“You killed him!” Lob said.
Yama shook his head. He could not get his breath. The ancient knife lay on the filthy floor exactly between him and Lob, sputtering and sending up a thick smoke that stank of burning metal.
Lud tried to pull the obsidian knife from his chest, but it snapped, leaving a finger’s width of the blade protruding. He blundered around the tomb, blood all over his hands now, blood running down his chest and soaking into the waistband of his kilt. He didn’t seem to understand what had happened to him. He kept saying over and over again, “What? What?” and pushed past his brother and fell to his knees at the entrance to the tomb. Light spilled over his shoulders. He seemed to be searching the blue sky for something he could not find.
Lob stared at Yama, his gray tongue working between his tusks. At last he said, “You killed him, you culler. You didn’t have to kill him.”
Yama took a deep breath. His hands were shaking. “You were going to kill me.”
“All we wanted was a bit of money. Just enough to get away. Not much to ask, and now you’ve gone and killed my brother.”
Lob stepped toward Yama and his foot struck the knife. He picked it up—and screamed. White smoke rose from his hand and then he was not holding the knife but a creature fastened to his arm by clawed hands and feet. Lob staggered backward and slammed his arm against the wall, but the creature only snarled and tightened its grip. It was the size of a small child, and seemed to be made of sticks. A kind of mane of dry, white hair stood around its starveling face.
A horrid stink of burning flesh filled the tomb. Lob beat at the creature with his free hand and it vanished in a sudden flash of blue light.
The ancient knife fell to the floor, tinging on the stone.
Yama snatched it up and fled down the passage, barely remembering to turn right into the faint breeze. He banged from wall to wall as he ran, and then the walls fell away and he was tumbling through a rush of black air.
Chapter Ten
The Curators of the City of the Dead
The room was in some high, windy place. It was small and square, with whitewashed stone walls and a ceiling of tongue-and-groove planking painted with a hunting scene. The day after he first woke, Yama managed to raise himself from the thin mattress on the stone slab and stagger to the deep-set slit window. He glimpsed a series of stony ridges stepping away beneath a blank blue sky, and then pain overcame his will and he fainted.
“He is ill and he does not know it,” the old man said.
He had half-turned his head to speak to someone else as he leaned over Yama. The tip of his wispy white beard hung a finger’s width from Yama’s chin. The deeply wrinkled skin of his face was mottled with brown spots, and there was only a fringe of white hair around his bald pate. Glasses with lenses like small mirrors hid his eyes. Deep, old scars cut the left side of his face, drawing up the side of his mouth in a sardonic rictus. He said, “He does not know how much the knife took from him.”
“He’s young,” an old woman’s voice said. She added, “He’ll learn by himself, won’t he? We can’t—”
The old man curled and uncurled the end of his wispy beard around his fingers. At last, he said, “I cannot remember.”
Yama asked them who they were, and where this cool white room was, but they did not hear him. Perhaps he had not spoken at all. He could not move even a single fingertip, although this did not scare him. He was too tired to be scared.
The two old people went away and Yama was left to stare at the painted hunting scene on the ceiling. His thoughts would not fit together. Men in plastic armor over brightly colored jerkins and hose were chasing a white stag through a forest of leafless tree trunks. The turf between the trees was starred with flowers. It seemed to be night in the painting, for in every direction the slim trunks of the trees faded into darkness. The white stag glimmered amongst them like a fugitive star. The paint had flaked away from the wood in places, and a patch above the window was faded. In the foreground, a young man in a leather jacket was pulling a brace of hunting dogs away from a pool. Yama thought that he knew the names of the dogs, and who their owner was.
But he was dead.
Some time later, the old man came back and lifted Yama up so that he could sip thin vegetable soup from an earthenware bowl. Later, he was cold, so cold that he shivered under the thin gray blanket, and then so hot that he would have cast aside the blanket if he had possessed the strength.
Fever, the old man told him. He had a bad fever. Something was wrong with his blood. “You have been in the tombs,” the old man said, “and there are many kinds of old sicknesses there.”
Yama sweated into the mattress, thinking that if only he could get up he would quench his thirst with the clear water of the forest pool. Telmon would help him.
But Telmon was dead.
In the middle of the day, sunlight crept a few paces into the little room before shyly retreating. At night, wind hunted at the corners of the deep-set window, making the candle gutter inside its glass sleeve. When Yama’s fever broke it was night. He lay still, listening to the wuthering of the wind.
He felt very tired but entirely clearheaded, and spent hours piecing together what had happened.
Dr. Dismas’s tower, burning like a firework. The strange cage, and the burning ship. The leonine young war hero, Enobarbus, his face as ruined as the old man’s. The ghost ship, and his escape—more fire. The whole adventure seemed to be punctuated by fire. He remembered the kindness of the fisherman, Caphis, and the adventure amongst the dry tombs of the Silent Quarter, which had ended in Lud’s death. He had run from something terrible, and as for what had happened after that, he remembered nothing at all.
“You were carried here,” the old woman told him, when she brought him breakfast. “It was from a place on the shore somewhere downstream of Aeolis, I’d judge. A fair distance, as the fox said to the hen, when he gave her a head start.”
Her skin was fine-grained, almost translucent, and her white, feathery hair reached to the small of her back. She was of the same bloodline as Derev, but far older than either of Derev’s parents.
Yama said, “How did you know?”
The old man smiled at the woman’s shoulder. As always, he wore his mirrored lenses. “Your trousers and your shirt were freshly stained with river silt. It is quite distinctive. But I believe that you had been wandering in the City of the Dead, too.”
Yama asked why he thought that.
“The knife, dear,” the woman said.
The old man pulled on his scanty white beard and said, “Many people carry old weapons, for they are often far more potent than those made today.”
Yama nodded, remembering Dr. Dismas’s energy pistol.
“However, the knife you carried has a patina of corrosion that suggests it had lain undisturbed in some dark, dry place for many years. Perhaps you have carried it around without scrupling to clean it, but I think that you are more responsible than that. I think that you found it only recently, and did not have time to clean it. You landed at the shore and began to walk through the City of the Dead, and at some, point found the knife in an old tomb.”
“It’s from the Age of Insurrection, if I’m a judge,” the woman said. “It’s a cruel thing.”
“And she has forgotten a good deal more than I ever knew,” the old man said fondly. “You will have to learn its ways, or it could kill you.”
“Hush!” the old woman said sharply. “Nothing should be changed!”
“Perhaps nothing can be changed,” the old man said.
“Then I would be a machine,” the old woman said, “and I don’t like that thought.”