The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

  ‘Then you have spoken to him today, cousin?’ asked one of the Lords.

  ‘I have . . .’ Carnelian read the name glyph on his crowns, ‘cousin Veridian.’

  The Lord bowed. ‘At the service of your lineage, cousin.’

  ‘I am heartened to receive it,’ Carnelian said.

  ‘Does our Ruling Lord anticipate victory for his party?’

  Carnelian shrugged his hands. ‘It hangs in the balance and why should it not when even those of his own House betray him?’ He looked at Spinel.

  The Lord lifted his right hand to show his blood-ring. ‘This is no mere bauble, my Lord. I will cast its votes as I will. That is my right.’

  ‘And you feel no duty whatever to your Ruling Lord?’

  Spinel opened his arms to take in the gleaming concourse. ‘Only when we vote does the tyranny of our Ruling Lords lift enough to let us for a moment into the light. Like many others here, I will not be persuaded to walk back into the shadows merely by some rhetoric about family loyalty. Are you making me an offer for my votes, cousin?’

  Carnelian controlled his anger, tried to think of something. ‘My father is a fair man.’ He turned to the other Suth Lords. ‘He will treat you as you treat him.’

  ‘I see,’ said Spinel. ‘So on the basis that your father is a “fair man” you would have me declare myself apostate before all the gathered Great and make the new Gods and Their mother my foes.’ He shook his crowned head. ‘I think not. I shall honour the agreement I have made with Molochite and we shall see what transpires.’

  A Ruling Lord appeared towering at the edge of their group. Carnelian saw the House Imago dragonflies on his robe.

  ‘Internecine conflict within the House Suth, tsk, tsk,’ said Jaspar. ‘Not that one can own to much surprise, to judge from the lack of care with which its Ruling Lord is wont to treat its interests.’

  ‘My father’s interests are his own, Jaspar.’

  Looking at Jaspar, Spinel pointed at Carnelian. ‘Lord Imago, my kinsman here was attempting to detach me from my agreements.’

  ‘Indeed. That would be foolish, Suth Spinel. One should not lightly abandon one’s commitments.’

  ‘Spare us your threats, my Lord,’ said Carnelian. ‘My kinsman is already determined in his act of treachery. He had better only hope that when this election is over, Ykoriana will be able to protect him from my father’s wrath.’

  ‘Carnelian, you should not concern yourself overmuch with that. Once Molochite wears the Masks he will reward his friends and, no doubt, become an inconvenience to those whose lack of foresight led them to become his enemies.’

  ‘We are not afraid—’

  Carnelian was interrupted by a chime that shook the air all the way from the Chamber of the Three Lands.

  ‘Aaah, cousin dear, we must discuss your fears some other time. You are summoned into the chamber.’

  Another chime rang out. Carnelian waited for its reverberations to dull. ‘In spite of all your treacheries, Jaspar, the victory will be ours.’

  Jaspar laughed at him through his mask and walked off, dragging a train like a sunset sky.

  Carnelian stood rigid, feeling set about with enemies as the bell’s pealing shuddered over him. He felt a pulling at his sleeve. He looked up to see his own mask reflected in that of one of the third lineage Lords.

  ‘Come, cousin, we must obey the call of the Turtle’s Voice.’

  Leading the Suth Lords, Carnelian made his way along the nave as the pealing gusted like a gale. The nave was filling with the processions of the Great like an armada of sails. The bronze trees of the chamber wall rose menacingly ahead. The moat caught their sinister reflection. The Great did not sail across the bridge, for the northeastern gate was shut. They tacked round towards the south-east, making the gloomy journey to where Carnelian eventually could see the eastern doors were opening like sluice gates, releasing a flickering flood of light. The jewelled oblongs of the Great began bunching as they crossed the bridge accompanied by a shadowy reflected host moving in the moat’s black depths. As they passed into the doorway they smouldered and then caught fire.

  Carnelian slowed with the others, feeling the dazzle falling on him. A chime hit him with its wave. He began crossing the bridge and saw before him the interior of the chamber filled with a ring of the Lesser Chosen like a lake in which there rose an island fenced about with lantern posts. A wall feathered with fire hedged the Lesser Chosen in. Its whole flickering circuit was breached only where he saw a door open in the north and by the eastern door through which he was entering. Naphtha dragon odour wafted in the swell of the pealing bell.

