“Suitable for sneaking up on someone in the dark,” Tamora said. “If you stand on tiptoe, rat-boy, you should be able to reach someone’s vitals with this.”
Pandaras flexed the knife’s blade between two clumsy, clawed fingers, licked it with his long, pink tongue, then tacked it in his belt. Yama told him, “You do not have to follow me. I killed the man who would have helped her, and it is only proper that I should take his place. But there is no need for you to come.”
“Well put,” Tamora said.
Pandaras showed his small sharp teeth. “Who else would watch your back, master? Besides, I have never been aboard a voidship.”
One of the guards escorted them across the wharf to the voidship lighter. Cables and flexible plastic hoses lay everywhere, like a tangle of basking snakes. Laborers, nearly naked in the hot sunlight, were winding a cavernous pipe toward an opening which had dilated in the lighter’s black hull. An ordinary canvas-and-bamboo gangway angled up to a smaller entrance.
Yama felt a distinct pressure sweep over his skin as, following Tamora up the gangway, he ducked beneath the port’s rim. Inside, a passageway sloped away to the left, curving as it rose so that its end could not be seen. Yama supposed that it spiraled around the inside of the hull of the lighter like the track a maggot leaves in a fruit. It was circular in cross-section, and lit by a soft directionless red light that seemed to hang in the air like smoke. Although the lighter’s black hull radiated the day’s heat, inside it was as chilly as the mountain garden of the curators of the City of the Dead.
Another guard waited inside. He was a short, thickset man with a bland face and a broad, humped back. His head was shaven, and ugly red scars crisscrossed his scalp. He wore a many-pocketed waistcoat and loose-fitting trousers, and did not appear to be armed. He told them to keep to the middle of the passageway, not to touch anything, and not to talk to any voices which might challenge them.
“I’ve been here before,” Tamora said. She seemed subdued in the red light and the chill air of the passageway.
“I remember you,” the guard said, “and I remember a man with only one eye, but I do not remember your companions.”
“My original partner ran into something unexpected. But I’m here, as I said I would be, and I vouch for these two. Lead on. This place is like a tomb.”
“It is older than any tomb,” the guard said.
They climbed around two turns of the passageway. Groups of colored lights were set at random in the black stuff which sheathed the walls and ceiling and floor. The floor gave softly beneath Yama’s boots, and there was a faint vibration in the red-lit air, so low-pitched that he felt it more in his bones than in his ears.
The guard stopped and pressed his palm against the wall, and the black stuff puckered and pulled back with a grating noise. Ordinary light flooded through the orifice, which opened onto a room no more than twenty paces across and ringed round with a narrow window that looked out across the roofs of the city in one direction and the glittering expanse of the Great River in the other. Irregular clusters of colored lights depended from the ceiling like stalactites in a cave, and a thick-walled glass bottle hung from the ceiling in the middle of the clusters of lights, containing some kind of red-and-white blossom in turgid liquid.
Yama whispered to Tamora, “Where is the captain?”
He had read several of the old romances in the library of the peel-house, and expected a tall man in a crisp, archaic uniform, with sharp, bright eyes focused on the vast distances between stars, and skin tanned black with the fierce light of alien suns.
Pandaras snickered, but fell silent when the guard looked at him.
The guard said, “There is no captain except when the crew meld, but the pilot of this vessel will talk with you.”
Tamora said, “The same one I talked with two days ago?”
“Does it matter?” the guard said. He pulled a golden circlet from one of his pockets and set it on his scarred scalp.
At once, his body stiffened. His eyes blinked, each to a different rhythm, and his mouth opened and closed.
Tamora stepped up to him and said, “Do you know who I am?”
The guard’s mouth hung open. Spittle looped between his lips. His tongue writhed behind his teeth like a wounded snake and his breath came out as a hiss that slowly shaped itself into a word.
“Yessss.”
Pandaras nudged Yama and indicated the bottled blossom with a crooked thumb. “There’s the star-sailor,” he said. “It’s talking through the guard.”
Yama looked more closely at the thing inside the bottle. What he had thought were fleshy petals of some exotic flower were the lobes of a mantle that bunched around a core woven of pink and gray filaments. Feathery gills rich with red blood waved slowly to and fro in the thick liquid in which they were suspended. It was a little like a squid, but instead of tentacles it had white, many-branching fibers that disappeared into the base of its bottle.
Pandaras whispered, “Nothing but a nervous system. That’s why it needs puppets.”
The guard jerked his head around and stared at Yama and Pandaras. His eyes were no longer blinking at different rates, but the pupil of the left eye was much bigger than that of the right. Speaking with great effort, as if forcing the words around pebbles lodged in his throat, he said, “You told me you would bring only one other.”
Tamora said, “The taller one, yes. But he has brought his . . . servant.”
Pandaras stepped forward and bowed low from the waist. “I am Yama’s squire. He is a perfect master of fighting. Only this night past he killed a man, an experienced fighter better armed than he, who thought to rob him while he slept.”
The star-sailor said through its puppet, “I have not seen the bloodline for a long time, but you have chosen well. He has abilities you will find useful.”
Yama stared at the thing in the bottle, shocked to the core.
Tamora said, “Is that so?”
“I scanned all of you when you stepped aboard. This one—” the guard slammed his chest with his open hand—“will see to the contract, following local custom. It will be best to return with the whole body, but if it is badly damaged then you must bring a sample of tissue. A piece the size of your smallest finger will be sufficient. You remember what I told you.”
Yama said, “Wait. You know my bloodline?”
Tamora ignored him. She closed her eyes and recited, “’It will be lying close to the spine. The host must be mutilated to obliterate all trace of occupation. Burn it if possible.’”
She opened her eyes. “Suppose we’re caught? What do we tell the magistrates?”
“If you are caught by your quarry, you will not live to tell the magistrates anything.”
“He’ll know you sent us.”
“And we will send others, if you fail. I trust you will not.”
“You know my bloodline,” Yama said. “How do you know my bloodline?”
Pandaras said, “We aren’t the first to try this, are we?”
“There was one attempt before,” Tamora said. “It failed. That is why we’re being so well paid.”
The guard said, “If you succeed.”
“Grah. You say I have a miracle worker with me. Of course we’ll succeed.”