Purity abhors pollution.
Control of the boundary where these meet
Is control over those who wish to cross it.
Slipping through glooms roofed with fronds. Each peeping star a needle in his eye. The dull ache in his head threading each fleeting awakening like a bead. Curves rubbing raw his ear, shoulder, hip, ankle. Was he still curled in the womb of the funerary urn? Unhuman heads dipped over him. Murmuring voices. Repeating rhythm of a ferryman poling. Drifting into the harbours of the dead. A woman’s voice. The sky’s first blush of dawn turned bloody. Suddenly all was a blue so bright it burned him like ice. Carnelian lost his grip on consciousness, slipping back into a darkness haunted by the recent passing of some horror.
Feeling her leaning over him, he opened his eyes. A shape pulled back, oil light flickering over the slopes of its shrouds. It had a head of sorts, a glint of eyes. Carnelian’s attention wandered off over rock surfaces that sagged into columns. Moving, the shape drew his gaze back to it. He tried to make sense of what it might be. ‘Where…?’ he managed.
‘Deep in the caves of my people,’ the shape said with a husky, female voice. ‘In the heart of our camp, far from help.’
Carnelian’s head was throbbing. He tried to lift a hand, but it was tethered.
The shape shambled forward, eyes like distant flames. ‘You’ll not escape us.’
‘Who?’
‘What does that matter? One of your victims.’
Carnelian heard in her voice her appalling crisis of loss.
‘We’ve sent word to the other refuges. Soon they’ll begin to arrive. We didn’t want to waste you. It would’ve been greedy to keep you all for ourselves.’ The woman’s eyes glittered as they gazed at him. They seemed to linger greedily. She shook her shrouded head. ‘We lack your skill at torture, but we’ll do our best. I’m sure we’ll manage to make it last long enough for everyone to get their fill.’
Animal fear welled up in Carnelian. ‘Why?’
The eyes flashed. ‘Why? You ask me that? We offered you submission. We grovelled before you. Gave you everything we had.’ The voice was swelling the pain in his head. ‘Vowed everything. We even worshipped you!’
The cry echoed around the cave then died. The woman rose and Carnelian saw from her movement that, under her shrouds, she had human proportions. He could see no flesh, no hands, no feet. Even the eyes had disappeared into the narrow slit in the swaddling of cloth strips.
‘Did you feel invulnerable on your dragon? Did you laugh as you watched our people impaled? Did you revel at your feasts lit by the bodies of my people as they burned alive?’
Carnelian remembered the charred remains. ‘Lepers?’ he muttered, growing cold.
The shrouded head turned as if to listen. ‘What was that?’
‘Were they Lepers?’
‘Yes, just filthy lepers,’ the Leper agreed, ‘and you’re a Master, but still you will dance for our amusement.’
The Leper turned away, her shrouds sighing as they dragged on the floor. When silence fell, Carnelian tried his strength against his bonds, but struggling only served to make them bite deeper into his wrists and ankles. Phantasms of shadow were fluttering in crannies in the rock. The Leper thought him Aurum’s ally. Anger burned up in him that he was to die in Aurum’s place. Thoughts of never seeing Fern or Poppy again caused his mind to falter with despair. Images merged, divided. He saw the Lepers burning, impaled, and they merged with the Ochre dead. He had made it all happen. Akaisha burned beneath the arches of her tree. Aurum, a pillar of ice, did not melt even a tear. No, the cold beauty was Osidian’s. He saw his own face in Osidian’s; Osidian’s in his. Even aged Aurum’s. All cut from the same ice. Each guilty of the other’s crimes.
Afloat on a black sea oppressed by glowering sky. Terror slicing through the depths. Is that dawn spreading livid across the waves? Spume turns to choking dust. Whirling towers of it like smoke. Becalmed upon rusty dunes, he stoops to scoop a handful of red earth. Itching palm. Worms sliming into his honeycomb flesh.
Carnelian woke bucking. He calmed down, heart pounding, letting the dream drain away.
The Leper was there. He shuddered at her touch as she cleaned him like a baby. Her skin rasped against his thighs, his buttocks. Wiping him with leprosy. Trapped between waking horror and his dreams Carnelian had nowhere left to flee.
The shrouds rose over him. Water dribbled into his mouth, trickled down his cheek then neck. ‘Drink.’
A lip of rough earthenware opened his mouth wider, clinked against his teeth. ‘Drink.’
A choking flood. He arched his back, spluttering.
‘You’re not what I expected,’ said the Leper once his coughing had subsided.
Carnelian imagined all kinds of faces deep in the black mouth of her hood: deformities more hideous than the sartlar Kor’s.
‘You don’t believe you will die?’
Carnelian did and longed for it, as the only remaining way out. The Leper leaned close enough for Carnelian to see bandages stretched over a mouth and chin and all the way up the bridge of a nose. The eyes were remote stars reflected in a midnight sea.
‘I’m wrong. I can feel your fear.’ The bandages deformed as the Leper spoke. ‘Beg for your life!’
The scene lost cohesion, dissolved.
‘You’ll beg sure enough when we torture you.’
Carnelian felt he was overhearing a faraway conversation.
