The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

  Carnelian stared at the fingers playing the throat like a flute.

  ‘Seraphim, you have gone beyond the bounds we permitted you in the outer world.’

  Vennel came forward, nodding a bow, his hands making the vague shape of surprise. ‘You have come yourself, Grand Sapience, from the sickbed of . . .’

  As he spoke the homunculus muttered an echo to his words.

  ‘I wish to wash my hands of all responsibility.’

  The homunculus was repeating those words when the fingers at its throat choked it quiet. They trembled more instructions into its neck and it said, ‘Seraph, the Empress expects your immediate attendance at court.’

  Vennel bowed lower.

  Carnelian looked up at the tearful silver face. This was one of the Wise. He was trying not to imagine what kind of face the mask concealed when the cloven hands turned the homunculus’ head towards him. Carnelian felt it was not the homunculus but its master that was scrutinizing him through its eyes. As the fingers shifted at its throat, Carnelian winced, seeming to feel their movement inside his head.

  ‘You are that son of Suth for whom we recently made a blood-ring?’

  ‘Suth Carnelian.’ The words were squeezed out of his brain like pips from a lemon.

  The homunculus repeated the two words. Its finger collar flexed. The homunculus pointed at the bier. ‘It is the Ruling Seraph of your House that lies there?’

  Carnelian nodded eagerly. One of the cloven hands detached itself from the homunculus’ throat and blurred pale instructions. Ammonites swarmed forward and the Ichorians moved away from the bier as if they feared even the touch of their shadows. Their purple robes huddled over Suth, producing many fingers that they touched to his neck, his wrists, his chest. They began rattling out words. ‘Pulse. Five. Soft. Tallow threefold. Lipped blade. Two by three deep.’

  The homunculus echoed everything they said. Carnelian found his eyes drawn to the finial on the staff it held. A limpid green jewel larger than his hand carved into the form of a man who wore upon his head a crescent like the blade of a silver sickle.

  The ammonites straightened, silent, waiting, looking to the Grand Sapient.

  ‘Salve edge, blue vapouring, soft white bind,’ the homunculus said.

  The ammonites opened boxes, unstoppered vials, pulled lengths of cloth and bent over Suth as if they were carpenters repairing furniture.

  ‘Seraphic Aurum,’ said the homunculus, ‘it is your disregard for the Law that has imperilled this life.’

  ‘I told him—’ Vennel began.

  The homunculus spoke over him. ‘This matter will be examined fully.’

  Aurum stood very still. ‘Will he live?’

  Carnelian held his breath. Vennel’s mask inclined so that it was focused wholly on the homunculus’ mouth.

  ‘Perhaps,’ it said after a pause. ‘We shall bend our skills towards the healing. We must haste back to the Isle where we have the requisite resources.’

  ‘It is customary for He-who-goes-before to seek formal ratification in the Clave before he should begin his duties,’ said Vennel quickly.

  ‘Does my Lord wish the Ruling Lord Suth dead?’ said Jaspar over the homunculus’ muttering.

  ‘Custom is not Law,’ it said.

  ‘Then I shall accompany the Ruling Lord on my way to court,’ said Vennel.

  ‘As you wish.’

  Sapient Immortality’s hands uncoiled free of his homunculus’ neck.

  Carnelian took a step forward. ‘Sapience . . .’

  The homunculus reached up to touch the retreating hands. They slipped back around its muttering throat. ‘Proceed.’

  Carnelian stared at the long mirror face, swallowed. ‘Is there not a risk that my father will die unless you heal him now?’

  ‘Do you presume to greater wisdom than the Wise?’ the homunculus said severely.

  Carnelian was unable to respond.

  ‘Good, then we shall proceed to the Labyrinth.’

  ‘I won’t go with you,’ said Carnelian, lapsing into Vulgate.

  Aurum whisked round. ‘Why will you not, my Lord?’

  Carnelian closed his eyes to find composure. ‘I wish to go to my own coomb, my Lord.’

  ‘You would desert your father?’

  Carnelian looked at the old Master. ‘I would follow his command.’

  ‘This command must have been given you some time ago. Much has changed since then, my Lord.’

  ‘Nevertheless.’

  ‘This is outrageous. Immortality, you must stop this.’

  ‘The matter does not concern us,’ said the homunculus.

