Even a hairline crack can shatter a mountain.
Carnelian gazed at the cliff of dust that countless sartlar feet were driving towards him and the rest of Molochite’s host. The half-light was giving it a darker, bloodier hue. In its rolling depths growled nearing thunder. Sometimes faint lightning, like a twinge of toothache, made him remember his dreams and, for some reason, his voyage to the Three Lands. He gazed up into the leaden heavens dreading the weight of rain above them. Fern was watching the sartlar approach. Before them both stretched more than a dozen ranks of heads and banners, of backs of saddle-chairs, of lances that combed the gale the mountainous wave was hurling at them. Carnelian opened his cowl to sample the air, almost expecting the tang of the sea, the iron of blood, but there was nothing save the smell of aquar, of men and their sweat and, perhaps, the dry musk of the land.
Left was the vast sweep of auxiliary squadrons bristling all the way towards the pale thread of the Great Eastern Road. Right, a dragon loomed that was the nearest bastion in the wall of monsters that ran unbroken into the west as far as Carnelian could see. Their flame-pipes gave them the appearance of some vast hornwall. Chimneys lit, this whole first line was streaming banners of black smoke back over the second: another rampart that would stand should the first fail, and Molochite’s ancient tactic to counter Osidian’s hollow crescent. Not that such a precaution seemed necessary. Regarding such a concentration of raw power, it seemed ridiculous to imagine that Osidian could triumph. A bleakness at the thought of his defeat alerted Carnelian to what he had not known he felt: that he still yearned for Osidian’s victory. Willing his gaze to penetrate the gloom behind Molochite’s second line, he was sure he could see the demonic face hanging leering above the Iron House. It was a perfect representation of the mind that moved that vast host. Adjusting his position in the saddle-chair made him aware his torn muscles were beginning to seize up. His joints ached where they had almost come apart. His skin shivered, remembering the brutal touch of the cross. He relived his pain, his shame, but also the naked children and Molochite’s bitter malice. Was it strange, then, that he did not wish that monster to triumph?
Resuming his survey over the heads of the auxiliaries, he watched again the sartlar advance rearing its wall of curling dust. Though it looked solid, it was not. This was no wave of blood that would drown Molochite’s power, merely a mirage behind which lay nothing more terrible than a multitude of starved, poorly armed brutes. Would their flesh resist Molochite’s fire? Would their bones withstand the trampling thunder of his dragons? Carnelian chuckled mirthlessly. Still he could not let go hope of Osidian’s victory. Scanning the dust wall, he searched for any sign of him. A light flickered, there towards the far end of Osidian’s right flank. It flared again. A tiny flicker too close to the ground to be lightning. Dragonfire, then. Carnelian’s heart leapt as he had a thought. Could it be a feint to draw Molochite’s strength from his centre, weakening it perhaps enough to land a fatal blow? He looked back towards the Iron House and watched it for a signal. Nothing. The two lines might have been granite walls upon whose ramparts fires smoked.
Suddenly the air was rent by a ragged, shrill chorus pumped out by many brass throats. The blasts reverberated beneath the heavens. Again the fanfare sounded, so harsh it seemed as if it might pare flesh from bones. Their commander, in the front rank, jabbed his lance as if he sought to spear the clouds. The men behind him answered him with a roar that seemed mild in comparison with the trumpets. Carnelian and Fern could feel the excitement around them heating. The battlecries rushed away along the line, turning distantly to a hiss that set the lances vibrating like a wind through ferns. Fern bared his teeth and nodded.
Then Carnelian became aware the front ranks of their squadron were sliding forward in a packed mass of flesh and hide, of bronze and wood. He did not even need to signal his aquar. Her head dropped and she sprang forward. He was thrown from side to side. Faster and faster until the rocking smoothed and she was leaning into her run as her feet reached forward, clutched the ground with their claws, then whipped back. Carnelian adjusted his position, wound his wrist into the reins and clutched his lance in both hands. Its grip was greasy, but firm. Around him other riders were hazy jiggling shadows. Only glimpses of Fern’s pale leathers allowed him to know his friend was close.
Peering ahead Carnelian could see little through the dust their aquar were scratching up from the ground. He lowered his head against the pelting sand, deafened by the furious drum and rush of their charge. From up ahead came muffled, crashing sounds. His aquar rocked him as she slowed, her head rising a little with her plumes. Then the ground became rough, uneven. He was jerked this way and that as her footfalls landed on things that collapsed suddenly like eggs beneath her weight. One of her legs snagging threw him forward. As she yanked her foot free he was punched back into his saddle-chair. Her head was high now, crowned with startled plumes, and she had slowed to a jerky stride. A shudder. Another as her footing slipped and she fought for balance. Carnelian clung to the saddle-chair, his lance lying flat across his knees, and he peered down to see the field of rocks or whatever it was they were fighting through. At any moment she might lose her footing and he would be thrown.
The ground seemed for a moment to be meshed in the roots and stems of dark ferns. Then he saw a thick hand, limbs contorted into loops and hooks. Boulders resolved into heads furred with hair. Some staved in, crushed and leaking moist pulp. Bestial faces torn and bloating, lips drawn back revealing black peg-encrusted maws. A stench rose up of shit and blood as his aquar stumbled forward through that quagmire of mangled flesh.
