The story seemed far stranger and more exciting than the actual experience. To tell it concisely, Yama had to miss out the fear and tension he had felt during every moment of his adventures, the long hours of discomfort when he had tried to sleep in wet clothes on the floor of the banyan, his growing hunger and thirst while wandering the hot shaly land of the Silent Quarter of the City of the Dead.
As he talked, he remembered a dream he had had while sleeping on the catafalque inside the old tomb in the Silent Quarter. He had dreamed that he had been swimming in the Great River, and that a current had suddenly caught him and swept him toward the edge of the world, where the river fell away in thunder and spray. He had tried to swim against the current, but his arms had been trapped at his sides and he had been helplessly swept through swift white water toward the tremendous noise of the river’s fall. The oppressive helplessness of the dream had stayed with him all that morning, right up to the moment when Lud and Lob had caught up with him, but he had forgotten about it until now. And now it seemed important, as if dream and reality were, during the telling of his tale, coterminous. He told his two friends about the dream as if it were one more part of his adventures, and then described how Lob and Lud had surprised him, and how he had killed Lud by accident.
“I had found an old knife, and Lob got hold of it, ready to kill me because I had killed his brother. But the knife hurt him. It seemed to turn into something like a ghoul, or a giant spider. I ran, I am ashamed to say. I left him with his dead brother.”
“He would have killed you,” Derev said. “Of course you should have run.”
Yama said, “I should have killed him. The knife would have done it for me if I had not taken it, I think. It helped me, like the ghost ship.”
“Lob escaped,” Ananda said. “He wanted his father to condemn you for the murder of his brother, the fool, but then you came back. Lob had already convicted himself, and Unprac confessed to his part as soon as he was arrested.”
Unprac was the name of the landlord of The House of Ghost Lanterns. Yama had not known it until the trial.
“So I killed Lob anyway. I should have killed him then, in the tomb. It would have been a cleaner death. It was a poor bargain he got in the end.”
“That’s what they said about the farmer,” Derev said, “after the girl fox had lain with him and took his baby in payment.”
Suddenly, with a feeling like falling, Yama saw Derev’s face as a stranger might. All planes, with large dark eyes and a small mouth and a bump of a nose, framed by a fall of white hair that moved in the slightest breeze as if possessed with an independent life. They had pursued each other all last summer, awakened to the possibilities of each other’s bodies. They had lain in the long dry grasses between the tombs and tasted each other’s mouths, each other’s skin. He had felt the swell of her small breasts, traced the bowl of her pelvis, the elegant length of her arms, her legs. They had not made love; they had sworn that they would not make love together until they were married. Now, he was glad that they had not.
He said, “Do you keep doves, Derev?”
“You know that my father does. For sacrifice. Some palmers still come here to pray at the temple’s shrine. Mostly they don’t want doves, though, but flowers or fruit.”
“There were no palmers this year,” Ananda said.
“When the war is over, they’ll come again,” Derev said. “My father clips the wings of the doves. It would be a bad omen if they escaped in the middle of the sacrifice.”
Ananda said, “You mean that it would be bad for his trade.”
Derev laughed. “Then the desires of the Preservers are equal to those of my father, and I am glad.”
“There is one more mystery,” Yama said, and explained that he had been knocked unconscious by a fall and had woken somewhere, in a little room in a hollow crag by the Great River’s shore, watched by an old man and an old woman who claimed to be curators of the City of the Dead.
“They showed me a marvel. It was a picture slate from a tomb, and it showed someone of my bloodline. It was as if they had been waiting for me, and I have been thinking about what they showed me ever since I was returned here.”
Derev had the bottle of wine. She took a long swallow from it and said, “But that’s good! That’s wonderful! In less than a decad you have found two people of your bloodline.”
Yama said, “The man in the picture was alive before the building of Confluence. I imagine he is long dead. What is interesting is that the curators already knew about me, for they had the picture slate ready, and they also had prepared a route from their hiding place to the very grounds of the peel-house. That was how I returned. One of them, the woman, was of your bloodline, Derev.”
“Well, so are many. We are traders and merchants. We are to be found throughout the length and breadth of Confluence.”
Derev looked coolly at Yama when she said this, and his heart meltingly turned. It was hard to continue, but he had to. He said, “I did not think much of it for that very reason, and I did not even make very much of the fact that, like you, they had a fund of cautionary sayings and stories concerning magical foxes. But they kept doves. I wonder, if I looked amongst your father’s doves, if I would find some that were not clipped. I think you use them to keep in touch with your people.”
Ananda said, “What is this, Yama? You make a trial here.”
Derev said, “It’s all right, Ananda. Yama, my father said that you might have guessed. That was why he did not allow me to go to the peel-house, or to talk with you using the mirror. But I came here anyway. I wanted to see you. Tell me what you know, and I’ll tell you what we know. How did you guess that I helped you?”
“I think that the old woman, Beatrice, had a son, and that he is your father. When Lob returned to Aeolis, you gave him money and got him drunk to learn his story. I know that he had not been paid by Dr. Dismas, so he had to get the money from somewhere. You found me, and took me to your grandparents. They made up a story about looking for a lost goat and finding me instead, but they ate only vegetables. As do you and your parents, Derev.”
“They make cheese from goats’ milk,” Derev said. “And they did lose one last year, to a leopard. But you more or less have the truth. I’m not sure what scared me more, getting Lob drunk, or climbing down the cliff using the rope he had left behind and picking my way through the dark tomb to find you.”
“Did your family come here because of me? Am I so important, or am I merely foolish to believe it? Why are you interested in me?”
“Because you are of a bloodline which vanished from the world long ago. My family have stayed true to the old department as no others of my bloodline have. We revere the dead, and keep the memory of their lives as best we can, but we do not remember your bloodline, except in legends from the beginning of the world. Beatrice isn’t my grandmother, although she and her husband came to live at the tower after my great-grandparents died. My grandparents wanted a normal life, you see. They established a business downriver and my father inherited it, but Beatrice and her husband persuaded him to move here because of you.” She paused. She said, “I know you are destined for great things, but it doesn’t change what I feel for you.”
Yama remembered Beatrice’s verse and recited, “Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives, Live registered upon our brazen tombs.”
Derev said, “Yes, it’s a favorite verse of Beatrice’s. She has always said that it was far older than Confluence. But we keep the memory of all the dead alive, even if no one else will.”