“I have burned away that part of me,” the thing said. “Love is a weakness. As I have refined myself, so I will refine you.”
“Then you are a giant amongst the rebels,” Yama said. He was walking at the edge of the ramp as he followed the puppet-thing, peering eagerly into the depths of the pit. “How large have you grown?”
“I have not enlarged my processing capacity overmuch because the architecture would become too complex. But I have redistributed myself, and I have many auxiliaries and drones.”
“And your paramours.”
“Oh yes. You are trying to find a way to me already. You will not. You destroyed the main part of the child Dismas implanted within you, but you had to mutilate yourself to do it because you were not able to overcome it in any other way. You will not be able to overcome me, for I am so much stronger and wiser. It is touching that you try, though. I would have expected nothing less. You hoped to use the heretics as a diversion—that was why you drew them here. A bold plan. I applaud it. But I fight them using only a fraction of my might, and soon they will be defeated.”
“Then I was right to come here,” Yama said. “I have learned much since I destroyed the Shadow. I will learn more.”
“I will teach you all you desire, when you are with me. You may ask anything, and I will tell you.”
Pandaras remembered the old tales of how feral machines buried in old temples or in the wild places of the world trapped those who hunted them by granting their wishes. Here was the truth which had spawned those fanciful stories. All stories were true because all were derived from the world, no matter how distantly. Otherwise, how could they be told by men, who were creatures of the world?
“O,” Yama said, “I have so many questions. To begin with, I had only one. I wanted only to know where I could find people of my bloodline. I went to look for them, and I had hardly begun on that task when I found instead that I was asking the wrong question. To know my people I must first know how to ask questions. I must know myself. A wise man told me that, and beat me with his fan to make me remember it.”
Theias, the envoy from Gond. Yama had tricked him into revealing more than he had wanted to reveal, and Theias had fled in shame and confusion, or so Pandaras had thought at the time. But now he saw that Theias had left because his task had been completed.
“I can tell you everything,” the thing said through the dead mouth of Dr. Dismas. “I can tell you why the Preservers made Confluence, and why they raised up the ten thousand bloodlines. I can tell you the true nature of the world and the true nature of the Preservers. I can tell you where they went and why we should not serve them.”
“I do not need to know any of that,” Yama said. “You comfort yourself with false answers to those questions because you disobeyed the Preservers, who made you as surely as they made me. You need to believe that you acted not out of pride but to save the world because your masters betrayed you. Is this the place?”
Yama had stopped because silvery vines grew so thickly from the glassy wall that there was no way forward. They had gone around six turns of the ramp as they descended; they were deep within the pit now. It was so narrow here that Pandaras could have jumped clear across it. A thick red vapor hid the bottom from view.
“It has already begun,” the thing said. Its voice was louder now, and the same voice rattled from the bony jaws of the skeletons behind them, roared in the razor mouths of the giant cats, hummed from the mouths of the faces that floated in the glass walls. The air was full of electricity. Every hair of Pandaras’s pelt bristled, trying to stand away from its fellows.
The silvery vines snaked out with sudden swiftness. They enveloped Yama and he fell to his knees under their weight. Pandaras started forward, but Yama waved him back. A vine looped around his upraised arm. “It is all right,” Yama said thickly. Blood ran from his mouth, rich and red. “What will be will be.”
Pandaras halted, his hand inside his thin tattered robe, on the hilt of the skean. He remembered the coiling tentacles of the sharers of the deep dredgers. Yama had sent the giant polyps away after they had sunk Prefect Corin’s ship; perhaps he could dismiss the vines too.
The vine around Yama’s arm stretched, its end dividing and dividing. There was a flash of intense red light and Yama cried out. Pandaras blinked and almost missed what had happened. One of Yama’s fingertips had been seared off and carried away. “A tissue sample,” the voice of the thing in the pit said. “A finger for the fingers you snapped from the hand of Dr. Dismas. But I will design a better body for you, my dear boy. You will not miss it.”
The frayed end of the vine was poised above Yama’s head now. Yama looked at it calmly. He said, “That will not be necessary. The paths grown by my Shadow are still there.”
“Do not be afraid,” the voice said. It filled the pit, echoing and reechoing from the glassy walls.
And the vine struck.
Yama’s head vanished beneath a myriad fine threads that flowed over each other, molding so tightly to his face its contours emerged as a silvery mask. Pandaras caught the stink as his master’s bowels and bladder voided.
The Dismas puppet-thing tipped back its rotting face and howled. The faces trapped in the walls howled too. The skeletal figures rattled their jaws; the wild cats screeched.
All howled the same five words, over and over. “Get out of my mind!”
And something fell from the sky and plunged into the pit. It fell so fast that Pandaras barely glimpsed it before it vanished into the heavy red vapors at the bottom. The glassy walls rang like a bell and the ramp heaved. Pandaras fell to his knees. The eye-blink image burned in his mind: a black ball not much bigger than his head, covered in spines and spikes.
The Dismas-thing darted at Yama, quick as a snake. Pandaras managed to grab an ankle and it fell to its knees, breaking off one hand at the wrist. It flipped around and threw itself at Pandaras, who struck out with the skean, a desperate sweeping blow that caught the thing in the neck. Its head was almost severed and hung between its shoulders by a gristly flap of flesh and a silvery cord, bouncing as it swung to and fro, groping for Pandaras with its remaining hand. Pandaras slashed again, aiming at the dead thing’s heart. The skean’s narrow blade sliced bone and shriveled flesh, grated on a metal sinew. Rotten blood pattered over him. A terrible stink filled the air. Pandaras was at the edge of the ramp; he dodged sideways as the thing made a final lunge, took a step onto air, and toppled into the heavy red mist without a sound.
All around, faces trapped under glass howled, melting and re-forming.
The skean could not cut the silvery vines, but they had gone limp and Pandaras was able to pull them away from his master’s body. The ones which had been attached to Yama’s face left decads of pinpricks which each extruded a blob of bright red blood. Yama’s mask had come off.
He shuddered, drew a breath, another. His eyes were full of blood. Pandaras tore a strip from the hem of his robe and tenderly wiped it away.
Red vapor swirled around them. It was full of motes of sparkling light. Pandaras realized they were tiny machines, every one a part of the thing in the pit, as millions of termites in a nest make up a single super-organism. He tried to get Yama to stand up, but Yama was staring at something a thousand leagues beyond Pandaras and the walls of the pit. The faces in the pitted slabs of glass were dwindling into points of absolute blackness that hurt to look at.
“Caphis was right,” he said. “The river comes to its own self. The snake which swallows its tail.”
He shuddered, choked, and vomited a good deal of blood and watery chyme. He spat and grinned at Pandaras. “I took it all from him. All of it.”