“Up,” the voice would say, “Up.” And, “Red firefly circle right, white firefly circle left. Red circle right, white circle left.”
There were hundreds of these exercises. Sometimes Yama was asked to weave complex dances involving a decad of differently colored fireflies; sometimes he spent long hours moving a single firefly in straight lines back and forth across the darkness, or varying its brightness by increments. He did not try to understand the significance of the different kinds of exercises. He suspected that if there was a pattern, it had been randomized so that he could never unravel it. Better to think that there was no pattern at all. Better to think that they did not know what they wanted to find out, or did not know how to find out what they wanted to know.
He worked hard at the tests, although they often left him with bad headaches or worse. Sometimes red and black sparks would fill his sight and some time later he would find himself lying on the floor of the cell, his trousers soaked with stale urine, blood on his lips and tongue.
These fits terrified him. Perhaps they were a legacy of the blow to his head (although the wound had completely healed; there was not even a scar), exacerbated by the stress of the exercises. He told no one about them.
He would reveal no weakness to his enemies.
Whether or not those testing Yama were learning about his abilities, he was certainly learning more about himself every day. Despite the fits, he exulted over the growing control over his powers. And for the first time since he had set out from Aeolis on the road to Ys, he had time to reflect on what he had discovered about himself. Always, his actions had been driven by contingency or by the needs of others. First, under the unwanted protection of Prefect Corin and then, after his escape from the Prefect and (so he thought) from his ordained fate as a minor official in the Department of Indigenous Affairs, in the company of Pandaras and Tamora.
He had promised himself that he would discover the secret of his origin—the silver-skinned woman, the white boat in the middle of the Great River, attended by a cloud of tiny machines—and he had failed. No, it was worse than that. He had not really tried. He had preferred to adventure with Tamora and Pandaras rather than think about what he was, and why he was here.
When he was alone in his cell, he spent his time reviewing every step of his adventures between leaving Aeolis and the fall of the Department of Vaticination, weighing every one of his actions and motives and finding them all wanting.
He slept a lot, too, and in his sleep his sense of the location and activity of machines expanded. Sometimes he seemed to be suspended in the midst of a vast array of little minds that were both quick and stupefyingly dull, with webs of connectivity blossoming and fading around him like a runaway loom simultaneously weaving and unraveling a cloth in three dimensions. Most of the machines were fireflies, but at the periphery of their immense flock Yama could detect larger machines employed in defense of the Department. Further still, glimpsed like bright lights through river fog, were larger machines whose purpose was totally obscure, and interspersed through the volume of greater and lesser machines were intense points which he recognized as the potential energies of active shrines.
And sometimes, at the furthest edge of this inward vision, was a faint intimation of the feral machine he had accidentally drawn down at the merchant’s house. It was very far away, hung in isolation beyond and below the end of the world—but it was always there, the iron to which the lodestone of his mind was drawn again and again.
At times, his sensitivity increased so much that he could even perceive the clusters of tiny machines which every sentient person carried at the base of their brain. Faintly, he could feel in these clusters the echoes of the memories of their hosts; it was as if he was the only living person in an impalpable world inhabited by hordes of ghosts mumbling over their last ends.
In his sleep, Yama tried to discover which of the ghosts might be Tamora, or Pandaras, or Eliphas, but always this effort would shift his trancelike apprehension of the machines around him into a dream. Sometimes he ran along a web of narrow paths between the tombs and steles of the City of the Dead, pursued by men who had by grotesque mutilation merged themselves with machines. Sometimes he fled endlessly from the hell-hound, waking with a start in the very moment that its burning blue light swept across him. And sometimes he harried numberless enemies with bloody zeal, exultant as cities burned and armies fought and looted the length of the world in his name, and woke shocked and ashamed, and swore never to dream such dreams again.
But they were always with him, like splinters of cold metal under his skin.
At intervals, Prefect Corin came and sat with Yama, and slowly, punctuated by long silences, a conversation would begin. Yama supposed that these conversations were really interrogations, but mostly it seemed that Prefect Corin was interested in Yama’s childhood, asking about details—and details within those details—of small events or ceremonies, the geography of Aeolis or the hinterlands of the City of the Dead, the disposition of books in the library of the peel-house, the lessons taught by the librarian, Zakiel, or by the master of the guard, Sergeant Rhodean.
The matter of the white boat, the mystery of Yama’s origins, the attempted kidnap by Dr. Dismas, Yama’s adventures in Ys—none of these were ever touched upon.
Yama did not have to dissemble about his encounter with the custodians of the City of the Dead and the slate they had shown him, in which he had seen a man of his bloodline turning away to contemplate a sky full of stars. Nor did he have to describe how he had drawn down the feral machine at the merchant’s house, or the merchant’s last words; nor how he had woken and then defeated the feral machine which had been trapped far beneath the Temple of the Black Well; nor what the woman in white, aspect of one of the Ancients of Days, had told him when she had appeared in the shrine.
But it also meant that all these adventures and discoveries were thrust to the back of his mind by Prefect Corin’s patient but insistent demands for increasingly minute details about the mundane days of his childhood. It was as if all that had happened to Yama in the handful of days between leaving his home in Aeolis and arriving here, in this bleak cell amongst thousands of identical cells in the Department of Indigenous Affairs, had been no more than a vivid dream. It was another reason why, when left alone in the unquiet darkness of his cell, Yama traced and retraced his every footstep between Aeolis and Ys like an ox plodding around and around a water lift, the groove of its path infinitesimally deepening with each round. He was frightened that if he forgot even the slightest detail of his adventures he would begin to forget it all, as the unraveling of a piece of cloth can begin with the fraying of a single thread.
Whenever Yama asked a question, Prefect Corin had a habit of falling silent, as if engaged in an internal dialogue with himself, before asking a question in return. The Prefect’s dry, spare manner intensified during these interrogation sessions. His silences were vast and arid; his gaze burned intently while Yama talked at random about his childhood, like a mountain lion fixing on its prey and waiting for the moment of weakness or uncertainty that will betray it. It was as if he had shaped his intellect to a single inquiring point, as one of the fisherfolk might flake a pebble to form the head of a harpoon. Yama got no answers from him at all—only questions. And he did not know if the answers he gave to the Prefect’s questions were sufficient. Like all of his own questions, that also went unanswered.
Apart from Prefect Corin and the disembodied voice in the divided, darkened room, Yama’s only human contacts were his guards. Four men had sentry duty outside Yama’s cell, changing watches in regular succession. They lived in the cells on either side of his, and marched with him from his cell to the room where he took his tests, and back again.