Paul McAuley: Child of the River

You have called me. I am here. Now come with me, and serve.

Pain struck through Yama’s skull like an iron wedge. His sight was filled with red and black lightnings. Blind, burning inside and out, he gave the soldiers a final order.

They moved as one, and then Yama could see again. The four soldiers were clinging to the machine as men cling to a bit of flotsam from a wreck. They were shearing away the machine’s spines with the blades of their hands.

The spines were what enabled the machine to bend the gravity field of the world to its will. It spun and jerked, like a hyrax attacked by dire wolves, but it was too, late. It fell like a stone into the well, and the temple shuddered again.

There was a long roaring sound, and the column of red light flickered and then went out.

Yama and the two priests helped each other through the smoky wreckage of the temple. A great cheer went up when they emerged into the twilight, scorched, blinking, coughing on fumes and covered in soot. The people who lived in the houses around and about the temple had run out of their homes convinced that the last day of the world was at hand, and now they knew that they were saved. Men of the priests’ bloodline ran up and helped them away; Tamora urged her horse up the shallow steps, leading Yama’s mount by its reins.

Yama fought through the crowd. “It is gone!” he shouted to her. “I woke the soldiers and I defeated it!”

“We may be too late!” Tamora shouted back. “If you’re done here, follow me!”

By the time Yama had climbed into the saddle of his horse, she was already galloping away across the square. He whooped and gave chase. His horse was a lean, sure-footed gelding, and needed little guidance as he raced Tamora through the narrow streets. The rush of warm evening air stung his scorched skin but cleared his head. His long hair, uncut since he had left Aeolis, streamed out behind him.

A bell began to toll, and Tamora looked back and yelled, “The gate! Ten minutes before it closes!”

She lashed the flanks of her mount with her reins, and it laid back its ears and raised its tail and doubled its speed.

Yama shouted encouraging words in the ear of his own horse, and it took heart and gave chase. A minute later, they shot out of the end of the narrow street and began to plough through crowds that clogged a wide avenue beneath globes of blue fire floating high in the air.

They were petitioners, penitents and palmers trying to gain entrance to the Palace of the Memory of the People, their numbers swelled by those panicked by earth tremors and strange lights. Tamora laid about her with bunched reins, and people pressed back into each other as she forced a way through, with Yama close behind. The tolling of the bell shivered the air, drowning the screams and shouts of the crowd.

When Tamora and Yama reached the end of the avenue, they found a picket line of machines spinning in the air, burning with fierce radiance like a cord of tiny suns. Overhead, more machines flitted through the dusk like fireflies. They filled Yama’s head with their drowsy hum, as if he had plunged headfirst into a hive of bees. Robed and hooded magistrates stood behind the glare of the picket line. Beyond them the avenue opened out into a square so huge it could easily have contained the little city of Aeolis. At the far side of the square a high smooth cliff of keelrock curved away to the left and right, punctuated by a gateway that was guarded by a decad of soldiers in silvery armor who stood on floating discs high in the blue-lit air.

The black mountain of the Palace of the Memory of the People loomed above all of this, studded with lights and blotting out the sky. Its peaks vanished into a wreath of clouds. Yama stared up at it. He had come so far in a handful of days, from the little citadel of the peel-house of the Aedile of Aeolis to this, the greatest citadel of all, which the preterites claimed was older than the world itself. He had learned that his bloodline was older than the world, and that he could bend to his will the machines which maintained the world.

He had learned that the heretics considered him a great prize, and had resolved to fight against them with all his might and he had confronted and defeated one of their dark angels.

He had left behind his childhood. Ahead lay the long struggle by which he would define himself. Perhaps it would end in death; certainly, countless men had already died in the war, and many more would die before the heretics were defeated. But at this moment, although he was exhausted and bruised, his clothes scorched and tattered, he felt more alive than ever before. Somewhere in the great citadel that reared above him, in the stacks of its ten thousand libraries, in the labyrinths of the hundreds of temples and shrines and departments, must be the secret of his origin. He did not doubt it.

The woman in the shrine had said that he had come from the deep past, but she was his enemy, and surely she had been lying. He would prove her wrong. He would find the secrets that Dr. Dismas had uncovered and discover where his bloodline still lived, and learn from them how to use his powers against the heretics.

Tamora caught the bridle of Yama’s horse and shouted that they would do better to return tomorrow. “The gates are about to close!”

“No! We must go now! It is my destiny!”

Pandaras raised his head and said weakly, “My master wills it.”

Tamora grinned, showing the rack of her sharp white teeth, and held up something that flashed with red light. The picket line of incandescent machines spun apart before her. People started toward the gap and magistrates moved forward, lashing out with their quirts, driving those at the front into those pressing forward from behind. In the midst of the mêlée, a fat woman reclining on a pallet born by four oiled, nearly naked men suddenly clutched at the swell of her bosom.

Under her plump hands, a vivid red stain spread over her white dress. She slumped sideways and the pallet tipped and foundered, sending a wave, of confusion spreading out through the close-packed people.

Yama did not understand what had happened until a man right by his horse’s flank flew forward and folded over and fell under the feet of his neighbors. Yama glimpsed the red fletching of the bolt in the dead man’s back, and then the crowd closed over him.

Tamora had drawn her sword and was brandishing it about her as she forced a way through the crowd. Yama kicked at hands which tried to grasp the bridle of his plunging mount, and fought through the tumult to her side.

“Gorgo!” he shouted at Tamora. “Gorgo! He is here!”

But Tamora did not hear him. She was leaning against Pandaras and shouting at the magistrates who barred her way.

Yama reached for her shoulder and something went past his ear with a wicked crack, and when he jerked around to see where it had come from another bolt smashed the head of a man who had been tying to catch hold of the bridle of his horse.

Yama lashed out in panic and anger then. Red and black lightning filled his head. And suddenly he saw the square from a thousand points of view that all converged on a figure on a flat roof above the crowded avenue. Gorgo screamed and raised the arbalest in front of his face as hundreds of tiny machines smashed into him, riddling his torso and arms and legs. He must have died in an instant, but his body did not fall. Instead, it rose into the air, the sole of one boot brushing the parapet as it drifted out above the packed heads of the crowd.

Yama came to himself and saw that Tamora had forced her way through the line of magistrates. He galloped after her. On the far side of the vast square, the great iron gates of the Palace of the Memory of the People were closing. The bell fell silent, and there was a shocking moment of silence. Then people felt drops of blood falling on them and looked up and saw Gorgo’s riddled body sustained high above, head bowed and arms flung wide, the arbalest dangling by its strap against his ruined chest.