Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 03 - Shrine of Stars

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Paul J. McAuley

Shrine of Stars

Chapter One

THE PYRE

THE TWO [GARBLED]-HATCHED men were working in a small clearing in the trees that

grew along the edge of the shallow reach of water. The larger of the two was chopping steadily at

the base of a young blue pine. He wore only ragged trousers belted with a length of frayed rope

and was quite hairless, with flabby, pinkish-gray skin and an ugly, vacant face as round as a

cheese. The head of his axe had been blackened by fire; its handle was a length of stout pine

branch shucked of its bark and held in the socket of the axe head with a ring of carefully whittled

wedges. His companion was unhandily trimming branches from a pine bole, using an ivory-

handled poniard. He was slender and sleek-headed, like a shipwrecked dandy in scuffed and

muddy boots, black trousers and a ragged white shirt with an embroidered collar. A ceramic coin

hung from his long supple neck by a doubled leather thong, and a circlet woven from coypu hair

and studded with tiny black seed pearls was loose on his upper arm. Now and again he would

stop his work and stare anxiously at the blue sky beyond the tree-clad shore.

The two men had already built a raft, which lay near the edge of the water. It was no more

than a pentad of blue pine logs lashed together by a few pegged crosspieces and strips of marsh

antelope hide, and topped by bundles of reeds. Now they were constructing a pyre, which stood

half-completed in the center of the clearing. Each layer of cut and trimmed pine and sweetgum

logs was set crosswise to the layer below, and dry reeds and caches of resinous pine cones were

stuffed in every chink. The body of a third man lay nearby. It was covered with fresh pine

boughs, and had attracted the attention of a great number of black and bronze flies. A fire of

small branches and wood chips burned beyond, sending up white, aromatic smoke; strings of

meat cut in long strips dangled in the smoke, curling as they dried.

All around was devastation. Swamp cedars, sweetgurn trees and blue pines all leaned in the

same direction. A few of the biggest trees had fallen and their upturned roots had pulled up

wedges of the clayey soil. Nothing remained of the blue pines which had cloaked the ridge above

but ash and smoldering stumps. Some way beyond the clearing where the two men worked was a

wide, shallow basin of vitrified mud filled with ash-covered steaming water.

Except for the ringing of the axe, the land was silent, as if still shocked by the violence

recently done there. On one side, beyond the island's central ridge and a marshy creek, were the

low black cliffs of the old river shore and a narrow plain of dry scrub that ran along the edge of

the world; in the other, beyond the reach of shallow, still water, a marsh of yellow reeds stretched

toward the edge of the Great River. It was noon, and very hot.

The slender man cut the last branch from the pine bole and straightened and looked up at the

sky again. "I don't see the need to trim logs which are only for burning," he said. "Do you love

work so much, Tibor, that you must always make more?"

"The pyre must go together neatly, little master," Tibor said, fitting his words to the

rhythmic blows of his axe. "It must not fall apart when it burns, and so the logs must be

trimmed."

"We should leave it and go," the slender man said. "The flier might return at any moment.

And call me Pandaras. I'm not anyone's master."

"Phalerus deserves a proper funeral. He was a good man. He always bought me cigarette

makings wherever the Weazel put into port."

"Tamora was a good friend," Pandaras said sharply, "and I buried her burnt bones and the

hilt of her sword under a stone. There's no time for niceties. The flier might come back, and the

sooner we start to search for my master, the better."

"He might be dead too," Tibor said, and stood back and gave the pine a hard kick above the

gash he had cut around its trunk. The little tree leaned and Tibor kicked it again and it fell with a

threshing of boughs and a crackling as the last measure of wood in the cut broke free.

"He's alive," Pandaras said, and touched the circlet on his arm. "He left the fetish behind so

that I would know. He was led into an ambush by Eliphas, but he is alive. I think he entrusted me

with his coin and his copy of the Puranas because he suspected that Eliphas might betray him, as

Tamora so often said that he would. I swore when I found the fetish and I swear now that I will

find him, even if I must follow him to the end of the river."

