Empire of Bones (26 page)

"That doesn't matter," Nowhere One said. "It isn't Sirru we'll be looking for."

13. 't4ranast/ lemple 01 Durga

Jaya paced the inner chamber of the Temple of Durga like a tiger in a cage, memories of her last conversation with Sirru echoing dismally throughout her mind. Spoken so simply, with such devastating innocence, as though no reasonable per-son could possibly object to such an idea. She was furious with herself, for ever being nai've enough to have hope. The prospect of a cure for Selenge now seemed nothing more than a remote and fanciful dream.
Harvest
. She should have killed him while she had the chance, Jaya thought; there must have been a way. And now Sirru had disappeared, presumably to carry out his sinister plans for humanity.

"Where is he?" She turned on an agitated Ir Yth.

/
do not know
.

"Why not? I thought you were his colleague, his comrade. And now the mediator has vanished and you—" The lash of her rage made the
raksasa
take an involuntary step back. "You have been
lying
to me. Sirrubennin EsMoyshekhal tells me that we are to be harvested. What does that mean, Ir Yth, god-dess of lies? Are we to be some kind of
crop}
Or food for the demons that you clearly are ?"

Ir Yth's mouth folded itself away, piece by piece. She turned away from Jaya and slowly, slowly, a remote fury ex-tended from her. The chamber became suddenly cold. A bead of sweat trickled icily down Jaya's spine. Ir Yth's voice in Jaya's mind felt like frost, but there was a fire burning beneath the words, somewhere far away. The pressure inside Jaya's mind expanded and grew, and her knees began to buckle. She remembered a sensation like lightning, streaking down her palm.

J
am not obliged to explain myself. You are a small part of a large organism; a pivot, nothing
more. The mediator does as he sees fit; he reports to the Core, as do I. Neither of us need answer
to
you. She flicked the pronoun like a whip, and Jaya gasped as if she had been struck. Then the
rahsasa
said, in a more concilia-tory tone,
We are treating you with consideration; remember that.

You are
desqusai,
after all; you are irRas. You are a person when all is said and done, not one of
the
hiroi.
And you are not a crop
.

"But the mediator spoke of harvest."

The mediator was correct. That is the original aim of the project.

"What does that mean?" Jaya demanded. The
raksasa'%
pa-tience was somehow more terrible than her rage.

The castes of the
desqusai,
like all the irRas, require the guid-ance of the Core when they reach a
certain level. You have reached this point yourselves. You already engineer the
hiroi
to a primitive
degree, and now that your genetic structures are deemed capable of bearing proper
communication systems, as proved by your sum-moning of the ship, it has been decided to bring
you under the aegis of the irRas
.

"You're here to colonize, aren't you? To conquer." Her deepest instincts had been right all along. Never mind the damned Westerners. An army would come, with weapons be-yond imagining.

Ir Yth seemed annoyed.
We do not "conquer." We are here to facilitate development
.

"You're here to enslave!"

We have no need to enslave
, Ir Yth replied.
You are already part of us. How could this not be so?

We have made you what you are; we have a duty to bring you into the fold. Can you not see that
?

"Frankly, no!"

"Jaya? Ir Yth?"

Jaya turned to see Sirru standing in the doorway. His golden eyes flickered from face to face, reading the situation.

"Where have you been?" Jaya snapped. There was a subtle change in the mediator's demeanor, she noted, a certain lan-guidness of movement. He spoke to Ir Yth with a flick of his fingers and walked slowly past them in the direction of his chamber. Jaya stared after him, resentful and afraid.

"Sirru. Wait!" He did not look back.

Adjustment to new developments is always hard
, Ir Yth said magnanimously.
Perhaps you should
rest. I intend to
.

The note of dismissal was very clear. Jaya went numbly to her chamber and lay down on the pallet bed.

She had planned to get the aliens out of the city the following night, but what now? Should she tell Rakh to put a bullet in die pair of them? Better yet, assume responsibility and do it herself? But what then?

Sirru and Ir Yth were only two people out of an appar-ently immense empire. Even if she killed them, more would follow…

Sleep did not come quickly.