Seeing the dust thinning, he pulled her up. Around him other riders were struggling through the carnage, fanning out. Less than ten ranks ahead they met the edge of a sea. He gaped at that milling ocean of heads. Cries and screams were coming from where the auxiliaries met the sartlar in a frothing boundary. Arms rose and fell wielding blades of gleaming, dripping bronze. He felt a horror greater even than his disgust of the slaughter. Clearly, the beastmen were unarmed. Then there was a small but sudden change in the scene. A man and rider toppled, and disappeared. At a different point along the boundary, another vanished. An aquar that had been screeching fell abruptly silent. His scalp began to crawl. He glanced round and saw Fern’s pallid shape hunched in a saddle-chair some distance away.
‘Fern,’ he cried, but his voice was lost in the tumult. He wanted to work a path to his side, but there were too many auxiliaries in the way. He became aware of how desperately they were eyeing the fighting up ahead. He and Fern were being fed into that front with everyone else. He glanced back, contemplating retreat, some attempt at regrouping. Carnage carpeted the land to their rear, but this mess was slowly being overrun by an eddying tide of sartlar creeping around their flank. Ahead, he saw how much the line of auxiliaries had thinned. A surf of hands grasped at man and beast, which the auxiliaries hewed at with their blades, but as a hand was cut away, more replaced it. He saw one aquar struggling to stand as a skirt of sartlar clung to it. The creature flailed its neck as it toppled, spilling its rider into the waiting grasp of dozens.
His sympathy for the sartlar had all dried up. His fingers fumbled the toggle that closed a scabbard. Slipping his fingers around the handle of a sword gave him a thrill of relief. He pulled its fanblade free and glanced round. Their way back was now closed. He focused his gaze on Fern and urged his aquar towards him. In pushing past another rider, their saddle-chairs scraped against each other. Carnelian had no time for the man’s gaping panic. Fern glanced round and their eyes met. The next moment he looked away and Carnelian saw the man before him being pulled down, adding his cries to the pandemonium.
Then, suddenly, at the edge of his vision, an auxiliary disappeared. He spun round and they were upon him. He saw first their filthy mouths. Then their monstrously branded faces. Then the animal gleam of their eyes. He swung the fanblade, pruning off a couple of hands. Twisting, he swung it back, feeling it snag as it bit into bone. It caught, the blade turned transverse and the central ball cracked a skull. Even as his wrist got control of it, he felt the tethers of their fingers hooking his saddle-chair. He dashed the flat along a knobbled run of knuckles and was jerked back by their release, but other hands came and a face slavering for his arm. He sliced the blade into that mouth, clinking against rotten teeth, widening the grin, then the blade struck bone and stuck. Grinning impossibly wide, the corpse fell back, yanking the sword from his grip. He laid about him with his fists as hands and arms hooked over his aquar’s neck. She screeched as they gouged her with their claws, then worked their fingers into her wounds to widen them. More hands were reaching ever higher up her neck as they bent her head down towards them. Her plumes snapped like twigs when a sartlar grabbed her skull and swung up to tear at her throat with its teeth. She convulsed. Her legs buckled. Carnelian was tumbled out. His head cracked against another, even as his elbow dug into flesh. Stunned, he watched the world whip past as he plunged in among their legs.
Then he was lying on the earth, gazing up at an angry sky. A livid crack opened it for a moment. A booming, slow, stuttering voice sounded. He turned into the earth, gouging dust as he sought to stand. His feet under him, pushing up, unbending his spine. He was startled by his whiteness. He was puzzled to be naked under the cloak. Corpses seemed stones scattered over the earth. An aquar, one clawed foot twitching, her belly torn and spilling entrails. Carnelian became aware of the circle round him. At first he could make no sense of it, then he saw they were sartlar kneeling, their heads bowed into the dust. A movement of his head was enough to make them shudder. He regarded them, feeling eerily calm. Then he became aware of a pale figure being pulled down. As he remembered Osidian and the slavers, anger rose. Sartlar were bending to their victim like raveners. Then he knew what it was he was seeing and roared, ‘Fern!’
He ran towards his friend, ready to rend any who opposed him, but the sartlar sprang from his path. Fern was now invisible beneath their frenzy. Carnelian grabbed hair and the dark, coarse stuff of their clothing and pulled two off. Faces came up, snarling, but their maws snapped closed as they ducked away, whimpering, abandoning their victim prostrate upon the earth. Carnelian fell to his knees at Fern’s side, and had eyes for nothing but the blood smearing him. The sartlar assault had been so violent they had torn him almost wholly free of his commander’s leathers. Carnelian felt Fern’s body for wounds. Though his skin was striped with gashes, none seemed deep. Fern groaned. Carnelian was transfixed by the overwhelming relief he was alive. The bloody face opened an eye that stared in wonder.
‘Are you hurt?’
Fern frowned, clearly dazed. Carnelian spat on his fingers and gently began to wipe Fern’s face clean. A metallic screaming echoing beneath the rumbling sky made Carnelian rise and look in the direction from where the sound had come. There the sartlar envelopment was thinning. Through the gaps he could see that, in the centre, unopposed by aquar, the sartlar had continued to advance to well behind his current position. Beyond them dragon towers rose as a crenellated rampart. Another blast sounded even as, beyond the sartlar, a violent dawn erupted that caused him to shield his eyes. Feeling the coruscation dim, he peered over his arms. Thick sooty smoke had risen like a fog. Flashes sliced through the writhing billows. He froze with horror. Molochite’s first line was advancing, vomiting fire. Oceanic surges of terror were rippling back through the sartlar mass as the creatures tried to escape the holocaust. Their numbers choked their flight. He thought it was their shrieks he was hearing, then he recognized the whine and scream of the fire jets as they scythed through their ranks.
