A moment later, Yama and Pandaras threw their arms around each other and whirled around their common axis. The boy began to babble his story, beginning with the way he had escaped Prefect Corin when the two floating gardens had passed each other, but Yama hushed him and explained what Pandaras must do for him.
“Master, I cannot—”
“I should have had you do it as soon as I discovered them growing under my skin, Pandaras. I should have guessed then what Dr. Dismas had done to me.”
“Prefect Corin was not drowned, master. He has come to kill you. He used me to find you. He sends machines to sleep. You will need all your strength to face him.”
“He will not try to kill me straightaway, I think. And this will make me stronger, not weaker. We must be quick, Pandaras. The thing which stops machines working was on the floating garden you fell from, was it not?”
“Unless Prefect Corin brought it with him. I’m sure he followed me here. But it had grown very hot and very bright.”
“Because it was drawing energy from a wide area. The machines here will begin to work once it has passed out of range. You must do it now and do it quickly. No time for fine surgery.” Yama noticed for the first time that the boy had lost his left hand. He said, “I am sorry, Pandaras. There will be more pain, if you stay with me.”
Pandaras drew himself up. He was very ragged and had a haunted, starved look, but he met Yama’s gaze and said, “I am your squire, master. I lost you for a while, it’s true, but now I have found you I will not let you escape me so easily again. What do you want me to do?”
They could not find a knife amongst the dead around them, so Yama broke off the tip of a sword. Pandaras wrapped the broken end in a strip of cloth. Yama sat with his back pressed against a rough boulder, his hands braced against his thighs and a sliver of wood between his teeth. The pain was not as bad as he had feared, and at first there was only a little blood. The plaques lay just beneath his skin, and Pandaras had to cut away only a little flesh to expose them.
“It’s a queer kind of stuff, master,” Pandaras said. “Like plastic and metal granules that have been melted together. I can see things like roots. Should I cut out those, too?”
Yama nodded.
The pain was suddenly sharper. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth. An intimate scraping, metal on bone. Red and black flashes in his eyes. Hot blood dripped from the point of his chin. Pandaras pushed his head down, and there was a sharp slicing pain in his neck.
“It’s done, master,” Pandaras said. He held a decad of small, irregular shapes in his bloody hand. Wire-like whiskers stuck out from their corners.
“Throw them away,” Yama said. “If I start behaving in a strange way, knock me out and tie me up. Do not let me near any dirt. There is metal in dirt. Do you understand?”
“Not entirely, master, but I’ll get rid of these at once.” Pandaras ripped up the cloak of a dead soldier and placed a pad of cloth over the left side of Yama’s face and held it in place with a strip tied around his jaw and the top of his head. Yama’s face was numb, but there was a feeling of fire at the edge of the numbness. The wound on the back of his neck was more trivial, but it was bleeding badly.
“We’re getting near the river now,” Pandaras said. “And look, the coin is beginning to glow again.”
He held it up: it showed a faint, grainy light.
“Arm yourself,” Yama said. He got to his feet and took a step, then another, but stumbled on the third.
Instantly, Pandaras was by his side. He made Yama sit down, untied the cloth around his head, and whistled. “I cut a vein in there, I think. I’m sorry, master, I am not much of a sawbones. I learned a little of it from one of my uncles, who worked at one of the fighting pits, but not enough, it seems. I should stitch the wound, but I don’t have any tackle. I could put a compress in—”
“Cauterize it.”
“It will leave a scar. Of course, the jacks who worked the pits liked that kind of thing. It made them look fiercer, neh? But you do not want that, master. A compress—”
Yama picked up the bit of sword and stumbled over to a man-sized machine which had broken apart and was burning with a fierce, steady flame. He thrust the tip of the sword into the center of the fire.
“We do not have time for niceties,” he said. “I must be able to fight.”
“You couldn’t fight a puppy the way you are,” Pandaras said. He wrapped a bit of cloth around his hand and drew the broken sword tip from the white heart of the burning machine. “Cry out if you want. They say it helps the pain. And hold onto my arm, here.”
Yama did not cry out, because it might bring his enemy to him, but he almost broke Pandaras’s left arm when the boy thrust the point of the hot metal into the wound in his cheek. The smell of his own blood burning was horrible.
“Done,” Pandaras said. He was crying, but his hand was steady and deft as he packed Yama’s wound. He retied the strip of cloth around Yama’s head, then tied another around his neck and under his arm to hold a compress against the lesser wound in his neck.
The coin was burning brighter. Pandaras held it up and said, “Shall I throw this away? He knows how to find it; it is how he found me and it is why he kept me alive, so that he could find you. In any case, we should run now, master. If the coin is working again, then surely you can command some machine to take us away.”
“I want Prefect Corin to find us,” Yama said. “He destroyed my home. He was responsible for the death of my stepfather. I will have an accounting.”
“He will kill you.”
“I do not think he has come here to do that. If I do not confront him, Pandaras, then I will never be able to rest, for he will not.”
“That’s as may be, but I don’t know if you can kill him. Those monsters you called up from the depths couldn’t. I think he jumped on a floating disc and sailed away from them.”
“I do not know if I want to kill him, Pandaras. That is why I want to see him.”
Yama took the gisarme and Pandaras found a short ironwood stave. They armed themselves with pellet pistols too. As they climbed out of the sally port’s amphitheater, some of the dead began to stir and twitch. The machines in Dr. Dismas’s servants were awakening in bodies too mutilated to control. Yama found a legless torso trying to drag itself along, its guts trailing behind it, and dispatched it with the spike of the gisarme.
Yama began to call out to Prefect Corin as he and Pandaras walked toward the far edge of the island, through near darkness lit only by burning trees. But the Shadow found him first, suddenly gliding beside him at the edge of his vision. As before, it took the form of Derev, but this time her likeness was distorted to resemble one of Dr. Dismas’s man-animals, naked and on all fours. Its voice was a faint hiss, like the last echo of creation.
You cannot destroy me, Child of the River. I am wrapped around every neuron in your brain.
“I do not want to destroy you. I want you to help me understand what I am.”
Pandaras said, “What is it, master? Is he here?”
“No, not yet. It is the thing in my head.”
You are a fool to deny what we can become. A worm, a weakling. How I will torment you.