‘I saw many plead as they were broken. Cut, crushed, impaled, burned. You watch it, because you can’t turn away. Hard to believe they could still be alive. A mere rag of a thing, blood and piss and shit leaking away, but still watching its tormentor with animal eyes, pouring a scream so sharp it’s nothing more than a gasp.’
Silence. A silence that made Carnelian come back, that made the Leper solid again.
‘Stripped of your power you’re not so different from us.’ She lifted a shrouded arm from which hung a ball of stained cloth. ‘You foul yourself as a man does.’ The arm dropped. ‘Though your beauty is unearthly; your eyes. I can see why you hide behind a mask. Your face is more terrifying than leprosy. But don’t imagine that weakness.. .’ The Leper waved an arm over Carnelian. ‘It won’t save you. My people were more helpless than you look now. We’ll show you we can be as merciless.’
Silence and Carnelian enduring it, trying to stay in the cave.
‘Why did you do it? We offered you submission.’
Carnelian tried to find words.
The Leper jabbed a foot into his ribs. ‘Why?’
Carnelian moistened his mouth to speak. ‘Do Masters need a reason to be cruel?’
The Leper was there again. ‘Where’ve you hidden your auxiliaries?’
Carnelian strung the words together. Auxiliaries?
‘You’re hoping we’ll go back to our homes. You call us vermin. Extermination is a Master’s word.’
Carnelian remembered the pyres and the stench of death in his nostrils as familiar as his own smell.
Light thrust into his face, searing his eyes closed. ‘Where?’
Carnelian tried to turn away, but fingers digging into his cheek forced his head back.
‘Dead,’ he said, moving his jaw against the Leper’s grip. ‘All dead.’
The grip released. ‘Do you take us for fools?’
‘It’s true.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘We killed them all.’
‘What’re you talking about?’
Carnelian tried to describe the battle as he recalled it, in snatches. As each jewel-bright impression flashed into his mind he tried to hook words to it. He fell silent, aching for his loved ones.
‘Are you trying to tell me the Plainsmen defeated you?’
Carnelian registered the Leper’s incredulity as it mixed with his confusion. Clarity came as a vision of a landscape columned by rising smoke.
‘Are you?’
Carnelian managed a nod.
‘All were destroyed?’
‘All,’ Carnelian said, as memory dug its roots into him. Pyres burned the smiling dead. Trees burned. The Koppie Crag with darkness coiled around it like a snake. Poppy’s face striped by tears. Flashes of light, smothering dark, faces, familiar, strange. The living and the dead. Enmeshing memory and dream.
When he surfaced again in the cave the Leper was gone. A lamp guttering was causing shadows in the walls to shudder like mourners.
‘You were travelling with Marula. We followed you. We’re sure they had no brass around their necks.’
Carnelian groaned. ‘I told you before: the auxiliaries are all dead.’
The Leper shifted her shapeless shrouds. ‘There was a girl with you, a Plainsman girl.’
Carnelian’s heart leapt. ‘Poppy.’
‘Your slave?’
Carnelian tried to shake his head.
‘Why weren’t you wearing a mask? Why the rags? Were you disguised? It doesn’t make sense.’
Carnelian began rambling, discovering his past even as he was coining it into words.
‘Living with them? You were living with Plainsmen?’
Carnelian brought the Leper into focus. ‘They gave us sanctuary.’ That last word chimed like a bell, then he was overwhelmed with loss, with the horror of what he had allowed to happen.
‘Why are you crying?’ said the Leper, her voice huskier with alarm.
Carnelian staunched his tears. The dead demanded not tears, but atonement.
‘Sanctuary from whom?’
Carnelian responded to the gentleness in the Leper’s voice. ‘Other Masters.’
Carnelian sensed her surprise.
‘You fought with the Plainsmen against the auxiliaries?’ she whispered. ‘You were fighting the Master who is our enemy…?’
‘Aurum,’ Carnelian said, tasting the syllables as if his breath had become that of a corpse.
‘Au-rum,’ the Leper repeated. ‘It’s strange to know our enemy by name.’ She leaned towards him. ‘You hate him too. I can see it in your face.’
‘I hate all the Masters. All.’
The Leper waited for the echoes to fade. ‘But him most of all.’
Carnelian almost explained how Aurum had had his uncle put to death, but that did not feel right. The Lepers had primacy when it came to loss at Aurum’s hand.
‘Then you weren’t involved in… in the atrocities…?’
Carnelian managed a dry chuckle, almost a cough. ‘You’re wrong. I am involved. Aurum came down here searching for… for me.’
The shrouded head nodded. ‘But if he’s your enemy why are you prepared to die in his place?’
Carnelian grew suddenly fatigued, worn out, despairing that he could not find enough energy to confess his crimes.
His buttocks were raw. The discomfort he could bear, but he was enough himself to feel the humiliation of being cleaned like a baby. When the Leper had finished she brought a bowl of water to his lips. He drank, trying to pierce the shadow in her shrouds.
‘There’s no need for you to have to keep doing this,’ he said. He lifted his ankles to show their bindings. ‘Loose me then I can relieve myself decently.’