  He looked for the source of all that sound. A mound rose on the low island lying in the midst of the Lesser Chosen. Above this something floated like a summer moon. As he walked towards it down the avenue between the throng, he saw a hammer wielded by syblings hit this moon. It gave out a ripple of sound as if at that moment it had fallen from the sky into the sea. As the vibration rolled over him he faltered and, re-establishing the rhythm of his steps, he became aware of the void above his head. The chamber was open to the night sky. Looking upwards, his eyes could find nothing to see. Fathomless darkness, a dead sky unpricked with stars. He felt its emptiness pouring into his mind through the holes of his eyes and, dropping his gaze, he reminded himself how deep inside the Pillar’s rock he was.

  He was glad to reach the island’s blood-red stone. He had disliked seeing himself twisted in the metal faces of the Lesser Chosen. Steps climbed between the lantern posts, which were tall and slender and grew six branches, each holding aloft a light. He saw the resemblance they bore to the watch-towers he had seen on the road and as he climbed past them he had a notion. The island he had come up onto was a perfect red circle inlaid with a network of silver lines. This was the Guarded Land with its roads. The lantern posts were set around its edge in the positions of the Ringwall cities. The floor of jade and malachite the Lesser Chosen were thronging represented with its greens the encircling lands of the barbarians. The platform that rose at the centre of the chamber seemingly of black glass was fenced by posts carrying the horn-ring of divinity. That was surely Osrakum with its Sacred Wall. The carved stone bell that hung above it in the black air was the Turtle’s Voice, and, like the Pillar of Heaven, a connection between earth and sky. The chamber was a wheelmap made stone, the Commonwealth become geometry, the Three Lands captured within a ring of fire.

  As the Great began to cover the platform of the Guarded Land, Carnelian led the Suth Lords along its rim, until he found the post in the north-west that represented Nothnaralan. From this the silver line of the Great Sea Road ran towards the Osrakum platform. Carnelian leaned on the lantern post and saw the road run down to be lost among the Lesser Chosen. He found Maga-Naralante, a spire rising in their midst, and against the chamber’s flaming wall, Thuyakalrul’s post.

  ‘What are you doing, my Lord?’ asked Tapaz.

  Carnelian had forgotten the other Lords. ‘I was looking for my past,’ he said. Around them the Great were obscuring the red stone with their gold. Already he could not see over their heads to the avenue he had come along but only the upper part of the eastern door.

  The Turtle’s Voice fell silent. A muttering seemed to be coming from the Chosen but as Carnelian listened it grew into an insistent modulating grumble. It was the firewall singing a slow, sonorous song. It soaked into him. The rumble of the chanting slid up to a peak, down and up again and took his heart with it.

  When the other sound started he gasped with shock. A whining at first that tore into a braying, ululating cry. More shawms joined their voices to it, interweaving, fraying into great vibrating surfaces of sound. He saw the mirror faces round him turning to the northeast to where a black doorway was opening in the firewall. Out from the darkness came a light, a flaming apparition. A green path opened up in front of him. The shawms slid in a shrilling pitch, shredding the air as He-who-goes-before came coruscating, towering through the Lesser Cho
sen. His lictors walked before him, holding up his standards like glowing coals. Carnelian worried that their support was out of his father’s reach, but his progress seemed as relentless as a comet’s through the sky as he pulled a flaming tail of the Ruling Lords of the Great with their lightning crowns.

  Then his father was hidden. Carnelian could still follow the red eyes of his standards above the heads of the Great. As his father climbed onto the Guarded Land, the opaque pulsing brilliance of the shawms swelled louder. The sunburst of his father’s head rose into sight and slid across Carnelian’s vision and then, preceded by his lictors, moved up and through the horned-ring fence to stand facing the Turtle’s Voice.

  Carnelian felt the Great turning around him. He followed their gaze and saw the Ruling Lords were moving along the edge of the Osrakum platform. A ripple of bowing accompanied them. One of the Ruling Lords was being bowed to by the Great. A stone grew heavy in Carnelian’s stomach. He knew it was Jaspar to whom they were already paying the homage due a victor.

