“I have heard that you cheat your customers,” Yama said. “Those who cheat are always afraid that they will be cheated in turn, so I would guess that the only place you could have hidden my coin is somewhere in this room. Probably under your pillow.”
The landlord lunged forward then, and something struck at Yama’s knife. The room filled with white light and the landlord screamed.
Afterwards, the landlord huddled against the headboard of his bed and wouldn’t look at Yama or the knife. His hand was bleeding badly, for although he had wrapped his sheet around it before grabbing at the knife, the blade had cut him deeply. But he took no notice of his wound, or Yama’s questions. He was staring at something which had vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and would only say, over and over, “It had no eyes. Hair like cobwebs, and no eyes.”
Yama searched beneath the bolster and the mattress, and then, remembering the place where he had hidden his map in his own room in the peel-house, rapped the floor with the hilt of his knife until he found the loose board under which the landlord had hidden the gold rial. He had to show the landlord his knife and threaten the return of the apparition to make the man roll onto his belly, so that he could gag him and tie his thumbs together with strips torn from the bedsheet.
“I am only taking back what is mine,” Yama said. “I do not think you have earned any payment for hospitality. The fool you sent to rob me is dead. Be grateful you are not.”
Pandaras was waiting outside the gate. “We’ll get some breakfast by the fishing docks,” he said. “The boats go out before first light and the stalls open early.”
Yama showed Pandaras the gold rial. His hand shook. Although he had felt quite calm while looking for the coin, he was now filled with an excess of nervous energy. He laughed and said, “I have no coin small enough to pay for breakfast.”
Pandaras reached inside his ragged shirt and lifted out two worn iron pennies hung on a string looped around his neck.
He winked. “I’ll pay, master, and then you can pay me.”
“As long as you stop calling me master. You are hardly younger than I am.”
“Oh, in many ways I’m much older,” Pandaras said. “Forgive me, but you’re obviously of noble birth. Such folk live longer than most; relatively speaking, you’re hardly weaned from the wet nurse’s teat.” He squinted up at Yama as they passed through the orange glow of a sodium-vapor lamp.
“Your bloodline isn’t one I know, but there are many strange folk downriver of Ys, and many more in her streets. Everything may be found here, it’s said, but even if you lived a thousand years and spent all your time searching you’d never find it all. Even if you came to the end of your searching so much would have changed that it would be time to start all over again.”
Yama smiled at the boy’s babble. “It is the truth about my bloodline I have come to discover,” he said, “and fortunately I think I know where to find it.”
As they descended toward the waterfront, down narrow streets that were sometimes so steep that they were little more than flights of shallow steps, with every house leaning on the shoulder of its neighbor, Yama told Pandaras something of the circumstances of his birth, of what he thought Dr. Dismas had discovered, and of his journey to Ys.
“I know the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons,” Pandaras said. “It’s no grand place, but stuck as an afterthought on the lower levels of the Palace of the Memory of the People.”
“Then I must go there after all,” Yama said. “I thought I had escaped it.”
“The place you want is on the roof,” Pandaras said. “You won’t have to go inside, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
The sky was beginning to brighten when Yama and Pandaras reached the wide road by the old waterfront. A brace of camels padded past, loaded with bundles of cloth and led by a sleepy boy, and a few merchants were rolling up the shutters of their stalls or lighting cooking fires. On the long piers which ran out to the river’s edge between shacks raised on a forest of stilts above the wide mud flats, fishermen were coiling ropes and taking down nets from drying poles and folding them in elaborate pleats.
For the first time, Yama noticed the extent of the riverside shanty town. The shacks crowded all the way to the edge of the floating docks, half a league distant, and ran along the river edge for as far as the eye could see. They were built mostly of plastic sheeting dulled by smoke and weather toward a universal gray, and roofed with tarpaper or sagging canvas. Channels brimming with thick brown water ran between mudbanks under the tangle of stilts and props. Tethered chickens pecked amongst threadbare grass on drier pieces of ground. Already, people were astir, washing clothes or washing themselves, tending tiny cooking fires, exchanging gossip.
Naked children of a decad or more different bloodlines chased each other along swaybacked rope walkways.
Pandaras explained that the shanty towns were the home of refugees from the war. “Argosies go downriver loaded with soldiers, and return with these unfortunates. They are brought here before they can be turned by the heretics.”
“Why do they live in such squalor?”
“They know no better, master. They are unchanged savages.”
“They must have been hunters once, or fishermen or farmers. Is there no room for them in the city? I think that it is much smaller than it once was.”
“Some of them may go to the empty quarters, I suppose, but most would be killed by bandits, and besides, the empty quarters are no good for agriculture. Wherever you dig there are stones, and stones beneath the stones. The Department of Indigenous Affairs likes to keep them in one place, where they can be watched. They get dole food, and a place to live.”
“I suppose many become beggars.”
Pandaras shook his head vigorously. “No, no. They would be killed by the professional beggars if they tried. They are nothing, master. They are not even human beings. See how they five!”
In the shadows beneath the nearest of the shacks, beside a green, stagnant pool, two naked men were pulling pale guts from the belly of a small cayman. A boy was pissing into the water on the other side of the pool, and a woman was dipping water into a plastic bowl. On a platform above, a woman with a naked baby on her arm was crumbling gray lumps of edible plastic into a blackened wok hung over a tiny fire. Beside her, a child of indeterminate age and sex was listlessly sorting through wilted cabbage leaves.
Yama said, “It seems to me that they are an army drawn up at the edge of the city.”
“They are nothing, master. We are the strength of the city, as you will see.”
Pandaras chose a stall by one of the wide causeways that ran out to the pontoon docks, and hungrily devoured a shrimp omelette and finished Yama’s leavings while Yama warmed his hands around his bowl of tea. In the growing light Yama could see, three or four leagues downriver, the wall where he and Prefect Corin had been taken yesterday, a black line rising above red tile roofs like the back of a sleeping dragon.
He wondered if the magistrates’ screens could be turned in this direction. No, they had set machines to look for him, but he had dealt with them. For now he was safe.
Pandaras called out for more tea, and told Yama that there was an hour at least before the money changers opened.
Yama said, “I will make good my debt to you, do not worry. Where will you go?”
“Perhaps with you, master,” Pandaras said, grinning. “I’ll help you find your family. You do not know where you were born, and wish to find it, while I know my birthplace all too well, and want to escape it.”