The Leper drew back. ‘So you can try to escape?’
Carnelian’s heart leapt at the thought of rejoining his people. He shook his head. He had been a prisoner for days; they must be long gone.
‘Even if you managed to pass through our caves, you’d be lost in our land. We’d hunt you down.’
Carnelian smiled. ‘Well then.’
The Leper looked down her cowl at him for a while. ‘Roll over.’
Carnelian did as he was told. He felt her working at the knots and bore the pain as the rope peeled away from his wounded flesh. His arms seemed wood as he brought them round in front of him. He grimaced as he saw his wrists; the colours of bronze and so swollen that they did not seem to belong to him at all. He sat up to watch the Leper free his legs. Her bandaged hands were nimble. He imagined the skin beneath the bandages with its sores, its thickened plaques. It quickened fear in him that he must now be a leper.
When his feet came loose, he gingerly drew them apart, grimacing at the ache and stiffness.
The Leper laughed. ‘You’ll have difficulty standing on those, never mind escaping.’
Her laughter was a warm sound. Not meant unkindly. Relief perhaps.
‘What’re you called?’ he said.
The Leper regarded him in her motionless way. ‘Lily.’
His face must have betrayed his surprise because she added: ‘Do you think a leper has no right to a pretty name?’
Carnelian shrugged, discomfited.
‘And you?’ Lily said.
Carnelian told her and was charmed by how she pronounced it. ‘Do you wear those shrouds even among your own kind?’
Lily turned her head to one side. ‘Why do you ask?’
Carnelian shrugged. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Perhaps it’s because I’m monstrously disfigured.’
‘I’ve seen much disfigurement.’
He sensed her anger in the cast of her shoulders. ‘How like a Master that you should only be capable of seeing this from your own perspective.’
Carnelian was stung by this rebuke, not least because it was justified. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘A Master apologizing to a leper?’ She laughed. ‘Incredibly, you seem to have the capacity for pity. Keep it for yourself, Master.’
Her bandaged hands rose to her cowl. As she pulled it back, a cascade of white hair was released that, for a moment, blinded Carnelian to anything else. It was not old woman’s hair, but thick and lustrous. Then he saw her skin, rosy, pale as one of the Chosen. There was something strange about her eyes. She held his gaze and he saw they were the colour of watered blood.
‘You like my eyes?’
Carnelian could not think what to say.
Lily began to unwrap the lower half of her face. Each unwinding showed more of a wide, flat nose. He tensed, fearing the ragged wound of a mouth that would make a mockery of her strange beauty. Her lips appeared, a washed-out coral, but unflawed.
The last bandage fell away from her small chin. Her eyebrows and lashes were white. Carnelian gazed, mesmerized. ‘You’re beautiful.. .’
Her eyes darkened. ‘Who did the Enemy, Au-rum, kill? Someone you loved?’
Carnelian told her about Crail, then: ‘And you?’
She looked puzzled. ‘Is it possible all Masters are like you under their masks?’
Carnelian frowned. ‘No. Most of them are like Aurum. Pray you never see him unmasked. The atrocities against your people he carried out with indifference or for his amusement.’
Lily’s eyes grew dark as roses. ‘Lust for revenge withers my heart; the hearts of all the Lepers. He murdered everyone I loved.’
On the cave wall, shadows played out the scenes of torture and death that Carnelian had witnessed the Masters inflicting; that he had inflicted.
‘You’re not to blame.’
Carnelian turned on her. ‘You don’t know that!’
Her shock chased away his anger. ‘My actions, my inaction, have brought disaster on those I’ve loved. I was a fool to believe I could escape what I am. We’re a cancer.’
Lily nodded. ‘One for which there is no cure.’
‘Perhaps,’ Carnelian said, not seeing her, seeing only Osidian’s face, Aurum’s, the sheer, invulnerable ramparts of Osrakum. ‘I would cut it out and burn it if I could find a way.’
He became aware of how intensely Lily was looking at him. ‘I believe you would.’
She chewed her lip. Carnelian waited, knowing she wanted to tell him something. She made her decision. ‘Your Marula are looking for you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They search the Valleys for you.’
Carnelian had been certain that the Marula, driven by Osidian’s obsession with reaching the Guarded Land before Aurum, must be far away by now. ‘Have they done violence to your people?’
Lily shook her head. ‘Though they threaten it if you’re not returned.’
Such restraint on Osidian’s part made Carnelian uneasy. ‘You shouldn’t trust him.’
‘Him?’
‘They’re led by another Master who’s more like Aurum than he’s like me.’
‘But he too is Au-rum’s enemy?’
Carnelian considered this. ‘For the moment.’ When it came to wars between themselves, Masters were driven more by whatever might bring political advantage than by their feelings.
‘So you don’t want to be given back to him?’
Carnelian probed Lily’s red eyes. He thought of Fern and of Poppy. He thought of playing the game. ‘You told me your people are being gathered to watch me die.’
‘They are, but it’s not you they really hate.’
‘One Master will seem to them very much like another.’
‘That’s true, but I now believe you are different.’
Lily offered him a shroud. She looked angry at his hesitation. ‘Take it. Put it on – or are you too proud?’
