The Chosen - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 01 (16 page)

'I told him that Crail was ours and that if he insisted on it we would carry out the punishment. But you can speak to him, Father, you can do something
..
.'

His father looked as
hen. 'You put me in a difficult
position, more difficult than you can know.' 'You will save him?'

'I will do what I can.' His father slid his mask back over his face. 'Go now, eat, and for the sake of your blood, henceforth, be sparing with the poppy.'

Before he ate, Carnelian made the round of all their cabins to see that his guardsmen were bearing up. He asked Keal how their people were coping between the decks. Nothing to worry about, Keal said. Carnelian knew he was lying and made him tell him the truth. One had been washed into the sea. Several were burning with fever. Carnelian had expected worse.

Back in his cabin he made sure that Crail ate something first. The old man was confused. He was recounting a nightmare he had had of a Master and a deck.
Carnelian
showed him a smile. When he ate with Tain, it surprised him how hungry he was. He gulped the food down though his stomach ached. He made jokes with Tain. They talked about dragons and the Three Lands, but all the time he was listening. Steadily the wind's moan had become a keening. He eyed the silver box with its promise of dreams. There was a crack so loud he thought a mast had snapped. Snatches of voices screeched over the gale. Then the storm front hit them like a hammer. The ship spun round to one side, and then was walloped round the other way. She leaned over. The lantern smashed against the ceiling. Crail was tipped onto the floor. Cries erupted on every side. The ship juddered once, twice; each time it seemed she had struck a rock. Tain's eyes were as round as his mouth. She righted herself, rocking.

For an age they clung to her as she rode the tempest. Each time her hull broke a wave, there was a thud that shook them to their bones. This would be followed by a hiss running over their heads to the stern. In the lulls they could hear the running in the corridor, the cries, the lamentations, the slam of doors. Once Carnelian looked out to see the corridor awash with foam.

Tain's eyes kept straying to the silver box. Carnelian only knew this because his eyes were there too. He relented and nipped pellets from the honey.

He was despairing that it had lost its potency until he felt the flames of comfort licking up his body. Fear burn
ed away. The rocking seemed gentl
e.

The three of them sagged back into poppy dreams. Carnelian took care when he woke to send Tain out to bring them food. They forced it down. Stale water lubricated tedious chewing. Every shudder of the ship was mimicked by their bodies. Even before the bowls were clean their eyes turned greedily to the silver box.

On a day when there was a lull in the storm, Tain and Carnelian were sitting eating though they felt no hunger. Both had noticed that the cabin floor had acquired a permanent slope down towards the door. Neither had said anything. There was a knocking that they ignored. They had grown used to ignoring every sound. The door opened and a Master's mask came into the cabin. They both recoiled. The poppy still lingered in the folds of their minds and so it seemed to them that this was some terrible being arisen from the sea.

'Carnelian, why do you stare so?' It was his father.

'You
...
you startled me, my Lord.'

The Master crowded into the cabin and hunched forward. Tain found a space in which to perform the prostration. The door slammed open in a draught. Suth's cloak billowed up so that it filled the cabin. His gold face turned to look at the bunk where Crail was a crumple among the sheets. It lingered, then turned its eyeslits back to Carnelian. 'We are to have a conclave,' it said. Carnelian could hear a nuance of emotion in his father's voice 'When you are called you must attend. You are required to do nothing, save that, should it be required, you will vote with me.'

Carnelian said that he understood and his father backed out of the cabin. For a few moments, Carnelian remained slumped where he sat and then found the will to stand. Tain cleansed him. They stood there, Carnelian bowed by the ceiling, Tain bracing himself by holding on to his arm. An eternity later they were finished. Carnelian was like some dead thing that had been wedged between the ceiling and the floor.

It was Keal who came to get him. Carnelian was alarmed when he saw how much life had gone out of his brother. Keal rasped some words that Carnelian could not make out, then pointed down the corridor. Massing round the mast column were several immense shapes. As he came towards them Carnelian saw that all three Masters were there with his father: each masked, each shrouded in his travelling cloak, each a being of a power that the wooden bulkheads looked too flimsy to contain. In their midst the mast shuddered and the bronze shoe that held it squealed.