As he watched, he saw their flank shivering, vibrating. With each moment, a tremor in the ground was growing stronger. He realized the creatures were fleeing in the only direction they could: towards the flanks. He and Fern were right in the path of their stampede.
That brought him back to life. He spun round. Fern was still lying prone upon the ground. Carnelian cast around for even a single aquar, but all those he could see were dead or dying. The sartlar rout was almost upon them. He stooped, thrusting an arm under Fern’s right shoulder and head, pulling with his other hand on Fern’s left. He managed to sit him up. Still frowning, Fern’s gaze strayed to meet Carnelian’s.
‘You’ve got to get up!’ Carnelian shouted in his face.
Fern’s brow creased deeper as if he did not understand but, clutching at Carnelian, he scrabbled up onto his feet, the tatters of pale leather falling from him. Carnelian dug his shoulder under Fern’s arm, pulling it like a yoke over his neck, then grabbed hold of the hand on the other side. They stood unsteadily for a moment. He could make out bestial shapes hobbling and stumbling towards them. He manoeuvred Fern round and began striding, half carrying, half dragging him. When the sartlar flood smacked into them, it almost lifted them off their feet. Saturated with the odour of fear, the stench of the sartlar further quickened Carnelian’s heart so that he became too frantic to think. Constantly buffeted, he threw everything he had into keeping his footing and steadying Fern. He was slow to become aware of a deeper thunder in the earth. The shrieking of the flame-pipes was now sliding in pitch like a blade whipping past his ear. Ahead the sartlar flood was mounding as it flowed over some obstruction. Then the flow grew turbid; heads were dropping suddenly, arms flung up were then sucked down. He tried desperately to slow down, but the rout swept him and Fern inexorably towards the pile-up.
Closer and closer they were driven towards that bank of threshing limbs. Then his feet were catching in the mesh of bodies. Bones cracked under his heels, flesh slipped under his toes, warm wetness mouthed his bruised feet. He was stumbling, lowering his head, ramming through hard and soft obstructions, screams and yells, elbows arcing into him like pick-axes, thuds and shudders as bodies crashed into him, his arm yanked nearly from its socket as he pulled Fern towards him and, together, on all fours they scrabbled up a writhing slope of struggling flesh. Torrid breath wafted over him, laced with naphtha, thick with the stench of cooking meat. Desperation gave him new strength, but they were hopelessly enmeshed in flailing limbs and maned heads. The whole mound of bodies was quaking. He was engulfed in the aura of the monster. It avalanched towards them, red up to its knees. A footfall like a meteor strike. Another sent a concussion into the earth that shunted Carnelian hard against the sartlar among whom he was embedded; his bones jellied, his brain rattled in his skull. He had an overwhelming impression the Horned God was lunging to crunch them in His maw.
Then an arch of sun erupted so that he was blind to everything save its coruscating arc. Vibrating incandescence forced through his slitted eyes. Its odour a pure, bitter promise of death. His mind, like crystal, resonated to its shrill, terrifying song. He clung to Fern, wanting that they should die together. Among the shrieks of those set alight, he could hear the crackle of their flesh crisping. A bonfire whoosh. The heat intensified and he screwed his eyes closed, waiting for the unbearable touch of fire on his naked skin. Then its scream changed pitch and he opened his eyes and saw it pass, dancing over the arms and legs above him, skin peeling back from chests and faces, hair igniting in quick bushes of flame, all suddenly lost among thick black blossoms. Tar smoke rolled hot over him, oozing an acrid burn into his lungs. Then he was drowning, choking, coughing so hard he could taste blood. Iron in his mouth; iron infusing into his being. Stretching his neck up until he was sure his throat would tear, straining for breathable air. Then a sweet draught, another, another, until he surfaced, eyes raw, blinking, feeling the thunder almost upon them, saw the dim lantern of the high cabin in which a Master sat and, beneath him, the swelling monstrous dragon. Hawsers pulling on its horns caused it to drop its head, so that it was the flat of its skull that rammed the sartlar pyre. Carnelian was aware of the corpses rising round him in a bow wave. He was rolled in tumbling bodies, heavy blows from heads like clubs, a mass sharp with knees and elbows, lubricated with blood, reeking from smouldering flesh and sinew.
Buried alive. Terror consumed him as he lay there, smothered. Bodies sheathed him. Writhing in gore and shit and piss. He was one worm among many. He managed to turn his head to find a pocket of air to suck at. Among the moaning, the rustle, the gasping, he found the sound of his own breath. He listened to it, slowed it, deepened it, fighting for calm. Fern’s warm body under his arm. He managed to work this up his chest. He squeezed his hand up to the side of Fern’s neck, his jaw. A finger pressed up over the angle of his lips. Moist breath against his skin. Carnelian let out a sob of relief. For a moment all he could think about was how to save Fern. Eventually he realized that, to help him, he must first free himself. Focusing on his body, he became aware his left hand was cooler than the rest of him. He lay for a moment gathering his strength, then pushed towards that coolness through the press, wriggling like a maggot in flesh. His arm came out into space, he worked his shoulder free, then his face. He gasped at the air as if he had swum up out of the deep. He used his free arm to lever himself out, sliding more skin out with each try. When his right arm came free, he shoved down with both hands and slid out in a rush. Then he was tumbling and hit the ground with a stunning thud.
