The Chosen - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 01 (32 page)

The crowd surged in waves against him. He grew tired. When he looked up, the gate seemed further away. The tide was against them. More and more people were pouring out from the gateway into the field. Their stench maddened him. More impacts shook him to anger.

This is unbearable!'

For a moment Carnelian fancied it was his own voice crying out, but his teeth were clenched, his lips pressed closed.

'Digging a ditch in water.'

His father's voice rang clear above the turmoil. Carnelian saw his shrouded mass unfolding to betray his height. His huge hand appeared, like a spotted dove, floating, alighting on his head. Then, with a sudden motion, it pulled the hood back. The bandaged head was revealed and the mask that was a piece of sun. Carnelian was transfixed. His father's golden face was the serene centre of the storm. Carnelian's gaze followed its lunging forward. He watched his father's saddle-chair collide with one of the Marula, watched him grab the man's salt-bangled arm. The Maruli turned, lifting his lance in menace, stared wide-eyed at the mask, then down at the white Master's hand that held him. Suth shouted something before he let go. The Maruli bowed so low his head disappeared between his thighs. When he came up he was bellowing and holding his arm out as if he were cooling it from the Master's touch. The other Marula craned round, saw the Master's terrible mirror face, slitted their eyes and brayed battle cries as they turned their lance blades on the crowd.

'We are revealed Lords of the Hidden Land,' boomed Aurum as he too pushed back his hood. The crowd slid distorted across his mask as he scanned it. Take care, this riot might conceal our enemies.'

Jaspar gave a fierce cry and straightened in his chair as he revealed himself. Vennel unbent more slowly. Carnelian watched his hand waver but then the Master followed the others. Reluctant to give up his hold on the chair, Carnelian was last of all. He glanced uneasily at the throng but realized it was futile to search it for assassins.

The
Marula
's aquar were striding forward. The crowd was giving way grudgingly, snarling. Faces were turning to look, then a chorus of voices struck up. 'Masters! Masters!'

The word spread panic more rapidly than had the rumour of plague. Swathes of people were collapsing to their knees. The
Marula
trampled ahead regardless, scything their lance blades before them.
Carnelian
watched the crowd, in flight, yawn a corridor all the way to the gate. The Masters rushed down it and he was drawn after them. On either side the gates flung up their walls of wood. He glimpsed the bronze sneers of the faces high above. The space between the gates swirled with people. He was clattering up a ramp into a screaming, echoing canyon. A continuous mass of beasts and men was slipping by. His aquar loped on, dodging between wagons. A mudbrick wall coursed past on his right. Women flattened against it open-mouthed. Buttresses pulsed past. Shrilling children dashed from his path.

Ahead the road forked round a tower. It loomed up as he rode into its shadow. He could make out windows, a parapet. There was a rush of noise. At the edge of his vision the Masters and the
Marula
were rearing back. Plumes flared as Carnelian's own aquar juddered to a stop. As he toppled to one side he yanked the reins in panic. The world swept before his eyes.

Toll, toll,' coarse voices cried in Vulgate above the roar.

Carnelian's aquar struck something. There was a clatter of many things hitting the ground. His world steadied. He saw a tinker's angry face. The woman behind him went bloodless. Her look leapt to the other faces looking up. People began bending, grovelling, moaning.

Carnelian's hand strayed up to his mask. After so long hiding he had felt naked when they looked at him. Over their heads, he could see the toll-gatherers. Their high conical caps bore the city's cypher of the ladder and the sea. For a moment their faces show
ed fierce defiance but then the
moaning spread to them. Their mouths fell open as they let out the sound of fear. Slimed teeth. Mouths gaping so wide they squeezed tears from the slitted eyes above them. Their billhooks toppled like scythed reeds.

'Make way,' Aurum cried in Vulgate as he hung above them, vast and menacing.

