It tipped back its head, its throat elongating, and howled like a dervish. Something like a faint wash of flame passed across Yama’s mind. He bore it easily.
Pandaras said, “But I cut it out!”
“Not all of it. Just those parts which drew power from the world’s energy grid. It will be no more powerful than me now, unless it can regrow those parts.”
I will take the iron from your blood, you fool! I will weave myself so tightly against your every nerve that you will never be rid of me.
But the sparks of the Shadow’s words flickered so faintly that they were easier to ignore than the growing sense of the weave of machines which mapped the dark world all around. It was stronger than ever, an overlapping babble of voices near and far. Yama called upon one of the machines which served the garden, and it explained in a rapid, agitated staccato that the gravithic grids of the platform—it meant the floating garden—were exhausted, and that it was falling in an irrecoverable trajectory.
Pandaras squinted at the glowing thing that beat before Yama’s face on a blur of vanes. “They work for Prefect Corin,” he said.
“Not here. It wants us to evacuate this place. It seems we will strike the world in a handful of minutes.”
“But you will save us, master.”
“No.”
“But you must!”
“I cannot.” The machine was trying to explain about realignment and repolarization, but Yama asked it to be quiet, and told Pandaras, “There is not enough time for the garden to soak up enough energy to regain its lift.”
The machine added something tartly, and with a shrill whir of vanes flew up into the night.
“Apparently, the other garden will strike the world first,” Yama told Pandaras.
“As if that makes any difference. What’s that?” Yama heard it a moment later. An animal frenzy of howls and yips, and then a stutter of rifle fire.
Yama ran, feeling the cauterized wound in his cheek pull open at every step. He ran through the burning trees, across the cracked basin of the lake, and up the rocky slope. His head was full of voices. His face was a stiff mask with hot needles pushed through it into his skull, and his legs were rubbery, but as he leapt from rock to rock in the near dark, he called upon skills he had learned as a child while clambering about the steep dry slopes of the City of the Dead, and did not stumble.
Dr. Dismas stood at the far edge of the crag, his silvery cloak and cap glimmering in the fire-lit dark. A pentad of his naked man-animals cowered around him. Their round eyes glowed green or red, reflecting the light of the decads of tiny machines which swarmed around the man who leaned on his staff a hundred paces away.
“Yamamanama,” Prefect Corin said, without looking away from Dr. Dismas. “You have come to me as I knew that you would.” A rifle was slung over his shoulder, and Dr. Dismas’s energy pistol was tucked into his belt. The pale-skinned hierodule, clad only in ragged trews, squatted beside the Prefect, and bared his teeth when Pandaras called to him.
Yama’s face hurt when he spoke. He said, “Not at all. Instead, you have come to me.”
“You are still a vain and foolish boy,” Prefect Corin said chidingly. “While we travel back to Ys you will dwell on all the hurt you have caused, the deaths you must already count as yours and those which are to come when you undo your mischief.”
Dr. Dismas said, “Kill him, Yamamanama. Do it quickly. We have far to go.”
“You will be quiet, old man,” Prefect Corin said in his calm, soft voice, “or I will take your eyes and tongue. You have much to answer for, too. Taking away your little realm is only the beginning of the reckoning.”
“The laboratories are nothing,” Dr. Dismas said, and tapped the side of his head. “It is all in here.”
Prefect Corin told Yama, “A flier will be here in a moment. Unless of course you can save this garden. One way or another, we will be in the heart of our Department by dawn. There will be a new beginning. Frankly, you need it. You look bad, Yamamanama, bloody and ill-used. I will see that you get all the medical attention you so clearly have not had here.”
Yama said, as steadily as he could, “I will not serve.”
Prefect Corin looked at him for the first time. He said, “We all serve, Child of the River. We are all servants of the Preservers.”
Yama remembered what Sergeant Rhodean had told him outside the marquee where the Aedile had lain dying, on the far-side shore after the sack of Aeolis, and saw now what Prefect Corin was. Saw that the man’s reserve was not a discipline, but a denial that he was like other men. That his humble air was a mask which hid his hunger for all the world’s powers, all its riches. Yama had thought that his hatred of Prefect Corin would be too much to bear, but now he felt pity as much as hate, and pity diminished the man.
He found that he was able to meet and hold Prefect Corin’s gaze. He said, “The Preservers do not ask for servants. They ask nothing of us but that we become all we can be.”
“You have been too long amongst the heretics, Child of the River,” Prefect Corin said. There was a note of harshness in his voice now. “That will be corrected too.”
“I am not a heretic,” Dr. Dismas said. “For that alone you should kill him, Yamamanama.”
Prefect Corin ignored the apothecary, concentrating his mild gaze on Yama. A worm of blood was trickling along the angle of Yama’s jaw. He said, “The world is not a ledger, Corin, with good and evil in separate tallies. There is no division into good and evil. It is all one thing, light and shadow in play together. No one can set themselves aside from it unless they remove themselves completely.”
He had never been so certain as at that moment, there on the highest point of a rock slowly falling out of the sky. He was aware of everything around him—the wind which carried the harsh stink of burning, the trajectory of the garden and of the rock ahead of it, the myriads of machines in the cities along the shrinking shore of the Great River, the flier that was speeding toward the garden, still a hundred leagues off.
He made a few adjustments.
At the same moment Prefect Corin struck down with the point of his staff. Rock broke around it, cracks running outward from where he stood to every point of the crag, and the whole garden shivered like a whipped animal.
Pandaras fell down; the hierodule raised his head and howled, Dr. Dismas snickered. His man-animals hunched around him. “You’ve made him lose his temper, Yamamanama.”
Prefect Corin pointed his staff at him and said, “Be quiet, devil! Except for pain and repentance, your part in this is over.” The machines whirled up in a brilliant blaze above his head.
“You’re as bad as the heretics,” Dr. Dismas said, and turned his back in disgust. The hierodule was still howling, his muscles straining against each other under his flabby skin.
Yama told Pandaras, “Hold up the coin. Do not be afraid.” He saw the knot in the hierodule’s mind and loosened it, and said, “Be quiet, Tibor. He will not use you anymore. Come to me.”
The hierodule blinked and fell silent. The cloud of machines around Prefect Corin suddenly spun away in every direction, leaving the crag lit only by firelight and the dim red glow of the Eye of the Preservers. The Prefect reversed his grip of the staff and began to beat the hierodule about his shoulders. “Do not listen, you fool! Obey your master! Obey! Obey!”
Dr. Dismas was laughing. The man-animals crouched as his feet made little excited yips and howls.
“You will not use him,” Yama said. “It is all right, Tibor. Come to me.”
Tibor ducked away from Prefect Corin’s blows and stood up. He said, “It is good to see you again, master. I thought you had fallen over the edge of the world.”