The Third God

by Ricardo Pinto

  At last it began growing brighter up ahead. The air was acid with a reek of charcoal. His eyes took some moments adjusting to the light. He became aware that a sinister autumn had come to these forests. The ground was scattered with the ghosts of leaves. Trees were skeletal and black. The feet of the aquar were churning up a mist of ash. This was a world so wan it felt as if the capacity to see colour had drained from his sight.

  They came to a river soapy with ash. After crossing it they climbed a path lined with posts. As they neared this fence Carnelian’s dread flared into full horror. Melted, grinning, to each post was what was left of a human being.

  That was only the first avenue of charred bodies. In that ashen land such fences were common. Villages were thickets of charcoal stumps on the edges of black fields. Drifts of ash like grey snow banked here and there. The cliff of the Guarded Land was a vague, leprous wall. Even the sky seemed bone. The Oracles with their ash-rubbed skin seemed natural inhabitants of that sere land. Soon pale powder floating on the air had turned their march into a procession of wraiths. Terribly white, Osidian urged them on, driven by an inner vision that seemed to make him blind to the devastation. Hope leached from Carnelian’s heart. Anything beyond this dead world must be an illusion. Life and vigour were a fantasy; atrocity the only truth.

  Darkness found them on a hill overlooking the ruins of a village edging a black stream. The gold of the fires they lit seemed counterfeit. That dead world drew Carnelian away from the warmth. He drifted down the hill. Burnt trees had become the roots of the encroaching night. His footsteps faltered as his nostrils caught a whiff of cooked meat, of decay. Passing down an avenue of charred corpses, he could feel their eyeless sockets watching him. Despair claimed him. Would he never escape the Isle of Flies? Was he doomed to witness its malice infecting the world? Was he, perhaps, a carrier of its contagion?

  Some doorpost stumps tempted him to enter the circle of a hovel. Ash buried his feet with each step. His toe struck something. He crouched, tentatively feeling for it though he feared it might be some gruesome remains. Something smooth. A lump with small wheels at the corners. A toy, then. He searched the twilight, hearing the echoes of children playing. Ghostly memories of life. He put the toy down carefully and left the house.

  As he approached the black water the path sank into mud churned deep by the crossing of the dragons. Warped boards stretched between posts formed a fragile causeway zigzagging out through the reeds. The gurgle of the stream seemed unnaturally remote. A heron lifting heavily into the air flapped away, pale, along the stream.

  He felt a tremor in the boards beneath his feet. Turning, he could just make out a small figure approaching.

  ‘Carnie,’ it breathed.

  ‘Poppy.’

  She came to nestle into his hip. He caressed the warm, stubbly swelling of her head.

  ‘Why?’ she murmured.

  ‘This destruction?’ He contemplated all the death he had seen, all the suffering and wasted lives. ‘The Standing Dead need no more reason than does a plague.’

  ‘It must end,’ she said, an edge of pleading in her voice.

  Carnelian desperately wanted it to end, wanted desperately to make it end, but he was powerless. Resistance was self-indulgence. Every act of defiance led only to more victims. He was so weary he could not believe his heart still beat. His knees wanted to buckle. He would fall into the reeds. Slip into the dark water, drown. But release would not be so easily found. It seemed that his atonement was to be doomed to watch everything he loved die.

  Poppy, starting, awakened his senses. Reeds were parting. A sighing as something pushed through them. A shadow growing solid. Carnelian, reliving the night he and Osidian were captured in the Yden, scoured the twilight. The causeway was too narrow for them both to run back along it. He crouched to put his mouth to her ear. ‘Run,’ he growled.

  She clung to him, but he prised her off. He shoved her away. ‘Run!’ Poppy’s face was a blur, then disappeared. He felt her footfalls thumping off and turned to face the shadow. A black boat. He backed away, feeling for the boards behind him with his heels. The causeway gave a judder as the boat struck it. Figures swarmed off it. Carnelian gritted his teeth. His fists flashed as he struck at them. Hard contact skinning knuckles. An outline crumpling. A cry. A splash. He threw them off as they came at him. Shapeless creatures hissing, growling. Despair became rage. He strode forward clubbing at them. Poppy’s voice rose keening far away. Then something smashed into his head. He was on his knees, hands pale against the rough wood, receding.

  THE LEPER

  Purity abhors pollution.

  Control of the boundary where these meet

  Is control over those who wish to cross it.

  (a precept of the Wise of the Domain Immortality)

  SLIPPING THROUGH GLOOMS ROOFED WITH FRONDS. EACH PEEPING STAR A needle in his eye. The dull ache in his head threading each fleeting awakening like a bead. Curves rubbing raw his ear, shoulder, hip, ankle. Was he still curled in the womb of the funerary urn? Unhuman heads dipped over him. Murmuring voices. Repeating rhythm of a ferryman poling. Drifting into the harbours of the dead. A woman’s voice. The sky’s first blush of dawn turned bloody. Suddenly all was a blue so bright it burned him like ice. Carnelian lost his grip on consciousness, slipping back into a darkness haunted by the recent passing of some horror.

  Feeling her leaning over him, he opened his eyes. A shape pulled back, oil light flickering over the slopes of its shrouds. It had a head of sorts, a glint of eyes. Carnelian’s attention wandered off over rock surfaces that sagged into columns. Moving, the shape drew his gaze back to it. He tried to make sense of what it might be. ‘Where . . . ?’ he managed.

  ‘Deep in the caves of my people,’ the shape said with a husky, female voice. ‘In the heart of our camp, far from help.’

