When he came to himself, he had fetched up in the doorway of a dream parlor at the other end of the Strip.
One hand clasped the wrist of the other, crushing the coypu hair fetish. Seed pearls pricked his fingertips. There was blood on his hands and flecks of blood and bloody matter spattered his tunic and face and hair. It was not his blood.
Inside the dream parlor, within a huge glass tank filled with boiling wreaths of thick green smoke, a naked woman pressed her face and breasts against the glass for a moment, her mouth opening and closing as if she was trying to tell him something.
Yama cried out.
“Angel!”
But the woman stepped backward into the smoke and was gone.
Sailors and soldiers were rioting up and down the length of the Strip. Yama borrowed the eyes of a machine high above the crowd and saw that white smoke was pouring from the edges of the steep tiled roof of Mother Spitfire’s gambling palace. The gold neon dragon spat sheets of sparks; one of its wings went out. Yama spun the machine and saw that the buildings around the gambling palace were on fire, too. Magistrates on floating discs were cutting a firebreak across the Strip with pistol shots. A painted façade plunged like a huge guillotine blade into a gap that was blown open in front of it. Strings of light-bulbs and strips of jointed neon tubing fell, smashing amongst the rioting crowd.
Yama released the machine and got up and started back toward the ship, but he had not gone very far when he was seized from behind, lifted, and flung against a wall.
There were two men, burly and tall, as alike as brothers.
They wore breechclouts and plastic breastplates, and their shaven heads were crowned with tight-fitting copper caps.
One man pinned him while the other quickly and roughly frisked him.
“I have no money,” Yama said.
The man who held him laughed and said, “He thinks we’re robbing him, Diomedes!”
“We’re badly misunderstood, Dercetas,” the other said, and told Yama, “We’re from an old friend, boy. He’ll be pleased to see you again.”
Dercetas got Yama in an armlock and shoved him forward, down a service walkway that ran out above black water. Diomedes brandished a pistol, and when a magistrate suddenly swooped down from the darkness beyond the rail, he twitched his pistol and fired. The magistrate fell with his clothes on fire; his disc shot straight up in a clap of thunder.
Most of the magistrate’s machines had been destroyed in the violet flare of the pistol blast. Yama threw the rest at Diomedes. The man was knocked backward and spun around, held upright only by the machines which had embedded themselves in his flesh. One eye was a bloody hole; blood filled the space beneath his transparent breastplate and ran down his bare legs.
“Let me go,” Yama shouted. “Let me go and I will spare you!”
His head hurt very badly. He could barely see because great flags of red and black were crowding in. Diomedes’s body twitched as the machines began to work their way out of his flesh.
Dercetas thrust Yama from him and stepped backward, then turned and ran. Yama staggered after him and said in an entirely new voice, “Wait. You fool. Wait for me.” But the man had vanished into the crowd at the end of the walkway. Behind Yama, the dead man fell forward and the machines flew away into the night.
Much later, Pandaras and Pantin found Eliphas standing over Yama. There was a bloody corpse nearby, but at first Pandaras thought nothing of it. The riots had been very bad, and order was only now being restored. Magistrates were supervising teams of sailors and soldiers, putting out fires and clearing debris from the walkways. Bodies had been laid in neat rows in the big square at the center of the Strip, awaiting identification and shriving.
Eliphas seemed to be praying over Yama. As Pandaras approached, the old man turned and said, “He is sick, but I do not think that he is wounded.”
“Let me see,” Pandaras said. He pushed Eliphas aside and squatted beside his master. Yama stared past him at an imaginary point somewhere beyond the world. Pandaras said, “Master, do you know who I am? Do you know where you are?”
“He killed that man,” Eliphas said.
For the first time, Pandaras looked closely at the dead man. He wore a plastic breastplate and a copper cap. The breastplate was riddled with bloody holes.
“I’ve seen others dressed like that,” Pandaras said. “I expect they’re Prefect Corin’s men. Help me, Eliphas. We must get him back to the ship.”
Two men wearing armor and copper caps had found Pandaras and Pantin in a whorehouse. Pantin had stabbed one in the eye with a table knife and had jumped on the back of the other and cut his throat, sawing and sawing with the blunt blade until the man’s head had been nearly cut off. The boy was trembling but docile now, like a horse which has just run a race. Blood crusted his bare chest.
Together, Eliphas and Pandaras helped Yama stand. “We must get out of this, master,” Pandaras said. “Prefect Corin found you, didn’t he? I shouldn’t have listened to Tamora. I should have stayed. I’m sorry.”
“There is a monster,” Yama said dreamily. “I am dangerous, Pandaras. Even to myself.”
“He’s too hard on himself,” Pandaras told Eliphas. “You don’t go running to the magistrates to ask for justice when it’s your own family, and you don’t stint, either. If it was me, I would have burned the whole thing down to make sure I killed Corin.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Ascension of Angel
“They’re holding prefect Corin and both his ships,” Captain Lorquital said, “The magistrates think that he brought weapons ashore, or allowed his men to. They’d like to blame you, too, but they can’t see how one young man could have caused so much destruction. Our passenger put in a word, too.”
“Prefect Corin will follow us,” Yama said. “The magistrates may delay him, but they will not be able to stop him. They have no real cause, and he will be able to deny responsibility. After all, he is not the one who wrecked Mother Spitfire’s gambling palace.”
They stood on the quarterdeck, watching the lights of the floating harbor diminish across a widening gap of black water as the Weazel maneuvered through a channel marked by luminescent buoys. The fires had been put out and the crowds of sailors and soldiers had been dispersed to their ships. The places which had been damaged were ringed with lights, and the sounds of construction work could be heard. Beyond the floating harbor, the city of Gond shone against the night by its own inner light, like a range of low hills covered in luminous snow.
“The less of that kind of talk, the better,” Ixchel Lorquital said. “The magistrates have ears in the wind here.”
“No more,” Yama said, and shivered; he did not know why he had said it.
Pandaras had described in vivid detail how he and Pantin had found Yama by the dead man, with Eliphas praying over him. Yama had riddled a man with machines, but he did not remember it. He remembered nothing after his rage had taken him in the gambling palace. He had been floating above the Strip with burning buildings on either side…
There had been a woman hanging in green vapor… He turned the fetish around and around on his wrist; it helped him remember who he was.
He had suffered only a few scrapes and bruises, and there was a bump in the hollow between the two big tendons at the back of his skull. Something hard-edged which he could move around under the skin. He should know what it was… but the memory slid away when he tried to articulate it.