The bug knocked Yama down with a casual flick of a foreleg and pounced on Bryn, spraying black ooze everywhere. Wery suddenly appeared behind it and threw a long, weighted rope that tangled around its forelegs. Yama jumped up, ooze dripping from his silvery garment, and ran beneath the bug’s belly as it snapped at Wery. He stabbed the knife’s blade, blazing with blue fire, through the membrane at the articulation of one of its sturdy rear legs. The knife whined, burning so eagerly through horn and flesh that it almost jerked out of his hands. Clear, sticky blood gushed; the bug half collapsed, its leg almost completely severed. Cas stepped between its flailing forelimbs and stabbed the point of his wand between its eyes. It shuddered and kicked out and died.
While the others worked at severing the bug’s head, Yama noticed that a kind of belt was fastened around its narrow waist, slung with pouches and bits of shaped stone or bone. Tools.
Bryn saw his look and said, “It would have killed us if it could.”
“It was intelligent.” Yama thought of Caphis, the fisherman he had found in a trap set by one of the Amnan. People preying on other people. The strong on the weak, the clever on the stupid.
Bryn tugged at his beard. “It was bright enough to get onto the ship. But not bright enough to survive.”
Yama handed the knife to the old man, hilt-first. “I have had enough of killing, I think.”
Cas tugged hard and the armored head came free. Clear liquid gushed from the neck; the legs thrashed in a final spasm. Hand-sized creatures as flat as plates, thready blue organs visible through their transparent shells, skated over the muck to get at the spilled blood. Red whips had already wrapped around the bug’s legs, melting into its horny carapace.
Yama expected the three hunters to carry their grisly trophy in triumph back to their home, but instead they dumped it in the corridor directly outside the entrance to the mire and went on.
“The regulators will find it and mark it,” Bryn said. “Our task is done.”
The lights of the ship, slaved to a diurnal cycle, dimmed soon after they left the mire. They slept in a little room Bryn found off one of the corridors. This one was more suited to their kind. Beakers of distilled water and tasteless white cubes of food extruded from a wall at Bryn’s command. The floor humped into four sleeping platforms. “If you want to piss or shit,” Bryn told Yama, “do it in the corner there,” and ordered the room to dim its light.
Yama was woken from a light sleep by Wery’s giggle. Sounds of flesh moving on flesh, breath at two pitches gaining the same urgent rhythm. He lay awake a long time, lost and lonely and frightened, while the two hunters made love a few spans from him.
They walked along the endless white corridor for much of the next day. Wery walked at point with Cas, while Bryn asked Yama many questions about Confluence, most of which he could not begin to answer.
They traveled steadily, drinking from tubes set in the necks of their silvery garments, which recycled their own sweat as distilled water. At last, they left the corridor for one of the jungle wilds, and after an hour’s walk down paths so narrow they must have been made by animals, Wery insisted on showing Yama something.
“You’ll like it. Really you will. You won’t have seen anything like it.”
Yama demurred. He was still embarrassed and disconcerted by overhearing her lovemaking.
“Go on,” Bryn said, with a sly smile. “You will see where you are.”
Yama and Wery climbed a grandfather tree that rose through the dense green canopy, its surprisingly small crown of dark green feathery fronds silhouetted against sky glare high above. Its rough bark provided plenty of easy hand- and footholds. They climbed a long way. Cool inside his silvery garment despite the fetid heat, but quite breathless and with his pulse pounding heavily in his head, Yama sat at last in the crutch of a massive bough on which Wery balanced with heart-stopping ease.
And saw that the jungle stretched away for several leagues on all sides, a rumpled blanket of green studded here and there with splashes of bright orange or yellow or red where trees were in flower. A line or chain of tiny, intense points of white light hung high above the treetops: the little suns which fed the jungle’s growth. But that was not what Wery wanted him to see.
The jungle grew on the outer skin of the ship, seemingly not enclosed by anything at all—perhaps gravity fields held in the atmosphere, as they contained the envelope of air around Confluence, or perhaps it was domed with material so transparent that it was invisible. The rest of the ship could be clearly seen all around the jungle’s oval footprint.
Yama, remembering the voidship lighter which had docked at Ys, had thought that the ship would be some kind of sphere, bigger certainly, but more or less of the same design, much as a dory resembles a carrack. But now he saw that the ship was a series of cubes and spheres and other more complex geometrical solids strung like beads along a wire, and that it was many leagues long—impossible to tell how many. In all their journeying, they had traversed only one part of one segment. There was room enough for any number of wonders to be hidden here.
But he knew that he could not stay. He had thought about it last night. He had found people of his bloodline, yet they were stranger to him than Pandaras or Tamora or Derev. They lacked the breath of the Preservers and so could not be anything other than what they already were, enslaved forever by their circumstances. This was not his home. That was on Confluence. It was with Derev. She and Yama had sworn a compact, and he knew now that it meant more to him than life itself. He would find the cistern and the shrine, and force the Gatekeeper to take him home. And then he would end the war. He had known how to do it ever since he had seen the picture in the slate which Beatrice and Osric had shown him at the beginning of his adventures, but he had not known he had known it until he had absorbed the knowledge hoarded by Dr. Dismas’s paramour.
Standing before him on the broad branch high above the jungle, Wery clapped her hands over her head and laughed. Yama realized for the first time that she was older than him, perhaps twice his age. The achingly brilliant light of the chain of miniature suns accentuated the wrinkles around her eyes, showed where flesh was beginning to loosen and sag along the line of her jaw.
It did not make her less desirable.
“Look starboard,” she said, and pointed at the distant edge of the ship.
Something stood far beyond the jungle. A red line—no, a dome, the top of a structure bigger than any of the wilds. It was lengthening and growing in height, as if it was crawling toward them.
A vast creature, big as a mountain…
Yama looked at Wery, wondering if he had finally been driven mad, and she laughed again and said, “That’s the mine world the ship orbits.”
Yama realized then that the growing blister was part of a disc. Not advancing, but rising—it was a world as round as the sun, just like those described in the opening suras of the Puranas. Or not round, but a sphere, a globe, a battered red globe rising above the ship’s horizon. Yama laughed too, full of wonder. Its pockmarked red surface was capped top and bottom with white, and scarred by a huge canyon that pointed toward three pits. Or no, they were the tops of huge, hollow mountains. At the very edge of the world’s disc was a fourth, so big that it rose above the narrow band of diffracted light which marked the limit of the world’s atmosphere.
Wery said that it was time to descend. They walked down narrow paths through understory trees and bushes that divided and divided again in an endless maze which Cas, who took the lead, seemed to know well, for he set an eager pace.
Now it was Yama’s turn to ask questions. Bryn said that mined mass was moved from the surface of the world to the ship by something called an elevator, a chain or cable that hung down from a point many leagues above the world’s surface. It took a while for Yama to understand why the cable did not collapse. The world was spinning, so that its surface moved at a certain speed, and the cable was grown from a point high above that also moved at the same speed, so that it was always above the same place on the surface. Hoppers moved up the cable and the material in them was slung out like pebbles from a catapult, to be caught by the ship and stowed away.