“He was like that when I arrived,” someone said.
Pandaras recognized the man’s soft voice at once. He had been interrogated by him after the fall of the Department of Vaticination in the Palace of the Memory of the People. Without turning around, he said, “And the other?”
“Drowned, I fear, in the bowl of water conveniently left in the middle of the floor. How easy death is to find. Throw down your knife, boy, or it will find you in the next instant.”
Pandaras dropped his poniard at his feet. He said, “Death finds some more easily than others. All the waters of the Great River were not enough to drown you.”
“Where is he?”
It took a great effort not to turn around. “Not here. Downriver, I think.”
“Hmm. You will tell me all you know. Ah, do not bother to deny it. You know that you will. But not here, not now. I do not have time to kill all the gangsters in this city. Close the book, boy. We will bring it with us.”
Pandaras said, “What happened to Azoth?”
“Is that his name? He needs it no longer. The book is dangerous, boy. It has been changed. It takes the soul of any unwary enough to look into it.”
“It did not take mine,” Pandaras said, taking the book from Azoth’s unresisting fingers. The boy continued to stare at his empty hands. A slick of drool glistened on the brown pelt of his chin.
“Perhaps it already has taken you. We will see.” Prefect Corin stepped out of the shadows by the door, the white stripe on the left side of his face catching the light from the book Pandaras held open toward him. He said, “That will not affect me. I believe that you have a token of the man I am seeking.”
Pandaras could not move. The book slipped from his numbed fingers and fell at his feet. Every hair on his body rose, prickling; the muscles of his arms and legs were painfully locked.
Prefect Corin said, “You have a little talent for music, like many of your kind, so you might find it amusing to know that I hold you with a tightly focused beam of sound. It is a single note pitched higher than you or I can hear, but your muscles hear it.”
He crossed the room in three strides, reached inside Pandaras’s shirt and lifted out the coin. With an abrupt motion he pulled the doubled thong over Pandaras’s head.
He stared at the coin for a long moment, then pressed it against Pandaras’s forehead. Pandaras felt it burning there. Prefect Corin exhaled, slipped the thong back over Pandaras’s head, and extended his arm toward Azoth. There was a flash of blue light; Azoth’s head exploded in pink mist. The boy’s body pitched forward, throwing a long spurt of rich red blood from its neck stump, kicked out twice, and lay still.
“Yamamanama has learned much,” Prefect Corin said. “Or he is well advised. The coin has attuned itself to him and he has attuned it to you. You can find him by using it, or he can find you. No one else. Very well then.”
Suddenly Pandaras could move again. He fell to his hands and knees and bent his head and vomited.
Prefect Corin said, “You will live, boy. Come now. With me. We have far to go, I fear.”
Chapter Six
The Shadow
As ever, Dr. Dismas was there when Yama woke, and almost at once Agnitus and Enobarbus came into the room, followed by a phalanx of officers and guards. The warlord had news of another great victory, but Yama was too full of joy to pay much attention at first. He had at last found Pandaras, and had rescued him from danger and lost him, all in a few hectic minutes. Pandaras was alive, and although he seemed to have fallen into deep trouble, Yama was certain that the boy was searching for him, for he wore Oncus’s fetish on his arm.
“There are great advances all across the front,” Enobarbus was saying. “In only a few days Yamamanama has gained more territory than we have won in the past year.”
Yama wondered if Pandaras knew that he had guided the machine which had knocked the gun from the hand of the ruffian in the alley. Yama had lost contact with the machine moments later, when the Shadow had withdrawn its control of a myriad machines along the warfront, but it did not matter. He had found Pandaras once, and he could find him again.
“Not exactly Yamamanama,” Dr. Dismas told Enobarbus.
“Could this be done without him?”
“That’s not the point, my dear Enobarbus.”
The two men stood on either side of Yama’s big, disordered bed. Yama could not move, but suddenly he had a dizzy vision of his paralyzed body from above; the Shadow had possessed one of the little machines which spun in the air, and was feeding him its optical output.
A pentad of officers with red capes falling around their battle armor stood behind Enobarbus. One of the officers was writing on a slate. Its green-and-white light flickered in flowing patterns tugged here and there by his stylus. Guards flanked the officers, clad from head to toe in black plastic like man-shaped beetles, their carbines held at port arms. They were there not to protect Yama, but to defend their commander in the event that Yama—or the Shadow—went mad and tried to destroy him. Enobarbus’s physician, black-cloaked, gray-maned Agnitus, stood just at the edge of the field of view, as patient as a carrion crow. There were servants in the room too, young men and women in tunics and tabards of gorgeous watered silks, or in fantastic uniforms of red leather kilts, golden cuirasses inlaid with intricate designs of black mother-of-pearl and plumed helmets that almost doubled their height, armed with ornately decorated gisarmes, pole-axes and sarissas which they held grounded before them. The servants and soldiers were all indigens. Some were frog-jawed fisherfolk, others lanky, rail-thin herders. There was a single sturdy forest pygmy a third the height of the others, with glossy black skin that shone as if oiled. They were all Dr. Dismas’s experimental subjects. Metal collars were embedded in their necks and their shaven scalps were marred by angry red lacerations crudely stitched with black thread. One had had the top of his skull sliced off and replaced with a disc of transparent plastic; cubes and pyramids and spheres nestled amongst what was left of his brain. He shook slightly and constantly; drool slicked his chin and stained the front of his red silk blouson.
And someone or something stood amongst the officers, guards and servants, insubstantial, shifting, barely glimpsed, the shadow of a shadow. It filled Yama with dread. He could not look directly at it, but he guessed that it was a new torment of the Shadow. Day by day it was growing stronger; day by day he was growing weaker. But now at least his hope was renewed. If he could find Pandaras again, and tell the boy where he was being held prisoner, he could at last begin to plan his escape.
Yama was paralyzed by an injection which Dr. Dismas had given him several hours before. Now, at an unseen signal, three of the servants stepped forward and tenderly lifted him from the bed and carried him to a canopied throne, propping him up amongst satin cushions. Dr. Dismas turned Yama’s bare arm over, stroked a vein in the crook of his elbow until it plumped up, a river of blue blood under pale skin, then with a swift underhand motion stabbed the hypodermic needle home. Yama blacked out for a moment, and then was back in every part of his body, dizzy and cramped and sick to his stomach.
One of the servants held Yama’s head while he vomited into a yellow plastic bowl. There was little but mucus to come up. Dr. Dismas took a square of linen from another servant and wiped the slick of chyme from Yama’s chin as deftly and gently as a mother tending her child. Yama suffered this silently, and allowed Agnitus to probe him with hard fingers.
“As usual, he is febrile and dehydrated. Otherwise his muscle tone is good and his vital signs are stable.” Agnitus stared at Dr. Dismas. “You use him hard, Doctor. At this rate he may not last the course.”