The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

  Carnelian lifted his hands in apology. ‘I meant no offence.’

  Jaspar made a dismissive gesture. Before he could turn away, Carnelian reached out and touched his arm. ‘Perhaps in view of what I have said, cousin, you might consider putting an end to this torture.’

  Jaspar jerked his arm free. ‘You presume too much, my Lord. This is a lesson that I will brand deep into the memory of my slaves. Since his guardsmen did not care to die to save his life, they will die so that my father’s ghost might sup on their blood as he descends into the Underworld.’

  The moans and pealing grew deafening. Carnelian fidgeted as he looked up the steps. The idols of the avatars leered down at the crucifixion frames standing beside their altars. A procession was coming down the steps between them. Sapients, horned and wearing the moon’s face, drifted hand in hand with their homunculi. Behind came ammonites chiming heart-stone bells or waving moaning silver mouths aloft on poles.

  Carnelian was forced to move aside, to draw closer to the tortured man. Water oozing in his mouth anticipated vomit. He closed his eyes and prayed that he would not retch. His mask was a gag, but if he threw it off it would bring even more death and mutilation to the household Imago.

  A heavy waft of stale incense made him open his eyes. The Sapients were upon him, their bead-crusted purple samite swinging like plates of armour. Each carried a staff capped with a manikin of green-rusted copper crowned with a scything crescent moon.

  My Lords of the Domain Immortality, Jaspar signed, then bowed.

  The Sapients worked their staves backwards and forwards like levers as they slid past. The moaning was like a peopled gale. Carnelian saw the silver-faced ammonites striking their stone bells, compelling his heart to their dirgeful rhythm. Floating between them was a slab of ice like smoky quartz. Upon this a Master lay, reeking of myrrh, encased in a green robe as stiff as a box, the cloth darkening where it sucked up meltwater. The robe was spangled with tiny spirals that might have been the heads of nails hammered through into the flesh. On the chest lay an annulus of mirror obsidian in token of the Dark Water over which the dead cross to the Underworld. The gold mask was a face in which the world slid reflected, like the memories of the dead man’s life. The ammonites leaned in towards each other gripping their burden with blue hands.

  Jaspar moved into Carnelian and forced him to retreat until he could feel the cross’s arm digging into his back. He shuddered, feeling the pain tremoring the frame. A Chosen woman, her face sagging yellowed marble, stopped to allow Jaspar his place behind his father’s bier. Carnelian was glad she did not look to question his own presence there. More than a dozen scarlet Masters followed, some throwing frowns at him as they passed.

  Carnelian was hoping for a place at the end of the procession but the Imago guardsmen bringing up the rear, resplendent in azure-feathered cuirasses, heads hanging, waited for him to join the other Masters. As he hesitated, one of the guardsmen looked up as if waking from sleep. Gashes that had been cut down from each of his eyes were weeping tears of blood.

  Several kharon boats were waiting at the quay, the sun gleaming on their bony curves. Guardsmen knelt and cried their blood onto the stone. Jaspar’s brother came towards them, his hands signing, Why does he come with us?

  ‘Because I will it,’ said Jaspar and motioned for Carnelian to stand beside him.

  The eyeslits of Jaspar’s brother’s mask turned to stare at Carnelian, who looked away to see the bier being presented like a table to a ferryman standing in one of the boats. The creature did not look like a man at all as he inclined his bone-crowned head, arms extending to lift the dead Master’s huge and pallid hand. He removed a ring from a finger, returned the hand to the bier, then stepped aside. The Sapients and their homunculi were already standing on the deck. Under their instruction, the bier was loaded onto the boat.

  First Jaspar and then his brother gave rings to the ferryman and stepped aboard. Carnelian pulled a jade ring from his finger, remembered to offer it with his left hand and stepped onto the cobbled deck. The other Masters of House Imago followed him. Feeling out of place, Carnelian watched the other boats being loaded with the people and baggage streaming out from the palace.

  His own boat was the first to turn her prow towards the lake and slide off. Carnelian felt sad for the old Chosen woman left standing off to one side, alone on the quay. Swinging more freely on their poles, the silver mouths summoned up for them a wind of keening that seemed to carry the bone boats across the water with only the merest effort from their oars.

