Ancients of Days, page 2
“I pray you are right. I think that Prefect Corin is still searching for me, and he is a high official in Indigenous Affairs.”
They had talked about this before. Tamora said with exaggerated patience, “Of course I am right. It is how it has always been, since the world was made. If it were not for the ancient protocols, there would be constant civil war here. Your Prefect will not be able to interfere. I am sure the Indigenous Affairs sent those fools to ambush us, and perhaps Prefect Corin had a hand in it, but now we are inside the boundary of this Department he will dare do nothing else.”
“Listen. Here is the problem. Not your Prefect, but the real problem. We fight because we’re paid. Once captured no harm will come to us. But the thralls fight because they’ve been told to fight, and they’ve been told to fight because that fat fool who rules this place and claims to see into the future predicts victory. The thralls know in their guts that she is wrong. That is why they are so sullen.”
Yama said, “We do not know that Luria does not have the powers she claims.”
“Grah. She knows that she doesn’t, and so does Syle, and so do the thralls. And the other pythoness is no more than a whey-faced wet-brained child stolen from her cradle. I have not heard her speak a single word since we came here.”
Pandaras said, “From what I hear, Daphoene might be young, but she does have power, and that’s why she is forbidden to speak. Luria fears her because she thinks that one day innocent Daphoene will expose her fraud. Master, I must speak with you about what I heard.”
Yama said, “Daphoene is very young. She may appear to keep her own counsel, but perhaps she has none to offer.”
Tamora laughed. “Yama, you’re so innocent that you’re a danger to all around you. For once your pet rat has said something sensible. If Daphoene does have true foresight, then Luria has every reason to keep her quiet. Syle too, and that bloodless wife of his. For Daphoene will know how badly the defense of this place will go.”
Yama said, “Well, we will see her at work soon enough.”
In two days, the oracle would be opened for public inquisition, and the pythonesses would answer the questions of their petitioners. It might be the last time the ceremony was held, for ten days after that the deadline for challenging the quit claim would run out. The Department of Indigenous Affairs would be allowed to march on the crumbling glory of the High Morning Court of the Department of Vaticination, and occupy the place where once Hierarchs had swum amongst maps of the Galaxy’s stars, ordering the voyages of ships that fell from star to star through holes in space and time.
Pandaras told Tamora, “My master has paid you to help him find his bloodline, and it is a better and more honorable task than this game of soldiers. As you will at once see, if you let me tell my tale.”
“You run if you want,” Tamora said. “I’d like to see you run, rat-boy. It would prove what I’ve always thought about you.”
Pandaras said, with an air of affronted dignity, “I’ll ignore the slights on my character, except to say that those who attribute base motives to all around them do so because they expect no better of themselves. But while you have been playing at soldiers, I have been risking my life. Master, please hear me out, I must tell you what I heard.”
“If this is more kitchen gossip,” Tamora said, “then hold your yap. You’d inflate the breaking of a glass into an epic tragedy.”
“Neh, and why not? It’s a painful death for the glass concerned, leaves its fellows bereft of a good companion, and makes them aware of their own mortality.”
Yama said, “Pandaras claims to have overheard a conspiracy.”
“Master, she will not believe me. It is not worth telling her.”
“Out with it, Pandaras,” Yama said. “Forget your injured dignity.”
“There were two of them. They were whispering together, but I heard one say, ‘Tomorrow, at dawn. Go straightaway, and come straight back.’ This was a woman. The other may have been a servant, for he simply made a noise of assent, and the first said, ‘Do this, and I see a great elevation. Fail, and she lives. And if she lives we all may die.’ Then they both moved off, master, and I heard no more. But it is enough, don’t you think?”
Tamora said, “We should expect nothing less. These old departments are rats’ nests of poisonous intrigues and feuds over trifles.”
Pandaras said, “If we can trust no one here, why must we stay? We should cut our losses and run.”
Yama said, “You have not told us who these plotters were.”