'Now that we are all gathered, my Lords, I would beg your patience to hear first the evidence of the baran's captain,' said Vennel. His voice played above the ship's creaking like an oboe. 'Captain, make your report,' it said in Vulgate.

The Twins Themselves are against us, my Masters.' The voice spoke from the ground. Carnelian searched among their feet and saw the captain grovelling there.

'You were asked for a report, not a theological conjecture.'

'Apologies, Master.' A glint curved around his neck as the captain thumped his forehead against the floor. The sliders on his collar chinked.

The ship, my Masters, has been blown far off course. For nigh on twenty days we have struggled south against the westerlies.'

Twenty days, thought Carnelian, startled. Twenty days already.

'We've lost several sails and one of the steering oars is close to breaking. The ship's been taking on water. Because of the storm we couldn't go down there. I must regretfully report that two starboard bulkheads have been breached and that sixteen oars of sartlar've been drowned.'

'Have the affected bulkheads been sealed off?' asked Suth.

'Yes, Master.'

'And they can be bailed out?' asked Aurum. 'We attempt it even now, Master.' 'So there's no immediate danger?' said Jaspar. 'If we're hit by another storm we could sink, my Master.'

'You appreciate the risk, my Lords?' Vennel said in Quya and then, in Vulgate, 'What's our current position, captain?'

'According to the lodestone and what reckonings I can make, Master, we should be somewhere near the Woadshore's southern reaches.'

'And how far from Thuyakalrul?'

'Under the right conditions, depending on our real position, taking into account—'

'How many days?'

'Perhaps three or four, Master. But against the wind?' He peered up with a twitch in one eye. 'I just can't say.' Vennel turned his mask on them. 'My Lords, it seems to me the height of folly to keep to our present course.'

'And what then is your proposal, Vermel?' asked Jaspar.

'It seems, my Lord, that our captain knows of some anchorage that should not be too far from here.'

'And this anchorage, I presume, is in the swamps?' said Aurum.

'And what will we do if we should miss it?' said Suth.

The winds will take us there,' said Vennel. 'We would be sailing before the tempest rather than against it. We would hug the shore. If there is some error in the captain's calculations, no matter. There are countless trading posts all the way up this coast.'

'And what does my Lord suggest that we should do once we find this salubrious spot?' asked Jaspar.

'We should carry out what repairs we can and wait until the tempest has blown itself out. From there we would need only a few days of clear weather to make a crossing to Thuyakalrul across the open sea.'

'I can see that you have given this matter much thought, Vermel,' said Aurum. 'But you seem to have neglected one factor.'

'And what, pray, is that, Great Lord?'

Time.'

'What matter time if we should end up among the fish?'

'You well know, my Lord, that time in this matter is everything,' said Aurum with an edge to his voice.

'You heard the captain's words. He said that we will founder if we pursue our present course.'

'He said that we
might
founder.'

'You also forget, Vermel,' said Suth, 'that it was not one of the Chosen who spoke those words. So, the creature fears. What of it? It is a condition of its state.'

'Valour will not make this vessel move against the wind,' said Vennel.

'But oars will, my Lord.'

'Even a full complement of oarsmen could not maintain such an effort. How much less can we depend on the animals we have below?'

That is true, and that is why we must needs bend our own servants to the task.'

'My votes and my slaves are yours, my Lord,' said Aurum.

'I too will throw my ring in with Lord Suth's,' said Jaspar.

'In that case it is decided,' said Aurum. 'We shall continue on to Thuyakalrul.'