  Jaspar sat on the middle chair with his brother on his right. Carnelian had been set on his left. The other Imago Lords stood behind them. Carnelian kept his back as stiff as the chair’s and tried to shut out the bells and moaning. Before him the corpse of Jaspar’s father lay on the ice like a fish in a kitchen waiting to be gutted. Although the ammonites held a canopy over the body, the sun was still low enough to slip under it. Rivulets ran down the ice, sparkling indigo, puddling the skull-cobbled deck.

  The corpse looked so much like Carnelian’s father in the Ichorian chariot that Carnelian warmed with sympathy for Jaspar and for his brother. But his stomach reminded him of the crucifixions and he grew cold.

  On the water, the bone boats turned towards the slope behind which lay the Plain of Thrones. Carnelian saw a cleft in its green that came slicing down to the water’s edge.

  ‘The Quays of the Dead,’ murmured Jaspar’s brother.

  Carnelian was sure he could hear grief catching at his throat.

  The boats began nestling into the quay. Ammonites carefully unloaded the corpse as the other boats began disgorging their passengers. Carnelian watched each Sapient disembark leaning his bulk on his homunculus. The little creatures stooped among the purple skirts of their masters’ robes, reached inside behind the cloth and came out with ranga. Descending, the Sapients seemed to be sinking into the quay. Carnelian looked back across the Skymere to where the circling cliff of the Sacred Wall crimped with coombs and realized that even there the ground was too profane for the Wise to walk without ranga.

  When he turned back he saw guardsmen unfurling banners as the embalming procession formed up at the foot of a stair. Carnelian followed Jaspar and his brother and felt the other Masters walking behind him. The Sapients were already moving up the stair.

  The climb was long and arduous. At landings, they stopped just long enough to allow the ammonites to transfer the burden of the corpse among themselves.

  They came up onto a larger landing whose outer edge was lined with stumps like teeth. Carnelian felt a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘One would speak with my Lord,’ said Jaspar. He nipped off the beginning of his brother’s protest with a sign and sent him and the other Masters up the next flight of steps after the procession, accompanied by the majority of the guardsmen, all the women and children and the porters with their burdens. Only a few guardsmen remained, hanging their banners above them like parasols. Carnelian saw that the cuts down their cheeks were healing brown.

  ‘Perhaps, cousin, you would explain to me how my slaves might have been prompted into committing murder?’ said Jaspar.

  ‘Have you had visitors? A message from court?’

  ‘Some Lords came to conclave. From court. . .?’ Jaspar shrugged a no.

  ‘Perhaps their entourages . . .?’

  ‘My Lord’s arguments tend towards a certain circularity, neh?’

  Carnelian had to agree. He used his foot to scrape earth from a ring shape on the ground. ‘Are you sure that no person whatever came from court?’

  Jaspar’s mask regarded him as if from a great height. ‘I suppose there is always the regular traffic in ammonites.’

  ‘Ammonites?’

  Jaspar fluttered a gesture of disbelief in the air. ‘If you draw ammonites into your fantasy then their masters are sure to be close behind.’

  ‘Why should the Wise not conspire with Ykoriana?’

  ‘Enough! You would have me be
lieve that two powers work in concert against the third.’ He shook his head. ‘If that were so, first the Balance and then the Commonwealth would be destroyed.’

  Jaspar dropped his cowled head as if he were deep in thought. So as not to interrupt him, Carnelian looked down at the ring his foot had uncovered. It was of bronze and had a hinge at one end, like a mooring ring. He looked out over the blue waters spread out below. He glanced from side to side along the landing and wondered if in some ancient time it could have been a quay. He felt Jaspar move away. ‘Well?’

  Jaspar turned. ‘I must follow my father this one last time.’ He sighed. ‘And, as Funereal Law demands, on foot.’

  Carnelian followed Jaspar, sensing victory. He noticed that the steps had several times been recut deeper into the rock. The dirgeful bells came echoing distantly from above. Striped walls of stone rose up on either side. As they climbed, Carnelian became uneasy, convinced he was being watched. The walls had in them an impression of a crowd. When he squinted, he could make out their faces, vague from uncountable years of rain, furrow-mouthed, scratch-browed, noseless, with pits for eyes.

