Ancients of Days

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.”

“Oh, pythoness, you should see how the thralls march!” Syle said again, and began to describe the precision of the martial drills at length, falling silent only when the last course, iced fruits and sweet yellow wine, was served.

Luria ate a token mouthful, then rang her bell. The praise-sayer fell silent. The meal was over. Luria’s chair arrived and she was helped into it by two tall strong attendants and carried away. Another attendant took Daphoene’s arm, and she rose and followed him with the childlike trust of a sleepwalker. Her mouth hung open and there was a slick of drool on her chin.

As the thralls began to move out of the hall, followed by flocks of faint fireflies, Rega told her husband, “You are kinder to Luria than she deserves. Certainly kinder to her than she is to you, who works so hard for her.”

Syle said mildly, “She worries all the time about the quit claim, and of course about the public inquisition. We are all a little short of patience, these days.”

Rega said, “Luria has her fine troops, who can march in formation all day long without missing a step. Why should she worry about the quit claim?” She smiled sweetly at Tamora and said, “You’re doing your best, I’m sure, but you must wish for proper soldiers.”

“We only have what we have,” Syle said, again gazing at Yama. “I’m sure the thralls will fight to the death.”

“I’m sure they will,” Rega said. She held out her hand, and her husband helped her to her feet. Her round belly swayed, stretching the panels of her satin dress. She added, “A very quick death it will be, too. Yama, Tamora, I don’t blame either of you. Our good pythoness has said that there will be victory, and so she does not trifle to provide the means to ensure it. Of course, it isn’t possible to sell even one tenth of her jewels and trinkets. Although she does not wear or use any of them, they are heirlooms and cannot be sacrificed for anything as trivial as the defense of the Department. And so we must make do, with the fate of the Department in the balance.”

Tamora drew herself up. She was very angry. She showed her sharp white teeth and said, “If you find anything I have done that does not satisfy you, then I will resign at once.”

Syle made fluttering motions with his hands. “Please. Nothing of the sort is intended. I myself have seen how well you have drilled our thralls. A thrilling sight, to see them march!”

“Then perhaps your reports have been misunderstood,” Tamora said. “Excuse me. I have work to do.”

Syle caught Yama’s arm and said quietly, “Walk with me, if you will.”

Yama looked after Tamora, but she had leapt from the platform and was already halfway across the refectory, the crowd of thralls parting before her as rice parts before the scythe. He said, “Of course.”

Syle’s touch, its implication of familiarity, excited him.

He felt the same quickening nervousness which had possessed him whenever he had attempted a dive off the end of the new quay into the strong river currents in which the children of the Amnan sported so easily. Not precisely fear, but an anticipation that heightened his senses. He liked Syle too much to be afraid of him, and not only because the tall, slightly built man, with his delicate bones, fine features, and white, feathery hair, reminded him of his sweetheart, Derev.

Syle had taught him much about the history of the Department of Vaticination and of its trade of prognostication. There were very many ways of gaining foresight, Syle said, but almost all of them were false, and those that remained could be divided into no more than three types. The least of these was sortilege, the drawing of lots, or astragalomancy, the use of dice or buckle-bones or sticks, neither of which, as Luria had pointed out, were practiced in the Department, although they were much abused by charlatans. Of more merit were those methods classed as divination, in which signs were scried in the client’s physiognomy, as in metascopy or chiromancy, or in the landscape, or in dust cast on a mirror (Syle said that gold was best, but the filings of any metal were better than ordinary dust or the husks of rice grains used by village witches). The form most often performed by the Department was rhabdomancy, or dowsing, used to find lost property or to find the best place for the site of a house or to locate a hidden spring. Finally, there was true foresight obtained through visions, either in dreams or in waking trances. It was the most difficult and most powerful method of all, and it was by custom what the pythonesses would attempt in two days’ time at the public inquisition, although these days most clients wanted answers to trivial questions, to find things that were lost or hidden (wills were a perennial favorite, for many slighted by the wishes of rich, dead relatives came to believe that, hidden somewhere, there was a true will which would favor them), to speak with the dead, or to gain assurance of the success of a new business or a marriage.

The problem was that, as Syle put it, the business of the future was a thing of the past. The ordinary citizens of Ys would believe a roadside cartomancer as readily as the pythonesses of the Department of Vaticination, and other departments no longer called upon its services when planning their business.

“Syle wants to ask you something,” Rega told Yama. “Be good enough to humor him.”

“This is not the place,” her husband told her. “We will be able to say anything we like soon enough. Don’t do anything to ruin it.”