  A myriad crashes of breaking glass made Carnelian imagine for a moment that around him the Chosen were splintering into shards. His father stood as motionless as an idol. Behind him, in the south, a door was opening. Among a hailstorm of cymbals and crotala, Carnelian noticed the Chosen turning to look into the west. There too a door was opening and in it a pale pageant was appearing, of creatures far taller than the Lesser Chosen who moved back to let them through. The Grand Sapients’ row of icy pinnacles slid along a curve withershins through the Chosen. Each wore the horns of the crescent moon and an icicle crown. Each was preceded by a pair of glittering standards that seemed to move of their own volition. All were clothed in a flash and fold of moonlight. Carnelian counted all twelve Grand Sapients and saw that like snails they were leaving behind them a gleaming track of smaller Sapients. He watched their pavane move into the south-east until all he could see of them over the crowned Great was a twinkling froth like the wake a ship might leave upon a moonlit sea.

  A while later he saw another procession of the Wise churning towards him through the Lesser Chosen. The angle of their approach suggested they formed part of a long spiral feeding in from the southern door. Their course brought them right to the edge of the Guarded Land, close enough for him to see the starry glisten of the tears upon their blind masks. With sistrums trembling they slid past, walking with their staves and homunculi, winding their procession tight around the Guarded Land.

  Then, above the cymbals, Carnelian heard a hiss that made him turn. Under the Turtle’s Voice the crowns of the Grand Sapients were drifting like thistledown. The tail of their march had formed up around the edge of the Osrakum platform. As the tinkling music abated, Carnelian saw the horn-ringed posts begin to melt and waver, then turn into smoke that grew up into the starless night. This slowly blossomed into vast ghostly trees that hung their serpent branches over the Chosen and showered them with attar of lilies.

  Carnelian’s crowns lost their weight. His robe became no more burden than air-thin silk. He looked up and saw the white smoke uncurling in the air like ferns. Rain was falling in the distance. He watched the smoke weave its tendrils into a misty ceiling and realized it was drugged. The Great around him buffeted him as they moved towards the centre of the chamber, casting glances to the south-west. He lifted a hand to touch the landscape of a jewelled robe.

  ‘What . . .?’

  ‘The coming of the House of the Masks.’

  He let the Master go and found himself following him, lifting his ranga shoes with ease, feeling pleasure in his liquid motion. The thrumming was not rain but drumming. A pounding of a heart as massive as the Pillar of Heaven. Lighter rhythms pattered long patterns that took his mind with them even as he crushed in with the brocaded wall of the Great, gazing off to see the door in the southwest opening. The massive heart quickened its beating, making the air rock with its excitement. When the doors were fully open, Carnelian could see the Stairs of the Approach running all the way up into a remote distance where the Iron Door seemed a window onto a thunderous sky. The screaming began, grumbling, tearing metal, rasping into harshness even as the door began parting. More trumpets were pumping, bruising the air and ears with fanfares as the Iron Door fed an incandescing procession onto the stair. Down the steps it poured like burning tar. The anger of the music shifted into an ever more frantic fraying until Carnelian was convinced that it would split him from crowns to ranga shoes. He stared appalled, grinding his teeth, as the procession bubbled down its syblings, carrying with it a gory eye, a bloody gathering of knives, Ykoriana and the other women of her House.

  He let his gaze fall to the sybling vanguard of that march as they reached the chamber and carried tall flames into the Lesser Chosen as if they were burning a path through a forest. Ykoriana came on behind, floating into the chamber on a gale of horns and trumpets. Her hands were folded across her chest sheathed in the jade of her four Great-Rings. Before her went the staves of the Regent with their horned-rings, their targets of the Commonwealth. Beside her paced four smaller amethystine women. Around them blood-eyed eunuchs pale as bones faced outwards, displaying their mutilations. Behind came the Lords of the Masks, scores of them with jewelled nest crowns and the faces of angels reflecting sunrise, and Chosen syblings as wide in their robes as chariots, and their brethren flanking them in greens and blacks, with iron casques and masks and poles bearing jade and obsidian faces.

  Amidst the imperious tumult, Carnelian gaped as the glorious mass broke against the Great and shattered, sending syblings out in branches to outflank the platform of the Guarded Land. The core broke free, climbing onto the Osrakum platform, surrounding it, filling it up so that Carnelian saw his father was engulfed.