Tibor took papers cut from corn husks and a few strands of coarse tobacco from a plastic

pouch tucked into the waist of his trousers, and began to roll a cigarette. He said, "We should not

have climbed down to the shrine, little master. I know about shrines, and that one had been

warped to evil ends."

"Eliphas lured my master there, if that's what you mean. If we had not followed them, we

would not have learned what happened. Fortunately, I was able to read the clues as any other man

might read a story in a book. There was a fight in the shrine, and someone was hurt and ran away.

Perhaps Eliphas tried to surprise Tamora from behind, and she managed to defend herself. She

wounded him and chased him outside, and that was when she was killed, most likely by someone

from the flier. Eliphas didn't have an energy pistol, or he would have used it much earlier—there

would have been no need to lead my master away from the ship into an ambush. But it was an

energy pistol that killed poor Tamora, and melted the keelrock of the stair, and no doubt the same

energy pistol was used to subdue Yama."

While Pandaras talked, Tibor crossed to the fire and lit his cigarette with the burning end of

a branch. He dropped the branch back into the fire and drew on his cigarette and exhaled a plume

of smoke. "We will find the Weazel," he said, "and the Captain will help us find your master."

"They are all dead, Tibor. You have to understand that."

"We found no bodies except poor Phalerus's," Tibor said stubbornly. "And nothing at all of

the ship, except the axe head."

"A fire fierce enough to transmute mud to something like glass would have vaporized the

ship like a grain of rice in a furnace. Phalerus was hunting in the marsh near the island, and he

was caught in steam flash-heated by the blast of the flier's light cannon. The others died at once

and their bodies were burned up with the ship."

Pandaras and Tibor had found Phalerus's scalded body lying near an antelope he had shot. It

was clear that the old sailor had not died immediately; he had put the shaft of an arbalest bolt

between his teeth and nearly bitten it through in his agony. Pandaras remembered a story that one

of his uncles had told him about an accident in a foundry. A man had slipped and fallen waist-

deep in a vat of molten iron. The man's workmates had been paralyzed by his terrible screams,

but his father had grabbed a long-handled ladle and had pushed his son's head beneath the

glowing surface. Phalerus had died almost as badly, and he had died alone, with no one to ease

his passing.

Tibor started to trim the larger branches from the pine he had felled. After a little while, he

stopped and said, "The Captain is clever. She's escaped pirates before, and that's what happened

here. The flier's light cannon missed the Weazel, and she made a run for it. Maybe Phalerus was

left behind, but the rest will be with the ship. The Captain won't know your master has been

taken, and maybe she'll come back for him." He ran a hand over the parallel scars that seamed his

broad chest. He said, "I belong with the ship, little master."

Pandaras swiped away the little black bees that had clustered at the corners of his eyes to

drink his sweat. "I'm not your master," he said. "We are traveling together, as free men. Eliphas

betrayed my master and killed your shipmates, and I will kill him for that. I swear it. Eliphas

claimed to know of a city hidden in the Glass Desert where others of my master's bloodline lived,

and so lured him all this way from Ys. Eliphas is a liar and a traitor, but all lies have some truth

in them, and I think we'll find the place where he has taken my master if we continue downriver.

You will help me, and then you can set out on your own road."

Pandaras did not want the responsibility of looking after Tibor, but he needed him because

the hierodule knew how to survive in the wilderness. Pandaras had lived all his short life in Ys.

He knew the city's stone streets and its people; he knew words which, if whispered in the right

place, could kill a man; he knew the rituals and meeting places of hundreds of cults, the

monastery where anyone could beg waybread and beer at noon, the places where the magistrates

and their machines never went, the places where they could always be found, the rhythm of the

docks, the histories of a thousand temples, the secrets of a decad of trades. But the randomness of

this wild shore confused and frightened him. It was tangled, impenetrable, alien to thought.

