Does a dreamer walk in the Underworld?
Arrayed in a robe of vibrant green, Osidian reminded Carnelian of Jaspar’s father on his bier of ice. Save for the lances they had had returned to them after purification, the Marula warriors were naked. Morunasa had commanded them to submit to the ammonites as he and the Oracles were doing. Enraged with fear, the Marula had nevertheless allowed their leather armour to be cut from them and burned. Lotus smoke relaxed them enough to allow the ammonites to wash them, to rasp the curls from their heads. Even their mouths were invaded. Every part of them strigils could reach was scraped until, in places, they bled. The ammonites had been more gentle with Carnelian and Osidian, but no less thorough. Something had been put on Carnelian’s wound so that now he hardly felt it. He had insisted on keeping his father’s cloak, but it had had to be thoroughly cleansed before he was allowed to wrap it over the green robe provided by the ammonites. As they were ushered into the tunnel that lay behind the Forbidden Door, the familiar drugged remoteness gave way to dread.
Tomb shelves on either side cramped their stumbling march. The lanterns the ammonites carried lit their masks from beneath, making them seem to be the vengeful dead. Carnelian tried to find Sthax among the warriors, but they could all have passed for shadows were it not for their staring eyes. The fear in the Marula soon took root in Carnelian as they crept down into the Underworld.
Around him the Marula collapsed suddenly to the ground. Shocked, Carnelian came to a halt. The tunnel walls had disappeared. Unawares, he had strayed into a vast forest of the night. The girth of the trunks implied monstrous height. He focused on the green flame he had been following: Osidian once again leading them to the hoped-for light of the Earthsky. Carnelian’s eyes filled with tears of longing to look upon those he loved among the Tribe. Only his breath separated him from the dead. He reached out and touched one of the trunks. Cold stone, not bark. This was the Labyrinth. He gazed up and saw the stone, baroqued with glyphs, rising up beyond the reach of the lantern light and knew it to be a sarcophagus whose pith was the mummy of a God Emperor long deceased. For a moment he was haunted by a memory of the pygmies buried in their baobabs. Then he was gazing about him. Dimly, he could see more of the columns marching off in every direction.
A whimpering around his feet made him look down and see the Marula warriors curled up, cowering, their hands clasped over their smooth heads, their quivering shoulders, muffling their ears. Perhaps they believed they had been brought to the Isle of Flies. Were they wrong? Panic rising, Carnelian glanced up, feeling hunted. The Oracles gaped, staring with wonder. Among them Morunasa, a stranger without his ashen pallor, in whose yellow eyes Carnelian saw what he most feared. Morunasa knew his god was here. Carnelian did not care whether the Darkness-under-the-Trees had come in with them, or if he had always dwelled here. Morunasa cocked his head, his eyes closed. Carnelian listened too. A strange rumbling was pounding the air. His breath caught in his throat. It was so like the sound the Blackwater made as it forked round the Isle of Flies to tumble, roaring, into the Lower Reach. The sound the Oracles maintained was the voice of their god.
Monsters surrounded them. Sybling Ichorians, two-headed, many-limbed like crabs. Carapaced with bronze, cloaked with darkness. Osidian barked a command that confirmed Carnelian’s fear this was an ambush. Morunasa and the other Oracles reacted by shouting at the Marula, rushing back among them, kicking them, so that the warriors scrambled to their feet, scrabbling for their lances. Beyond this chaos, the sybling Sinistrals fell some on one knee, some on two, lowering their casqued heads, both tattooed and not, their cloaks subsiding like billows of tar smoke. ‘Celestial,’ they murmured.
Osidian was still tense as he surveyed the guardsmen. The Marula warriors had formed up with their lances. Carnelian saw their eyes and knew that, at a word, they would fall upon the syblings, releasing their fear as bloody rage.
It was Osidian relaxing a little that calmed everyone. ‘Have the Halls of Rebirth been made ready to receive me?’
The syblings kneeling in front of Osidian bowed their two heads further. ‘As much as could be done in the time available, Celestial.’
Osidian extended a hand to raise the guardsmen from their knees. ‘Lead on.’
The commander of the Sinistral Ichorians looked uncertainly at the Marula. It seemed to Carnelian the syblings were reluctant to cede their place at the Jade Lord’s side to these barbarians, but when Osidian gestured more insistently, they obeyed. At Osidian’s command Morunasa and some of his Oracles put themselves between him and the Sinistrals, then they all set off.
As he walked, Carnelian listened again for that distant roar. It had to be rain being drained by gutters from the vast canopy of stone above their heads. Still, glancing into the crowding blackness all around, he felt a creeping unease that, in such a place, Osidian should choose to put so much faith in the Oracles of the Darkness-under-the-Trees.