  Aurum’s mask bore down on Carnelian but he refused even to flinch. The Master swung round on Jaspar. ‘Since it seems Suth Carnelian’s mind is made up perhaps my Lord would condescend to accompany him.’

  Jaspar snorted. ‘And why pray should one wish to do that?’

  ‘Because you would find me grateful.’

  Jaspar turned to Carnelian, saying loudly, ‘The gratitude of House Aurum is a prize to be devoutly desired, neh? One’s coomb is near your own, cousin, so there would be only a little inconvenience. Besides, we might even manage to amuse each other on the way.’

  Carnelian was in no mood to be amused or to oblige either Master, but nor did he want to be left alone in this strange new world. He lifted his hand in agreement.

  Jaspar held Carnelian back when he made to move towards his father. Carnelian shoved his arm away.

  Jaspar flared his palms. ‘You misunderstand, my Lord. Our way lies along a different road.’

  ‘But I thought. . .’ Carnelian’s resolve crumbled. He had not expected to have to part from his father so soon.

  Aurum turned towards Jaspar. ‘My Lord, your father must come to the Labyrinth immediately to represent his faction.’

  ‘That will not be possible. The Lord Imago will take several days to prepare himself.’ He waved a vague gesture. ‘One will have to inform him of our . . . our mission, a household will have to be readied to accompany him.’ He sighed. ‘My Lord knows well what tedious arrangements one is required to make before planning even the briefest sojourn at court.’

  ‘Make sure that he is there in three days,’ said Aurum and turned away.

  ‘My Lord Aurum?’ said Carnelian.

  The Master turned back.

  ‘Will you send me word if my father improves, or if he were to . . .?’

  Aurum’s hand snapped agreement, and he strode away.

  Carnelian knelt at his father’s side. He glanced at the metal face and then found the hand and cursed his mask that stopped him kissing it. He stood back as the bier was lifted and mournfully watched it move away with the Grand Sapient, the Masters and the others.

  ‘Alas,’ said Jaspar beside him.

  Carnelian turned to him, surprised. ‘You share my pain to see them go?’

  Jaspar laughed. ‘On the contrary, it is a blessed relief. One was bemoaning the necessity of more walking. It is customary to send ahead to one’s coomb for suitable transport and an escort of one’s tyadra.’ He pretended to look around him. ‘As you can see, cousin, we shall have neither convenience.’

  The Master’s flippancy angered Carnelian. ‘We will get nowhere unless we move on.’

  Carnelian looked for his father and was dismayed to see him being carried into the silver house. A protest was on his tongue when the whole edifice lurched into movement and he noticed its skirting of wheels and realized it was a chariot. The thought of his father locked inside with the Sapient and the homunculus made him shudder.

  ‘Will the Wise heal him, Jaspar?’

  ‘Grand Sapient Immortality is guardian to all the lore of his Domain. Short of divine intervention there is no power in all the lands that can do more for the Ruling Lord Suth than he.’

  Fearing hope would unman him, Carnelian said quickly, ‘Which is our road?’

  Jaspar pointed down an avenue running towards the lake.

  Carnelian saw
the silver chariot veering off to the right, disappearing into the forest of stone.

  ‘Our road is the straighter.’ Jaspar sauntered off.

  Carnelian watched the last silver panel of the chariot wink out and almost ran after it. He felt as trapped as the Quyans in their stone. Their dimple eyes saw through his flesh. They mobbed the road all the way down to the lake. He strode after the only companion he had left, his enemy, Jaspar.

  ‘Curse the sun, it makes me sweat!’ growled Jaspar.

  Carnelian threw a fold of his robe over his head to stop his mask heating. A sun ray had split his head in two. He squinted past the ache. Ahead there was something like a burning barricade set across the road. He was sure that he could feel its waves of heat beating against him. Soon he saw that its flames were formed by a hillside of carved and gilded columns. The road divided to run round them and edging one fork there was a narrow rind of shadow.

  They made for this shadow and stopped to rest, pressing their backs against the cool gilded stone. The air still burned Carnelian’s lungs. His robe clung to him. He pinched some of the cloth to peel it off his skin and wafted it. Jaspar was panting.