“Ah, as to that…”
Tamora scowled. “Grah. You were scared, and didn’t dare look.”
“Had I leaned out over the gallery rail, I might have been seen, and the game would have been up.” Pandaras batted at the pair of fireflies which circled his head; they dipped away and circled back. “These cursed things we must use instead of candles would have given me away.”
“As I said, you were scared.”
Yama said, “It does not matter. The gate is closed at night, and opens again at sunrise. Whoever leaves when it opens tomorrow will be our man.”
Tamora said, “And when we catch him we can cut the truth from him.”
“No,” Yama said. “I will follow him, and learn what I can. If there is a conspiracy, of course. There may be an innocent explanation.”
Drilling the thralls was all very well, but Yama had done little else in the three days since they had arrived here. He was beginning to feel as if he was suffocating in the stale air of the Department of Vaticination, with its meaningless ceremonies and its constant reverent evocation of the dead days of its long-lost glory. He wanted to see more of the Palace. He wanted to find the records of his bloodline and move on. He wanted to go downriver and plunge into the war at the midpoint of the world.
“It’s obviously some plot against the fat bitch,” Tamora said thoughtfully. “It’s because of Luria’s refusal to bargain with the Department of Indigenous Affairs that we’re here. Without her, there would be no dispute.”
“ ‘Fail, and she lives. And if she lives we all may die,’ “ Pandaras said.
“When your rat-boy agrees with me,” Tamora told Yama, “then you know I must be right. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to do nothing. In any case, you should not leave this place, Yama. We are protected by law and custom only as long as we stay within the boundaries of the Department of Vaticination. I know that you want to begin your search for the records of your bloodline. But be patient. In a decad, the Department of Indigenous Affairs will take this place, no matter how well we train the thralls. Then we can search together, as we agreed. You’re already wounded, and we have been misled about the kind of troops we were to command, and our employers plot against each other. It’s clear someone here has allied themselves to Indigenous Affairs, and hopes to make a bargain after assassinating their rivals. It doesn’t matter who is plotting against who, for there’s no honor to be won here. The defense is simply a matter of form before the inevitable surrender. Like all of Gorgo’s little jobs, this has nothing to commend it. Another reason to kill him, when we are done here.”
Gorgo was the broker who had given Tamora this contract. He had tried to kill Yama because Yama had cost him the commission on a previous job and because he suspected that, with Yama’s help, Tamora might free herself of her obligation to him. Yama had killed him instead, riddling him with a hundred tiny machines, but Tamora had not seen it and she did not or would not believe in what she called Yama’s magic tricks.
“If we find out more,” Yama said, “then we can end the plot before it begins.”
“Grah! And if you leave here before the end of the contract, you’ll be assassinated. You will stay here, for your own safety.”
“I can take care of myself.”
Tamora said sharply, “How is your wound? Does it trouble you?”
“A headache now and then,” Yama admitted.
He had the beginning of a headache now. He felt as if his skull was too small to contain his thoughts, as if his brain was a bladder pumped up by a growing anger. Red and black sparks crawled at the edge of his vision. He had to stifle an impulse to draw his knife and do some harm.
He said, “I will not make the same mistake again. And I will do as I will.”
Pandaras said, “Perhaps my master should leave now. Go and find the records of his bloodline, for that’s why he is really here.”
Tamora suddenly whirled, smashing her stave against the plinth with such force that it snapped in two. She glared at the splintered stub in her hand, then threw it hard and fast down the length of the Basilica. “Grah! Go then! Both of you! Go, and accept what falls out. Death, most likely. Even if you dodge the hirelings of the Department of Indigenous Affairs, you know nothing about the Palace, and it is a dangerous place.”
“I will come back,” Yama said. “I promised that I would help you and I was taught to keep my promises. Besides, I hope to learn something here. Is not one of the attributes of this Department the ability to find lost things?”
