“Not yet,” Yama said. The words were compelled from him by Tibor’s mild stare; they seemed to come from somewhere in the babble of voices in his head. He remembered the dream he had had in the tomb in the Silent Quarter of the City of the Dead, and then remembered Luria, the true pythoness in the Department of Vaticination. A truth came to him, brilliant and many-splendored. It was like the peacock, but he could bear it now. Lifted on great wings of exhilaration, he felt that he could bear anything.
He said, “The coin Pandaras has faithfully carried for so long enables access to the space inside the shrines, just like the induction loop in a hierodule like Tibor. And one can talk with the other. My father was fascinated by the past, and his excavations turned up many coins like it. I think that in the Age of Enlightenment people used them as commonly as we use money, but they did not use them to buy the stuff of everyday life. Instead, they bought access to the shrines. Anyone could consult the aspects then, without mediation of priests or hierodules.” He turned to Pandaras and grasped the boy’s hand. “Do you remember, Pandaras, when we walked toward the Temple of the Black Well? Do you remember the medallions in the windows of those poor shops, the medallions people hung on their walls to ward off the ghosts of dead machines? I thought then that I recognized the engravings on their surfaces, and now I see that they are similar to the patterns of light in this coin. The people remember, even if they do not understand what they remember. They are the strength of the city, Pandaras! The strength of the world!”
“Master, you are hurting me,” Pandaras said. There was fear in his eyes.
Yama realized how tightly he was gripping the boy’s hand, and apologized and let go. But his joy did not diminish. It grew as the babble of voices in his head grew: he was dissolving into it, forgetting his fear, his anger, the agony of Pandaras’s hasty surgery.
“I forgive your ravings,” Prefect Corin said dryly. “Your father is ages dead, and the Aedile of Aeolis was a foolish man who looked only to the past.”
Yama said, “You carry something made by the mages which acts like the coin, I think. But it cannot work as well as that which it tries to imitate.”
“The Aedile was the beginning of your corruption, Yamamanama, and I will be the end of it. No more talk now. Perhaps you think to convince me by reason, but I am proof against your reason. Perhaps you came to duel with me, thinking to decide the fate of the world in the way of the old stories, but they are only stories. I could kill you now, and there would be an end to it.”
Yama laughed. He threw the gisarme to one side, pulled the pellet pistol from his waistband and threw that away too. He spread his empty hands. “Those were for Dr. Dismas’s servants. But I see that only a few are left.”
Dr. Dismas turned and said, “Enough for my purposes.” He made no signal, but the man-animals leaped toward Prefect Corin in a single fluid movement. There was a wash of flame. Yama turned away from the searing heat and light, but thought that he glimpsed Dr. Dismas falling beyond the edge of the crag, globed by fire which beat at the mirror of his silvery cloak. When he turned back, the stones of the place where Dr. Dismas had been standing were glowing with a dull red heat, and Prefect Corin was pointing the energy pistol at him.
“If you thought that he would kill me,” the Prefect said steadily, “then you were wrong. I will use this against you if I have to, and at its full setting.”
Yama said, “I came here to see what kind of man you were. Now I know.”
“I am a servant of something greater than you think you are, boy.”
“I once feared you because of the authority you embodied, but then you burnt down Aeolis and killed my father and I knew that you misused your authority for your own ends. You are not my nemesis, Corin.”
Prefect Corin leaned on his staff, attempting to command Yama and Pandaras and Tibor with his gaze.
“Talk on, boy. You have a few minutes.”
“Fewer than you think, perhaps.”
“You do not command here. The garden is mine.” Prefect Corin set something in the air before him. It was a sketch of a solid object that was neither a sphere nor a cube but somehow both at once; it seemed far bigger than the space which contained it. Prefect Corin said, “If I start this spinning it will draw away the energy from machines everywhere and there will be no help for you.”
“The flier will not come, and the world is rushing toward us.”
“I can stop the machine a moment before the flier arrives. Meanwhile, your little tricks will come to nothing.”
“You have thought of everything,” Yama said, “but it does not mean that you are right.”
“I have right on my side, boy.”
Yama’s heart quickened. Although he strove to keep his face calm, his hands were trembling. Let Prefect Corin think it was fear. The moment was approaching. He had only to finish this.
He took a deep breath and said, “The Department of Indigenous Affairs once served in harmony with the other departments of the civil service, to keep the world as it always was. In this way the civil service is like the heretics, for both abhor change. One struggles to knit society together at the expense of individual destiny; the other wants to destroy society so that a few lucky individuals might live forever; both deny change. But life is change. The Preservers taught us that when they created this world and its inhabitants, when they shaped the ten thousand bloodlines. And the Preservers changed too, and changed so much that they could no longer bear this universe. All of life is change.”
Prefect Corin said, “You have learned nothing, or unlearned all you were taught. If not for the civil service, the ten thousand bloodlines would have warred against each other and destroyed the world long ago. The civil service maintains a society in which every man has a place, and is happy in that place. The Great River which sustains this world is the first lesson, for it is always changing and always the same. And so with society, in which individuals live and die. Even bloodlines change and rise toward the nothingness of enlightenment and pass away from this world, but the world remains as it is. There are always more individuals, and always more bloodlines.”
“The Great River is failing,” Yama said. He was aware of a voice at the forefront of the crowd of voices which yammered and babbled inside his head. It was counting down the seconds. There was only a little more time. He said, “Even the indigenous races know that the river fails. Your department has decided that it speaks for the Preservers, and in its arrogance it has lost its way. For no one in this world can speak for the Preservers, who are no longer of this world. We can only repeat the words the Preservers left us, and nothing new can come of those words.”
“We need nothing more than their words. All good men are guided by them. How badly you have strayed, Yamamanama. But I will save you.”
“The Department of Indigenous Affairs has become what it fights against. I do not blame it, because it was inevitable. There has to be one strong department to lead the war against the heretics, but its strength means the destruction of the consensus which sustained the civil service. For if the war is won then the Department will assume all the powers of the civil service, as it has already assumed the territories of the departments which border upon it within the Palace of the Memory of the People. And it will become a greater tyranny than the heretics could ever be.”
“We will win, and things will be as they were.”
“Why then are you here?”
“I am a voice and an arm of the Department.”
“No. You are a man who wants power within the Department. I am a way to that power. There are other men like you. When the war is over, you and your kind will fight each other. Perhaps not at once, perhaps not for ten thousand years, but it will happen at last, and the Department will destroy itself. In making the assumption that anything you do is for the good of the world, you excuse all your actions, good and bad, until you can no longer distinguish between them. But I think that is enough. You do not listen to me.”