Yama learned that Eliphas’s own family had been in the trade of question-running for three generations. Eliphas was the last of the line. His only son had joined the army and was fighting the heretics at the midpoint of the world, while his daughters’ children would be raised in the trades of their fathers.
“That’s the difference between trades and professions,” Eliphas said. “Trades marry out; professions marry among their own kind. It’s how they keep their power.”
When it was at last their turn to speak with the clerk at the table, the sunlight had climbed the wall and left the courtyard in shadow. Lights like drifts of sparks had woken across the darkening slope of the mountain. The fireflies that hung above the heads of clerks and petitioners stirred and brightened as the sunlight faded, casting shifting tangles of light and shadow.
Eliphas leaned over the table, the orbits of his fireflies nearly merging with those of the clerk, and fanned a sheaf of pastel-colored papers, pointing at one and then another with his long forefinger. The two men exchanged a merry banter, and the clerk stamped Eliphas’s papers without reading them.
“This is a friend of mine,” Eliphas said, standing aside for Yama. “You do well by him, Tzu.”
“Picking up strays again, Eliphas?” The clerk looked Yama up and down with a raking gaze and said, “Let’s have your papers, boy. You’ll be the last I process this day.”
“I have no papers,” Yama said, as boldly as he could. “I have only my question.”
The clerk, Tzu, had a long, gloomy face. His brown skin was softly creased, like waterlogged leather. Now more creases appeared above his wide-spaced black eyes. He said, “Hand over your papers, or you can walk back down and start over tomorrow.”
“I have my question, and money to pay the fee. I would not take bread from the mouths of your family by trying to gain the information you guard for nothing.”
Tzu sighed, and shook a little bell. He said, “What have you brought me, Eliphas? And at the end of the day, too. We have procedures here,” he told Yama, “and no time for troublemakers.”
Another clerk appeared, a slight old man with a humped back. He conferred with Tzu, and then stared at Yama through spectacles perched on the end of his long nose. He had a wispy white beard and a bald pate mottled with tubercles.
“Stand straight, boy,” Tzu said. “This is Kun Norbu, the chief of all the clerks.”
“How did you get here, boy?” the chief of clerks, Kun Norbu, said.
“Down those stairs,” Yama said, and pointed across the courtyard.
“Don’t lie,” Tzu said. “There’s a guardian. No one has used the Gate of the Hierarchs for a century. Now and then thieves and vagabonds try, as one tried today, but all are destroyed by the guardian.”
“Longer than that, I believe,” Kun Norbu said. “The last Hierarch to visit us was Gallizur the Joyous. It would have been in the summer of the year when Ys was invested by the armies of the Insurrectionists. That would be, hmm, eleven thousand five hundred and sixty-eight years ago.”
“A long time indeed, brother,” Eliphas said, “but this boy is no thief. I can vouch for him.”
Kun Norbu said, “When did you first see him, Eliphas? Not before today, I would wager. I suppose he bribed a guard, and promised to pay you to help him. He doesn’t even have a single firefly. He’s some indigenous wildman, for all you know.”
Yama had supposed that his firefly had followed him, but he now realized that he must have destroyed it by asking it to give up all its light at once. He stared at the chief of clerks and said, “As for fireflies, if that is your only concern, then my lack of them is easily fixed.”
“Don’t be impudent,” Kun Norbu said. “Fireflies choose a host according to their station. Clearly you have no station to speak of.” He clapped his hands. “Guards! Yes, you two! To me, if you please!”
Tzu gasped and stood up, knocking over his stool. Eliphas stepped back, covering his face with his hands. All around, people turned to stare at Yama. A few knelt, heads bowed. The two guards who had started across the courtyard stopped and raised their partisans as if to strike at an invisible foe. Light gleamed along the crescent edges of their double-bladed weapons; a hundred sparks were caught in the lenses of Kun Norbu’s spectacles. In an extravagant impulse born of exhaustion and impatience, Yama had clothed himself in the light of a thousand fireflies, borrowed from everyone close by or called from the wild population beyond the walls. He felt that he was very close to the end of his quest, and he would not be stopped by the petty restrictions of a moribund bureaucracy.
“My question is quite simple,” Yama said. “I want to find my people. Will you help me?”
Chapter Six
The Hell-Hound
The Strangers’ Lodge of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons was built around a small square courtyard.
Tiers of long, narrow balconies rose above the courtyard on three sides; on the fourth was a sloping wall of metal as transparent as glass, on which the last light of the sun glowed like the shower of gold by which, it was said, the Preservers had manifested themselves for the first and last time on the world, when they had seeded it with the ten thousand bloodlines.
Yama bought Eliphas supper in the refectory on the ground floor, and they ate at one of the long tables with a decad of other petitioners. All were crowned by the restless sparks of fireflies; there was no other light in the long room. Yama’s wad of papers was by his elbow, an untidy rainbow fanned on the table’s scarred and polished surface, for he did not have deep enough pockets to hold all the documents he had been given. His wound had been washed with an astringent lotion and freshly bandaged.
Despite the trick with the fireflies, the chief of clerks, Kun Norbu, had insisted that Yama should prove that he had been able to persuade the guardian of the Gate of the Hierarchs. Yama, still clothed in a thousand fireflies, walked up and down the stairs beneath the arch three times before a growing audience of clerks. It seemed to him that they would have watched him do it all night, and after the third time he told Kun Norbu that he had not come to the library as a mountebank or clown, and returned the fireflies to their former hosts, retaining only a pentad of those he had recruited from the local wild population. This trick astonished the clerks more than that of being able to pass the guardian.
Kun Norbu dismissed every clerk but Tzu, who assiduously dealt with Yama’s paperwork, and then the chief of clerks had taken Yama and Eliphas to his cluttered office, where they sat on dusty couches and drank tea sweetened with honey. It seemed that Kun Norbu was an old friend of Eliphas’s, and he said that he was at Yama’s service.
“Tell your story, young man. Tell us how we can help you.”
Yama explained that as a baby he had been found in a boat on the Great River, that he had been told that his bloodline was that of the Builders, long thought to have transcended the world. He said that he had come to Ys to search for others like himself, and added that he suspected that a certain Dr. Dismas had recently found important clues in this very library. Kun Norbu listened patiently, and then asked Yama a hundred questions, most of which he could not begin to attempt to answer. He found himself saying again and again, “If I knew, I would not be searching for the answers myself,” or, “I hope to find that here.”
“You will need to provide a sample of blood and a scraping of cells,” Kun Norbu said at last. “That will be a good beginning.”
Eliphas said, “Then you will take his case, brother. I am glad.”