“You were looking for something to serve,” Pandaras said.
“I am a hierodule.”
Yama said, “You had food and drink ready for us. How did you know that we were coming here?”
Tibor spread his big, six-fingered hands and said gravely, “Why, she told me. If you had not come here, I would have had to fetch you.”
For the first time since he had escaped the Mighty People, Yama felt the Shadow stir. He said, “I thought it might be something like that. You had better show me the shrine.”
Tibor nodded. “She is waiting for you, Yamamanama. And do not be afraid. She forgives you for the time you tried to kill her.”
The long processional path still retained a feeble blue luminescence. It led them down wide corridors and through a nest of round chambers with intricate murals painted on their walls and ceilings to the naos at the heart of the temple, a vast dry cave that could easily have held a thousand petitioners. As Yama and Pandaras followed Tibor into it, like emmets creeping into a darkened house, tiny sparks whirled down from above to crown them. Pandaras laughed to see them: fireflies.
Yama said, “How far back into the plateau does the complex run, Tibor?”
“Further than I am allowed to explore,” the hierodule said. “She will answer all your questions.”
The floor was inlaid with a spiral pattern of garnet slabs; the reflections of the fireflies glittered underfoot as Yama and Pandaras followed Tibor toward a faint glow that curdled in the darkness ahead, flickering in the black disc of the shrine.
It stood on a dais raised high above the floor. A steep stair led up to it. Poles had been driven into the sandstone slabs of the dais and bodies clad in tattered robes were lashed to the poles with corroded wire. The dry air had cured the skin and flesh of the bodies to something like leather, shrunken tightly over the bones.
“I cleaned away the slogans,” Tibor said, “but she likes to see the remains of her enemies.”
“I think this one is the Archivist,” Pandaras said. “You see? They took off the top of his skull as if it were an egg.”
The coin hanging from his neck had begun to glow. He held it up for Yama to see; its light struck sparks in his eyes.
And then a green glow washed over him.
The shrine had become a window in which the aspect of Angel walked swiftly forward, fixing Yama with a confident and commanding gaze. As before, she wore a white one-piece garment that clung to her tall, slender body. The green garden receded behind her beneath a perfect blue sky. She stared silently at Yama for a long time. He returned her gaze and resisted the compulsion to say something, although his heart quickened with the effort and sweat soaked through his ragged shirt and trousers.
At last, she said, “You have lost your looks, my love. The world has been hard on you, but now I am here to help you. What, you have no words for me?”
“I serve no one,” Yama said. He tried to look beyond her, hoping that he could summon the hell-hound, but something stopped him looking very far.
She laughed. Yama thought of knives clashing. She said, “Of course you serve. It is what you were made for.”
“I suppose a feral machine was tracking me. They dare not visit the world they lost, except for brief moments, but they are compelled to watch what they cannot have.”
“You are very stubborn, I think that you know that you need my help. You know there is much you do not know. For instance, you thought that you had killed me, and you do not understand how you failed. Do stop trying to call that bothersome creature, by the way. This time it will not come.”
Pandaras said in a small but defiant voice, “You are the ghost my master told me about. The very ghost of a ghost, for I know my master killed you.”
“You speak more truly than you know, little creature. You are the one who looked in the book, aren’t you? I let you live then. Show gratitude for my mercy now.”
“If you have any mercy,” Yama said, “show me a token of it. Let the hierodule go. You use him falsely.”
“Is he not a servant of the avatars? And there are no avatars left, except for me. I should know: I killed them all.”
Yama said, “You are no avatar, merely the discarded aspect of a dead woman. You are lost in time. Your kind were overthrown more than five million years ago. Just as you use the hierodule, the feral machines use you.”
“We have an alliance. You can be a part of it still.”
Yama turned his face to show her his terrible scar. “One of the feral machines has already used me. It tried to do to me what it did to Dr. Dismas, but it no longer has power over me, and neither do you. You are just a memory, and not even a whole one.”
“With my help you can be so much more powerful than any of the feral machines, my darling.”
“We can only be what we are.”
The aspect smiled. “That is the philosophy which made your Preservers flee from the Universe. It is untrue. Animals can only be what they are, but humans can transcend their animal selves. The Preservers were fools. They raised up the ten thousand bloodlines from animal stock, but forbade them to rise higher than their creators. You and I will prove how wrong the Preservers were.”
“You have no power over me,” Yama said, and with an enormous effort turned away from the green light of the garden inside the shrine.
The aspect said, “I know why the Great River fails. I can help you save the world, if that is what you want.”
“You want the world for yourself.”
“I will have it, too, in a little while.”
“Then why should I save it?”
The aspect’s voice deepened. There was music in it and Yama could feel his muscles trying to respond; there was still much of the machine inside him. He fought against it, staggering against the Archivist’s dry, brittle body and embracing it for support.
Pandaras cried out, but Yama did not hear what the boy said. The aspect’s voice filled his mind.
“The world is a fabrication,” she said. “An artificial habitat twenty thousand kilometers long and a thousand wide, set in a nest of fields which mimic the gravity of an Earth-sized planet and prevent the atmosphere from dissipating into space. It is not well made. Machines must constantly maintain it; without them, the air would soon become unbreathable, the inhabited places would become deserts, and the Great River would silt up. Those are some of the functions of the lesser machines. But there are greater machines in the keel.”
Yama remembered the huge engines he had glimpsed in the keelways when Beatrice had taken him back to the peel-house. She had warned him not to waken them before their time; he had not understood her until now.
The aspect sang on, seductive, compelling. “There are many wormholes orbiting Confluence’s star. I suspect that they emerge at various points in the Galactic disc. But there is also a wormhole at the midpoint of this strange world. Something has altered it. Your people constructed this world, Yamamanama. You are the key. And you will serve. I have powerful allies. Tell me now that you will at least listen to one of them, and I will spare the boy. But if you will not continue this conversation then I will have my slave crush his skull and paint your face with his brains. A simple yes will be enough.”
Pandaras tried to run then, but Tibor caught him and lifted him up and closed one big hand over his head. The hierodule’s face was set in a horrible rictus. He began to shake. Muscles jumped in his arms and legs as if struggling against each other. Pandaras shrieked in fear and agony.
The aspect said, “Say the word, or I will have his life.” Yama started to move toward Tibor and Pandaras, but it was as if he were in a dream where gravity was much stronger or the air was as dense as water. He was breathing in great gasps.