Paul Mcauley - Shrine of Stars

“You are talking to the wrong one,” Dr. Dismas said impatiently. “We won’t need him much longer. Not once the child of my paramour is fully integrated.”

Yama looked past the warlord and his physician, trying to see the thing which stood behind them, in the midst of the officers and servants and guards. A stain in the air in the shape of a man that gradually brightened and came into focus. A familiar, patient, careworn face with a fine pelt of gray hair, long-fingered hands folded over each other beneath the chin. It was the eidolon of a dead man, of Yama’s beloved stepfather, the Aedile of Aeolis.

Yama tried to turn away, but he was paralyzed once more, this time by the Shadow’s will. The eidolon spoke. Its words crawled across Yama’s brain like sparks over a log in a dying fire.

I am well pleased with you, my son. Do not listen to the doctor. I will not let you fade away. A part of you will always be with me.

The eidolon winked and faded. And then, horribly, Yama felt his tongue and jaw work. Something said in a hoarse, strangled voice, “I need him still, Doctor. Even when construction of the pseudo-cortex is complete there will be much to learn because there is much he does not yet know about himself.”

Dr. Dismas leaned over and wiped Yama’s cracked lips with a sponge and squeezed a trickle of water into his mouth. “There,” he said. He brushed Yama’s cheeks, kneading the plaques beneath the skin with stiff fingers. “This is a frail and stubborn vessel, but I will look after it for you. I will guard it with my life.”

The eidolon of Yama’s dead stepfather came back, more solid than ever. He thinks that he is our father , it said. He will pay for his mistake, by and by. He has wasted much time with his experiments and his foolish plots. He could have brought you to me years ago.

Yama found that he could move again. He said, “Yes, you would have preferred to take me when I did not know who I was and what I could do because you are not as powerful as you would like me to believe.”

“Ah, Yamamanama,” Dr. Dismas said, standing back from the bed. “You are still there.”

I grow, day by day. And day by day you shrink. I will not go away.

“Oh, no, dear Child of the River,” Dr. Dismas said. “You are mine.”

There is much we could do together, Child of the River. Why resist? We could be the ruler of this world, just as beginning. The battles I win now will bring an end to war ten thousand years old, but they are as nothing to those I will have to fight in the space inside the shrines after I have defeated the forces loyal to the Preservers. After that victory, she who is now our ally will try and destroy me. She will not succeed, of course, and if you help me you will learn much about the world and all the worlds beyond. She has her own plans for Confluence and soon I will possess them just as I possess you. Ask Dr. Dismas about the machinery of the keelways. Ask him about the heart of the world. The eidolon smiled, a sharp, cunning, rapacious grin that was not at all like the gentle smile of Yama’s stepfather. It said, Ask him why the Great River shrinks.

After the Aedile had died, Yama had found amongst his papers pages of notes about the fall of the level of the Great River. The Aedile had made measurements every decad for many years, and had calculated the likely date of the beginning of the river’s failure. Most believed that it had begun when the Ancients of Days had meddled with the space inside the shrines and deleted the avatars which had survived the wars of the Age of Insurrection. But the Aedile’s calculations showed that the fall in the level of the Great River had begun much later, in the year that Yama had been found by old Constable Thaw, a baby lying on the breast of a dead woman in a white boat cast adrift on the Great River.

Yama could not tell if the Shadow really knew what linked these two events, or if it was merely tormenting him with its stolen knowledge, but it had touched upon his greatest fear, that he might not be the savior of the world, as so many claimed, but might instead be its unwitting nemesis. He reached out and gripped Dr. Dismas’s claw-like left hand and said, “There is much we can do together, Doctor. I think that together we can save the world, but first we must stop the war.”

“Ah, but we will, Yamamanama. We will.” Dr. Dismas was smiling as he tried and failed to free his hand from Yama’s grip. He looked at Agnitus and said, “Help me, damn you.”

Help me , the eidolon said. Ask him the question. It will cause much trouble, I promise you. I am on your side, Yamamanama. How could I not be? I depend upon you for my life and for my powers. In one sense I am becoming you. But soon things will change, and you will depend upon me. We will have to reach an agreement, or you will dwindle to no more than a remnant. Would you work with me as an equal part of a gestalt, or would you be worse than any of the good doctor’s experimental subjects? I could bury you so deep that all the light and the glory of the world would be no more than a mute spark, as dim and distant as the farthest star. I could subject you to torments worse than even the good doctor can imagine, without cease. Choose.

“He is in your care,” Agnitus told Dr. Dismas, “as you delight in telling us.”

“You tell us that you control him,” Enobarbus said. “Sometimes I wonder how true it is. We must talk about it.”

“It is the child of my paramour that controls him,” Dr. Dismas said. He was still struggling to free himself from Yama’s grip. “It still grows.”

An age ago, Yama and his stepbrother, Telmon, had liked to listen to Sergeant Rhodean’s stories about the battles at the midpoint of the world. This had been in the gymnasium of the peel-house, and the old soldier had scratched the positions and lines of attacking and opposing armies in the packed red clay of the floor with the point of an old javelin. He had taught Yama and Telmon that the best commanders overcame their enemies by wisdom as much as by force. Indeed, it was better to subdue an enemy without fighting: to enter into battle was a last resort. For that reason, knowledge of the enemy was paramount. Not just the character and strength of the opposing army, but the morale and training of its ordinary men and its officers, the severity of punishments inflicted on miscreants, the state of its supplies, the nature of the terrain it occupied, the disposition of conquered peoples toward the occupiers, and the present and predicted weather. The best policy was to understand the enemy’s strategy and then to seek to undermine it, to always grasp the initiative and to be flexible, to attack where the enemy felt itself to be invulnerable and thus to bring about a decisive change. Sergeant Rhodean had shown his pupils that even a weaker force can overwhelm a strong enemy if it seizes the opportunity and strikes with precision and overwhelming momentum.

More than ever, Yama knew that he had to draw on the lessons of the kindly old soldier. He was a prisoner in the center of the empire of the heretics, surrounded by the servants and machines of Dr. Dismas and the soldiers of Enobarbus, with a jungle and armies of heretics separating him from the unconquered regions a thousand leagues upriver, and only the hope that a former pot boy could come to his rescue. Worse, he was a prisoner in his own body, struggling against the growing power of the Shadow which Dr. Dismas had introduced into his body. But now he saw that by allying himself with his most immediate threat he could exploit the divisions of those who held him prisoner.

“The keelways,” he said. “Tell me the truth about how the world works, Doctor.”

You are mine! The eidolon tipped back its head and howled, twisting the mild face of Yama’s stepfather into something coarse and lupine. Its eyes burned with a feral red light, as if a balefire had been kindled inside its skull. The soldiers and servants around it took no notice, of course.