Yama got a shoulder under Eliphas’s arm and they staggered down the path to the edge of a steep embankment.
Directly below was a broad road crowded with carts drawn by bullocks or water buffaloes, camels laden with hessiany-wrapped packs, and women and men walking with bundles or clay pots balanced on their heads. Carts and camels and people were all moving downhill toward the high, square entrance of a tunnel in the side of the slope.
As Yama and Eliphas staggered down the embankment, people shrieked and shrank away. Yama glanced over his shoulder. The hell-hound had appeared behind them, burning brightly against a reef of white smoke. Yama shouted in despair and pulled Eliphas behind a cart piled high with watermelons. All around, men and women screamed as the hell-hound swept down the embankment. A bullock bolted, bawling with fear, and its cart overturned, spilling hands of red bananas. A flock of moas ran in circles, screeching wildly and kicking up dust. The hell-hound plunged amongst the birds, rearing back and forth as if maddened.
Yama and Eliphas were swept along in the midst of the panicking crowd into the darkness of the tunnel, brick walls doubling and redoubling the shouts and screams of men and women and the bawling of animals, then into a huge underground chamber. Like a breaking wave, the crowd washed against loading bays where laborers were unloading and weighing produce and clerks were handing out tallies to husbandmen.
Yama and Eliphas were halfway across the wide chamber when the flock of moas stampeded out of the tunnel, the hell-hound burning in their midst. People screamed and dropped baskets and packages and ran in every direction, and a pentad of guards came out of a tall narrow gate. The guards wore half armor and carried slug rifles which they began to fire as they ran toward the hell-hound. Wounded moas fell to the ground, kicking with their strong, scaly legs. Ricocheting slugs whooped and rang, knocking dust and brick fragments from the ground all around the hell-hound as it stretched and bent this way and that, and finally fixed on Yama and Eliphas.
Eliphas wailed and sank to his knees, his arms wrapped over his head. Yama held up the ceramic coin in one hand and his long knife in the other, and slowly backed away from the hell-hound. It had elongated to four or five times the height of a man and shone so brightly that he could only squint at it through half-closed eyes. It made a horrible high-pitched hiss as it sinuously advanced toward him, gouging a smoking trench in the brick floor. Its heat parched his skin. The guards kept up a steady rate of fire, but the fusillade merely kicked up shards of brick around the hell-hound or passed through it as if it was no more than light—and perhaps it was no more than light, light bent into itself. Yama backed into a stack of baskets of live chickens.
He slashed the baskets open and kicked them toward the hell-hound. The thing stopped and bent in a half circle as panicked chickens scattered around it, but then it straightened and fixed on Yama again. He tried again to command it to halt, but he might as well have tried to snuff a furnace by pure will. He was aware of a number of small machines in the chamber, but he could no more hurl them at the hell-hound than he could have endangered the village.
People were fighting to get through the gate; no escape there. Yama stepped backward as the hell-hound swayed toward him, watched by laborers and husbandmen hiding amongst wagons and carts. Eliphas called out. Yama risked glancing around and saw that the old man was standing on top of an overturned cart. A man jumped up beside Eliphas; Yama recognized the gambler who had been playing the shell game outside the bawdy house.
“This way, brother,” Eliphas called, and the gambler shouted, “Come with me if you want to live!”
Yama turned and ran, and knew by the screams of the people all around that the hell-hound had started after him.
He dodged around the cart and for a moment thought that Eliphas and the gambler had vanished. No, they had ducked through a little round hole in the wall. Yama’s shadow was thrown ahead of him, and he ran to meet its dwindling apex. Fierce heat and light beat at his back as he scrambled through the low opening, and then something fell with a clang behind him and he was in darkness.
Chapter Eight
The King of the Corridors
Moments after it had fallen into place behind Yama the hatch rang with a pure, deep note and a smell of scorched metal began to fill the narrow space in which he stood, pressed close to Eliphas and the gambler.
“Put up your knife, dominie,” the gambler said. “You’re with friends here. Follow me, follow me now. The hatch is crystalline iron, but it won’t hold for long.”
The gambler’s stiff red coxcomb, with its single dim firefly, brushed the low ceiling. He wore bright red leggings and a baggy black shirt that came to his knees.He had a pungent but not unpleasant odor, like that of a wet dog.
“I am at your service,” Yama said. His blood was still thrilling from the near escape. When Eliphas took his arm, he realized that he was trembling so much that he could hardly stand.
“It is my turn to help you, brother,” Eliphas said, and put his shoulder under Yama’s arm to support him as they followed the gambler down the tunnel.
Yama said, “What is this place?”
“The service corridors,” Eliphas said. “They’re supposed to run through every part of the Palace, even to the offices of the Hierarchs. But there are no maps to their maze, and few use them now.”
The gambler glanced at them over his shoulder. His long pale face gleamed in the combined light of their fireflies. He said, “Most of that’s true, but more use these corridors than you might reckon, and not everything has been forgotten. Speaking of which, do you remember me, dominie?”
“You were playing the shell game yesterday. You were wearing a silver shirt then.”
“You’re as sharp as they say you are,” the gambler said. “I’m Magon, and I’m here to help you. We’ve been on the lookout for you, dominie. You ran the wrong way yesterday, and it’s my luck to have found you again. Do you know what it is that you wakened? You did wake it, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, I did. It was in a shrine.”
“In the temple of a latriatic cult? We hadn’t thought that one was still functional—well, it isn’t functional now, of course. The shrine was destroyed when the hell-hound broke through.”
Yama touched the coin that hung at his chest. The gambler, Magon, saw the gesture, and said, “That won’t help you, dominie. It isn’t a charm.”
“I was wondering if it had woken the thing.”
The woman in the shrine of the Temple of the Black Well had said that the coin had drawn her to him.
Magon said, “You did that yourself, I reckon. Lucky you were brought up where you were, in the City of the Dead, and not in Ys. There are too many shrines in Ys, and more remain functional than most folk think. If you had been brought up in Ys, it is likely that a hell-hound would have scented you before you were ready for it. But that would be a different world, and I wouldn’t have the good fortune of talking with you here and now.”
“You seem to know a lot about me,” Yama said.
“Lucky for you that I do,” Magon said jauntily.
“And you know about the hell-hound.”
“A little, dominie.”
“It seemed to be made of light,” Yama said.
“Something very like it,” Eliphas said, eager to explain something he understood. “Light is only matter in another form, and it can be bound for a while. If we can keep away from it, brother, the hell-hound will collapse when its binding energy sinks below a certain level, or it will find a functioning shrine and upload itself and return to the place for which shrines are windows. They are terrible things. They can live in the space inside the shrines, and in our world, too. They pass through our world from one shrine to another like an arrow through air, if an arrow could make itself into air in its flight and remake itself when it hits its target. They were sent after avatars, originally.”