Chapter Two: The Eye of the Preservers
It was the custom of the Department of Vaticination that everyone, from senior pythoness to lowliest collector of nightsoil, took their evening meal together in the refectory hall of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms. The pythonesses and their domestic staff—the secretary, the bursar, the chamberlain, the librarian, the sacristan, and a decad of holders of ancient offices which had dwindled to purely ceremonial functions or nothing more than empty titles—raised up on a platform at one end of the refectory; the thralls ranged around the other three sides. The refectory was not a convivial place. Yama supposed that there had once been tapestries muffling the bare stone walls—the hooks were still in place—and perhaps rugs on the flagstone floor, but now the gloomy high-ceilinged hall was undecorated, and lit only by the fireflies which danced attendance above the heads of every man and woman. The thralls ate in silence; only the chink and scrape of their knives underlay the high, clear voice of the praise-sayer, who, at a lectern raised in one corner of the refectory, recited suras from the Puranas. Alone amongst several hundred sullen servants, only Pandaras dared glance now and then at the people on the platform.
Although the refectory was bleak, Yama found the formal style of the meals, a decad of courses presented at intervals by liveried thralls, comfortingly familiar. It reminded him of suppers at the long banqueting table in the Great Hall of the peel-house. He sprawled in a nest of silk cushions (their delicate embroidery tattered, stained and musty) at a low square table he shared with Syle, the secretary of the Department of Vaticination, and Syle’s pregnant wife, Rega. The rest of the domestic staff were grouped around other tables, and all were turned toward the couches on which the two pythonesses reclined.
The Department of Vaticination was one of the oldest in the Palace of the Memory of the People, and although it had fallen on hard times, it kept up its traditions. The food was poor, mostly rice and glutinous vegetable sauces eaten with wedges of unleavened bread (the thralls had it even worse, with only lentils and edible plastic), but it was served on fine, translucent porcelain, and accompanied by thin, bitter wine in fragile cups of blown glass veined with gold and silver.
Luria, the senior pythoness, overflowed her couch, looking, as Tamora liked to say, like a grampus stranded on a mudbank. Crowned by a tower of red and gold fireflies, she ate with surprising delicacy but ferocious appetite; usually, she had finished her portion and rung the bell to signal that the dishes should be taken away before the others on the platform were halfway done. Swags of flesh hung from her jowls and from her upper arms, and her eyes were half-hidden by the puffy ramparts of her cheeks.
They were large, her eyes, and a lustrous brown, with long, delicate lashes. Her black hair was greased and tied in numerous plaits with colored silk ribbons, and she wore layers of colored gauze that floated and stirred on the faintest breeze. Whenever she chose to walk, she had to be supported by two thralls, but usually she was carried about on a chair.
She had been pythoness for more than a century. She was the imperturbable center of such power that remained in the faded glory of the Department of Vaticination, like a bloated spider brooding in a tattered web in a locked, airless room. Yama knew that she did not miss a single nuance of the whispered conversations around her.
The junior pythoness, Daphoene, was Luria’s starveling shadow. Only a single wan firefly flickered above her flat, pale face, as if she were no better than the least of the kitchen thralls. She wore a long white shift that, girdled with a belt of gold wires, covered her body from neck to ankles. Her head was shaven, and lumpy scars wormed across her scalp. She was blind. Her eyes, white as stones, were turned toward the ceiling while her fine-boned hands moved amongst the bowls and cups on the tray a servant held before her, questing independently like small restless animals. She never spoke, and did not appear to hear any of the conversations around her.
Yama suspected that Daphoene was inhabited by more than one person. Lately, he had begun to sense that everyone had folded within themselves a small irreducible kernel of self, the soul grown by the invisibly small machines which infected all of the changed bloodlines. But Daphoene was a vessel for an uncountable number of kernels, a constant ferment of flickering fragments.