"I am a slave of all the world, little master." Tibor drew on the stub of his cigarette, held his

breath, and exhaled. "Nothing can change that. Ten thousand years ago my bloodline fought on

the side of the feral machines, against the will of the Preservers. In the shame of our defeat we

must serve the Preservers and their peoples for all our lives, and hope only that we will be

redeemed at the end of time."

"All men are servants of the Preservers," Pandaras said. "They raised us up from animals,

remember all who have ever lived, and will raise them from the dead in the last moment at the

end of time and space. If you must be a servant, then serve my master, Yama. He is of the ancient

race of the Builders, who made this world according to the will of the Preservers. In all the world,

he is closer to them than any other man—the emissary from the holy city of Gond admitted as

much. He is their avatar. I have seen him bend countless machines to his will. In Ys, on the roof

of the Palace of the Memory of the People, he brought a baby of one of the indigenous people to

self-awareness, and you saw how he drew up monstrous polyps from the bottom of the Great

River to save us from Prefect Corin. He is a wise and holy man. He alone can end the war begun

by the heretics; he alone can return the world to the path which will lead to redemption of all its

peoples. So by helping me find him, you will serve all the world."

"We will search for your master, and for my ship," Tibor said. He drew a last puff from the

stub of his cigarette and pinched it out and swallowed it. His long red tongue passed over his

black lips. "But a ship is easier to find than a man. How will we find him, in all the long world?"

Pandaras showed Tibor the ceramic coin Yama had given him before following the traitor

Eliphas into ambush. It held a faint spark in its center. Pandaras hoped that it meant that Yama

was still alive, but no matter which way he turned the coin, the spark did not grow brighter or

dimmer.

Tibor nodded. "I have heard of such things, young master, but never thought to see one."

"It's real," Pandaras said. "Now work harder and talk less. I want to be gone from here as

soon as possible."

At last the pyre was finished. Pandaras and Tibor laid Phalerus's body on top and covered it

with a blanket of orange mallows and yellow irises. Tibor knew the funeral rituals by heart, and

Pandaras followed his instructions, becoming for that short time the servant of a holy slave. They

asperged the body with water and Tibor said prayers for the memory of the dead sailor before

lighting the dry reeds he had woven through the lower layers of the pyre.

When it was burning well, with Phalerus's body a shadow in the center of leaping yellow

flames and white smoke bending like a banner toward the blackened ridge of the little island,

Pandaras and Tibor clambered on to their raft and poled away from the devastated island with

unseemly haste. It took them the rest of the day to thread a way through the stands of tall yellow

reeds to the mudbanks and pioneer mangroves that lay beyond, along the margin of the shrinking

river. When the water became too deep to use the pole, Tibor took up a leaf-shaped paddle he had

carved from a scrap of wood.

Pandaras squatted at the raft's blunt prow, Phalerus's arbalest in his lap and his master's pack

between his feet. He was more afraid than he could let the hierodule know. Tibor said that the raft

was stronger than it looked, that the strips of hide would shrink in the water and bind the logs

ever tighter, but Pandaras thought it a flimsy craft. The idea of traveling the length of the Great

River on it, like an emmet clinging to a flake of bark, filled him with dread, but he was certain

that Yama had been carried away on the flier, and he loved his master so fiercely that he would

follow him beyond the edge of the world. He had smeared every bit of his exposed pelt with

black mud to protect himself from the biting flies and midges which danced in dense clouds over

stumps and breather roots. He was a savage in a savage land. He would go naked, cover his body

with strange swirling tattoos, drink blood from freshly killed animals until he was as strong as a

storm, and then he would pull down the walls of the citadel where his master was held, rescue

him, and kill the traitor who had taken him. His people would make songs about it until the end

of time.

Such dreams sustained his small hope. Those, and the faint but unwavering spark trapped

within the ceramic coin.