Then, through the columns, Carnelian glimpsed a trembling spire of light. They moved towards its beacon. With every step it widened, but also it grew taller until it seemed to him the path of the sun lay twinkling across a brooding sea. They were entering a world that appeared lit by the melancholy, slanting amber of a northern late afternoon. The columns of the sarcophagi soared in the reflected glow, until the soft wavering light had reached up to reveal the faces surmounting them and the lofty arches that flew from one to the other upon which sat the distant ceiling. He realized that the reason everything was bathed in glimmering light was because the columns and vaults were all skinned with gold.
‘The Shimmering Stair,’ Osidian breathed and Carnelian saw the source of light was a flight of steps of mirror gold climbing a hill flanked by sarcophagus columns and banistered by walls in which fluttered countless flames. Dark mouths, in pairs, opened all the way up the stair, culminating in a single gape.
As they continued to advance, a vast moat opened up before their feet whose mirror doubled the glowing golden vision. Crossing this on a causeway, squinting against the coruscating air, Carnelian only slowly became aware of a dark figure standing at the foot of the stair, haloed by its shimmer. The hackles rose on his neck. Was this Morunasa’s god in human form? The closer they approached this apparition, the more mortal it appeared to be. It had a strange globular head, a crown, perhaps, except that Carnelian had a nagging feeling he had seen it before. A few more steps and he knew who it was. He looked for and found upon its dark head the glimmer of its double mask: two gold Master’s faces set side by side.
‘You!’ Osidian exclaimed.
Carnelian had good reason to remember the sybling Hanuses: Ykoriana’s lackeys who had overseen him and Osidian being forced, drugged, into funeral urns to meet a certain and terrible death.
The syblings bent forward, leaning to one side and reaching for the ground with a thin arm. Thus supported, they folded into a prostration so painfully that Carnelian felt they must be wounded. Osidian waved the Sinistrals and Marula out of his path and went forward, Carnelian at his side. They both gazed down at the double-lobed head. It had changed. One side of it was smaller, wrinkled.
‘Rise,’ Osidian said, his voice tight.
Carnelian observed with what difficulty the syblings came to their feet. The twin faces of gold, though imperious and beautiful, hung at an angle that cheated them of their power.
‘Unmask,’ Osidian commanded and Carnelian could hear how dangerous he was.
A single, tremulous voice sounded from behind the double mask. ‘Celestial… the barbarians…’ The syblings lifted a hand to indicate the Marula.
Coldly, Osidian informed them that, since he had taken the barbarians into his service, they were now a part of the household of the House of the Masks. The syblings bent their head to comply. Their right hand struggled up to worry at the bindings behind the misshapen head. Carnelian looked for and found the left arm hanging withered, useless at the syblings’ side. Then their faces were revealed. The left was unlike Carnelian’s memory of it, but he could adjust to how much it had aged, to the folds in the putty flesh, and in its pitted eyes it had the same black diamonds. The right shocked him. Shrunken, wizened like a dried fig. Where it met the living face, it dragged down the corner of its mouth, the empty cheek, the right eye so that it seemed that, at any moment, the black jewel might be squeezed out like a pip, might run down the cheek like an oily, black tear. Clearly, it was Left-Hanus alone who stood before them. His brother had died. Carnelian gazed with horror at the shrivelled remains of Right-Hanus. In his bones he knew this was Ykoriana’s handiwork.
‘What made you dare appear before me?’ Osidian said.
The sybling’s face grew moist. ‘Your mother, Celestial, bade me come and bring you to her.’ The sybling’s speech was slurred by him being forced to speak out of the left corner of his mouth. ‘To bring you both to her.’
It was as much the sound of that voice as the words it had spoken that chilled Carnelian. The moment was upon him. That Ykoriana had sent the sybling must be a sign that she felt no remorse for what she had done to them. On the contrary, she was clearly determined to brazen it out. Carnelian grew grim. She had reason to be so confident.
‘Take us to her then,’ said Osidian, a weariness in his voice that suggested he was thinking similar thoughts.
Left-Hanus ducked a bow, then motioned with his good hand. A child rose from the shadow at his feet and nestled its head under his hand. Then, hobbling, the sybling turned to the steps and began a slow ascent. Carnelian watched the man as they followed him. He felt no rage, not even anger, but only pity. He could imagine what it was to lose a brother, but even then he could claim none as close to him as the sybling’s. For Carnelian, if one of his brothers were to die he would bury him; he would not have to carry the corpse as part of him all the remaining days of his life.
They climbed the central, raised stair of the Shimmering, passing several of the immense portals that penetrated the slope in pairs. At last they came to the final gateway that gaped at the summit of the steps. Two colossi flanked it, one of jade, the other of mirror obsidian. Osidian came to a halt gazing up to either side. Carnelian could not see what he was looking at, but then noticed the hinges twisting out of the rock from which massive gates had been wrenched. This made him recall the gap torn in the fabric of the Green Gate. Most likely this desecration had the same cause. Portals of iron had stood here, that Molochite had melted down to sheath his chariot. Brooding on this, Carnelian looked through the gateway. His eyes found it hard to grasp the strange geometries of the spaces beyond.
