If night is the hidden face of day
What then is the hidden face of Paradise?
Blades sliced in from the darkness. More shadow heads. A burst of foul breath as a cry was cut off. Carnelian swung his arm and hammered bone. A groan of pain in a lighter voice. ‘Seraph, it is us.’ A woman’s voice. Carnelian saw a two-headed silhouette against the night sky. ‘The Quenthas,’ he said, shocked to his core that they had turned on him.
The sisters crouched. ‘The assassin is dead.’
One of the ribs was shuddering as someone heavy was coming rapidly down its staples. A thump as that someone jumped down to the roof. The Quenthas had already turned to meet this new threat, swords slanting back ready.
‘Out of my way, fools.’ Osidian’s voice. The sisters moved aside and he came to kneel at Carnelian’s side. ‘Are you hurt?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Carnelian said, pressing his hand against his thigh, the palm sliding on a slick of blood.
Osidian and the sisters helped move him into the light of the naphtha flares. Osidian snatched Carnelian’s hand away from his wound and peered at it. ‘It doesn’t look deep.’
‘I feel fine,’ Carnelian said, stunned at how close he had come again to failing those depending on him. All he could focus on was how his life was the thread upon which hung their fates.
Osidian pulled away, seeming to grow larger. ‘I shall have them flayed.’
‘Who?’ said Carnelian, still confused.
‘The Marula I set to guard this tower.’
‘Celestial, we are certain the assassin was already here.’
Osidian turned on the sisters, who were kneeling, heads bowed. Carnelian realized how close they had come to cutting Osidian down. ‘They saved my life.’
Osidian glanced round at him.
‘We came up after the Seraph,’ said Left-Quentha; her sister indicated Carnelian.
‘No one could have passed us coming up from below.’
‘Fetch some light,’ Osidian growled.
The sisters rose and soon returned, carrying something aflame. Osidian directed them to cast the flickering light over the body of the assassin. One cruel gash through his nose had opened his temple to the skull. Another had sliced down through his shoulder, so that his arm hung at a strange angle. He wore a dark spiralled robe and a silver mask at his belt but, with his stubbled, thin, swarthy face, he was clearly no ammonite.
It was instinct that made Carnelian stoop to pull the purple robe down from the man’s neck. With his other hand he rolled the man’s head away. There it was. The tattoo of a six-spoked wheel.
‘My mother,’ Osidian breathed, sounding surprised.
It was the obvious conclusion, so Carnelian was puzzled at feeling doubt. Osidian was staring at the assassin as if he were a window he could look through. ‘I was the target of this attack, not you.’
‘How could she know you were to spend the night here?’
Osidian threw his hand up in a gesture of irritation. ‘For all we know she may have infested every tower between the battlefield and Osrakum with her assassins.’ The fury in his eyes dimmed. ‘Though it amazes me she would be so inept as to use these scum a third time.’
He turned to squint between two of the watch-tower ribs towards the black abyss of the Sacred Wall. ‘Perhaps desperation forced her to risk one last throw.’
‘Why could it not have been the work of the Wise?’
Osidian turned crazed eyes on him. ‘However much they may fear me, they fear and hate her more. Besides, they would have as much reason to fear the ensuing interregnum as have the Great. With no candidate of pure blood left, one would have to be chosen from among the Houses.’ Osidian’s lips curled. ‘In terror for their lives, the Great would be unable to muster a common front against her. Enough of them would scramble to fall at her feet.’ Osidian’s eyes cooled with hatred. ‘Imagine their terror as she lingered over her choice. The more impure the candidate, the deeper into the Great would be cast his shadow of death. The new God Emperor alone would survive from his own kin, his peers and superiors. A single tree left standing after the forest all around was blasted by the storm. The Great cowed, the Wise naked before her, she would have absolute power in her grasp.’
Osidian’s expression was bilious, but yet Carnelian could see something else in his eyes. Was it avarice?
Osidian was nodding, on his face a look of understanding, of admiration. ‘For such gains who would not risk everything?’
Carnelian was overcome with horror, of Osidian and of the thought of Ykoriana triumphant. Though, after everything he had experienced, why was he still surprised? Were they not mother and son?
Carnelian sagged. And yet, he was Osidian’s brother. A thought crept into his mind: Osidian had been incorrect when he said there would have been no pure-blood candidate left. If Osidian were dead, then the path to the Masks would surely be open to his only surviving brother. Carnelian saw how he could present himself to the Great and Wise as a saviour; the more so because he would come unlooked-for. Ykoriana might oppose him, but even she could not impose her will if the Great and Wise stood behind him. He could discard her as she deserved, take her daughter for a wife. In the time before Ykorenthe became capable of bearing children, he would rule protected by the fear of the chaos that would ensue should he die without pure-blood issue. With such power he would be able to keep his loved ones safe. More, what could he not do to heal the wounds of the world once he became God Emperor?