At last the raft rounded the point of a long arm of mangroves, and the wide river suddenly

stretched before them, gleaming like a plain of gold in the light of the setting sun. There was so

much light glittering up from the water that Pandaras could not see if it had an ending. He stood,

suddenly filled with elation, and flung out an arm and pointed downriver, toward the war.

Chapter Two

DR. DISMAS'S DISEASE

DR. DISMAS CAME into the big white room without ceremony, flinging open the double

doors and striding straight toward Yama, scattering the machines which floated at various levels

in the air. A decad of servants in various brightly colored liveries trailed behind him.

Yama had been performing some of the exercises Sergeant Rhodean had taught him, and

jumped up as Dr. Dismas approached. He was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only a pair of

silk trews and a wide bandage wound twice around the burns on his chest. Ever since his capture,

he had wanted nothing more than to be able to command just one machine and make it fling itself

into Dr. Dismas's eye and burn through his brain, but no matter how much he strained to contact

the machines around him, he could not bend them to his will. The powers which he had painfully

learned to master had been taken from him by the thing which had grown from seeds Dr. Dismas

had, by a trick, planted in him at the beginning of his adventures. He was plagued by a fluttering

of red and black at the edges of his vision, and was visited in his sleep by strange and terrible

dreams which, although he utterly forgot them upon waking, left an indelible residue of terror and

loathing.

Dr. Dismas did not speak at once, but clapped his stiff hands together in an irregular rhythm

and paced up and down while looking sidelong at Yama, as if trying to marshal his hectic

thoughts. The servants stood in a row behind him. They were all indigens, and all mutilated.

Yama scarcely noticed them. He was watching the bent-backed, black-clad apothecary as a

mouse might watch a snake.

"You are awake!" Dr. Dismas said at last. "Good, good. How are you, Yamamanama? Any

headaches? Any colored lights or spots floating in your vision? Your burns are healing nicely, I

see. Ah, why do you look at me that way? I am your savior!"

"You infected me with this disease, Doctor. Are you worried that it is not progressing as fast

as you wish?"

"It is not a disease, Yamamanama. Do not think of it as a disease. And do not resist it. That

will make things worse for you."

"Where is this place, Doctor? Why have you brought me here? Where are the others?"

He had asked these questions many times before, and Dr. Dismas had not yet answered

them. The apothecary smiled and said, "Our allies gave it to me as a reward for services rendered.

A part payment, I should say, for I have only just begun. We, my dear Yamamanama, have only

just begun. How much we still have to do!"

Dr. Dismas marched across the room and stood for a moment at the great window, his hands

twisted behind his back. But he could not stand still for long, and whirled around and smiled at

Yama. He must have recently injected himself with a dose of the drug, for he was pumped full of

an energy he could not quite control, a small, sleek, perpetually agitated man in a black claw-

hammer frockcoat that reached to his knees, the stiff planes of his brown face propped above the

high collar of his white shirt. He was at once comic and malign.

Yama hated Dr. Dismas, but knew that the apothecary had the answers to many of his

questions. He said, "I am your prisoner, Doctor. What do you want from me?"

"Prisoner? No, no, no. O, no, not a prisoner," Dr. Dismas said. "We are at a delicate stage.

You are as yet neither one thing or another, Yamamanama. A chrysalis. A larva. You think

yourself a power in the world, but you are nothing to what you will become. I promise it. Come

here. Stand by me. Don't be afraid."

"I am not afraid, Doctor." But it was a lie, and Yama knew that Dr. Dismas knew it. The

doctor knew him too well. For no matter how much he tried to stay calm, the residue of his

dreams, the flickering red and black fringes that plagued his sight, the thing growing under his

skin, and the scuttling and crawling and floating machines that infested the room all conspired to

keep him perpetually fearful.

