Yama had not told Prefect Corin about the machine. Let him think what he liked. But Yama had not been able to stop himself reliving what had happened as he had trudged behind the Prefect on the long road to Ys. Sometimes he felt a tremendous guilt, for it had been his foolish pride which had prompted him to use the machine, which had led to the deaths of the bandits and the kidnapped women. And sometimes he felt a tremendous anger toward Prefect Corin, for having laid such a responsibility upon him. He had little doubt that the Prefect could have walked into the bandits’ camp, killed them all, and freed the women. Instead he had used the situation to test Yama, and Yama had failed, and felt guilt for having failed, and then anger for having been put to an impossible test.
Humiliation or anger. At last, Yama settled for the latter. As he walked behind Prefect Corin, he often imagined drawing his knife and hacking the man’s head from his shoulders with a single blow, or picking a stone from the side of the road and using it as a hammer. He dreamed of running fast and far and, until the warship passed, had been lost in his dreams.
Yama and Prefect Corin ate at a roadside stall. Without being asked, the owner of the stall brought them steamed mussels, water lettuce crisply fried in sesame oil with strands of ginger, and tea made from kakava bark; there was a red plastic bowl in the center of the table into which fragments of bark could be spat. Prefect Corin did not pay for the food—the stall’s owner, a tall man with loose, pale skin and rubbery webs between his fingers, simply smiled and bowed when they left.
“He is glad to help someone from the Department,” Prefect Corin explained, when Yama asked.
“Why is that?”
Prefect Corin waved a hand in front of his face, as if at a fly. Yama asked again.
“Because we are at war,” the Prefect said. “Because the Department fights that war. You saw how they cheered the warship. Must you ask so many questions?”
Yama said, “How am I to learn, if I do not ask?”
Prefect Corin stopped and leaned on his tall staff and stared at Yama. People stepped around them. It was crowded here, with two- and three-story houses packed closely together on either side of the road. A string of camels padded past, their loose lips curled in supercilious expressions, little silver bells jingling on their leather harness.
“The first thing to learn is when to ask questions and when to keep silent,” Prefect Corin said, and then he turned and strode off through the crowd.
Without thinking, Yama hurried after him. It was as if this stern, taciturn man had made him into a kind of pet, anxiously trotting at his master’s heels. He remembered what Dr. Dismas had said about the oxen, trudging endlessly around the water lift because they knew no better, and his resentment rose again, refreshed.
For long stretches, now, the river disappeared behind houses or godowns. Hills rose above the flat roofs of the houses on the landward side of the road, and after a while Yama realized that they were not hills but buildings. In the hazy distance, the towers he had so often glimpsed using the telescope on the peel-house’s heliograph platform shone like silver threads linking earth and sky.
For all the long days of traveling, the towers seemed as far away as ever.
There were more and more people on the road, and strings of camels and oxen, and horse-drawn or steam wagons bedecked with pious slogans, and sleds gliding at waist height, their loadbeds decorated with intricately carved wooden rails painted red and gold. There were machines here, too. At first, Yama mistook them for insects or hummingbirds as they zipped this way and that above the crowds. No one in Aeolis owned machines, not even the Aedile (the watchdogs were surgically altered animals, and did not count) and if a machine strayed into the little city’s streets everyone would get as far away from it as possible. Here, no one took any notice of the many machines that darted or spun through the air on mysterious errands. Indeed, one man was walking toward Yama and Prefect Corin with a decad of tiny machines circling above his head.
The man stopped in front of the Prefect. The Prefect was tall, but this man was taller still—he was the tallest man Yama had ever seen. He wore a scarlet cloak with the hood cast over his head, and a black tunic and black trousers tucked into thigh-high boots of soft black leather. A quirt like those used by ox drivers was tucked into the belt of his trousers; the ends of the quirt’s hundred strands were braided with diamond-shaped metal tags. The man squared up to Prefect Corin and said, “You’re a long way from where you should be.”
Prefect Corin leaned on his staff and looked up at the man. Yama stood behind the Prefect. People were beginning to form a loose circle with the red-cloaked man and Prefect Corin in its center.
The man in the red cloak said, “If you have business here, I haven’t heard of it.”
A machine landed on Prefect Corin’s neck, just beneath the angle of his jaw. Prefect Corin ignored it. He said, “There is no reason why you should.”
“There’s every reason.” The man noticed the people watching and slashed the air with his quirt. The tiny, bright machines above his head widened their orbits and one dropped down to hover before the man’s lips.
“Move on,” the man said. His voice, amplified by the machine, echoed off the faces of the buildings on either side of the street, but most of the people only stepped back a few paces. The machine rose and the man told Prefect Corin in his ordinary voice, “You’re causing a disturbance.”
Prefect Corin said, “There was no disturbance until you stopped me. I would ask why.”
“This is the road, not the river.”
Prefect Corin spat in the dust at his feet. “I had noticed.”
“You are carrying a pistol.”
“By the authority of my Department.”
“We’ll see about that. What’s your business? Are you spying on us?”
“If you are doing your duty, you have nothing to fear. But do not worry, brother, I am no spy. I am returning from a downriver city where I had a task to perform. It is done, and now I return.”
“Yet you travel by road.”
“I thought I would show this boy something of the countryside. He has led a very sheltered life.”
A machine darted forward and spun in front of Yama’s face. There was a flash of red light in the backs of Yama’s eyes and he blinked, and the machine flew up to rejoin the spinning dance above the man’s head. The man said, “This is your catamite? The war is going badly if you can’t find better. This one has a corpse’s skin. And he is carrying a proscribed weapon.”
“Again, by the authority of my Department,” Prefect Corin said.
“I don’t know the bloodline, but I’d guess he’s too young for an apprenticeship. You had better show your papers to the officer of the day.”
The man snapped his fingers and the machines dropped and settled into a tight orbit around the Prefect’s head, circling him like angry silver wasps. The man turned then, slashing the air with his quirt so that those nearest him fell back, pressing against those behind. “Make way!” the man shouted as he hacked a path through the crowd with his quirt. “Make way! Make way!”
Yama said to Prefect Corin, as they followed the man, “Is this the time to ask a question?”
“He is a magistrate. A member of the autonomous civil authority of Ys. There is some bad blood between his department and mine. He will make a point about who is in charge here, and then we will be on our way.”
“How did he know about the pistol and my knife?”
“His machines told him.”
Yama studied the shuttling weave of the little machines around Prefect Corin’s head. One still clung to the Prefect’s neck, a segmented silver bead with four pairs of wire-like legs and mica wings folded along its back. Yama could feel the simple thoughts of the machines, and wondered if he might be able to make them forget what they had been ordered to do, but he did not trust himself to say the right thing to them, and besides, he was not about to reveal his ability by helping the Prefect.