He came to feeling the good earth cradling him. He rose, groaning at the ache that was his whole body. A ridge of limbs and bodies and lolling heads rose up before him that twitched and slid against itself. The ridge ended abruptly at a gaping wound as if it were a gum from which a tooth had been torn. On the other side of the gap, the ridge continued. The edges of the gap were ripped and bloodied, but its floor was raw with a dark paste squeezed from sartlar bodies by the dragon’s feet. Carnelian stared in horror and the horror stared back: eyes gaping at him from a mangled, branded sartlar face. A mane clotted with gore. The creature propped up on a crooked arm. Her breasts sagging gourds. Her body squeezing to gore and skin merging into the quagmire of blood.
‘Is this the Land of the Dead?’ she rasped, with her thick sartlar voice.
Carnelian managed to free his gaze from her and saw around him a landscape ridged and rutted by corpses. Perhaps she was right. His finger remembered Fern’s warm, living breath. Soon he was scrambling up the slope, clasping at the fleshy flowers of hands and feet, treading on thighs and heads. He heard a moaning rising from his chest and knew it was fear he would not find Fern. He clambered, peering, into the nest of bodies, interspersing his moans with barks of ‘Fern, Fern.’
And then he saw a brown leg. He slid his fingers between its warm skin and the matted hair of a head that lay upon it like a boulder, past the ear to the stomach underneath, shoving his hand up then over, following the ridge of the rib cage until he had a good grip of him. Then, digging his feet in, he leaned back and tugged and slowly, one heave at a time, the body came out and then the face. Fern, eyes filled with wonder, as if he were being born. His brows contracted, his lips opened in a circle. ‘What…?’
Carnelian ignored the question, putting his strength into freeing him completely, then propping him up upon the slope.
‘What…?’ Fern said again, but Carnelian hardly heard him, his gaze snared by another in the heap. The small, bright eyes of a child. Its little hand reached out for him. He avoided the grip, caught the tiny wrist, slid his other hand in seeking an armpit, aware of nothing but the desperation in those eyes. He managed to work the morsel of a body free, but it was still attached by a thin arm. He reached in to prise its grip loose, but it shook its head in violent distress repeating a sound, a word, over and over: ‘Mya, mya…’ And feeling along that bony sliver, Carnelian found the tiny fist held fast in a larger one and soon he was working to free their owner and was struggling to loose her, when two strong brown arms came to help him: Fern was there beside him. Together they fought to free the child’s mother.
A remote detonation brought Carnelian’s head up. As the sound reverberated under the sky, he and Fern looked at each other. After freeing the sartlar mother, they had gone back for more. Even though she had been dead, there were many still alive among the corpses. Carnelian had become hardened to their fear of him and blind to their deformities. All he had been able to think of was that they were trapped as he had been. He had laboured ceaselessly, ignoring the pain in his muscles, finding in the work a way to avoid looking into that dark place deep inside in which lurked the conviction that all this carnage was, in great measure, his doing.
A harsh trumpet blast shocked him to stillness. His arms hung, his grip on a sartlar leg slackening. He bent his strength once more to pulling out the creature. He registered its wide-eyed horror as it saw him. He could feel the creature’s muscles knotting under his touch. Only when he knew the sartlar had no more need of his help did he finally gaze in the direction from which the trumpet call had come. His view was blocked by another ridge of corpses. He turned back to the slope and began to clamber up, trying not to tread on any moving limbs, his feet remembering the rootstairs of the Koppie.
When he reached the summit, he saw the dragon that had trampled them was, with the rest of Molochite’s first line, spreading a sickle of fire through the sartlar into the east. He followed the flickering round to the south, where it thinned with distance. All along its curve the blade of fire was going out. Only at its most southern extremity did it burn brightly. He squinted at the conflagration that seemed a star fallen to earth and realized it marked the intersection of the sickle curve with the Great South Road. He swung round. Molochite’s second line, still in position, though now exposed, was folding like jaws towards its centre from behind which rose the standard of the Iron House. He was certain it was from there the trumpet signal had come. As he watched, the two halves of the line of dragons continued to close as if seeking to devour some morsel. It was while searching for what this might be that he became aware of the lurid, churned landscape that lay between Molochite’s two, separated lines. The air was too hazy with smoke, the black ceiling of the sky too dark to allow him to see clearly, but fires burning all across the land hinted at how it had been transformed. He had the impression of ridges, of snaking curves as if a labyrinth had been ploughed into the earth. Then he knew that what he was seeing was a vast tract of land patterned by the mounds and ridges of the piled-up sartlar dead.
Fern came scrambling up the corpse logjam to join him. He cursed, stumbling, and they grabbed each other for support. Carnelian watched him gazing out as he had done and saw the unbelieving horror come into his face.
Fern raised a finger pointing. ‘Look there.’
Where the faint thread of the road disappeared into the maw of Molochite’s second line, there was a bristling movement.
Then a sun ignited in the heart of Molochite’s second line.
‘Osidian,’ Carnelian breathed, entranced.