Carnelian regarded the rags. To take them was to confirm what he already knew. He might prefer death to living as a leper. He imagined Poppy shunning him, Fern. ‘I don’t think I can return.’
‘Why not?’ she demanded.
He indicated the shrouds she was holding out to him.
She looked puzzled. Then her white eyebrows rose. ‘You mean as a leper?’
Grimly, Carnelian nodded.
To his surprise Lily threw back her head and laughed. ‘I thought you would’ve noticed I’m clean.’
Carnelian stared at her. ‘But… why then do you wear a shroud?’ Before she had a chance to answer he knew it already. ‘A disguise…’
‘A leper’s all but invisible to the Clean. As an object of horror we’re almost invulnerable. They may cast stones, but that’s just fear. We slip through their cities like shadows.’
Carnelian felt as if she had given him the gift of life. When she offered him the shrouds again, he took them and she helped him put them on.
They crept through the darkness along the edge of a river. Though Lily held a lamp aloft it cast little light. Carnelian felt his way with feet and hands. Then the rock fell away, opening into a cavern, its ceiling low enough to force him to stoop. A diamond-bright slot oozed light in from the outside. Squinting, Carnelian could make out furtive movements. Soon they were passing through an encampment. Chambers had been made by hanging rugs from the rock. Within these lurked thickly shrouded shapes. As he drew closer to the source of light Carnelian almost had to close his eyes against its intensity. People shuffled like ghosts. They drew away from his path as if it were he who was a leper.
When they reached the entrance of the cave Carnelian had to turn his back on the flood of light. His head ached. He felt dizzy.
Lily touched his arm. ‘Are you strong enough?’
‘I just need some time for my eyes to adjust.’
Looking back into the cavern, he could see people more clearly. Hunched, bony women. Tiny mounds of filthy cloth from which children’s limbs projected as thin as sticks.
‘Where’re your men?’ he said.
‘I lied to you. Most died defending their families.’ She pulled at his arm. ‘Come on.’
Lily led him down to the bank. There, concealed under some ferns, was a boat sewn from bundled reeds. Carnelian helped her launch it on the stream. The water was a braided mirror to the fully risen sun. Its rays sliced into his head. The slow rocking of the boat soothed him. A gentle breeze cooled his face as they drifted along the bank. Squinting, he could see Lily using a pole to keep them from running aground.
When he offered to take the pole, she shook her head. ‘I’ll do it better.’
He slept and, when he woke, he found they were pushing through a dense weave of stems. Gnats threaded the air. Fish darted glinting in the shadowed water. Sometimes the boat would drift into pools along whose banks he glimpsed giants shifting slowly, their movements hissing a sway into the reeds.
Their stream eddied suddenly into a great, winding river. With her full weight Lily poled them towards the northern bank where they could move hidden within tunnels of rushes. Glancing up-river he caught glimpses of an immense gorge.
Soon Lily was poling them down a branch channel that swelled into a water meadow paved with lotus pads and golden hyacinth. The pads squealed as the prow parted them. He tried to talk to her, but she seemed not to hear him. Her shrouds streaked with sweat, she kept the boat slicing through the green.
When she pointed over his head, he swivelled round and peered into the twilight. An island rose where the river forked ahead. For a moment he could see nothing out of the ordinary, but then he noticed a thread of rising smoke. He turned back to her, heart beating hard. ‘My people?’
She nodded.
He watched her as she punted. Her strength belied her apparent fragility. He glanced over the prow. Osidian would be there, Fern and Poppy and Krow. A part of him longed to see them; another misgave at the thought. The truth was that he felt too exhausted, too drained to take on again the burden of their expectations, of his need to seek atonement.
He looked at Lily. ‘How long has it been?’
‘Since we captured you? Eight days.’
‘So long?’ He realized that Osidian must have abandoned his pursuit of Aurum. He considered what this implied about the situation he was going into. Something occurred to him. ‘How did you know where to find them?’
Lily raised her pole, then, throwing her weight onto it, drove it deep into the water. ‘There’re many Leper eyes in these valleys.’
‘The camp will be fortified; the Marula guards jumpy. It might be better if you were to leave me at some distance and let me walk in.’
‘You think you’re strong enough for that?’
He imagined stumbling through the undergrowth, in the darkness.
Lily drew the pole up. ‘It might be better if we make our own camp on the opposite shore. I can take you over in the morning.’
Carnelian agreed.
He helped Lily pull the boat up from the water. She lifted a bundle from the stern then made off up the slope. Carnelian followed her, dizzy, his feet snagging on roots. Several times he had to stop to free his shrouds from thorns.
They came to a small clearing lit dimly by the darkening sky. Lily found a place to sit. Barely seeing her, he sat nearby. ‘I suppose we shouldn’t make a fire.’
‘They’d see it. Put your hands out.’
Carnelian did so. They hovered, faint, but visible enough for Lily to see them. He felt something falling onto his palms. Bringing it up to his nose he sniffed it. A smoky, cooked smell. Fernroot of some kind. He bit off a piece and chewed. It was floury and faintly sweet.