‘The Halls of Rebirth,’ Osidian said, sounding surprised, as if he had never again expected to see them.
They entered a realm of dream. Vast halls they crossed, giving onto perspectives apparently infinite. Forests of gleaming stone. Cliffs of filigreed marble liked bleached bone. Walls of translucent alabaster hung like mist. Pools bisected landscapes of stone polished to a sheen like oiled skin, that was veined with fiery filaments. Chambers echoed to falls of water. Hanus led them through sequences of spaces like the hollows of a seashell, all hung with lamps like clouded stars. Up flights of steps they followed, each stair bringing them into some new world of form, of shimmering colour, of sound. Every surface was slick with subtle reflections. Gargoyles pushed out through membranes of coral, of lapis lazuli. Faces everywhere vanished when you looked at them directly. Feeling eyes upon him, Carnelian, turning, saw only jewel mosaics so fiendish they mesmerized him. Shadows flitted at the edge of vision but, when he looked round, there was nothing there.
Among these wonders the Marula stumbled, their thick feet leaving trails across the mirrored stone which blushed then faded like breath on glass. Some of the Oracles looked around them wild-eyed, their mouths hanging open. The rest hung their heads, gripping each other, like children skulking through a haunted wood.
Rising into open air was like coming awake. Glancing back the way they had come, Carnelian could see nothing but shadow. The splendour of the palace was already fading. They were on the roof. Terraces spilled their cataracts into the immense pit of the Plain of Thrones. He felt a vast presence behind him so menacing it took courage to turn. As the towering blackness came into sight he stopped breathing, certain it was the Darkness-under-the-Trees rearing to engulf him. He gasped back to life as he recognized the Pillar of Heaven: a black shaft plunging down from the light-veined clouds to impale the earth way off down the broad belly of the Labyrinth.
A distorting shadow, Hanus guided them across the Labyrinth roof. When he came to a halt, at his command the Ichorians lit lamps. Carnelian followed Osidian to stand beside the sybling on the brink of a well, still partially covered by an immense slab. Osidian snatched a lamp from one of the guardsmen and held it aloft. Its light found steps spiralling down into blackness.
‘The Path of Blood,’ Osidian muttered and his words seemed to find an echo in the rumbling sky. He turned to the sybling. ‘My mother went this way?’
‘She did, Celestial.’
‘It is forbidden.’
‘She waits for you, Celestial, alone.’
‘Without attendants?’ Osidian’s tone was incredulous.
‘I myself watched her descend, Celestial. None followed her.’
‘Only a candidate may walk this path, accompanied by the primary sacrifice.’
Carnelian’s heart misgave at that word.
‘She asked that you should bring the Lord Suth with you.’
‘She expects us to walk defenceless into her trap?’
The sybling bowed his misshapen head. Carnelian saw a trail of spots leading down the first few steps. He crouched and reached out to touch one. He expected it to be wet and was surprised when it felt like skin. He pinched the thing up, brought it to the nose holes of his mask. Inhaled. Rose. He extended his hand into the light. The petal sat in his palm like a wound. He looked again at the petals on the steps that still seemed like a trail of blood. The well was exuding from its black throat the odour of blood. The hackles rose on his neck. Was this the well that had so often haunted his dreams? He glanced back at the Pillar of Heaven remembering the stair that had taken him to his first meeting with Osidian. In his gut he knew it was his fate to descend into its depths. Even though what lay down there might be his mortal enemy and his own certain death. ‘I think we should go.’
Osidian’s mask turned to him, imperious. ‘Even after what happened last night?’
‘I am certain she will be alone.’ Carnelian was. Ykoriana would want no witnesses for what she was going to say.
‘You saw this in a dream?’
In so many dreams, Carnelian thought, but said: ‘Trust me.’
Osidian’s gold face regarded him impassively. ‘Very well.’ He raised the lantern, perhaps to check it had enough oil.
‘Light is forbidden-’ the sybling began, but Osidian cut him off with a harsh gesture. He passed the lantern to Carnelian, then commanded two of the Sinistrals to give him their swords. Taking them, he offered one to Carnelian, who shook his head. Osidian handed back the unwanted sword, then muttered some instructions to Morunasa. Carnelian set his foot on the top of the stair and, holding the lantern out so that its light fell on the next few steps, he began the descent. As he followed the wall of the well round, he glanced back to make sure Osidian was following him. A grating sound made him aware the slab was being pulled over the opening.
‘We will not be coming back this way,’ Osidian said.