Dr. Dismas began to fit a cigarette into the holder which had been, he claimed, carved from

the finger-bone of a murderer. His concentration on the task was absolute; his left hand had been

bent into a stiff claw by the plaques which grew beneath his skin—a symptom of his disease, the

disease with which he had infected Yama. At last it was done, and he lit the cigarette and drew on

it and blew two smoke rings, the second spinning through the first. He smiled at this little trick

and said, "Not afraid? You should be afraid. But I am sure that there is more to it than fear. You

are angry, certainly. And curious. I am sure that you are curious. Come here. Stand by me."

Yama drew on the lessons in diplomacy which his poor dead stepfather, the Aedile of

Aeolis, had so patiently taught him. Always turn any weakness into advantage by admitting it, for

nothing draws out your enemy like an exposed weakness. He said, "I am afraid, Doctor. I am

afraid that I might try to kill you. As you killed Tamora."

"I do not know that name."

Yama's hatred was suddenly so intense that he could hardly bear it. He said, "The cateran.

My companion."

"Ah. The silly woman with the little sword and the bad temper. Well, if I killed her, it is

because she was responsible for the death of Eliphas, who so successfully led you to me. An eye

for an eye, as the Amnan would say. How is your father, by the way? And the stinking little city

he pretends to rule?"

Yama charged at the doctor then, and one of the flock of machines which floated in the big,

airy room swerved and clipped him on the side of the head. One moment he was running

headlong, the next he was sprawled on his back on the rubbery black floor, looking up at the

ceiling. Pain shot through him. His chest and face had been badly seared by the backwash of the

blast which had killed Tamora and Eliphas, and his ribs had been cracked when it had knocked

him down. A splinter of rock had pierced his lung, too, and although he had been treated by a

battery of machines, he tasted blood at the back of his mouth now.

Dr. Dismas smiled down at him and extended the claw of his left hand. Yama ignored it and

laboriously and painfully got to his feet.

"You have spirit," Dr. Dismas said. "That's good. You will need it."

"Where are the others? Pandaras, and the crew of the Weazel. Did you leave them behind?"

"The Weazel? Oh, that's of no consequence. It is only you I am interested in, dear Child of

the River. Are you all right? Not hurt by your fall? Good. Come and stand by the window with

me. I have much to tell you, and we will make a start today."

Yama followed Dr. Dismas unwillingly. The room was part of a mansion hollowed out of

one of the flanks of the floating garden. Its single window, bulging like an eye, overlooked a vast

panorama. Far below, Baucis, the City of Trees, stretched away in the sunlight of a perfect

afternoon. Other floating gardens hung at various heights above their own shadows, like green

clouds. Some were linked together by catenaries, rope slides and arched bridges of shining metal.

An arboreal bloodline had inhabited Baucis before the heretics had come; their city had been a

patchwork of ten thousand small woods separated by clear-felled belts and low, grassy hills. Now

many of the woods had been cut down. New roads slashed through the rolling landscape, a

network of fused red clay tracks like fresh wounds. The heretics had made their encampments on

the hills, and a kind of haze or miasma of smoke from weapons foundries and numerous fires

hung over the remaining patches of trees.

Beyond the city, the vivid green jungle stretched away beneath the mist of its own

exhalations. The floating garden was so high up that both edges of the world were visible: the

ragged blue line of the Rim Mountains on the right and the silver plain of the Great River on the

left, and all the habitable world between them, dwindling beneath strings of white cloud toward a

faint hint of red. In the days since he had been captured, Yama had spent much of the time gazing

at this scene, and had convinced himself that he could see beyond the fall of the Great River and

the mountains at the midpoint of the world to the beginning of the Glass Desert.

Dr. Dismas exhaled a riffle of clove-scented smoke and said, "Everything you see is the

territory of the heretics. Two hundred cities downriver of this one, and a hundred more upriver.