  Then the whole world shook to its foundations as one by one the doors slammed closed. Ripples ran along the firewall that seemed to shower the Lesser Chosen with sparks. The trumpets boomed, then grumbled silent. Carnelian could feel the resonant humming of the Turtle’s Voice. His eyes followed the firewall round and found it was complete. The Chosen were all trapped within its fiery ring. With a rustling the Chosen lifted their hands to their faces and removed their masks. Carnelian was slow to follow, shivering, startled by the winter of faces. He looked up and saw his father, clean and bright like an unsheathed sword. Facing him on the other side of the bell, across the Grand Sapients, still masked, Ykoriana looked like an instrument of murder.

  ‘The Jade Lords,’ murmured voices.

  ‘The twins,’ sighed others.

  ‘Nephron,’ said Spinel. Carnelian followed the nervous flicker of his eyes past the Turtle’s Voice, to the south-east where high in the firewall something was embedded like a black diamond. Spinel turned a frown to the north-west. ‘And Molochite.’

  In that direction stood an emerald man. Carnelian looked around him in time to see his third lineage snatch their eyes away from him. One looked down like a shameful child. Carnelian felt again his robe and crowns dragging him down. Were they all going to vote against his father? His foreboding seemed to be leaching out from him into the air. The grumbling chanting had begun again.

  ‘You who are the Lords of the Earth,’ the homunculi of the Wise broke out in chorus, ‘who even now stand upon the Three Lands in power, as you do upon this floor, shall now make ready to choose as once you were chosen.’

  ‘As it has been done,’ the Great broke into thunderous voice, ‘so shall it be done, for ever, because it is commanded to be done by the Law-that-must-be-obeyed.’

  The chanting had grown stronger, more insistent.

  ‘He that shall be chosen by you will be raised as a cup to the sky and thrust as a scoop into the earth that in truth are two but one. Thus he shall receive the double Godhead so that They might once more take Their place here, at the centre of this realm, within the embrace of the Sacred Wall that They flung up to conceal from profane eyes this place of Their transcendent birth.’

  The Great answered the Wise, ‘As it has been done, so shall i
t be done, for ever, because it is commanded to be done by the Law-that-must-be-obeyed.’

  ‘As the Law ordains, this choosing shall be determined by the casting of blood-rings into vessels of jade and of obsidian.’

  The syblings below him raised up bowls in time with a growling of trumpets.

  ‘Molochite of the Masks by virtue of primogeniture shall be the green candidate, Nephron of the Masks shall be the black.’

  The trumpets hung several ragged notes above in the swirling incense.

  ‘The candidates are of the same blood, dewed from the Gods Kumatuya and squeezed from the womb of Ykoriana Four-Blood. Their taint is zero, zero, zero, zero, six, thirteen, ten, five, fifteen, four, thirteen, fifteen.’

  The trumpets grazed each number into the air.

  ‘Let all be aware that any blood-taint zero, zero, zero, three, zero, twelve, eleven, seventeen, two, three, fifteen or lower shall be forfeit at the Apotheosis that shall be held in four days’ time.’

  The horns and trumpets began a slow crescendo and were joined by the oscillating calls of the shawms and a shimmer of cymbals. The voices rose deafeningly, pulsed, collapsed, rose again to shrillness, the trumpets playing a ragged ululation over which the shawms brayed a lilting counterpoint. They fell echoing silent.

  ‘Choose!’ cried the homunculi.

  The forest of gold around Carnelian shimmered into movement. He took hold of Spinel’s sleeve. It is not too late.

  The Lord gave him a look of contempt as he pulled his sleeve free. Carnelian glimpsed the guilty faces of Tapaz and others as they turned their backs on him and began moving towards the syblings standing under the lantern posts. Around the edge of the Osrakum platform, the Ruling Lords were casting their votes. Carnelian saw one as he waited his turn, twisting his blood-ring into a loop that held a bunch of others. Carnelian’s eyes were drawn to a white oval, Jaspar’s face. Carnelian turned away from its look of triumph and went to cast his own vote in despair.

  He stood in line with other Lords until it was his turn. The iron faces of the syblings stared eyeless. One held an urn of jade, the other of glassy obsidian. Carnelian removed his blood-ring, held it over the mouth of the black urn and dropped in its paltry twenty votes. Then he turned and waded a little way off into the golden robes.