Though the curving wall of Molochite’s dragons hid the fire, its glare was flung up stark into their towers. One at the centre flared into flames. Another joined it. Another two. They burned like torches as they veered away from each other. He and Fern watched, mesmerized, as more towers ignited, one after the other, outward from the centre as Osidian’s dragons incinerated Molochite’s line. Then the Black Face standard was lit up from below. The sun of Osidian’s attack had penetrated all the way to the Iron House. Its standard shivered like a thing alive, turned towards them, grimacing as it caught fire. Carnelian watched, stunned. The Iron House itself must be alight. Relief that Molochite would die was choked by a memory of the children he had with him. The standard fell like sputtering wax. As if this were a signal, the sky flickered, then released a booming roar. Instinct jerked Carnelian’s head back as the air above hissed. Then he had to close his eyes against the needle rain. A cool sheath slipped down over his skin. He gasped with delight as it scoured him clean of gore, then he was drinking the gift of the sky. He dropped his head, rubbed the water from his eyes and saw Fern gazing at him in wonder. For a moment they gaped at each other, then gave themselves over to laughter, that was not joy, but perhaps a release of terror.
The downpour diminished. The towers of Molochite’s second line had ignited like marsh lights as Osidian’s flame-pipes burned their way from its centre towards both flanks. Flying from the inferno, the monsters streaked the guttering torches of their towers through the gloom, but were soon enmeshed in the labyrinth of the sartlar dead. Here and there the burning towers lit the folds and creases of the corpse mounds. Sometimes one would detonate, its explosion dulled by the hissing rain. A flash, then gobbets of liquid fire would spill, strike the ridges with sparks, smear bright-backed smoulder over sinuous, crumbling contours, that would dull to pulsating scars, then nothing. Fallen dragons were left nestled among the dead as smoking boulders.
Though it was all happening some distance away, Carnelian and Fern eyed the path of Osidian’s fiery destruction as it burned nearer, glancing at each other, feeling exposed on their corpse hill. A dragon emerged from behind the last of Molochite’s line. It swept round the exposed flank belching flame. Its victim was soon alight and picking up speed as it fled with a ravening conflagration on its back. The ground quaked as the monster veered towards them. Carnelian felt Fern’s hand on his shoulder and put his own up to hold the arm there, for he judged they were safe. They watched as the monster lumbered south trailing flames and smoke. Its pursuer sailed after it, first one pipe then another snuffing out. The monsters disappeared into the labyrinth, then the pipes screeched back to life so that Carnelian and Fern could follow their progress by the smoke.
To the west the haze tore, thinning enough for them to be able to see, in the distance, something tilted burning among the smouldering mounds of the dragons that had pulled it half off the road. The Iron House seemed a child’s toy with a broken wheel, but Carnelian knew the truth of what he was seeing. ‘An oven,’ he muttered, imagining the fury of heat within its iron walls.
‘What?’ cried Fern above the rain.
Carnelian stared. Within that wreck people were being cooked alive. Not only Molochite, but the children of the Chosen; no doubt also the Quenthas and many of their brethren and who knew what others.
Then a harsh brazen cry echoed across the battlefield. Twice more it sounded, with an urgency that made Carnelian’s heart beat even faster. He glanced at Fern for some explanation, but he clearly had no idea what new horror this might presage. A rumble in the earth was causing the corpses upon which they stood to tremble. Casting around, Carnelian saw a boiling in the east like the rough edge of an oncoming flood. Molochite’s first line was returning. He swung his arm out, blindly feeling for Fern, even as he saw the horned heads rising and falling in time with the shaking earth. His hand finding nothing, he turned and saw Fern was staring in the same direction. Soon they were scrambling down to the ground as fast as they could.
They crept along a valley. Mounds of corpses rose up on either side, striped black by the passage of dragonfire. The rain had quenched most of the burning, but furtive, lurid flames still flickered in the depths of the piled-up dead. The rain pummelled their backs, forcing them to bow their heads, though they still had to blink away drops to see. Horror would have been enough to stoop them and they would rather have walked blind were it not that they feared snagging their feet upon an arm, a leg, a crushed head, then falling into the foul mud. Earth mixed with rain and gore and shit, churned by panicked sartlar, formed a treacherous, sucking mire. Everywhere streams ran like arteries exposed to the air. Everywhere sartlar like crushed shellfish were extruding pastes, leaking fluids. Wounded sartlar crawled over the slopes and dragged themselves in clumps through the marshy flats, unsteady on their bony legs, sliding, slipping, holding on to each other with desperate knobbed hands. Even at this extreme, they found the strength to pull themselves from Carnelian’s path. He regretted adding to their agony as they scrabbled to avoid him but, try as he might to keep his distance from them, there was no other way through. Most cowered as he passed, but some sneaked glances, squinting at him as if he were a dazzling flame.
Raw wounds gaping in the corpse ridges showed where Molochite’s first dragon line had crushed through. Carnelian and Fern had already crossed swathes of fiery destruction that might have been left by meteors crashing from the sky, when they came across the pitiful sight of a dragon of the second line run aground upon a reef of bodies. Exploding, its tower had scattered around it a pale field of bone splinters, at the centre of which the hump of the dragon’s back formed a halo of pulverized meat around the black crater of its body cavity. As they crept past, Carnelian regarded the concentric rings of destruction and saw in it a sinister representation of a wheelmap.