Rega gave her husband a cold look, but allowed him to kiss her on her forehead before she took her leave.

As Syle steered him toward the broad stair at the far end of the hall, Yama said, “Where are we going?”

Thralls made way for them. Pandaras had disappeared, no doubt in pursuit of another amatory conquest.

“I have something to show you,” Syle said. He had the tentative touch of an old man, although he was not much more than twice Yama’s age, and much younger than his wife. “I promise not to keep you long. Is your wound healing? You should let brother Apothecary attend to it.”

“Tamora said that the dressing should not be disturbed,” Yama said. “Besides, it is mostly bruising.”

He had been embarrassed in the brief fight. The ruffians had rushed up from behind as Tamora, Pandaras, and Yama had climbed toward the Gate of Double Glory. One had struck Yama with the flat of a blade; dazed and half-blinded by blood, Yama had saved himself with a lucky swipe that had hit his opponent’s sword-hand, severing two fingers and causing the man to drop his weapon. By the time Yama had wiped blood from his eyes, Tamora had killed three of the ruffians and the two survivors had fled, with Pandaras chasing after them and screaming insults.

“We have lodged a protest with the Department of Internal Harmony over the incident,” Syle said. “If it is successful, then we may move on to a formal hearing. Unfortunately, the petition of protest must be read and approved by a clerk of court in the first instance, and then a committee will be deputized to discuss it. That may take no more than fifty or sixty days if the business is rushed, but I do not suppose it will be rushed. Nothing ever is rushed in the Palace, but of course that is only proper. These are serious matters, and must be taken seriously. After that, well, the process of establishing a hearing usually takes at least two years.”

“And in twelve days the ultimatum delivered by the Department of Indigenous Affairs will expire.”

Syle said, “Yes, but I have faith in you, Yama.”

Yama had learned a little of the art of diplomacy from his stepfather, the Aedile of Aeolis. Nothing must be said directly; to ask a question is to lose advantage. He said, “I have never been in this part of the Department before.”

“This was the main entrance, once upon a time. Now no one uses it but me. It leads to the roof.” They reached the top of the stairway and went down a long corridor. Its walls were paneled in dark, heavily carved wood and hung with big square paintings whose pigments were so blackened by time that it was impossible to discern what scenes or persons they might once have depicted. A rat fled from their footsteps, pursued by a single wan firefly. It disappeared into a hole in the paneling, and rolled the end of a broken bottle across the hole to stop it. The feeble light of the firefly flickered behind the thick roundel of glass as the rat lay still and watched the two men pass.

The corridor ended at a pair of round metal doors, with a metal-walled antechamber sandwiched between them.

The inner door was open, the outer dogged shut. Syle shut the inner door behind them and talked to the lock of the outer door—Yama felt its dim intelligence briefly waken—then instructed Yama to spin a wheel and pull the door open. It moved sweetly on its counterbalanced track, and Yama followed Syle over the high sill.

They were on the wide, flat roof of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms. It was lapped with metal plates that fitted together like the scales of a fish. Behind it was the cavern, dark except for a few tiny stars where people walked, attended by fireflies. The other buildings of the Department of Vaticination—the Basilica, the Hall of the Tranquil Mind, the Hall of Great Achievements, and the Gate of Double Glory—were set symmetrically around the edge of this great hollow, dark shapes sunk deep in darkness. On the other side of the House of the Twelve Front Rooms, beyond the looming arch of the cavern’s mouth, was the night sky. A cold wind blew past skeletal towers which jutted from the outer edge of the roof. Syle explained that in ancient times drugged pythonesses lashed to platforms on top of these towers had searched for intimations of the future in the patterns of clouds and the flight of birds.

Beyond the towers, a narrow walkway projected from a corner of the roof into the windy darkness. It was along this walkway that Syle now led Yama, who clung to the single railing with sweating hands.

The House of the Twelve Front Rooms faced toward the Great River; even at noon, only a shallow curtain of light fell into the mouth of the cavern. Directly below the walkway, a long steep slope of scrub and bare rock fell to the spurs and spires and towers which had accreted around the ragged hem of the Palace, covering it as corals will cover a wreck in the warm lower reaches of the river.

Beyond, the lights of Ys were spread along the edge of the broad river; Yama could see, across a hundred leagues of water, the flat edge of the world itself against the empty darkness of the night sky. Downriver, where the world narrowed to its vanishing point, was a dim red glow, as if a fire had been kindled beneath the horizon.

In the windy dark, his mild face illuminated by his crown of fireflies, Syle said, “In a few hours the Preservers will look upon us for the first time this year.”

