“I spent much of my childhood in a library. Perhaps too much of it was spent studying the past. I want to see the world, Eliphas, and all its wonders. I want the present, not the past.”
“But the past is all around us. We cannot escape it. Everything important has happened in the past, and we are its children. The Preservers achieved godhood in the past and made the world in the past and shaped the bloodlines in the past. The future is a small thing and hazily glimpsed, and we are told that once every bloodline has changed the future will cease, for history will cease. But you are right, brother. Children should look ahead, not behind. We cannot live in the past, or else the future will only echo what has already happened.”
So they talked as the ship, sailing aslant the river’s currents, drew closer to the shining city of Gond. Eliphas preferred his own opinions to those of anyone else, but Yama was grateful for the diversion of his company.
He could not grieve for his stepfather, not yet. He could not give way to grief or anger. He must stay calm and alert, for sooner or later he would have to face Prefect Corin again.
He did not believe that he had escaped. Prefect Corin was a thorough man. He would not have been fooled for long by Yama’s ruse, and would have returned to the floating forest to search for remains of his quarry. Finding none, he would have gone on downriver, implacable, relentless. This was not mere supposition: Yama had already turned aside several machines that were searching the wide river for any trace of the Weazel. So he was not surprised when, that evening, as the Weazel scudded ahead of a light breeze toward the floating harbor that stood off the shore of Gond, Captain Lorquital called him up to the quarterdeck.
Aguilar and Tamora stood on either side of Captain Lorquital’s sling chair. Aguilar told Yama, “Your trick with the machines has run aground. The devil has got ahead of us.”
“We’ll have to face him now,” Tamora said, and her black lips peeled back from her teeth at the thought.
Ixchel Lorquital handed Yama her spectacles without comment. Through their magnifying lenses, the floating harbor leapt closer. There were ships of every size laid up at the leagues of pontoons and cranes and warehouses of the docks; their masts made a leafless forest. And in the channels beyond the floating harbor, a picketboat and a triple-decked warship were anchored side by side, their sails half-reefed.
“Well,” Yama said, “we could not hope to hide from him forever.”
“There was a light signal from the harbor,” Captain Lorquital said. “We are to pick up our passenger tonight. He’s an important man, and we can leave tomorrow morning under his protection, like any other honest vessel.”
“We can’t depend on that,” Aguilar said, and told Yama, “Your devil will be watching the river night and day, but I think we’ll have a better chance if we run at night.”
Tamora said, “We might surprise him.”
“I saw a machine today,” Captain Lorquital said. “It was making directly for us when it suddenly angled away, as if it remembered business it had elsewhere.”
“I cannot confuse the minds of men,” Yama said, “and Aguilar is right. Prefect Corin’s men will be watching every ship that passes by. Especially those few that pass by at night.”
“We have lost our cannon,” Aguilar said. “We have only our small arms. If it comes to a fight, we must surprise them.”
“We must strike first,” Tamora said.
“We have made plans,” Aguilar said. “Barrels of pitch. A catapult—”
Captain Lorquital said, “I won’t be a pirate, daughter. They must fire the first shot.”
“And that one shot could sink us,” Aguilar said.
Yama said, “It is better to know where our enemy is than to run with the thought that he is always somewhere behind us. Besides, he will have no warrant or power here. He is merely another sailor put in for shore leave and reprovisioning. If he tries to hurt us, the common law will protect us.”
“The people of Gond care little for anything but their philosophies,” Aguilar said. “They’ll probably turn us over to that town burner rather than interrupt their meditations to listen to us plead our case.”
“She’s right,” Tamora said. “We must take matters into our own hands.”
“Then we’ll be worse than them,” Captain Lorquital said firmly. “This is an end to the argument. We’ll behave as any normal ship. The free men will get their shore leave, and you, daughter, will stand guard with the slaves. Nothing will happen to us at the harbor, and once our passenger is aboard, we’ll have his protection.”
Afterward, Tamora followed Yama to the bow. “You are planning something,” she said. “I know you don’t believe that crut about common law.”
“I want to kill him,” Yama said.
Tamora grinned hugely. “That’s more like it. How? And how can I help?”
“I want to kill him, but I do not think that I should.”
“Then he will kill you.”
“Yes, he will, if he cannot make me serve him.”
“He destroyed your home, Yama. He killed your father as surely as if he had put an arbalest bolt through his heart. He is your enemy. There is nothing sweeter than drinking the blood of your enemy. Don’t deny yourself the pleasure.”
“He is only one man. How many more will the Department send after me? How many more would I have to kill? If I kill Prefect Corin there will never be an end to killing. I will always be hunted. But if I can find a way to end this, then I will be free.”
Tamora thought about this. “We’ll try your way,” she said at last. “And if that doesn’t work, give him to me. He is as much my enemy as yours. I’ll rip his heart from his chest and eat it in front of his dying eyes.”
She smiled fiercely at the thought, but Yama knew that she shared his foreboding.
A fishing barge was anchored upstream of the floating harbor, the enormous carcass of a leviathan sprawled across its wide flat deck. Already partly defleshed, the arches of the leviathan’s ribcage rose higher than the barge’s cranes. Its guts, tinged pink with the plankton on which it had fed, spilled in heavy loops from a rent that would have admitted the Weazel, mast and all. A line of men was strung across the wide flat tail of the carcass, like harvesters working across a field. They were using huge flensing knives to cut the hide away from the blubber beneath. Black smoke poured from the barge’s rendering furnaces, sending up a stink of burning fat and hazing the last light of the sun. Flocks of birds dipped and rose like whirling snowstorms, fighting for tidbits in the bloody waters.
As the Weazel glided through the lee of the barge, Yama watched the city of Gond slip past to starboard. It had once risen out of the river; now, it looked like the last tooth of an old man, its roots exposed beyond a labyrinth of mudflats. Gond, the porcelain city. A clutch of luminous white shells three leagues across, rising and falling in rounded contours like a range of ancient dunes, tinged with rose and silver and gold. Here and there were clusters of slim towers, their tops ringed round by tiers of balconies. Floating gardens hovered along the river margin, their parks and woods strung with thousands of lamps.
Eliphas climbed onto the forecastle deck. “There are probably not more than a hundred living there now,” he said. “Mostly, it is maintained by machines.”
“Yet they once ruled Ys,” Yama said.
He had once read a brief history of the porcelain city, and remembered that it had grown from a single seed planted in the sand of a beach at the first bend in the Great River. He wondered if that beach was still there, beneath the carapace of the city—the past preserved forever in the present. But no strangers were allowed into Gond. Its beauty was also its shield. Its people were great philosophers and teachers, but they did their work in colleges scattered amongst the orchards and fields and paddies that surrounded the city. From the first, the city had drawn circle around itself.