Further on, another dragon, front legs buckled, had plunged its head into a corpse mound as far as its upper horns. Its beak had gouged a bow wave of earth and carcasses. The ruin of its tower, still restrained by some girdle ropes, leaned over the mound like a half-fallen tree, its flame-pipes snapped like branches against the sartlar dead. The monster’s flanks and rear had been burned through to the bone by the conflagration that had spilled down from its tanks. The tower, eaten away by fire, exposed a blackened interior where the stump of its capstan was still manned by its charcoaled crew. Sitting like a shadow high in his command chair, the remains of a Master.
On they walked, clambering where they could through gaps in the mounds, shutting their hearts to the horrors to which they could not shut their eyes, each imprisoned in his own mind. Carnelian was remembering their flight through the limestone runnels on their way down from the Guarded Land, but was haunted too by memories of the Isle of Flies, of the Labyrinth.
The clump of sartlar seemed like others they had seen, except that they stood so still. Above them loomed a broken dragon tower that had been hurled some distance from where the monster that had borne it lay fallen. Carnelian and Fern were forced to draw nearer to the sartlar because they and the tower almost blocked the way. When one of the creatures turned its gore-encrusted head, Carnelian expected it to cower away, taking its fellows, trembling, with it, but the head turned back and the sartlar remained where they were. Carnelian and Fern glanced at each other, sharing their unease. As they edged round the sartlar, they became aware the creatures were in a ring looking down at something in their midst. Though Fern signed against it, Carnelian was drawn to look. Something pale but smeared with black lay upon the ground. The sartlar seemed to sense his interest and several heads came up. They regarded him with their dark eyes. For some reason he felt they wanted him to look. As he stepped forward, they moved aside. It was a Master on the ground, his body twisted into an unnatural shape. He stared, feeling how incongruous the expression of terror and surprise seemed upon that beautiful pale face, upon those pale, dead Chosen eyes. He saw the mask that had come loose and saw himself reflected in it like a crack of light in a winter dawn. The sartlar were gazing at him. Steadily they gazed at him and he grew afraid. He tried to rationalize his fear away, reminding himself of how much they had suffered and that they were victims. He told himself it was suffering he was seeing in their eyes, but he knew it was something different. At the very least, a lack of fear. At worst, a slow-burning, cold hatred.
It was Fern who pulled him away. Carnelian managed one last glance back before Fern drew him out of sight behind a buttress of sartlar dead.
Beyond a gateway framed by corpses, the open plain seemed the land of the living. As they moved through, nervous of the tottering walls on either side, Carnelian relived the passage through the gutter of the purple factory. Though then he had been riding an aquar. Still, it was easier to pretend he was wading through crushed shellfish than acknowledge what it actually was.
Reaching the edge of the red pools, they clambered out onto clean, solid ground, their toes gouging into the good earth. They took several half-running strides and then Carnelian bent to scoop mud, using it to rub his legs clean, to scrape the muck from between his toes. Glancing up he saw, through tears, Fern was doing the same, his face a mask of disgust. When they had done what they could, they turned their faces up to the heavens, letting the rain wash their tears away. Carnelian lowered his head, rubbing water from his eyes, and looked back the way they had come. Gory footprints led to the carnage in the gateway through which they had escaped the corpse labyrinth.
He saw how the ridge of bodies resembled some vast breaker. ‘So many dead,’ he muttered.
He was possessed by the act of imagining how that great ridge had come about. The panic of the sartlar as the earth shook beneath their feet. Their terror as they saw the wall of dragons lumbering towards them. The animal imperative to flee. The front ranks pushing back into the unyielding mass of those behind. Stumbling, people were shoved down, trampled, tripping those that had pushed them, falling, crushing those beneath who continued to struggle for air, for life, but the receding tide of flesh could not be denied. At these obstacles, the fleeing fell and those behind scrabbled over them, in wave upon wave, building the ridge of the fallen ever higher, burying alive those beneath, until the screaming fire gushed and trickled down to light infernos among the matrix of the struggling. Carnelian closed his eyes, remembering being trapped; living their dying.
A firm grip upon his shoulder made him open his eyes with a gasp. He saw Fern’s concern for him, but also that he was pointing at the ridge. Carnelian looked up at it, at first aware only of the dead, but then realizing that the crest was lined with sartlar, like citizens manning a city wall. Turning, he saw what it was they all were watching: the Iron House smouldering.
Across the mud-glazed plain a dragon lay collapsed, its tower heeling over so that it seemed a ship left stranded on the mud by a receding tide. Then they heard paired trumpet screams, scratching from the south. As the sound repeated, Carnelian and Fern lurched into a lope, breathing hard against the strain of running through the mud. They reached the island of the fallen dragon. Dangling above were the brass mouths of its flame-pipes. They walked round the monster, keeping an eye on the tower leaning towards them. Up past the boulders of the dragon’s knees and thighs, the brassman had fallen onto the rear haunch, one of its chains broken, dangling from one ankle. Carnelian was the first to advance under the shadow of the tower. He halted at the back knee, glancing up warily. He reached out to touch the hide. It was still warm. He scrambled up onto the monster’s shin, then scrabbled up its rain-slicked thigh, grabbed hold of the edge of the brassman. It rattled as he pulled himself up onto it. He smelled the burnt thing before he saw it. The charred remains of a man cooked to the brass. Fern was waiting to come up. Carnelian eyed the gaping maw of the tower entrance, then climbed towards it. The brassman gave a shudder as Fern came up onto it. Carnelian approached the doorway, wrinkling his nose against its charcoal breath. He reached up, caught hold of some of the rigging, then pulled himself up to stand to one side of the doorway. The brassman juddered with each step as Fern climbed it to take a place on the other side of the door. They both leaned in.
