“We do not need maps,” Yama said.
“That’s what the other fellow said. He’ll be buzzard meat soon enough, and so will you if you won’t unbend and take some advice.” The chandler was very tall and very thin, with fine-grained brown skin that shone like polished leather. He laid a long-nailed finger beside one of his opaline eyes and said, “Perhaps you have one of your own, and put your trust in that. Him. Many come here with old maps found in some depository or archive, but you can’t rely on them. All the ruins within easy travel of the edge of the Glass Desert are mined out, and most of the waterholes are poisoned. My maps are up-to-date. You won’t have to pay for them, not right now, but you’ll have to sell anything you find to me.”
Pandaras said, “How will you make sure that we do?”
The chandler looked down at Pandaras. He was three times the boy’s height. By the doorway, the burly bodyguard shifted the rifle which rested in the crook of one of her beefy arms. The chandler said, “This is the only way into the Glass Desert, and the only way out. If you survive, you’ll be back. You’ll probably have to sell anything you find to me anyway. I give the best valuations in town. Ask around if you don’t believe me, and you’ll find that all my rivals say I’m far too generous with my money.”
Yama said, “Who was this other man? Did he have a white mark on his face?”
“Not so bold,” the chandler said. “Everything has its price here.”
Yama told Pandaras to give the chandler the rest of their money. “Describe him.”
The man spat on the clipped coins and rubbed them with the soft, flat pads at the ends of his bony fingers. “He was about your height. Had a veil over his face, and yellow eyes. Wore a hat and a silvery cloak. I know his name, but you’ll have to pay me to get it.”
“I know his name too,” Yama said.
The chandler glared at Yama. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “He didn’t take a map, or any water or food, just a saddle for his mule. And he smelled bad, like skinrot or canker. Hmm. It doesn’t matter what he’s called. He’ll be dead by now.”
They were followed out of town by three ruffians of the same bloodline as the two Yama had just killed. They were either kin to the dead man, or in the pay of the chandler, or freelances looking to strip novices of newly bought supplies. As they rode hard toward him, Yama called down a machine and killed them all. He and Pandaras tied the bodies to one of the horses and sent it back to the town as a warning. The second horse had bolted when the machine had smashed the skull of its rider, but Pandaras easily rounded up the third, an old mare with a shaggy gray coat. With Pandaras following on the bact, Yama rode the mare through the high pass of the Gateway of Lost Souls, where unending wind howled over polished ice, and followed a trail down the dry mountain slopes toward the glaring wastes of the Glass Desert.
The trail wound through a dead landscape. Nothing grew there but stonewort, which could survive on the brief dew which formed each morning. The yellow or black crusts were the only color in the simmering white, alkaline landscape. Cairns were raised here and there, the burial places of would-be prospectors. All had been disturbed; on the afternoon of the second day, Yama and Pandaras rode past three skulls set on a flat-topped rock beside the trail.
Pandaras pointed out the neat hole punched into the ridge above the empty eye sockets of one of the skulls. “Perhaps he quarreled with his companions over treasure they had found. Or perhaps he killed himself after he killed his friends. Men are driven mad here by the ghosts of machines that fought in the war.”
“You can still turn back,” Yama said. “I must face something worse than any ghost you can imagine, and I do not think I will be able to protect you from it. It may well destroy you. It may well destroy me, too.”
Pandaras touched the coin he still wore around his neck. “Why, you’ve said yourself that this is better than any of the seals and medals the people of the New Quarter use to protect themselves from machine ghosts.”
“Take the horse, Pandaras. Ride back through the pass and wait for me.”
“Will you turn back too, master? Well then.”
That evening, they made camp by a waterhole. The water was black, and mantled with white dust. The mare slipped her hobble and drank before Yama could find a machine which could test it. She foundered almost at once, screaming with pain and foaming at the mouth. The bact snorted, as if in disdain; it had not tried to go near the water. The mare convulsed. Blood poured from her eyes and nostrils. Yama stroked her muzzle, then slit her throat in a swift movement.
Pandaras took a sip from a cupped handful of water and tipped the rest on the ground, promptly spat it out and he said, “Poison all right,” and spat again. “I bet the chandler’s men did it. They poison most of the waterholes, and he hires out maps, showing those which are safe.”
“The whole land is poisoned,” Yama said.
They moved their camp to a flat shelf of rock a league farther down the trail. Pandaras cooked slabs of muscle he had cut from the mare’s hindquarters; he had also drained some of her blood into two of the empty water bottles, saying that for him blood was almost as good as water.
Pandaras ate most of the food, for Yama had little appetite. He had had a distant sense of Dr. Dismas’s paramour ever since they had begun to descend toward the desert. It pulled at the remains of his Shadow like the wink of sunlight on a far-off mirror or a tintinnabulation in the ear. And he also felt the pull of the feral machine he had called upon, without knowing it, when he had been in desperate danger in the house of the renegade star-sailor.
Poised between the two attractors, he sat and looked out toward the wastelands of the Glass Desert until long past sunset, and did not notice when Pandaras wrapped a fur around him against the night’s bitter cold.
From then on, Pandaras and Yama took turns riding the bact. It took three more days to descend the mountain slopes. The Glass Desert stretched beyond: red and yellow and brown, patched and cratered, one side by a meandering canyon which once had been driven on a river as vast, wide and deep as the Great River.
Points of reflected light flashed here and there across the bitter land, and a whole sea of light burned in the middle distance where a city had stood. The Glass Desert had once been as verdant as the inhabited half of Confluence, and as populous, but the feral machines had made it their homeland after they had rebelled, and it had been devastated in the last and fiercest of the wars of the Age of Insurrection. Nothing lived there now.
As he walked beside the bact that day, through a barrens of blowing sand and piles of half-melted boulders fused together by some great, ancient blast, Yama kept glimpsing figures amongst the stones, figures which vanished if he turned to look at them, but which he recognized nonetheless. First Derev, her white feathery hair blowing out in the hot wind, and then others. His love, and all his dead. The remnant of the Shadow was stirring in his mind, wakened by the call of its progenitor far off across the tumbled desolation.
When they made camp that evening, Pandaras saw how drawn his master had become. Yama squatted on his haunches and stared into the thin, cold wind that blew out of the dark desert. His long black hair was matted with dust and tangled about his pale, scarred face. He did not seem to notice when Pandaras shaved him, using a flaked edge of glass and a couple of handfuls of their precious water. They had no scissors, but Pandaras had given the skean’s blade a good edge, and he hacked back Yama’s hair with that. It was not easy to do with only one hand, but Yama bore Pandaras’s clumsiness patiently. More and more, he seemed to be retreating inside his head.
Yama would not eat anything, and he slept uneasily. Pandaras watched over him, chewing congealed blood that was beginning to spoil. He reckoned that they were not coming back. At best, they would somehow destroy this thing and then hope for an easy death of thirst or heat prostration. At worst, it would destroy them.