Thousands of bloodlines are theirs now. And soon the rest, Yamamanama. Soon the rest, unless

something is done. Their triumph is great, but they must be prevented from completing it. They

have meddled in much that they do not understand. They have tried to wake the great engines in

the keelways of the world, for instance. Fortunately, they did not succeed."

Dr. Dismas looked sideways, but Yama said nothing. The apothecary had a habit of alluding

to matters about which Yama knew little, perhaps in the hope of drawing out secrets, as a

fisherman might scatter bait to lure fish to the surface. Yama had glimpsed something of the vast

machines beneath the surface of the world when Beatrice had returned him to the peel-house by

the old roads in the keelways, but he had not known much about his powers then, and had not

thought to try and question them. "Well, for now you will help the heretics," Dr. Dismas said

briskly. "You will provide a service for which we will later ask payment. Please. For your sake

do not make any more sudden moves. My servants here are simple things and have very literal

minds. I would not like to see you hurt because of a misunderstanding."

Yama's fist was so tightly clenched that his fingernails cut four points of pain into his palm.

He said, "Whatever I was able to do has been taken away from me. I am glad that it is gone. Even

if I still had it, I would never choose to serve you."

"Oh, it isn't a question of choice. And it is still there, somewhere or other. I'm sure it will

surface again."

"Do what you will. Invoke the thing you placed inside me. Invoke your disease. But do not

involve me. Do not try to make me take your side or see your point of view." Yama turned away

and crossed to the bed and sat down.

Dr. Dismas remained by the window. Hunched into his frockcoat, he slowly and carefully lit

another cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke while gazing at the city spread below, like a

conqueror at his ease. At last, without turning around, he said, "You have it easy, Yamamanama.

I envy you. I was alone when I was changed, and my paramour was old and badly crippled. We

both nearly died before the union was complete, and we nearly died again when we retraced my

path across the Glass Desert. That was almost forty years ago. An odd coincidence, don't you

think?"

Yama was interested, despite the loathing he felt toward the apothecary. He said, "I suppose

that it was something to do with the Ancients of Days."

"Good, good. You have been learning about your past. It will save us much time. Yes, it had

something to do with one of them. With the most important of them, in fact. All of the Ancients

of Days were merely variations on a single theme, but the one who called herself Angel was

closest to the original. I believe that you have met her."

The woman in the shrine. The woman in white. Yama said, "It was the revenant of

something five million years old, of a pathetic scared fool who failed at godhood and escaped her

enemies by fleeing to a neighboring galaxy. She found nothing there and returned to meddle with

Confluence. She was the seed of the heretics, and was killed by her fellows."

"Indeed, indeed. But before she was killed, Angel left a copy of herself in the space inside

the shrines. Her aspect—that was who you talked to. She wants you on her side, and so she told

you her story. And told you how powerful she was, no doubt."

"I destroyed her, Doctor."

Dr. Dismas smiled. "Oh, I think not. You have much to learn about distributed information.

She is stored as a pattern of interrupted light deep within the space inside the shrines. Perhaps

your paramour will destroy her, when it is stronger, and if I so choose, but you destroyed only the

copy of a copy." Dr. Dismas plunged his right hand into the pocket of his frockcoat and brought

out the plastic straws which he habitually cast when he needed to make a decision. He rattled

them together, smiling craftily, and put them away. "The fate of gods in my hands—don't you

find it amusing? Ah, you are a humorless boy, Yamamanama. It is not your fault. Anyone

brought up by that stiff-backed narrow-minded backward-looking innumerate superstitious fool

would—"

Yama roared and ran at Dr. Dismas again, and again was knocked down by one of the

machines, but before he fell he had the satisfaction of seeing the apothecary take a step backward.

For a moment he was blinded by a silent roar of red and black that seemed to fill his head. He

rolled onto his back, a ringing in his ears and the taste of blood in his mouth, and slowly got to

his knees. When he stood, the room seemed to sway around him, and he sat down on the edge of

the bed.

