“At least you would not need to worry. But I will be careful. Pay no attention to me, youngster. My mind wanders these days, as my wife will surely remind you at every opportunity.”
They had been married a long time. They both wore the same kind of long, layered shifts over woolen trousers, and shared the same set of gestures, as if love were a kind of imitation game in which the best of both participants was mingled. They called themselves Osric and Beatrice, but Yama suspected that these were not their real names. They both had an air of sly caution which suggested that they were withholding much, although Yama felt that Osric wanted to tell him more than he was allowed to know. Beatrice was strict with her husband, but she favored Yama with fond glances, and while he had been stricken with fever she had spent hours bathing his forehead with wet cloths infused with oil of spikenard, and had fed him infusions of honey and herbs, crooning to him as if he were her child. While Osric was bent by age, his tall, slender wife carried herself like a young dancer.
Later, husband and wife sat side by side on the ledge beneath the narrow window of the little room, watching Yama eat a bowl of boiled maize. It was his first solid food since he had woken. They said that they were members of the Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead, an office of the civil service which had been disbanded centuries ago.
“But my ancestors stayed on, dear,” Beatrice explained. “They believed that the dead deserved better than abandonment, and fought against dissolution. There was quite a little war. Of course, we’re much diminished now. Most would say that we had vanished long ago, if they had heard of us at all, but we still hold some of the more important parts of the city.”
“You might say that I am an honorary member of the department, by marriage,” Osric said. “Here, I cleaned the knife for you.”
Osric laid the long, curved knife at the foot of the bed.
Yama looked at it and discovered that although it had saved his life he feared it; it was as if Osric had set a live snake at his feet. He said, “I found it in a tomb in the cliffs by the river.”
“Then it came from somewhere else,” Osric said, and laid a bony finger beside his nose. The tip of the finger was missing. He said, “I used a little white vinegar to take the bloom of age from the metal, and every decad or so you should rub it down with a cloth touched to mineral oil. But it will not need sharpening, and it will repair itself, within limits. It had been imprinted with a copy of the personality of its previous owner, but I have purged that ghost. You should practice with it as often as you can, and handle it at least once a day, and so it will come to know you.”
“Osric—”
“He needs to know,” Osric told his wife. “It will not hurt. Handle it often, Yama. The more you handle it, the better it will know you. And leave it in the sunlight, or between places of different temperature—placing the point in a fire is good. Otherwise it will take energy from you again. It had lain in the dark a long time—that was why you were hurt by it when you used it. I would guess it belonged to an officer of the cavalry, dead long ages past. They were issued to those fighting in the rain forests two thousand leagues downriver.”
Yama said stupidly, “But the war started only forty years ago.”
“This was another war, dear,” Beatrice said.
“I found it by the river. In a tomb there. I put out my hand in the dark.”
Yama remembered how the knife had kindled its eldritch glow when he had held it up, wonderingly, before his face.
But when Lob had picked it up, the horrible thing had happened. The knife was different things to different people.
Yama had been brought a long way from the river. This was the last retreat of the last of the curators of the City of the Dead, deep in the foothills of the Rim Mountains. He had not realized until then the true extent of the necropolis.
“The dead outnumber the living,” Osric said, “and this has been the burial place for Ys since the construction of Confluence. Until this last, decadent age, at least.”
Yama gathered that there were not many curators left now, and that most of those were old. This was a place where the past was stronger than the present. The Department of the Curators of the City of the Dead had once been responsible for preparation and arrangement of the deceased, whom they called clients, and for the care and maintenance of the graves, tombs and memorials, the picture slates and aspects of the dead. It had been a solemn and complex task. For instance, Yama learned that there had been four methods of dealing with clients: by interment, including burial or entombment; by cremation, either by fire or by acids; by exposure, either in a byre raised above the ground or by dismemberment; and by water.
“Which I understand is the only method used these days,” Osric said. “It has its place, but many die a long way from the Great River, and besides, many communities are too close together, so that the corpses of those upriver foul the water of those below them. Consider, Yama. Much of Confluence is desert or mountain. Interment in the soil is rare, for there is little enough land for cultivation. For myriad upon myriad days, our ancestors built tombs for their dead, or burned them on pyres or dissolved them in tanks of acid, or exposed them to the brothers of the air. Building tombs takes much labor and is suitable only for the rich, for the badly constructed tombs of the poor are soon ransacked by wild animals. Firewood is in as short supply as arable land, for the same reasons, and dissolution in acid is usually considered aesthetically displeasing. How much more natural, in the circumstances, to expose the client to the brothers of the air. It is how I wish my body to be disposed, when my time comes. Beatrice has promised it to me. The world will end before I die, of course, but I think there will still be birds . . .”
“You forgot preservation,” Beatrice said sharply. “He always does,” she told Yama. “He disapproves.”
“Ah, but I did not forget. It is merely a variation on interment. Without a tomb, the preserved body is merely fodder for the animals, or a curiosity in a sideshow.”
“Some are turned into stone,” Beatrice said. “It is mostly done by exposing the client to limy water.”
“And then there is mummification and desiccation, either by vacuum or by chemical treatment, and treatment by tar, or by ice.” Osric ticked off the variations on his fingers. “But you know well that I mean the most common method, and the most decadent. Which is to say, those clients who were preserved while still alive, in the hope of physical resurrection in ages to come. Instead, robbers opened the tombs and took what there was of value, and threw away the bodies for wild animals to devour, or burned them as fuel, or ground them up for fertilizer. The brave cavalry officer who once wielded your knife in battle, young Yama, was in all probability burned in some furnace to melt the alloy stripped from his tomb. Perhaps one of the tomb robbers picked up the knife, and it attacked him. He dropped it where you would find it an age later. We live in impoverished times. I remember that I played amongst the tombs as a child, teasing the aspects who still spoke for those beyond hope of resurrection. There is a lesson in folly. Only the Preservers outrun time. I did not know then that the aspects were bound to oblige my foolishness; the young are needlessly cruel because they know no better.”
Beatrice straightened her back, held up her hand, and recited a verse: