Yama said, “You lured me here, but I will not come with you. I will not serve.”
“Oh, but you will. The day market is not yet under the Department’s authority, but this place is, for it leads directly to one of the gates of the Department. You ran where I wanted you to run, Yama. The soldiers of Internal Harmony cannot help you here. Come with me, and you will be treated like a tetrarch if you can do half the things I believe you are capable of doing. Come with me now. Come home. Your father and your sweetheart will be pleased that you have turned up safe and sound.”
For an instant, Yama was aware of every machine around him, all the way out to the edge of the day market.
He spoke to one and turned and struck at the splintered glass with the knife. Blue light flared. Prefect Corin shouted and threw aside his staff and ran at Yama, and Yama hurled himself bodily at the circle of splintered glass and plunged through it into the open air.
Chapter Five
The Library
The city and the side of the mountain described a perfect somersault around Yama’s head. Then something flashed toward him out of the blue sky and he hit it hard, knocking his breath away. It was the floating disc he had stolen from under the feet of one of the soldiers.
With one hand Yama held onto the knife and its sheath; with the other the edge of the disc. Its smooth flat shape was hot from its rapid passage through the air and it stung Yama’s skin, but he clung on tightly as it made a breathtaking swoop toward a huddle of roofs far below, halting just above a flat apron of red adobe. Yama landed in a tumble, bruising hip and knee and shoulder and dropping the knife and its sheath.
He got up and dusted his hands on the seat of his trousers. His wounded head ached. When he touched it his fingers came away smudged with sticky blood.
The disc hung in the air like an obedient pet awaiting a command. When he dismissed it, it shot away at once, rising at a steep angle against the sheer mountainside. It caught the light of the sun for a moment, and then it was gone.
Yama picked up his knife and sheathed it. He judged that he had fallen at least five furlongs; the glass tunnel from which he had thrown himself was no more than a gleaming thread, as fine as a hair, laid between two black crags that were themselves only interruptions in the mountain’s ascent into the blue sky.
Somewhere up there was the cavern which contained the Department of Vaticination. Tamora would be hard at work, drilling the sullen thralls for their brief, futile battle.
He could leave her and Pandaras, Yama thought, and continue alone on his quest for the library of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons, the place where Dr. Dismas had claimed to have found records of his bloodline.
But he knew that he would not. He had sworn to help her, as she had sworn to help him. And at the very least he must tell them about Prefect Corin and the attempted kidnapping. It seemed certain that the conversation Pandaras had overheard was nothing but a lure aimed to draw Yama into a trap.
More immediately, he must find a way back into the mountain. Beyond the parapet at the edge of the flat roof was a drop to the slope of terracotta tiles, and then the roofs of a huddle of buildings and the slope of the mountain falling away to the hatched plain of the great city. As Yama contemplated this vista something cracked like a whip past his ear, shattered half a dozen tiles, and went whooping away into the distance. He remembered the ruffians’ slug pistols and immediately jumped over the parapet and ran down the slope of sun-warmed tiles. Another slug split the air and he changed direction and tripped and suddenly was rolling down the slope amidst a small avalanche of loosened tiles. He grabbed at the edge of the roof and for a moment hung there, breathing hard—and then the tiles gave way.
He landed on his back on a cushion of thick moss. Amazingly, he had not let go of his sheathed knife. All around, terracotta, tiles smashed to dust and flinders. Small animals fled, screaming. Monkeys, with silver-gray coats and long tails that ended in tufts of black hair. They jumped onto a shelf of black rock at the far end of the shadowy courtyard, their wrinkled faces both anxious and mournful. Dwarf cedar trees, their roots clutching wet black rocks, made islands in a sweep of raked gravel littered with the hulls of pistachio nuts. On three sides of the courtyard were black wooden walls painted with stylish eyes in interlocked swirls of red and white; on the fourth was a clerestory.
When Yama stood, the largest of the monkeys ran forward and swarmed up a rope and swung from side to side.
A gong started a brazen clamor somewhere beyond the clerestory’s arches.
Yama ran. A broad stair led down from the clerestory to a huge, vaulted hall paneled with carved wood. The plaster ceiling was painted black, with a triple-armed swirl of white that represented the Galaxy at one end and a recurved red swirl that represented the Eye of the Preservers at the other. This was the temple of a latriatic cult, then, one of those which believed that the grace of the Preservers could be restored to the world by contemplation, prayer and invocation.
The gong was louder here, battering the cool air with waves of brassy sound. Suddenly, shaven-headed monks in orange robes rushed into the far end of the hall. They were armed with a motley collection of spears and cutlasses; one carried a hoe. Yama drew his knife, but even as the monks started to advance toward him, light flared in the center of the hall and they fell to their knees and dropped their weapons on the ebony floor.
At first, Yama thought that part of the roof had been opened to admit the light of the sun. Then, shading his eyes against the glare with his forearm, he saw that a shrine stood in the middle of it. It was an upright disc twice his height, and it was filled with restless white light.
Yama drew the coin from his shirt and, raising it as high as the thong looped around his neck would allow, advanced toward the shrine. He thought that the woman in white had found him again, drawn by the coin, but as the blazing light beat around him, he was seized by a deep dread. Not her, which would have been bad enough, but something worse. Something huge and fierce and implacable advancing through the light, very far away in the folded space within the shrine but rapidly growing closer, stooping toward him as a lammergeyer stoops through leagues of air to snatch an oryx grazing on a mountain crag.
Yama’s nerve failed. He dropped the coin into his shirt, and ran past the shrine, dodging between the monks on the far side. They were groveling with their foreheads pressed to the ebony floor, their buttocks higher than their heads. Not one moved to stop him.
He ran out into open air, along a stone terrace and down a long flight of steps dished by the tread of countless feet.
Monks in orange robes turned to watch as he ran past them down narrow stone paths between plots of pumpkin vines, yams and manioc.
The brass gong suddenly fell silent, and there was only the buzz of insects and the distant roar of the city. Yama did not stop. Once again he had accidentally brought something into the world. He ran from it headlong, with nothing in his head but his hammering pulse.
This part of the mountain had been built over with temples and monasteries and sanctuaries. Many stood on the ruins of older structures. Staircases descended sheer rock faces carved with grottoes and shrines. Viaducts and bridges and walkways strung across gorges and looped between crags. One pinnacle had been hollowed out; a hundred small square windows pierced its steep sides. Slopes were intricately terraced into long narrow fields where vines and vegetables grew, irrigated by stone cisterns that collected rainwater from fan-shaped slopes of white stone.
Yama spent the rest of the day descending the mountain. It seemed that there was always a flight of ravens turning in the air beyond the steep mountainside. He hoped this was not a bad omen, for ravens, particularly those of the Palace of the Memory of the People, were said by some to be spies. Far below, the city, immemorial Ys, stretched away into blue distances under a rippling layer of smoggy air. Around noon, as the sun paused at the height of its leap into the sky before falling back toward the Rim Mountains, he arrived at a long terrace thatched in emerald-green stone and grass. An ornate fountain of salt-white stone bubbled in the middle. He drank from one of the fountain’s clam-shell basins until his belly was full, and washed dust and dried blood from his face, but he did not dare stop for long. He was aware of the populous mountain that reared above. Prefect Corin might be watching his flight through a telescope, and the thing that lived in the light of the shrine might be following him.