The Third God (17 page)

Weary, burdened by loss, as night approached men collapsed among the smouldering pyres. The reek of smoke, of roasting flesh was close enough to the smell of food to bring nausea. At least the fires kept the raveners at bay.

Carnelian rose. Overnight the horror of the battlefield seemed to have seeped into his bones. Raveners nosing round had haunted his half-waking dreams. He peered at the smoke-choked dawn. Huddled in twos and threes the Marula were grimacing at the bony grins of their charring dead. He wandered among them, but could not find the one he sought.

Osidian had the Marula scour the battlefield for the bronze-bladed lances of the auxiliaries with which to replace their flint-headed spears. After that it was a drawn-out struggle to gather them and get them mounted. As the Oracles marshalled them, Carnelian watched Osidian ride up. Osidian indicated the Mother’s Backbone with his spear. ‘There lies the road my Father made for us.’

Carnelian said nothing as Osidian rode ahead, but glanced to where drag-cradles were pulling away into the south. Gazing at the hunched Plainsmen he knew he would never see any of them again. He looked for Poppy and Fern and Krow. When he found them, his feelings of love for them conflicted with his conviction that they were all riding to certain ruin.

Mangled ferns formed the wake left by the passage of Aurum’s dragons. Dung rose in hills along that route. Poppy complained about how much they stank. ‘Like ravener shit,’ she said, her face twisting.

‘By feeding them render,’ Fern said, ‘the Standing Dead make them akin to raveners.’

Osidian drove them hard through the blistering day. His eyes, revealed in the slit of his indigo swathings, were always fixed on the wavering horizon. It was a race, but not one that Carnelian or the others were certain they wanted to win.

As dusk fell the pace slackened. Eventually they came to a halt and found a place up among the Backbone rocks to make a camp. People sat round their fires in morbid silence.

Even before dawn Osidian had them mounted and trudging northwards. It was around midday when they began to see the horizon ahead, banded with shimmering white. With each passing moment this mirage solidified. As they looked for a spot to make camp, Carnelian watched the band turn pink then bloody purple. Gazing thus on the cliff edge of the Guarded Land he could not help feeling a yearning to see his father and his family again.

In the still morning air the Guarded Land was solid, undeniable. Its cliff formed the pale foundations of the sky. As everyone packed up, Carnelian spotted some sartlar and wondered what those creatures must be feeling at seeing again the land of their bondage. He watched Fern and Poppy and Krow frown as they stole glances at the cliff. In their faces and those of the Marula he saw his own doubts and fears reflected. Only Osidian’s eyes burned as if gazing upon some long-lost lover. Soon he had them mounted and coursing northwards again, their shadows spindling away towards the vertebrae of the Backbone. As the shadows shortened, the sun began to melt the Guarded Land into a shimmering vision that rose ever higher as they rode.

Cresting a ridge Carnelian lifted his feet from his aquar’s back. As she slowed he stared. The slope plunged down into a land veined with rivers. These braided eastwards into a single channel: a torrent that issued from a canyon where the cliffs of the Guarded Land closed upon the slopes of the Earthsky. Westwards the land fanned out, undulating, sparkling with water, spreading to hazy distance. On the edge of delight he felt unease. The greens should have been more vibrant. There was a greying, like mould tainting the skin of a lime. Blackened patches. Scars disfigured the canopies. Everywhere he could see signs of fire. Of flame-pipes.

They wound down a wide gully. Trees towered on either side. Gouged scree showed where the dragons had gone before them. Soon they were riding into a deepening twilight. Sky was banished to shifting diamond cracks high among the branches. The air moistened like breath. Moss carpeted the slopes and boulders. Lichens furred trunks and twigs. They followed a tunnel, edged with splintered branches, that had been ripped through the forest by something massive. The only sounds were aquar footfalls muffled in the moss. Carnelian could not rid himself of a feeling of impending doom.

At last it began growing brighter up ahead. The air was acid with a reek of charcoal. His eyes took some moments adjusting to the light. He became aware that a sinister autumn had come to these forests. The ground was scattered with the ghosts of leaves. Trees were skeletal and black. The feet of the aquar were churning up a mist of ash. This was a world so wan it felt as if the capacity to see colour had drained from his sight.

