“I do not know what you want of me.” A silence.
Yama corrected himself. “I do not know what the Department wants of me.”
Prefect Corin considered this. At last, he said, “Then you will be here a long time, and so will your friends. It is not about what you know, but what you can do.”
“I am sorry that Coronetes was killed. He did not deserve it.”
“Nor did the men who attacked you. They were not much more than boys, and foolish boys at that, but they were brave. Their only mistake was that they were more loyal to their friends than to the Department.”
Yama said, “Do you wish that they had killed me?”
“You are a monster, boy. You do not know it, but you are. You have more power than any individual should have, and you use it without purpose. You do not even know how to use it properly. You refuse to serve, for no other reason than your pride. You could help win the war, and that is the only reason why you are kept alive. Some want you dead. I have argued against it, and so you still live, but I cannot defend you forever. Especially if you continue to resist.”
“I have completed every test as best I could.”
“This is not about the tests. It is about loyalty.”
“I will not serve blindly,” Yama said. “If I am here, with such gifts as I have, there must be a purpose to it. That is what I want to discover. That is why I came to Ys.”
“You should try and be true to the example of your stepbrother. He served. He served well.”
“I will go to war in a moment, but you will not allow it. So please do not invoke Telmon’s bravery.”
Prefect Corin put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, looking directly into Yama’s face. His brown eyes were steady and unforgiving. He said, “You are very young. Too young for what you possess.”
“I will not serve blindly,” Yama said. “I have thought long and hard about this. If there are those in the Department who want me to help them, then they should talk with me. Or you should kill me now, and then at least you will know that I will never fight against you.”
“We are all one, hand and brain,” Prefect Corin said. “Your stepfather did not like the way things had changed, but still he served.”
“Yes, Coronetes once said something similar.”
“But you will not serve. You set yourself apart. You are a monster of vanity, boy.” Prefect Corin stood up and tossed something on the mattress of the bed. “Here is your copy of the Puranas. Read in it carefully, and consider your position.”
Once he was certain that he had been left alone, Yama began again to scrape at the base of the circular window. He broke a thin strip of wood from the frame of the bed and used this and water from the spigot to loosen the packed earth. The sky had darkened by the time he had dug to the depth of his hand and found the point where glass merged seamlessly with fused rock. Perhaps the window was no more than a place where the rock had been made transparent, but apart from the door it was the only possible way out of the cell.
He began to extend the little hole he had made, scraping away hard earth a few crumbs at a time until the frayed strip of wood met something embedded in the dirt. He probed carefully with his bleeding fingertips and felt a thin curved edge, then dug around it until he could pull it free.
It was a ceramic disc, an ancient coin exactly like the coin the anchorite had given him. But the Aedile’s excavations had turned up thousands of coins around the tombs of the City of the Dead, and there was no reason to believe that this one should be any different from those.
Yama dug a little more, but could find no potential weakness in the window’s edge. He filled in the hole he had made and as the room darkened around him he leaned against the window and watched the shadows of the bent trees lengthen across the tumbled rocks. He fell asleep, and woke to find a constellation of faint lights hung just outside the window. They were fireflies, drawn away from the wild creatures which lived amongst the sliding stones.
Beyond the shifting sparks of the fireflies, the small red swirl of the Eye of the Preservers was printed on the black sky.
Something nagged at Yama, like a speck in his eye. It was the coin, shining softly on the dirt floor. He picked it up. It was warmer than his own skin, and had become translucent, with fine filaments and specks of cold blue light shifting within its thickness.
There was an active shrine nearby.
He could suddenly feel it, with the same absolute sense of direction that linked him with the feral machine. He shivered and drew the blanket around himself. He knew that he could activate the shrine even at this distance, and a plan of escape presented itself.
It was horribly risky, but no worse than trying to climb through a window high above a steep slope of sliding stones at the top of a mountain. And he could not even open the window. Before he could frighten himself by thinking through all the consequences, he willed it.
Beyond the bull’s-eye window, the fireflies scattered as if before a great wind.
His trousers were still damp, but Yama drew them on anyway, and tucked the sliver of wood inside the waistband. Then he wrapped the blanket around his shoulders and sat by the window in the dim red light of the Eye of the Preservers, waiting for something to happen. At intervals, he held the coin up to his eye, but the shifting patterns of luminous lines and specks told him nothing.
Perhaps the shrine was dead after all… but then he knew it was not, as surely as if a light had been shone in his face. He got up and paced around the room, a fierce excitement growing in him. Presently he heard shouts, and then the thin snapping of slug guns. The sounds of distant combat lasted several minutes; then there was the scream of an energy pistol’s discharge and wisps of white smoke began to curl around the edges of the cell door.
Yama scrambled to his feet, and at the same moment the door was flung back with a crash. A guard tumbled in ahead of a thick billow of smoke. His tunic was torn across the chest. The right side of his face was scorched, his hair shriveled to blackened peppercorns.
“Come with me!” the guard yelled. “Now!”
Yama straightened his back and drew the blanket around his shoulders. The guard glared at him and raised his rifle.
“Come now!”
For a moment, Yama feared that the man had lost his mind and would execute him on the spot. Then the guard looked over his shoulder and screamed. He scrambled across the cell, knocking Yama aside and fetching up against the bull’s-eye window, clutching his rifle to his chest and staring wide-eyed at the door. Yama faced it squarely, his heart beating quickly and lightly. Blue light filled the frame. And then, without a transition, the hell-hound was inside the cell.
It was a pillar of blue flame that seemed somehow to extend beyond the floor and ceiling. There was a continual crackling hiss as its energies ate the air which touched its surface. Its heat beat against Yama’s skin. He had to squint against its brilliance as he held up the coin. It took all of his will to stand still.
He said, “I do not know if we have already met, or if you are brother to the one I called forth before, but in any case I apologize for my behavior. I ran away because I did not know what I had called, and I was afraid. But now I have freed you knowingly, and I ask for your help.” He did not see the hell-hound move, but there was a brief wash of heat on his skin and suddenly it was gone.