“If you can help me understand where I came from, perhaps I can help you.”
The woman smiled. “You try to bargain with me. But I have already told you where you came from, Yamamanama, and I have already helped you. I have sung many songs of praise in your honor. I have told many of your coming. I have raised up a champion to fight for you. You should be with him now, sailing downriver to the war.”
Yama remembered the young warlord’s story. He said, “With Enobarbus?”
“The soldier too. But I meant Dr. Dismas. He found me long ago, long before I spoke with Enobarbus. You should be with them now. With their help, and especially with mine, you could save the world.”
Yama laughed. “Lady, I will do what I can against the heretics, but I do not think I can do more than any other man.”
“Against the heretics? Don’t be silly. I have not been able to speak to you, but I have watched you. I heard your prayers, after your brother’s death. I know how desperately you wish to become a hero and avenge him. Ah, but I can make you more than that.”
After the news of Telmon’s death, Yama had prayed all night before the shrine in the temple. The Aedile had sent two soldiers to watch over him, but they had fallen asleep, and in the quiet hour before dawn Yama had asked for a sign that he would lead a great victory in Telmon’s name.
He had thought then that he wanted to redeem his brother’s death, but he understood now that his prayers had been prompted by mere selfishness. He had wanted a shape to his own life, to know its beginning and to be given a destiny.
He realized that perhaps his prayer had been answered after all, but not in the way he had hoped.
“You must take up your inheritance,” the woman said. “I can help you. Together we can complete the changes my original began. I think you have already begun to explore what you can do. There is much more, if you will let me teach you.”
“If you had listened to me, domina, you would know that I pledged to save the world, not change it.”
Did her gaze darken? For a moment, it seemed to Yama that her strange beauty was merely a mask or film covering something horrible.
She said, “If you want to save the world, it must be changed. Change is fundamental to life. The world will be changed whichever side wins the war, but only one side can ensure that stasis is not enforced again. Stasis preserves dead things, but it suffocates life. A faction of the servants of this world realized that long ago. But they failed, and those which survived were thrown into exile. Now they are our servants, and together we will succeed where they alone did not.” Yama remembered the cold black presence of the feral machine he had inadvertently called down at the merchant’s house, and it took all his will not to run from the woman, as Pandaras had run at first sight. He knew now which side this avatar was on, and where Enobarbus and Dr. Dismas would have taken him if he had not escaped. Dr. Dismas had lied about everything. He was a spy for the heretics, and Enobarbus was not a champion against them, but a warlord secretly fighting on their side. He had not escaped when his ship had been sunk, but had been captured by the heretics and made into one of them. Or perhaps he had been granted safe passage because he already was one of them—for had he not spoken of a vision which had spoken to him from the shrine of the temple of his people? Yama knew now who had spoken to the young soldier, and knew what course he had been set upon. Not against the heretics, but for them. What a fool he had been to believe otherwise!
He said, “The world cannot be saved by contesting the will of those who made it. I will fight the heretics, not serve them.”
Silver bells, ringing in the air all around. “You are still so young, Yamamanama! You still cling to the beliefs of your childhood! But you will change your mind. Dr. Dismas has promised that he has already sown the seeds of change. Look on this, Yamamanama. All this can be ours!”
The shrine flashed edge to edge with white light. Yama closed his eyes, but the white light was inside his head, too.
Something long and narrow floated in it, like a needle in milk. It was his map. No, it was the world.
Half was green and blue and white, with the Great River running along one side and the ranges of the Rim Mountains on the other, and the icecap of the Endpoint shining in the sunlight; half was tawny desert, splotched and gouged with angry black and red scars and craters, the river dry, the icecap gone.
It floated before Yama, serene and lovely, for a long moment. And then it was gone, and the woman smiled at him from the window of the shrine, with the green lawn and the high hedges of the garden receding behind her.
“Together we will do great things,” she said. “We will remake the world, and everyone in it, as a start.”
Yama said steadfastly, “You are an aspect of one of the Ancients of Days. You raised up the heretics against the will of the Preservers. You are my enemy.”
“I am no enemy of yours, Yamamanama. How could an enemy speak from a shrine?”
“The heretics silenced the last avatars of the Preservers. Why shouldn’t something else take their place? Why do you tempt me with foolish visions? No one can rule the world.”
The woman smiled. “No one does, and there is its problem. Any advanced organism must have a dominating principle, or else its different parts will war against each other, and it will be paralyzed by inaction. As with organisms, so with worlds. You have so many doubts. I understand. Hush! Not another word! Someone comes. We’ll talk again. If not here, then at one of the other transceivers that are still functioning. There are many on the far-side shore.”
“If I talk with you again, it will be because I have found some way of destroying you.”
She smiled. “I think you will change your mind about that.”
“Never!”
“Oh, but I think that you will. Already it has begun. Until then.”
And then she was gone, and with her the light. Once more, Yama could see through the darkly transparent disc of the shrine. On the far side of the apse, the curtain of black mesh stirred as someone pushed it aside.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Assassin
It was not Pandaras, nor even Tamora, but a bare-chested giant of a man in black leather trews. His skin was the color of rust and his face was masked with an oval of soft black moleskin. He carried a naked falchion, and there was a percussion pistol tucked into his waistband. His muscular arms were bound tightly with leather thongs; plastic vambraces, mottled with extreme age, were laced around his forearms. As soon as he saw Yama, the man quickly advanced around the shrine. Yama stepped backward and drew his long knife. It ran with blue fire, as if dipped in flaming brandy.
The man smiled. His mouth was red and wet inside the slit in his black mask. The pointed teeth of a small fierce animal made a radiating pattern around the mask’s mouth slit and little bones made a zigzag pattern around the eyeholes, exaggerating their size. The man’s rust-colored skin shone as if oiled, and a spiral pattern of welts was raised on the skin of his chest. Yama thought of the friendly people who had colonized the abandoned tombs at the edge of Ys. This was one of their sons, corrupted by the city. Or perhaps he had left his people because he was already corrupted.