Carnelian crawled up the rootstair towards Akaisha's hearth, his eyes fixed on his feet, clawing at the roots, desperate not to look to either side, too aware of the shapes hanging everywhere, so close to the ground they appeared to be standing.
He moved away from the stair towards Akaisha's hearth. His fingers touched the beloved roots of her mother tree. The stench was too thick to breathe. He felt them round him but dared not look; instead he crept searching with narrowed eyes for Fern. He felt the movement and was drawn to it. Glancing up he saw too much. Faces he knew, melting in death, and Fern moving among them with an expression of wonder as he gazed from one to another. Carnelian saw Akaisha strung up by her uba, her toes brushing the earth. Nausea and grief convulsed him into a spasm of vomiting. He wiped his mouth and scrambled to Fern's side. He took hold of him and was thrown off with a snarl. Fern fixed him with a look of such pure hatred Carnelian was turned to stone. The Plainsman resumed his wandering among the dead. When Carnelian glimpsed Sil's distorted face he fled, mindless.
The scream pouring from his mouth felt as if it was emptying him of flesh. His lungs drank air. He heard the delicate rasping of flies. Three Manila were standing by the Crag. Their fear of him made him ravenous for their blood. They fled and he pursued them. Round the Crag he hunted them and came to where a number of them had gathered their oily, sweating flesh. He advanced and they drew away, chattering their fear. Something pale hung above them like the moon. He discerned its symmetries of bone. A waft of carnage air reminded him of death, of the Isle of Death, of Osidian maggot-pale among the roots of the black banyan. He looked up and saw the Ancestor House: a casket of the slain, its walls as pale as Osidian's face.
Hatred threatened to overwhelm Carnelian. His gaze fell upon one of the Manila, paler than the others in his Oracle's ash, and saw it was Morunasa offering him a spear. Carnelian took it. A way opened to the steps. They seemed steeped in blood. The whole world was red with murder. He was climbing the steps. He reached the porch and moved to stand before the leather curtain. He drew it back with the spear and looked in.
Osidian's pale body made the bone floor upon which it lay look yellow. Carnelian entered, hefting the spear. It bucked in his fist as the curtain slid off it and then the room went black.
'I have come to kill you, Osidian.'
'You cannot,' said Osidian in a sepulchral voice.
Carnelian could see him laid out as if he were a corpse. 'I am going to kill you for this atrocity'
The barbarians were executed because they sinned against the Law-that-must-be-obeyed not once but countless times.'
That is a filthy lie! You murdered them because of your pride and for that I will kill you.' 'You will not.'
The certainty in Osidian's voice cheated Carnelian of strength. He fell to his knees but managed to keep the spearhead questing for Osidian's throat.
'I must kill you,' he whispered.
'If you do, the whole Earthsky will die with me.'
'You have already destroyed the best of it,' said Carnelian, desperate to thrust the spear into the heart of that voice.
'Did you not see the columns of smoke?' Osidian said.
Carnelian groaned, the spear tangling in the words.
They rise from every koppie from here to the very edge of the Guarded Land.'
Sweat ran into Carnelian's eyes, slicking his face so that he could taste salt on his lips but, still, he held the spearpoint to Osidian's throat.
It moved again. 'I saw them as I came north and did not know what they might mean. The old told me, before I hung them from their trees.'
Carnelian clenched and reclenched the spear, fighting cramp in his arm.
It is a signal a thousand years old. It warns the Plainsmen that the Masters have come down from the upper land with dragons. They are coming here burning everything in their path. I alone can stop them.'
'I shall give them your body and they will leave.'
That would not save the Earthsky.'
'You yourself told me it would,' cried Carnelian.
'I told you how you might appease the Wise. It is not they but one of the Great who comes.'
Carnelian laughed mirthlessly. 'Your foul God no doubt has told you this.'
Three days ago I sent scouts into the north. When they returned, they brought with them a rumour. A name. An ancient name that is a terror to the Plainsmen. Hookfork.'
'What are you talking about?' Carnelian hissed through his grinding teeth, drawing back the spear for the strike.
Osidian lifted his hands and shaped a sign like a long stalked lily.
The spear trembled in Carnelian's grip as he spoke the name to whom such heraldry belonged. 'Aurum.'
The name cleared his mind like the pealing of a bell. How could Aurum be coming with a legion when it was forbidden for any of the Great to have such a command? Only the Wise could have given him such terrible power.
Contemplating cruel Aurum having at his whim the terror of the dragons and their flame, Carnelian threw back his head and let forth a cry of anguish that made the bone walls tremble.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ricardo Pinto is Portuguese, but has lived and studied in Scotland since he was a child. Previously he designed and programmed computer games. This is his second novel. He lives in Edinburgh where he is currently working on the final volume in this trilogy. The first volume of The Stone Dance of the Chameleon, The Chosen, is also published by Bantam Books.
THE CHOSEN
Stone Dance of the Chameleon by Ricardo Pinto
'Pinto writes with an almost Donaldsonian/Feistian grip' Anne McCaffrey
Carnelian is of the Masters, cruel beings who rule their kingdom from an earthly paradise hidden in a crater that is the navel of the world. Soon after he is bom, Carnelian's father takes him across the sea to an island in the colourless north. Far from the Crater's rituals and pomp, their household is allowed to become a family to the boy and the world of the Masters fades to alluring fairy tale.
In deepest winter, years later, a ship comes riding before the gales, three Masters her only cargo. As these giants remove their masks of gold, Carnelian is awed by the light that seems to radiate from their skin. In formal conclave they ask Carnelian's father to end his exile and return with them to oversee the election of a new God Emperor. His father's agreement feeds Carnelian's longing for the world beyond the sea, but as the days pass Carnelian watches with growing horror as the ship's needs devour his home. The Masters are indifferent, imperious, concerned only with their blood politics, their majesty. As his father becomes strangely powerless, Carnelian strives to save his people, but when the ship turns her prow towards the stormy sea he knows that he is abandoning them to famine among the ruins of his former home.
This is the beginning of Carnelian's journey. The terror of the tempest yields to the weary grind along the road, the climb up the forbidding cliff wall to the Guarded Land and then the frantic rush into the deep south. Carnelian's education, which began with the starving of his people, proceeds with bitter lessons in bloodshed, intrigue and betrayal. When they finally reach the Canyon of the Three Gates, which leads into the Crater, Carnelian finds both love and treachery, but it is here within the Heaven Wall that he will set in motion the concluding events in a story already ten thousand years old.
'Boldly conceived and intelligently written .. . Lingers in the memory
like a strange and disturbing dream'
Interzone
A Bantam Paperback
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