Osidian came alive. ‘Come, we must get your wound tended. Then we must wait for dawn, so that we can get this business over.’ He let forth a sigh. ‘How weary I am of this outer world.’ A childlike look of hope came into his eyes. ‘Tomorrow, Osrakum.’
Carnelian gave a solemn nod. ‘Yes, tomorrow.’
Carnelian sat hunched in Earth-is-Strong’s command chair, listening to the rain drumming on the bone roof above his head. It had been falling incessantly since they set off. Ahead, through its mist, he could just see, across the moat bridge, the mass of the gatehouses. He was not sure, but it seemed that the great brass gate between them was closed, barring access to the Wheel: the heart of the City at the Gates.
He glanced round at Fern and the others. It was too gloomy back there to see their faces. He looked forward again, watching the rain-stained tenement walls slide slowly past on either side. Perforated with unnumbered windows shuttered against the rain – or perhaps it was that none dared look upon this sodden procession of the Masters.
Some steps squeezed down to a mess of boats, many half capsized, lifted by the rising waters of the lake, tethered to mooring posts already submerged. The road was flooding, filthy with scum, the run-off foaming into alleyways, fed from above by spouts vomiting from the roofs as if the sky was trying to scour the city clean. It had been like that all the way. Carnelian had expected, perhaps even hoped for the termite frenzy of the crowds, the views into rooms and lives, even the mouldering stench of the metropolis he had entered as a boy, but he had not seen a soul.
When they had set off along the causeway towards the city, the flinty lake had been unscratched by the ripples of a single boat. True, in many places on either side he had seen wheel ruts in the mud, the churn left behind by feet, but these had held glimmers of reflected sky; had looked as if they had been left there in some ancient time and that nothing but this funeral procession had passed there for long ages of the world.
When they reached the first towers, these had seemed almost ruined, decayed. Above the slurp of the water lapping tunnels and alleys, steps and quays, Carnelian was sure he had heard a child crying, some vague voices, the screeches of an animal being killed, but these could have been the ghosts of the city’s dead inhabitants and were soon lost in the noise of the thunder and the falling rain.
As they slipped through the twilight beneath the crowding tenements, Carnelian felt a lament rising in him and was not sure whether he grieved for the lost city, for the dead, or for himself.
After Osidian and the Quenthas had helped him descend from the watch-tower roof, he had not slept. All night, deprived of Fern, he had struggled alone with his fears and choices. When morning came, he had found that, though his leg ached, it bore his weight easily enough. The sisters had accompanied him down to the road. He had sent them to fetch Fern and his brothers. While he waited, the Wise had given him instructions on how to negotiate the Three Gates.
A grinding sound snatched his attention. Ahead, between the gatehouses, something massive was twisting, changing form. It was just reflections in the brass gates as they opened for him. He realized they must already be on one of the bridges that spanned the Wheel moat. Glancing to starboard, he looked down into the great curving trench and saw how much higher the water was than it had been the last time he had crossed it. Through the opening gates, he glimpsed what seemed the cobbles of the marketplace, but then these began to rise in a surge that faded away in the veiling rain. A dense throng. Earth-is-Strong pounded closer, and ripples of panic moved through the multitude as they struggled to get out of her way. In the milling pattern of heads, Carnelian detected many smaller than the rest. Children. Filling the Wheel as far as he could see were the tributaries and the flesh tithe.
It was Poppy who first moved to peer through the screen at the tributaries. Krow went with her, then Fern. Carnelian watched them for a while then rose and joined them. The crowd below had opened an avenue down which Earth-is-Strong was pounding. Carnelian regarded the sea of humanity, saddened by how different this was from the tumultuous marketplace he had once crossed. How quietly the people below watched their progress. He remembered that Fern had once been among just such a throng with his father and brother. He glanced round and saw Fern braced against the sway of the deck, his face grim as he gazed out.
‘How long have they been here?’ Poppy asked, softly. She had poked her fingers through the bony lattice and clung to it.
Krow put an arm around her. ‘Probably quite a while.’
Carnelian recalled that he too had been with Fern and the tithe children of both their tribes.
‘They will be starving by now,’ growled Fern.
So many children. That such numbers should be given up to the Masters each and every year. The way they watched the Masters pass in such perfect silence. Contempt rose in Carnelian at their docility. Where was their rage?
‘Master?’
Carnelian turned on his Lefthand, making the man start. He calmed himself. ‘What is it?’
‘If it please you, Master, which way shall we turn?’
Carnelian glanced back down to the Wheel; they had reached the ring of black stone inlaid into the Wheel that was called the Dragonway. ‘The shortest way.’
