The Third God (87 page)

The ache in Carnelian’s leg stung him into motion towards a nearby clump of Sapients. Closer, he became aware of the figure at the heart of their conclave. The stone surmounting his staff was emberous whilst all the rest were emerald. The murmuring of the homunculi faltered. Carnelian recognized the red finial with a sinking heart. It was too late to retreat. The eyes of the homunculi indicated the awareness of their masters to his approach.

‘My Lord Law,’ he said, dismayed that the Grand Sapient had reached the cleansing cordon before him. It was going to be harder to get what he wanted.

‘Suth Carnelian,’ said Law’s homunculus. Neither had turned towards him.

Before Carnelian had time to marshal his thoughts, the eyes of the homunculi released him to fix upon another Sapient approaching. The staff with which he walked gave off a ruby glint above his pale fist. A homunculus was holding his other hand. When close, the little man took the staff with one hand, while guiding his master’s fingers to his throat. ‘Greater Third of Gates,’ he announced.

The other homunculi murmured an echo. The Third’s homunculus locked his gaze to that of Law’s. ‘Does my Lord wish to pass through the cleansing system now?’

‘I shall be cleansed in Thrones,’ said Law’s homunculus. ‘Another system is being prepared at the Forbidden.’

‘And my Lord’s ammonites?’

‘Through the cages.’

‘I too wish to pass my servants through the cleansing,’ said Carnelian. He could not help glancing back to where he had left Fern and the others with his father’s palanquin. His brothers were there. The Quenthas. He was relieved to see they were all still kneeling with their heads bowed. He had asked them to do that so as to make them invisible to the Masters processing past them. He fingered the roughness of the military cloak he was wearing, that he had found in his father’s tent. Certain he had heard his name in the muttering of the Third’s homunculus, he turned back.

‘. . . come to petition me,’ Law was saying. His homunculus turned on Carnelian. ‘Why do you want this, Suth Carnelian?’

The Sapients crowded round him like crows, but he sensed their wariness. It occurred to him they might think he spoke on Osidian’s behalf. His mind focused on his need to get his people through this safely. It could be dangerous to show any concern for them. ‘My father ails.’

‘And would have died long ago were it not for our ministrations.’

Anger rose in Carnelian. Rather than saving him, just then he felt they had poisoned him. There was also the part they had played in his deposal and the recent use they had made of him. He felt no gratitude. ‘Still, I fear for him should he be long delayed here.’

‘The Ruling Lord Suth is high among the Great and so will naturally be among the first to be processed.’

Carnelian clenched his teeth. He had played badly and was now trapped. He could see no way except the truth. ‘My Lord, I want our servants to be processed with him because they know how to tend to his needs.’

‘Is House Suth possessed of no other servants?’

Carnelian felt the trap pressing in on him. He had already all but confessed he had some special interest in these servants. Fear rose in him lest he had made them pieces the Wise could use in their struggle against Osidian. If so, that was too late to undo. Now even less did he dare trust them to the quarantine. ‘Nevertheless, I wish it.’

‘What you ask directly contravenes the Law.’

‘Much is already out of balance,’ Carnelian said, with stress. ‘This does not seem to me a great sin.’

The homunculi muttered an echo of his words then fell silent. Carnelian became aware of the bustle all around him. He resisted an urge to turn and look at his people again.

‘We shall grant you this boon, Suth Carnelian,’ said Law’s homunculus. The little man turned his gaze on the homunculus of the Third. ‘Process not only the Ruling Lord Suth, but also his slaves, though only after all the Great. We do not wish to needlessly provoke their ire.’

Carnelian had got what he wanted, but at what cost?

Standing against the cabin screen, Carnelian watched his people embarking onto a bone boat. After taking his leave of Grand Sapient Law, he had summoned the Quenthas and asked them to shepherd his people through the cleansing. Then he had climbed back to his dragon tower, from where he could see down to the water’s edge.