A black cavity sloped down into a pit where the deck should have been. At first they could make no sense of it but then Fern pointed and Carnelian saw the arch in the bottom of the pit with its individual stones and knew it was the exposed backbone of the monster. How fierce had been the inferno that had eaten its way down through decks and tank and flesh? The tower rose black and hollow like a chimney to the sky. Everything inside had been consumed.
Another doubled trumpet blast made them look south, but they could not see over the corpse ridge. Using the rigging, they clambered up the remains of the tower. As he pulled himself up onto the ledge around the topmost tier, Carnelian peered through a porthole. The command chair and the Master who had sat in it had fallen into the conflagration below. Using a guy rope, he pulled himself up the mast onto the narrow ledge that was the remains of the roof. There was just enough space for Fern to join him. It was only then they gazed out over the land. Dark ripples stretched away behind the first corpse ridge like those a tide leaves in sand. Here and there tiny dragons with their towers gave scale. Both stared, appalled, unable to comprehend how many dead there must be to make up such a landscape. A flashing in the midst of this carnage drew Carnelian’s eye. There upon the thread of road, a fire was burning. It died. Its smoke spiralled up, thinning into a haze, and he saw the dragon on the road and more behind it in a long column. The flame-pipes spoke again, the fire igniting against the road just before everything was obscured by naphtha smoke. At the root of that boiling black column, fire pulsed.
‘A signal,’ Carnelian and Fern said together. Carnelian looked further south and saw the ripples of the dead growing fainter and a scattering of ruined dragons like pebbles. He glanced east and saw a line of dragons there. There was another in the west. The two flanks of Molochite’s first line turned inwards, facing each other across the labyrinthine ripples of the dead and at its heart those flame-pipes signalling.
Sitting with their backs against the mast, Carnelian and Fern were frozen together like two blocks of ice. The rain pouring over them had drained their flesh of life, their minds of thought. Their eyes might have been glass as they gazed towards Heart-of-Thunder and Osidian. Who else could it be? In response to his signals, the two surviving wings of Molochite’s first line had exchanged communications by means of torches. As a result of all those firefly signals, a dragon from each wing had wound its way through the corpse labyrinth to meet Osidian on the road. By means of the torches their attendants lit, Carnelian and Fern had watched the commanders descend to the road and, there, in the shelter of Heart-of-Thunder’s belly, they had spent a long time, no doubt negotiating terms. After this the emissaries had returned each to his wing, where, after more torch signals, they had all moved south and had, a long while past, disappeared into the rain haze.
A light came suddenly from the west, shocking Carnelian and Fern to life. The curves and windings of the corpse labyrinth were thrown into sharp relief with a texture of piled-up fishbones.
A growl emitted from Fern’s throat brought Carnelian’s head up to see Heart-of-Thunder was turning. Shadows moved and melted upon his tower, and soon Osidian and his dragons were marching south along the road. Watching this, Carnelian felt a yearning to follow him, but as quickly as he felt this, he rejected it. He looked at Fern. For a moment his face seemed that of a stranger, but when Fern’s eyes came alive surveying the scene Carnelian’s heart jumped. It was then he determined that, come what may, he would share Fern’s destiny.
A bleak warmth upon his cheek made him turn to see the sun fallen beneath the ceiling of black cloud, already westering. Beneath its orb, the wheeled box of the Iron House was all burnt out. Imagining its oven horrors was not enough to deter his need to go there. He lingered for a while, examining without success the motives of his heart before he turned to Fern. ‘We must find shelter for the night.’ The words seemed spoken by a stranger. Fern was looking back at him, a question in his eyes. Then he must have seen Carnelian had no answers, for he shrugged. They broke their immobility with difficulty. Their limbs and backs felt stiff enough to snap off at the joints. Like old men, they began the descent to the earth.
The wreck loomed black against purple sky. Above hung the gory clot of the sun. They were weary from the long slog through the mud. Chilled to the bone by the rain, at first they welcomed the warm aura of the ruined Iron House. Until, that is, they began to smell its funeral-pyre reek. Half off the road it lay, like a ship run aground upon a reef. Carnelian imagined how it had happened. In pain and panic, the two blind draught dragons had pulled it off the road so that one side had tipped, a wheel rolling for a moment in the air before landing heavily enough on the earth below to buckle. In all, three dragons were piled up against the wreck like foothills. The nearest, having lumbered completely off the road, had avalanched down, shattering its forelimbs, plunging its massive head into the rubble of the demolished leftway. One of its lower horns had snapped off at the skull, from which a pool of blood had oozed. Its beak had buckled as it punched into the ground. Its rump and back formed a fleshy buttress crushed beneath the toppling mass of the Iron House. The second dragon had crashed down into bloody ruin and now lay slumped half on, half off the road. The third was one of Osidian’s that had been caught up in the disaster. Its head lay hidden, but by the way the body lay, it must somehow be wedged between the wheel still on the road and the further wall of the Iron House. The monster sloped up from its collapsed haunches, suggesting its head was lying upon the axle. Its tower, angled back, was blackened but had not burned, so that perhaps its crew had been able to abandon it. The same fire that had licked the tower had burned furiously upon the backs of the two draught dragons. The summits of their backs were black craters ringed about by ashen flesh. Charcoaled gashes and clefts cutting deep into the meat showed where the wooden housings and the yokes as large as bridges had been consumed in the holocaust.
