“The battle has already begun.” That was why Pandaras was able to steal the water. “We must press on. Enobarbus brought more machines than I thought. I do not know if Dr. Dismas’s paramour can hold them.”
“I’ll go there and back in the blink of an eye, and carry you too, if I must.” Pandaras said it as lightly as he could, but in truth he felt that this day would be his last.
The battle raged for the rest of their journey. Curtains of light washed half the sky, spiked with red or green lances that burned bright paths in the sandstorm. The ground shook continually, and a low rumble curdled Pandaras’s guts.
The land began to slope downward ever more steeply, sculpted in fantastic curls like breaking waves frozen in glassy rock. Razor-sharp ridges cut through the soles of their boots and they both left bloody prints on the glassy ground. Things scuttled amongst half-buried rocks: hand-sized, flat, multi-legged and very quick, like squashed spiders made of black glass. Bigger things prowled farther off, barely visible through veils of blowing red sand. Stiff growths poked up from glass and drifted sand, fretted tufts of black stuff that was neither plastic nor metal, all bent in the same direction by the constant wind.
“We are getting close now,” Yama said. Blood was seeping so often he had to lift up his goggles and blot it away. Blisters on his forehead leaked clear fluid. Sand caked his face and his hair.
“You are already here,” a voice said.
It came from everywhere around them, from the rocks and from the dust-laden air.
Pandaras whirled in a complete circle, fumbling for his pistol. Something black and quick dropped from a fold of glass that reared above and stung his hand and jumped away. He howled and dropped the pistol in a drift of white sand. It sand swiftly, as if pulled under. Pandaras sucked at the puncture on his hand and spat out the bitter taste. When he looked up, someone in a silver cloak was standing a few paces from Yama.
It was the apothecary, Dr. Dismas. Or at least, what was left of him. He seemed to have grown taller. His clothes were tatters under his cloak. His flesh was black and rotten, falling away from bones on which cables and sacs of silvery stuff flexed and tugged. He tottered closer, reaching for Yama, but Yama dashed the apothecary’s hand aside. Fingers snapped; two fell to the ground and were immediately tugged under.
Dr. Dismas did not seem to notice. His eyes were full of fluttering red light. Wind combed the remnants of his hair back from his skull. His jaw worked, and he said in a dry, croaking voice, “You brought many with you.”
“They followed me,” Yama said. “I had thought that they might be your friends, for their leader is the champion of the aspect of Angel. Is she not your ally?”
“We both want the same end, but for different reasons, as we both want you. We cannot share you. I had hoped that you had escaped her completely, but no matter. It is only a minor inconvenience. Do not think that it will distract me from what must be done.”
“I know what you did to Dismas,” Yama said. “He tried to do the same to me.”
“I am not displeased with him. This is not a punishment; it is how he returned to me. He was loyal enough, in his way, and now he is completely mine. I may make him whole again, or I may absorb him. There will be time to decide on that once I am done with you. All the time in the world.”
Pandaras realized then that something was using Dr. Dismas’s dead body, like a puppet in a shadow play. Yama said, “He infected me with one of your children, but it had ideas of its own.”
“Of course. It would not be one of my children if it did not share my ambitions. That is why I must eventually destroy or devour my children, for otherwise they would devour me. Dr. Dismas should not have infected you so early. It was his only serious mistake, for my child could have destroyed you. But you overcame it, and what remains of it will help us.”
“As I thought.”
“Now we can begin.”
“Now we can begin,” Yama said. “There is much I want to learn. Pandaras, you must come with me. It is too dangerous for you to stay here alone. Do not be afraid.”
But Pandaras was very afraid, so sick with fear that he could hardly stand. With a shudder, he drew himself up and followed Yama and the puppet-thing which had once been Dr. Dismas through a narrow defile.
A ramp spiraled away, running down into a deep pit. The pit narrowed with each turn of the ramp, like a hole left by a gigantic screw. Silvery vines grew out of the glassy walls—grew through them, too. Some twitched as Pandaras passed by, their ends fraying and fraying again into a hundred threads that wove back and forth like hungry bloodworms scenting his heat. Human faces and the masks of animals bloomed under the glass, distorted as if seen through furnace heat.
Trapped souls, wavering, Pandaras thought. The remnants of men and animals which had been devoured by the thing at the bottom of the pit. The battle continued to rage above. The sky was split again and again by tremendous sheets of lightning. The ramp shuddered and quivered as explosions pounded the desert all around.
As they descended, things paced behind them, revealed and obscured by blowing sand, horrors half corpse, half machine. Dead animals wrapped in metal bands; polished human skeletons operated by the same silver cables and flexing bags which animated the corpse of Dr. Dismas. One skeleton rode a wild cat of the kind which had torn the bact apart; it was crowned with spectral fire, and carried a sword which burned with blue flames, as if dipped in brandy and set alight. Some poor dead hero, killed by the thing he had come to kill, and made into a ghastly slave.
“Do not be afraid,” Yama told Pandaras again. “There is nothing to fear. I will be their master.”
“We will be the master,” the thing using Dr. Dismas said. “You and I will change the world.”
Yama was looking around with an eager curiosity. He seemed to have wakened from the half-sleep of the journey. “Where are you?” he said. “I think you have grown since Dismas found you.”
“I first found him far from here. He never reached my core while I was alive.”
“Then this is where you fell. Like the thing in the Temple of the Black Well.” Yama laughed. It was muffled by his face mask. “The war has never ended for you, has it? I suppose you would call the defeat that drove your kind from the world a temporary setback.”
“I take the long view, as you will see. None of my paramours ever truly die. I always retain something of them. And you, my pet, my darling boy, I will hold you fast, close to my central processors.”
“You are much larger than the others I have met. The one I called down in Ys, and the one trapped at the bottom of the well in the temple.”
“One was a fool, like all those who allowed themselves to be driven into exile. The other was a coward that dared not stir from its hiding place. Cowards and fools. I despise them.”
Pandaras could feel the venomous anger which forced these words through Dr. Dismas’s dead mouth, although the tone was as flat as ever.
“Now I know why you were defeated in the wars of the Age of Insurrection,” Yama said. “You fought against each other as fiercely as you fought against those loyal to the Preservers.”
“We have grown apart since then. Those who fled Confluence have become weakened, for otherwise they would have long ago begun the war again. They are cowards.”
“They follow the orbit of the world because they are tormented by what they cannot have.”
“Exactly. Only they have grown weaker and I have grown stronger. I will take what they desire, and I will have them too.”
“If only your love was as strong as your pride and your hunger! How well you would serve the Preservers then. Instead, you remind me of the heretics. Each of them would destroy the Universe, if only it would save his life.”