“First you prove yourself,” the boy said. “Then, maybe you see her. She is very busy. She has much business.”
Pandaras was kept for three days in a small, hot room on the top floor of a six-story house which overlooked one of the city’s squares. Crowds and traffic noise all day and all night; the smell of burnt alcohol mixed with the scent of the flowering vine that twisted around the balcony outside the window. A transformer on a pole beneath the balcony hummed and hissed to itself. Water dripped from a broken pipe into a plastic bowl in the center of the room. A gecko kept Pandaras company, clinging to one or another of the walls for hours at a time, with only a faint pulse in its throat to show that it was alive, before suddenly stirring and making a swift dart at a roach or click beetle. There was no furniture in the room. Pandaras slept on the balcony and spent most of his waking hours looking at the pictures in the copy of the Puranas or watching traffic which swarmed around the stands of giant bamboos in the center of the square. He knew that he must not lose his nerve. He must keep his resolve.
The coin was still displaying its shifting pattern of sparks.
The boy and the two bravos visited Pandaras each morning and evening. They brought food from the fry stall at the corner, rice and shrimp and green chillies in a paper bag, the edges of which were translucent with oil. The boy squatted by the window and watched as Pandaras ate, humming to himself and cleaning his broad nails with a pocketknife; the bravos lurked by the door, talking to themselves in a dialect of stuttering clicks. The boy had a percussion pistol in the back of the waistband of his creased trousers, with his shirttail out to cover it, and the bravos had pistols too.
The boy’s name was Azoth. Although he was older than Pandaras, his bloodline was long-lived and he was still a child, with the calculating cruelty of one who has never been truly hurt, who believes that he will never die or that death is nothing. He never took off his orange plastic shades and would not answer any of Pandaras’s questions, but instead talked about the war for ten minutes or half an hour before, without warning, standing up and leaving, followed by the bravos.
The door was unlocked, but Pandaras knew better than to try and walk away. On the evening of the third day he was roughly hustled downstairs by the two bravos and forced to stand at the edge of the road. Passersby made wide diversions around them; traffic roared past a handsbreadth in front of them. A rickshaw stood in the shade of the giant bamboos. Pandaras saw someone inside the rickshaw lean forward and say something to the driver, who nodded and stood up on his pedals. As the rickshaw pulled away, Pandaras got another glimpse of its passenger: a woman in a red silk dress, much smaller than him, with the large eyes of a nocturnal bloodline and long, lustrous black hair.
On the way back up the stairs he asked the boy, Azoth, if the woman he had seen was Pyr.
“Mind your questions,” one of the bravos said.
“I don’t talk with you,” Pandaras said. “You know nothing.”
“Pyr is interested in you,” Azoth said.
“Is she scared to speak with me?”
“She does not know if you are worth the trouble,” Azoth said. He put his hand on the pistol hidden beneath his shirttail when he entered the room, and crossed to the window and leaned at it and looked down at the bustling street below.
“Something is troubling you,” Pandaras said.
“We look after our own,” Azoth said, without turning around. “Prove yourself, and you are ours, and we are yours.”
“He’s still looking for me, isn’t he? And I know he is a dangerous man.”
“Perhaps we should give you to him. Would you like that?”
“Then he does not offer money, or I think that you would have done that already.”
“He makes threats. We don’t like that. Pyr will find him, by and by, and deal with him.” Azoth turned and stared rudely at Pandaras. “Who are you?”
“A loyal servant.”
Azoth nodded. “We wondered why you had a hierodule, and why you are so eagerly sought. Where is your master?”
“I have lost him.”
Azoth smiled. “Don’t worry. Masters are easy to find for the likes of you.”
Later, as the boy was leaving, Pandaras said, “Tell Pyr I know many things.”
The bravos made their chattering laughter. Azoth said, “Don’t make yourself more than you are, and you’ll do fine.”
Pandaras thought about that as he sat on the narrow balcony and watched the street below. Perhaps he was no more than he had been before he had met Yama, a mere pot boy with a talent for telling stories and getting into trouble. Perhaps he had caught himself in one of his stories. And yet he had survived adventures which no ordinary person had ever faced. Even if he had begun his travels as an ordinary man, one of the unremarked swarm of his bloodline, then he was ordinary no more, for extraordinary things had happened to him. And now he was being hunted by Prefect Corin, who must be more than a man to have survived the destruction of his ship by the monstrous polyps Yama had called up from the depths of the river. Pandaras shivered, remembering how one of the polyps had torn poor Pantin apart with a contemptuous flick of its tentacles. He touched the fetish and then the coin and promised his master that he would not fail.
“I have fallen into trouble, but I will find my way out,” he whispered. “And I will find you and rescue you from whatever harm you have fallen into. My life is short, and worth little to anyone but me, but I swear on it now.”
Pandaras could not sleep for thinking of all he had to do and of what Azoth might want of him. He leafed through the copy of the Puranas, and found that the more he looked at the pictures the more they seemed to contain. They were saturated with meaning, and now he was beginning to fully understand the story they told.
The Ancient of Days who had escaped her ship had fled the length of the world, ending up in an obscure city at the place where the Great River fell over the edge of the world. The bloodline which lived there was unchanged, and she had taken control of them despite the efforts of the city’s Commissioner and its Archivist. She had learned something in the shrines by the fall of the Great River and had quickened the minuscule machines in the brains of some of the inhabitants of the city. They had been reborn as individuals. They had been changed. And then the ship of the Ancients of Days had arrived in the middle of the civil war between changed and unchanged, having traveled the length of the Great River from its landfall at Ys. She had tried to destroy her crewmates, but they had killed her. Yet her ideas had survived. The Archivist of Sensch had escaped from the ship of the Ancients of Days. He had been the first of the heretics who even now strove to overturn the word of the Preservers.
Pandaras began to feel that perhaps the heretics might be right, or might at least have guessed the truth about some things. It was as if a voice had woken inside his head: the book had woken it, or planted it there. The world had turned away from the path ordained by the Preservers. It had become static and stratified, weighed down by ritual and custom. No one was free to choose their own destiny.
He shuddered, a single quick convulsion like a sneeze—his mother would have said that a ghoul had been sniffing around his grave. The book was valuable to his master, but it was dangerous. He must not look in it again, he thought, but a small part of him, that whispering voice perhaps, knew that he would.
It was long after midnight. The Eye of the Preservers was beginning to set over the roofs and treetops of the city. Its red swirl was dimmed by the city’s neon glare, but the pupil at its center was quite distinct, the pinprick void swept clean by the black hole into which the Preservers had vanished and from which they would not emerge until the end of time. Could the heretics dare take the war there, if they conquered the world the Preservers had left behind?