“You are awake!” Dr. Dismas said at last. “Good, good. How are you, Yamamanama? Any headaches? Any colored lights or spots floating in your vision? Your burns are healing nicely, I see. Ah, why do you look at me that way? I am your savior!”
“You infected me with this disease, Doctor. Are you worried that it is not progressing as fast as you wish?”
“It is not a disease, Yamamanama. Do not think of it as a disease. And do not resist it. That will make things worse for you.”
“Where is this place, Doctor? Why have you brought me here? Where are the others?”
He had asked these questions many times before, and Dr. Dismas had not yet answered them. The apothecary smiled and said, “Our allies gave it to me as a reward for services rendered. A part payment, I should say, for I have only just begun. We, my dear Yamamanama, have only just begun. How much we still have to do!”
Dr. Dismas marched across the room and stood for a moment at the great window, his hands twisted behind his back. But he could not stand still for long, and whirled around and smiled at Yama. He must have recently injected himself with a dose of the drug, for he was pumped full of an energy he could not quite control, a small, sleek, perpetually agitated man in a black claw-hammer frockcoat that reached to his knees, the stiff planes of his brown face propped above the high collar of his white shirt. He was at once comic and malign.
Yama hated Dr. Dismas, but knew that the apothecary had the answers to many of his questions. He said, “I am your prisoner, Doctor. What do you want from me?”
“Prisoner? No, no, no. O, no, not a prisoner,” Dr. Dismas said. “We are at a delicate stage. You are as yet neither one thing or another, Yamamanama. A chrysalis. A larva. You think yourself a power in the world, but you are nothing to what you will become. I promise it. Come here. Stand by me. Don’t be afraid.”
“I am not afraid, Doctor.” But it was a lie, and Yama knew that Dr. Dismas knew it. The doctor knew him too well. For no matter how much he tried to stay calm, the residue of his dreams, the flickering red and black fringes that plagued his sight, the thing growing under his skin, and the scuttling and crawling and floating machines that infested the room all conspired to keep him perpetually fearful.
Dr. Dismas began to fit a cigarette into the holder which had been, he claimed, carved from the finger-bone of a murderer. His concentration on the task was absolute; his left hand had been bent into a stiff claw by the plaques which grew beneath his skin—a symptom of his disease, the disease with which he had infected Yama. At last it was done, and he lit the cigarette and drew on it and blew two smoke rings, the second spinning through the first. He smiled at this little trick and said, “Not afraid? You should be afraid. But I am sure that there is more to it than fear. You are angry, certainly. And curious. I am sure that you are curious. Come here. Stand by me.”
Yama drew on the lessons in diplomacy which his poor dead stepfather, the Aedile of Aeolis, had so patiently taught him. Always turn any weakness into advantage by admitting it, for nothing draws out your enemy like an exposed weakness. He said, “I am afraid, Doctor. I am afraid that I might try to kill you. As you killed Tamora.”
“I do not know that name.”
Yama’s hatred was suddenly so intense that he could hardly bear it. He said, “The cateran. My companion.”
“Ah. The silly woman with the little sword and the bad temper. Well, if I killed her, it is because she was responsible for the death of Eliphas, who so successfully led you to me. An eye for an eye, as the Amnan would say. How is your father, by the way? And the stinking little city he pretends to rule?”
Yama charged at the doctor then, and one of the flock of machines which floated in the big, airy room swerved and clipped him on the side of the head. One moment he was running headlong, the next he was sprawled on his back on the rubbery black floor, looking up at the ceiling. Pain shot through him. His chest and face had been badly seared by the backwash of the blast which had killed Tamora and Eliphas, and his ribs had been cracked when it had knocked him down. A splinter of rock had pierced his lung, too, and although he had been treated by a battery of machines, he tasted blood at the back of his mouth now.
Dr. Dismas smiled down at him and extended the claw of his left hand. Yama ignored it and laboriously and painfully got to his feet.
“You have spirit,” Dr. Dismas said. “That’s good. You will need it.”
“Where are the others? Pandaras, and the crew of the Weazel. Did you leave them behind?”
“The Weazel? Oh, that’s of no consequence. It is only you I am interested in, dear Child of the River. Are you all right? Not hurt by your fall? Good. Come and stand by the window with me. I have much to tell you, and we will make a start today.”
Yama followed Dr. Dismas unwillingly. The room was part of a mansion hollowed out of one of the flanks of the floating garden. Its single window, bulging like an eye, overlooked a vast panorama. Far below, Baucis, the City of Trees, stretched away in the sunlight of a perfect afternoon. Other floating gardens hung at various heights above their own shadows, like green clouds. Some were linked together by catenaries, rope slides and arched bridges of shining metal. An arboreal bloodline had inhabited Baucis before the heretics had come; their city had been a patchwork of ten thousand small woods separated by clear-felled belts and low, grassy hills. Now many of the woods had been cut down. New roads slashed through the rolling landscape, a network of fused red clay tracks like fresh wounds. The heretics had made their encampments on the hills, and a kind of haze or miasma of smoke from weapons foundries and numerous fires hung over the remaining patches of trees.
Beyond the city, the vivid green jungle stretched away beneath the mist of its own exhalations. The floating garden was so high up that both edges of the world were visible: the ragged blue line of the Rim Mountains on the right and the silver plain of the Great River on the left, and all the habitable world between them, dwindling beneath strings of white cloud toward a faint hint of red. In the days since he had been captured, Yama had spent much of the time gazing at this scene, and had convinced himself that he could see beyond the fall of the Great River and the mountains at the midpoint of the world to the beginning of the Glass Desert.
Dr. Dismas exhaled a riffle of clove-scented smoke and said, “Everything you see is the territory of the heretics. Two hundred cities downriver of this one, and a hundred more upriver. Thousands of bloodlines are theirs now. And soon the rest, Yamamanama. Soon the rest, unless something is done. Their triumph is great, but they must be prevented from completing it. They have meddled in much that they do not understand. They have tried to wake the great engines in the keelways of the world, for instance. Fortunately, they did not succeed.”
Dr. Dismas looked sideways, but Yama said nothing. The apothecary had a habit of alluding to matters about which Yama knew little, perhaps in the hope of drawing out secrets, as a fisherman might scatter bait to lure fish to the surface. Yama had glimpsed something of the vast machines beneath the surface of the world when Beatrice had returned him to the peel-house by the old roads in the keelways, but he had not known much about his powers then, and had not thought to try and question them. “Well, for now you will help the heretics,” Dr. Dismas said briskly. “You will provide a service for which we will later ask payment. Please. For your sake do not make any more sudden moves. My servants here are simple things and have very literal minds. I would not like to see you hurt because of a misunderstanding.”
Yama’s fist was so tightly clenched that his fingernails cut four points of pain into his palm. He said, “Whatever I was able to do has been taken away from me. I am glad that it is gone. Even if I still had it, I would never choose to serve you.”