  *

  ‘The Plain of Thrones,’ said Jaspar.

  Carnelian gazed at the walled plain, widening round then narrowing again in the distance to where the wall looked no higher than the thickness of his arm. Behind it rose an immense blackness that overwhelmed him. As the bells’ pealing struck him with its hammer blows, Carnelian was again clinging to the deck of the baran. His mind’s eye widened looking down into the gyring horror of the well. He blinked. Before him was the plug that would have filled that pit in the sea. It was only motionless rock, he told himself, the flank of the Pillar of Heaven, narrower from this side. The pressure of the bells was fading. He let his eyes slip down to an arrowhead, a hollow pyramid cut into the plain’s wall, a buckle in its belt. He realized the stone on either side of it was pricked with windows, ribbed with balconies, striped with colonnades. Below stood a line of shadowy men. He turned to follow them round. Standing one beside the other, they hemmed the wall for fully half its circle. In the west they stood revealed by the sun as solemn stone.

  The funereal pealing and moaning was pulsing round the plain. Remembering his father’s stories, Carnelian snatched his eyes back, searching. There, beneath the pyramid hollow, he found a space wedged between two of the stone men and knew that it must hold the Forbidden Door, the entrance to the Labyrinth.

  Carnelian was walking along a road that ran as straight as a shadow towards the Forbidden Door. For a while, he had been noticing something like a clump of people conclaving in the centre of the plain. Heat shimmer had lent them movement but as he came closer Carnelian saw they were stone monoliths set in a ring.

  ‘My Lord,’ said Jaspar, in the silence vibrating between two peals.

  Carnelian turned to him and saw the Master’s hands begin to sign.

  Soon I will leave this procession and go into the Labyrinth. If you still wish to accompany me you must do as I say, agreed?

  Carnelian agreed and they continued on their way.

  Inside the outer ring of monoliths, close to its centre, were two more rings, one within the other. Most of the monoliths were the colour of a stormy sky but those forming the innermost ring looked as if they had been painted with blood. All the ground within the outermost ring was slabbed, mosaiced, ridged, or spotted with cobbles. The road they were on divided to curve round the flanks of the stone circle, then joined up again upon the other side. Along the left fork Carnelian could see another procession moving with banners. The Sapients took the embalming procession along the right. A quarter of the way round, a new road branched off towards the northwestern edge of the plain. At this junction the procession came to a halt and Jaspar and his kin began to argue with their hands. Carnelian looked away, not wishing to intrude further. The Sapients stood near a pair of monoliths that lay a little distance out from the circle. Although only half their height, the Sapients bore some resemblance to them. Jaspar glanced over, then chopped an angry sign that caused his kin to bow and move away.

  Carnelian watched Jaspar walk to his father’s bier and kneel beside it, then rise and come towards him. His heart warmed to see such filial affection.

  ‘It must be very hard to lose a father,’ he said when Jaspar returned.

  ‘Terrible.’ Jaspar’s hand went to a chain at his throat and drew a Ruling Ring out from his robe. He dangled it. ‘But still, there are compensations, even for such a loss. Long have I coveted this . . . to wield its power. . .’ He sighed in a kind of ecstasy. ‘I cannot count how many times I have wished him dead.’

  ‘Dead? But . . . I thought. . .’

  ‘What did you think, my Lord?’ said Jaspar, as he fed the ring and its chain back into his robe.

  ‘The crucifixions . . .’

  ‘You thought I did that from sentiment?’ He laughed, shaking his cowled head. ‘How rich. Really, you are too peculiar, cousin dear. It was done for revenge, but, even more, for future security. Could you have conceived a better way to inaugurate one’s reign? Admittedly, it is a profligate waste of flesh wealth, but exactly because of that the lesson will live long in the memory of my slaves. If fortune is not unkind to me, it will never have to be repeated.’

  Carnelian was glad of the mask that hid his distaste.

  Jaspar made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Enough. This is neither the place nor the time for social banter. I have a gift for you, cousin.’ Jaspar held out his hand and waited for Carnelian’s to move under his before he dropped something into it.