‘This morning a rumour reached us that the Ringwall’s been closed,’ said Lily.
‘All of it?’ he asked, confused.
‘At least that part running above us.’
He thought about it. Aurum might have closed the border to stop Osidian getting into the Guarded Land.
‘Au-rum’s doing?’
‘Probably,’ Carnelian said.
‘Why would he do that? Is it to keep you from returning?’
Carnelian’s instinct was to deny this, but the lie caught in his throat.
‘Why with his dragons does he fear two Masters and a band of Marula mercenaries?’
Carnelian could only answer that if he told her who Osidian was.
‘I’m also curious as to why he came down here in the first place. Though there are legends describing a time when the Masters brought fire and ruin down from the Guarded Land, no Leper living can remember such a thing.’
‘He came to put down a Plainsman rebellion.’
‘Then it had nothing to do with you being among them?’
Carnelian saw that no lie he could come up with would make sense of everything Lily knew. Further, he could not clearly understand why it was that he wanted to keep the truth from her. So he launched into some kind of account of how he and Osidian had ended up in the Earthsky, of what had happened there, of why they had come with Marula into the Leper Valleys.
‘I still don’t understand why you’re so important to him.’
‘It’s not me, but the other Master that Aurum seeks.’ Carnelian went on to tell her why. When he was done, there was silence between them.
‘You expect me to believe that this other Master is actually the God in the Mountain?’
Carnelian shook his head. As he tried to explain divine election, he became increasingly aware of her exasperation. ‘Do you have any other theory that fits what you know?’
‘So you believe Au-rum acts according to the wishes of the current God?’
‘Actually I believe the opposite is likely to be true.’
Lily groaned. ‘But if he were to capture this other Master, this fallen god, Aurum would triumph, right?’
‘He might be allowed back into the Mountain. I’m sure that’s what he desires above all else.’
‘And if the fallen god were to reach the Guarded Land he’d cause Au-rum ruin? Perhaps even overthrow the God in the Mountain?’
‘The God in the Mountain’s unassailable. He has countless legions. The Mountain is a fortress none could take, but there’s a possibility that, should he reach the Guarded Land, he could disrupt the currents of power of the Commonwealth. This I’ve worked for, will work for, in the hope it will cause the Masters enough confusion that they’ll forget the Plainsmen defied them in open rebellion.’
‘And Au-rum?’
‘He’d fall prey to the God in the Mountain.’
A rasping rhythm of insect calls filled the night. Lily suggested they should settle down to sleep.
Lily shook Carnelian awake. Her red eyes were gazing down at him. She pulled her shrouds over her head and rose. He spent some moments gazing up at the blueing sky. His body ached all over. Groaning, he rose, then plodded down the slope after Lily’s pale form.
When they reached the boat they pushed it down into the water and then she held it for him as he clambered aboard. Soon she was poling them away from the bank.
The water was a grey mirror. Night still lingered among the reeds. Winged shapes flitted across the dawn sky.
Lily made one last, slow punt to nudge the boat into the bank. Standing leaning on her pole she seemed a kharon boatman with his steering oar.
‘So this is goodbye then?’ he said.
She nodded, her face, even her eyes hidden beneath her shrouds. He waited, but there was nothing more. He rose, steadied himself on the prow and swung onto the shore. When he looked back, the boat was already beginning to edge away. He felt suddenly alone and realized he was sorry that he would never see Lily again. He raised his hand in a half-hearted gesture, then watched as she disappeared among the reeds.
Walking along the bank brought Carnelian into view of the camp: a wound in the forest edged about by a crude palisade. Smoke was rising in a dozen spires. According to Lily, he had been away eight days. Time enough for Aurum to make the pass to Makar secure. In lingering, Osidian had thrown away any chance he might have had to overtake Aurum and, with that, the failure of his schemes was all but assured. Reluctant to confront what awaited him there, Carnelian felt like turning round. It might still be possible to catch up with Lily. No, his fate lay before him, for good or ill.
As he approached the camp a cry went up. Marula sprang to the palisade. Carnelian made for a gateway and found it barred by a hedge of lances. There was fear in their faces as they stared at him. Eyes widened as he threw back his cowl. The bronze points wavered and began to rise. He marched forward and a gap opened in their ranks. Soon he was among them, breathing their stale sweat. He saw with what fearfulness they drew away from him. It was not him they feared, but the contagion they believed he carried. One stood out as being braver than the others: Carnelian recognized him as Sthax. He was wondering how to react when a tall, ash-grey man appeared in his path. Carnelian forgot everything else. ‘Aren’t you pleased to see me, Morunasa?’
The Oracle seemed impassive, but his yellow eyes betrayed a mix of emotion Carnelian could not read. There was an increase in the hubbub. He knew it was Osidian approaching even before he came into sight. A darker figure followed just behind him; a smaller one pushed past them both. Seeing it was Poppy running to greet him, Carnelian grinned. Krow, rushing forward, caught her. She struggled, but fell still when Osidian advanced.
The emerald intensity of his eyes was a shock.
‘Are you clean?’
Carnelian saw the fear for him there was in Osidian’s face. It humbled and confused him. He nodded. Osidian searched Carnelian’s eyes, uncertain.