Carnelian suppressed a thrill of panic as the last rind of the dark sky was eclipsed by the stone. Then he resumed the descent, their footfalls having acquired a disturbing echo.
The steps spiralled them down, down into the blackness. Fearing his sight dangerously impaired by the eyeslits through which he was peering, Carnelian removed his mask and hung it at his waist. A moist exhalation rising up from the depths made his skin clammy. The air was thick with the odour of spilled blood. Carnelian put his hand out to touch the wall. It was gritty, slimy. He brought his fingers to his nose.
‘Rust,’ said Osidian.
Carnelian glanced up and saw he too had unmasked. He watched Osidian squinting into the blackness below.
‘If you were going to your Apotheosis, I would be going to my death.’
Osidian focused on Carnelian’s face and he frowned. ‘Go on.’
Carnelian resumed the descent, each step taking him closer to his doom. Notions flitted through his head: of murder and becoming a god; of despair and a striving for absolution.
Down and further down they went. The breeze from below slowly died. It grew hotter until their robes were clinging to their skin. It became harder to breathe. The lantern flame was guttering.
At last they reached the ground and saw a tunnel leading off into blackness. As they moved into it, their hackles rose: shapes were following them. Carnelian convinced himself they were only reflections given feverish life by the pulsing flame. Then the light died and they were in blackness. They came to a halt. The only sounds in the world were their breathing and his own heartbeat. The blackness was smothering. A touch on his hand made him recoil.
‘Just me,’ Osidian whispered.
Carnelian let his hand fall, questing in the darkness for Osidian’s. Their fingers found each other. They crept forward, hand in hand.
Ahead, beyond the end of the tunnel, was what appeared to be a clot of blood glowing. Carnelian and Osidian slowed, unsure of what it was they were approaching. Osidian slipped his hand free of Carnelian’s as they advanced. He raised his mask to set it before his face. Reluctantly, Carnelian copied him and was glad when its slits subdued the glare.
They emerged into open space, both still mesmerized by the mass of redness. This was surmounted by a halo of darker red. Crusted and ridged, like a dried puddle of blood, at whose centre was a face of gold, so beautiful it stopped Carnelian’s breath.
‘Mother,’ said Osidian, coming to a halt at the entrance to the tunnel, half emerging into the light, half remaining in shadow. His mask fell with his hand, exposing his pallid face. Carnelian registered the movement, but his attention could not long be diverted from the scarlet apparition. She was clothed in rose petals. A countless number of them sewn together in drifts, each like a tiny gouge of bloodied skin. The whole robe seemed almost to bleed, in contrast to the deathly, perfect mask that sat above it.
‘My son,’ the mask said, in a rich, melodious voice. The jewelled halo flashed and coruscated as Ykoriana gave Osidian a nod. ‘Carnelian,’ she said, giving another nod.
The rose robe whispered, tore red, shedding petals as she raised an arm. A porcelain hand emerged and formed a gesture of invitation. Drawn by its command they both stepped further into the light. Carnelian raised his mask as a screen, breaking the compulsion of fascination long enough to be able to look up and round. They were emerging from an opening set into a staircase that rose precipitously, lit with lamps, to a great height. On either side tiers shelved off into the gloom. He was becoming aware of the vastness of the cavern they were entering when a flash of light momentarily illuminated its entirety for a moment. An immense space backed with a ladder of tiers set with stone seats. A dull rumble caused the world to quiver as he looked down. He waited until another flash revealed the Plain of Thrones below. They were standing in the Pyramid Hollow. When the darkness returned, the only thing he could see out there was, far away, something like a star fallen burning to the earth.
‘On your head is all the destruction, all the deaths, even among the Chosen,’ Osidian said, pointing to the fallen star. Carnelian regarded the point of light. It was located near the rim of the Plain of Thrones, where the Chosen dead had been carried. That light was likely a pyre made from the palanquins that had brought them there. He remembered other pyres.
He dropped his mask and gazed once more upon Ykoriana. She towered above them; no doubt she stood on ranga. Her robe gave off an intoxicating perfume.
‘I played my part in the destruction of the Balance, but let us not pretend, my Lord, I brought it down alone.’
‘My part in it was also your doing, Madam,’ snarled Osidian, his sword rising in his hand so that Carnelian feared he might impale his mother. ‘You snatched from me what was rightly mine.’
‘I too have lost much, had much taken away from me,’ said Ykoriana, oblivious to the blade aimed at her. Carnelian remembered that she was blind.
‘The Chosen chose me to become the Gods. What you did was a crime, a sin.’
The jewelled halo winked and ran with light as it jerked back. Ykoriana laughed. ‘A sin? You turn the world upside down to right a wrong committed against you and that is perfectly justifiable but, when I act against the wrongs done to me, you name that a sin.’
