Paul McAuley - Child of the River

Yama took the scrap of stiff paper. It had been folded four times and tucked into itself, and sealed with a splash of wax.

Yama turned it over and over, and asked Pandaras, “Can Tamora read and write?”

“She put her thumb to the contract, master, so I’d guess she has as much reading as I have, which is to say none.”

The landlady said helpfully, “There are scribes on every corner. The seal is one of theirs.”

“Do you know which one?”

“There are very many. I suppose I could have one of my boys…” The landlady patted her brow with a square of yellow cloth that reeked of peppermint oil. Her eyes were made up with blue paint and gold leaf and her eyebrows had been twisted, and stiffened with wax to form long tapering points, giving the effect of a butterfly perched on her face.

She added, “That is, when we are less busy. It is a festival day, you see.”

Yama said, “I saw the cart go by.”

“The cart? Oh, the shrine. No, no, that is nothing to do with the festival. It passes up and down the street every day, except on its feast day, of course, when it is presented at the Great River. But that is a hundred days off, and just a local affair. People have come here from all over Ys for the festival, and from downriver, too. A very busy time, although of course there are not so many people as there once were. Fewer travel, you see, because of the war. That is why I was able to find you a room at short notice.”

“She moved two palmers into the stables, and charges us twice what they paid,” Pandaras remarked.

“And now they are paying less than they would have,” the landlady said, “so it all evens out. I hope that the message is not bad news, sirs. The room is yours as long as you want it.” Despite her claim to be busy, it seemed that she had plenty of time to stick her nose in other people’s business.

Yama held up the folded paper and said, “Who brought this?”

“I didn’t see. One of my boys gave it to me. I could find him, I suppose, although it’s all a muddle today—”

“Because of the festival.” Yama snapped the wax seal and unfolded the paper.

The message was brief, and written in neatly aligned glyphs with firm and decisive downstrokes and fine feathering on the upstrokes. Most likely it had been set down by a scribe, unless Tamora had spent as long as Yama learning the finer nuances of penmanship.

I have gone on. The man you want is at the Temple of the Black Well.

Pandaras said, “What does it say?”

Yama read the message to Pandaras, and the landlady said, “That’s not too far from here. Go down the passage at the left side of the inn and strike toward the Palace. I could get you a link boy if you’d like to wait.”

But Yama and Pandaras were already pushing their way through the crowded room toward the open door and the sunlit avenue beyond.

The narrow streets that tangled behind the inn were cooler and less crowded than the avenue. They were paved with ancient, uneven brick courses, and naked children played in the streams of dirty water that ran down the central gutters.

The houses were flat-roofed and none were more than two stories high, with small shuttered windows and walls covered in thick yellow or orange plaster, walls that were crumbling and much-patched. Many had workshops on the ground floor, open to the street, and Yama and Pandaras passed a hundred tableaus of industry, most to do with the manufacture of the religious mementoes which were displayed in shops which stood at every corner of every street, although none of the shops seemed to be open.

It was a secretive, suspicious place, Yama thought, noting that people stopped what they were doing and openly stared as he and Pandaras went past. But he liked the serendipitous geography, so that a narrow street might suddenly open onto a beautiful square with a white fountain splashing in its center, and liked the small neighborhood shrines set into the walls of the houses, with browning wreaths of flowers and pyramids of ash before a fly-spotted circle of black glass that poorly mimicked the dark transparency of true shrines.

The domes and pinnacles and towers of temples and shrines reared up amongst the crowded flat roofs of the ordinary houses like ships foundering in the scruffy pack ice of the frozen wilderness at the head of the Great River hundreds of leagues upstream. And beyond all these houses and temples and shrines, the black mountain of the Palace of the Memory of the People climbed terrace by terrace toward its distant peak, with the setting sun making the sky red behind it.

Pandaras explained that this part of the city was given over to the business of worship of the Preservers and of the governance of Ys. Civil service departments displaced from the interior of the Palace of the Memory of the People occupied lesser buildings on its outskirts, and a thousand cults flourished openly or skulked in secret underground chambers.

“At night it can be a dangerous place for strangers,” Pandaras said.

“I have my knife. And you have yours.”

“You should have worn your armor. We collected it from the Water Market, cut down neatly and polished up as good as new.”

Yama had found it when he had taken his shirt from the satchel. He said, “It would attract attention. Someone might take a fancy to it. Already I feel as if I am a procession, the way people turn to stare.”

“They might want our blood. Or want to scoop out our brains and put them in tanks, all alive—like the star-sailors.”

Yama laughed at these fantasies.

Pandaras said darkly, “This is a place of good and evil, master. It is the New Quarter, built on a bloody battleground. You are a singular person. Don’t forget it. You would be a great prize for a blood sacrifice.”

“New? It seems to me very old.”

“That’s because nothing here has been rebuilt since the Age of Insurrection. The rest of the city is far older, but people are always knocking down old buildings and putting up new ones. The Hierarchs ordered clearance of the ruined buildings where the last battle between machines was fought, and the bones and casings of all the dead were tipped into great pits and the ground around about was flattened and these houses were built.”

“I know there was a battle fought near Ys, but I thought it was much farther upriver.” Yama remembered now that the Temple of the Black Well had something to do with that last battle, although he could not quite remember what it was.

Pandaras said, “They built the houses over the battleground, and nothing’s changed since, except for the building of shrines and temples.”

“I had thought the houses were built around them.”

“Houses have to be knocked down each time a new temple is built. It’s a dangerous business. There are old poisons in the ground, and old weapons too, and sometimes the weapons discharge when they are uncovered. There’s a department which does nothing but search by divination for old weapons, and make them safe when they’re found. And some parts of the quarter are haunted, too. It’s why the people are so strange hereabouts, neh? The ghosts get inside their heads, and infect them with ideas from ages past.”

Yama said, “I have never seen a ghost.” The aspects which haunted the City of the Dead did not count, for they were merely semi-intelligent projections. And while the Amnan claimed that the blue lights sometimes seen floating amongst the ruins below the peel-house were wights, the eidolons of the restless dead, Zakiel said that they were no more than wisps of burning marsh gas.

Pandaras said, “These are machine ghosts mostly, but human, once, and they say that those are somewhere worse. That’s why they make so many icons hereabouts, master. If you were to look inside one of these houses, you’d find layer upon layer of them on the walls.”