People shuffled aside bleating. A wagon was rolling out of the way. All around, the road seemed carpeted with dead. The
Marula
moved forward between the toll posts and the Masters followed. The party picked up speed. Echoes flattened as they came into the open, into a marketplace, that swelled wide then narrowed in the distance almost to a point. Like an almond, Carnelian thought, an almond they were entering by one corner. The road was a loop raised around its edge upon which crowds were slowly circling the sunken centre with its mess of stalls. As they rode nearer, chariots rolled their man-high wheels left to right across Carnelian's vision. Among their arches people ambled and the heads of saurians bobbed floating. It seemed an impenetrable flow.

Carnelian felt the rising anger of the Masters. Sitting tall and terrible in their midst, his father lifted his arm and with it sent the
Marula
crashing headlong. Their chevron cut into the crowd. The Masters followed them, clinging to their chairs as if they were riding small boats down rapids. They were picking up speed as they drove everything before them. Carnelian felt the power pistoning up through his saddle-chair as they blew along the road like a gale. A woman scrambled screaming from Carnelian's path. His aquar swung round a wagon that was turning ponderously out of his way. He felt the shatter of each dropped pot. Gourds rolled like heads. Someone slipped, tumbling scrunched into a ball. Carnelian gritted his teeth as his aquar kicked and stumbled through the obstruction. The buildings on his right were wearing the first lurid colours of the sun. He had dizzy glimpses of the mudbrick facade with its porticoes and tiers in which cracks led down into alleyways. From the corner of his eye he had a persistent impression that a storm was rising in the east. He looked off between the jumbled stalls and saw the gloomy rampart that defined the other side of the marketplace. His aquar's slowing to a walk caused him to turn back to see that their route was being choked by a convoy of wagons. The rest of the road had been cleared by the Masters' aura of terror.

Carnelian watched the wagons snare each other as they hurried to get out of the way. He did not want to look back at the destruction they had left behind them and so distracted himself by examining a huge tower that rose up behind the wagons. It stood back from the marketplace behind a thick stone wall that came to just below its waist. At its foot a road left the marketplace leading westwards. Half the height of the tower that could be seen above the wall was a truncated pyramid pricked with windows. Growing up from that were spars, as if some ship had run aground and rotted away leaving only its ribs; three on each side resembling the prongs of a fork. The middle prong of the closest carried a plaque. When Carnelian screwed up his eyes he could make out the ring glyph and below it the two spots and three bars of the number seventeen. From the tower the wall ran further round the marketplace to two more identical towers.

Carnelian's survey was interrupted by one of the wagons rolling free. The Marula were already streaming through the gap and the Masters fell in behind them.

Tower seventeen rose on the intersection of the marketplace and the western road. At its foot stood a monolith not much taller than a man. As soldiers appeared from behind this, Suth formed the Marula into a cordon to keep back the throng. Aurum rode into the soldiers as they were trying to kneel. Carnelian edged his aquar closer. He could see that their bright auxiliary collars were inscribed at the throat with the ring glyph on either side of which were the service and rank rings.

'..
. bear a pass,' Aurum was saying to one of the soldiers, who was a marumaga. He passed down a jade tablet ridged with spirals into the marumaga's hand.

This pass allows what you demand, Master, but I have my instructions from the legate of this city.' He pointed across the marketplace to the black rampart.

'It is you who are the keeper of this watch-tower and must obey the pass unconditionally,' Aurum rumbled.

The marumaga keeper faltered, chewed his quivering lip. This watch-tower, although part of the Ringwall, still lies within the jurisdiction of the Legate, my Master.'

'Enough,' cried Suth, who had joined Aurum.

The keeper took a nervous step back as this second Master brought his aquar towards him.

'Keeper, you've seen our pass. Now you've a simple choice: either you let us through or else you delay us. If you choose the latter I'll have a chair upholstered with the skin from your back.'

The keeper looked ill. His watery eyes flicked from one mask to the other. His head nodded in an uneven rhythm. 'Of course, Master, of course
...
the pass is entirely valid.'