The point of Osidian’s sword slowly fell. Carnelian was relieved. He gazed up at Ykoriana’s face of gold trying to work out what it was he felt. Whatever it was, he did not want her slain there, now, in cold blood.
Osidian’s face saddened. ‘Years I endured living among filthy barbarians.’ Tears lensed his eyes. Carnelian felt that sight awakening his own grief.
‘I was a slave,’ Osidian said, bleakly, gazing up at his mother through tears. ‘A slave.’ Horror paled his face. ‘It was a living death within the funeral urn.’
The halo dulled as the gold face inclined towards them. ‘You forget, Nephron, to whom you speak. All my life I have been confined, much of it in darkness.’
Osidian grimaced. ‘But it was not I who did that to you,’ he pleaded.
Ykoriana straightened. ‘That hardly matters. What I did to you was not out of hatred. It was simply a tactic in the slow, cold war that has been fought within the House of the Masks for centuries. We are all casualties of that war.’
But not the only ones, thought Carnelian. He flinched when he saw Osidian’s face changing. So would Ykoriana had she been able to see his barely contained fury. Many who had seen it had died. ‘Unnatural mother,’ he hissed.
The gold mask above them moved a little to gaze down on them with imperious scorn. ‘I deny your right to make a claim on me. I know you not who hardly ever saw your face, who never felt your mouth upon my breast. Even your voice is a stranger’s. You were taken from me at birth so that I did not even have a touch of you to salve the pain of your release.’
Her head fell. ‘But you cannot know what it is to carry a child within you, to have it torn bleeding from your womb, knowing it is born to die in sacrifice, to be imprisoned, to be used as I have been used. Yet I have done what I could to protect those of my children that I love.’ She raised her head. ‘You know, Carnelian, how far your father was prepared to go to protect you.’
Carnelian, even while he wondered at the softness of her voice, felt a barb in those words that tore at him.
She pulled herself up and became imperial again. ‘A mother’s love is stronger by far than a father’s. To save her child, she would destroy the world.’
There was a terrible edge to her voice that shook Carnelian, not only with fear, but also with a twinge of desire to be that child.
‘And, yet, you gave yourself and the Masks to the murderer of your daughter.’
Carnelian looked at Osidian, stung by the venom in those words, but saw no rage burning in his eyes, only… was it hope?
The petal robe, shivering, gave off a wall of perfume. ‘Would seeking revenge against her murderer have brought my daughter back from her tomb?’ Her voice was as cold as the metal of her mask. ‘Women are forced to see life as it is. In contrast, you men are so ready to believe in your fantasies, to have your every expectation confirmed. In spite of hating your brother for what he had done, I protected him because he was my path to power. You prefer to believe women victims to their passions, but we can be at least as calculating as you. Love does not make us weak, but strong. Do you remember, Carnelian, when your father brought you to see me? He did so hoping that, through love of my sister, I would stay my hand against you and, even, against him.’ She laughed. ‘Why do men prefer to make themselves blind to who we really are? Perhaps this is why you use us as you do, but be certain I will not let it happen again.’
Carnelian, who had felt he was being reduced to a stupid child, could not follow her. ‘Let what happen again?’
Her mask seemed to regard him for a while. ‘Molochite, I lost control of; you, Nephron, I will not.’
There was doubt and confusion in Osidian’s face. Carnelian felt no doubt, only fear, but also a longing for the relief of at last confronting what he knew was coming.
‘I shall wield not only the power I once had but, now the Balance is broken, vastly more; not only here in Osrakum, but in the world beyond.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Osidian said, anger and anxiety warring in his face.
‘About the power I will have after your Apotheosis, once you wed me.’
Osidian gaped at her, incredulous. ‘Wed you?’
‘I shall be your wife, as I was your brother’s and your father’s before him.’
Osidian stared at her, shaking his head as if he could not believe what he had heard. He looked at Carnelian, seeking confirmation of her madness, but Carnelian only managed a shrug. Osidian swung back towards his mother, grimacing. ‘Recent events must have un-witted you, my Lady.’
In response, her hands emerged from her robe. The sleeves tore, revealing inner layers of sewn petals more intensely red that released an overpowering odour of roses. The porcelain fingers reached behind her head and her mask came loose. Carnelian flinched as her naked face was revealed.
At first he was aware of nothing but her eyes: tapering, oval peridots as limpid as dew caught in the calyx of a flower. Her pale skin reddened where it met the stones so that they seemed to have been forced into wounds. The lips were thin and pursed as if from the strain of biting back too many bitter words. It was a beautiful face, but one that betrayed suffering impatiently borne.
Osidian was gazing at his mother, seeming to seek someone he knew, or thought he knew, or remembered and had lost. ‘I shall lock you away. No one will ever see you again.’
Ykoriana smiled. Though it seemed that tears might at any time squeeze from under her stone eyes, those lips bore the certainty of victory.
