The burning ship squatted over its livid reflection, tossing harvests of sparks into the night, as if to rival the serene light of the Galaxy. It was a broad-beamed carrack, one of the fleet of transports which carried troops or bulk supplies to the armies fighting the heretics at the midpoint of the world.
Four small boats were rowing away from it, sharply etched shadows crawling over water that shone like molten copper.
Even as Yama watched, gape-mouthed, a series of muffled explosions in the ship’s hold blew expanding globes of white flame high above the burning mastheads. The ship, broken-backed, settled in the water.
Lud and Lob cheered, and the skiff rocked alarmingly as they stood to get a better view.
“Sit down, you fools,” Dr. Dismas said.
Lud whooped, and shouted, “We did it, your honor! Sweet as you like!”
Dr. Dismas said to Yama, “I devised a method so simple that even these two could carry it out successfully.”
Yama said, “You tried to burn a ship a few days ago, did you not?”
“Two barrels of palm oil and liquid soap. One at the bow, one at the stern,” Dr. Dismas said, ignoring the question, “armed with clockwork fuses. It makes a fine diversion, don’t you think? Your father’s soldiers are busy rescuing sailors and saving the rest of the floating harbor while we go about our business.”
“There is a pinnace anchored farther out,” Yama said. “It will investigate.”
“I think not,” Dr. Dismas said. “Its commander is most anxious to make your acquaintance, Yamamanama. He is a cunning warlord, and knows all about the fire. He understands that it is a necessary sacrifice. The heretics will be blamed for the burning of the ship, and also for your disappearance. Your father will receive a ransom note tomorrow, but even if he answers it there will, alas, be no reply. You will disappear without trace. Such things happen, in this terrible war.”
“My father will search for me. He will not stop searching.”
“Perhaps you won’t want to be found, Yamamanama. You want to run away, and here you are, set on a great adventure.”
Yama knew now who the sailors had been searching for.
He said, “You tried to kidnap me two days ago. Those burning rafts were your work, so my father’s soldiers would chase after imaginary heretics. But these two failed to get hold of me, and you had to try again.”
“And here we are,” Dr. Dismas said. “Now please be quiet. We have a rendezvous to keep.”
The skiff drifted on a slow current parallel to the dark shore. The burning ship receded into the night. It had grounded on the river bottom, and only the forecastle and the masts were still burning. The fisherfolk were abroad, and the lanterns they used to attract fish to their lines made scattered constellations across the breast of the Great River, red sparks punctuating the reflected sheen of the Galaxy’s light.
Dr. Dismas stared intently into the glimmering dark, swearing at Lud and Lob whenever they dipped their oars in the water. “We got to keep to the current, your honor,” Lud said apologetically, “or we’ll lose track of where we’re supposed to be.”
“Quiet! What was that?”
Yama heard a rustle of wings and a faint splash.
“Just a bat,” Lud said. “They fish out here at night.”
“We catch ’em with glue lines strung across the water,” Lob explained. “Make good eating, bats do, but not in spring. After winter they’re mainly skin and bone. They need to fatten up—”
“Do shut up!” Dr. Dismas said in exasperation. “One more word and I’ll fry you both where you sit. You have so much fat on your bodies that you’ll go up like candles.”
The current bent away from the shore and the skiff drifted with it, scraping past young banyans that raised small crowns of leaves a handspan above the water. Yama glimpsed the pale violet spark of a machine spinning through the night. It seemed to be moving in short stuttering jerks, as if searching for something. At any other time he would have wondered at it, but now its remote light and unguessable motives only intensified his feeling of despair. The world had suddenly turned strange and treacherous, its wonders traps for the unwary.
At last Dr. Dismas said, “There! Row, you fools!”
Yama saw a red lamp flickering to starboard. Lud and Lob bent to their oars and the skiff flew across the water toward it. Dr. Dismas lit an alcohol lantern with flint and steel and held it up by his face. The light, cast through a mask of blue plastic, made his pinched face, misshapen by the plaques beneath its skin, look like that of a corpse.
The red lantern was hung from the stern of a lateen-rigged pinnace which swung at anchor beside a solitary banyan. It was the ship which had returned Dr. Dismas to Aeolis. Two sailors had climbed into the branches of the tree, and they watched over the long barrels of their rifles as the skiff came alongside. Lob stood and threw a line up to the stern of the pinnace. A sailor caught the end and made the skiff fast, and someone vaulted the pinnace’s rail, landing so suddenly and lightly in the well of the skiff that Yama half rose in alarm.
The man clamped a hand on Yama’s shoulder. “Easy there, lad,” he said, “or you’ll have us in the river.” He was only a few years older than Yama, bare-chested, squat and muscular, with an officer’s sash tied at the waist of his tight, white trousers. His broad, pugnacious face, framed by a cloud of loose, red-gold hair, was seamed with scars, like a clay mask someone had broken and badly mended, but his look was frank and appraising, and enlivened by good-humored intelligence.
The officer steadied the skiff as Dr. Dismas unhandily clambered up the short rope ladder dropped down the side of the pinnace, but when it was his turn Yama shook off the officer’s hand and sprang up and grabbed the stern rail.
His breath was driven from him when his belly and legs slammed against the clinkered planks of the pinnace’s hull, and pain shot through his arms and shoulders as they took his weight, but he pulled himself up, got a leg over the rail and rolled over, coming up in a crouch on the deck of the stern platform at the bare feet of an astonished sailor.
The officer laughed and sprang from a standing jump to the rail and then, lightly and easily, to the deck. He said, “He has spirit, doctor.”
Yama stood up. He had banged his right knee and it throbbed warmly. Two sailors leaned on the steering bar and a tall man in black stood beside them. The pinnace’s single mast was rooted at the edge of the stern platform; below it, three decads of rowers, naked except for breechclouts, sat in two staggered rows. The sharp prow was upswept, with a white stylized hawk’s eye painted on the side. A small swivel-mounted cannon was set in the prow’s beak; its gunner had turned to watch Yama come aboard, one arm resting on the cannon’s fretted barrel.
Yama looked at the black-clad man and said, “Where is the warlord who would buy me?”
Dr. Dismas said querulously, “I dislike doing business with guns pointed at me.”
The officer gestured, and the two sailors perched in the banyan branches above the pinnace put up their rifles. “Just a precaution, Dismas, in case you had brought along uninvited guests. If I had wanted you shot, Dercetas and Diomedes would have picked you off while you were still rowing around the point of the bay. But have no fear of that, my friend, for I need you as much as you need me.”
Yama said again, loudly, “Where is he, this warlord?”
The, bare-chested officer laughed. “Why here I am,” he said, and stuck out his hand.
Yama took it. The officer’s grip was firm, that of a strong man who is confident of his strength. His fingers were tipped with claws that slid a little from their sheaths and pricked the palm of Yama’s hand.
“Well met, Yamamanama,” the officer said. His large eyes were golden, with tawny irises; the only beautiful feature of his broken face. The lid of the left eye was pulled down by a deep, crooked scar that ran from brow to chin.