The Third God (88 page)

‘Welcome, Celestial,’ said Labyrinth’s homunculus. ‘We have brought the means by which you shall be cleansed of the taint of the outer world.’

It seemed to Carnelian it would take more than unguents to do that.

‘I shall submit to the cleansing, my Lords,’ said Osidian, ‘but I give warning I intend to bring these barbarians in with me.’ He turned enough to take in the Oracles and the Marula warriors behind them.

As soon as the homunculi finished repeating his words, Labyrinth’s homunculus began to speak, but was interrupted by Law’s. ‘We cannot allow this, Celestial. The Law-that-must-be-obeyed is unequivocal. These barbarians may be infested with corruption that external examination will not reveal. To bring them onto holy ground is to endanger its very sanctity.’

‘Whatever danger they pose, my Lord, I am no less a threat. You will clean them as you clean me.’

‘It is perilous, Celestial, to let these animals pass through the Forbidden Door untamed,’ said Labyrinth. ‘You may have fought your way back into Paradise, but you must not force your way into Heaven.’

‘Lecture me not, my Lords, about peril. Only last night was my own life endangered. I will not leave myself thus exposed again.’

‘Celestial, the Sinistral Ichorians are the proper guardians of your life.’

‘Who then will guard the Gates?’

The Grand Sapients absorbed his words through the throats of their homunculi. For a moment, it seemed they would respond, but their fingers faltered.

‘I intend to breed from these creatures a new caste of Ichorians that shall be in their person a joining of the two previous castes. Their skin shall symbolize the unity of my rule.’

Carnelian’s unease rose in unspoken protest: Have you forgotten the promise you made to save their Lower Reach? He found among the Oracles Morunasa’s sombre face. Was he aware of Osidian’s plans for them? He bit his tongue when it would have warned that the wealth of Osrakum would corrupt these barbarians. He had enough problems of his own. Behind the Grand Sapients, he could see the Forbidden Door. What dangers might lie beyond that portal? If he were to be slain before he had a chance to put in place the necessary arrangements, his people would suffer. He focused upon the long, blind masks floating above. The fingers of the Grand Sapients formed collars of ice around the throats of their homunculi. Carnelian wondered what thoughts, what calculations were flashing through their masters’ minds.

It was Osidian’s voice that broke his reverie. ‘If needs be I will blast my way through to the Labyrinth.’

Carnelian remembered the thunder in the ground. He knew what power Osidian had brought with him and was not surprised when the Wise capitulated.

IN THE UNDERWORLD

Does a dreamer walk in the Underworld?

(Quyan fragment)

ARRAYED IN A ROBE OF VIBRANT GREEN, OSIDIAN REMINDED CARNELIAN
of Jaspar’s father on his bier of ice. Save for the lances they had had returned to them after purification, the Marula warriors were naked. Morunasa had commanded them to submit to the ammonites as he and the Oracles were doing. Enraged with fear, the Marula had nevertheless allowed their leather armour to be cut from them and burned. Lotus smoke relaxed them enough to allow the ammonites to wash them, to rasp the curls from their heads. Even their mouths were invaded. Every part of them strigils could reach was scraped until, in places, they bled. The ammonites had been more gentle with Carnelian and Osidian, but no less thorough. Something had been put on Carnelian’s wound so that now he hardly felt it. He had insisted on keeping his father’s cloak, but it had had to be thoroughly cleansed before he was allowed to wrap it over the green robe provided by the ammonites. As they were ushered into the tunnel that lay behind the Forbidden Door, the familiar drugged remoteness gave way to dread.

Tomb shelves on either side cramped their stumbling march. The lanterns the ammonites carried lit their masks from beneath, making them seem to be the vengeful dead. Carnelian tried to find Sthax among the warriors, but they could all have passed for shadows were it not for their staring eyes. The fear in the Marula soon took root in Carnelian as they crept down into the Underworld.

