Ancients of Days

Chapter Nine The Public Inquisition

Huge mirrors had been set up on the flat roof of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms, deflecting sunlight into the cavern and mercilessly illuminating the shabby façades of the buildings ranged around the wide plaza. Yama squinted against the mirrors’ multiple glare when he and Eliphas came through the Gate of Double Glory. He had expected to find a crowd waiting for the pythonesses, but although a platform had been set up on the steps of the Basilica, its deck covered with landscape cloth and strewn with garlands of white lilies and trumpet flowers that already were beginning to wilt, the plaza was deserted.

Inside the Basilica, Tamora was roaring at a double file of thralls marching in two-step time, turning them again and again in precise right angles. Pandaras ran up and said to Yama, while staring openly at Eliphas, “We thought you lost, master!”

“So I was, for a little while. This is my friend, Eliphas. He searches libraries for facts. He has already been of help to me, and I hope he will help me further. Eliphas, this is Pandaras. The fierce woman over there is Tamora.”

“Yama exaggerates my importance in our adventures on the roof,” Eliphas said.

“I am Yama’s squire,” Pandaras said, staring up at Eliphas boldly. The boy had oiled his hair back from his forehead. It gleamed beneath his three fireflies. He turned to Yama and said, “I see you have had the sense to bandage your head, master. Let me look at it.”

“It is almost healed.”

“As you said two days ago.”

Now Tamora came stalking across the Basilica’s marble floor. She wore her corselet and a short leather skirt, and sandals with laces that crisscrossed her calves. Her scalp was freshly shaven, and the fall of red hair at the back of her skull had been braided into a complex knot. She looked both terrified and desirable.

“I thought you’d been killed, or that you’d run away,” she said, and took Yama’s arm and drew him a little way from the others. “Grah. You stink of the warrens of some subhuman race. Where have you been? And who’s your fish-eyed friend?”

“I was lost. Eliphas helped me find my way. There is a conspiracy—”

Tamora grinned, showing her rack of pointed teeth. “The servant you followed? The fucker is dead. When you didn’t come back, Pandaras told me you were following this fellow by the name of Brabant, and I told Syle. On his advice, Luria ordered the execution. Brabant was bound and pitched out of a window of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms. It’s how they do things here. They call it defenestration. Yama, I talk too much, but it’s because I am pleased to see you alive! I thought Brabant had lured you into an ambush. I wanted to torture him for the truth, but he went straight out the window.”

Yama said, “I think I know the whole story, Tamora. No one here is plotting against anyone else. Certainly not Luria, or she would not have agreed to have Brabant killed.”

“Of course not. Luria has so much meat on her she can’t walk five steps in a straight line. Why would she meet with someone in secret in a remote place when she could do so at ease in her own chambers? No, I think it’s Syle. You might trust him, but I don’t. Not him, and not that pregnant hen of his, either. He could have had Brabant killed to cover his tracks.”

“Brabant was not working for Syle, but for someone outside the Department. In fact, he—”

“He is dead. If there are other traitors here they’ll show themselves soon enough, and I’ll deal with them. Now, tell me about what happened to you.”

Yama suddenly found himself smiling. He could not help it. “I have found the library, Tamora! The library where Dr. Dismas discovered the secret of my bloodline. I have put a question to it, and perhaps the answer is already known.” If the hell-hound had not destroyed the records, he thought. Eliphas had said that they were safe, but Yama did not entirely trust the old man. Eliphas preferred to tell people what he thought they wanted to hear, even if it was not always the truth.

“I’m pleased for you,” Tamora said. “I get paid no matter how you go about your search, so the quicker the better as far as I’m concerned. But right now we have work to do.”

“Then I have not missed the inquisition? That is good. I mean to keep my word, Tamora.”

“It has already begun. Go and put on your armor. Luria is still worried that an attempt will be made on her life. The Department of Indigenous Affairs would claim this place at once if she was killed.”

“The assassination plot is only half the story, Tamora. Perhaps there is no plot at all, except against me.”

Tamora lost her temper. “Will you serve? Then do as I say! Put on your armor and follow my orders!”

“I have your armor close by, master,” Pandaras said, and ran off to fetch it.

Yama told Tamora, “Please listen to me. Brabant set up a charade, making sure that Pandaras overheard it, and then he lured me to a place where I could be taken. Prefect Corin tried to kidnap me, Tamora. He has been looking for me, and he almost caught me. The ruffians who ambushed us were part of it.”

“Well, Brabant is dead,” Tamora said, “and you escaped.” She turned to Eliphas. “If you’re a friend, go up with Pandaras and keep watch. That way, I won’t have to worry about you.”