‘I am clean, my Lord,’ Carnelian said, in Quya.
Osidian’s shoulders fell. He came so close Carnelian felt uncomfortable, but he did not flinch when Osidian leaned forward to kiss him. Osidian gave him one last, intense look then turned away crying out: ‘Morunasa, we leave immediately.’
Poppy was there, beaming at him, tearful. Carnelian knelt, opening his arms, and she ran into them. She nuzzled him, wetting his throat with her tears as she rattled out the fears she had had for him, how long they had searched, how she had never given up hope. Looking over her shoulder, Carnelian saw Krow gazing at her, hesitating as to whether he should come to greet him or wait. Next to Krow, standing like a post, was Fern. Carnelian thought his eyes cold. Upset, he gave all his attention to Poppy. By the time he looked up again, Fern had disappeared into the maelstrom of the Marula breaking camp.
They rode across the island. The villages they came to had been abandoned but, though the roofs of their huts had been burned, the circles of their mud walls were still intact. Trees still shaded the paths. There were some dead, but these hung rotting from trees among ferngardens still fresh and green.
They waded water meadows following underwater roads whose routes were marked by posts. Eventually they came up out of the water, where a track led up to a ridge. It was only when they crested this that they saw, below, the black swathe of devastation branded deep into the earth. Soon they were once more riding through a grey land spined by charcoaled stumps, down avenues of the impaled dead. Where the dragons had passed they had left the earth scarred. The rest of the day was a slog along a black road made by flame-pipes.
In deepening dusk they made camp on the edge of a valley. While some Marula cleared the ground others began to erect a palisade. Osidian told Carnelian he wanted to talk. They passed through a perimeter of aquar being fed to the heart of the camp where Oracles were setting fires. At the centre of this space was a hearth already lit. Osidian sat down, his eyes on the flames teasing smoke from wood and dry ferns. When Carnelian joined him, Osidian proceeded to question him about the Lepers. Carnelian did not feel it a betrayal to tell him what he knew.
As he described the pitiful refugees he had witnessed, Osidian nodded. ‘They hate Aurum?’
‘Venomously.’
‘Could we use this hate? Would they fight for us?’
Carnelian did not like the direction Osidian was taking. ‘I told you already I saw no men, just women, children.’
‘Was my Lord then overpowered and captured by women or children?’
Carnelian had to admit that this was unlikely, though he had only indistinct memories of his capture.
‘You learned nothing else at all?’
Carnelian followed his instinct to pass on the information he had gleaned from Lily. ‘The Lepers told me the Ringwall above here has been closed.’
Osidian’s eyes pierced him. ‘How could they know this?’
Carnelian shrugged. ‘They told me word had come down the river to them.’ He saw how hard Osidian was taking this news. ‘You should not have waited here for me.’
Osidian regarded him, emotions shifting in his eyes. ‘It was already too late to reach the pass before Aurum.’
Carnelian was surprised to feel disappointment. Did he really want to believe that Osidian had chosen to abandon his campaign for love of him? He focused on what was important. ‘Then you know it’s hopeless.’
Osidian frowned. ‘We shall go on. We will reach the pass tomorrow.’
‘Why go on? If it is not Aurum who has closed the Ringwall then it is the Wise. Either way the Commonwealth will be impenetrable.’
Osidian’s birthmark folded deeper into his frown. ‘We shall see.’
Under the licking onslaught of the flames the tangle of firewood was collapsing.
Morunasa appeared. ‘Master, you wanted to check the perimeter.’
Osidian rose. He looked down at Carnelian. ‘Tonight I would rather that my Lord should sleep at my fire.’
It was the sadness in Osidian’s face that made Carnelian agree. He watched him move away with Morunasa, then turned back to the fire and saw in it a vision of what would happen should they try to force the Pass against dragons.
He punched the earth. ‘No!’
‘Who are you talking to, Carnie?’
It was Poppy approaching. Anxiety jumped from his face to hers. ‘What’s the matter?’
He reached out to catch her wrist. Drew her to his side. ‘Nothing.’
She looked at him, puzzled, then said: ‘Do you have dreams?’
He humphed. ‘Oh yes, I have dreams.’ But he did not want to talk about them, especially with her. ‘Where’s Fern?’
‘Out there,’ she said, pointing with her chin. ‘I left him with Krow.’
Carnelian smiled at her. ‘Krow’s turning out to be nicer than you thought, isn’t he?’
Poppy looked down, chewing her lip. ‘I suppose.’ She looked up. ‘I came here to tell you what’s been happening and to find out what you’ve been up to.’
‘You go first,’ he said.
She began describing what had happened on the night he was taken. ‘The Master’s rage was terrifying. He sent the Marula searching for you in all directions.’
Carnelian remembered her cries.
‘In the morning his rage had cooled, but it was still burning in his eyes.’
She gazed at him and he nodded, knowing exactly what she meant. ‘The Master said that, if the Lepers thought they’d suffered from Hookfork’s dragons, they’d soon learn they could suffer much worse at his hands. It was Fern who told him to go easy. He suggested we should use the terror they’d suffered to our advantage. Numbed by horror and loss, the Lepers might respond better to kindness.
