It was small, with a crooked blade. Luria flourished it dramatically, as if about to plunge it into her own breast.
Daphoene spread her eyes wide. She was smiling toward Luria. Her white eyes were full of tears. A thread of blood ran from one corner of her mouth.
“Now it ends,” she said.
To Yama, it seemed as if a hundred people had spoken with the same voice. Syle stepped forward and said, “Pythoness. Please—” Luria swung the knife. Not at Syle, but at Daphoene.
The blade must have been poisoned, for although it only inflicted a shallow cut on Daphoene’s flat breast, the girl convulsed and fell back on to the chair of her palanquin.
A moment later Luria fell too, riddled with arbalest bolts.
Rega wailed and ran across the stage to Daphoene, and snatched her up and covered her face with desperate kisses.
Chapter Ten
The Committee for Public Safety
“Daphoene was the daughter of Rega by another marriage,” Prefect Corin said. “I think it was Rega who had the idea—Syle is a clever man, but not one given to carrying out his schemes. Rega, however, is very ambitious. She was not content to be the wife of the secretary of a dwindling department. Her father was a failed merchant who killed himself before his debtors could, and she clawed her way up from poverty. I half admire her for her ambition, if not for her methods. She is a magnificent bitch.”
“She altered her daughter’s appearance by surgery and infected her with machines carrying the essences of dead people. It is a technique we have used to produce battlefield advisers. The infected subject becomes a population which, when asked a question, can by heuristics derive the best solution to a particular problem. It has not had a high success rate—most of the subjects retreat into fugues. Daphoene was more successful than most, but the procedure blinded her, and most of her own personality was destroyed. However, Rega felt that the loss of her daughter’s sight and sanity was an acceptable sacrifice to her own ambition. I think that Luria suspected that Daphoene was Syle’s stepdaughter, but she had no proof. It was Syle who organized the search for the new pythoness, after all, and Syle who kept all the records, and he married the only person who could betray him.”
Yama said, “They meant to betray me from the beginning. Luria wanted to exchange me for the safety of her department; Syle and Rega plotted to use me as a counter in a bargain with you. At the last moment, Syle feared that the plans would go wrong and tried to persuade me to help him against you, but I would not. And even if I had helped him, I think that Rega would still have betrayed me.”
Brabant had been innocent. The conversation which Pandaras had overheard had been staged by Syle and Rega, part of the scheme to lure Yama into territory under the control of the Department of Indigenous Affairs so that he could be captured by Prefect Corin. It was well known that Brabant patronized the bawdy house at the edge of the day market, and Prefect Corin had waited for Yama there. But Yama had escaped the trap and had to be betrayed all over again, this time publicly. The gatekeeper had informed Syle of Yama’s return, and Syle had delayed the start of the public inquisition until Prefect Corin’s men were in place.
Prefect Corin said, “No doubt Rega will infect her new daughter once she is born—and meanwhile Syle will find an amenable candidate to play the role of pythoness. He is our man, now. These old departments are utterly decadent, Yama, incurable except by the most radical surgery. We have developed a new system where all, from the humblest clerk to the most senior legate, are answerable to a network of committees. With no center of power, no single person can influence the Department for their own ends. Thus, we are able to take a long-term view with the best interests of Confluence in mind. In time, all will fall under our system, and we can begin to win the war against the heretics.”
They sat side by side on the narrow cot in Yama’s tiny cell, lit only by a luminous stick. Yama’s fireflies had been stripped from him, as had his knife and the ancient coin which the anchorite had given him. He had been allowed to keep his copy of the Puranas and his clothes, nothing else.
The cell was Spartan. There was the cot with its lumpy mattress, a plastic slop bucket, a shelf which folded down from the wall, and a square of raffia matting on the stone floor. A spigot in the wall delivered lukewarm, tasteless water. There was a plastic cup hanging on a chain beside the spigot, and a drain beneath, no bigger than Yama’s outspread hand. Prefect Corin assured Yama that it was no different from his own cell and every other private cell in the Department of Indigenous Affairs. Husbands and wives each kept their own cells when they were married, and children lived in dormitories until they were old enough to be given a job and a cell of their own.
The heart of the Department of Indigenous Affairs was a vast honeycomb of cells and narrow corridors, interspersed with long, low chambers where clerks worked, row upon row upon row, fireflies flickering above their heads as they bent over papers and books and slates. A hundred layers of cells and corridors and chambers crammed into the middle levels of the Palace and ringed by outlying territories sequestered from other departments, which contained barracks and armories.
Tamora and Pandaras and Eliphas were being held a long way from Yama, in their own cells. They were undergoing debriefing, Prefect Corin said, and would be released once it was finished. Yama asked when that might be, and Prefect Corin replied that it might take only a few days, or it might take years.
“Once we know everything,” he said.
“There is no end to questions,” Yama said.
Prefect Corin considered this. He said, “In your case, that might be true.”
It was never quiet. There was always the sound of voices somewhere, the clash of doors slamming, the tread of feet. Yama lost track of time. At the beginning, he was mostly left in darkness, and meals—edible plastic occasionally leavened with a piece of fruit or a dollop of vegetable curry—arrived at irregular intervals. Later, when daylight was piped into his cell through a glass duct, he could at least read in the Puranas and mark, by the waxing and waning of the weak light, the passage of the days.
At intervals, Yama was taken from the cell and marched by armed guards to a large, dimly lit room divided into two by a pane of thick glass. It was where he was tested.
On one side of the glass was a stool; on the other were fireflies, anything from one to more than a hundred. A disembodied voice would instruct Yama to sit on the stool. Once he was seated, his side of the room would be plunged into darkness. Then the tests would begin.
The first time this happened there was only a single firefly, a brilliant point of light that hung in the center of the darkened space on the other side of the glass. Yama was told to move it to the right. He refused, and after a long time he was taken to his cell and left in darkness without food. Judging by the ebb and flow of noise, Yama thought that two days might have passed. At last, weak with hunger, he was brought back to the divided room and asked by the voice to repeat the exercise.
Yama obeyed. Both sides had made their point. He had shown that he was acting under coercion; they had shown that they would not tolerate resistance. The voice was patient and never tired or varied its precise inflection. It gave each set of instructions twice over and waited until Yama had complied before issuing the next. It took no notice of any mistakes or failures. Yama gradually constructed a fantasy image of the voice’s owner. A middle-aged man, with cropped, iron-gray hair and a square jaw, sitting in a cell much like his own, a single firefly at his shoulder illuminating the script from which he read.