“Because while I keep watch, the boy will keep watch on me?” Eliphas smiled. “I understand completely. But you do not have to worry, Tamora. Yama’s interests coincide with mine.”

“Then we’ve much to talk about,” Tamora said. “And we will, when this is over.”

Yama said, “You do not have to do anything here, Eliphas. This has nothing to do with helping me find my people.”

“I will enjoy it, brother. Like my friend Kun Norbu, all this excitement makes me feel young again.”

Tamora helped Yama to assemble his patchwork armor. “This is how it falls out,” she said. “Syle is talking with the clients and keeping them entertained until the ceremony begins. What he’s really doing is finishing off the business of finding out as much as possible about them. He told me how it works. The clients have to submit their questions two decads in advance of the ceremony, which gives him plenty of time to research them. He employs spies and bribes clerks, that sort of thing. He says that it is to provide the pythonesses with as much background information as possible, but I reckon that he doesn’t really believe in the pythonesses’ powers of prediction. He finds out what kind of answers his clients want, and makes sure that’s what they get.”

“He believes that Daphoene can see into the future. And there is something strange about her, Tamora. As if her head is full of ghosts.”

“Grah, I’d say it was mostly full of air. She says little, and because of her position her few words seem important. But they’re not. They’re nothing but simple-minded babble. But I know you don’t listen to me.” Tamora knelt to tighten the buckles of Yama’s greaves—the greaves he had won by killing the one-eyed cateran, Cyg. She looked up. “There’s something wrong about this place. It’s nothing to do with your funny feeling about Daphoene. It’s as if they all hold knives at each other’s throats.”

“In a few days they will be under attack, and they are already under siege. You must listen to me, Tamora. There is no intrigue except that of Prefect Corin. He found out where I was and used Brabant to lure me away. If there is an assassination plot, then it is also the work of Prefect Corin.”

“Then why are they at each other’s throats? Luria has told me to watch Syle, and Syle took me aside after Brabant went out of the window and said that there is a conspiracy that goes deeper than one foolish thrall.”

Yama hesitated. He knew that Tamora did not believe in his powers. Did not believe, or refused to allow herself to believe. Although he had tried to explain how he had awoken the Thing Below in the Temple of the Black Well, and how he had killed Gorgo, she had merely scoffed and told him that the blow to his head had given him delusions.

He said, “Syle knows what I am, Tamora. He knows that I am one of the Builders. He asked me to use machines against the forces of the Department of Indigenous Affairs. I refused, of course.”

“So he betrayed you to Prefect Corin?”

“This was after Pandaras overheard Brabant. But I suppose that Syle might think of selling me now.”

“Your brain is still bruised from the ding you got at the gate. No more talk about magical powers, or I’ll begin to regret I took up with you.”

“I know you do not believe me, Tamora, but I raised up the feral machine in the Temple of the Black Well, then woke the guards which destroyed it. It was that fight which set fire to the temple.”

“It was the assassin who did that, to cover his tracks. You’re brave enough, Yama. You got the priests out of the burning temple. Don’t spoil it with silly stories.”

“I killed Gorgo. You did not see it, but thousands of others did.”

“If he isn’t dead, he deserves to be. He will be, when I finish here. I’ll make sure of it.”

“My fireflies, then. I left here with one, and I have returned with five.”

“You’ve been on the roof. Your firefly left you then, and you got a new set when you came back inside.”

Yama laughed. She was as stubborn as an ox. “Forget your fantasy, Yama, and concentrate on what you are. Which is what I am, a cateran hired to defend this miserable place.” Tamora prowled around Yama, stepped in to tighten a strap of his cuirass, stood back and gave him an appraising look. “You should have kept Cyg’s sword, if only for show.”

“That was all it was good for. My knife serves me well enough.” Yama realized now that the real reason he had rejected the sword was because it had been wielded against him, and saw that Tamora had understood this from the beginning. He said, “I do not look much like a soldier, do I?”

Tamora said, “There’s nothing to it. The rat-boy is on the roof with an arbalest, and your new friend will help him keep watch. The clients have brought their own guards, and I reckon that’s where any trouble will come from. If there are any more traitors amongst the servants, they’ll choose a less public time. A knife or a strangling cord in the dark, or poison—that’s the style of this place. All we have to do is stand on either side of the platform and look fierce. If there is trouble, we’ll get the thralls between the stage and the clients. Those gray-skinned rockheads can’t do much, but at least they can get in the way of anyone who tries to hurt the fat one or the airhead. Promise you won’t try any heroics. None will be needed.”