His Lefthand muttered into his voice fork and the hawsers on Earth-is-Strong’s horns pulled her head round and she began to turn east.
‘The Standing Dead,’ exclaimed Poppy, pointing.
A vast gash seemed to be opening in Osrakum’s mountain wall that was guarded on either side by figures that might have been men except that those of flesh and blood were mere dust at their feet. Even through the rain Carnelian could see the brooding stare that those giants cast down upon the tributaries. Between them more and more of the Canyon they guarded was coming into view. The deeper he could see into that dark mouth, the greater grew his dread. After everything that had happened, it was miraculous that he should be here again, but it did not feel like any kind of homecoming. He glanced round, seeking some distraction. Perhaps he had hoped to see wonder in the faces of those he loved, at least for a moment, but there was only fear, as if they were looking upon the very gateway to the land of the dead. And why not? Once they went in, what hope had any of them of ever returning?
The ankle of one of the colossi slid past the starboard screen as an immense column of scabrous rock. They heard more than saw the walls of the Canyon funnelling together as the thunder of Earth-is-Strong’s footfalls reverberated, the judder of her tower and harness shivered and echoed. The scuffle of the palanquins following them was a constant scratching on their hearing. More disconcerting than this was a swelling roar. He had started to hear it when they were crossing the bridge over the Wheel moat into the Canyon mouth. The last time he had heard the Cloaca, it had been a murmur. It had been tame then; now it was carrying the run-off from the Skymere swollen by the Rains. The bass rumble reminded him of the Blackwater Falls in the Upper Reach. No doubt Morunasa would hear in that roar his god speaking.
Then he became aware of the twilight illuminating the turn up ahead. He knew what he would see when they rounded it, but even so, as it came into sight it shocked him. The vast hedge of bronze that filled the Canyon from side to side was holding back a glow of morning light but, in one place, this sombre dam was breached. Perhaps as much as a third of it had been torn down.
When Earth-is-Strong moved into the breach in the Green Gate there was more than enough space to spare. The ripped edges of the bronze thicket loomed, its blades and thorns like frayed threads. On their passage through what had been the first of three gates, chambers were exposed on either side like the hollows of a crushed snail shell. Torn floors hung in shreds. Doorways opening like wounds at various heights funnelled away into dark, still-secret recesses of the fortress. Propped up against these ruins were the gates themselves, two slabs of bronze rising higher than they could see. Carnelian had been told to expect this, but still he was appalled that Molochite had been prepared to demolish a part of Osrakum’s defences merely to indulge his whim to go to battle in the ancient relic of the Iron House. Was it his certainty of victory or, perhaps, his concern to maintain his majesty in comfort that had led him to this vandalism?
Once they were through the Gate, the Canyon opened up before them, its smooth floor running off towards the next turn. Carnelian looked for and found the Lords’ Way running in its groove in the cliff along which he had travelled in a chariot with his father. The roar of the Cloaca had become more remote as it had widened into a black chasm. He knew the shelves of the quarantine were down there somewhere. Remembering Tain’s description of his ordeal in that darkness, Carnelian resisted turning to look at him. Each day being moved to the next shelf down the Canyon before passing under the Blood Gate. His brother had thought the chasm a way down to the Underworld. At least, this time, neither Tain nor the rest of his people were going to have to endure that. Molochite’s breach in the Green Gate had already allowed the pollution of the outer world to reach deep into the Canyon. It was strange they had him to thank for their deliverance. Carnelian watched the next turn approaching and longed to reach the light flooding from it. What he really wanted was to save his people from quarantine altogether. He desired them to go immediately to their coomb with his father. He wanted to have them all as far away as possible from what was going to happen.
With each sway of the cabin, a tower had been solidifying in the twilight ahead, like the blade of some immense axe half embedded in the Canyon floor and splitting the Cloaca in two. The closer they came, the deeper Carnelian could see the roots of the tower going down into the fork of the chasm. As the tower reared above them, the spikes in its crown which he had taken for the ends of joists glimmered. He saw they were brass, these structures, shaped like the calyxes of lilies swelling their trumpet mouths down towards him. They were the throats of massive flame-pipes; passing under their gape, Carnelian imagined with horror what would happen to them should these weapons begin vomiting fire.
A lurching shift in the monster’s gait made him drop his gaze and see her turning to move onto a slab that spanned the nearest branch of the forking chasm. Under the looming flame-pipe tower, they crossed to the great oval space that lay within the embrace of the chasm branches and that was in the deep shadow of a vast rampart rising at its further end. A massive fortress, gloomy against the morning. Carnelian felt the hackles rising on his neck. He had seen this place before, though then, so close up, he had not fully appreciated its scale. This was the Blood Gate whose portals, he judged, would overtop a watch-tower of the Guarded Land as much as a Master did a sartlar. Gate-towers on either side rose loftier still. Disturbed, he remembered the instructions the Wise had given him before setting off. ‘Is there enough light?’