“I had forgotten. Will there be celebrations?”

“Amongst the rabble of the city, yes. If we stay out long enough we’ll see their fireworks and bonfires. And later, perhaps, the fires of riots, and then the flashes of the weapons of the magistrates as they restore order.”

“Ys is a strange and terrible city.”

“It is a very large city, and there can only be order by suppressing any disorder at once, by whatever force is necessary. The Department of Indigenous Affairs has raised an army to fight the heretics; that is why they want new territory. But the magistrates are a greater army, one which constantly strives against a greater enemy. It is because we have fallen from grace that the people war against themselves with more hatred than against the heretics.”

Yama remembered Pandaras’s story of how his uncle had been trapped when magistrates had laid siege to a block of the city which had refused to pay an increase in taxes. He said, “In the city where I grew up, the people celebrate the setting of the Eye of the Preservers, not its rising. They sail across the river to the far-side shore and hold a winter festival. They polish and repair the settings of the shrines, and renew the flags of the prayer strings. They light bonfires, and feast and dance, and lay flowers and other offerings at the shrines.”

“The ordinary people of Ys celebrate the rising of the Eye because they think that once more they are beneath the beneficent gaze of the Preservers, and all evil must flee away. They bang gongs, rattle their pots and pans, and light firecrackers to drive evil into the open. I am not familiar with your city, Yama, but I wonder why its people are glad to believe that they are free of this gaze. Surely they must worship the Preservers, for else they would be unique amongst the ten thousand bloodlines of the Shaped.”

“They celebrate the beginning of winter. They dislike the summer’s heat.”

“Ah. In any case, although the Eye is named because it has the appearance of the organ of sight, it does not share the function of its namesake. Anyone with a little learning knows that when the Preservers vanished beyond the horizon of the Universe, they left behind servants to watch over us, their poor creatures. Were not the shrines once the homes of countless avatars who guided and inspired us? Are not all of the changed bloodlines infected with the particles of the breath of the Preservers, who will cherish our memories after we die?”

“I am glad to see the Eye. I have always preferred summer to winter. Is it what you brought me to see?”

“I would like to talk with you in private. Do not be afraid. This walkway has stood for longer than the Department. It was built long before Confluence entered its present orbit.”

But Yama felt a chill vertigo, for they were now so far out that the buildings heaped along the hem of the Palace were directly below. A cold wind buffeted him; the walkway hummed like a plucked wire. All he could see of it was that part of its mesh floor beneath his feet, illuminated by the intense light of the single firefly above his head.

He could lose his grip on the slender rail and fall like a stone through someone’s roof. Slip, or perhaps be pushed.

“You are the first to come here with me,” Syle said, “but then, you are a singular young man. Take your firefly, for instance. You should have allowed them to choose you, and not taken the brightest anyone has ever seen.”

“But it did choose me.” Yama had kept others from joining it because he feared that he would be blinded inside their ardent orbits.

“Some say that fireflies multiply in dark places hidden from our sight, but I think not. Every year there are fewer and fewer people in the Palace proper—by which I mean the corridors and chambers and cells, and not the newer buildings built over the lower floors. Once, even the least of bloodlines were crowned with twenty or thirty fireflies, and the Palace blazed with their light. Now, many fireflies are so feeble that they have become tropically fixed on members of the indigenous tribes which infest the roof, or on rats and other vermin. I doubt that there is another firefly as bright as the one you wear, except perhaps within the chambers of the Hierarchs. It will attract much attention, but it is fixed now, and will not leave you until you leave this place.”

Yama said, “I hope that it does not put me in danger.”

He could order the firefly to leave, and then choose others more ordinary—but that might be worse than having selected it in the first place.

Syle did not answer at once. At last, he said, “You know that I find the cateran is very amusing, but I do not think that she will be able to marshal a successful defense of the Department.”

Yama remembered what Rega had said. “If you gave us more men—”

“How would you train them? Indigenous Affairs will send an army of its best troops to enforce the quit claim.”

“That is what Tamora thinks, too.”

“Then at least she has some sense. But she is an ordinary cateran. I believe that you are capable of greater things.”

Yama said warily, “You do?”

Yama’s wise but unworldly stepfather had not known what Yama was. He had sent the apothecary, Dr. Dismas, to the Palace of the Memory of the People to discover what he could about Yama’s bloodline, but Dr. Dismas had lied to the old man and claimed to have found nothing, and then tried to kidnap Yama for his own purposes. For the first time Yama wondered whether Syle, kin to his sweetheart and to one of the curators of the City of the Dead, who had shown him that he was of the bloodline which had built the world according to the will of the Preservers, was part of their conspiracy.

