Paul McAuley: Child of the River

He said, “The world cannot be saved by contesting the will of those who made it. I will fight the heretics, not serve them.”

Silver bells, ringing in the air all around. “You are still so young, Yamamanama! You still cling to the beliefs of your childhood! But you will change your mind. Dr. Dismas has promised that he has already sown the seeds of change. Look on this, Yamamanama. All this can be ours!”

The shrine flashed edge to edge with white light. Yama closed his eyes, but the white light was inside his head, too.

Something long and narrow floated in it, like a needle in milk. It was his map. No, it was the world.

Half was green and blue and white, with the Great River running along one side and the ranges of the Rim Mountains on the other, and the icecap of the Endpoint shining in the sunlight; half was tawny desert, splotched and gouged with angry black and red scars and craters, the river dry, the icecap gone.

It floated before Yama, serene and lovely, for a long moment. And then it was gone, and the woman smiled at him from the window of the shrine, with the green lawn and the high hedges of the garden receding behind her.

“Together we will do great things,” she said. “We will remake the world, and everyone in it, as a start.”

Yama said steadfastly, “You are an aspect of one of the Ancients of Days. You raised up the heretics against the will of the Preservers. You are my enemy.”

“I am no enemy of yours, Yamamanama. How could an enemy speak from a shrine?”

“The heretics silenced the last avatars of the Preservers. Why shouldn’t something else take their place? Why do you tempt me with foolish visions? No one can rule the world.”

The woman smiled. “No one does, and there is its problem. Any advanced organism must have a dominating principle, or else its different parts will war against each other, and it will be paralyzed by inaction. As with organisms, so with worlds. You have so many doubts. I understand. Hush! Not another word! Someone comes. We’ll talk again. If not here, then at one of the other transceivers that are still functioning. There are many on the far-side shore.”

“If I talk with you again, it will be because I have found some way of destroying you.”

She smiled. “I think you will change your mind about that.”

“Never!”

“Oh, but I think that you will. Already it has begun. Until then.”

And then she was gone, and with her the light. Once more, Yama could see through the darkly transparent disc of the shrine. On the far side of the apse, the curtain of black mesh stirred as someone pushed it aside.

It was not Pandaras, nor even Tamora, but a bare-chested giant of a man in black leather trews. His skin was the color of rust and his face was masked with an oval of soft black moleskin. He carried a naked falchion, and there was a percussion pistol tucked into his waistband. His muscular arms were bound tightly with leather thongs; plastic vambraces, mottled with extreme age, were laced around his forearms. As soon as he saw Yama, the man quickly advanced around the shrine. Yama stepped backward and drew his long knife. It ran with blue fire, as if dipped in flaming brandy.

The man smiled. His mouth was red and wet inside the slit in his black mask. The pointed teeth of a small fierce animal made a radiating pattern around the mask’s mouth slit and little bones made a zigzag pattern around the eyeholes, exaggerating their size. The man’s rust-colored skin shone as if oiled, and a spiral pattern of welts was raised on the skin of his chest. Yama thought of the friendly people who had colonized the abandoned tombs at the edge of Ys. This was one of their sons, corrupted by the city. Or perhaps he had left his people because he was already corrupted.

“Who sent you?” Yama said. He was aware that one of the statues was only a few paces from his back. Remembering what Sergeant Rhodean had taught him, he carefully watched as the man moved toward him, looking for weaknesses he might exploit if it came to a fight.

“Put up that silly pricking blade, and I’ll tell you,” the man said. His voice was deep and slow, and set up echoes in the vaulted roof of the apse. “I was asked to kill you slowly, but I promise to make it quick if you don’t struggle.”

“It was Gorgo. He hired you at the Water Market.”

The man’s eyes widened slightly under the mask and Yama knew that he had guessed right, or had struck close to the truth.

He said, “Or you are a friend of Gorgo, or someone who owes him a favor. In any case, it is not an honorable act.”

The man said, “Honor has nothing to it.”

Yama’s fingers sweated on the hilt of the knife and the skin and muscles of his forearm tingled as if held close to a fire, although the knife blade gave off no heat. Pandaras had not known to leave the knife in sunlight while I was ill , he thought. Now it takes the energy it needs from me, and I must strike soon.

He said, “Did Gorgo tell you who I killed? He cannot have forgotten, because it was only two nights ago. It was a rich and powerful merchant, with many guards. I was his prisoner, and my knife was taken from me, but he is dead and I stand here before you. Go now, and I will spare you.”

He was calling out to any machine for help, but there were none close by. He could only feel their distant, directionless swarm, as a man bears the many voices of a city as an unmodulated roar.

The assassin said, “You think to keep me talking, that I may spare you or help will come. Those are foolish hopes. Put up your knife and it’ll be a quick dispatch. You have my word.”

“And perhaps you talk because you do not have the stomach for it.”

The assassin laughed, a rumble like rocks moving over each other in his belly. “It’s the other way around. I was paid to kill you as slowly as possible, and to withhold the name of my client until the last possible moment. You won’t put away your silly little blade? You choose a slow death, then.”

Yama saw that the assassin favored his right arm; if he ran to the left, the man must turn before striking. In that instant Yama might have a chance at a successful blow. Although the shrine was dark and fading sunlight had climbed halfway up the walls, laying a bronze sheen on the cloudily opaque torsos of the gigantic soldiers, everything in the square apse shone with an intense particularity. Yama had never felt more alive than now, at the moment before his certain death.

He yelled and ran, striking at the man’s masked face. His opponent whirled with amazing speed and parried automatically with such force that Yama was barely able to fend off the blow. The knife screamed and spat a stream of sparks, and notched the assassin’s sword.

The assassin did not press his advantage, but stared distractedly at something above Yama’s head. Yama struck again, lunging with the point of his knife; Sergeant Rhodean had taught him that the advantage of a shorter blade is the precision with which it can be directed. The assassin parried with the same casual, brutal force as before and stepped back, pulling the percussion pistol from his waistband.

Suddenly, dust boiled around them in a dry, choking cloud.

Chips of stone rained down like hail, ringing on the stone flags of the floor. In the midst of this, Yama lunged again.

It was a slight, glancing blow that barely grazed the assassin’s chest, but the knife flashed and there was a terrific flash of blue light that knocked the man down. Yama’s arm was instantly numbed from wrist to shoulder. As he shifted the knife to his left hand, the assassin got to his feet and raised the percussion pistol.

The man’s mouth was working inside the mask’s slit, and his eyes were wide. He fired and fired again at something behind Yama. The pistol failed on the third shot and the assassin threw it hard over Yama’s head and ran, just as Pandaras had run when the woman had appeared in the shrine.