His Lefthand murmured into his voice fork, then, nodding a few times, turned to Carnelian. ‘Just enough, apparently, Seraph.’
‘Send the signal.’
As the man relayed the command to the mirrorman on the roof, Carnelian became aware of a glimmering coming as if from the sky. He rose from his chair and advanced towards the screen. Gripping it against the cabin sway he looked up. The towers swooped so high, he could not see their summits, but he saw they grew gills in which clusters of flame-pipes nested like worms. Together with the pipes on the tower behind them, the space upon which Earth-is-Strong was walking was a plain of death. Molochite had not, after all, left Osrakum undefended. In comparison to these structures, the Green Gate was nothing but a flimsy fence. Legions’ boast had not been vainglorious. Had Molochite chosen to remain behind these defences, he would have been invulnerable. Had Osidian dared bring his dragons in so far, they would have been incinerated.
Carnelian fought vertigo as, with a dull shudder, the gates began to open, making it seem the whole world was collapsing. Soon they were moving in between the receding cliffs of bronze. A spindle of grey light widened up ahead as the second pair of portals began to open. The walls of the fortress, its doors and tiers, grew increasingly substantial as their edges caught the light. Rows of tiny figures lined the avenue between the gates. Half-black they were, but not girded with the blood-red cloaks of the Ichorians who had once manned these gates. Instead their garments were green and black and their collars wintry in the gloom.
Carnelian had agreed to lead the funerary procession. Osidian wanted to bring up the rear in case he should have need to linger at the Blood Gate to ensure the Ichorians there swore fealty to him. He had no wish to become imprisoned in Osrakum as had been his fathers for centuries.
The second set of portals parting gave them access to the Canyon beyond. Its walls had been reddened up to a great height as if by a tide of blood. As Earth-is-Strong crossed over the lefthand chasm branch on another span, Carnelian’s gaze descended the barracks’ galleries to the colonnades below, with their machines and piers and counterweights. When he, long ago, had seen these structures, he had not known what they were. Now he recognized them as the mechanisms of a cothon. Arches and berths upon which the Red Ichorian dragon towers had rested disassembled. Racks where their flame-pipes had been stowed. Behind, the shadows must conceal the openings to the stable caves in which the dragons of the Red Legion had slept. All empty now, all smashed and broken and dead at Makar. He brooded over this as they continued down the Canyon; how much had already been lost, how much destroyed.
Ahead, running from cliff to cliff, the final fortress reared its sombre wall. Behind was the Hidden Land of Osrakum. Carnelian’s heart began to beat so loudly he was amazed none in the cabin seemed to hear it. Even as they moved into the shadow of the Black Gate, the leftmost of two portals began to open. Poppy and Krow were standing against the screen, though Carnelian had not noticed them moving forward. He rose, a childlike enthusiasm rising in him to watch the wonder on their faces. Bells began bruising the air. Not a single bell to announce his blood-rank as had happened when he last entered, but a multitude of them, their pealing building echo upon echo until he became sure the Black Gate and the walls of the Canyon must shatter from the reverberation. He did not care, for he had reached the screen and, with a quick glance at Poppy and Krow, he fixed his gaze upon the opening gate.
A landscape wrought from flint. Not blue and smiling, the Skymere, but dark, opaque. Certainly no mirror to heaven. Carnelian looked for the Yden, but its emerald had lost its fire. Dull, it looked, lifeless, its once verdant riot seeming to have been smothered by mould. From its faded heart the Pillar of Heaven rose, a black thorn that seemed to be pricking the brooding sky. The Labyrinth mound seemed no less forbidding than the Isle of Flies. Osrakum’s sacred mountain wall, the curving grin of a greying corpse. The coombs, rotted pockets in which palaces lodged their grey moraine.
Carnelian’s elation drained away. His memory of Osrakum’s beauty died. He was reluctant to look at Poppy’s face, but he could not help himself. It reflected the grey crater. Her expression was very far from wonder. Krow had his arm around her and together they looked, stone-faced, upon what was to be their home. Almost Carnelian said to them that it could be glorious in the sun, but he remembered how dangerous a place this was. Could any amount of beauty compensate for such danger? As he gazed upon the Hidden Land, it occurred to him, grimly, that the face she was showing them now might be her true one.
Down through the Valley of the Gate they went, between the thickets of polygonal columns whose tips bore the shape of men. Not angels, as they had appeared to him the previous time he had seen them; instead a miserable near-faceless multitude, seeming to watch them pass. He brooded on the accepted belief that they were the Quyan host turned to stone.
