Yama was not allowed to attend the trial; nor was he allowed to leave the grounds of the peel-house, although he very much wanted to see Derev. The Aedile said that it was too dangerous. The families of Lob and the tavern landlord would be looking for revenge, and the city was still on edge after the riots which had followed the failed siege of Dr. Dismas’s tower. Yama tried to contact Derev using mirror talk, but although he signaled for most of the afternoon there was no answering, spark of light from the apartments Derev’s father had built on top of his godown by the old waterfront of the city. Sick at heart, Yama went to plead with Sergeant Rhodean, but the Sergeant refused to provide an escort.
“And you’re not to confuse the watchdogs and go sneaking out on your own, neither,” Sergeant Rhodean said. “Oh yes, I know all about that trick, lad. But see here, you can’t rely on tricks to keep yourself out of trouble. They’re more likely to get you into it instead. I won’t risk having any of my men hurt rescuing you from your own foolishness, and think how it would look if we took you down there in the middle of a decad of armed soldiers. You’d start another riot. My men have already spent too much time looking for you when you were lost in the City of the Dead, and they’ll have their hands full in a couple of days. The department is sending a clerk to deal with the prisoners, but no extra troops. Pure foolishness on their part, and I’ll get blamed if something goes wrong.”
Sergeant Rhodean was much exercised by this. As he talked, he paced in a tight circle on the red clay floor of the gymnasium. He was a small, burly man, almost as wide as he was tall, as he liked to say. As always, his gray tunic and blue trousers were neatly pressed, his black knee-boots were spit-polished, and the scalp of his heavy, ridged skull was close-shaven and burnished with oil. He favored his right leg, and the thumb and forefinger of his right hand were missing.
He had been the Aedile’s bodyguard long before the entire household had been exiled from the Palace of the Memory of the People, and had celebrated his hundredth birthday two years ago. He lived quietly with his wife, who was always trying to overfeed Yama because, she said, he needed to put some muscle on his long bones. They had two married daughters, six sons away fighting the heretics, and two more who had been killed in the war; Sergeant Rhodean had mourned Telmon’s death almost as bitterly as Yama and the Aedile.
Sergeant Rhodean suddenly stopped pacing and looked at Yama as if for the first time. He said, “I see you’re wearing that knife you found, lad. Let’s take a look at it.”
Yama had taken to hanging the knife from his belt by a loop of leather, with its blade tied flat against his thigh by a red ribbon. He undid the ribbon, unhooked the loop and held out the knife, and Sergeant Rhodean put on thick-lensed spectacles, which vastly magnified his yellow eyes, and peered closely at it for a long time. At last, he blew reflectively through his drooping mustache and said, “It’s old, and sentient, or at least partly so. Maybe as smart as one of the watchdogs. A good idea to carry it around. It will bond to you. You said you were ill after using it?”
“It gave out a blue light. And when Lob picked it up, it turned into something horrible.”
“Well now, lad, it had to get its energy from somewhere for tricks like that, especially after all the time in the dark. So it took it from you.”
“I leave it in sunlight,” Yama said.
“Do you?” Sergeant Rhodean gave Yama a shrewd look. “Then I can’t tell you much more. What did you clean it with? White vinegar? As good as anything, I suppose. Well, let’s see you make a few passes with it. It will stop you brooding over your true love.”
For the next hour, Sergeant Rhodean instructed Yama on how to make best use of the knife against a variety of imaginary opponents. Yama found himself beginning to enjoy the exercises, and was sorry when Sergeant Rhodean called a halt. He had spent many happy hours in the gymnasium, with its mingled smell of clay and old sweat and rubbing alcohol, its dim underwater light filtered through green-tinted windows high up in the whitewashed walls, the green rubber wrestling mats rolled up like the shed cocoons of giant caterpillars and the rack of parallel bars, the open cases of swords and knives, javelins and padded staves, the straw archery targets stacked behind the vaulting horse, the battered wooden torsos of the tilting dummies, the frames hung with pieces of plastic and resin and metal armor.
“We’ll do some more work tomorrow, lad,” Sergeant Rhodean said at last. “You need to work on your backhand. You aim too low, at the belly instead of the chest, and any opponent worth their salt would spot that in an instant. Of course, a knife like this is really intended for close work by a cavalryman surrounded by the enemy, and you might do better carrying a long sword or a revolver when walking about the city. It’s possible that an old weapon like this might be proscribed. But now I have to drill the men. The clerk is coming tomorrow, and I suppose your father will want an honor guard for him.”
But the clerk sent from Ys to oversee the executions slipped unnoticed into the peel-house early the next morning, and the first time Yama saw him was when the Aedile summoned him to an audience that afternoon.
“The townspeople already believe that you have blood on your hands,” the Aedile said. “I do not wish to see any more trouble. So I have come to a decision.”
Yama felt his heart turn over, although he already knew that this was no ordinary interview. He had been escorted to the Aedile’s receiving chamber by one of the soldiers of the house guard. The soldier now stood in front of the tall double doors, resplendent in burnished helmet and corselet and scarlet hose, his pike at parade rest.
Yama perched on an uncomfortable curved backless seat before the central dais on which the Aedile’s canopied chair stood. The Aedile did not sit down but paced about restlessly.
He was dressed in a tunic embroidered with silver and gold, and his sable robe of office hung on a rack by his chair.
There was a fourth person in the room, standing in the shadows by the small private door which led, via a stairway, to the Aedile’s private chambers. It was the clerk who had been sent from Ys to supervise the executions. Yama watched him out of the corner of his eye. He was a tall, slender man of the Aedile’s bloodline, bareheaded in a plain homespun tunic and gray leggings. A close-clipped black pelt covered his head and face, with a broad white stripe, like a badger’s marking, on the left side of his face.
Yama’s breakfast had been brought to his room that morning, and this was the first chance he had to study the man.
He had heard from the stable hands that the clerk had disembarked from an ordinary lugger, armed with only a stout iron-shod staff and with no more than a rolled blanket on his back, but the Aedile had prostrated himself at the man’s feet as if he were a Hierarch risen from the files.
“I don’t think he expected someone so high up in the Committee for Public Safety,” the foreman, Torin, had said.
But the clerk did not look like an executioner, or anyone important. He could have been any one of the thousands of ordinary scribes who plied pens in cells deep in the Palace of the Memory of the People, as indistinguishable from each other as ants.
The Aedile stood before one of the four great tapestries that decorated the high, square room. It depicted the seeding of Confluence. Plants and animals rained out of a blaze of light toward a bare plain crossed by silvery loops of water.