  Carnelian turned to the column he had been leaning against and saw that it was the shins of a narrow Lord. Hundreds more crowded up the slope. The carving was unlike the angels. It was sharp and fresh and the curving golden limbs seemed almost alive.

  ‘The Clave,’ said Jaspar, looking at Carnelian. He drooped his head and flapped his hands at it like fans.

  ‘Where the Great . . . meet?’ said Carnelian.

  They walked round rubbing against the cool legs of the golden crowd, keeping in their delicious shadow. They came to where a stair of snowy marble wound up between the giants.

  ‘Is it cool up there?’ Carnelian asked.

  Jaspar shook his head. ‘The Clave is a bowl in which we meet only when the sun is behind the Sacred Wall or sometimes at night. Now, it will be incandescent.’

  They passed several more stairs before they reached the shadow’s end. ‘One longs to linger here, but alas we must go on . . . it should be cooler by the lake.’

  Carnelian watched Jaspar stand there for some moments as if he were gathering up his courage, then the Master pushed forward and was burned up in the glare.

  Jaspar swung the bronze clapper on its ropes. Then the heart-stone bell seemed the only stillness in a trembling world. Carnelian did not hear it peal. He had lost every sense but sight. The Pillar of Heaven was there, a filament from the Singing Turtle’s heart, where it had been since the creation, a mountain holding up the immense weight of the sky. The Sacred Wall was set about its axle like the rim of a wheel. Around the Pillar spread the terraces and water meadows of the Yden, the Gods’ own Forbidden Garden floating in the midst of the Skymere.

  ‘They come,’ a voice said remotely in his ear, waking him.

  Carnelian followed Jaspar’s pointing finger and saw a needle detach itself from the Yden’s rim and darn a white stitch into the perfect sapphire of the lake.

  ‘We shall wait up here in the shade,’ said Jaspar.

  Carnelian looked down the flight of steps that fell precipitously to the water’s edge. Carvings of stone flanked it all the way. He put his hand out to touch the nearest one, in whose shadow they sheltered. The flow of years had smoothed it but still he could see it was a turtle. He looked out across the lake, daring to be possessed again. He ran his eyes round the outer wall of the crater like a finger round a bowl. All along its purpling length it pleated like cloth and in the folds jewelled fragments lodged, the coombs of the Chosen.

  Carnelian’s eyes settled back to the mirrors of the Yden and the strip of earth that moored it to the cliff upon which he stood. There along that causeway a fleck of light caught in his eye. It glinted again like a signal. He lifted his hand out as if he would pluck it from the distance.

  ‘The Grand Sapient’s chariot,’ said Jaspar even as Carnelian had guessed what it was.

  ‘My father . . .’

  ‘With Aurum fretting,’ said Jaspar and Carnelian could hear the smile in his voice. ‘And our dear Lord Vennel.’ He chuckled. ‘One does not envy him the meeting with his mistress.’

  Thoughts of his father brought back Carnelian’s headache. He waited for each tiny flicker as if he could read some message in it. He narrowed his eyes to examine the causeway. It looked like nothing much except that it was a road across the Skymere, a lake deeper than the sky. Mountains had been crumbled and fed into that lake so that chariots could roll their wheels across its water. ‘Sartlar numberless as leaves . . .’

  ‘My Lord?’ said Jaspar.

  Carnelian looked at him. ‘Something my father once told me about the building of that road.’

  Jaspar looked off towards the causeway. ‘It is said that its stones were mortared with sartlar blood.’

  ‘Then it is another of their tombs.’

  ‘Hardly, cousin. The Law insists their carcasses be removed from Osrakum. It is true that when we need labour we bring them in from the outer world. But then, those that do not die in the work are slain. The Law forbids that they should return alive from paradise. But be assured, my Lord, that what is left of them is returned. This holy land must not be polluted by the impious dead.’

  Carnelian’s wonder was souring. He had looked altogether too often on death’s black face. The boat was nearing the quay below and so he left the shadow of the turtle and went down to meet her.

  The ferryman’s robe confused his eyes. Whether it was a white pattern on a black ground or a black pattern on a white, Carnelian could not tell. He stared at the man’s ivory mask, the face of a dead Master locked into a right profile. Half a face with a single eye staring out of it. It was like those ill-omened faces in the glyphs that encoded sinister words. Carnelian stopped his head turning in unconscious mimicry. The ferryman wore a crown in which the turtleshell sky glyph was the body of a nest of bony limbs that could have been the remains of a crab bleaching on a shore.