As a more human assemblage came into sight, at first he felt relief. A rising pyramid of gilded, perfect Masters that enringed the bowl in which the Great were wont to hold their Clave. When last he had gazed upon them, he had been wandering at their feet. From this height, however finely wrought, they seemed mere carvings. The furious fire the sun had lent them then had died. As they slipped past, he watched the bulk of Earth-is-Strong reflected in their gold, fragmented into a many-scaled shadow. It made him shudder. He could not help feeling it was a glimpse of the Darkness-under-the-Trees creeping into Osrakum.
The Valley columns bristled to a sudden end where they reached the Skymere shore. To either side, as far as Carnelian could see, flights of steps cascaded down to the water. Only the road they were on continued, borne out over the lake on the back of a vast causeway. Sartlar numberless as sand grains had built it and mortared it with their blood. For a moment, Carnelian brooded on the mounds of their dead he and Fern had wandered among upon the battlefield. It seemed that, whatever happened, it was the flesh of the brutes, their blood, that was the matter from which all else was built.
He was woken from his musings by noticing what appeared to be leaden blocks forming a neat barricade across the mouth of the Great Causeway. Not of lead, but silver: the many-wheeled chariots of the Wise. Cordons of dark figures formed a barrier before the steps from amongst whom tendrils of smoke were beginning to rise. Here and there along their line, some furtive glimmers. He leaned forward, squinting through the slits of his mask. Ammonites, crowds of them spilling down the steps, amongst them all manner of structures.
He sat back, thinking. What had to be said would be better said unmasked, even though his face might betray his doubts. ‘Be blind.’
Immediately his Left and Right clasped their hands to their faces and bent forward to touch the backs of their hands to the deck. Carnelian removed his mask and looked at Fern, then Poppy, then Krow. ‘You must leave me and accompany my father and brothers to our…’ He tried to find an Ochre word for coomb, but failed. He half pointed in the direction where he knew Coomb Suth lay. ‘Across the water.’
‘Why can’t we stay with you, Carnie?’
‘I need to go on alone, Poppy. Where I’m going, you’d only get in the way. I need to know you’re all safe. And I want you to take care of my father.’
‘What is it you need to do?’ asked Fern, sensing his fear.
‘It’s something dangerous, but something I have to do. Do you trust me?’
Fern, slowly, gave a nod.
‘When will we see you again?’
Carnelian saw how scared Poppy was. ‘Whatever happens, in a day, two at the most, I’ll cross the water to you.’ He buried deep his dread that, on that day, he might be coming to say goodbye to them for ever. He saw Fern’s misery. As their eyes met, Carnelian was sure Fern guessed something of what he was trying to hide.
‘We need to descend to the ground now,’ he said, hoping Fern would accept this. When his lover gave an imperceptible nod, Carnelian felt a lightening of his burden. Whatever happened, he convinced himself that Fern would survive and would take care of Poppy and Krow. He managed a smile for the two youngsters. ‘You must take as much care as if the people on the ground were raveners.’ He was glad to see the colour draining from their faces. He remasked and bade his officers see again. The marumaga sneaked glances at Fern and the others. Carnelian could see their shock and appreciated how strange it must seem to them, in spite of not understanding a word, the intimate way he talked to his people.
As he rose painfully from the command chair, he raised his hand to stop Fern coming to help him. Putting weight on his wounded leg, he was sure it would carry him. He pulled the Suth Ruling Ring from his finger and thrust it into Fern’s hand. ‘Give it to the eldest of my brothers.’ He considered urging all kinds of advice on him, but the handing over of the ring would have to be enough to show his brothers how important Fern was to him. ‘Tell my father everything that you know.’
Fern raised his eyebrows, but then nodded and closed his hand around the ring. Carnelian sent him ahead, then Poppy and Krow after him. When they had disappeared through the hole in the deck, he turned to his officers. ‘Hold her here until I return. You will take commands from none but me.’
The two men jerked their heads. ‘As you command, Master.’
Satisfied, Carnelian turned to the ladder.
Leaning a little on Fern, Carnelian watched ammonites swarming the palanquins. Masters emerging from them were coaxed by the silver-masked ammonites towards the ragged wall of smoke that was rising at the head of the Turtle Steps. There, from among the ranks of purple figures, rose the taller shapes of their masters the Wise, who, though motionless, seemed to be overseeing the reception of the Chosen. Like ants the ammonites clipped the finery from the Masters. Robes as bright as butterfly wings were cast into braziers, where their iridescent colours soon turned black. Divested of their gorgeous carapaces, the Masters grew thinner, paler. Stripped of their distinguishing heraldry, they were revealed as being very much alike as they approached the wall of smoke. Next they were flayed of their ritual protection. The windings came away like dead skin, revealing the white beneath. Painfully thin they seemed, in their icicle nakedness. Vulnerable. Wearing nothing but their masks they disappeared into the smoke.
