The Chosen - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 01 (52 page)

'What will you believe once you are left only with limbless slaves, my Lord?'

'Is this all you came to tell me, my Lord?' Jaspar's voice sounded flat, emotionless.

'I had hoped that you might intend to take your father's pre-eminent place among the Great.'

And if I did?
signed Jaspar.

Then you would be going to the Labyrinth?

All the other Ruling Lords are there.

Could you take me with you?

To join your father?' asked Jaspar.

Carnelian nodded.

'You ask me to break the Law, my Lord.'

'It is not so great a sin, cousin. You could pass me off as one of your kin.'

'An outrageous request, Carnelian, although one is heartened that at last your machinations are acquiring a Chosen hue.' Jaspar looked away, thinking. Carnelian could hear the blood dripping into the bowls. 'Perhaps I will accede to your request, although one can hardly see why you felt the need to manufacture these elaborate notions of conspiracy.'

'But I believe—' Carnelian began, but was distracted by a clamour of bells and moaning that came wafting down the stair. Jaspar looked up towards it.

'One will give the matter some thought. But now my father begins his journey to the Plain of Thrones. One's decisions will be made there. If my cousin wishes, he could form part of the sombre procession.'

'I would be honoured to attend the funeral,' Carnelian said.

Jaspar turned back to look at him. 'Funeral?' 'I thought
...'

'Do you really imagine that the entombment of a Ruling Lord of the Great is an occasion that can be organized in a few days? The Houses have to be invited, the grave goods prepared, and' - he gave Carnelian a patronizing smile - 'it is customary to have the body embalmed. You would not have the vessel of my father's blood drying to dust like the cadaver of some slave, would you?'

Carnelian lifted his hands in apology. 'I meant no offence.'

Jaspar made a dismissive gesture. Before he could turn away, Carnelian reached out and touched his arm. 'Perhaps in view of what I have said, cousin, you might consider putting an end to this torture.'

Jaspar jerked his arm free. 'You presume too much, my Lord. This is a lesson that I will brand deep into the memory of my slaves. Since his guardsmen did not care to die to save his life, they will die so that my father's ghost might sup on their blood as he descends into the Underworld.'

The moans and pealing grew deafening. Carnelian fidgeted as he looked up the steps. The idols of the avatars leered down at the crucifixion frames standing beside their altars. A procession was coming down the steps between them. Sapients, horned and wearing the moon's face, drifted hand
in hand with their homun
culi. Behind came ammonites chiming heart-stone bells or waving moaning silver mouths aloft on poles.

Carnelian was forced to move aside, to draw closer to the tortured man. Water oozing in his mouth anticipated vomit. He closed his eyes and prayed that he would not retch. His mask was a gag, but if he threw it off it would bring even more death and mutilation to the household Imago.

A heavy waft of stale incense made him open his eyes. The Sapients were upon him, their bead-crusted purple samite swinging like plates of armour. Each carried a staff capped with a manikin of green-rusted copper crowned with a scything crescent moon.

My
Lords of the Domain Immortality
, Jaspar signed, then bowed.

The Sapients worked their staves backwards and forwards like levers as they slid past. The moaning was like a peopled gale. Carnelian saw the silver-faced ammonites striking their stone bells, compelling his heart to their dirgeful rhythm. Floating between them was a slab of ice like smoky quartz. Upon this a Master lay, reeking of myrrh, encased in a green robe as stiff as a box, the cloth darkening where it sucked up meltwater. The robe was spangled with tiny spirals that might have been the heads of nails hammered through into the flesh. On the chest lay an annulus of mirror obsidian in token of the Dark Water over which the dead cross to the Underworld. The gold mask was a face in which the world slid reflected, like the memories of the dead man's life. The ammonites leaned in towards each other gripping their burden with blue hands.

Jaspar moved in to Carnelian and forced him to retreat until he could feel the cross's arm digging into his back. He shuddered, feeling the pain tremoring the frame. A Chosen woman, her face sagging yellowed marble, stopped to allow Jaspar his place behind his father's bier. Carnelian was glad she did not look to question his own presence there. More than a dozen scarlet Masters followed, some throwing frowns at him as they passed.

Carnelian was hoping for a place at the end of the procession but the Imago guardsmen bringing up the rear, resplendent in azure-feathered cuirasses, heads hanging, waited for him to join the other Masters. As he hesitated, one of the guardsmen looked up as if waking from sleep. Gashes that had been cut down from each of his eyes were weeping tears of blood.

Several kharon boats were waiting at the quay, the sun gleaming on their bony curves. Guardsmen knelt and cried their blood onto the stone. Jaspar's brother came towards them, his hands signing,
Why does he come with us?

'Because I will it,' said Jaspar and motioned for Carnelian to stand beside him.

The eyeslits of Jaspar's brother's mask turned to stare at Carnelian, who looked away to see the bier being presented like a table to a ferryman standing in one of the boats. The creature did not look like a man at all as he inclined his bone-crowned head, arms extending to lift the dead Master's huge and pallid hand. He removed a ring from a finger, returned the hand to the bier, then stepped aside. The Sapients and their homunculi were already standing on the deck. Under their instruction, the bier was loaded onto the boat.

First Jaspar and then his brother gave rings to the ferryman and stepped aboard. Carnelian pulled a jade ring from his finger, remembered to offer it with his left hand and stepped onto the cobbled deck. The other Masters of House Imago followed him. Feeling out of place, Carnelian watched the other boats being loaded with the people and baggage streaming out from the palace.

His own boat was the first to turn her prow towards the lake and slide off. Carnelian felt sad for the old Chosen woman left standing off to one side, alone on the quay. Swinging more freely on their poles, the silver mouths summoned up for them a wind of keening that seemed to carry the bone boats across the water with only the merest effort from their oars.

