“Say it!”
The aspect and the hierodule had spoken together. Pandaras slashed at Tibor’s arm with the stone blade, but the hierodule blocked the blow and knocked the blade into the darkness beyond the edge of the dais.
“Say it or he dies!”
“No!”
The hierodule lifted Pandaras above his head, as if to dash him to the floor. And the boy ripped the coin from the thong which dangled from his neck and thrust it edge-first in the hierodule’s eye.
Tibor and the aspect screamed at the same moment. White light blotted out the garden and beat across the huge chamber. The hierodule dropped Pandaras. With the glowing coin stuck in his eye and blood streaming down his face, he blundered into two of the staked bodies, smashing them to dust and fragments of brown bone, and pitched over the edge of the dais.
Yama and Pandaras ran down the steep stair. Tibor lay at the bottom, his neck broken. Pandaras pulled the coin from the hierodule’s eye and closed his lids and kissed his forehead.
“He would have killed me,” Pandaras said. He was crying.
“It was well done. She had made a link with Tibor through the shrine, and you shut it down. We cannot stay, Pandaras. She will soon find a way to return.”
They ran, chased by a flock of fireflies, their shadows thrown ahead of them by the white light which burned in the shrine. By the time the aspect had managed to reconfigure it, they were already descending toward the keelways.
Chapter Seventeen
The Glass Desert
It was a dusty town built along a narrow defile, high in the dry mountains which bordered the Glass Desert. The defile was roofed over with sheets of painted canvas that flapped and boomed in the constant cold, dry wind, and was lined with the mud-brick façades of buildings which had been hacked into its rocky walls. A decad of different bloodlines came there to trade drugs, rare metals, precious stones and furs for rifles and knives and other weapons which artisans made in secretive little courtyards between the buildings. There was a produce market at one end of the defile, and a maze of corrals and sheds where bacts, dzo and mules were bought and sold at the other. Fields and orchards watered by artesian wells stepped away below the produce market, startlingly green against a tawny landscape in which only cacti, barrel trees and cheat grass grew.
The town was called Cagn, or Thule, or Golgath, and had many other secret names known only to the tribes who used them. It was agreed by all that it was one of the worst places in the world; it was said that the double peak which loomed above, framing the Gateway of Lost Souls and casting its shadow across the town in the early morning and the late afternoon, hid the town from the gaze of the Preservers, and that any sin practiced there went unremarked. It had not been much changed by the coming of the heretics. It was still a refuge for smugglers, reivers, rustlers, fugitives and other desperadoes. Only an hour after he and Pandaras had arrived in the town, Yama had to kill two ruffians who tried to rob them.
Both men were tall and burly and covered everywhere with coarse red hair. They wore striped cotton serapes and white cotton trews, with broad leather belts hitched under their ample bellies. They were belligerently drunk. When one of them swung at him with a skean, Yama broke the man’s arm, snatched up the weapon, and told both of them to run. The injured ruffian yowled, lowered his shaggy head, and charged like a bull. Yama dodged him easily, swung the skean hard as he went past, and slashed his neck down to the spinal cord; the man fell flat, dead before he hit the dust.
The second ruffian swayed and said, “You killed him, you skeller,” and pulled a pistol from his belt. Yama, with a cold, detached feeling, as if this had already happened somewhere else, perhaps in a story he had once read, hefted the skean to get a feel for its balance, threw it overhand, and skewered the man in the right eye.
People who had stopped to watch the fight began to drift away now that the fun was over; murders were commonplace in a town outside the rule of any law. Pandaras scooped up the pistol, chased off a couple of children who were creeping toward the bodies, and went through the pouches on the men’s belts, finding a few clipped coins, and a packet of pellets and a powerpack for the pistol. He pulled the skean from the second ruffian’s eye, cleaned its double-edged blade on the dead man’s serape, and tucked it into the waistband of his trousers.
Yama refused the pistol when Pandaras offered it to him, and said, “I know that we will need more money, but I will not kill to get it.”
The cold precision which had gripped him in the moment of danger had vanished. He began to tremble as they walked away. Behind them, the children moved in to take the belts and pouches. Canvas as red as a priest’s robe cracked overhead, turning sunlight to the color of blood.
Pandaras said, “In this kind of place, we’ll need all the weapons we can get just to keep what we have. As for money, I have a confession. I did not burn all the treasures the Mighty People had hidden away in their miserable huts. I kept two of the smallest portraits. I doubt that we’ll find much appreciation of art here, but they are enameled on beaten gold, and although they are no bigger than my hand, I think they’ll buy us what we need. Aren’t you glad you weren’t able to send me away?”
Yama had tried to make Pandaras take the keelroad back to Ys, telling him that the journey to the Glass Desert would almost certainly end in death, but the boy had refused.
“I am your squire, master, for better or worse,” he had said fiercely. “And I do not think that things can get much worse than this. I have killed two men in as many days, and one of them was my friend. I have lost my hand, and I failed you in many ways while we were apart. I’ll not fail you now.”
And so they went on together. Yama used machines to guide them through endless caverns and corridors. He no longer cared if his enemies could track him by the traces left by his commands. It was too late for that.
A thing like a giant silvery spider, one of the machines which kept the caverns clean, led them at last to an active part of the transportation system which had once knitted the whole world together. They traveled all night in a humming capsule that fell through one of the keelroads. Neither of them slept, although both pretended to.
All of the transportation system beyond the midpoint of the world had been destroyed in the wars of the Age of Insurrection. The capsule took Yama and Pandaras as far as it could, delivering them to a maze of passages beneath a ruined peel-house; they emerged at the foot of a bluff which overlooked the mid-slopes of the mountains of the Great Divide. The yurts of a party of nomad musk-deer herders were pitched nearby. When Yama and Pandaras walked into their camp, still crowned with fireflies Yama had forgotten to dismiss, the longhaired, yellow-skinned men and women fell on their knees. They breakfasted on soured goat’s milk mixed with deer blood, and a sickly porridge boiled up from barley mash and dried apricots, then walked all day up the mountain, leaving behind the herders’ threadbare pastures and climbing through long, dry draws to the town.
With the money Pandaras got at a refiner’s for the gold he had stolen from the Mighty People, they bought a bact from a livestock trader and supplies from the town’s only chandler. New clothes, furs for the mountain pass and light robes for the desert, a tent of memory plastic that folded as small as a scarf, dried food, water bottles and a dew still, a saddle and harness for the bact. There was a little money left, but Yama politely refused the chandler’s invitation to inspect the armory. He would need no weapon where he was going, and Pandaras was armed with the skean and pistol he had taken from the dead ruffians.
“I have maps too,” the chandler said. “Reliable. Certified.”