The ache in Carnelian’s leg stung him into motion towards a nearby clump of Sapients. Closer, he became aware of the figure at the heart of their conclave. The stone surmounting his staff was emberous whilst all the rest were emerald. The murmuring of the homunculi faltered. Carnelian recognized the red finial with a sinking heart. It was too late to retreat. The eyes of the homunculi indicated the awareness of their masters to his approach.
‘My Lord Law,’ he said, dismayed that the Grand Sapient had reached the cleansing cordon before him. It was going to be harder to get what he wanted.
‘Suth Carnelian,’ said Law’s homunculus. Neither had turned towards him.
Before Carnelian had time to marshal his thoughts, the eyes of the homunculi released him to fix upon another Sapient approaching. The staff with which he walked gave off a ruby glint above his pale fist. A homunculus was holding his other hand. When close, the little man took the staff with one hand, while guiding his master’s fingers to his throat. ‘Greater Third of Gates,’ he announced.
The other homunculi murmured an echo. The Third’s homunculus locked his gaze to that of Law’s. ‘Does my Lord wish to pass through the cleansing system now?’
‘I shall be cleansed in Thrones,’ said Law’s homunculus. ‘Another system is being prepared at the Forbidden.’
‘And my Lord’s ammonites?’
‘Through the cages.’
‘I too wish to pass my servants through the cleansing,’ said Carnelian. He could not help glancing back to where he had left Fern and the others with his father’s palanquin. His brothers were there. The Quenthas. He was relieved to see they were all still kneeling with their heads bowed. He had asked them to do that so as to make them invisible to the Masters processing past them. He fingered the roughness of the military cloak he was wearing, that he had found in his father’s tent. Certain he had heard his name in the muttering of the Third’s homunculus, he turned back.
‘… come to petition me,’ Law was saying. His homunculus turned on Carnelian. ‘Why do you want this, Suth Carnelian?’
The Sapients crowded round him like crows, but he sensed their wariness. It occurred to him they might think he spoke on Osidian’s behalf. His mind focused on his need to get his people through this safely. It could be dangerous to show any concern for them. ‘My father ails.’
‘And would have died long ago were it not for our ministrations.’
Anger rose in Carnelian. Rather than saving him, just then he felt they had poisoned him. There was also the part they had played in his deposal and the recent use they had made of him. He felt no gratitude. ‘Still, I fear for him should he be long delayed here.’
‘The Ruling Lord Suth is high among the Great and so will naturally be among the first to be processed.’
Carnelian clenched his teeth. He had played badly and was now trapped. He could see no way except the truth. ‘My Lord, I want our servants to be processed with him because they know how to tend to his needs.’
‘Is House Suth possessed of no other servants?’
Carnelian felt the trap pressing in on him. He had already all but confessed he had some special interest in these servants. Fear rose in him lest he had made them pieces the Wise could use in their struggle against Osidian. If so, that was too late to undo. Now even less did he dare trust them to the quarantine. ‘Nevertheless, I wish it.’
‘What you ask directly contravenes the Law.’
‘Much is already out of balance,’ Carnelian said, with stress. ‘This does not seem to me a great sin.’
The homunculi muttered an echo of his words then fell silent. Carnelian became aware of the bustle all around him. He resisted an urge to turn and look at his people again.
‘We shall grant you this boon, Suth Carnelian,’ said Law’s homunculus. The little man turned his gaze on the homunculus of the Third. ‘Process not only the Ruling Lord Suth, but also his slaves, though only after all the Great. We do not wish to needlessly provoke their ire.’
Carnelian had got what he wanted, but at what cost?
Standing against the cabin screen, Carnelian watched his people embarking onto a bone boat. After taking his leave of Grand Sapient Law, he had summoned the Quenthas and asked them to shepherd his people through the cleansing. Then he had climbed back to his dragon tower, from where he could see down to the water’s edge.
He sighed with relief when the bone boat pulled away from the steps. The mirror of the lake was being opaqued by the wakes of dozens of the pale boats rowing the Great back to their coombs all along the outer shore. He limped back and sank heavily into the command chair. While he waited for the chariots of the Wise to move aside, he gazed down the causeway towards the brooding Yden. At last the way was clear. When his Lefthand confirmed that the funerary procession was ready, Carnelian gave the command to begin the crossing.
Thunder reverberated around the crater. The rain was giving the Skymere the look of knapped obsidian. It was drumming on the roof above his head. The mirrorman up there was surely nearly drowned, but still Carnelian could almost envy him and, even more, the lookout, exposed to the raw energies of the sky, washed by the elemental downpour. Osrakum could be seen only dimly through the rain. He could just make out the looming shadow of the Pillar of Heaven. At its feet, the lagoons of the Yden had swollen into a single, murky mere. Its verdant glories lived only in his heart, illuminated by the summer light of childhood. The actual world was dark and forbidding.