Jaspar sat on the middle chair with his brother on his right.
Carnelian
had been set on his left. The other Imago Lords stood behind them.
Carnelian
kept his back as stiff as the chair's and tried to shut out the bells and moaning. Before him the corpse of Jaspar's father lay on the ice like a fish in a kitchen waiting to be gutted. Although the ammonites held a canopy over the body, the sun was still low enough to slip under it. Rivulets ran down the ice, sparkling indigo, puddling the skull-cobbled deck.

The corpse looked so much like Carnelian's father in the Ichorian chariot that
Carnelian
warmed with sympathy for Jaspar and for his brother. But his stomach reminded him of the crucifixions and he grew cold.

On the water, the bone boats turned towards the slope behind which lay the Plain of Thrones.
Carnelian
saw a cleft in its green that came slicing down to the water's edge.

The Quays of the Dead,' murmured Jaspar's brother.
Carnelian
was sure he could hear grief catching at his throat.

The boats began nestling into the quay. Ammonites carefully unloaded the corpse as the other boats began disgorging their passengers.
Carnelian
watched each Sapient disembark leaning his bulk on his homunculus. The little creatures stooped among the purple skirts of their masters' robes, reached inside behind the cloth and came out with ranga. Descending, the Sapients seemed to be sinking into the quay.
Carnelian
looked back across the Skymere to where the circling cliff of the Sacred Wall crimped with coombs and realized that even there the ground was too profane for the Wise to walk without ranga.

When he turned back he saw guardsmen unfurling banners as the embalming procession formed up at the foot of a stair. Carnelian followed Jaspar and his brother and felt the other Masters walking behind him. The Sapients were already moving up the stair.

The climb was long and arduous. At landings, they stopped just long enough to allow the ammonites to transfer the burden of the corpse among themselves.

They came up onto a larger landing whose outer edge was lined with stumps like teeth. Carnelian felt a hand on his shoulder.

'One would speak with my Lord,' said Jaspar. He nipped off the beginning of his brother's protest with a sign and sent him and the other Masters up the next flight of steps after the procession, accompanied by the majority of the guardsmen, all the women and children and the porters with their burdens. Only a few guardsmen remained, hanging their banners above them like parasols. Carnelian saw that the cuts down their cheeks were healing brown.

'Perhaps, cousin, you would explain to me how my slaves might have been prompted into committing murder?' said Jaspar.

'Have you had visitors? A message from court?'

'Some Lords came to conclave. From court
...
?' Jaspar shrugged a no.

'Perhaps their entourages
...
?'

'My Lord's arguments tend towards a certain circularity, neh?'

Carnelian had to agree. He used his foot to scrape earth from a ring shape on the ground. 'Are you sure that no person whatever came from court?'

Jaspar's mask regarded him as if from a great height. 'I suppose there is always the regular traffic in ammonites.'

'Ammonites?'

Jaspar fluttered a gesture of disbelief in the air. 'If you draw ammonites into your fantasy then their masters are sure to be close behind.'

'Why should the Wise not conspire with Ykoriana?'

'Enough! You would have me believe that two powers work in concert against the third.' He shook his head. 'If that were so, first the Balance and then the Commonwealth would be destroyed.'

Jaspar dropped his cowled head as if he were deep in thought. So as not to interrupt him, Carnelian looked down at the ring his foot had uncovered. It was of bronze and had a hinge at one end, like a mooring ring. He looked out over the blue waters spread out below. He glanced from side to side along the landing and wondered if in some ancient time it could have been a quay. He felt Jaspar move away. 'Well?'

Jaspar turned. 'I must follow my father this one last time.' He sighed. 'And, as Funereal Law demands, on foot.'

Carnelian followed Jaspar, sensing victory. He noticed that the steps had several times been recut deeper into the rock. The dir
geful bells came echoing distantl
y from above. Striped walls of stone rose up on either side. As they climbed, Carnelian became uneasy, convinced he was being watched. The walls had in them an impression of a crowd. When he squinted, he could make out their faces, vague from uncountable years of rain, furrow-mouthed, scratch-browed, noseless, with pits for eyes.

The Plain of Thrones,' said Jaspar.

Carnelian gazed at the walled plain, widening round then narrowing again in the distance to where the wall looked no higher man the thickness of his arm. Behind it rose an immense blackness that overwhelmed him. As the bells' pealing struck him with its hammer blows, Carnelian was again clinging to the deck of the baran. His mind's eye widened looking down into the gyring horror of the well. He blinked. Before him was the plug that would have filled that pit in the sea. It was only motionless rock, he told himself, the flank of the Pillar of Heaven, narrower from this side. The pressure of the bells was fading. He let his eyes slip down to an arrowhead, a hollow pyramid cut into the plain's wall, a buckle in its belt. He realized the stone on either side of it was pricked with windows, ribbed with balconies, striped with colonnades. Below stood a line of shadowy men. He turned to follow them round. Standing one beside the other, they hemmed the wall for fully half its circle. In the west they stood revealed by the sun as solemn stone.

The funereal pealing and moaning was pulsing round the plain. Remembering his father's stories, Carnelian snatched his eyes back, searching. There, beneath the pyramid hollow, he found a space wedged between two of the stone men and knew that it must hold the Forbidden Door, the entrance to the Labyrinth.

Carnelian was walking along a road that ran as straight as a shadow towards the Forbidden Door. For a while, he had been noticing something
like a clump of people conclav
ing in the centre of the plain. Heat shimmer had lent them movement but as he came closer Carnelian saw they were stone monoliths set in a ring.

'
My Lord,' said Jaspar, in the sil
ence vibrating between two peals.

Carnelian turned to him and saw the Master's hands begin to sign.