Yama said, “Corin wanted me to serve the Department of Indigenous Affairs, so that every bloodline on Confluence would be forced to conform to the same destiny: stasis, and a slow decline. You and the heretics want to force change by making every bloodline believe that the self is all. There is a better way. A way to allow every bloodline to find its own particular destiny. We were raised up by the Preservers not to worship them, but to become their equals.”
“You will help us become more than that. After we take Confluence, we will destroy the Preservers. It will be a good beginning.”
“I will not serve you,” Yama said.
“You will serve those higher than yourself, little builder. It is your function.”
“My people served the Preservers, but they have gone. No one should serve any other, unless they wish it. I learned much from Dr. Dismas’s paramour, and part of what it tried to grow inside me still remains. It has helped me find friends here.”
The first wave of flying men stooped down out of the light of the setting sun. There were more than a hundred of them. Their membranous wings, stretched between wrists and ankles, folded around them like black cloaks as they landed and came across the plaza with a hobbling gait, clutching spears of fire-hardened wood and slingshots and bolos.
The Prefect burned away several decads with a sweep of his pistol and screamed at the regulators to kill the rest, but the second wave was already swooping overhead, dropping nets that engulfed the silver-skinned regulators and drew tight.
The Prefect threw away his staff and showed Yama the energy pistol, lying in his palm like a river pebble. “We will kill you if we must.”
“I know that weapon,” Yama said. “Corin told me how it works long ago. It fires three shots, and then must lie in the sun for a full day before it can fire again. You fired one shot to kill Bryn, another to kill Cas and Wery, and you have just fired the third and last.”
The Prefect screamed, threw the pistol at Yama, and ran straight at him. A pair of bolos wrapped around his legs, and a net folded over him as he fell headlong.
Once freed of the compulsion Yama had laid upon them, the flying men threw themselves face down around him, but he told them that they should stand, that he was not the god they believed him to be.
They were the children of a feral machine which had fled the war at the end of the Age of Insurrection, falling through a shortcut to this world. It had made reduced copies of itself and used them to infect various species of animal, but only the ancestors of the flying men had proven satisfactory hosts. The flying men were a unique synthesis. Their intelligence was contained within tiny machines which teemed in their blood, but the machine intelligence was tempered by their animal joy of life and flight; they were quite without the cold arrogance which had prompted the feral machines to rebel. The original machine, badly damaged when it had first arrived here, had died thousands of years ago, but the flying men believed that it would at last return, incarnated in one of their kind, to save their world.
The flying men had narrow, long-muzzled foxy faces, and small red eyes that burned in the twilight. They were twice Yama’s height; their skinny, naked bodies were covered with pelts of coarse black hair. After much twittering discussion, the oldest of them, with gray on his muzzle, came forward. By gestures, he asked whether Yama wanted his enemies killed.
Yama could speak directly to the consensus of tiny machines within the flying men; it seemed to him that each had an animate, intelligent shadow standing at his back. “I thank you for your help,” he told them, “but do not kill your prisoners. There has been enough killing this day. Let me speak to their leader.”
The flying men dragged the Prefect forward. He was still bound by the pair of bolos and the net. The oldest flying man told Yama that this was a dead man with a brother trapped inside it. It was a curious thing, to see a dead man kept alive in this way.
“He is from another place,” Yama said. That took a long time to explain; once the old man understood, he wanted to know if the Prefect was a god.
“No, but he is very powerful. He can help you in many ways. One of his kind was, I think, responsible for you.”
“I thought them dead,” the Prefect said. “The star-sailors told me that they were dead.”
The old flying man shivered all over—it was his equivalent of laughter—and said that the star-sailors did not trouble to come to the surface of the world, but instead sent servants. His people’s blood could speak with the brothers in the heads of the servants, and make them believe anything.
Yama told the thing inside the Prefect that it could be of much help here. It could begin to undo this world’s slow decline. It could help the flying men be all that they could be. But it could never return to Confluence.
“These people were formed from an act of malice, but evil can create good without knowing it. By serving them, you can make amends. You have much to teach them, and they can teach you something about humility. Or else you can remain a prisoner, with the body you took decaying around you.”
The Prefect tried to spit at Yama, but his mouth had no saliva. The strands of the net pressed a lattice into his dead flesh. There was a glint of metal beneath the ruin of his left eye.
The oldest of the flying men said that there was a place of silence where this brother could be kept; its words would never again touch the minds of other men.
“Dr. Dismas knew about such places,” Yama told the Prefect. “There was the cage in The House of Ghost Lanterns, for instance. Shall I consign you to eternal silence, or will you serve here? Think about it while I free those you have enslaved.”
Yama freed the regulators first. It took a long time to unpick the opaque shells which guarded their true minds, and at first he was hindered because the thing inside Prefect Corin tried to countermand his efforts, but after Yama found the part of it which spoke to other machines and shut it off, he was able to work without interruption. Night was almost over when he was at last finished with the regulators and could turn his attention to the ship.
It was still turning high above, swinging in wide circles about the elevator cable because it had not been ordered to do anything else. It was a transparent teardrop not much larger than the Weazel, the lugger which had carried Yama down half the length of the Great River. Hidden inside the shells of false personality Prefect Corin had woven for it was the bright, innocently inquiring mind of a child. It wanted to know where its mistress was, and Yama told it that Angel had been dead for five million years.
“Then I will serve you,” the ship said, and swooped down, extruding a triplet of fins on which it perched at the edge of the plaza.
The flying men brought the Prefect before Yama again, and again Yama asked whether he would be content to serve him.
“You raise yourself too high,” the Prefect said. “You cannot stand in judgment of me.”
“I find myself here,” Yama said. “I do what I must.”
Prefect Corin said defiantly, “I will take this world, and I will build such a race that they will set fire to the Galaxy.”
“They will not allow themselves to become your slaves,” Yama said. He was not sure that this was the best solution, but he owed the thing his life, and could not kill it.