“As far as I am concerned, I am a long way from trust.”
“We will be there inside a day, Yamamanama. But first we must rid ourselves of this small problem.”
They climbed up the slope on the far side of the dry lake, charred vegetation giving way to steeper rock that burned the thin soles of Yama’s slippers. It was the edge of the island. Dr. Dismas turned to Yama. A white star shone at his forehead—a machine clung there. The flat-topped rock was so close now that Yama could see the sheets of water which spilled from its side and were torn into spray. It was moving toward them at a slant, and gaining perceptibly. Something shone at its leading edge, a point of white light as intense as any star cluster within the Galaxy. The city had fallen far behind, a lake of dull orange light embraced by the dark jungle.
“Something is affecting the gravity fields,” Dr. Dismas said. “We are falling too slowly.”
Yama remembered one of Zakiel’s lessons. The librarian had used a banyan seed and a lead ball he had taken from the armory. He said, “Surely all things fall at the same rate.”
“We fall down the length of the world because a machine in the keel of the garden manipulates gravity fields to suit our purpose. But the machine is failing. The nearer that rock gets, the slower we fall. There is something draining the energy grid. You must put a stop to it.”
Yama said, “Surely the rock chasing us would also fall more slowly too.”
“Yes, Yes,” Dr. Dismas said impatiently. “It is slowing, but it was moving faster than us in the first place. We have only a few minutes before it reaches us, Yamamanama. You must act quickly!”
The eidolon had disappeared when Yama had followed Dr. Dismas up the slope, but now it came back. Its eldritch glow was so weak that Yama could see right through it. Its eyes were dark holes in the mask of its face; its hair a pale flicker.
You know the man, it said, its words raveling weakly across Yama’s brain. Stop him or we will lose our advantage…
The eidolon flickered and faded, but Yama had the sense that its eyes were still there, like holes burnt into the fabric of the night. The glow of the machine which clung to Dr. Dismas’s forehead faded too, and the apothecary plucked it off with his stiff fingers and crushed it.
“I have just lost control of the garden. If I do not regain it we will intersect the surface of the world in forty minutes. But there is still much we can do. You are not a machine, Yamamanama. Or not entirely. Neither are my children. My hybrids were destroyed by Enobarbus’s guards, but I still have many purely biological specimens. Chimeras, crossbreeds and the like. My children of the night. We do not need machines.”
“And you, Doctor?”
“Oh, as for me, I will have to rely on my purely human part.” Dr. Dismas said this casually, but in the half-light Yama saw the gleam of sweat on those parts of his face not affected by the plaques of his disease. He knelt, cast a handful of plastic straws on the ground, and peered closely at them. “I will not die,” he said. “That was part of the promise made to me, and I will see that it is kept.”
He stood and raised his arm toward the rock that eclipsed a quarter of the sky now. His energy pistol flared so brightly that dawn might have touched the tops of the Rim Mountains.
Yama ran.
The machine which Prefect Corin had set in the air was spinning so quickly now that its shriek had passed beyond the range of even Pandaras’s hearing. It glowed so brightly that it hurt to look at, and had begun to melt the rock beneath it. Prefect Corin, Pandaras and Tibor retreated from it to the far side of the lake. Prefect Corin uncoiled a length of fine cord and looped it around a pine tree which stood at the edge of the rock.
The spinning machine was draining the local grid on which all machines fed, turning the energy into heat and noise. The cloak of machines had fallen away from Prefect Corin; the lights had died in the ceramic coin. Tibor was affected too; he sat with his arms wrapped around his head, rocking from side to side.
And the rock was slowly sinking through the air like a stone through water, pitching this way and that as it fell. Pandaras clung to the pine tree, his cheek pressed against its dry resinous bark. Branches soughed above him.
“Have courage, boy. Have dignity.”
“You are going to kill us all!”
“Nonsense. I have calculated that we will pass a few chains above our target. Our keel may brush a few treetops, no more. Perhaps you have been wondering why I fastened the rope to the tree. Soon you will understand.” Prefect Corin’s one good eye searched Pandaras’s face. “You are a coward, like all your race, small-souled and small-brained. Only a few chosen bloodlines will inherit this world when this war is done. Others will serve, or perish.”
Then bolts from Dr. Dismas’s energy pistol struck the leading edge of the rock, and chunks of white-hot stone flew up. Most splashed into the lake, sending up spouts of steam and hot water, but one fragment tumbled amongst a stand of pines, which immediately burst into flame.
Prefect Corin turned to look at the burning trees and Pandaras shrieked and lashed out. He caught the Prefect with his one hand and both feet, clamped his mouth on the man’s thigh and twisted, coming away with a mouthful of cloth and bloody meat. And then he was flying through the air. His hip and shoulder smashed hard against stone, but he rolled and got to his feet. He was right at the edge of the floating rock. Prefect Corin was limping through fire-lit shadows toward him. Tibor stood up, his normally placid face twisted in a snarl, his big hands opening and closing. Pandaras turned and looked down, and then gave himself to the air.
The first of the man-animals attacked Yama when he reached the burning trees. He pulled off his silvery cloak and threw it over the creature, and in the moment it took to shake off the cloak snatched up a burning branch and jabbed it in the thing’s face. It was not afraid of fire and sprang straight at him and knocked him down, but Yama discovered that his attacker had only a child’s strength. Unlike the other servants, the man-animals had been grown rather than surgically transformed, and Dr. Dismas had not had time to bring them to maturity. Enveloped in rank stench and feverish body-heat, sharp teeth snapping a finger’s width from his face, he got his thumbs on the creature’s windpipe and stood up, lifting the man-animal with him, and pressed and pressed until its eyes rolled back, then put his palm under its jaw and snapped its neck.
Two more man-animals skulked around him, but when he picked up the burning branch they turned tail and ran. He yelled and threw the branch after them.
The floating rock was very close now, blocking half the black sky.
Yama ran. The sally port where fliers docked with the floating garden was near the mansion in which he had been kept. Perhaps one of the fliers which had brought Enobarbus’s men was still intact. He was halfway there when the rock passed overhead.
Its keel scraped the crag where Dr. Dismas had taken him, and came on, breaking the tops from trees and dropping a shower of rocks and gravel. A tree toppled across Yama’s path, burning from top to bottom. He skidded and fell down amidst a storm of burning fragments. For a moment he thought that he might faint, that something was trying to pluck his soul from his body, and then it passed and he picked himself up and ran on. He knew that he had only a little time now.
A big semicircular amphitheater sloped down toward the platforms of the sally port. It had been lit by decads of suspensor lamps, but only a few were still working, fitfully illuminating the remains of a terrible battle. Gardens of stone and miniature cedars and clumps of bamboos had been trampled and broken and burnt. There were numerous fires, and patches of scorched stone radiated fierce heat and sent up drifts of choking white smoke. Yama found many corpses, men and things like men, sprawled alone or entangled in a final embrace. Many were so badly burnt that they were little more than charcoal logs, arms and legs drawn up to their chests in rictus, bones showing through charred flesh. Yama armed himself with a gisarme and was about to pluck a pellet pistol from a dead soldier’s grasp when someone ran at him. He made a wild swipe with the gisarme, then saw who it was and managed to turn the blow so that the pointed axe-head thumped into the ground.