He said it with little hope, for he was convinced that the two curators were holding him prisoner. But Beatrice smiled and said, “I will do better than that. I will take you.”
Osric said, “You are stronger than you were when you arrived here, but not, I think, as strong as you can be. Let my wife help you, Yama. And remember us. We have served as best we can, and I feel that we have served well. When you discover your purpose, remember us.”
Beatrice said, “Don’t burden the poor boy, husband. He is too young. It is too early.”
“He is old enough to know his mind, I think. Remember that we are your friends, Yama.”
Yama bowed from the waist, as the Aedile had taught him, and turned to follow Beatrice, leaving her husband sitting in a pool of sunlight, his ravaged face made inscrutable by the mirror lenses of his spectacles, the blue uncharted mountain ridges framed by the pillars behind him, and the picture slate, wrapped in white cloth, on his lap.
Beatrice led Yama down a long helical stair and through chambers where machines as big as houses stood half-buried in the stone floor. Beyond these were the wide, circular mouths of pits in which long narrow tubes, made of a metal as clear as glass, fell into white mists a league or more below. Vast slow lightnings sparked and rippled in the transparent tubes. Yama felt a slow vibration through the soles of his feet, a pulse deeper than sound.
He would have stayed to examine the machines, but Beatrice urged him past and led him down a long hall with black keelrock walls, lit by balls of white fire that spun beneath a high curved ceiling. Parts of the floor were transparent and Yama saw, dimly, huge machines crouched in chambers far below his feet.
“Don’t gawp,” Beatrice said. “You don’t want to wake them before their time.”
Many narrow corridors led off the hall. Beatrice ushered Yama down one of them into a small room which, once its door slid shut, began at once to hum and shake. Yama felt for a moment as if he had stepped over a cliff, and clutched at the rail which ran around the curved walls of the room.
“We fall through the keelways,” Beatrice said. “Most people live on the surface now, but in ancient times the surface was a place where they came to play and meet, while they had their dwelling and working places underground. This is one of the old roads. It will return you to Aeolis in less than an hour.”
“Are these roads everywhere?”
“Once. No more. We have maintained a few beneath the City of the Dead, but many more no longer function, and beyond the limits of our jurisdiction things are worse. Everything fails at last. Even the Universe will fall into itself eventually.”
“The Puranas say that is why the Preservers fled into the Eye. But if the Universe will not end soon, then surely that is not why they fled. Zakiel could never explain that. He said it was not for me to question the Puranas.”
Beatrice laughed. It was like the tinkling of old, fragile bells. “How like a librarian! But the Puranas contain many riddles, and there is no harm in admitting that not all the answers are obvious. Perhaps they are not even comprehensible to our small minds, but a librarian will never admit that any text in his charge is unfathomable. He must be the master of them all, and is shamed to admit any possible failure.”
“The slate showed the creation of the Eye. There is a sura in the Puranas, the forty-third sura, I think, which says that the Preservers made stars fall together, until their light grew too heavy to escape.”
“Perhaps. There is much we do not know about the past, Yama. Some have said that the Preservers set us here for their own amusement, as certain bloodlines keep caged birds for amusement, but I would not repeat that heresy. All who believed it are safely dead long ago, but it is still a dangerous thought.”
“Perhaps because it is true, or contains some measure of the truth.”
Beatrice regarded him with her bright eyes. She was a head taller than he was. “Do not be bitter, Yama. You will find what you are looking for, although it might not be where you expect it. Ah, we are almost there.”
The room shuddered violently. Yama fell to his knees. The floor was padded with a kind of quilting, covered in an artificial material as slick and thin as satin.
Beatrice opened the door and Yama followed her into a very long room that had been carved from rock. Its high roof was held up by a forest of slender pillars and wan light fell from narrow slits in the roof. It had once been a stonemasons’ workshop, and Beatrice led Yama around half-finished carvings and benches scattered with tools, all abandoned an age ago and muffled by thick dust. At the door, she took out a hood of black cloth and said that she must blindfold him, “We are a secret people, because we should not exist. Our department was disbanded long ago, and we survive only because we are good at hiding.”
“I understand. My father—”
“We are not frightened of discovery, Yama, but we have stayed hidden for so long that knowledge of where we are is valuable to certain people. I would not ask you to carry that burden. It would expose you to unnecessary danger. If you need to find us again, you will. I can safely promise that, I think. In return, will you promise that you won’t mention us to the Aedile?”
“He will want to know where I have been.”
“You were ill. You recovered, and you returned. Perhaps you were nursed by one of the hill tribes. The Aedile will be so pleased to see you that he won’t question you too closely. Will you promise?”
“As long as I do not have to lie to him. I think that I am done with lies.”
Beatrice was pleased by this. “You were honest from the first, dear heart. Tell the Aedile as much of the truth as is good for him, and no more. Now, come with me.”
Blinded by the soft, heavy cloth of the hood, Yama took Beatrice’s hot, fine-boned hand, and allowed himself to be led once more. They walked a long way. He trusted this strange old woman, and he was thinking about the man of his bloodline, dead ages past.
At last she told him to stand still. Something cold and heavy was placed in his right hand. After a moment of silence Yama lifted the hood away and saw that he was in a dark passageway walled with broken stone blocks, with stout tree roots thrust between their courses. A patch of sunlight fell through a narrow doorway at the top of a stair whose stone treads had been worn away in the center. He was holding the ancient metal knife he had found in the tomb by the river’s shore—or which had found him. A skirl of blue sparks flared along the outer edge of its blade and sputtered out one by one.
Yama looked around for Beatrice and thought he saw a patch of white float around the corner of a passageway. But when he ran after it, he found a stone wall blocking his way.
He turned back to the sunlight. This place was familiar, but he did not recognize it until he climbed the stair and stepped out into the ruins in the Aedile’s garden, with the peel-house looming beyond masses of dark green rhododendrons.
Chapter Eleven
Lob and the landlord of The House of Ghost Lanterns were arrested before Yama had finished telling his story to the Aedile, and the next day were tried and sentenced to death for kidnap and sabotage. The Aedile also issued a warrant for the arrest of Dr. Dismas, although he confided to Yama that he did not expect to see the apothecary again.
Although it took a long time to explain his adventures, Yama did not tell the whole story. He suppressed the part about Enobarbus, for he had come to believe that the young warlord had somehow been caught by Dr. Dismas’s spell. He kept his promise to Beatrice, too, and said that after he had escaped from the skiff and had been helped ashore by one of the fisherfolk, he had fallen ill after being attacked by Lob and Lud amongst the ransacked tombs of the Silent Quarter, and had not been able to return to the peel-house until he had recovered. It was not the whole truth, but the Aedile did not question him closely.