They came to a river soapy with ash. After crossing it they climbed a path lined with posts. As they neared this fence Carnelian’s dread flared into full horror. Melted, grinning, to each post was what was left of a human being.

That was only the first avenue of charred bodies. In that ashen land such fences were common. Villages were thickets of charcoal stumps on the edges of black fields. Drifts of ash like grey snow banked here and there. The cliff of the Guarded Land was a vague, leprous wall. Even the sky seemed bone. The Oracles with their ash-rubbed skin seemed natural inhabitants of that sere land. Soon pale powder floating on the air had turned their march into a procession of wraiths. Terribly white, Osidian urged them on, driven by an inner vision that seemed to make him blind to the devastation. Hope leached from Carnelian’s heart. Anything beyond this dead world must be an illusion. Life and vigour were a fantasy; atrocity the only truth.

Darkness found them on a hill overlooking the ruins of a village edging a black stream. The gold of the fires they lit seemed counterfeit. That dead world drew Carnelian away from the warmth. He drifted down the hill. Burnt trees had become the roots of the encroaching night. His footsteps faltered as his nostrils caught a whiff of cooked meat, of decay. Passing down an avenue of charred corpses, he could feel their eyeless sockets watching him. Despair claimed him. Would he never escape the Isle of Flies? Was he doomed to witness its malice infecting the world? Was he, perhaps, a carrier of its contagion?

Some doorpost stumps tempted him to enter the circle of a hovel. Ash buried his feet with each step. His toe struck something. He crouched, tentatively feeling for it though he feared it might be some gruesome remains. Something smooth. A lump with small wheels at the corners. A toy, then. He searched the twilight, hearing the echoes of children playing. Ghostly memories of life. He put the toy down carefully and left the house.

As he approached the black water the path sank into mud churned deep by the crossing of the dragons. Warped boards stretched between posts formed a fragile causeway zigzagging out through the reeds. The gurgle of the stream seemed unnaturally remote. A heron lifting heavily into the air flapped away, pale, along the stream.

He felt a tremor in the boards beneath his feet. Turning, he could just make out a small figure approaching.

‘Carnie,’ it breathed.

‘Poppy.’

She came to nestle into his hip. He caressed the warm, stubbly swelling of her head.

‘Why?’ she murmured.

‘This destruction?’ He contemplated all the death he had seen, all the suffering and wasted lives. ‘The Standing Dead need no more reason than does a plague.’

‘It must end,’ she said, an edge of pleading in her voice.

Carnelian desperately wanted it to end, wanted desperately to make it end, but he was powerless. Resistance was self-indulgence. Every act of defiance led only to more victims. He was so weary he could not believe his heart still beat. His knees wanted to buckle. He would fall into the reeds. Slip into the dark water, drown. But release would not be so easily found. It seemed that his atonement was to be doomed to watch everything he loved die.

Poppy, starting, awakened his senses. Reeds were parting. A sighing as something pushed through them. A shadow growing solid. Carnelian, reliving the night he and Osidian were captured in the Yden, scoured the twilight. The causeway was too narrow for them both to run back along it. He crouched to put his mouth to her ear. ‘Run,’ he growled.

She clung to him, but he prised her off. He shoved her away. ‘Run!’ Poppy’s face was a blur, then disappeared. He felt her footfalls thumping off and turned to face the shadow. A black boat. He backed away, feeling for the boards behind him with his heels. The causeway gave a judder as the boat struck it. Figures swarmed off it. Carnelian gritted his teeth. His fists flashed as he struck at them. Hard contact skinning knuckles. An outline crumpling. A cry. A splash. He threw them off as they came at him. Shapeless creatures hissing, growling. Despair became rage. He strode forward clubbing at them. Poppy’s voice rose keening far away. Then something smashed into his head. He was on his knees, hands pale against the rough wood, receding.

THE LEPER

Purity abhors pollution.
Control of the boundary where these meet
Is control over those who wish to cross it.

(a precept of the Wise of the Domain Immortality)

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.