He sighed with relief when the bone boat pulled away from the steps. The mirror of the lake was being opaqued by the wakes of dozens of the pale boats rowing the Great back to their coombs all along the outer shore. He limped back and sank heavily into the command chair. While he waited for the chariots of the Wise to move aside, he gazed down the causeway towards the brooding Yden. At last the way was clear. When his Lefthand confirmed that the funerary procession was ready, Carnelian gave the command to begin the crossing.

Thunder reverberated around the crater. The rain was giving the Skymere the look of knapped obsidian. It was drumming on the roof above his head. The mirrorman up there was surely nearly drowned, but still Carnelian could almost envy him and, even more, the lookout, exposed to the raw energies of the sky, washed by the elemental downpour. Osrakum could be seen only dimly through the rain. He could just make out the looming shadow of the Pillar of Heaven. At its feet, the lagoons of the Yden had swollen into a single, murky mere. Its verdant glories lived only in his heart, illuminated by the summer light of childhood. The actual world was dark and forbidding.

Even above the hissing rain he could hear the Yden’s black water roaring under the road to gush out, furious, down the channels to froth the edge of the Skymere below. Paths of marble wound down beside the streams; flights of pale steps and landings cascaded down to quays. Carnelian imagined the Masters would soon be disembarking there from bone boats, climbing up to the road on their way to the Plain of Thrones and the Labyrinth. Then he noticed the narrow house, end on to the Skymere shore. A kharon boathouse like the one in which he and Osidian had been kept prisoners after their kidnapping. He remembered again the sybling Hanuses, minions of their mistress Ykoriana. The woman who, after everything that had happened, still had the power over him of life or death.

It seemed an age since they had reached the hill that held within its summit the Plain of Thrones. Gradually the road had been winding up its flank. Hunched in his chair, Carnelian was shivering, listening to the rain. The rough stuff of his father’s cloak was in his grip. Lifting his head he peered westwards seeking to glimpse Coomb Suth but, through the rain, he could see nothing except for the shadowy Sacred Wall, which seemed a far, leaden horizon.

His Left muttered something at Carnelian’s feet, then Earth-is-Strong began to turn. Sliding off towards his left, steps swooped down in many flights. He recognized them as the same he and Jaspar had climbed from the Quays of the Dead. Then the view of the rain-filled void was snuffed out by a wall of stone. The command chair pushed hard into his back even as the deck tilted up. They were climbing into a ravine by means of long shallow steps. Everything shuddered and rattled as the tower began to swing heavily first to one side, then the other. His grip tight on the arms of the chair, he watched with alarm as a ravine wall would lurch towards them, then away. After a while, he relaxed his grip, reassured that Earth-is-Strong’s gait would not dash her tower to pieces against the rock.

As they climbed, Carnelian fell to wondering what had happened to Jaspar. He hoped the man was dead: even considering his sins, he had suffered enough.

At last the deck tilted forward, even as the ravine gave them up into the vast and airy cliff-walled Plain of Thrones. Carnelian had eyes for nothing except the black trunk that rose from behind that wall. The Pillar of Heaven was a tree whose storm-sky canopy cast all the world beneath into shadow.

They were approaching the centre of the plain when the rain stopped, suddenly. The sky gave one last shudder, then eerie silence reigned. Before them lay a ring within a ring. Carnelian had seen this thing before, but not from above. The outer ring swept round like a cothon. From this a mosaic of ridges of fiendish complexity converged on the inner ring. His gaze became enmeshed in the radial branching tendrils that seemed like the iris of some vast eye. Escape lay only in the double inner ring that enclosed the dark pupil. For a moment he was possessed by an uneasy conviction this was an opening to a well, a smooth sinkhole into which he might tumble.