Even above the hissing rain he could hear the Yden’s black water roaring under the road to gush out, furious, down the channels to froth the edge of the Skymere below. Paths of marble wound down beside the streams; flights of pale steps and landings cascaded down to quays. Carnelian imagined the Masters would soon be disembarking there from bone boats, climbing up to the road on their way to the Plain of Thrones and the Labyrinth. Then he noticed the narrow house, end on to the Skymere shore. A kharon boathouse like the one in which he and Osidian had been kept prisoners after their kidnapping. He remembered again the sybling Hanuses, minions of their mistress Ykoriana. The woman who, after everything that had happened, still had the power over him of life or death.
It seemed an age since they had reached the hill that held within its summit the Plain of Thrones. Gradually the road had been winding up its flank. Hunched in his chair, Carnelian was shivering, listening to the rain. The rough stuff of his father’s cloak was in his grip. Lifting his head he peered westwards seeking to glimpse Coomb Suth but, through the rain, he could see nothing except for the shadowy Sacred Wall, which seemed a far, leaden horizon.
His Left muttered something at Carnelian’s feet, then Earth-is-Strong began to turn. Sliding off towards his left, steps swooped down in many flights. He recognized them as the same he and Jaspar had climbed from the Quays of the Dead. Then the view of the rain-filled void was snuffed out by a wall of stone. The command chair pushed hard into his back even as the deck tilted up. They were climbing into a ravine by means of long shallow steps. Everything shuddered and rattled as the tower began to swing heavily first to one side, then the other. His grip tight on the arms of the chair, he watched with alarm as a ravine wall would lurch towards them, then away. After a while, he relaxed his grip, reassured that Earth-is-Strong’s gait would not dash her tower to pieces against the rock.
As they climbed, Carnelian fell to wondering what had happened to Jaspar. He hoped the man was dead: even considering his sins, he had suffered enough.
At last the deck tilted forward, even as the ravine gave them up into the vast and airy cliff-walled Plain of Thrones. Carnelian had eyes for nothing except the black trunk that rose from behind that wall. The Pillar of Heaven was a tree whose storm-sky canopy cast all the world beneath into shadow.
They were approaching the centre of the plain when the rain stopped, suddenly. The sky gave one last shudder, then eerie silence reigned. Before them lay a ring within a ring. Carnelian had seen this thing before, but not from above. The outer ring swept round like a cothon. From this a mosaic of ridges of fiendish complexity converged on the inner ring. His gaze became enmeshed in the radial branching tendrils that seemed like the iris of some vast eye. Escape lay only in the double inner ring that enclosed the dark pupil. For a moment he was possessed by an uneasy conviction this was an opening to a well, a smooth sinkhole into which he might tumble.
It began to drizzle. Drawing back into himself, he gazed at the Stone Dance of the Chameleon, ostensibly a calendrical device. At its centre, the twelve month stones. Eight red, two black, two green. Upon these twelve was carved the Law-that-must-be-obeyed. The stones had a round-shouldered look as if they were hunched against the rain, or against the too-vast sky. Still square and young, another twelve stood behind like ghosts. It was from these that ridges flowed, branching, meshing, intertwining to connect with the outer ring of, as he recalled, commentary stones. The twelve innermost stones were the least imposing of the Dance and yet they were clearly the jewel for which all the others were nothing more than a setting. He could see how time had softened them. His gut told him that even when Legions had been a child, these had been ancient and once had stood there on their own.
As Earth-is-Strong carried him round the rings of stones, Carnelian gazed for a moment, sombrely, upon the road running off south-west, along which the funerary procession would soon go. At the end of that road were the caves in the wall of the plain, where the Wise embalmed the dead. As the wall continued to slide past, he discerned, in a long row with their backs to it, a line of what seemed pale homunculi. Except that he knew these were not tiny men, but the colossi who stood each astride the entrance to a tomb. These it was who, gazing down upon the Plainsmen tributaries, had given them the name for the Chosen, ‘the Standing Dead’. The view continued to swing round and he saw the terraces and galleries of the lower palace carved into the cliff above those tomb guardians. He frowned, desolate. There, penetrating deep into the cliff like a nasal cavity into a skull, was the hollow pyramid in which the Masters would stand in tiers as bright as angels as they gazed down upon their tributaries. Earth-is-Strong was heading straight towards this now. Before her a black rectangle stretched out over the floor of the Plain. Upon this tens of thousands would cower. Soon they would be there, gazing up to watch Osidian made God. Perhaps they would see Carnelian sacrificed.
