Paul Mcauley: Ancients of Days

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.”