“There will be all the time in the world for that, Yamamanama. At my leisure, in the Palace of the Memory of the People. But I will talk then, and you will listen. All you make now are animal noises. Noises which mean nothing.”
“There is no more time. The flier will not come. I ordered it away.”
“It is almost here,” Prefect Corin said.
“A machine tells you that. Do not rely on machines, Corin.”
“Enough of your tricks,” Prefect Corin said, and the thing in the air in front of him began to spin, gathering itself into a soft red haze that at once began to brighten toward the color and intensity of the sun, and shrieking like the world’s last end.
The voices in Yama’s head died away. He took up their count. Twelve.
Pandaras cried out in alarm and dismay. “Master! Would you kill us?”
“Would you die to save the world, Pandaras?” Seven.
“What kind of question is that, master? If I refused that sacrifice then the world would die and I would die anyway. Or the world would live and again I would die. In any case, I do not like this talk of dying.”
Two. One.
“Then follow me,” Yama said. Now.
Impossibly, the sun rose downriver. No, it could not be the sun, for as the blister of light spread out horizontally it suddenly redoubled in brightness, and redoubled again. It was so bright that Yama could see the bones of the hand he flung up to save his eyes.
The floating rock had struck the river, and the first machine Prefect Corin had set spinning to draw energy from the local grid had finally collapsed, and released all its stored energy at once.
For an instant, Yama existed at every point of machine consciousness in the world. And then the concussion of the impact arrived in a blast of air and thunder, and he was knocked down by a howling gale full of water and bits of debris, as if the distinction between air and river had been abolished. Tibor was struggling with Prefect Corin, trying to force down the Prefect’s outflung arm. Yama got to his feet, swept up Pandaras and yelled at Tibor to follow them, and ran straight over the edge of the crag.
A violent gust caught them, and for a moment they hung in the midst of a hard, driving rain. A double shadow at the edge of the crag might have been Prefect Corin and Tibor. Then the gust failed. Yama and Pandaras fell past the edge of the floating garden as a blade of light broke the sky in half.
They did not fall far—the world had risen very close to the floating garden—but the impact was still unforgiving. Yama plunged down and down in roaring dark water. Pandaras was torn from his grasp. He let himself float for a moment to get his orientation and then struck upwards, breaking the surface and drawing in a great gasping breath that was half air, half water.
Despite the storm, it was as bright as day, although the light was sulfur-yellow and came from the wrong quarter of the sky. Above, the floating garden was sliding away like a great ship, a solid shadow against a nimbus of achingly bright light. Something was climbing up from that intolerable light. A stalk or pillar of black smoke and ordinary fire that rose higher and higher and blossomed at last in the upper reaches of the atmosphere as a great thunderhead. Brilliant stitches of lighting blinked continuously around it.
Yama kicked against the flood, turning in a complete circle as waves lifted and dropped him. The wounds in his face and neck were ablaze with pain. As he rose for the fourth time he saw something between two waves close by and swam strongly toward it. It was Pandaras. Yama caught the boy by the scruff of his neck and he tried to climb up him in blind panic. Yama asked forgiveness and knocked him out with a swift clean punch, and got an arm around his chest to support him.
As Yama and Pandaras were lifted and dropped by line after line of waves that marched away upriver, something came walking across the water toward him, small and sharply focused at first, but becoming more and more indistinct as it neared.
Derev. Yama roared into wind and rain. “Get out of my mind!”
She was a giant, transparent as smoke. Her great wings unfurled far into the storm. She stooped toward him, and her face writhed and became a horror of snakes and scorpions, and then she seemed to be blown away in rags and tatters by the wind.
Pandaras stirred, and then came awake and at once began to struggle again. “Quiet,” Yama said, “or I will have to hit you a second time.”
“I can’t swim properly! Not with only one arm!”
“There is no point trying to swim! The second wave will be here soon! I will save us, Pandaras. Do not be afraid!”
They were shouting into each other’s ears against the tremendous howl of wind and rain and the roar of clashing waves.
Pandaras turned his face upward. “Master! The rain is growing warmer!”
Yama said, “The second wave!”
“When the other garden hits, master?”
“No, from the first. From Prefect Corin’s machine. First it was light, then sound. Sound carries the most energy—that is why the floating garden was knocked over. But it comes in two stages, because energy travels more slowly through water than through air.”
They rose on the crest of another wave. For a moment, wind swept aside curtains of rain. The Great River dwindled away ahead of them, hatched by lines of waves driven by the strong warm wind. The floating garden had vanished—perhaps it too had finally struck the river. The false sunrise had faded, but the pillar of burning smoke still stood at the vanishing point where the nearside and far-side edges of the world seemed to meet, The cloud at its top was spreading out and its light was changing to a ghastly red, but it did not appear to be any dimmer.
Yama wondered how much energy Prefect Corin’s machine had managed to store before it had been dissipated on the moment of impact. Prefect Corin had not understood the power of the things he thought he controlled.
The first machine arrived, plucking at the yoke of Yama’s loose shirt. Then another, and a decad more. The largest was a kind of wire-thin dragonfly as long as his arm, but most were much smaller. Together, they pulled Yama and Pandaras a handspan above the clashing wave-tops, and then more arrived, lifting them higher into the rain-filled wind.
Above the noise of the storm, there was a sound like a tremendous cannonade. Far away down the length of the world, the river seemed to be tilting into the sky.
Chapter Thirteen
The Forest Folk
The flood knocked down every tree for many leagues beyond the shore of the Great River and deposited vast shoals of silt and gravel and mud. Streams and creeks ran at full spate as the water receded, carving new channels into the landscape. It rained continuously, and dense reefs of mist were driven back and forth by restless winds.
The machines carried Yama and Pandaras far inland, and left them at the top of a plateau which rose above the devastated forests. They made camp as best they could in a glade of small trees at the edge of a cliff that dropped straight down into the mists. Yama was exhausted, and bruised over his entire body, and the wounds in his face hurt horribly.
“You must summon more machines to help us,” Pandaras said. “You must get us away from here, master, or you will die.”
“No,” Yama said wearily. “No more machines.”
A floating disc could carry them wherever they wanted, but would be a target for anyone who wanted to take a potshot. And Yama was not certain that Prefect Corin had been killed in the crash of the floating garden; if he called on any machine, the Prefect might be able to track him down. He had shut down the coin which had guided Pandaras to him for that very reason, even though it could have helped Tibor, had he survived the tidal wave, to find them. And it was because of Yama’s ability to bend machines to his will that tens of thousands of people had died in the great flood; he feared now that he might inadvertently destroy the world.