Jogging, looking Lack many times, he led them to the monolith where the Masters dismounted. Carnelian handed his aquar's reins to one of the auxiliaries as he saw the others do. Although the monolith lay very close to the watch-tower, a passage angled behind it with space enough for the aquar to pass through in single file. Behind, a doorway led into dank gloom.

In lantern light, Carnelian saw the doors that ran along one wall. A ramp angled up against another. As they began to climb he was deafened by the scrape of aquar claws and the clatter of their ranga shoes. The ramp brought them up to another level whose flagstones were smothered with straw. The place stank of the aquar that could be seen in stalls.

Several more ramps took them up through the watch-tower. Carnelian glimpsed machinery and the counterweights that spoke of other doors. Skeletal men with large eyes hid as they passed. Their thin fear reminded him of the massacre of the sailors on the baran. He disliked their cringing even more than the rings and seventeens branded into their faces.

At last they came up into a lofty hall, cheered by purling water. Squat columns held up a weave of heavy beams. Shafts let some light in from the floors above. Ladders hung on the walls. One whole side of the hall was a cistern filling from a spout. Men climbed on either side of a portcullis to release the counterweights that allowed others to lift it. Carnelian led his aquar into the archway, out past another monolith into the bright morning.

He walked to a parapet to see the market's roaring seethe laid out below him.

'A leftway, at last a leftway,' said Jaspar.

Carnelian turned. It was only then that he realized they were standing on a road. In one direction it crossed the west road by means of a narrow bridge. In the other, it curved off to the next watch-tower.

As their aquar loped round above the marketplace, Carnelian saw that the tower ahead bore the number eighteen high in its ribs. He made a broad scan from the west, where the Guarded Land fell away into the sky, to the south where it ran flat to the horizon. Nothnaralan's half-circle seemed scorched into the land's rusty painted edge. He could see a wall running alongside the western road the top of which carried the continuation of the left-way along which he rode. If instead of coming this way they had turned to cross the bridge beside watch-tower seventeen they could have ridden its pale thread through the city and out beyond it to fade into the hazy western sky.

They slowed as they drew closer to watch-tower eighteen where the leftway forked. One way crossed to the watch-tower over a narrow bridge that spanned the southern road. The other turned south.

'Here we leave the Ringwall,' Aurum boomed as the Marula made the turn.

Carnelian looked up at the plaque, suddenly understanding the ring glyph. He stared in wonder at the leftway that continued over the bridge and past the watch-tower into the east. Should he ride that way, in months or maybe years he would have made a complete circuit of the wall that enclosed the Guarded Land. He looked over the back of his saddle-chair. He would come from the west riding the top of the Ringwall round to that very spot. Giving the market and the fortress one last look, he turned his aquar's head south to follow the others.

They sped above a mouldering chaos of mud walls, flat roofs, views down into alleys, stairways, balconies. Below them, a river of people rumbled along the southern road. They passed earth ramparts that were crumbling into a moat. The poorer outskirts of Nothnaralan spread their shambling messy browns. Tumbled hovels squashed together into neighbourhoods. Dust choked crooked lanes. They reached the city's border ditch with its torn pal
isades. Beyond stretched a limitl
ess rusty plain bisected by the line of the road.

Aurum shouted something into the scorching wind and the Marula surged ahead, black cloaks flapping. The Master lifted his hand, signing. A dove's wing flap.

Windspeed,
read Carnelian. It was not difficult to guess the meaning. The aquar ahead were already slipping away. His chair's rocking quickened as his mount leapt after them. He was thrown from side to side, each swing smaller than the last, then there was his robe snapping up around him, the chair vibrating, the parapets pouring past. The wind dissolved the din of the road, pressed him back into the chair, slipped his hood off then streaked his ears with half-heard cries.

The Guarded Land was tiled with brown squares that faded shrinking to every horizon. Its monotony was only relieved by wheels that
dotted the fields, turning constantl
y. A heavy sky pressed the whole scene flat. It was only when he listened to the wind and watched the rushing parapet that Carnelian knew he was flying.