  The pattern on the ferryman’s robe moved, entangling Carnelian’s eyes so that it took him a while to notice the outstretched whitewashed hand. Carnelian looked at it, not knowing what to do.

  ‘The kharon asks for his fee,’ said Jaspar.

  Carnelian watched the Master pull off a ring that he dropped onto the ferryman’s hand. The man did not close his hand but brought it back to Carnelian who looked at his own hands. All he had was his rusty blood-ring. He turned to Jaspar. ‘Can my Lord lend me some gold?’

  ‘The kharon take only jade.’ Jaspar twisted another ring from his finger and handed it to Carnelian, who took it and made to give it to the ferryman.

  ‘The other hand, my Lord, the other hand.’

  Carnelian did not understand what he meant.

  ‘If the jade is given with the left hand the kharon will only take you across to the Isle. Put the jade in your right hand.’

  Carnelian did as he was told. The ferryman’s whitened hand closed around the rings as he moved back from the bow. Jaspar reached out to clasp one of the posts rising from the gunnel and pulled himself aboard. Other than Jaspar and the ferryman there was no-one the length of the deck. The whole boat was yellow-white, patched together from rods and roundels. An ivory boat. Carnelian reached out to grasp the post. Its knobbed shaft slipped smoothly into his hand. Its carving was picked out in brown. He realized what it was. Quickly, he heaved himself onto the deck and let go of it in disgust.

  ‘Is anything the matter, cousin?’ said Jaspar.

  Carnelian stared at the cobbled deck that narrowed up at either end to posts as pale and slender as beech saplings.

  ‘Come, sit here, cousin.’ Jaspar rested his hand on the back of a chair. There were three of them under a dark canopy.

  Carnelian walked across the cobbles as carefully as if they had been eggshells. ‘Bones . . . there are bones everywhere.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jaspar. ‘This is a bone boat.’

  Carnelian looked r
ound, aghast. ‘But human bones . . .?’

  ‘Sit down, cousin.’

  Carnelian walked round and sat in a chair beside Jaspar. He craned his neck round. The ferryman was there, his ivory face looking as if it were a carved part of the stern post. He held the handle of a steering oar in each hand. The boat began to turn away from the quay. Soundlessly the oar heads spooned the water on either side.

  ‘I thought it a fairytale.’

  Jaspar chuckled. He tapped the arms of the chair. ‘If you look under your arm, cousin, you will see that even these chairs are made of bones.’

  Carnelian lifted his arms, saw the chair was a mosaic of finger bones. Here and there was the tell-tale green pinprick of a copper rivet.

  ‘This deck,’ Jaspar was tapping his foot, ‘skulls.’

  Carnelian could see how the cobbles were of ovals of different sizes, fissured brown. He gave up trying to estimate how many had been used to make the deck. ‘Generations . . .’

  ‘Since the Twins raised up the Sacred Wall,’ said Jaspar. ‘Our dear ferryman,’ he glanced back at the stern, ‘and all his brethren rowing beneath our feet, will one day add their own bones to this very vessel. These boats are the tombs of their race.’

  ‘Tombs,’ muttered Carnelian. His head ached. He rested it against the back of the chair and closed his eyes. Tombs. And what of his House tomb? He imagined consigning his father to its everlasting night.

  He opened his eyes. Beyond the sapphire water the Yden spread its meres as a floor of varied jades. Something winked on the thread of road that ran along its stony margin. At that signal the crystal air shattered as flamingos rose in a red blizzard. Carnelian watched for the sparking on the road that showed where the silver chariot was making its progress beneath their cloud. He closed his eyes to trap their tears and choked down the voice that was telling him he would never see his father again.

  Carnelian longed to kite away on the breeze but his heart weighed him down. Its beating echoed up into his head. His face inflated into the sweaty shell of his mask.

  ‘Behold your coomb, my Lord,’ said Jaspar.

  Carnelian looked up blearily. Crags. He pushed his head back, and further back, until at last he had to narrow his eyes against the sky glare as he reached the jagged edge of the Sacred Wall. He dropped his eyes, dizzied, appalled by the scale of it.