His Left gave the command to turn the dragon onto the road that skirted the black field.
‘Belay that order,’ Carnelian said. ‘Steady as she goes.’
On the ground, his back to the Forbidden Door, Carnelian looked back the way they had come. Grand Sapient Labyrinth was there behind him with one of his Thirds and a gang of their ammonites. They had offered him an immediate cleansing so that he might enter the Labyrinth, but when Grand Sapient Law on arrival had declared he would wait for Osidian, Carnelian had said he would wait with him.
The funerary procession had already reached the caves of the embalmers. There the palanquins seemed a nest of tiny beetles. He could just make out a thread of people returning along the road towards the standing stones. He guessed these must be the bearers being driven to the cages of the quarantine.
He squinted back towards the ravine through which he had entered the Plain. Watching the minuscule movement on the floor of the slot in the cliff, he became certain it was a towered dragon entering the Plain. It had to be Heart-of-Thunder. Grumbling, the sky was beginning to blacken in the east. Carnelian’s spirits sank even further. Night would fall before Osidian reached him. He had hoped they would confront Ykoriana in the light. He gazed up at the galleries scaling the cliff like some vast ladder to the sky. Rock everywhere riddled with holes. From any one of those myriad cavities she could be scrutinizing him with borrowed eyes.
Starless night. A tremor in the ground made Carnelian relive the horrors of the battle. Many dragons were approaching. The massing shadow of the leading monster was growing larger, carrying the lantern of its tower. The world quaked as light filtering down from the honeycombed cliff began to sketch Heart-of-Thunder’s mountainous form.
Carnelian met Osidian as he descended from his tower. ‘I had expected you sooner.’
There was only shadow in the loop of Osidian’s cowl. ‘I had to take the submission of the Sinistrals at the Blood Gate then wait while they gathered supplies.’
Render, thought Carnelian, almost tasting it. Then he gave a start as the night dewed into flesh: the ash-misted faces of the Oracles. Their grim expressions could have been fear. Whatever they were feeling, Carnelian was filled with unease. At that moment Osidian angled his head back. Some of the light coming from the terraces above found the sinister mirror of his mask. ‘Come.’
Together they advanced upon the Wise, who were framed by the pale silver faces of their ammonites. They halted beneath the jewelled gaze of the two Grand Sapients.
‘Welcome, Celestial,’ said Labyrinth’s homunculus. ‘We have brought the means by which you shall be cleansed of the taint of the outer world.’
It seemed to Carnelian it would take more than unguents to do that.
‘I shall submit to the cleansing, my Lords,’ said Osidian, ‘but I give warning I intend to bring these barbarians in with me.’ He turned enough to take in the Oracles and the Marula warriors behind them.
As soon as the homunculi finished repeating his words, Labyrinth’s homunculus began to speak, but was interrupted by Law’s. ‘We cannot allow this, Celestial. The Law-that-must-be-obeyed is unequivocal. These barbarians may be infested with corruption that external examination will not reveal. To bring them onto holy ground is to endanger its very sanctity.’
‘Whatever danger they pose, my Lord, I am no less a threat. You will clean them as you clean me.’
‘It is perilous, Celestial, to let these animals pass through the Forbidden Door untamed,’ said Labyrinth. ‘You may have fought your way back into Paradise, but you must not force your way into Heaven.’
‘Lecture me not, my Lords, about peril. Only last night was my own life endangered. I will not leave myself thus exposed again.’
‘Celestial, the Sinistral Ichorians are the proper guardians of your life.’
‘Who then will guard the Gates?’
The Grand Sapients absorbed his words through the throats of their homunculi. For a moment, it seemed they would respond, but their fingers faltered.
‘I intend to breed from these creatures a new caste of Ichorians that shall be in their person a joining of the two previous castes. Their skin shall symbolize the unity of my rule.’
Carnelian’s unease rose in unspoken protest: Have you forgotten the promise you made to save their Lower Reach? He found among the Oracles Morunasa’s sombre face. Was he aware of Osidian’s plans for them? He bit his tongue when it would have warned that the wealth of Osrakum would corrupt these barbarians. He had enough problems of his own. Behind the Grand Sapients, he could see the Forbidden Door. What dangers might lie beyond that portal? If he were to be slain before he had a chance to put in place the necessary arrangements, his people would suffer. He focused upon the long, blind masks floating above. The fingers of the Grand Sapients formed collars of ice around the throats of their homunculi. Carnelian wondered what thoughts, what calculations were flashing through their masters’ minds.
It was Osidian’s voice that broke his reverie. ‘If needs be I will blast my way through to the Labyrinth.’
Carnelian remembered the thunder in the ground. He knew what power Osidian had brought with him and was not surprised when the Wise capitulated.