“You are just in time, brother,” Menas said, and put away his timepiece and embraced Prefect Corin. “The duel is about to begin. Listen. Do you hear the thunder?”
Pandaras had thought that it was distant artillery fire, but when he looked at where Menas pointed, he saw heavy thunderclouds rolling across the dark sky. Lightning strobed between clouds and the edge of the river.
“They manipulate the weather,” Menas said. “They like to set the stage for the nightly duel. So far it is stalemate, for by the grace of the Preservers our mages have built an ironclad which is the match of their champion. Come with me. Come on! We do not have much time!”
A pentad of staff officers went with them, each followed by his own flock of little machines. Menas was filled with so much energy that he could not keep still or follow the thread of any conversation for more than a minute; he kept breaking off to run over to this or that group of soldiers, to ask how they were and where they were from and if they were ready to fight. It was clear that the soldiers loved him. All of them cheered his approach and offered him libations of beer and wine.
“We will show them this time, boys,” Menas shouted. “We will push them back into the river!” He whirled about and ran back up the slope to where Prefect Corin waited. “They are in good heart,” he said breathlessly. “The best men we have, the bravest fighters.”
“I see no fighting here,” Prefect Corin said coldly.
“Soon enough,” Menas said, and once again took his complicated timepiece from his coat pocket and held it up to the light of one of the machines which hung above his head. “We satisfy their need for drama, but it is a matter of precise timing.” He put away the timepiece and added more soberly, “Some day they will decide to move forward, and we will not be able to stop them.”
Prefect Corin looked at Menas and said, “Perhaps you have been too close to the heretics for too long, brother.”
“This is not Ys,” Menas said. “This is the war, the real war. I do not tell lies to my soldiers, I tell them the truth. There are no lies here, no stories to comfort the general population. The heretic forces have grown stronger over the years, and in the last handful of days they have grown very bold indeed. I hear that things go badly in the marshes. I hear that our machines are failing there and I believe that the heretics could take this city whenever they wish, but instead they play a game with us. We can hold our present position as long as we cooperate with them. We must strive to match them. If not, there are horrors…”
His voice had dropped to a whisper. Pandaras shuddered, realizing that the man’s hectic energy barely concealed his terror. His eyes were rimmed with red, and his hands trembled; he thrust them in the pockets of his long, black-leather overcoat and leaned closer to Prefect Corin and whispered, “They bring back the dead.”
Prefect Corin eyed Menas with distaste. He said, “We must cross their lines. The captain of the flying platform refused me. I hope that you will not.”
Menas shrugged. “We send in scouts all the time. Sometimes they come back. Usually turned. They pass all the tests we can devise and then, a few days later, they walk into a crowded bunker and burst into flame.”
Pandaras remembered the explosion in the café moments after the young woman had run into it.
Prefect Corin said, “It is not the first time I have done this.”
“Things have changed. They turn our machines against us somehow. The mages cannot explain it, but at least their new devices are proof against heretic trickery. At least, for the time being.”
Prefect Corin nodded. “It is because things have changed that I must cross the lines.”
“There will be a scouting party going out soon, I expect. One of my staff can advise you.” Menas looked at Pandaras. “Is this boy going with you? Who is he? Is he your servant?”
“He will lead me to my prize.”
“I have my own reasons,” Pandaras said, and dodged away when Prefect Corin struck at him with his staff. “I am a seeker after truth, like my master!”
The machine on his neck stung him hard and he cried out and fell down. Two of the staff officers laughed. Pandaras picked himself up and cursed their ancestry all the way back to the slimes from which they had been mistakenly raised by the Preservers. The machine stung him again, forcing him to run after Prefect Corin and Menas, who were walking toward a glow in the distance.
Pandaras was astonished to see that it was a shrine, a big disc standing on its edge at an intersection of two broad streets. But perhaps it was not astonishing after all, for shrines were only partly of this world, and were immune to energies that would evaporate ordinary matter. Perhaps this place had once been the site of a temple which now lay in ruins on every side, with only its heart left intact.
Soldiers had gathered in front of the shrine, and the glow which beat from its disc made their faces shine and polished their prickly black resin corselets. Pandaras approached it reluctantly, remembering the woman in white who had appeared inside the shrine of the Temple of the Black Well. But as he followed Prefect Corin through the ranks of soldiers, he realized that this shrine was a fake, an enlarged version of the disc of cheap half-silvered glass which his mother had kept on a high shelf in their room. She had lit a candle behind it on holy days so that light moved within it like an echo of those avatars which, before the heretics had swept them away, had haunted certain shrines in the city. A similar trick was being played here, although the source of light was far brighter than a mere candle, and it was somehow bent and split so that circles of primary colors continually expanded from the brilliant white point at the center and seemed to ripple out into the darkening air.
Pandaras looked away, for he had the dizzy feeling that he might fall into the light and never escape. No doubt his master would have said that this was how the Preservers had felt as they had begun their infinite fall into the Eye, and would have constructed some keen analogy between the conditions required for prayer and the Preservers’ state of grace, but the play of light simply made Pandaras nauseous.
“A little invention of the mages,” Menas told Prefect Corin boastfully. “They call it an ipseorama. You do not yet have them in Ys, but the time will come soon enough. It induces a peculiar state in the nervous system of men, similar to the rapture induced by the presence of the avatars. It calms and empties the mind and prepares it for the immanence of the Preservers.”
Pandaras shaded his eyes and saw that a pentad of priests was gathered to one side of the shrine. They wore robes of shaggy pelts and were crowned with high, pointed hats. One was casting incense into a brazier of glowing coals; the others shook their hands above their heads as they prayed.
Prefect Corin told Menas in his dry, forthright manner, “I have no time for silly conjurations. At best this is a foolishness; at worst it is heresy, pure and simple.”
“It is a matter of regulating prayer,” Menas said. The light of the ipseorama flickered over his rapt face and turned each of his machines to a little star. “Regulation is important. Just as men marching in step across a bridge can find the right harmonic to shiver it to pieces, so ten thousand prayers, properly focused and synchronized, can blaze in the minds of the Preservers. How can they refuse such a plea?”
“No man should be forced to pray; such prayers are worthless.” Prefect Corin raised his staff. For a moment Pandaras thought that he would stride forward and smash the false shrine, but he merely grounded it again and said, “This is a dangerous experiment, Menas, and you will gain nothing from it.”