It was a pity. He would have liked to have made a song of Yama’s adventures amongst the world’s wonders. He remembered the engines he had seen in the cellars of the keel of the world, when the spider thing had led them to the road.
Whole swathes of the floors of the vast vaults had been transparent, showing chambers deep enough to swallow mountains. It was as if he and Yama had become birds, hanging high above a world within a world. Far below, tiny red and black specks had roamed across a green plain, illuminated by a kind of flaw in the middle air that had shed a radiance as bright as day. The specks must have been machines as big as carracks, and even bigger machines had studded the verdant land. Black spires of intricate latticework had reared halfway toward the radiant flaw, wound about with what looked like threads of gold, threads which must have been as wide as the Grand Way of Ys. There had been black cubes in heaps as wide as cities, and geometric patterns of silver and white laid into the green landscape.
At one point Yama had lain flat on the floor, prostrating himself like a palmer at a shrine. The spider had halted, flexing one leg and then another as if in frustration, until at last Yama had stood and walked on.
He had told Pandaras then that there were mysteries in the world that he could only guess at, and they began to talk about this again as they journeyed into the Glass Desert. Yama wanted to unburden himself of all that had happened to him. Once more, he told Pandaras the story of how he had been found as a baby on the breast of a dead woman in a white boat cast adrift on the Great River. He talked of his childhood, of how happy he had been, how fortunate to have been the adopted son of the Aedile of Aeolis and the stepbrother of brave, dead Telmon. He described how Dr. Dismas had tried to kidnap him and how he had escaped and had been given refuge in the tower of Beatrice and Osric, the last curators of the City of the Dead, of his journey to Ys, where he had escaped Prefect Corin and met Pandaras. And then, turn and turn again, they told each other the rest of the tale: their adventures in the Palace of the Memory of the People; the voyage downriver in the Weazel; the sacking of Aeolis by Prefect Corin and the death of the Aedile; the treachery of Eliphas. And on, through their separate adventures and their reunion, and now this, their last exploit. They had reached the Glass Desert after all—not in search of Eliphas’s invented lost city, but of Yama’s nemesis.
Pandaras noticed the birds on the afternoon of the third day after they had quit the mountains: black cruciform specks circling high above in a sky so achingly bright it was more white than blue.
“Not birds,” Yama said. “They have been watching us ever since we crept through the pass, but they dare to fly lower now because this is their land.”
He coughed long and hard into his fist. They were both affected by the alkaline dust which hung in the hot air. It worked through the seals of their filter masks and irritated their throats and lungs, and got into every crevice of their bodies, drying their skins and causing pressure sores. It worked under their goggles, too, inflaming their eyes.
They were still taking turns riding the bact. Pandaras was in the saddle, and now he clambered down and said, “Ride a while, master. Rest.”
Yama lifted his filter mask and spat. There was blood in his spittle. When he could speak again, he said, “It has grown strong, Pandaras. It no longer cares about being found, for the machines which would have destroyed it are engaged in fighting the heretics. And it has made many servants.”
“You could make them go away, master. Please climb up. You’ll feel better for riding.”
But Yama walked on, still leading the bact. “There are different kinds of machine,” he said. “I thought of it while we were crossing that big chamber far beneath the temple. Do you remember?”
“I will never forget it, master. Do you think people live there, in the lands of the keel?”
“No, Pandaras. Down there are machines I cannot yet control. I cannot even talk with them. They are raised as far above the simple little machines which the magistrates command as we are above the animals from which the Preservers made us. As with men so with machines. There are the enlightened races of men which have passed beyond this world, and there are the machines in the world beneath the world. Just as we cannot talk with the enlightened, so I cannot talk with those machines. Or not yet, not yet. And just as there are the changed bloodlines, in whom the breath of the Preservers has been quickened, so there are machines which are likewise self-aware, such as the dwellers of the deep which sweep silt from the bottom of the Great River. I can command those as a general can command an army, although both the general and his soldiers are equal in the eyes of the Preservers. And then there are the unchanged bloodlines, and the ordinary machines which take care of the world, such as the machines commanded by the magistrates. And there are the indigenous races, and machines which are neither self-aware nor ever need to be.”
“And yet you raised up the mirror people and the forest folk,” Pandaras said.
Yama did not hear him. He said, “Machines and men. We are each other’s mirrors. The feral machines are greater than the changed, but lesser than the enlightened. But are they greater or lesser than me? I called down one to help me; I feel it still. But did I command it, or did it see its chance to place its hook into me? I could not master the child of the thing that lies ahead of us, the Shadow which Dr. Dismas grew in me, but perhaps that was because the Shadow was too like me. It had begun to assume my power. I do not know what I can do, Pandaras. Perhaps it knows me better than I know myself.”
They had been plodding all day through the petrified stumps of what had once been a forest. Pandaras gestured around himself and said, “This is a dead place. No wonder only machines can live here.”
They walked on in silence for a while. At last, Yama said, “This half of the world lost its river. Do you remember when we crossed that gorge two days ago? That was once a tributary of the Great River of this half of Confluence, running down from the snowfields of the Rim Mountains, just as the Breas empties into the Great River near Aeolis. But the Great River into which that tributary emptied fell away and was not renewed. The land died. Perhaps our land will die too. Our own Great River is dying.”
At last Pandaras persuaded his master to climb onto the saddle in front of the bact’s dwindling hump. When he was settled, Yama said, “If my father was right, then the fall of the Great River is my fault. It began when I was cast upon this world. Perhaps I can atone for that, Pandaras, if I can learn enough. It is my only hope.”
Pandaras understood less than half of what his master said, but he clearly saw the anguish these thoughts caused him. He said, “You are greater than you know, master. You are tired now. You don’t see things clearly. It will be better when you have rested. You ride the rest of the day. I don’t mind walking.”
They reached the far edge of the petrified forest at nightfall, and made camp. As usual, Pandaras kept watch while Yama muttered and twitched in his sleep, and once or twice he thought he heard something padding outside the tent. There! A scrape of metal on stone. The bact snorted and moved about. It was not his imagination. He gripped the pistol, although what use was it against monsters?
The next day, Yama said, “I dreamed that we are being followed.”
“And I know it, master.”
Pandaras squinted against sky glare. The bird things were still up there. Even when he was not watching them he could still feel their purpose, a prickling itch at the crown of his skull. All around, red sand blew in scarves and streamers across pitted red rock. The air was filled with the dry hiss of blowing sand.