Around him the Marula collapsed suddenly to the ground. Shocked, Carnelian came to a halt. The tunnel walls had disappeared. Unawares, he had strayed into a vast forest of the night. The girth of the trunks implied monstrous height. He focused on the green flame he had been following: Osidian once again leading them to the hoped-for light of the Earthsky. Carnelian’s eyes filled with tears of longing to look upon those he loved among the Tribe. Only his breath separated him from the dead. He reached out and touched one of the trunks. Cold stone, not bark. This was the Labyrinth. He gazed up and saw the stone, baroqued with glyphs, rising up beyond the reach of the lantern light and knew it to be a sarcophagus whose pith was the mummy of a God Emperor long deceased. For a moment he was haunted by a memory of the pygmies buried in their baobabs. Then he was gazing about him. Dimly, he could see more of the columns marching off in every direction.

A whimpering around his feet made him look down and see the Marula warriors curled up, cowering, their hands clasped over their smooth heads, their quivering shoulders, muffling their ears. Perhaps they believed they had been brought to the Isle of Flies. Were they wrong? Panic rising, Carnelian glanced up, feeling hunted. The Oracles gaped, staring with wonder. Among them Morunasa, a stranger without his ashen pallor, in whose yellow eyes Carnelian saw what he most feared. Morunasa knew his god was here. Carnelian did not care whether the Darkness-under-the-Trees had come in with them, or if he had always dwelled here. Morunasa cocked his head, his eyes closed. Carnelian listened too. A strange rumbling was pounding the air. His breath caught in his throat. It was so like the sound the Blackwater made as it forked round the Isle of Flies to tumble, roaring, into the Lower Reach. The sound the Oracles maintained was the voice of their god.

Monsters surrounded them. Sybling Ichorians, two-headed, many-limbed like crabs. Carapaced with bronze, cloaked with darkness. Osidian barked a command that confirmed Carnelian’s fear this was an ambush. Morunasa and the other Oracles reacted by shouting at the Marula, rushing back among them, kicking them, so that the warriors scrambled to their feet, scrabbling for their lances. Beyond this chaos, the sybling Sinistrals fell some on one knee, some on two, lowering their casqued heads, both tattooed and not, their cloaks subsiding like billows of tar smoke. ‘Celestial,’ they murmured.

Osidian was still tense as he surveyed the guardsmen. The Marula warriors had formed up with their lances. Carnelian saw their eyes and knew that, at a word, they would fall upon the syblings, releasing their fear as bloody rage.

It was Osidian relaxing a little that calmed everyone. ‘Have the Halls of Rebirth been made ready to receive me?’

The syblings kneeling in front of Osidian bowed their two heads further. ‘As much as could be done in the time available, Celestial.’

Osidian extended a hand to raise the guardsmen from their knees. ‘Lead on.’

The commander of the Sinistral Ichorians looked uncertainly at the Marula. It seemed to Carnelian the syblings were reluctant to cede their place at the Jade Lord’s side to these barbarians, but when Osidian gestured more insistently, they obeyed. At Osidian’s command Morunasa and some of his Oracles put themselves between him and the Sinistrals, then they all set off.

As he walked, Carnelian listened again for that distant roar. It had to be rain being drained by gutters from the vast canopy of stone above their heads. Still, glancing into the crowding blackness all around, he felt a creeping unease that, in such a place, Osidian should choose to put so much faith in the Oracles of the Darkness-under-the-Trees.

Then, through the columns, Carnelian glimpsed a trembling spire of light. They moved towards its beacon. With every step it widened, but also it grew taller until it seemed to him the path of the sun lay twinkling across a brooding sea. They were entering a world that appeared lit by the melancholy, slanting amber of a northern late afternoon. The columns of the sarcophagi soared in the reflected glow, until the soft wavering light had reached up to reveal the faces surmounting them and the lofty arches that flew from one to the other upon which sat the distant ceiling. He realized that the reason everything was bathed in glimmering light was because the columns and vaults were all skinned with gold.

‘The Shimmering Stair,’ Osidian breathed and Carnelian saw the source of light was a flight of steps of mirror gold climbing a hill flanked by sarcophagus columns and banistered by walls in which fluttered countless flames. Dark mouths, in pairs, opened all the way up the stair, culminating in a single gape.

