Was something watching over him? If so, to what purpose? Or perhaps it was no more than a coincidence: some old machinery had been accidentally awakened, and Yama had seized the moment to escape. It was possible that there was another world where the ghost ship had not appeared, or had appeared too early or too late, and Yama had gone with Dr. Dismas and the warlord, Enobarbus. He would be traveling downriver on the pinnace even now, a willing or unwilling participant in their plans, perhaps to death, perhaps to a destiny more glorious than the apprenticeship which now lay ahead of him.
Yama’s speculations widened and at some point he was no longer in control of them but was carried on their flow, like a twig on the Great River’s flood. He slept, and woke to find Prefect Corin standing over him, a black shadow against the dazzling blue of the sky.
“Trouble,” the man said, and pointed down the long gentle slope of the road. A tiny smudge of smoke hung in the middle distance, trembling in the heat haze, and at that moment Yama realized that all along Prefect Corin had been protecting the palmers.
They found the dead first. The bodies had been dragged off the road and stacked and set on fire. Little was left but greasy ash and charred bones, although, bizarrely, a pair of unburnt feet still shod in sandals protruded from the bottom of the gruesome pyre. Prefect Corin poked amongst the hot ashes with his staff and counted fourteen skulls, leaving nine unaccounted for. He cast about in one direction, bending low as he searched the muddle of prints on the ground, and Yama, although not asked, went in the other. It was he, following a trail of blood speckles, who found Belarius hiding inside a tomb. The priest was cradling a dead woman, and his robe was drenched in her blood.
“They shot at us from hiding places amongst the tombs,” Belarius said. “I think they shot Vril by accident because they did not shoot any of the other women. When all the men had been killed or badly wounded, they came for the women. Small fierce men with bright red slan and long arms and legs, some on foot, some on horse, three or four decads of them. Like spiders. They had sharp teeth, and claws like thorns. I remember they couldn’t close their hands around their weapons.”
“I know the bloodline,” Prefect Corin said. “They are a long way from home.”
“Two came and looked at me, and jeered and went away again,” Belarius said.
“They would not kill a priest,” Prefect Corin said. “It is bad luck.”
“I tried to stop them despoiling the bodies,” Belarius said. “They threatened me with their knives or spat on me or laughed, but they didn’t stop their work. They stripped the bodies and dismembered them, cut what they wanted from the heads. Some of the men were still alive. When they were finished, they set the bodies on fire. I wanted to shrive the dead, but they pushed me away.”
“And the women?”
Belarius started to cry. He said, “I meant no harm to anyone. No harm. No harm to anyone.”
“They took the women with them,” Prefect Corin said. “To despoil or to sell. Stop blubbering, man! Which way did they go?”
“Toward the mountains. You must believe that I meant no harm. If you had stayed with us instead of getting ahead no, forgive me. That is unworthy.”
“We would have been killed, too,” Prefect Corin said. “These bandits strike quickly, and without fear. They will attack larger groups better armed than themselves if they think that the surprise and fury of their assault will overcome their opponents. As it is, we may yet save some of your people. Go and shrive your dead, man. After that you must decide whether you want to come with us or stay here.”
When Belarius was out of earshot, Prefect Corin said to Yama, “Listen carefully, boy. You can come with me, but only if you swear that you will do exactly as I say.”
“Of course,” Yama said at once. He would have promised anything for the chance.
It was not difficult to track the bandits and the captured women across the dry, sandy land. The trail ran parallel to the granite scarp across a series of flat, barren salt pans. Each was higher than the next, like a series of giant steps. Prefect Corin set a relentless pace, but the priest, Belarius, kept up surprisingly well; he was one of those fat men who are also strong, and the shock of the ambush was wearing off. Yama supposed that this was a chance for Belarius to regain face. Already, the priest was beginning to speak of the attack as if it was an accident or natural disaster from which he would rescue the survivors.
“As if he did not invite the lightning,” Prefect Corin said to Yama, when they stopped to rest in the shade of a tomb. “At the best of times, bringing a party of palmers on the land route to Ys without proper escort is like herding sheep through a country of wolves. And these were archivists, too. Not proper archivists—those are from the Department, and are trained in the art of memory. These use machines to record the lives of the dying. If you had looked closely at the skulls, you would have seen that they had been broken open. Some bandits eat the brains of their victims, but these wanted the machines in their heads.”
Yama laughed in disbelief. “I have never heard of such a thing!”
Prefect Corin passed a hand over his black-furred face, like a grooming cat. “It is an abomination, promulgated by a department so corrupt and debased that it seeks to survive by coarse imitation of the tasks properly carried out by its superiors. Proper archivists learn how to manage their memories by training; these people would be archivists in a few days, by swallowing the seeds of machines which migrate to a certain area of the brain and grow a kind of library. It is not without risks. In one in fifty of those who swallow the seeds, the machines grow unchecked and destroy their host’s brains.”
“But surely only the unchanged need archivists? Once changed, everyone is remembered by the Preservers.”
“Many no longer believe it, and because the Department will not supply archivists to the cities of the changed, these mountebanks make fortunes by pandering to the gullible. Like real archivists, they listen to the life stories of the dying and promise to transmit them to the shrines of the Palace of the Memory of the People.”
Yama said, “No wonder the priest is upset. He believes that many more died than we saw.”
“They are all remembered by the Preservers in any event,” Prefect Corin said. “Saints or sinners, all men marked by the Preservers are remembered, while true archivists remember the stories of as many of the unchanged bloodlines as they can. The priest is upset because his reputation will be blemished, and he will lose trade. Hush. Here he comes.”
Belarius had ripped away the blood-soaked part of his orange robe, leaving only a kind of kilt about his waist. The smooth yellow skin of his shoulders and his fat-man’s breasts had darkened in the sun to the color of blood oranges, and he scratched at his sunburnt skin as he told Yama and Prefect Corin that he had found fresh horse droppings.
“They are not more than an hour ahead of us. If we hurry, we can catch them before they reach the foothills.”
Prefect Corin said, “They make the women walk. It slows them down.”
“Then their cruelty will be their undoing.” Belarius curled his right hand into a fist and ground it into the palm of his left. “We will catch them and we will crush them.”
Prefect Corin said calmly, “They are cruel but not stupid. They could tie the women to their horses if they wanted to outpace us, yet they do not. They taunt us, I think. They want sport. We must proceed carefully. We will wait until night, and follow them to their camp.”