Syle said, “We have forgotten how to speak plainly here. In a department as old as this, words raise such echoes that their meaning might never be clear. Forgive me.”

“But we are in the open air now.”

“Luria has been pythoness for more than a century, but the Department is more than two hundred times older. I must be loyal to the Department first.”

Yama saw the man’s distress. He said, “No one can overhear us here.”

“Except the Preservers.”

“Yes. We must always speak truthfully to them.”

Syle gripped the fragile rail and stared into the night, toward the first light of the Eye of the Preservers. He said, “The truth then. I know what you are, Yama. You are one of the Builders. Your bloodline was the first of all the bloodlines the Preservers raised up to populate Confluence, and the machines which maintain this world have not forgotten your kind. All machines obey you, even those that follow the orders of other men. Even those which will not obey anyone else.” He laughed. “There, I have said it. Rega thought I could not, but I have. And the world has not ended.”

Yama said, “How did you find out what I am?”

Wind blew Syle’s white, feathery hair back from the narrow blade of his face. He said, “Our library is very extensive.”

Yama’s heart turned over. Perhaps his quest was already over, before he had hardly begun. He said, “I came to Ys to search for my bloodline, and would very much like to see that book. Will you show me now?”

Syle said, “No, not yet. The library is closed to all but the pythonesses and the highest officers of the domestic staff. I would show you all I can, Yama, but I fear that I am more in need of help than you. I’m told that the Preservers act through you. If that’s true, then whatever you do cannot be evil. You cannot help but do good. Don’t deny the powers you have. I know, for instance, that the Temple of the Black Well was burned down on the day you entered the Palace. It seemed that someone woke the thing in the well and then destroyed it. As for us, a lesser miracle would suffice.”

Yama had encountered two feral machines since he had arrived in Ys. In a desperate moment, he had called down the first without knowing what he was doing. The second had fallen in the wars of the Age of Insurrection, and men had later built a temple over the hole it had burnt through the keelrock. The machine had lain brooding within a tomb of congealed lava for an age, until woken by the same call which had brought down the first. With the help of the ancient guardians of the temple, Yama had reburied it.

Machines like those had destroyed half the world in the Age of Insurrection, and although their time was long past, and their powers had faded as the lights of the fireflies had faded, they were still powerful. They shadowed the world from which they had been expelled, waiting, some said, for the Preservers to return to begin the final battle when the just, living and dead, would be raised up, and the damned thrown aside.

Beyond dismissing the fireflies which had eagerly flocked to him when he had entered the Palace, Yama had not tried to influence a machine since. He was scared that he might inadvertently wake more monsters from the past. He told Syle, “I signed as a cateran, for a cateran’s wages. That is the duty I will discharge to you, dominie, nothing more and nothing less. What you have learned from your library is your own affair. You have not shared it with the pythonesses, or you would not have brought me here to talk in secret. Perhaps I should ask them about it.”

Syle turned to Yama and said with sudden passion, “Listen to me! If you can help me, then I can help you find out about your bloodline. True pythonesses can see the past as well as the future. Just as our actions and wishes contain the seeds of the future, so the present also holds the echoes of actions and wishes of the past. Indeed, since there was only one past but there are many possible futures it is easier to read the past from the present than it is to predict the future. It is said that the Preservers could travel from the future into the past as easily as starships slip from star to star, but that they could not travel into the future because from the point of view of the past the future does not yet exist. And so with prediction.”

“Yet it is said that the Preservers will return from the future, so there can only be one future, as there is only one past.”

“Our world has only one past, but there are many possible worlds arrayed in the future. Some say that every step we take creates new worlds, which contain all the directions in which we could have turned. When looking into the future, a pythoness must encompass all these possible states and choose the most likely, which is to say the one which is most common. But the past is a straight road, because the world has traveled along it to reach the present.”

“You do not speak of Luria, do you? You speak of Daphoene.”

Syle nodded. “Daphoene has true sight. The business of this Department is to tell people what they want to hear, or what they most need to hear, which is not always the same thing. And so most of our business is concerned with collecting intelligence about our clients, so that we can satisfy their inquiries.”

“You are very candid.”

“If you will not help us, then what I tell you will do no harm, for the Department will cease to exist. If you do help us, then you will need to know these things. Some say that we practice magic, but in truth ours is a rational science.”