The drum beat its dirge in the ship's rotting belly. In his cabin, Carnelian clapped his hands over his ears. It was a long time since it had started and its insistent pounding was driving him mad. He stroked the eye on the silver box. It was a door he was reluctant to pass through even though it promised escape. Twenty days. The captain had said that they had been at sea for twenty days. Truly it had seemed like an eternity. He could hardly remember when his life had not consisted of dreaming in this cabin. Tain was snoring. Crail seemed less alive than something carved into the bulkhead. Those twenty days were all lost time. A single unending night. The wooden bulkheads pressed in on him. Carnelian wanted to stretch, to stand tall. He rose and curved up against the ceiling. He shuffled on his cloak, put on his mask and left the cabin.

The drumbeat pulsed louder in the corridor. He climbed the stairway and passed through the door onto the deck. The sky was striped with cloud. The moon hid its silver eye behind some tatters. A voice cried from the deck. Others answered from above. He looked up the mast. Only a few sails were unfurled, great hands running their fingers through the sky. The ship's heart beat on and on. The deck leaned off to starboard. He walked down it to the rail, leant over and saw the oar heads fly out into the air like fish. The drum thumped and they plunged back in. His people were down there on the end of those oars, in the stinking dark, pickling in brine with the sartlar half-men. He slid his hand along the rail. Where the harpoon engine had been there was nothing, a gap and the torn deck where the bolts had pulled through. The moonlight suddenly brightened and sketched an eddying silver inlay over the sea.

The melodies of Master voices fluttered his heart. He turned and saw the two apparitions come up out of the ship and drift off towards the prow. Carnelian was sure that they would see him but they kept right on. They stood under the stem. He could hear the lilt of their Quya but could understand nothing of what they said. The moonlight dimmed. Carnelian looked up and saw that the moon now passed mysterious behind a veil of cloud. He looked to the prow and saw that one of the Masters was looking up at the moon. His mask caught a rill of its light. He stooped and ignited the Gods' fire on Their altar. Carnelian was uneasy under the Green Face's lurid stare. The Masters turned so that the firelight fell on their hands and then began to make signs.

Carnelian looked up again. He estimated the length of the cloud behind which the moon was sliding and decided to take the chance. He lifted his bright hands up into the sleeves of his cloak, then crept towards the prow trusting to the darkness. He came close enough to see the signing hands.

...
her eyes are not only here.
The signs were shot through with a jewel glimmer that spoke of Aurum's hands.

...
even she would not dare.
Those signs had his father's familiar framing.

Do you forget what she has already dared?
made with strong, bold gesture. Aurum.

If she should even for a moment suspect.
His father with a certain nervous slurring between the signs.

Aurum made a sign of reassurance.

His father's hands began signing again.
Her arm has grown long indeed if she can stretch it even to the sea.

Her arm has grown long,
the signs precise with emphasis.

Carnelian sensed more than saw the moon waxing. It was as if he felt its colour on his back. He turned, hoping that the Masters were focused on their conversation. When he reached the mast, he moved behind it and from there went down the steps two at a time.

When he had closed the door of his cabin Carnelian stood for some moments listening. Wind. Timbers creaking. He removed his mask, threw off his cloak, and shrugged off the various robes. He lay down and slowed his breathing to match Tain's. His heart quietened till it seemed to Carnelian that the ship's pulse was his own. His feet managed to find their way to Tain's warm back. Tain moaned a protest but did not move away.

It could only be the Empress Ykoriana that they spoke of with such dread.

TRAPPED
in
AMBER

The Categories of Concealment are: first, the offspring and the consorts of the Cod Emperor; second, the Ruling Lords of the Great and the Grand Sapients of the Wise; third, other Lords of the Great and the Ruling Lords of the Lesser Chosen; fourth, the remainder of the Chosen and the Wise; fifth, the ammonites of the Wise. The Protocol of Concealment states that those in a lower category must unmask whenever those in a higher category do so unless this contravenes the second Law of Concealment. The Categories of Seeing are: first, Lords of the Great and Ruling Lords of the Lesser Chosen; second, the remainder of the Chosen; third, a Lord's own household or the ammonites of the Wise; fourth, the household of another Lord; fifth, marumaga; sixth, all other creatures.