Ahead, Cas paused at a place where the path split into three. He turned and waved and went on.
Wery chased after her husband. A moment later, frantic whistles pierced the green quiet of the jungle. Bryn broke into a run and Yama followed. They scrambled down a steep fern-laden bank and splashed across a muddy stream, clambered up the bank on the far side and burst through a screen of tall grasses into the brilliant light of the miniature suns.
A huge tree had fallen here long ago; Yama and Bryn had emerged at the top of a wide, deep bowl, grown over with rich green grass, which had been torn out of the earth when the tree’s roots had been pulled up by its fall. Here and there bodies lay in the long grass. Human-sized, human-shaped, clad in silver.
Yama’s heart turned over. But then he saw that the bodies were naked; the silver was the color of their skin. “Regulators,” Bryn said, and sat down beside one of the bodies and bowed his head.
Cas and Wery were standing at the far edge of the clearing. When Bryn sat down they looked at each other and then ran off in opposite directions.
“Wait,” Bryn said, when Yama, made to follow Wery. “There may be traps.”
“This is the home of your people.”
“They were camped here. Perhaps they moved on before…” Bryn bowed his head once more, and clasped his hands over the white hair on top of his head.
Yama moved from body to body. All were quite unmarked. They were very thin. Their right hands were three-fingered, but their left hands were all different: one like pinchers made of black metal; another extended into a bony scimitar with a jagged cutting edge; a third had hinged blades, like monstrous scissors. The silver of their skin had a gray cast. Their eyes were huge, the color of wet blood, and divided into hexagonal cells. Although they were dead, something still seemed to be watching Yama behind these strange eyes. It was like the men whom the rogue star-sailor had enslaved by putting machines in their heads; the machines had lived on after the men had died, and so here.
Wery appeared at the far end of the clearing, shouted that everyone was gone, and ran off again. Bryn got up slowly, straightened his back, took a deep breath, and said, “We will see what has happened.”
The bowl of the clearing was a hundred paces across, twice that in length. The rotting carcass of the fallen tree lay at one end, extending into bushes and young trees which grew all around. Butterflies which might have been made of gold foil fluttered here and there in the bright light. Cas caught one as he came down the slope toward Bryn and Yama, and crushed it in his massive fist.
The encampment was no more than a few panels of woven grass leaning against the trunk of the fallen tree. A scattering of mats and empty water-skins, neatly tied bundles of dried leaves, a frame of tall sticks in which a stretched hide had been half-scraped of its hair. A blackened cube in a hearth of bare earth still radiated heat; a bowl of something like porridge had dried out on top of it and was beginning to burn. Yama picked up a hand-sized bit of flat glass. Glyphs began to stream and shiver inside it, but they were of no language he knew.
Wery said, “There were three regulators waiting for us. Cas killed two. I killed the other.”
Bryn said, “The others?”
“Gone,” Wery said. She dabbed angrily at the tears which stood in her eyes. “All gone.”
Cas pointed at Yama with his wand, and Bryn got in front of Yama and said, “No. It could not be him.”
“There would only be three of us if you killed him, Cas,” Wery said.
Yama understood. Their family was the last of the bloodline on the ship; that was why they had been so amazed to see him. And now they were the last of their family.
Bryn flipped his patch down over his left eye. He turned in a slow, complete circle and said, “Where are the bodies, Cas?”
“I have not found them. I will look again.” Cas trotted across the clearing and plunged into the bushes on the far side.
Wery said, “Do you think they might still be alive?”
Bryn lifted the eye-patch. “Ordinarily the regulators would have killed them at once. But there is no blood, and there are no bodies.”
“Perhaps the regulators took the bodies,” Wery said.
“But they left their dead companions,” Yama said.
Wery and Bryn looked at him. And at the same moment a regulator parted a clump of tall ferns and stepped into the clearing, mismatched hands held up by her shoulders. The left was swollen and bifurcate, hinged like a lobster’s claw.
“Stop!” Yama said, and knocked Wery’s arm up as she aimed her wand at the regulator. Something went howling away into the bright sky. Wery turned on him, the wand swinging in an arc that would have ended in his chest if he had not stepped inside it. He gripped her elbow and bent her arm behind her back until she had to drop the wand; bent it farther until she had to kneel.
“Cas will kill you,” she said, glaring up at him.
“Be still,” Bryn told her, and she stopped struggling at once. Bryn was pointing his wand at the regulator, but he was looking at Yama. He said, “It obeys you.”
“Yes, but the others did not.”
The regulator still had her hands raised. Her flat breasts hung like empty sacs. She fixed her huge red eyes on Yama and said, “I have a message from Prefect Corin.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
So Below
Cas came back at a run, and would have killed the regulator at once if Bryn had not stood in his way. They argued in violent whispers; then Cas turned his back on them all and Bryn came across the clearing and told Yama, “We will both go with you.”
Yama said, “I think it would be better if you all stayed here.”
“They have our people,” Wery said. “Of course we will go with you.”
Bryn walked around and around the regulator, which still stood where Yama had told her to halt. At last he turned and said again, “It obeys you.”
“The regulators have machines in their heads which control them. I am able to talk with her machine, although I was not able to talk with the machines of the others.”
“It,” Wery said.
Yama and Bryn looked at her.
Wery said defiantly, “It, not she. They’re all things. Not people. Things. Things!”
Cas put his hand on Wery’s shoulder and she turned and rested her face against his broad chest. Cas said, “We will come with you, Yama. We will kill this Prefect Corin and free our people and come home. What you do after that is of no matter to us.”
“I wish it were that simple,” Yama said. “And I still think you should all stay here.”
They were savages. They tried to justify their presence on the ship and placate the regulators with trophies from bug hunts, but they were as much stowaways as the things they had killed in the mire. If there had been time, Yama would have mixed a little of his blood with water and let them drink it; without the breath of the Preservers they were no more than any of the indigenous peoples of Confluence, higher than animals but less than men. But there was not enough time.
Cas said, “We will come with you. We are hunters. We hunt bugs. We hunt our enemies.”
“We will come with you,” Bryn said. He stared into the regulator’s big, red, faceted eyes, tugging at his neatly trimmed beard. “But before we leave, you will tell it to obey us too. I will not have it used against us.”