“By tomorrow,” Captain Lorquital said, “the place will be back to normal.”
“They will catch more of them,” Yama said. “The river renews all, good and bad.”
He was thinking of the kelpies in Mother Spitfire’s pit, but Ixchel Lorquital misunderstood. “Every day more soldiers pass by on their way downriver to the war,” she said. “The war has changed everything along the river. This place is the least of it.”
As the Weazel passed beyond the edge of the floating harbor and raised her sail to catch the offshore breeze, fireworks shot up from Gond, bursting in overlapping showers of gold and green and raining down toward their own reflections in the river’s black water. The Weazel’s crew, up in the rigging, cheered each new explosion.
“For our passenger,” Ixchel Lorquital said with a smile. “So few remain in the city that they mark the departure or return of every one of their bloodline.”
Yama had forgotten about the passenger for whom the Weazel had put in at the floating harbor. He said, “I suppose you and your daughter have lost your cabin to him. Is that where he is now? I would like to meet him, and thank him for his help.”
Captain Lorquital pointed at the mast with the stem of her clay pipe. “He has taken the crow’s nest. Climb up if you want to talk, but he’ll be with us for at least five days.”
The passenger from Gond had arrived an hour before Pandaras and Pantin had brought Yama back to the ship.
He was an envoy to the cities of the Dry Plains, where there were disputes about the new land uncovered by the river’s retreat. It was all to do with the war, Captain Lorquital declared. Normally, such matters were decided at a festival of dance and song, but most of the able young men had gone to fight the heretics, and there were not enough contestants.
“He’s been appointed to make peace between the cities,” Captain Lorquital said. “The people of Gond are a holy people. Their decisions are not easily come by, and are highly respected.”
All this time, Tamora had been sitting in the pool of light cast by the big square lantern at the stern rail, sharpening her sword with a stone and scrap of leather. When Yama left Captain Lorquital to her charts and went forward to the bow, Tamora followed him.
“I fucked up,” she said bluntly. “Put me off at the next port and I’ll find another job.”
“I remember that you saved my life,” Yama said. “And that I then did something foolish. The fault is mine.”
“You should have burned the place to the waterline,” Tamora said fiercely. “It’s no more than it deserves. You don’t need me when you can command any machine. Let me go.”
“I am too tired to talk about this,” Yama said. In fact, he was ashamed of what he had done, although he did not remember much of it. “I need your strength, Tamora. I need to know when to act and when to stay my hand.”
Tamora said, “That’s easy. You only strike when you have to.”
“I need to be sure that I am acting for myself. I feel like a horse under a skillful rider. Most of the time I pick my own way, but sometimes I am pulled up short, or made to gallop in a direction not of my own choosing. I do not know if I am on the side of good or evil. Help me, Tamora.”
She fixed him with her gold-green gaze. “Before I was hurt in the war, they said I was crazy. No one would fight by my side because they said I took too many risks. You know what? I did it because I was scared. It’s easier to charge the enemy under fire than stand and wait for the right moment. So that’s what I did until I was wounded. Afterward, while I was recovering, I had plenty of time to think about what I’d done, and I swore then that I would never again let fear control me. I thought that I had been true to that oath until this night.”
Yama remembered that Sergeant Rhodean had told him that the best generals judge the moment to attack; the worst are driven by events willy-nilly, like a ship before a storm. He said, “You are right. Fear is natural, but I should be able to control it. Thank you.”
“What for? For being a damned fool? For letting you walk into that trap? For failing to help you when it went wrong?”
“For trusting me with your story.”
They watched the last of the fireworks burst far astern as the Weazel headed out into the deep water, and later fell asleep in each other’s arms. As the sky lightened, Yama woke and disentangled himself from Tamora’s embrace. Someone, probably Pandaras, had covered them with a blanket. Tamora sighed and yawned, showing her sharp white teeth and black tongue, and Yama told her to go back to sleep.
Apart from the old sailor, Phalerus, who had the helm, the whole ship was asleep. The new passenger must still be in the crow’s nest, for only Pandaras and Eliphas slept on the raffia matting under the awning. The Weazel was running ahead of a strong wind, her triangular mainsail filled, water creaming by on either side of her bow. The Great River stretched away on all sides; the Rim Mountains were no more than a long line floating low in the lightening sky. The water here was not the usual brown or umber but was the same dark blue as the predawn sky.
It was more than a league deep in places; some of the abyssal trenches plunged into the keel of the world. Hard to believe that this could ever change, and yet year by year the cities of the shore were stranded further and further inland by the river’s retreat. The Great River would at last run dry even here, leaving only a string of long, narrow lakes at the bottom of a deep dry valley.
Yama leaned at the starboard rail. Warm wind blew his unruly black hair back from his face. The bright lights of the huge fishing barges were scattered widely across the river. Yama wondered what monsters lay in the deeps under the Weazel’s keel, and for the first time in many days felt the tug of the feral machine which hung in its cold, solitary orbit a million leagues beyond the end of the world, attached to him by an impalpable thread, just as the kelpies had been attached to their operators by wires and cables. But who was puppet, and who operator? And for what end? He remembered the conclusion of his stepfather’s complicated calculations about the river’s shrinkage and shivered in the brightening sunlight.
After a while, he took out his copy of the Puranas.
The bright crammed pictures stirred to life under his gaze, speaking directly to an unconsciously receptive part of his mind. He realized that there must be machines embedded in the pages. Was every book freighted with hidden meanings? As a child, had he dreamed so vividly of the past because books from the library of the peel-house had lain by his bed?
But then he was lost in the last of Angel’s story, and all idle speculation was driven away.
When Angel came back from the far side of the river, she talked with those of her followers who had waited at the docks for her, then went straightaway to Mr. Naryan, the Archivist of Sensch, to tell him what she had found.
The Archivist was with a pupil, but the hapless lad was immediately dismissed when Angel appeared. Fortified by tea brought by the Archivist’s wife, a quiet woman of Sensch’s lizard race, Angel began to tell the tale of her adventure on the far-side shore.
The Archivist knew that Angel had been to the edge of the world, and for the first time he could not hide his fear.
He was afraid of what she might have done amongst the shrines on the river’s far side, about what she might change.
She said, teasingly, “Don’t you want to hear my story? Isn’t that your avocation?”
“I will listen to anything you want to tell me,” the Archivist said. Despite his fear, he maintained his air of quiet dignity, and she liked him for that.
She said, “The world is a straight line. Do you know about libration?”