Osidian rubbed his face, blinking, as if wiping cobwebs from it. ‘I have no need of your blood, mother. To produce an heir, I shall mate with my sister-niece, Ykorenthe.’
Ykoriana’s face hardened to ice. Her eyes flashed as she pointed over their heads to the steps that rose behind them. ‘We watched your father’s Apotheosis from up there, your grandmothers, your great-aunts and I.’
Carnelian had a feeling Ykoriana was addressing him as much as she was her son. They were his grandmothers, his great-aunts too.
‘All the women of our House watched. We had all taken leave of our brothers, our cousins, our sons. Since the election of your father, they had been held as captives. For days, they had been starved so that they would not pollute the rituals. Even as the Chosen took their places…’ She swept her arms up, taking in the tiers that rose in a cliff behind them. Carnelian looked up and, even though they were in darkness, he imagined the Masters in their glory taking their places on their thrones. ‘… our kin had already been placed within the torsion devices.’
She pointed to the nearest of several peculiar contraptions that hung from posts up both sides of the stair. In the lamplight they looked like the dried carcasses of huge squid, their heads hanging from the posts on hooks, their tentacles dangling almost to the ground.
‘You have not seen these in operation,’ she said, ‘but you will. An ingenious invention of the Wise.’ She raised her left hand with the long fingers drooping. ‘The man or boy is strapped inside.’ She formed her right hand into a beak as if she held a plum stone between the tips of her fingers. She moved this up into the cage of her left hand and withdrew it, closing the cage as if she had left the stone within it. ‘The thongs are all pulled together.’ She drew imaginary threads from the ends of her left fingers. ‘And tied to a capstan.’ Carnelian glanced and saw a capstan beneath the nearest device. ‘Then it is turned, twisting the thongs.’ She spiralled her fingers. ‘Turn after turn, the tentacles above tightening, digging the barbs that line their inner surface deeper and deeper into flesh.’
Carnelian grimaced, glancing at the device. He saw the barbs like fish teeth.
‘When they can twist it no further, the capstan is locked. Then, at the right time during the ritual…’ The silence made him turn to see Ykoriana frowning. Her hands formed two cones touching at their points. ‘… they are released.’ Her hands spiralled apart in opposite directions so violently her sleeves shed a mass of scarlet petals into the air. ‘The bodies within them, ripped apart. Their flesh sieved through an obsidian-bladed mesh. Scattering blood across the Chosen. Creation through blood sacrifice.’
Carnelian remembered his father speaking those very words when they had sighted a turtle, as they stood together in the prow of the baran on the approach to Thuyakalrul. Right after the massacre he had sparked off by appearing on deck unmasked.
‘Kumatuya, your father…’ Ykoriana lingered, gazing down with her fiery green eyes upon neither of them, but both. ‘… stood there.’ She pointed at the plinth that rose between them to their waists. ‘The Twelve about him, bearing the Masks and the Crowns and all the other divine insignia. As this chariot rose to the apex of the pyramid and they transformed him into the Gods…’
Carnelian could not see why this was a chariot, but he noted for the first time the cables that ran up the steps.
Her rose-petal robe sighing, she moved to one side, revealing a slab of iron rising at an angle behind her in which there was the impression of a man spreadeagled. ‘In which procedure my other brother played the Turtle.’
Her hand lingered for a moment, tracing the edge of the man-shaped hollow in which some petals lodged like spots of blood. Her brow knitted and the lids narrowed her stone eyes. ‘The Wise gouge out his eyes to be the sun and moon. They take his tongue, his hands, his feet. Each portion plays a role in the ritual. Finally, as your father watches…’ Carnelian was as close to the hollow now as Kumatuya had been. ‘… the closed doors of his ribs are broken open one at a time.’ She spread her fingers. ‘His still beating heart is torn out and held above him. The warm blood gushes, from which your father drinks, so that as he takes the life of his brother, two become one. From death, divine life risen.’
She regarded them both, her face blank with horror. She had seen this with her own eyes before they were taken from her.
‘My uncle was drugged,’ Osidian declared. He swung his arm round to take in the torsion devices. ‘They were all drugged. They felt nothing.’
Ykoriana frowned. ‘That certainly is what the Wise claim. It is true my brother made no movement; he did not cry out.’ She leaned towards them. ‘But your father, who witnessed his mutilation at close hand, told me afterwards he had seen in our brother’s eyes, before they were plucked out, a terrible, animal fear. It haunted him.’ She grew aged beyond her years. ‘It haunted me.’