‘I think it was seeing how frantic Fern was that made the Master listen to him.’
‘Frantic?’
‘Don’t let his coldness fool you, he was frantic.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Well, for one thing, the two of them worked on getting you back, together, like brothers.’
Carnelian found this overwhelming. Poppy saw the change come upon him and took his hand. ‘They both love you.’
By the time Osidian and Morunasa came back with some of the other Oracles Poppy had gone. Carnelian had been trying to work out how he felt. He watched Osidian approach and reminded himself of what he had done to the Ochre. Whatever else he felt, that could never be forgiven.
He addressed Osidian in Quya. ‘My Lord, is the perimeter secure enough to defend us against Aurum’s return?’
Osidian gazed at him as if he were holding an internal debate. ‘If he comes with huimur alone we can escape him.’
‘What if he has obtained more auxiliaries?’
‘Well, then we will find ourselves in a difficult position. Nevertheless my calculations suggest we still have a few days’ grace. Enough time, perhaps, to force our way up to Makar.’
The next morning, Carnelian, having saddled his aquar, went to look for Fern. He found him adjusting the girth on his saddle-chair. Fern glanced up as he approached, then returned to what he was doing. Carnelian watched him, searching for an opening to conversation.
‘Poppy told me how you worked with the Master to try and get me back.’
‘It was either that or watch him prey on some other poor bastards,’ Fern said, without turning.
Carnelian stared at his back. Desiring to touch him. ‘Was that the only reason?’ he said, then grimaced, longing to take the words back.
Fern whirled round. ‘What do you want from me?’
Carnelian could look into his brown eyes now. There was anger there, but also a vulnerability, as if Fern were caught in a trap he could not escape. Carnelian yearned to help him free himself, but did not know how. ‘I’m not sure.’
Lunging forward, Fern kissed him. ‘There. Do you feel better? Now both of us have proved we don’t care if you’re a leper.’
Carnelian stared. Fern vaulted into the saddle-chair, then touched his feet to the aquar’s neck. The creature rose, forcing Carnelian to step back. As he watched it pound away he frowned, confused.
After crossing a stretch of marshy water their march brought them up onto the hump of an island. For the rest of the morning they journeyed along its spine, keeping parallel to the silver band of the cliffs of the Guarded Land. They were still following Aurum’s ashen road.
The sun was at its highest when the land began to sink down into a vast swamp, on the other side of which they could see the gaping maw in the white cliff. Green land ran up into the narrowing throat, greying until it became the pale thread that led up to Makar.
Earth softened to mud as they descended towards the swamp. Soon they were wading, water up to their saddle-chairs, following the winding route marked through the water lilies by posts. Here and there they would pass a mound covered with the charcoal ruins of some hamlet whose inhabitants’ tattered remains spiked the road posts, grinning like Oracles.
At last they began to leave the pools behind. Ahead the cliffs of the Guarded Land rose white and scabrous in the afternoon. They followed the high ground west towards the gaping Pass.
Shadows were stretching when they turned north riding directly for the Pass. The ground became scrubby and strewn with rocks the colour of bad teeth. As the Pass widened to receive them, the cliffs that framed it rose higher still, so that Carnelian felt he and the Marula were shrinking. Soon the pale boulders surrounding them were so large that, even riding, they could no longer see over them. Larger still they grew, becoming cliffs in their own right. The Guarded Land had risen up to fill the sky with ramparts etched by deepening shade. Then shadow fell on them like a tidal wave. The sun was shut off by sheer, forbidding rock. The Marula shivered. Carnelian wound his uba around his face.
They marched on in twilight, though behind them the land was still soaked in gold by the westering sun. When even this began to darken Osidian called a halt.
They made a camp among some boulders. The Marula sent foraging came back with roots like snakes. The fires cheered them. Some dared to turn their backs upon the Pass. Others faced it, though they sank their heads so as not to see it. Carnelian gazed into its abyss of darkness. Somewhere up there was Aurum and his dragons. The Pass had a look about it of the canyon that led up into Osrakum, though it was impossible to imagine that a smiling lake encircled with palaces lay within its black depths.
In the dawn, men eyed the Pass nervously. Osidian sent word round that they should hone their weapons. Carnelian watched the Marula sharpening the bronze of their stolen blades and made a show of doing it himself, though he failed to see how lances would be effective against dragonfire. At least it distracted everyone from the coming trial. He ran his finger along the edge of his spearhead, imagining what the day ahead might bring. He was a victim to his hopes and fears. Glancing up, he saw Poppy working hard on some flint she had found. Fear for her choked him.
At last Osidian ordered them to mount. Soon they were filtering up through the boulders into the black throat of the Pass, the sartlar, as usual, at the end of the column. Narrower and narrower the Pass became. Closer and closer its limestone ramparts. The sun bathed the valley behind them, but they were denied its light and heat. A chill wind blew constantly in their faces carrying a bleak odour of remote, empty places. Scree skittered constantly down from above. The scrabbling their aquar made upon the chalky paths was echoed by the cliffs, so that it seemed their march was haunted by other, invisible riders. The walls on either side were filled with caves like empty eye sockets or toothless, gaping maws. Occasionally they crossed the mouth of a tributary canyon down which sunlight could be seen glowing; some were only a narrow slit, others wider, choked with boulders or rotten with caves.