Tamora clapped Yama between his shoulder-blades and added, “Don’t doubt yourself,” and went off to shout at the thralls, ordering them to get back into formation.

When Yama and Tamora marched out of the main doors of the Basilica and came down the steps leading a double column of thralls, the people who had gathered at the foot of the platform fell silent and stared at the spectacle. There were only three clients, each sitting in a plain chair with a small entourage of advisers, clerks and bodyguards behind them. No more than a couple of decads of men in total, and a scattering of old women who had no doubt come for the entertainment. Yama went right and Tamora left, each leading a line of thralls. Yama halted at the place where the rear edge of the platform butted the stairs, and the thralls marched past him and turned out one by one, forming a neat arc down the long, shallow staircase.

Tamora really had done wonders with their drill. Their metal caps shone and they had tied long red ribbons beneath the double-edged blades of their partisans.

Yama did not feel nervous now that he was in place. As with the public ceremonies he had attended with his stepfather, the Aedile of Aeolis, he found that the worst thing was the entrance, when the audience had nothing better to look at and was full of anticipation, so that any mistake by the participants was most obvious.

A small procession made its way across the wide plaza toward the Basilica, led by a herald who blew a braying brass trumpet. The people below the platform turned to watch. In better times, Yama supposed, the trumpet would have been necessary to clear a way through the crowd, but now it sounded small and plaintive, and its echo came back from the rock walls and made discords. Behind the herald came a tall figure in a cloud of red—it was Syle, in a long robe of red feathers that fluttered with his every step. He marched solemnly ahead of the palanquins, carried on the shoulders of bare-chested thralls, on which the pythonesses sat. Both women wore white gowns and were crowned with wreaths of ivy. Luria’s jowls were rouged and her eyes were accentuated by gold leaf; Daphoene’s face was as bloodless as ever, and she ceaselessly worked her narrow jaw as if chewing something. The senior servants of the household walked behind the palanquins. They were led by Rega, stately as a carrack, in a dove-gray silk dress with a full skirt and a high collar trimmed with pearls.

Luria was carried up the steps to the right of the platform and Daphoene to the left. The senior servants took their place on the steps above as the bearers, their gray skins gleaming with oil, carefully set the palanquins on the platform. The landscape cloth, which had been showing a field of green grass ceaselessly winnowed by wind, now changed to show blue sky. The change raced out from the two pythonesses, so that they seemed to be couched on air, the heaps of white flowers at their feet like clouds.

Syle stood beside Yama while the pythonesses were set in place. “I am so pleased to see you return,” he whispered. “I had thought all was lost, but now I know that we are saved.”

Before Yama could ask what he meant by this, Syle moved off, taking a position in the center of the platform, in front of a little brazier which stood between the pythonesses. Syle bowed to both of them—Luria acknowledged him with a regal nod, but Daphoene had turned her blind face toward the light which shone from the mirrors on the far side of the plaza—and threw a handful of dried leaves on the glowing charcoal in the bowl of the brazier. Instantly, heavy white smoke billowed over the sides of the brazier and spread across the platform. The white smoke had a powerfully sweet smell. It spilled over the edges of the sky-colored platform and rolled down the stairs.

Syle stepped to the front of the platform, the hem of his red robe swirling through white vapor. His fireflies spun above his head like a spectral crown. He looked hierophantic, uncanny, terrifying. He pulled a slate from his robes and read from it in a conversational voice. “The merchant, Cimbar, would ask the avatars of the Preservers this question. Will his business prosper if he leases an additional two ships to supply the loyal army of the will of the Preservers?”

There was a silence. Then Luria began to intone sonorously, “There is no end to the war—”

Daphoene shuddered violently and bent over, squealing like a stricken shoat. It was as if she had been struck in the belly. Syle covered his confusion by stepping backward and casting a pinch of dried leaves on to the brazier.

Daphoene straightened. Everyone was watching her, even Luria. Yama could hear her breath whistling through her narrow lips. The faint sense he had of the ghosts of many machines inhabiting her intensified for a moment, like a sea of candle flames flaring in a sudden draft.

Daphoene said in a thick, choked voice, “No one profits from war but the merchants,” and fell back on the couch of her palanquin. Blood spotted the front of her white gown; she had bitten her tongue.

The fat man in the central chair smiled and nodded as two of his advisers whispered in his ear. At last he waved a beringed hand, clearly satisfied with his answer.

Syle cleared his throat and said, “The avatars of the Preservers have answered, and the answer is acceptable.”

He raised his arms, the sleeves of his red robe falling like wings around him, and framed the second question, concerning plantations of green wood which were not growing properly.

