Telmon sprang onto a hummock of sedge and looked left and right to check the progress of the beaters, but it was Yama, staring straight ahead with the rain driving into his face, who saw a little spark of light suddenly blossom far out across the sweep of the moors. He cried out and pointed, and Telmon blew and blew on his silver whistle, and raised both arms above his head to signal that the beaters at the far end of each line should begin to walk toward each other and close the circle. Other whistles sounded as the signal was passed down the lines, and Yama and Telmon broke into a run against the wind and rain, leaping a stream and running on toward the scrap of light, which flickered and grew brighter in the midst of the darkening plain.
It was a juniper set on fire. It was burning so fiercely that it had scorched the grass all around it, snapping and crackling as fire consumed its needle-laden branches and tossed yellow flame and fragrant smoke into the wind and rain. Telmon and Yama gazed at it with wonder, then hugged and pounded each other on the back.
“It is here!” Telmon shouted. “I know it is here!”
They cast around, and almost at once Telmon found the long scar in a stand of heather. It was thirty paces wide and more than five hundred long, burnt down to the earth and layered with wet black ashes.
“It was a lek,” Telmon said. “The male makes it to attract females. The size and regularity of it shows that he is strong and fit.”
“This one must have been very big,” Yama said. The excitement he had felt while running toward the burning tree was gone; he felt a queer kind of relief now. He would not have to face the dragon. Not yet. He paced out the length of the lek while Telmon squatted with the blazing tree at his back and poked through the char.
“Four hundred and twenty-eight,” Yama said, when he came back. “How big would the dragon be, Tel?”
“Pretty big. I think he was successful, too. Look at the claw marks here. There are two kinds.”
They quartered the area around the lek, moving quickly because the light was going. The tree had mostly burned out when the beaters arrived and helped widen the search. But the dragon was gone.
Three days later, Telmon and the muster from Aeolis boarded a carrack that had anchored at the floating harbor on its way from Ys to the war at the midpoint of the world.
Yama did not go to see Telmon off, but stood on the bluff above the Great River and raised his fighting kite into the wind as the little flotilla of skiffs, each with a decad of men, rowed out to the great ship. Yama had painted the kite with a red dragon, its tail curled around its long body and fire pouring from its crocodile jaws, and he flew it high into the snapping wind and then lit the fuses and cut the string. The kite sailed out high above the Great River, and the chain of firecrackers exploded in flame and smoke until the last and biggest of all set fire to the kite’s wide diamond, and it fell from the sky.
After the news of the death of Telmon, Yama began to feel an unfocused restlessness. He spent long hours studying the map or sweeping the horizons with the telescope in the tower which housed the heliograph, most often pointing it upriver, where there was always the sense of the teeming vast city, like a thunderstorm, looming beyond the vanishing point.
Ys! When the air was exceptionally clear, Yama could glimpse the slender gleaming towers rooted at the heart of the city. The towers were so tall that they rose beyond the limit of visibility, higher than the bare peaks of the Rimwall Mountains, punching through the atmosphere whose haze hid Ys itself. Ys was three days’ journey by river and four times that by road, but even so the ancient city dominated the landscape, and Yama’s dreams.
After Telmon’s death, Yama began to plan his escape with meticulous care, although at first he did not think of it as escape at all, but merely an extension of the expeditions he had made, first with Telmon, and latterly with Ananda and Derev, in the City of the Dead. Sergeant Rhodean was fond of saying that most unsuccessful campaigns failed not because of the action of the enemy but because of lack of crucial supplies or unforeseeable circumstances, and so Yama made caches of stolen supplies in several hiding-places amongst the ruins in the garden of the peel-house. But he didn’t seriously think of carrying out his plans until the night after the encounter with Lud and Lob, when Dr. Dismas had an audience with the Aedile.
Dr. Dismas arrived at the end of the evening meal. The Aedile and Yama customarily ate together in the Great Hall, sitting at one end of the long, polished table under the high, barrel-vaulted ceiling and its freight of hanging banners, most so ancient that all traces of the devices they had once borne had faded, leaving only a kind of insubstantial, tattered gauze.
They were the sigils of the Aedile’s ancestors. He had saved them from the great bonfires of the vanities when, after coming to power, the present administration of the Department of Indigenous Affairs had sought to eradicate the past.
Ghosts. Ghosts above, and a ghost unremarked in the empty chair at the Aedile’s right hand.
Servants came and went with silent precision, bringing lentil soup, then slivers of mango dusted with ginger, and then a roast marmot dismembered on a bed of watercress. The Aedile said little except to ask after Yama’s day.
Yama had spent the morning watching the pinnace which had anchored downriver of the bay three days ago, and now he remarked that he would like to take a boat out to have a closer look at it.
The Aedile said, “I wonder why it does not anchor at the new quay. It is small enough to enter the mouth of the bay, yet does not. No, I do not think it would be good for you to go out to, it, Yama. As well as good, brave men, all sorts of ruffians are recruited to fight the heretics.”
For a moment, they both thought of Telmon. Ghosts, invisibly packing the air.
The Aedile changed the subject. “When I first arrived here, ships of all sizes could anchor in the bay, and when the river level began to fall I had the new quay built. But now the bigger ships must use the floating harbor, and soon that will have to be moved farther out to accommodate the largest of the argosies. From its present rate of shrinkage I have calculated that in less than five hundred years the river will be completely dry. Aeolis will be a port stranded in a desert plain.”
“There is the Breas.”
“Quite, quite, but where does the water of the Breas come from, except from the snows of the Rim Mountains, which in turn fall from air pregnant with water evaporated from the Great River? I have sometimes thought that it would be good for the town to have the old locks rebuilt. There is still good marble to be quarried in the hills.”
Yama mentioned that Dr. Dismas was returned from Ys, but the Aedile only said, “Quite, quite. I have even talked with him.”
“I suppose he has arranged some filthy little clerkship for me.”
“This is not the time to discuss your future,” the Aedile said, and retreated, as was increasingly his habit, into a book.
He made occasional notes in the margins of its pages with one hand while he ate with the other at a slow, deliberate pace that was maddening to Yama. He wanted to go down to the armory and question Sergeant Rhodean, who had returned from his patrol just before darkness.
The servants had cleared away the great silver salver bearing the marmot’s carcass and were bringing in a dish of iced sherbet when the majordomo paced down the long hall and announced the arrival of Dr. Dismas.
“Bring him directly.” The Aedile shut his book, took off his spectacles, and told Yama, “Run along, my boy. I know you want to quiz Sergeant Rhodean.”