Yama thought of the buzzing confusion in Daphoene’s head. Perhaps she was able to scry a path through the sheaves of possible futures because she was many people inhabiting a single mind, or perhaps what he glimpsed within her were futures continually appearing and dying.

Syle said, “Daphoene tells only the truth, and that is what scares Luria. She sees our clients driven away by the truth. Oh, do not think that Luria does not believe in her own powers. Of course she does. If her predictions come true, then she is satisfied; if not, then she will find some condition of the ceremony to be at fault, or she will say that something more powerful intervened to change events from the course she had divined. There can never be any blame on her part if what she predicts does not happen. But Daphoene is always right, and needs no ceremony. She speaks directly. I brought her here, Yama. I am responsible for her. I had hoped that she would be a true pythoness, and it seems that she is much more than I had hoped. Daphoene frightens Luria, and I fear that because of that Luria will destroy her. I would rather die than bear that.”

No doubt this confession was supposed to win Yama’s trust, but instead it made him wary. Syle was so accustomed to deceiving the clients of the Department of Vaticination that he habitually deceived himself, too, by pretending that everything he did was for the good of the Department and never for his own gain. But Yama suspected that Syle wanted to use him for his own ends. If Syle had been a little less clever, his motives might simply be venal, but nothing Syle did was simple. This seemed to be a straightforward bargain—a miracle in exchange for information—but Yama remembered the plot Pandaras had uncovered, and Tamora’s harsh words. These old departments are rats’ nests of poisonous intrigues and feuds over trifles.

He said, “If Daphoene can see into the future, then what does she say about the Department? Will it be saved?”

“She knows, but will not say. Do not think I have not asked, but she has set her heart against revealing what she knows. She says that if she speaks, then the future may be changed, and the fate of the world with it. All she will say is that it will not be saved by force of arms. I understand that to mean that you will intervene.”

“But if I asked her, would she speak plainly of my fate? Would she look into the future and see where I might meet my people?”

“She has already said something. That is why you must help us, Yama. If you do not, then yours will be a tragic fate.”

There, in the windy dark high above the oldest city in the world, Yama knew that Syle had baited a hook to set in his heart. But he had to ask.

“Tell me what she said, and perhaps I will know whether I should help you.”

Syle turned to regard the panorama spread far below.

The darkling plain of Ys, the wide ribbon of the Great River stretching away toward the vanishing point, where the Eye of the Preservers had risen a finger-breadth above the edge of the world. He inclined his head, and said, “There are two parts. The first is that you will either save the world or destroy it. She said that both things were connected. Do not ask me what she meant—she would not explain it to me.”

Yama said, “Perhaps the first is more likely than the second. The world will continue as before, but some might say that I am responsible. I think that people have more faith in me than I have in myself.”

“Then it’s time you learned to trust yourself,” Syle said briskly. “The second part is this: if you do not help me, then you will be betrayed to those you have already escaped. As I said, if you do not help the Department, then yours is a dark fate.”

Yama felt a chill of presentiment. His stepfather had sent him to Ys to become an apprentice to the Department of Indigenous Affairs, the same department he was now contracted to fight against. Although he had escaped Prefect Corin, the man to whom the Aedile had entrusted him, he had never escaped the fear that the Prefect, cold, ruthless, implacable, would find him again.

He said, “That seems more like a threat than a prediction.”

“You do not have to give me your answer now, but it should come before the Gate of Double Glory opens tomorrow. Think hard on this, Yama, and remember that I am your friend.”

“The future is uncertain, but you must know that I will discharge the duty for which Tamora and I were hired.”

“To act merely as a cateran will not be enough,” Syle said. “You know it is not enough. As a friend, I beg you to help us. I cannot be responsible for what will happen to you if you do not.”

Yama would have asked him what he meant, but Syle suddenly pointed toward the city below. “Look there! How brightly they burn!”

Near and far, rockets were shooting up above the streets and houses and squares of the endless city, red and green and gold lights streaking high into the night air and bursting in fiery flowers that drifted down in clouds of fading sparks even as more rockets rose through them. The noise of their explosions came moments later, like the popping of kernels of corn in a hot pan.

Yama thought again of Daphoene. Her mind like the night sky full of sparks constantly flowering and fading.

Rising faintly on the cold wind came the small sound of trumpets and drums, of people singing and cheering. A flight of rockets terminated their brief arc in a shower of golden sparks a few chains beneath the walkway on which Yama and Syle stood. Bats took wing from crevices in the rock face below, a cloud of black flakes that blew out into the night and swept across the red swirl of the Eye of the Preservers.