Paul Mcauley - Ancients of Days

The cook, Tibor, had stayed behind to dig for edible roots, and Pandaras had volunteered to help him. Yama had given the boy his book and coin, in case either drew the aspect of Angel to the shrine. Although the hell-hound had destroyed her, there might be other copies.

Tamora had insisted that it was her duty to watch over Yama. She thought that Eliphas was leading him into a trap. If she was right then neither her sword nor her bravery could save him, but Yama did not trouble to tell her that. There was a coldness growing in his heart; as he descended the stair it seemed to him that Tamora and Eliphas had become strangers, or worse, ghosts of strangers.

The world’s edge was a black vertical cliff that rose straight up from the sea of cloud and stretched away for thousands of leagues on either side. It was dark and cold; the only light was that reflected from the clouds far below.

Yama, Tamora and Eliphas were like mice descending a mountain, emmets crawling down a wall.

They descended a long way. At intervals, the stair opened out onto wide platforms or ledges, but always it continued downward. Once, a stream spurted from the cliff and arched above the stair, a muscular silvery braid shredded by wind as it fell toward the cloud deck. Wind buffeted them and whispered and whistled among the intricate carvings of the sheer cliff face. Eliphas’s straw hat was blown from his head and dwindled away into the infinite ocean of air.

Presently, light puddled around Yama’s feet. Tamora gasped and, five steps below, Eliphas turned and stared.

Pinpricks of light reflected in his silver eyes. A handful of fireflies had found Yama and crowned him with their cold blue-white fire. Soon afterward, the stair turned around a fold of rock. There was a wide ledge, and a tall, narrow arch cut into the adamantine keelrock of the cliff.

“The shrine!” Eliphas announced. “Some say it is the oldest in the world. You will learn much here, brother.”

“At least as much as from any other hole in the ground,” Tamora said.

A fugitive light glimmered inside the arch, and it brightened as Eliphas led Yama and Tamora toward it. It did not come from any source, but seemed to stain the air as pigments stain the water in which a painter dips his brushes.

The place beyond the arch did not seem to Yama to be a shrine at all. There was no black disc, no altar or sanctuary, nothing but featureless, slightly translucent walls that curved up and met high overhead. It was as if they had stumbled into a gigantic blown egg filled with sourceless light. While Tamora prowled around the perimeter of this lambent space, Eliphas told Yama, “When the shrine was in use, one of the priests would stand in the center and become possessed by the avatar. That is why there is no screen.”

Yama said boldly, “Are you hoping that I can awaken the avatar?”

He was excited by the idea. He had come so far, from the silent shrines of Ys to this, a shrine older than any on the nearside shore. He had learned the extent of his powers, and where his people might still live. He had mastered the hell-hound and destroyed Angel’s aspect. He suddenly felt that he had nothing to fear from anything in the world.

Eliphas’s eyes blankly reflected the even light. Nothing could be learned from his face. He said, “The woman should wait outside. She might spoil the reading.”

“I stay with Yama,” Tamora said. Her voice echoed from several points in the vaulted space. “If anything happens to him, old man, it will happen to you, too. I’ll make sure of it.”

“You could watch from the entrance as easily as from in here,” Eliphas said. “If you stay here, your presence may disturb the operation.”

Tamora crossed her arms. “Then why should I move? You give Yama airs, making him believe he can wake the dead. Those days are gone. We don’t need avatars to tell us what to do anymore.”

Eliphas said, “He stands there crowned with fireflies. Is that not sign enough for you?” He turned and asked Yama, “If the avatar came, brother, what would you ask it?”

Yama grinned. He no longer trusted Eliphas, but he did not fear him, either. He strode to the middle of the room. Immediately, the light thickened around him. Tamora and Eliphas dwindled into the light becoming shadows that frayed away and disappeared. Yama seemed to be standing inside a bank of glowing mist, and then the mist cleared and he saw a needle hung before the red swirl of the Eye of the Preservers.

It was the world. Not the representation which Angel’s aspect had shown him in the Temple of the Black Well, but the world as it was at that very moment. Yama discovered that if he stared at one spot long enough he flew directly toward it. He saw the brawling streets of Ys and the blackened ruins of Aeolis; the immemorial gardens and tombs of the City of the Dead, and the garden-topped crag where Beatrice and Osric lived. He saw the white contours of the ceramic shell of the holy city of Gond, and followed the course of the Great River toward the midpoint of the world. His gaze passed over a dozen different cities: a city of glass domes like nests of soap bubbles; a city of white cubes stacked over each other; a city built among trees; a city of spires that rose from a lake; a city carved into red sandstone cliffs above a curve of the river; a city of gardens and houses raised high on stilts. He saw the great forests that stretched for a thousand leagues above the Marsh of the Lost Waters, and the ruined cities along the forest shore. Smoke hung in tattered banners where cannon of the army of the Department of Indigenous Affairs were bombarding a fortified ridge.

Yama would have looked more closely at the forces of the heretics then, but he felt that someone among them was looking for him and he quickly turned away. The view unraveled to show the world entire again. He noticed a loose cloud of tiny lights that trailed behind it and at once the constant tug of the feral machine he had called down at the merchant’s house became more insistent. One of the lights grew until it eclipsed all the others, burning away the world and encasing him in its radiance.

If the machine spoke to Yama, he did not hear it. But across a great gulf he heard his own voice, apparently answering a series of questions.

Yes. Yes. I will. Yes.

He reeled backward, overwhelmed by light, and fell, and for an instant thought that he fell through the void beyond the edge of the world. Fell with Angel. Fell in her arms.

Something struck the length of his body with the weight of the whole world. Blood filled his mouth where he had bitten his tongue and cheeks; red and black pain filled his head.

Tamora lifted Yama’s head and cleared blood from his mouth with her fingers. She had a shallow cut on one arm.

Her sword lay beside her on the softly glowing floor. It was bloody to the hilt.

Yama discovered that he had urinated in his trousers; they clung unpleasantly to his thighs. Dried blood crusted his nostrils and his upper lip, and his head felt as if someone had tried to split it with a wedge. Little bits of fused metal and flaked carbon char were scattered in a circle around him—the remains of the fireflies which earlier had crowned him, now burned out and quite dead.

Eliphas was gone, but there were still three people in the shrine. Something was inside Yama, looking through his eyes. Sharing his thoughts. He knew now why he had eaten mud rotten with termites. For the metal in the bodies of the insects. For the metal needed to grow the machine under his skin.

Tamora got Yama to his feet and helped him walk about until he had recovered his sense of who and where he was. She told him that he had stood raptly in the center of the shrine for hours, his face turned up, his eyes rolled back so that only the whites showed. He tried to tell her what he had seen. The whole world, immense and particular, as the Preservers might see it.