“I want clothing, not food. Yama, you must be properly dressed. Frankly, that hide of yours is beginning to stink. Do it, room, and then we will move on.”
“You are welcome to stay as long as you like,” the room said. “I miss the company of people.”
“We can’t stay unless you change your settings,” Bryn told it, “and the regulators will know if you do. Just make the clothes.”
Yama pulled on the one-piece silvery garment with his back to the others, although he was sure that Wery was watching. He knew that she belonged to another man, but he ached for her all the same. His blood raced in his skin when she showed him how to adjust the seals at ankles, wrists and neck. Her fluttering touch; her heat; her scent. Surely she must know how he felt…
She talked with him as they walked the seemingly endless white corridor. Cas went ahead, waving them forward at each intersection, then loping on eagerly.
“You don’t mind Bryn,” Wery told Yama. “He has too much learning in his head. He wants to bring back the old days. Thinks we can make the regulators our slaves. He’ll be making plans for you.”
Yama smiled. “This is like one of the old stories! Bryn is the magician, and you are the warriors helping him in his quest.”
“We’re hunting bugs,” Wery said. “What are you?”
“I do not know. A magical creature perhaps. But I do not feel magical. I am beginning to understand that magic is a matter of perception. Knowing how to do something takes away the mystery which can make it seem magical.”
“Maybe you can teach us how to make the floor open. That’s useful. Bryn is full of dreams, but dreams are for children. We kill bugs and regulators, or they kill us. That’s how it is. It can’t be changed.”
“Are the regulators a kind of bug?”
“They’re passengers. Like us.” Wery laughed at Yama’s astonishment. Her teeth were very white. One of the incisors was broken. “There used to be many different kinds of passenger. Now there’re only the regulators and us. And the crew of course, but no one has ever seen one of them.”
“I saw one. Well, two, in fact. But that was in another place.”
Wery smiled. “You can tell me all about Confluence, when we’re finished traveling.”
“I could take you there.” His heart turned, melting.
“Maybe. Now get this straight. Regulators killed all the other passengers, but we’re too smart. Too tough. We hunt bugs and regulators, they hunt bugs and us. That’s how it is. Makes the ship work better if its passengers have to prove their worth.”
“Survival of the fittest,” Yama said. It seemed as vile as the creed of the heretics. As if the Universe were without any ruling principle but death.
“That’s what Bryn says. I say you are either dead or alive, and dead doesn’t count.”
“How many of your people are alive? Where do they live? I want to know everything about them, Wery.”
Wery held up her left hand and opened and closed her fingers three times. “And us,” she said. “We’re a way from home, and it moves about anyway.” She added, “Cas has found something,” and ran off down the wide, white corridor to catch up with her husband.
Bryn dropped back to walk alongside Yama. He said, “We can’t tell you too much, lad.”
“I understand. Perhaps you can tell me how your people came to live here. That was a long time ago, and surely telling me an old story will not do any harm.”
“We served the Preservers,” Bryn said. “We were their first servants—the original crew of the ship, I think. Then the Preservers made all the other races and went away, and we lost our powers.”
“I thought that our people went with the Preservers,” Yama said, smiling because it was so thrillingly strange to say our instead of my.
“Perhaps most of them did. But this ship was left behind, and we are the descendants of those who flew it.”
“Perhaps they refused to leave their home,” Yama said.
“We are loyal servants of the Preservers,” Bryn said. “Do not think otherwise.”
“I meant no offense.”
“None taken, lad. But if we live in your past, and you know no others of your kind, where did you come from?”
“That is what I am still hoping to discover,” Yama said. “Perhaps I am the child of sailors of our bloodline who jumped ship long ago. I know of at least one star-sailor who did.”
“Borrowed a body, I suppose. They try that on board sometimes. The ship doesn’t like it, and lets us hunt ’em, like bugs. What have you found, Cas?”
The big man had stopped at a place where another corridor crossed the one down which they had been traveling. The black stuff of the floor was scored heavily there, ripped into curling strips. The strips were creeping over each other and softening at the edges, trying to mend the wounds.
“Bug trace,” Cas said, holding up fingers smeared with sticky clear liquid which had splashed and spattered across the white walls. “Reckon there was a fight and one ate the other. Not long ago, either.”
Wery grinned. “It’s wounded,” she said. “There’s a trail. We kill it easy.”
The trail of colorless blood led into another of the big, forested spaces. As before, the transition was abrupt. One moment Yama was hurrying along beside Bryn, who, despite his age, kept up a spritely pace, with Wery and Cas jogging eagerly ahead. Then the two warriors went around a corner and when Yama and Bryn followed they were suddenly in a dark, dank, dripping place, where huge tree-trunks reared up through a broken layer of mist that hung some way beneath a high, dark canopy.
Yama looked back and saw a sliver of white light between two boulders propped against each other. It was the only point of brightness in this gloomy place. Pale fungi raised tall fans above ankle-deep ooze. Vines dropped from somewhere beyond the mist and slowly quested about the floor, pulsing with slow peristalsis as they pumped ooze upward. Yama saw that the giant trees were in fact conglomerations of these vines, twisted around each other like so many stiffened ropes. Parasitic plants wrapped pale, meaty leaves about the bases of the vines, and things in burrows spread feathery palps across the surface of the ooze; something bright red and thin as a whip shot from a hole and snapped at Yama’s ankles.
Bryn laughed. “This is one of the mires, lad. Everything passes through here eventually.”
Wery and Cas found a sign of the thing they were tracking, and disappeared into the gloom between the trunks of the giant tree things. There was a squalling noise in the distance. Bryn drew something from his sack and tossed it underhand to Yama.
It was a knife. When Yama caught it by the haft, its curved blade sparked with blue fire. Bryn stared and Yama grinned. “I know this at least,” he said, “and it knows me.”
Had the knife he had found—or which had found him—in the tomb in the Silent Quarter originally come from the ship? Was this perhaps the very same knife, destined to come into the possession of the dead warrior in whose tomb Yama had confronted Lud and Lob?
The squalling rose in pitch. Bryn and Yama sloshed forward through the ooze. Something thrashed beyond a tall ridge of white fungus, then suddenly reared up. It was three times the height of a man, and sprang over the fungus and ran at Yama and Bryn with preternatural swiftness.
Yama had a confused glimpse of something in black armor, all barbs and thin legs with cutting blades for edges, a narrow head dominated by wide jaws that opened sideways to reveal interlocked layers of serrated blades rotating over each other. It did not look so much like an insect as a dire-wolf chopped and stretched into a poor imitation of an insect. It made its high squalling noise again. Acrid vapor puffed from glands that ran along each side of its long, hairy belly.