Her hand strayed back to the hollow in the iron, caressing its edge as if the fingers wished to reach inside but dared not for fear of what they might touch. ‘It was I who had to make the choice between them. It was I who chose who would lie here… and who would stand there.’ She pointed towards them. ‘Suth Sardian with his exile saved your father from lying here.’ She tapped the iron. Her brows knit again. ‘I demanded this proof of love from your father, Nephron. I loved him, though I had reason to hate all men. I submitted myself to his touch, though it brought me little joy.’ Her face grew sour with remembered pain. ‘For an unripe fruit will carry any early touch as rot when it ripens. And though Sardian was no longer there between us, your father hated me for it.’ She clinked one of her stone eyes. ‘And he took my sight.’ She frowned. ‘Once I thought it was in revenge for depriving him of his lover; now I am not so sure. Perhaps it was vengeance for what he was forced to witness.’ Her face darkened. ‘Though it was the Wise he should hate, and the Great who cast their votes but hazard nothing.’
She put on a smile. ‘Still, that is politics.’ She raised her head and her green eyes glittered as if she was seeing something far away. ‘But then Sardian chose to stay away.’
Carnelian tensed.
‘Year after year when he could have returned, he chose not to. Almost I had forgotten him when that fool, Aurum, had the Clave elect him He-who-goes-before. I was confident Sardian would not return; but then he did and the minion I sent to find out why now, why not before, came back to me with nothing.’
‘What has this to do with anything?’ Osidian said, looking weary, upset. Carnelian gazed at him, wondering if it could possibly be the description of the blood rituals that had penetrated to his heart. He had looked on massacres unmoved, but this was bloodshed and torture among his own.
‘It has everything to do with your Apotheosis. To save himself, Aurum told me at last. For he had seen it when he arrived on Suth’s island.’
‘Seen what?’ Osidian cried, exasperated.
Almost Carnelian answered him, but felt a need to hear it told by Ykoriana. ‘Aurum was intimate with that old monster, my father. He was often at court.’
‘Please, tell me what you are talking about.’
Carnelian saw the weariness in Osidian’s face, but saw also how he had to listen, because this woman was still his mother.
‘That Carnelian here is the living image of your father.’
Osidian’s face folded in confusion.
‘The living image of his father.’
Carnelian watched the realization smooth Osidian’s face. For a moment, shocked, he looked like a stupid child. Then he gazed at Carnelian as if he were seeing him for the first time. His eyes narrowed. ‘You knew this already.’ His face darkened. ‘How long have you known?’
Carnelian explained how his father had told him when he came secretly to their camp.
‘Why didn’t you tell-?’
Carnelian watched the realization dawn.
‘That’s why you deserted me.’ The blood left Osidian’s face and he looked at his mother, then beyond her to the hollow man, in horror.
Ykoriana smiled. ‘That you ignored Sardian’s warning, that you are here, proves, Carnelian, does it not, that you know to what lengths my son will be prepared to go to save you.’
‘On the contrary, my Lady, it proves only that I came here knowing what you would threaten and to make sure Osidian does not submit to you.’ Carnelian turned to find Osidian staring at him and smiled at what was left in him of the boy in the Yden. ‘For I would not wish him enslaved again.’
Osidian’s lips seemed to be trying to return the smile, tears starting, but then his chin fell and there was a twitching at the corners of his eyes, his mouth, as if he were seeing scenes in rapid succession, or having fleeting conversations. Almost imperceptibly, his head sank further, his shoulders rounded, so that instinctively Carnelian glanced at Ykoriana, fearing that, by not even trying to mask his feelings of defeat, Osidian was making her victory over him, over them both, more complete.
But then Carnelian remembered that her eyes were stones and saw, besides, no trace of victory in her face, but only confusion and a pale fear. In his bones he felt it was not for herself she feared. ‘So as you see, Celestial’ – he paused, ready to gauge every nuance in her face – ‘your son will have no need to wed you. I will die at his Apotheosis and, afterwards, he will take Ykorenthe to be his empress.’
There! At the mention of her daughter’s name, he had seen the blade of fear cut deeper into her heart. It was the girl she sought to protect. Carnelian regarded Ykoriana afresh. Perhaps she had wed her other son for power, but what she sought now was to put her body between Osidian and her daughter. She was trying to protect the girl in the way no one had protected her. He no longer saw a terrible empress in her bitter pomp, but only a woman, aged by suffering beyond her years, who had dressed herself in a robe of rose petals in her attempt to seduce her own son, to protect a child; to protect what was left of the child that she had been.
Carnelian blinked back tears and looked from mother to son and back again. How defeated they looked. Both trapped and he along with them. Rage rose in him, as his heart sought to free itself from this ensnarement. ‘It is the Wise who bind us,’ he cried.
They both turned their green eyes upon him, stone and living, both needing, demanding more. Carnelian tried to think it through, but the pressure rising in him was beyond analysis. ‘We came here believing you had sought your son’s life.’ He described the assassination attempt and believed the shock in Ykoriana’s face was real, knew he had expected it. ‘It makes no sense now that you would do this, but the use of the Brotherhood of the Wheel must be intended to implicate you. So if not you, my Lady, who?’
