“They will leave us behind in the darkness!”
“I know this bloodline. They do not travel by night, for their blood slows as the air cools. Meanwhile we will rest. You will pray for us, Belarius. It will set our minds to the struggle ahead.”
They waited until the sun had fallen behind the Rim Mountains and the Galaxy had begun to rise above the far-side horizon before they set off. The tracks left by the bandits ran straight across the flat white land into a tangle of shallow draws which sloped up toward a range of low hills. Yama tried his best to imitate Prefect Corin’s ambling gait, and remembered to go flatfooted on loose stones, as Telmon had taught him. Belarius was less nimble, and every now and then would stumble and send stones clattering away downslope. There were tombs scattered at irregular intervals along the sides of the draws, unornamented and squarely built, with tall narrow doors which had been smashed open an age ago.
A few had picture slates, and these wakened when the three men went by, so that they had to walk along the tops of the ridges between the draws to avoid being betrayed by the light of the past. Belarius fretted that they would lose the trail, but then Yama saw a flickering dab of light brighten ahead. It was a dry tree set on fire in the bottom of a deep draw.
It burned with a white intensity and a harsh crackling, sending up volumes of acrid white smoke. Its tracery of branches made a web of black shadows within the brightness of its burning. The three men looked down on it, and Prefect Corin said, “Well, they know that we are following them. Yama, look after Belarius. I will not be long.”
He was gone before Yama could reply, a swift shadow flowing down the slope, circling the burning tree and disappearing into the darkness beyond. Belarius sat down heavily and whispered, “You two should not die on my account.”
“Let us not talk of death,” Yama said. He had his knife in his hand—he had drawn it upon seeing the burning tree. It showed not a spark, and he sheathed it and said, “A little while ago, I was taken aboard a pinnace by force, but a white ship appeared, glowing with cold fire. The pinnace attacked the white ship and I was able to escape. Yet the white ship was not real; even as it bore down on the pinnace it began to dissolve. Was this a miracle? And was it for my benefit? What do you think?”
“We shouldn’t question the plan of the Preservers. Only they can say what is. miraculous.”
Belarius was more intent on the darkness beyond the burning tree than on Yama’s tale. He was smoking one of his clove-scented cigarettes; cupping it. The light of the burning tree beat on him unmercifully; shadows in his deep eye sockets made a skull of his face.
Prefect Corin came back an hour later. The tree had burnt down to a stump of glowing cinders. He appeared out of the darkness and knelt between Belarius and Yama. “The way is clear,” he said.
Yama said, “Did you see them?”
Prefect Corin considered this. Yama thought he looked smug, the son-of-a-bitch. At last he said, “I saw our friend of last night.”
“The ghoul?”
“It is following us. It will feed well tonight, one way or the other. Listen carefully. This ridge rises and leads around to a place above a canyon. There are large tombs at the bottom of the canyon, and that is where the bandits are camped. They have stripped the women and tied them to stakes, but I do not think they have used them.” Prefect Corin looked directly at Belarius. “These people come into heat like dogs or deer, and it is not their season. They display the women to make us angry, and we will not be angry. They have built a big fire, but away from it the night air will make them sluggish. Yama, you and Belarius will create a diversion, and I will go in and cut the women free and bring them out.”
Belarius said, “It is not much of a plan.”
“Well, we could leave the women,” Prefect Corin said, with such seriousness that it was plain he would do just that if Belarius refused to help.
“They’ll sleep,” the priest said. “We wait until they sleep, and then we take the women.”
Prefect Corin said, “No. They never sleep, but simply become less active at night. They will be waiting for us. That is why we must make them come out, preferably away from their fire. I will kill them then. I have a pistol.”
It was like a flat, water-smoothed pebble. It caught the Galaxy’s cold blue light and shone in Prefect Corin’s palm.
Yama was amazed. The Department of Indigenous Affairs was surely greater than he had imagined, if one of them could carry a weapon not only forbidden to most but so valuable, because the secret of its manufacture was lost an age past, that it could ransom a city like Aeolis. Dr. Dismas’s energy pistol, which merely increased the power of light by making its waves march in step, had been a clumsy imitation of the weapon Prefect Corin held.
Belarius said, “Those things are evil.”
“It has saved my life before now. It has three shots, and then it must lie in sunlight all day before it will fire again. That is why you must get them into the open, so I have a clear field of fire.”
Yama said, “How will we make the diversion?”
“I am sure you will think of something when you get there,” Prefect Corin said. His lips were pressed together as if he was suppressing a smile, and now Yama knew what this was all about.
Prefect Corin said, “Follow the ridge, and be careful not to show yourself against the sky.”
“What about guards?”
“There are no guards,” Prefect Corin said. “Not anymore.”
And then he was gone.
The canyon was sinuous and narrow, a deeply folded crevice winding back the hills. The ridge rose above it to a tabletop bluff dissected by dry ravines. Lying on his belly, looking over the edge of the drop into the canyon, Yama could see the fire the bandits had lit on the canyon floor far below. Its red glow beat on the white faces of the tombs that were set into the walls of the canyon, and the brushwood corral where a decad of horses milled, and the line of naked women tied to stakes.
Yama said, “It is like a test.”
Belarius, squatting on his heels a little way from the edge, stared at him.
“I have to show initiative,” Yama said. “If I do not, Prefect Corin will not try to rescue the women.”
He did not add that it was also a punishment. Because he carried the knife; because he wanted to be a soldier; because he had tried to run away. He knew that he could not allow himself to fail, but he did not know how he could succeed.
“Pride,” Belarius said sulkily. He seemed to have reached a point where nothing much mattered to him. “He makes himself into a petty god, deciding whether my poor clients live or die.”
“That is up to us, I think. He is a cold man, but he wants to help you.”
Belarius pointed into the darkness behind him. “There’s a dead man over there. I can smell him.”
It was one of the bandits. He was lying on his belly in the middle of a circle of creosote bushes. His neck had been broken and he seemed to be staring over his shoulder at his doom.
Belarius mumbled a brief prayer, then took the dead man’s short, stout recurved bow and quiver of unfledged arrows. He seemed to cheer up a little, and Yama asked him if he knew how to use a bow.
“I’m not a man of violence.”
“Do you want to help rescue your clients?”
“Most of them are dead,” Belarius said gravely. “I will shrive this poor wight now.”
Yama left the priest with the dead man and quartered the ground along the edge of the canyon. Although he was tired, he felt a peculiar clarity, a keen alertness sustained by a mixture of anger and adrenalin. This might be a test, but the women’s lives depended on it. That was more important than pleasing Prefect Corin, or proving to himself that he could live up to his dreams.