  Carnelian looked at it. ‘A blood-ring?’

  ‘Hush! Put your hand down.’ He turned until one of his mask’s eyeslits could see the procession that was already moving down the north-western road in the wake of the Sapients.

  Carnelian obeyed him, concealing the ring in his fist. ‘Whose is it?’

  Jaspar grabbed his shoulder. ‘Come, my Lord, let us proceed. The sun begins to grow oppressive and we still have a long walk to the Forbidden Door.’

  They journeyed round the circle of monoliths, and as they passed the kneeling guardsmen and retainers Jaspar motioned for them to follow.

  ‘One would have thought it obvious that the blood-ring in your hand is from a Lord of one of my lesser lineages. Khrusos, to be precise,’ Jaspar said in a low voice. ‘You must wear it instead of your own.’

  Carnelian’s hands lifted in protest but Jaspar swatted them down.

  ‘You asked that I take you with me, my Lord, as one of my kinsman. That is exactly what I am doing.’

  Carnelian’s eyes wandered between the outer monoliths to the inner ring. After some thought, he carefully removed his own ring and replaced it with the one that Jaspar had given him.

  ‘Good. Now you are my inferior,’ said Jaspar.

  Carnelian could hear that he was speaking through a smile. Carnelian was not happy. The new ring felt unnatural on his finger. He distracted himself by counting the monoliths. He noticed that the red inner ring was completed with two green and two black stones.

  ‘What are these stones, my Lord?’

  ‘The Dance of the Chameleon.’

  ‘A calendar?’ said Carnelian, since that was the only meaning the words had for him.

  ‘In a manner of speaking. Does my Lord see the innermost ring? Well, he will also see that there are twelve stones of the same colours as the months.’

  ‘Your inferior still does not understand.’

  Jaspar’s mask flicked towards him. ‘It is a machine, a sorcerous engine that the Wise use to predict the coming of the Rains and all other temporal matters that provide impetus for the actions of the world.’

  ‘I see,’ said Carnelian, seeing nothing but stones. He waved his hand. ‘But these others?’

  ‘The calendrical stones also have inscribed on them the Law-that-must-be-obeyed.’

  Carnelian realized he had known this but still he gaped in wonder. ‘The Law itself!’

  Jaspar nodded
, taking his utterance as a question. ‘And these other stones are commentaries and amendments. The markings on the floor link the whole corpus in some manner unfathomable to any but the Wise.’

  Carnelian was walking blind, stroking his new blood-ring, working through what he would say to his father if they should actually meet. An acrid charcoal tang made him see again. The road ended at an edge of sooty stone. Looking up he saw the blackness stretching off towards the wall of the plain.

  ‘Why do you linger, my Lord?’ said Jaspar.

  ‘This burning . . .?’ said Carnelian, pointing.

  ‘Yes, it has been burned,’ Jaspar said impatiently. He waited but Carnelian did not move. He sighed. ‘It is here at the ceremony of the Rebirth that our tributaries kneel to worship us’ – he pointed up at the pyramid hollow – ‘up there.’

  Carnelian surveyed the black field and tried to imagine it covered by a vast and grovelling throng. ‘But the burning . . .?’

  ‘Carnelian!’ Jaspar sounded aggrieved. ‘Do you really think that we could allow their pollution to go uncleansed, here . . .’ He lifted his arms, turned round in a circle. ‘. . . here at the very centre of our hidden realm? The flame-pipes of the Ichorian Legion sweep this whole space like brooms and then . . .’ He pointed the blade of his hand back the way they had come. ‘. . . all the way along that road, down to the quays, round the Ydenrim, over the causeway, through the Valley of the Gate and all the way up to the Black Gate.’

  Carnelian saw the chameleoned faces round them hanging miserably and lost his curiosity. ‘This is all the burning I have seen.’

  ‘Sometimes, Carnelian, you are like a child. Do you really believe that the Chosen would choose to allow even their servants to walk around leaving black footprints all over Osrakum?’

  ‘A vast labour,’ said Carnelian gloomily.

  ‘There is a sky full of rain to help them.’