“They ruled Ys a long time ago,” Eliphas said, “in the grim days after the Hierarchs vanished, but before the civil service reached its present consensus. They are much diminished, yet still much exalted. If any who live in these days are close to the Preservers, then the people of Gond are the closest. They are so holy that they no longer have children. Their bloodline dwindles. The youngest is a century older than me, and I am counted as long-lived by my bloodline. Their holiness will be the death of them, soon enough. The past has consumed them, brother. The face of the city is more beautiful than I remembered, but it is the beauty of a well-kept tomb.”
As the Weazel made her way toward the harbor under the power of her reaction motor, her sail neatly reefed, a small boat motored out to meet her. A pilot came aboard and formally greeted Captain Lorquital, then asked to see the boy, Yama.
“We have two ships under command of an official of the Department of Indigenous Affairs,” the pilot told Yama. “Perhaps you know him.”
“His name is Corin. He is a Prefect of the Department.”
The pilot was a small man, smaller even than Pandaras, but he had the brisk, assured air of someone used to command. He wore immaculately polished black boots and loose linen trousers under a scarlet djellaba, and was smoking a black cigarillo. He blew a riffle of smoke with a flourish and looked at Yama squarely. “Whatever business you have with him, it is nothing to do with the harbor. We have become a staging post for the war, but we are not under the command of the Department of Indigenous Affairs.”
“I understand.”
“You will not take weapons if you go ashore. Neither will he, nor will his men. All go unarmed here.”
“You put it very plainly,” Yama said. “I hope that I may speak plainly, too. This man wants to make me his prisoner. Because of that, Captain Lorquital fears for the safety of her ship.”
The pilot nodded, and drew on his cigarillo. “He tried to force the issue, and the Harbor Master had to point out that we do not take sides in any dispute. Nor will we be the arena for the settling of any quarrel. Frankly, if he had not tried to force us, we would have let him take you. But we cannot allow him to set a dangerous precedent.” He flicked the butt of his cigarillo over the side and turned on his heel. “Now, Captain Lorquital, the helm if you please. I will take you in.”
The pilot guided the Weazel to a berth at a long pontoon at the inner edge of the harbor, amongst mussel dredgers and two-masted ketches of the kind which carried small cargoes between cities everywhere along the river. The sultry air tasted of the acrid smoke of the fishing barge’s rendering furnaces. The water around the pontoon was stained with sullen rainbows; flocks of tiny machines skated the surface, absorbing spilled fuel oil through pads on their long legs.
Pelicans perched on mooring posts, drying their wings, like rows of arrowheads against the red light of the setting sun. A league away, across a maze of channels and pontoons and graving basins, colored neon lights blazed and winked above clusters of clapboard buildings and plastic domes. The pilot repeated his warning to Yama and Captain Lorquital, and took his leave.
“We can’t go ashore unarmed,” Tamora said.
“You have your teeth and claws,” Pandaras said, “I have my cunning, and our master has his power over machines. What more do we need?”
“I want to talk with him,” Yama said. “I will go alone, and unarmed.”
Tamora said, “And where will you begin to look for him? It would be better if you stayed here. It’ll be the first place he’ll look, and there’s nothing to say we can’t be armed if we stay aboard our own ship.”
Even as the sailors began to make the Weazel fast in her berth, shills appeared on the pontoon, handing out little tiles that whispered seductive invitations to whorehouses and bars. One of the shills called Yama’s name and threw a tile to the deck at his feet and quickly walked away, pushing through the others. Yama picked up the white tile and the golden dragon printed on its surface flexed its wings and breathed a wisp of blue fire that formed two words. A name.
Mother Spitfire’s.
Yama insisted on going alone, although Tamora argued fiercely against it. “The crews of the picketboat of the warship will be crawling all over this place,” she said.”A gang of them could set on you anywhere. Better to fight in a place of your own choosing.”
“I know where he wants to meet you,” Eliphas said. “This place is famous for its entertainments. Of course, it has moved downriver. It used to be anchored off Kalyb, but the fall in the level of the river has stranded that city a dozen leagues from navigable water.” He peered at the long strip of lights twinkling in the dusk and added, “It seems larger, but I suppose that is because of the war.”
Tamora spat over the side of the ship. A tiny machine skated over oily water after her gob of spittle. “Grah. You should swim out to the warship, if you are so eager to meet Corin. It would make as much sense. A man like him won’t dirty the soles of his boots in the stews of a place like this. His invitation is a trick.”
“Better we speak on neutral ground,” Yama said.
“I could break his neck for you.”
“I am sure you could.”
“Or gouge out his eyes.”
“I just want to talk with him, Tamora. That is why I will go alone, or not at all.”
Pandaras agreed readily enough to this. He said that he had a mission of his own.
“Captain Lorquital has given the freemen liberty until the midnight watch, and it seems that my friend, Pantin, has never been with a woman. It was part of the discipline of his former trade. I feel it’s time he was taken in hand, as it were.”
“If you know what you are doing,” Yama said, thinking of the young sailor’s reputation as a pit fighter. Pantin was already on the pontoon, waiting with his hands in the back pockets of the scuffed leather trousers he habitually wore.
“Pantin has renounced the knife life,” Pandaras said, “and I’ll make sure he’s too busy to get into trouble.”
Pandaras walked a little way with Yama, then he and Pantin went off arm in arm, and Yama went in the other direction, toward the far end of the Strip and Mother Spitfire’s.
The main drag of the floating harbor was laid out along a broadwalk half a league long. The gaudily painted fronts of chandlers, bars and whorehouses rose shoulder to shoulder on either side. Groups of intoxicated sailors and soldiers surged and staggered beneath flashing neon and flaring torches, carrying paper cups of beer or smoking pipes of crystal or weed as they moved from one attraction to the next. This was the last stop their transports would make before the battlefields above the midpoint of the world, and Yama supposed that they sought oblivion in the few hours it took for their ships to renew their stores.
Hawkers cried the merits of drinking or smoking dens; there were tattoo parlors and fast-food joints, dream parlors and gambling palaces. Dancers of all sexes and a decad of different bloodlines (or perhaps they were all mirror people, he thought) bumped and ground in lighted windows above the awnings of bars; musicians, magicians and gamblers made islands in the throng. Here and there, magistrates stood on floating discs above the packed heads of the crowds, and their tiny, glittering machines spun everywhere through the neon-lit air.
Mother Spitfire’s was a gambling palace at the far end of the Strip. A dragon limned in golden neon tubing sprawled across its tall façade; pillars of fire roared within tall columns of glass on either side of the wide doors.