Then light caught the ragged summit of the western cliff. It burned lower, chasing shadows from the strata, turning the whole cliff brilliant white. Down it came until it reached the canyon floor. A tidal wave of incandescence broke over them. The sun was on their backs. Carnelian loosened his robe, delighting in the warmth seeping back into his bones, but the heat kept building. Breathless, the wind fell silent. The air began to melt, the cliffs to dance. Soon it was unbearable and they had to seek shelter in caves.
Some nibbled at djada, some fed from sacs. Carnelian sipped water from a skin, squinting out at the featureless blaze, trying to sear the fear from his heart.
They waited for the shadow to slip back across the canyon floor. They waited until its stone was cool enough to stand on. Then they resumed their march, the breeze returning to waft in their faces, to lift and flutter their robes like flags.
Day was failing when they saw ahead a fork in the Pass. Its walls had been drawing in steadily to squeeze the sky above into a luminous strip. The sun was just gilding the craggy heights of the eastern wall. Carnelian was as weary as his aquar. Around him the Marula sagged in their chairs, their mounts plodding forward with drooping necks. He lifted his head to examine the canyons of the fork as they approached. The right and narrower of the two had a steep, irregular floor. The left was wide with a smooth floor and gloomy almost to the brim. He squinted, trying to pierce its shadows. Something caught his eye: a regularity like the crenellations of a city wall. He resolved the shapes into towers supported by great black masses. His cry of warning was drowned out by a harsh, metallic braying that reverberated so deafeningly in the Pass it seemed the limestone cliffs must shatter and fall.
‘Dragons,’ Carnelian breathed as the trumpet echoes faded. He gaped at the line of monsters stretched across the Pass.
‘Their pipes are unlit,’ Osidian cried. ‘Ride between them!’
With that he launched himself towards the dragon line. Morunasa bellowed out a command that was taken up by the other Oracles. They kicked their aquar forward. Reluctantly the Marula followed them. Through his feet Carnelian felt his aquar keen to shoal with her kind. He let her go, casting glances from side to side. Fern overtook him. Poppy and Krow were looking to him.
‘After them, we have no choice.’
Then he had to give attention to his aquar’s increasing pace. He rolled with her strides. Riding the rhythm he could look up and face the dragons. Dim massing of shadows, they seemed more like the columns of the Labyrinth than creatures of flesh. Their towers with banner masts and rigging seemed incongruously delicate machines. His eyes detected a fraying above them. ‘Smoke,’ he groaned. ‘Their pipes are lit,’ he cried, but his warning was lost in their rushing charge.
A coughing came from somewhere above, then lightning. Night became day. Shrill screaming. Gobbets of fire spitting through the air. Incandescent arcs. Black masses mushrooming suddenly into great rolling clouds in which danced shards of sun. The reek of naphtha made his nose run, his throat raw. A rotting sulphurous stench. And heat, a furnace heat that beat in waves upon his face. His aquar stumbled, thrashed her neck from side to side. He struggled to make out the shapes of men and riders. Scratches of their cries engulfed by another chorus of shrieking fire that lit up the world. He urged his aquar forward; saw Osidian, terrible, with flamelight living in his eyes as he commanded everyone to advance. Carnelian located Morunasa and veered his aquar towards him. ‘Retreat,’ he cried. ‘Back.’
Morunasa’s face was lurid with reflected light. Just as he turned to face Carnelian, he disappeared behind blossoming, rolling blackness. Carnelian felt more than saw the Marula flee. The dragons hung before him, horned, their great white eyes blindly staring, their towers reflecting the firestorm. Osidian’s pale face was coming towards him, distorted by rage. ‘Where’re they going, the cowards?’
Carnelian was allowing his aquar to turn away from the heat when he heard a voice he knew. He searched for it. Located Fern, who was struggling to force his aquar into the dragonfire. The creature fought his control and he half fell, half tumbled out of his saddle-chair. Stumbling to his feet he confronted the dragons with arms upraised.
Carnelian was slipping away from him as his aquar picked up speed. There was no stopping her. He threw himself out of his chair, was kicked up by her rising knee, flew through the blazing night. It seemed as if the curling flames were his wings. Then the ground slammed into him.
He lay dazed, feeling thunder and the detonations through his ribs and jaw. He pushed himself up. Fire spirits uncurled like serpents, spun like acrobats. Fern’s voice drew him. Carnelian could see him dwarfed by the pillars of smoke, in the path of a blade of quivering light. He lunged towards him. Felt heat peeling his skin, turning his eyes to leather. In front of him Fern arched his back as the flame roared towards him. His hair was crisping. He danced and twitched in a shower of sparks. He threw his arms up to deflect the light and screamed. Carnelian reached out for him, gazing into the sun. He clutched his body. Pulled its weight onto him.
Slumped under what was left of Fern, Carnelian staggered away from the inferno.