The formal evening meals were a trial to Tamora, and she guyed her unease by playing up the part of an uncouth cateran. That evening, after the argument in the Basilica, she had chosen to sit alone at a table at the far end of the platform, and was more restless than ever. But the more she played the barbarian, the more she endeared herself to Syle, who would incline his head toward Yama and comment in an admiring, mock-scandalized whisper on the way Tamora tossed and caught her knife over and over, or yawned widely, or noisily spat a bit of gristle onto the floor, or drank from the fingerbowl, or, as now, scratched herself with a cat’s lazy self-indulgence.
“Quite wonderfully untamed,” Syle murmured to Yama. “Isn’t she so thrillingly physical?”
“She comes from a people not much given to formalities,” Yama whispered back.
“Fortunately, we didn’t hire her for her manners,” Syle’s wife, Rega, said. Rega was older than Syle, with a pointed wit and a sharp gaze that measured everyone it fell upon and usually found them wanting. She was tremendously pregnant; as round as an egg, as her husband fondly put it, in a shift of purple satin that stretched like a drumhead over her distended belly. She had twisted her feathery hair into a tall cone that sat like a shell on top of her small head.
“She is tired, too,” Yama said. “We have both been working hard.”
The praise-sayer had been reciting from the sura which described how the Preservers had altered the orbits of every star in the Galaxy, as a feoffer might replant a forest as a formal garden. A monument, a game, a work of art—who could say? Who could understand the minds of those who had become gods, so powerful that they had escaped this Universe of things?
Yama knew these suras by heart, and had been paying little attention to the praise-singer. But now the man paused, and began to recite a sura from the last pages of the Puranas.
The world first showed itself as a golden embryo of sound. As soon as the thoughts of the Preservers turned to the creation of the world, the long vowel which described the form of the world vibrated in the pure realm of thought, and re-echoed on itself.
From the knots in the play of vibrations, the crude matter of the world curdled. In the beginning, it was no more than a sphere of air and water with a little mud at the center.
And the Preservers raised up a man and set on his brow their mark, and raised up a woman of the same kind, and set on her brow the same mark.
From the white clay of the middle region did they shape this race, and quickened them with their marks. And those of this race were the servants of the Preservers.
And in their myriads this race shaped the world after the ideas of the Preservers.
Yama’s blood quickened. It was a description of how the Preservers had created the first bloodline of Confluence: the Builders, his own bloodline, long thought to have vanished with their masters into the black hole at the heart of the Eye of the Preservers. He saw that Syle was watching him, and knew that Syle knew. Knew what he was.
Knew why he was here. The sura had been chosen deliberately.
Luria rang her little bell. The attendants cleared away the bowls of rice and the dishes of sauces, and sprinkled the diners with water perfumed with rose petals.
“You will watch the exercises tomorrow,” Luria told Syle. “I want to know how the training of our defense force is proceeding.”
Without looking away from Yama, Syle said, “I am sure that it is in capable hands, pythoness.” Yes, he knew.
But what did he want?
Tamora said loudly, “Well, we didn’t kill anyone today, and I believe my friend’s wound is healing.”
She had spoken out of turn. Luria took no more notice than if she had belched.
Syle said, “I watched the exercises yesterday, pythoness, but I will do so again tomorrow. It is very diverting. You should see how well the thralls march.”
“It’s a pity they can’t fight,” Tamora said.
“I have had a presentiment,” Luria told Syle. “You will see to it that all is well.”
Tamora said, “If you’ve seen something with your cards or dice, perhaps you could share it with us. It could help our plans.”
There was a silence. Syle turned very pale. At last, Luria said in a soft croak, “Not dice, dear. Dice and cards are for street performers who take your money and promise anything they think will make you happy. I deal in the truth.”
Syle said, “The pythoness entered a trance today. If she has said little to you, it is because she is exhausted. You will see how hard divination is in two days’ time, at the public inquisition.”
“Syle likes to explain things,” Luria said. “You will show him the progress you have made. He will then explain it to me.”
