Pandaras shuddered again. “I will not fail you, master,” he whispered.
The next morning, Azoth and the two bravos did not bring Pandaras’s breakfast. Instead, Azoth said, “Come with us. No, leave your things here. They will be safe.”
“Are you going to take me to Pyr?”
The bravos made their chattering laugh.
Azoth said, “Perhaps soon. First you must prove yourself.”
Azoth hailed a rickshaw and they rode a long way through the brawling streets. The bravos fixed their mobile eyes on Pandaras as he stared out and asked Azoth many questions about the places they passed. They got off in a narrow street somewhere near the docks. The masts of many ships pricked the blue sky beyond the flat roofs on the godowns. As they walked past a chandler’s, Azoth pinched Pandaras’s arm and said to take notice, because that was the place he would firebomb.
“Why?”
“Because you’ll do what you’re told,” one of the bravos said.
“Because Pyr wants it,” Azoth said, with a shrug. “It’s just business.”
A small boy was hawking fuel alcohol at the dusty intersection at the end of the street. Azoth threw money at him and told him to go away. The boy snatched up the coins, knuckled his forehead, and said he would like to see the show.
“Fill two of your bottles, then,” Azoth said. “One word to anyone and I’ll cut out your eyes and tongue. Understand? Why are you smiling?”
“Because nothing exciting ever happens here,” the boy said. He was still smiling, but his hands were trembling and he splashed purple alcohol on the pavement as he filled the bottles.
One of the bravos took out a piece of cloth and tore it into long thin strips which he twisted up and stuck in the necks of the bottles. “You tip the bottle to wet the wick,” Azoth told Pandaras. “Light the very end and keep the bottle upright when you throw it. Throw the bottles hard and make sure they hit something that will smash them. Make sure you throw them through the door, too.”
“I know how it’s done,” Pandaras said. He was not scared, but there was a hollowness in his belly. It was the feeling he always had in the quiet moments before something violent happened. He picked up the two bottles. The rags in their necks stank sharply of sugar alcohol.
One of the bravos had a lighter. He waved its little flame at Pandaras, who stepped back in alarm, the two bottles and their sopping wicks clutched to his chest.
“Stop that,” Azoth said sharply, and held out his hand.
The bravo gave him the lighter; he flicked it twice to show how the flame was struck and put it in Pandaras’s shirt pocket. “Do it now,” he said, “and come straight back.”
It was early in the morning, but the street was already busy. Although no one seemed to take any notice of him, Pandaras felt that he was watched by a thousand pairs of eyes as he walked to the chandler’s, with the heavy bottles clutched to his chest and the stink of alcohol burning in his nostrils. The shutters of the shop were only half raised; someone was moving about inside, whistling a cheerful tune. On the other side of the street, his heart beating quickly and lightly, Pandaras set down the bottles and lit the wick of one of them. He put the lighter away and picked up the bottle and threw it at the pavement outside the chandler’s door. As glass smashed and flames bloomed he snatched up the other bottle and ran.
Not toward Azoth and the bravos, but in the other direction. People made way for him. He ran in front of a cart (the nilagai pulling it reared in its traces, raking the air with its clawed forelegs), dodged a soldier who grabbed at him, and ran into a crooked passage between two godowns, turning three corners before stopping, still clutching the bottle to his chest and listening to his hammering pulse and rasping breath.
Shrill whistles and an insistent bell somewhere in the distance, and beyond these bright noises the city’s constant roar. Pandaras still had not got his breath back when he heard footsteps approaching. He ducked low and glanced around the corner, ducked back and lit the wick of the bottle, fearful that the snick of the lighter would give him away, and stepped out.
The two bravos stopped and looked at each other. Azoth was not with them. Their mouthparts clattered together in brief laughter; then they saw what Pandaras held. One raised his pistol and there was a flash and it flew from his hands—a misfire, Pandaras thought, and lobbed the flaming bottle as hard as he could. It smashed at the feet of the bravos and they were at the center of a sudden tall blossom of blue flames. They shrieked and twisted in the flames and although people presently crept down the passage and poured water on them, they were already dead, and Pandaras was far away.
It took Pandaras the rest of the day to cross the city and reach the building where he had been kept prisoner. He kept up a monologue all the way, telling himself that he was a fool to go back because Azoth would certainly be waiting there, that Tibor had been right and they should have left the city days and days ago. Better to live on grubs and leaves than be in the thrall of some gangster like Pyr.
But it was the city which had caught him, not Pyr. There were plenty like Pyr in Ophir; he could have fallen in with any of them once he had allowed himself to be seduced by the city’s song. How well he knew that song, and what it promised! It was in his blood, the song that seduces all who are born in a city or who come to live in one.
Azoth had had it right. The city had made Pandaras think that he could be more than he was. He thought that he could win a fortune from it and rescue his master in style, and it had nearly cost him all he had. But he could not afford to lose the book. It was not his. Not his to sell, not his to lose.
When he reached the square, he stood for a long time on the far side of the stands of giant bamboos. The window of the room in which he had been kept was dark, but that signified nothing. He was very hungry—he had tried to snatch a hand of red bananas from a stall, but had been chased off—and very nervous. He walked around the block and came back to the square from another direction, did it again and thought he had located two people who were watching the building, one loitering by the food stall on the corner, the other at a roadside shrine, alternately wafting smoke from an incense cone and staring at the swarming passersby.
In the end, Pandaras went into the building next door and climbed its staircase to the roof, coming out amongst a small forest of clattering wind generators. An old man, drunk or drugged, lay on his back, waving his long arms and legs in the air like a beetle. Two more, wrapped in winding gray rags, turned their stalked eyes toward Pandaras, but they were only drunkards, sharing a plastic blister of an oily white liquor.
Pandaras marked his spot and took a short run and jumped the gap between the two buildings. He walked around the edge of the roof until he spied the balcony of the room where he had been kept, then took out his poniard and sawed at a sagging spot in the asphalted roof, exposing a lathe and plaster ceiling below.
There were wind generators on this roof too. He pried the heavy battery from one and threw it into the hole he had made and jumped after it, yelling like a crazy man and holding his poniard high above his head.
He landed in a pile of rubble and dust and fell over. There were three men in the room, but Pandaras only saw two of them at first. One was dead, lying on his back in the middle of the room with not a mark on him. The other was Azoth. He sat beneath the window, the copy of the Puranas open in his lap, faint light from a picture shining eerily under his narrow chin. His orange wraparound shades had fallen off; he stared down at the book in his lap with unblinking eyes and did not move when Pandaras dared to take a step toward him.