This time Luria answered, and at some length. Yama was watching Daphoene, and Tamora the small audience; it was Pandaras who raised the alarm. When he cried out, half of those in front of the platform stared up at the little balcony where the boy and Eliphas stood, high above the door of the Basilica; the rest turned to look at where he pointed.

Huge shadows flickered across the cavern. Yama realized that there were men on the roof of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms, small as emmets against the glare of the mirrors. One of the tiny figures fired an energy pistol. A thread of intense red light burned above the plaza. Fire splashed above the turrets of the Gate of Double Glory, and a curtain of rock plunged down with a roar that echoed and re-echoed in the sounding chamber of the cavern.

After that, there was very little resistance. Most of the thralls threw down their partisans and fled; when Tamora tried to rally the others, one drew a knife and ran at her.

It was the thrall with the streaks of gray in his mane who had been humbled by Yama two days before. Tamora parried his clumsy stroke, killed him with a single thrust to his throat and turned to face the others, the point of her bloody sword held up before her face.

Yama drew his knife and started toward her, but Syle caught his arm and thrust the muzzle of a slug pistol into his side and said, “You should have listened to me when I asked for your help, but perhaps this is for the best. If you stay calm, all of your friends will live. One word from you, and they die. Drop the knife please.”

“Perhaps you should take it. I do not want to damage the blade.”

“I know what it can do. Drop it.”

Soldiers were rappelling down the wall of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms; some were already running across the plaza toward the Basilica. Luria lifted the ivy wreath from her head and dashed it into the fumes at her feet. She pointed at Syle and bellowed, “You said you’d wait!”

Syle told her calmly, “I promised I’d wait until he returned, and so he has. My first duty is to the Department of Vaticination, not the dead past.” He said to Yama, “Tell your friends to come down. I’ve no desire to see them killed if they should try and defend their position. Besides, the Basilica might be damaged.”

Tamora swung around when Yama called to Pandaras, and Syle showed her his pistol. She spat and sheathed her sword and ordered the thralls who remained to lay down their partisans.

“I demand that ransom is paid for my freedom,” she said.

“I would give it to you at once,” Syle said, “but it is not mine to grant.”

Pandaras and Eliphas came out of the main door of the Basilica as the attacking force began to disarm the thralls. Pandaras held the arbalest above his head. A soldier plucked it from his hands and pushed him toward the thralls.

A man in homespun tunic, the black pelt of his face marked by a bolt of white, vaulted on to the stage. Syle thrust Yama forward and said, “Here he is, dominie.”

“I am the master of no man,” Prefect Corin said. He had a strip of translucent cloth tied across his eyes. “We meet again, Yama. How I wish this little drama was not necessary, but you provoked me.”

“Let my friends go,” Yama said. “They are no part of this.”

“They know about you. More than I do, I think. Your stepfather kept much from the Department. That trick with the fireflies, for instance.” Prefect Corin touched the cloth over his eyes. “Do not think to try that again, by the way. This will shield my eyes, and all my men are protected in the same way.”

Yama remembered the little machine which had saved him from Cyg by piercing the cateran’s brain. He could kill everyone in the plaza and walk free. He forced the thought away. He would not murder to save himself. He said, “The Aedile told you all he knew. I have learned much since I came to Ys.”

Prefect Corin nodded. “And you will learn more, with the Department’s help.”

Syle said, “You remember our agreement.”

“Perfectly. Will you kill her with that silly little pistol, or shall I order one of my soldiers to do it for you?”

Syle blushed with anger. “Do not presume to tell me what to do. I give you this territory, but the Department is not the territory.”

Luria struggled to her feet. White smoke billowed around her. She pointed at Syle and said loudly, “Traitor! You are disowned, Syle. I so rule.”

Prefect Corin said dryly, “You have claimed the Department of Vaticination for yourself, Syle. I hope you can control it. Do be careful. I believe that she has a knife.”

It was small, with a crooked blade. Luria flourished it dramatically, as if about to plunge it into her own breast.

Daphoene spread her eyes wide. She was smiling toward Luria. Her white eyes were full of tears. A thread of blood ran from one corner of her mouth.

“Now it ends,” she said.

To Yama, it seemed as if a hundred people had spoken with the same voice. Syle stepped forward and said, “Pythoness. Please—” Luria swung the knife. Not at Syle, but at Daphoene.

The blade must have been poisoned, for although it only inflicted a shallow cut on Daphoene’s flat breast, the girl convulsed and fell back on to the chair of her palanquin.

A moment later Luria fell too, riddled with arbalest bolts.

Rega wailed and ran across the stage to Daphoene, and snatched her up and covered her face with desperate kisses.