Paul Mcauley - Ancients of Days

The gambler started to protest again, but his mild manner enraged the boy, who leaned on the little table and shouted into his face. One of the other boys swept the shells on to the floor and his leader shouted that there was no pearl and it was no game at all, but a sharpy’s trick.

Yama hardly heard him. He had just seen a man come out of the bawdy house. He wore a tunic of plain homespun girdled with a red cord, and his face was covered in a glossy black pelt, with a white stripe down the left side.

He carried a staff taller than himself, and Yama knew that it was shod with iron. For he recognized the man at once, and with a shock knew that Brabant must be involved in a conspiracy after all.

The man was Prefect Corin.

“A sharpy’s trick,” the leader of the boys shouted. “We will have justice! Grab them both, lads—the one with the knife first.”

One boy seized Yama’s arms. The other wrenched the sheathed knife from its harness and handed it to the leader, who thrust it into Yama’s face and said, “By what authority do you carry a weapon here?”

“By my own,” Yama said. “What business is it of yours?”

The crowd murmured at this. The tall boy scowled. He and his two friends were young and excited and more nervous than Yama, not quite sure what they had discovered. They were not guards or soldiers, who would have taken Yama away for interrogation, but apprentices of some kind, eager and awkward, daring each other on.

“You’ve been on Department territory ever since you entered the day market,” the leader of the three said.

“Why are you carrying this antique? Is it licensed?”

The gambler said, “I beg your pardon, masters, but this is common ground, as is well known.”

“Keep out of it, animal,” the boy who held Yama’s knife said. He looked around at the press of clerks and added, “You all keep out of it.”

The boy holding Yama’s arms said, “Answer Philo, you piece of shit.”

“It is mine,” Yama said. He hoped that their leader, Philo, would try and draw the knife, for surely the knife would waken and defend him.

But Philo merely dangled the sheathed knife by its clip. He had a small face framed by a bob of glossy black fur, a flat, bridgeless nose, and a wide mouth. He thrust his face so close to Yama that he laid a little spray of spittle of Yama’s cheek when he spoke. His breath was scented with cloves.

“This? This is at least ten thousand years old. What is a kid like you doing with it? Explain yourself. If your business is innocent we will let you go.”

“I will fetch the guards,” one of the clerks said.

“We do not need guards,” Philo said loudly, turning this way and that as he tried to identify the man who had spoken. “We are stronger. We will deal with these cheats in our own way.”

“You are fools,” the clerk said. He turned his back on Philo with contempt, and the crowd parted to let him through.

The crowd had grown. Yama could no longer see Prefect Corin. From the center of a great calm, he told Philo, “You have no authority over me. You may kill me with my own knife if it is not true.”

“I will cut out your insolent tongue,” Philo said.

All three boys laughed. Philo’s smile widened and he gripped the hilt of the knife. There was a blue flash. Philo screamed and dropped the knife and clutched his hand.

Blackened skin hung in strips from it. There was a smell of burned meat. Yama felt a slight relaxation in the grip of the boy who held him. He stamped on the boy’s instep, wrenched free, and kicked the boy’s legs from under him.

The third boy drew a slug pistol and pointed it at Yama. The pistol’s muzzle was describing shaky arcs, but they were centered on Yama’s chest. The clerks behind him moved to either side. All this time, Philo was screaming that he had been killed.

“Give it up,” the boy with the pistol said.

“I will walk away,” Yama said, “and that will be an end to this.”

Many at the front of the crowd were trying to escape through those behind, who were pressing forward because they wanted to see what was going on. Yama glimpsed Prefect Corin. He was striking out with his staff as he tried to push through the melee. A decad of armed men was at his back.

“Give it up,” the boy with the pistol said again. He was braver than Yama had reckoned. “Give it up or I will put a big hole through you.” Yama squeezed his eyes shut. The explosive brightness as his firefly gave up all its light in one instant printed his vision with red and gold. All around him, men screamed that they were blinded. The slug pistol went off—the boy must have pulled the trigger by reflex—and something whooped past Yama’s left ear. Another scream: one of the bystanders had been hit. When Yama opened his eyes, ghostly volumes of light seemed to hang in the air. The three boys and the clerks at the front of the crowd were clutching at their eyes; Philo was screaming louder than ever.

“I am blinded! I am blinded!”

A hand fell on Yama’s shoulder. “Come with me, dominie,” the gambler said, and dashed something to the floor.

At once, dense red smoke billowed up around the blinded men. It obscured Prefect Corin and his band of men, who were still trying to fight through the panicky crowd. Overhead, soldiers on floating discs swooped into the street.

“With me!” the gambler said. “We are your friends!”

But Yama shook off his grip, scooped up the knife and its sheath, and ran in the other direction, toward the sunlit stand of palm trees.

Prefect Corin broke out of the bank of red smoke as some of his men started to shoot at the soldiers in the air. The soldiers spun around and shot back.

Yama ran beneath a rain of fronds cut down by small arms fire. Sawgrass caught at his trousers; parrots fled in a whir of wings.

Beyond the trees was a slender metal bridge which arched across a narrow deep cleft. Something beat down there, slow and steady and vast; Yama could feel its pulse through the soles of his boots as he went over the bridge.

Then a glass-walled tunnel that ran along the side of a sheer rock face, with the slope of the mountain falling to the mosaic of the city, and mountains in the misty distance. The curved wall suddenly crazed into a thousand splinters; a moment later Yama heard the sharp echo of a pistol shot, and then Prefect Corin shouted his name.

Yama turned.

The Prefect and three of his men stood fifty paces away.

“Well met, Yamamanama,” Prefect Corin said.

He looked quite unruffled, standing straight with his staff grounded beside him. He was not even out of breath.

One of the men had a bandaged hand. He was the ruffian Yama had wounded outside the gate of the Department of Vaticination.

Yama held the knife by the side of his leg. He said, as calmly as he could, “You escaped the magistrates, then.”

Prefect Corin said amicably, “As did you. You talked to their machines, did you not? Your father should have told me about that trick, but no matter. Here you are anyway.”

“I will not come back,” Yama said, and raised his knife when Prefect Corin stepped forward.

Two of his men aimed pistols at Yama; the third, the one with the bandaged hand, cocked an arbalest.

“We have no wish to harm you,” Prefect Corin said. “You must be very tired and confused after your adventures, but you have come home now. You have found us, as the Preservers wished. We have a lot to talk about, you and I. There have been sightings of feral machines in the city, and the Temple of the Black Well was destroyed by the Thing Below. Did you speak to them, too?”

Yama said, “You lured me here, but I will not come with you. I will not serve.”