Osidian’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘The Wise?’
‘Why not the Wise?’ Carnelian said. ‘Would the Brotherhood attempt such a thing on their own? Or the Great, who could only expect to be decimated by it?’ He frowned, considering what his heart was urging him to. Feeling it was a kind of madness, but unwilling to dam its flow. ‘We are all three here of the House of the Masks.’
There, he had said it. It was the first time he had felt it.
‘Instead of fighting each other, we should unite against our common foe.’ Carnelian paused and saw in their faces they were waiting for his words. He glanced into the hollow man. ‘I do not want to die here, nor do I want to live under a perpetually deferred sentence of death.’
Ykoriana lowered her head a little. ‘Does Aurum still live?’
‘I believe that unlikely.’
‘Well, then, assuming Sardian will not betray you, if I choose not to speak of it, I doubt if any could discover your secret.’
‘And the reason we cannot announce the truth of my birth openly is what?’
‘The Law-that-must-be-obeyed,’ she said.
‘And yet have we not all three defied it?’
Osidian frowned. ‘The blood rituals are essential for Rebirth, for Apotheosis.’
‘Are they?’ Carnelian could not shape in his mind what was coming; the words would have to find their own shape. ‘It seems to me these blood rituals have been conceived to set the House of the Masks against the Great. Further, to divide our House against itself. Are these mutilations, this massacre of our own, necessary? Can we not invoke the Creation without reproducing it? Or is it, perhaps, that the Wise wish to bring the candidate face to face with his own mortality? Even as they give him the symbols of power, even as they transform him into the Gods, they show him the flesh of which he is made, how easily his blood flows. Even if they can give you divinity, Osidian, you know they cannot give you immortality.’
‘Nevertheless, the Chosen will not accept my Godhead unless it is consecrated with ichorous blood.’
Carnelian saw in Osidian’s face that, on this issue, he was immovable. He feared losing impetus and so he turned to Ykoriana, the mother. ‘What if you were given your daughter to raise until she was of age to become empress and wife?’
Carnelian watched Ykoriana grow younger with hope.
‘That would destabilize my throne,’ Osidian said. ‘To rule without possibility of an heir for so long.’
Carnelian turned to him. ‘If you were to die this instant, who would most likely become the next God Emperor?’
Almost imperceptibly, Osidian’s eyes narrowed. ‘You would.’
‘Ever since my father came to speak to me, I could have sought the Masks, but, clearly, I have not.’
Osidian nodded.
‘Do you really believe I covet such power?’
Osidian’s face became brittle. ‘To save your beloved barbarians, perhaps.’
Carnelian saw the truth in this. It seemed for a moment as if everything would founder on that doubt. ‘Well, then, let me rule the outer world as your viceroy. Anyone who moved against either of us would have to fear the vengeance of the other. Until either of us produces an heir, the Great will live in fear that we should both die, for then one among them would have to be chosen to wear the Masks and the Law would force many of his peers to be slaughtered at his Apotheosis.’
Carnelian could see Osidian was still not entirely convinced. ‘For years you will be needed here to hold Osrakum together. How much energy would you have left to rebuild and safeguard the Commonwealth?’
‘You want to save your barbarians.’
‘I will not deny it, but also, and more pressing, there is the need to work against the famine that is coming.’
‘And when Ykorenthe comes of age and we produce an heir?’
‘I will retire to my coomb, to Coomb Suth.’
‘You will no longer be Suth.’
‘The Great will be unable to defy you when you give me the coomb as a gift.’
Osidian regarded him, weighing his judgement of this new brother. Carnelian knew there were several political attractions in such a scheme, but he wished to remove the last vestiges of doubt. ‘By then I will have done enough to appease my conscience.’
Osidian nodded.
‘And in the meantime you can keep an eye on me through the Wise and their watch-towers.’
Ykoriana stirred. ‘There is hope in this.’
As they both turned to regard her, it seemed she was holding her breath, waiting for Osidian’s response. He gazed at Carnelian, then sank his head. The wind soughed in the vast space above them. At last Osidian raised his eyes to Carnelian and smiled, grimly. ‘Let it be as my brother says.’
All three touched hands and swore oaths upon their blood.
Even if they had wished it, they knew they could not return by the Path of Blood, so it was necessary to climb the stair to the apex of the Pyramid Hollow where portals gave into the imperial strata of the Halls of Rebirth. Ykoriana removed her ranga and they began the climb, Osidian on her right hand, Carnelian on her left. The steps were steep so they supported her. Her robe tore upon the steps leaving a trail of petals. Glancing down it seemed to Carnelian to be the blood that had been shed there, but sweet and fluttering away on the wind.