“You’ll have to talk with Lupe, dominie. Please, I really am no more than a player of games. We’re at the service of the workers in the Palace, and that’s how I make my living. You might say that if we had a department, it would be the oldest of all.”
Eliphas caught Yama’s arm and whispered, “I know his kind now. Thieves and cutthroats, brother, no better than the husbandmen.”
Yama whispered back, “Unless you know the way out, we have no choice but to follow him.”
Magon cocked his head, his eyes bright as he looked from Eliphas to Yama. He said, “You don’t trust me, and I guess that if I was in your position I’d feel the same. I don’t have the answers you want, dominie. I’m just here to bring you to Lupe. Lupe will answer your questions. We must leave here. The hell-hound is still at your back, and the big fish get restless after a while, and start questing about with their arms to see if they can catch you. We—” Blue light was suddenly reflected in Magon’s eyes.
Yama turned. The hell-hound stood at the end of the bridge. It was smaller now, but burned as brightly as ever.
Yama unsheathed his knife. Its curved blade kindled with blue flame, as if to challenge the hell-hound’s unworldly light.
The hell-hound slid forward, elongating through black air as it climbed the arch of the narrow bridge. Yama and Eliphas retreated step by step. They had scarcely reached the far end when something hit the underside of the bridge so hard that it hummed like a plucked string. Magon and Eliphas screamed. Nests of pale tendrils rose up on either side of the bridge’s arch, slithering around the slender railings. The hell-hound stopped, bending back and forth as more tentacles quested up out of the water.
Yama guessed that there must be a decad or more of the giant polyps beneath the bridge. The undersides of the tentacles bore rows of fleshy suckers which stuck and unstuck to the metal span with wet noises; their ends were frayed into feathery palps which continually tasted the air.
Then the water under the bridge boiled and the forest of tentacles which gripped the railings tensed. The bridge groaned but held, and the tentacles coiled more tightly and tensed again, quivering with effort. One of the giant polyps was half-lifted out of the water. Under its white mantle, a huge blue eye with a golden pupil revolved and fixed its gaze on Yama.
The bridge groaned again and then the central section gave way with a sudden sharp crack that echoed and reechoed from the cavern’s wet walls. On the other side of the broken bridge, the hell-hound flared brilliantly and whirled around and fled into the tunnel, and Yama and Eliphas cheered.
The water boiled with activity. Green lights flashed furiously under its foaming surface. One, then another, then two more: the great polyps lifted the edges of their mantles out of the water and stared at Yama. Eliphas and Magon shouted in alarm, but Yama, guessing wildly, lifted the coin from his shirt and held it up. Satisfied, the polyps sank back one by one. The water boiled up once more and then darkened as the living lights beneath its surface faded away.
“Nothing will follow us now,” Yama said.
“The hell-hound will find another way to follow you,” Magon said. “That’s what it does.” He was very scared, but he had stood firm, and Yama liked him better for that.
Eliphas took a deep, trembling breath, then another. “Lead on, brother. And remember we trust you only slightly more than we trust your fishy friends.”
The narrow corridor which led away from the flooded cavern was circular in cross-section and lined with fused rock that dully reflected the lights of the fireflies of Yama and Eliphas. As it rose and turned, Yama was certain that its gravity changed direction, too, so that they were no longer walking on its floor but along its wall, rising vertically through the heart of the mountain. Occasionally, other corridors opened to either side and above; gusts of warm air blew from these openings, sometimes bringing the sound of distant machinery.
Magon soon regained his jaunty confidence, and boasted that these were the old skyways which only his people knew.
“You might say that there’s a Palace within a Palace, each twined around the other like a vine around a tree until you can’t tell whether the tree is holding up the vine, or the vine the tree. We were here from the beginning. Departments come and go. They fight each other and are destroyed or absorbed, yet we are still here. We will be here until the end.”
Eliphas said, “I suppose this is the teaching of your master, this Lupe.”
“It’s our history,” Magon said. “It’s passed on in song and dance from father to son, from mother to daughter. Just because it’s not written in books doesn’t mean it isn’t true, though for someone like yourself, who has breathed so much book dust he is mostly book himself, that might be hard to believe. We are always here to serve. It’s what we do. Whoever owns the Palace becomes our master, whether they know it or not.”
“And you want to help me?”
What struck Yama now was that in his posturing and anxious capering, his hypersensitivity to moods and eagerness to please, Magon was just like the kind of lap dog that childless gentlewomen keep.
Magon said, “You are come at last, dominie. Lupe said he had not expected it, although it was foretold by an anchorite years before. But Lupe will tell you himself.”
The corridor turned around itself again. Warm, humid air, laden with a rich organic stink, blew into their faces, and then the corridor opened out into a long, low room. Its bare rock walls ran with condensation; its floor was strewn with heaps of black soil in which frills of fungus grew; dead-white, blood-red, a yellow so shiny it might have been varnished. At the other end of the room, Magon parted layers of nylon-mesh curtains and ushered Yama and Eliphas into a barrel-vaulted cave lit by shafts of sunlight that fell from vents in the rock ceiling far above.
“Our home,” Magon said. “It is the capital of my people, for Lupe lives here.”
There were little gardens, and patchwork shacks built of plastic or cardboard sheeting, or of translucent paper stretched across bamboo framing. People drew around Yama and Eliphas as they followed Magon across the cavern, and they quickly became the center of a procession.
There were clowns and jugglers, mummers and mimes, weightlifters and agonists, fakirs with steel pins through their cheeks and eyelids. Acrobats walked on wires strung everywhere across the midway of the cavern. There were men dressed in richly embroidered dresses of faded silk stiff with brocade and silver and gold thread, with white-painted faces and black makeup that exaggerated their eyes, transvestites that burlesqued the sacred temple dancers. There were musicians and gamblers, and prostitutes of all four sexes and seemingly of every imaginable bloodline.
Eliphas looked around uneasily, but Yama knew that they would not be harmed. Not here. “They exist to serve!” he said, and took the old man’s arm to reassure him.
The gorgeous, motley procession crossed the length of the cavern. A fakir smashed a bottle on his head and rubbed a handful of broken glass over his bare chest; another pressed metal skewers through folds of skin pinched up from his arms. Musicians played a solemn march; clowns knocked each other down and breathed out gouts of fire or blew fountains of sparkling dust high into the air; men and women held up their children, who laughed, and clapped their hands.
The path ended at a round gilt frame twice Yama’s height. It might once have held a shrine. The crowd parted to let Yama and Eliphas follow Magon through this gateway.
The room beyond was swagged in faded tapestries and bunched silks stained with dust. The wrack of ten thousand years lay everywhere in an indiscriminate jumble. Lapidary icons were heaped like beetles in a green plastic bowl; a cassone, its sides painted with exquisitely detailed scenes from the Puranas, its top missing, was filled with filthy old boots; ancient books lay in a tumbled heap next to neat rolls of plastic sheeting.