She was awoken by a commotion at the gate. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was not yet midnight. She could hear a voice raised in wrath: Rakh shouting at someone, and a high imperious voice snapping in reply. There was something curiously familiar about the second voice. Jaya ran down the stairs to find Sirru standing in the courtyard, staring bemused at the gatehouse. Jaya headed for the gate.

"Rakhi? What's going on?"

Rakh turned on her, beard bristling.

"This—this
woman
demands an audience."

Not another one
, Jaya thought. There had already been over a hundred petitioners, claiming they had experienced visions or been sent by the gods. And since the news of her cure had got out, it had been a thousand times worse. Nothing like word of a miracle to bring people flocking to your door.

"Who is it this time?"

Peering past Rakh's camouflaged shoulder, she saw a girl standing in the entrance to the temple, head thrown back. Jaya froze.

Farmed orchids adorned the length of glossy hair that fell to the girl's feet. A ruby
bhindi
glittered between her frowning brows, but if it were not for the scowl, she would have been remarkably beautiful.

And she was also horribly familiar, for Jaya had only recently set eyes on her photograph, splashed across a double-page spread in
Movie Monthly
. Kharishma Kharim, Behind the actress was strung a motley array of followers, one of them leading the elephant on which Kharishma had apparently arrived. Why had the militia allowed her through their ranks? Weren't they supposed to be protecting the tem-ple? One look at the besotted face of an army major, however, hovering in the midst of the followers, explained that mystery. Taking a deep breath, Jaya said, "Well."

Kharishma tried to push past Satyajit Rakh, who thrust out an arm and pinned her against the wall of the gatehouse. There was an angry surge forward from the followers, but then everyone became very still.

Turning, Jaya saw that Sirru was standing at her shoulder. He looked at Kharishma rather as one might look upon an angry, pretty child, witli a kind of tolerant indulgence. Ir Yth peered around his shoulder.

Who is this
? Ir Yth asked.

"This is a woman who is portraying me in a film," Jaya said, through gritted teeth. There was a brief pause whilst Ir Yth translated, then the
raksasa
said,
The mediator wishes to know if this is a Second Body.

Did you resemble one another be-fore your sickness
?

"A Second Body? No, I've only ever had the one body, Ir Yth." What was the
raksasa
talking about now? "
Shrimati
Kharim is playing me in—a piece of entertainment. In the movie, she is apparently an aristocrat. I'd surmise that
Shrimati
Kharim likes the idea of being a warrior heroine." Merely because you allowed a certain myth to be cultivated around your name did not mean you had to believe in it, and Jaya knew exactly what she was and was not. Unlike some people, apparently.

Kharishma had been staring at Sirru and Ir Yth with a most peculiar expression. Jaya was reminded that the two aliens had really had very little exposure to people since they'd arrived, and that Sirru had not, to the best of her knowledge, been seen at all. Kharishma murmured something and fell to her knees in the dust.
Typical affected theatricality
, Jaya thought. She had seen the sudden glint of calculation in Kharishma's beautiful, kohl-lined eyes just before her obeisance.

The movie star's followers swayed like a field of reeds. Slowly and gracefully, Kharishma rose to her feet and raised her arms so that they were curved above her head. Her knees remained bent beneath the magnificent sari. Her jeweled fin-gers fluttered against her brow as she began to dance:
bharat natyam
, the great and ancient dance of the south, which de-picted the course of the god Krishna's life. Jaya too could dance, but never so gracefully or well, and she watched with a sick sense of irritation as Kharishma undulated in the dust. Sirru was following the gyrations with an intensity of interest that verged on the predatory. But after a very few minutes, everyone's attention was wrested elsewhere.

The scream came from the parapet of the temple. Looking up, Jaya saw a figure balanced on the battlements. The man must have climbed up the outside wall of the temple—Rakh and the army had been assiduous in not letting anyone through the gates. The man was holding a box or a can; she could not see clearly from this distance. He shook it over his head, and after a moment the stench of petrol drifted down. He paused, raised his arms high above his head in a parody of the dancer below, and wailed a blessing. It was a blessing on Jaya herself, on her supporters, on the aliens; it prophesied glory to all Bharat. It was a lengthy and exhaustive blessing, and everyone stood paralyzed—apart from Rakh, who was racing through the temple courtyard and up the stairs.

