prefect Corin.”
“You told me about your adventures more than once,” Tibor said. “I do not forget things, little master.”
“The point is that it happened in the battleground far downriver. Now we are in sight of him.”
“But although we have found him, he has not yet found you. And how can we free him, little master, if he, who is so powerful, cannot free himself? And how can you be certain that he is this mage? It seems to me that nothing is certain in this world, except the love of the Preservers.”
Pandaras sat down and massaged the stump of his left wrist. He said, “I suppose you still believe in them.”
“Who does not? Even the heretics cannot deny that the Preservers created the world and all its peoples.”
“I mean that you believe that they still have influence in this world. That it is worth praying to them.”
Tibor reflected on this, and said at last, “These days, most men who pray to the Preservers are in fact praying to their higher selves; prayer has become no more than a simple form of meditation. But I remember how it was when the avatar was still accessible within the shrine of the temple of which I was the hierodule. Ah, little master. You do not know how it was. You cannot imagine. Prayer was no solitary communion then, but a joyful conversation with a sublime and witty friend. But that is all lost now, all quite lost.”
There was a silence. Pandaras turned and saw with embarrassment that the hierodule was crying. He had forgotten that someone could take worship of the Preservers so seriously. The last of the avatars had been destroyed by the heretics long before he had been born; they were no more than a myth to him.
He pretended not to see Tibor’s tears and yawned elaborately and lay down, resting his head in the crook of his right arm and tucking the stump of his left wrist into his lap. He was still ashamed of the amputation and unconsciously tried to hide it whenever he could. “We’ll rest an hour or so,” he said. “I can feel in my muscles every league we walked today.”
After a while, Tibor said softly, as if to himself, “The Preservers created the world, and they created the ten thousand bloodlines. They made the different races of men into their image to a greater and lesser degree, but in their charity and love for their creations left them to find their own ways to enlightenment. For the Preservers knew that their children were capable of saving themselves, of becoming civilized and completing the gesture of creation by becoming like their own selves, as indeed many of the most enlightened bloodlines have since done. We have it in ourselves to be so much more than we are, but the heretics deny that. They want no more than to be what they already are, forever and ever.”
Pandaras thought sleepily of the armory where he had once worked for one of his uncles, of the cauldrons where metals were smelted. One of his tasks had been to skim dross from the surface of the molten metal using a long-handled wooden paddle. The paddle had been carved from a single piece of teak and was badly charred; you had to dip it in a wooden pail of water before each sweep, or else it would catch fire. It seemed to him now that this work had been the reverse of what happened in the world, where the good refined themselves out of existence, leaving only the dross behind.
He woke briefly and heard Tibor praying to the Eye of the Preservers, which had begun to sink back toward the far-side horizon. “Wake me an hour before dawn,” he said sleepily. “I’ll pick out a way for us then.” But he could not have slept long because when Tibor shook him awake the Eye still stood high in the black sky.
“There is fighting on the other side of the city,” Tibor said softly.
As Pandaras sat up there was a flash of intensely blue light, as if, leagues and leagues away, someone in the darkness of the jungle surrounding the city had opened a window into day. Groggy with sleep, he counted off the seconds. Four, five, six… There was a rumble like thunder and the rock trembled like a live animal, and then he was fully awake, for he knew what weapon it was. He jumped to his feet and said, “He’s found me again!”
“Your master? Then he has escaped the floating garden?”
A flock of red and green sparks shot across the city toward the place where the point of blue light had shone, but they tumbled from the sky and winked out before they could strike their target.
“The machines try and destroy him,” Pandaras said, “but he has some kind of magic which shuts them down. I’ve seen it before. He was not killed. Perhaps he cannot be killed. He followed me downriver and now he is looking for me in the other camps. He will be here soon. There! There! Oh mercy! He is coming for me!”