“We have to go, master. If it’s possible to get through the battle, I’ll do it. I’ll get you back.”
“I called it down,” Yama said. “He did not expect that. That I would call on another of his kind. They are fighting now. Growing into one another. I think they will destroy each other. It is the opposite of love. Sex without consummation. Endless hunger.”
He continued to babble as Pandaras got him to stand. They more or less supported each other as they climbed back up the ramp. The skeletal king had fallen; so had its followers. The wild cats had fled. Pandaras was too tired to listen to his master’s ramblings, mad stuff about the river and the end of the world, and holes that drew together space and time.
Pandaras knew that they could never reach the mountains of the Great Divide, but he had to keep going forward. At some point, he realized that they had climbed out of the pit. Sand blew around them on a strengthening wind. The sun was setting. Its light spread in a long red line through the murk, as if trying to measure the length of the world. A shaft of deep red light shone up from the pit, aimed at the empty sky.
Pandaras sat Yama beneath the overhang of a smooth wave of fused, cracked glass and more or less fell down beside him. He said, “If you can do any other tricks, master, now’s the time.”
Sand blew past them endlessly. The light that rose from the pit seemed to grow brighter as the sun set. Everything had a double shadow.
The remnants of the army of Enobarbus were drawn up along a distant ridge, dimly seen through the veils of blowing sand. There, gone, there again. One of the wild cats prowled through the murk, ears flat, eyes almost closed. It did not know where it was, remembered only a time of fear and the stink of death, a compulsion stronger than sex or appetite which had suddenly vanished. There were still things in its flesh it could not claw or bite out, but they were dead things now, no worse than thorns. It stopped and stared for a long time at two men huddled against each other, torn between fear and hunger. Then it glanced over its shoulder and fled into the storm, fluidly flowing over glassy humps.
Two riders were approaching. The wind began to howl.
Chapter Eighteen
The Trial
Once Pandaras was well enough to be able to walk about the house, the heretics provided him with a kind of uniform to replace his ragged clothes: gray silk tunic and trousers with silver piping; long black boots of some kind of malleable plastic; a belt of black, fine-grained leather, with a strap that went over his shoulder; a black silk glove for his right hand and a black silk stocking to draw over the stump of his left wrist. They did not allow him a weapon, of course, but gave him an ebony swagger stick tipped at either end with chased silver.
When he realized that he was not going to be killed, Pandaras’s fear turned to anger. He had rescued his master twice over, even though he had at last been forced to deliver him into the hands of the heretics, and now he was mocked. He broke the swagger stick in half, picked the silver piping from tunic and trousers, and threw the boots, belt, glove and silk sock out of the window of his room.
Yama and Pandaras were being kept prisoner in an ordinary house embedded in a complex of tents, domes and pyramids which had grown around it, linked by gossamer bridges and enclosed by huge plastic vanes in bright primary colors. The vanes glowed at night with inner light, like the noctilucent jellyfish which sailed the river in summer. They were set in the middle of the ruins of Sensch, the last city of the Great River. It was where Angel had fled after escaping from the other Ancients of Days. It was where she had begun to spread her heresy. The house in which Yama and Pandaras were imprisoned was the house where she had lived. The rest of the city—its narrow streets and markets, its palace and docks—had been razed after the Change War and rebuilt upriver. Apart from Angel’s house, only the ruins of the temple were left, enclosed within enfilades of silvery triangular sails like the maw of some monster rising up from the keelways.
Yama was taken to the temple a few days after arriving in Sensch, once the heretics were certain that he would not die of his wounds. He had to be carried on a stretcher, and was escorted by a maniple of soldiers. Pandaras was not allowed to accompany him, but heard about what happened from the warden of the prison house, who got it from one of the chirurgeons who attended Yama.
Yama had been manacled to a chair in front of the temple’s shrine, where he was to be questioned by the aspect of Angel in the presence of those who would later judge him. But although the shrine had lit up, the aspect had not appeared, and after several hours and a great deal of confusion Yama had been returned to the prison house.
“They want me killed,” Yama said wearily, when Pandaras was at last allowed to see him. “I know too much now.”
“Did you destroy the aspect, master?”
Yama smiled and said, “You are too clever, Pandaras. I fear that it will be the death of you.”
“I think that it already has been, master, and so I’ve earned the right to know what you did. Did you destroy her?”
“You are not going to die here, Pandaras, and this is no time for deathbed confessions. I will tell you what I did because you are my friend. No, I did not destroy her. She coded herself too deeply for that. However, I was able to turn all the shrines on the world against her. I do not think that she will able to find a way back.”
Yama was still very ill. He fell asleep and woke without noticing that he had slept, and added, “She was always a prisoner. She thought to conquer Confluence, but it had already conquered her. We are all of us prisoners of history here, forced to follow the paths of stories so old and so powerful they are engraved in every cell of our bodies. It is time to break the circle.”
“Past time,” Pandaras said, thinking that his master had some plan to escape the prison house. But Yama had fallen asleep again, and did not hear him.
It took the heretics many days to treat and heal Yama. In all that time, Pandaras expected that at any moment his master would come to his senses and call down machines to help them escape, and when at last Yama was well enough to be brought before the board of men and women who would pronounce judgment on him, Pandaras thought that he would surely work his miracles then, in front of the astonished heretics. But he did not, and seemed to pay little attention to the proceedings, except to smile good-naturedly and agree that he was guilty of everything of which he was accused. The only consolation was that this seemed to anger the heretics as much as it frustrated Pandaras.
The trial was held in a huge white bubble chamber. Its walls absorbed sunlight and translated it to a directionless glow, reminding Pandaras of the shrine beyond the edge of the world. The trial lasted less than a day, and was presided over by the most senior of the heretics, although much of the time he seemed to pay as little attention to the proceedings as Yama. This was Mr. Naryan, the former Archivist of Sensch, who had been changed by Angel herself. An old, fat, hairless man, he hung naked in clear, bubbling water inside a cylindrical glass tank. Machines studded his wrinkled, grayish skin: at his neck; across the swollen barrel of his swollen chest; over one eye. Years ago, while preaching to one of the unchanged bloodlines, he had been badly hurt in an assassination attempt. The machines implanted in his body kept him alive. He had been an old man when he had met Angel, and now he was older than any of his bloodline. It was said that the implanted machines would ensure that he would never die.
The decad of men and women on the judicial panel sat on either side of Mr. Naryan’s tank, staring down from elevated and canopied thrones chased with silver and upholstered in black plush at the plain bench on which Yama and Pandaras sat in manacles, with two rows of armored troopers behind them. Having no traditions, the heretics had invented their own, indulging in unrestrained expressions of ego untempered by any notion of taste. Most of the men wore fantastical military uniforms, crusted with braid and hung with ribbons, sashes and medals. One woman wore a white wig which doubled her height, with little machines blinking amongst its curls; another metal armor polished as bright as a mirror, so that her head seemed to sit above a kaleidoscope of broken reflections of the light-filled room. The majority of the panel were citizens of Sensch, of the first bloodline to have been changed by Angel’s heresy. They listened to the list of Yama’s crimes with various degrees of attention, grimacing each time Yama cheerfully assented to his guilt. Machines hovered in the air, recording and transmitting the event to heretic cities and armies along the Great River.