After an electric moment, Jaya followed him, but she had got only halfway across the courtyard when the figure on the battlements lit a match and went up like a bomb. There was a unanimous gasp from the crowd, which may have briefly cre-ated a vacuum, for the figure on the battlements seemed mo-mentarily to burn more brightly. Jaya watched in horror, which was all that anyone could do. From the corner of her eyes, through the open gate, she saw a surge in the front rows of the crowd as tliey realized the human torch was about to fall. He plunged from the battlements like a meteor, making no sound at all, not even upon landing. Perhaps he was al-ready dead.

Kharishma crouched in the dust, her hands pressed to her mouth in a silent scream. Jaya had to admit that immolating oneself in front of a gathering of hundreds of people was a fairly effective way to steal someone else's limelight, but she could take no pleasure in the fact, however much she might have despised Kharishma. Sirru was staring at the place where the immolator had stood with an expression suggesting that this was just another part of the show. Ir Yth appeared merely baffled, mixed with a trace of disgust. She wasn't the only one, Jaya thought, and shouted to Rakh, "What are you waiting for? Close the gate.
Close the gate
." And he did as she told him.

14. Jxhaikurrtye

Nervously, Anarres stood at the edge of the ledge, looking out across the city. Far below, a barge floated like a leaf in the wind. A glittering band of light defined the coast, and she could see Rasasatra's ancient sun sinking down toward the sea. The great wing of the raft rippled above die landing ledge, casting shadows over the faces of the crowd.

"What if someone notices us?" she hissed to Nowhere One.

The Natural shifted uneasily. "Just, keep yourself concealed from anyone who's a lower caste until you have to speak to the gatekeeper. I'll do the same. This is a service raft—most of these people are low-level personnel. If we come across any-one of a higher level who might see through the concealment, we'll just have to keep the scale turned up and hope they don't take an interest in us. If anyone asks, you're going to see a client and I'm a maintenance worker."

"Could they tell you're a Natural?"

"Eventually, yes. We'll just have to hope for the best."

The gates leading onto the ramp of the raft slid open. Anarres stepped forward, trying to merge with the throng of people. If the implant didn't work, or if EsRavesh had broadcast her de-scription… But there was no reason for him to suspect that she would want to go back to the translation orbital. Anarres hoped that Nowhere One could be trusted. She had never heard of the person whose First Body he sought in the vaults, and the Natural had told her nothing more than the name.

Anxiously she scanned the crowd, and saw no one who re-sembled a
khaith
. But then it occurred to her, /
wouldn't necessar-ily see them. They can make themselves invisible to me
. The thought of being followed by some slinking, unperceived nightmare made her quills hackle. The Natural squeezed her hand.

"Are you all right?" he whispered.

"Nearly." She had escaped the
khaithoi
once. She could do it again, if she just kept her wits about her and remembered to be brave. As she drew near to the gatekeeper, she dropped the con-cealment and exuded as much allure as she could. The gate-keeper gave an audible gasp. So did Nowhere One, who slipped through the gate in the aura of Anarres' magnetic sexuality.

Several people looked round, but Anarres was already through the gate and onto the raft, drawing her concealment about her once more. From the corner of her eye, she saw Nowhere One sliding into a corner behind a hanging veil of mesh. She followed him and sat down.

Nowhere One seemed rather breathless; Anarres hoped he wasn't claustrophobic or afraid of flying.

"Do you think anyone noticed us?" she asked, to take his mind off his surroundings.

Nowhere One turned to her rather desperately and said, "Quite frankly, all I can think about at the moment is sex. How do you
do
that?"

"It's my job," Anarres told him, bewildered. "I don't think we can do anything about it now. I'm sorry—someone might see.

"I'm not suggesting we—let's talk about it later, Anarres." He took a deep breath. "If there
is
a later."

There was a faint jolt as the raft lifted. Anarres shut her eyes, trying not to think about their destination.