Dr. Dismas lit another cigarette and watched Yama with a genuine tenderness. "You'll need

that spirit, Yamamanama," he said. "It is a hard road I have set you on, but you will thank me at

last. You will be transformed, as I have been transformed. I will tell you how."

"It is a symptom of the disastrous reversal in the development of the peoples of Confluence

that, although their technologies predated the creation of our world by five million years, the

Ancients of Days were able to manipulate much that was hidden or lost to the ten thousand

bloodlines. In particular, Angel was able to enter the space inside the shrines, and she learned

much there."

"She destroyed the avatars," Yama said. "People believe that the heretics destroyed them, but

it happened before the war began."

"Hush. This is my story, not hers. You already know hers, it seems. She tried to recruit you,

but I know that you resisted, for otherwise you would not be here. You chose wisely. She is not

our friend, Yamamanama. She is our ally, yes, but not our friend. Enobarbus submits to her

without reservation, but we have our own plans. And besides, much of what she says is self-

serving, or simply untrue. Angel did not destroy the avatars. That was the work of the copy of

herself that she installed in the space inside the shrines. The aspect you talked to was a copy of

that copy, but no matter. In any form, it is a poor deluded thing. After Angel died, it found itself

besieged, and it lashed out. That was how the avatars came to be destroyed. The avatars, and

many records, and most of the directories and maps within the space inside the shrines. That was

the true war; the war fought since, between the heretics and the bureaucrats, is but its shadow.

And so the bureaucrats were defeated before the first ship of fools sailed from Ys to put down the

uprisings at the midpoint of the world."

"But that does not concern us. While Angel was traveling downriver toward the last and least

city of Confluence, where she would plant the seed that would grow into the heretics, at that same

moment, I was entering the Glass Desert. I had been trained as an apothecary—my family had

been a part of the Department of Apothecaries and Chirurgeons for thousands of years—but I

sought greater knowledge. Arcane knowledge hidden or forgotten or forbidden by priests and

bureaucrats frightened by the true destiny of the world. As a child I had riddled the crannies of

the Department's library. This was before the hierodules within the screens of the library were

destroyed along with the avatars, and written records were almost entirely unused then. There

was a vast amount of trash, but I discovered a few gems."

Yama said, "And that was where you met Eliphas."

"No, not then. I knew him, in the way that a boy might glancingly know everyone who

works in the place where he grows up, but until my return last year I doubt that I had ever

exchanged a single word with him. Eliphas had long before given up searching for ancient

treasures, although his friend and one-time partner, the chief of clerks of the library, did give me

encouragement. He was interested in maps, but I found something better."

"It was the personal account of a traveling chirurgeon five thousand years dead. He had

worked amongst the unchanged bloodlines at the midpoint of the world, and found a cluster of

odd symptoms amongst certain of the nomadic clans which sometimes ventured into the ancient

battlegrounds of the Glass Desert. It was unusual in that the same symptoms were exhibited by

different bloodlines. Most clans killed or cast out those afflicted, but in some they were

considered blessed by the Preservers and became soothsayers, prophets, oracles, mysts and so

on."

"This is the disease with which you infected me," Yama said.

Dr. Dismas flung out an arm, pointed at Yama, and screamed with sudden violence, "Quiet!

Enough interruptions! You will be quiet or I will—" His arm trembled violently, and he whirled

around to face the window. His shoulders heaved. When he turned back he was smiling and there

was honey in his voice. "This is my story, Yamamanama. Do not race ahead. You think you

know more than you do."

"Perhaps I am not interested in your story, and want to bring it to its end as quickly as

possible."

"Ah, but you are interested. I know you are. Besides," Dr. Dismas added, in the same overly

sweet, wheedling voice, "if you do not listen I will slice off one of your ears as a lesson. Now,

where was I?"

"You had discovered an old traveler's tale."

Paul McAuley - The Book of Confluence 03 - Shrine of Stars

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