“Now,” Yama said, and they kicked off into the long steep slide.
Wery screamed all the day down—in delight, rather than fear. The surface of the shaft was almost frictionless, but even so the hide quickly grew warm beneath Yama’s bare buttocks. When at last the shaft straightened out and they came to a halt, he got up into a crouch and awkwardly fastened the cloak around himself again.
They walked a long way. The shaft was more than twice their height and perfectly circular in cross-section, lined with the same black stuff as the floor of the huge space they had escaped. Yama told Wery some of his story. “All my life I have been searching for my people,” he said. “I am so happy to have found you! How many others are there? And where is this?”
“You’ll find out, if you pass. You can trade questions with Bryn.”
“I can explain how I came here, and why I do not know where I am. The river was diverted—”
“No more talk now. We’re not safe here.”
At last, Yama discovered a place where he could make the black stuff pucker open. They clambered through into green light and hot, humid air. A rock face covered in creepers and thick lianas rose behind them, its top overhung by trees. A dry streambed snaked away between bushes and trees that leaned over it to form a kind of tunnel.
Wery looked all around, sniffing the air. “I think I know this wild. The others are not far away. You did well.” She stepped up to him, face to face. For a swooning moment Yama thought that she was about to embrace him, but instead she touched her wand to the skin behind his ear. A point of intense coldness swiftly spread across his scalp and face. His muscles loosened; Wery stepped out of the way when he fell.
Yama was woken by the screeching of birds high above. Two men stepped through the ragged rent they had hacked in the bushes that grew thickly along the dry streambed. Wery ran to the larger of the two men, embraced him, and said, “It wasn’t any bug that came through. I’m not sure what he is. He has a story so crazy it could be plausible, but he could be a medizer.”
“They killed all the medizers long ago,” the smaller man said, “after they killed the other tribes.”
“Hush,” Wery said. “He’s awake.”
Yama sat up. He smiled at the two men and spread his hands so that they could see that he was unarmed. He was so very happy to have found people of his bloodline that he could not believe that they would want to harm him.
The men were dressed in silvery one-piece garments like Wery’s, and both had similar tattoos across the backs of their necks. As with Wery, there seemed to be something lacking in them. It was as if they were not living people, but animated statues, or aspects cast in flesh rather than light…
The man Wery had hugged was a head taller than Yama, well-built and handsome. He had ripped off the sleeves of his silvery garment to show off his muscular arms; copper bands constricted his well-defined biceps. The other man was much older, and had a leather sack slung over one shoulder. His close-cropped hair and trimmed beard were white; his skin was papery and freckled with brown splotches. Deep wrinkles cut his forehead and seamed the skin around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. I will look like that if I live long enough, Yama thought, and wondered how long it would take, and how long he could live.
There was a silver patch over the old man’s left eye. He flipped it up and told Wery, “Something else came through, too. Regulators are swarming all through these decks. They know how you got away and sooner or later they will try to follow. We’ll have to move.”
The old man pointed his wand at Yama, and Yama’s muscles immediately locked in tetanic spasm. His body arched in a bow; his teeth ground against each other when he tried to protest.
The old man flipped the patch down over his eye and made several slow passes of his wand over Yama’s body. “He’s full of bits and pieces, but nothing I recognize. Stuff in his blood, too, but it isn’t regulator trace. Never seen anything like it. Maybe he really did come from somewhere else.”
Yama knew now what these people lacked. None of them had been touched by the breath of the Preservers. They might have been ghosts.
“The ship is very big,” the taller one, Cas, said slowly.
Wery shook her head. “From what he said, I think he’s from outside.”
The old man stood back. Yama’s muscles relaxed, then began to tingle. He stood slowly and said, “I really can explain everything.”
“Not here,” the old man said. “We shift, mates, find a berth and wait out the regulators.”
The old man, Bryn, was the leader of the three. They had been on what he called a bug hunt.
“Things come up with new cargo,” Bryn told Yama, “and sometimes they get loose. They have to be sly enough to get past the safeguards, so they usually cause trouble. We hunt them down.”
The big man, Cas, said, “Maybe he’s a bug that looks like a man.”
“No fooling, Cas,” Wery said. “This is important.” After they left the stream, they walked in silence a long way down a path that wound through the forest. Yama’s hide wrap dried slowly, stiffening around him. He was aware that it smelled of meat going bad. At last the path passed between two huge trees, and on the other side a white corridor stretched away to its vanishing point. They walked on for more than a league until Bryn said that it was safe to think of resting.
He opened a door Yama had not noticed, and they went through into a high-ceilinged, brightly lit room. Narrow slabs of ceramic floated in the air and gusts of hot, dry air blew from random directions. Feeding troughs were set in the floor along one of the walls, but the stuff in them had crumbled to dust. No one had been here for a very long time.
A voice welcomed them when they entered, and said that it could reconfigure to the requirements of their bloodline. Bryn told it to shut up. “We leave no traces,” he said to Yama. “Remember that and you might live as long as me.”
Yama sat next to the old man on one of the floating slabs and asked him how old he was. “Fifty-three years,” the old man said proudly. “You look surprised, and no wonder. It is older than anyone I know. I expect that no one in your family has ever lived as long, but it is possible, as you can see.”
Yama had thought that Bryn must be at least two centuries old, and the revelation disappointed him. It seemed that his bloodline was very short-lived, unless they aged quickly here because of hardship.
Cas and Wery were watching the door, their wands across their laps. “I hate this heat,” Cas said. “We should find one of our places.”
“The regulators will look in those places first,” Bryn said. “Shut up, Cas. Watch the door. I want to hear our new mate’s story.”
Wery said she had already heard it, and had not understood a word. Bryn shrugged. “She’s muscle,” he told Yama, “she and her husband. Good at killing, but not so bright.”
“You always got to think you’re cleverer than everyone else,” Cas said. He got up and began to prowl around, restless in the way of a man more comfortable with action than conversation.
Bryn said, “It’s well known that I am clever. I chose you two because I’m clever enough to know what you’re good at. Don’t break any of the machinery, Cas. That’ll bring the regulators at once.”
Cas said, “Good. I fight them.” But he set down the delicate construction of black rods he had been turning over in his big hands.
“Did you really come from Confluence?” Wery asked Yama, with a smile that broke his heart all over again. He had forgiven her for knocking him out; it had been a sensible precaution. She said, “It’s paradise, I hear. Like wilds that go on forever, but no regulators or bugs. You should take us all there.”