“They might want our blood. Or want to scoop out our brains and put them in tanks, all alive—like the star-sailors.”
Yama laughed at these fantasies.
Pandaras said darkly, “This is a place of good and evil, master. It is the New Quarter, built on a bloody battleground. You are a singular person. Don’t forget it. You would be a great prize for a blood sacrifice.”
“New? It seems to me very old.”
“That’s because nothing here has been rebuilt since the Age of Insurrection. The rest of the city is far older, but people are always knocking down old buildings and putting up new ones. The Hierarchs ordered clearance of the ruined buildings where the last battle between machines was fought, and the bones and casings of all the dead were tipped into great pits and the ground around about was flattened and these houses were built.”
“I know there was a battle fought near Ys, but I thought it was much farther upriver.” Yama remembered now that the Temple of the Black Well had something to do with that last battle, although he could not quite remember what it was.
Pandaras said, “They built the houses over the battleground, and nothing’s changed since, except for the building of shrines and temples.”
“I had thought the houses were built around them.”
“Houses have to be knocked down each time a new temple is built. It’s a dangerous business. There are old poisons in the ground, and old weapons too, and sometimes the weapons discharge when they are uncovered. There’s a department which does nothing but search by divination for old weapons, and make them safe when they’re found. And some parts of the quarter are haunted, too. It’s why the people are so strange hereabouts, neh? The ghosts get inside their heads, and infect them with ideas from ages past.”
Yama said, “I have never seen a ghost.” The aspects which haunted the City of the Dead did not count, for they were merely semi-intelligent projections. And while the Amnan claimed that the blue lights sometimes seen floating amongst the ruins below the peel-house were wights, the eidolons of the restless dead, Zakiel said that they were no more than wisps of burning marsh gas.
Pandaras said, “These are machine ghosts mostly, but human, once, and they say that those are somewhere worse. That’s why they make so many icons hereabouts, master. If you were to look inside one of these houses, you’d find layer upon layer of them on the walls.”
“To, keep out the ghosts.”
“They don’t usually work. That’s what I heard, anyway.”
“Look there. Is that our temple?”
It reared up a few streets ahead, a giant cube built of huge roughly hewn stone blocks stained black with soot, and topped by an onion dome lapped in scuffed gilt tiles.
Pandaras squinted at it, then said, “No, ours has a rounder roof, with a hole in the top of it.”
“Of course! Where the machine fell!”
The Temple of the Black Well had been built long after the feral machine’s fiery fall, but its dome had been left symbolically uncompleted, with the aperture at its apex directly above the deep hole made when the machine had struck the surface of the world and melted a passage in the rock all the way down to the keel. Yama had been told the story by the aspect of a leather merchant who had had his tannery near the site of the temple’s construction. Mysyme, that had been the merchant’s name. He had had two wives and six beautiful daughters, and had done much charitable work amongst the orphaned river-rats of the docks. Mysyme was dead an age past, and Yama had lost interest in the limited responses of his aspect years ago, but now he remembered them all over again. Mysyme’s father had seen the fall of the machine, and had told his son that when it hit, a plume of melted rock had been thrown higher than the atmosphere, while the smoke of secondary fires had darkened the sky above Ys for a decad.
“It’s a little to the left,” Pandaras said, “and maybe ten minutes’ walk. That place with the gold roof is a tomb of a warrior-saint. It’s solid all the way through except for a secret chamber.”
“You are a walking education, Pandaras.”
“I have an uncle who used to live here, and one time I stayed with him. He was on my mother’s side, and this was when my father ran off and my mother went looking for him. She was a year at it, and never found him. And a year is a long time for my people. So she came back and married another man, and when that didn’t work out she married my stepfather. I don’t get on with him, and that’s why I took the job of pot boy, because it came with a room. And then you came along, and here we are.” Pandaras grinned. “For a long time after I left this part of the city, I thought maybe I was haunted. I’d wake up and think I’d been hearing voices, voices that had been telling me things in my sleep. But I haven’t heard them since I met up with you, master. Maybe your bloodline is a cure for ghosts.”
“All my bloodline are ghosts, from the little I have learned,” Yama said.
The Temple of the Black Well stood at the center of a wide, quiet plaza of mossy cobbles. It had been built in the shape of a cross, with a long atrium and short apses; its dome, covered in gold leaf that shone with the last light of the sun, capped the point where the apses intersected the atrium. The temple was clad in lustrous black stone, although here and there parts of the cladding had fallen away to reveal the grayish limestone beneath. Yama and Pandaras walked all the way around the temple and saw no one, and then climbed the long flight of shallow steps and went through the tall narthex.
It was dark inside, but a thick slanted column of reddish light fell through the open apex of the dome at the far end of a long atrium flanked by colonnades. Yama walked toward the light. There was no sign of Tamora or her mysterious contact; the whole temple seemed deserted. The pillars of the colonnades were intricately carved and the ruined mosaics of the floor sketched the outlines of heroic figures. The temple had been splendid once, Yama thought, but now it had the air of a place that was no longer cared for. He thought it an odd choice for a rendezvous—far better for an ambush.
Pandaras clearly felt the same thing, for his sleek head continually turned this way and that as they went down the atrium. The reddish light, alive with swirling motes of dust, fell on a waist-high wall of undressed stone which ringed a wide hole that plunged down into darkness. It was the well, the shaft the fallen machine had melted. The wide coping on top of the wall was covered in the ashy remnants of incense cones, and here and there were offerings of fruit and flowers.
A few joss sticks jammed into cracks in the wall sent up curls of sweet-smelling smoke, but the flowers were shriveled and brown, and the little piles of fruit were spotted with decay.
“Not many come here,” Pandaras said. “The ghost of the machine is powerful, and quick to anger.”
Yama gripped the edge of the coping and looked into the depths of the well. A faint draught of cold, stale air blew up around him from the lightless depths. The walls of the shaft were long glassy flows of once-melted rock, veined with impurities, dwindling away to a vanishing point small as the end of his thumb. It was impossible to tell how deep the well really was, and in a spirit of inquiry Yama dropped a softening pomegranate into the black air.
“That isn’t a good idea,” Pandaras said uneasily.
“I do not think a piece of fruit would wake this particular machine. It fell a long way as I recall—at least, it was two days in falling, and appeared in the sky as a star clothed in burning hair. When it struck the ground, the blow knocked down thousands of houses and caused a wave in the river that washed away much of the city on the far-side shore. And then the sky turned black with smoke from all the fires.”