It was the wall of the Iron House, sheer and forbidding, that showed the greatest damage. The same long line of windows through which Carnelian, crucified, had seen the sartlar approaching that morning – had it really only been that morning? – those windows were now nothing more than a ragged slit from whose fissured upper lip wisps of smoke were still hazing up. Above, the wall had blackened and thinned. Through the surviving sooty filigree, Carnelian and Fern could glimpse hideous cavities the colour of charcoal. The whole smouldering mass rose mountainously before them, its cliffs and clefts, its mounds and gullies running with sheets and streams and rivulets from the rain that glazed it.
Overwhelmed, they almost fell to their knees, overcome by weariness and horror, weighed down by the immensity of death they had already witnessed that day.
Carnelian took Fern’s shoulder and drew him away to where something lay embedded in the mud. A black bowl that either of them could have lain outstretched in, strangely contoured, filled up with water. Carnelian bent to touch it and brought his fingers to his nose. Iron. He unbent and regarded it, thinking it had a look of Osrakum with its lake. Then he realized it was Osrakum, or at least a representation of it. The iron hollow was, in form, a turtle. Looking round, he saw the wheel from which this hub cap had fallen. They approached it together, gazing up to see where the green arch of its bronze tyre had come loose. The ruin of the Iron House loomed over them. Their eyes fixed on the wheel. The end of the axle showed the cracks and rings of the vast tree it had once been. The red spokes radiating up from it were whole, but many of those below had shattered. The massive rim had cracked in two places so that it now folded in like lips of a mouth in which the spoke stumps were uneven teeth. Gold discs studded the rim, which Carnelian knew must represent the cities of the Ringwall. Gazing at this immense, broken wheelmap, then glancing back at the Osrakum hub thrown away, half-buried in the red mud, he could not help feeling this was some kind of omen for the Commonwealth.
As if speaking to him, another of the spokes snapped, causing the wheel to fold in on itself a little more. Fern pulled him away as, with a hideous grating, the chariot slid towards them, shedding panels of iron. Stumbling, Fern fell with Carnelian almost on top of him. They gaped up. They flinched as panels clattered to the ground, right and left. Then the sombre stillness of the scene returned and the rain hiss. They rose, still gazing up uncertainly at the Iron House.
Fern was the first to walk away. Carnelian followed him, glancing at the bloody sky over the pale horizon formed by the edge of the road. Night was nearing: they needed to find a place to sleep. Fern was heading towards a strangely textured green ramp leaning up against the road. As Carnelian neared it, he became aware of the huge upside-down face embossed into the verdigrised slope of copper. The face smiled up at the black sky, surrounded by a halo of curls and spirals. He knew this thing. It was the Twins’ fallen standard. He remembered the hope it had given him that morning. He watched Fern reach up to touch its spiralled edge and, though he could not see his face, Carnelian saw the slump in the shoulders and dread rose in him that Fern was remembering the ferngardens of the Koppie. Fern ducked under the standard and disappeared into the gloom beneath it. Carnelian stood for a while, unable to focus his emotions. He glanced west, where the sun was making a bloody end to a bloody day, then he followed his friend.
In the cavern beneath the standard, Carnelian could hear Fern struggling for breath. Rain drummed upon the copper roof and some dim red light oozed in, but they were in a place separate from the world; safe from it. Listening to Fern’s struggle for air, Carnelian at first chose to believe it a reaction to all the death outside. He told himself he was too numb to care, but the sound was stirring up panic in him. He moved towards Fern’s barely defined shape, wanting, fearing to touch him. As he came closer, the sound Fern was making was like a cough, as if he were trying to rid his lungs of smoke. The strained wheezing was pulling Carnelian apart. He reached out. At his touch, Fern began sobbing. The grief in that sound sent cracks through Carnelian’s frozen heart. Each shudder in Fern’s body brought them closer. Carnelian felt his own grief spilling out, racking his whole frame. They collided and clung to each other as the grief overflowed. They sobbed for all their mothers, for all their fathers, for the children, for the Tribe and for love lost and the suffering of the world that was their own and for the dead forming the hills of the earth. Clutching each other so hard helped to squeeze out the poison and the tears. In the pressure of Fern’s arms, Carnelian felt he was being forgiven and he abandoned himself to forgiveness; forgiving all those others, forgiving himself. He was not the sky, nor the earth. He was nothing more consequential than a blown leaf. He was too small a thing to be responsible for all the suffering, to be the reason for it. The forces of the world shaped him; were not shaped by him. Carnelian drew Fern against him, wanting him to feel that too; feel the pain drain away. The heat in their bodies awoke a fire in them. Amidst so much death there was a need to assert the flame of their lives. For them both, it was a miracle to explore each other’s body by touch. The warmed brass around Fern’s neck. The scar about Carnelian’s. Fern’s fire scars. His four-fingered hands upon Carnelian. Warm tears on cheeks lubricated the turning of their faces to each other. Lips guiding them to that first kiss. The world forgotten. Breathing love names. Though Carnelian was the younger, it was Fern who was like a boy. They fell into their own joined flesh, both lost and found.