As they continued to advance, a vast moat opened up before their feet whose mirror doubled the glowing golden vision. Crossing this on a causeway, squinting against the coruscating air, Carnelian only slowly became aware of a dark figure standing at the foot of the stair, haloed by its shimmer. The hackles rose on his neck. Was this Morunasa’s god in human form? The closer they approached this apparition, the more mortal it appeared to be. It had a strange globular head, a crown, perhaps, except that Carnelian had a nagging feeling he had seen it before. A few more steps and he knew who it was. He looked for and found upon its dark head the glimmer of its double mask: two gold Master’s faces set side by side.

‘You!’ Osidian exclaimed.

Carnelian had good reason to remember the sybling Hanuses: Ykoriana’s lackeys who had overseen him and Osidian being forced, drugged, into funeral urns to meet a certain and terrible death.

The syblings bent forward, leaning to one side and reaching for the ground with a thin arm. Thus supported, they folded into a prostration so painfully that Carnelian felt they must be wounded. Osidian waved the Sinistrals and Marula out of his path and went forward, Carnelian at his side. They both gazed down at the double-lobed head. It had changed. One side of it was smaller, wrinkled.

‘Rise,’ Osidian said, his voice tight.

Carnelian observed with what difficulty the syblings came to their feet. The twin faces of gold, though imperious and beautiful, hung at an angle that cheated them of their power.

‘Unmask,’ Osidian commanded and Carnelian could hear how dangerous he was.

A single, tremulous voice sounded from behind the double mask. ‘Celestial . . . the barbarians . . .’ The syblings lifted a hand to indicate the Marula.

Coldly, Osidian informed them that, since he had taken the barbarians into his service, they were now a part of the household of the House of the Masks. The syblings bent their head to comply. Their right hand struggled up to worry at the bindings behind the misshapen head. Carnelian looked for and found the left arm hanging withered, useless at the syblings’ side. Then their faces were revealed. The left was unlike Carnelian’s memory of it, but he could adjust to how much it had aged, to the folds in the putty flesh, and in its pitted eyes it had the same black diamonds. The right shocked him. Shrunken, wizened like a dried fig. Where it met the living face, it dragged down the corner of its mouth, the empty cheek, the right eye so that it seemed that, at any moment, the black jewel might be squeezed out like a pip, might run down the cheek like an oily, black tear. Clearly, it was Left-Hanus alone who stood before them. His brother had died. Carnelian gazed with horror at the shrivelled remains of Right-Hanus. In his bones he knew this was Ykoriana’s handiwork.

‘What made you dare appear before me?’ Osidian said.

The sybling’s face grew moist. ‘Your mother, Celestial, bade me come and bring you to her.’ The sybling’s speech was slurred by him being forced to speak out of the left corner of his mouth. ‘To bring you both to her.’

It was as much the sound of that voice as the words it had spoken that chilled Carnelian. The moment was upon him. That Ykoriana had sent the sybling must be a sign that she felt no remorse for what she had done to them. On the contrary, she was clearly determined to brazen it out. Carnelian grew grim. She had reason to be so confident.

‘Take us to her then,’ said Osidian, a weariness in his voice that suggested he was thinking similar thoughts.

Left-Hanus ducked a bow, then motioned with his good hand. A child rose from the shadow at his feet and nestled its head under his hand. Then, hobbling, the sybling turned to the steps and began a slow ascent. Carnelian watched the man as they followed him. He felt no rage, not even anger, but only pity. He could imagine what it was to lose a brother, but even then he could claim none as close to him as the sybling’s. For Carnelian, if one of his brothers were to die he would bury him; he would not have to carry the corpse as part of him all the remaining days of his life.

They climbed the central, raised stair of the Shimmering, passing several of the immense portals that penetrated the slope in pairs. At last they came to the final gateway that gaped at the summit of the steps. Two colossi flanked it, one of jade, the other of mirror obsidian. Osidian came to a halt gazing up to either side. Carnelian could not see what he was looking at, but then noticed the hinges twisting out of the rock from which massive gates had been wrenched. This made him recall the gap torn in the fabric of the Green Gate. Most likely this desecration had the same cause. Portals of iron had stood here, that Molochite had melted down to sheath his chariot. Brooding on this, Carnelian looked through the gateway. His eyes found it hard to grasp the strange geometries of the spaces beyond.