It began to drizzle. Drawing back into himself, he gazed at the Stone Dance of the Chameleon, ostensibly a calendrical device. At its centre, the twelve month stones. Eight red, two black, two green. Upon these twelve was carved the Law-that-must-be-obeyed. The stones had a round-shouldered look as if they were hunched against the rain, or against the too-vast sky. Still square and young, another twelve stood behind like ghosts. It was from these that ridges flowed, branching, meshing, intertwining to connect with the outer ring of, as he recalled, commentary stones. The twelve innermost stones were the least imposing of the Dance and yet they were clearly the jewel for which all the others were nothing more than a setting. He could see how time had softened them. His gut told him that even when Legions had been a child, these had been ancient and once had stood there on their own.

As Earth-is-Strong carried him round the rings of stones, Carnelian gazed for a moment, sombrely, upon the road running off south-west, along which the funerary procession would soon go. At the end of that road were the caves in the wall of the plain, where the Wise embalmed the dead. As the wall continued to slide past, he discerned, in a long row with their backs to it, a line of what seemed pale homunculi. Except that he knew these were not tiny men, but the colossi who stood each astride the entrance to a tomb. These it was who, gazing down upon the Plainsmen tributaries, had given them the name for the Chosen, ‘the Standing Dead’. The view continued to swing round and he saw the terraces and galleries of the lower palace carved into the cliff above those tomb guardians. He frowned, desolate. There, penetrating deep into the cliff like a nasal cavity into a skull, was the hollow pyramid in which the Masters would stand in tiers as bright as angels as they gazed down upon their tributaries. Earth-is-Strong was heading straight towards this now. Before her a black rectangle stretched out over the floor of the Plain. Upon this tens of thousands would cower. Soon they would be there, gazing up to watch Osidian made God. Perhaps they would see Carnelian sacrificed.

His Left gave the command to turn the dragon onto the road that skirted the black field.

‘Belay that order,’ Carnelian said. ‘Steady as she goes.’

On the ground, his back to the Forbidden Door, Carnelian looked back the way they had come. Grand Sapient Labyrinth was there behind him with one of his Thirds and a gang of their ammonites. They had offered him an immediate cleansing so that he might enter the Labyrinth, but when Grand Sapient Law on arrival had declared he would wait for Osidian, Carnelian had said he would wait with him.

The funerary procession had already reached the caves of the embalmers. There the palanquins seemed a nest of tiny beetles. He could just make out a thread of people returning along the road towards the standing stones. He guessed these must be the bearers being driven to the cages of the quarantine.

He squinted back towards the ravine through which he had entered the Plain. Watching the minuscule movement on the floor of the slot in the cliff, he became certain it was a towered dragon entering the Plain. It had to be Heart-of-Thunder. Grumbling, the sky was beginning to blacken in the east. Carnelian’s spirits sank even further. Night would fall before Osidian reached him. He had hoped they would confront Ykoriana in the light. He gazed up at the galleries scaling the cliff like some vast ladder to the sky. Rock everywhere riddled with holes. From any one of those myriad cavities she could be scrutinizing him with borrowed eyes.

Starless night. A tremor in the ground made Carnelian relive the horrors of the battle. Many dragons were approaching. The massing shadow of the leading monster was growing larger, carrying the lantern of its tower. The world quaked as light filtering down from the honeycombed cliff began to sketch Heart-of-Thunder’s mountainous form.

Carnelian met Osidian as he descended from his tower. ‘I had expected you sooner.’

There was only shadow in the loop of Osidian’s cowl. ‘I had to take the submission of the Sinistrals at the Blood Gate then wait while they gathered supplies.’

Render, thought Carnelian, almost tasting it. Then he gave a start as the night dewed into flesh: the ash-misted faces of the Oracles. Their grim expressions could have been fear. Whatever they were feeling, Carnelian was filled with unease. At that moment Osidian angled his head back. Some of the light coming from the terraces above found the sinister mirror of his mask. ‘Come.’

Together they advanced upon the Wise, who were framed by the pale silver faces of their ammonites. They halted beneath the jewelled gaze of the two Grand Sapients.