  Carnelian’s head was throbbing. He tried to lift a hand, but it was tethered.

  The shape shambled forward, eyes like distant flames. ‘You’ll not escape us.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘What does that matter? One of your victims.’

  Carnelian heard in her voice her appalling crisis of loss.

  ‘We’ve sent word to the other refuges. Soon they’ll begin to arrive. We didn’t want to waste you. It would’ve been greedy to keep you all for ourselves.’ The woman’s eyes glittered as they gazed at him. They seemed to linger greedily. She shook her shrouded head. ‘We lack your skill at torture, but we’ll do our best. I’m sure we’ll manage to make it last long enough for everyone to get their fill.’

  Animal fear welled up in Carnelian. ‘Why?’

  The eyes flashed. ‘Why? You ask me that? We offered you submission. We grovelled before you. Gave you everything we had.’ The voice was swelling the pain in his head. ‘Vowed everything. We even worshipped you!’

  The cry echoed around the cave then died. The woman rose and Carnelian saw from her movement that, under her shrouds, she had human proportions. He could see no flesh, no hands, no feet. Even the eyes had disappeared into the narrow slit in the swaddling of cloth strips.

  ‘Did you feel invulnerable on your dragon? Did you laugh as you watched our people impaled? Did you revel at your feasts lit by the bodies of my people as they burned alive?’

  Carnelian remembered the charred remains. ‘Lepers?’ he muttered, growing cold.

  The shrouded head turned as if to listen. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Were they Lepers?’

  ‘Yes, just filthy lepers,’ the Leper agreed, ‘and you’re a Master, but still you will dance for our amusement.’

  The Leper turned away, her shrouds sighing as they dragged on the floor. When silence fell, Carnelian tried his strength against his bonds, but struggling only served to make them bite deeper into his wrists and ankles. Phantasms of shadow were fluttering in crannies in the rock. The Leper thought him Aurum’s ally. Anger burned up in him that he was to die in Aurum’s place. Thoughts of never seeing Fern or Poppy again c
aused his mind to falter with despair. Images merged, divided. He saw the Lepers burning, impaled, and they merged with the Ochre dead. He had made it all happen. Akaisha burned beneath the arches of her tree. Aurum, a pillar of ice, did not melt even a tear. No, the cold beauty was Osidian’s. He saw his own face in Osidian’s; Osidian’s in his. Even aged Aurum’s. All cut from the same ice. Each guilty of the other’s crimes.

  Afloat on a black sea oppressed by glowering sky. Terror slicing through the depths. Is that dawn spreading livid across the waves? Spume turns to choking dust. Whirling towers of it like smoke. Becalmed upon rusty dunes, he stoops to scoop a handful of red earth. Itching palm. Worms sliming into his honeycomb flesh.

  Carnelian woke bucking. He calmed down, heart pounding, letting the dream drain away.

  The Leper was there. He shuddered at her touch as she cleaned him like a baby. Her skin rasped against his thighs, his buttocks. Wiping him with leprosy. Trapped between waking horror and his dreams Carnelian had nowhere left to flee.

  The shrouds rose over him. Water dribbled into his mouth, trickled down his cheek then neck. ‘Drink.’

  A lip of rough earthenware opened his mouth wider, clinked against his teeth. ‘Drink.’

  A choking flood. He arched his back, spluttering.

  ‘You’re not what I expected,’ said the Leper once his coughing had subsided.

  Carnelian imagined all kinds of faces deep in the black mouth of her hood: deformities more hideous than the sartlar Kor’s.

  ‘You don’t believe you will die?’

  Carnelian did and longed for it, as the only remaining way out. The Leper leaned close enough for Carnelian to see bandages stretched over a mouth and chin and all the way up the bridge of a nose. The eyes were remote stars reflected in a midnight sea.

  ‘I’m wrong. I can feel your fear.’ The bandages deformed as the Leper spoke. ‘Beg for your life!’

  The scene lost cohesion, dissolved.

  ‘You’ll beg sure enough when we torture you.’

  Carnelian felt he was overhearing a faraway conversation.

  ‘I saw many plead as they were broken. Cut, crushed, impaled, burned. You watch it, because you can’t turn away. Hard to believe they could still be alive. A mere rag of a thing, blood and piss and shit leaking away, but still watching its tormentor with animal eyes, pouring a scream so sharp it’s nothing more than a gasp.’

  Silence. A silence that made Carnelian come back, that made the Leper solid again.

  ‘Stripped of your power you’re not so different from us.’ She lifted a shrouded arm from which hung a ball of stained cloth. ‘You foul yourself as a man does.’ The arm dropped. ‘Though your beauty is unearthly; your eyes. I can see why you hide behind a mask. Your face is more terrifying than leprosy. But don’t imagine that weakness . . .’ The Leper waved an arm over Carnelian. ‘It won’t save you. My people were more helpless than you look now. We’ll show you we can be as merciless.’

  Silence and Carnelian enduring it, trying to stay in the cave.

  ‘Why did you do it? We offered you submission.’

  Carnelian tried to find words.

  The Leper jabbed a foot into his ribs. ‘Why?’

  Carnelian moistened his mouth to speak. ‘Do Masters need a reason to be cruel?’

  The Leper was there again. ‘Where’ve you hidden your auxiliaries?’

  Carnelian strung the words together. Auxiliaries?

  ‘You’re hoping we’ll go back to our homes. You call us vermin. Extermination is a Master’s word.’

  Carnelian remembered the pyres and the stench of death in his nostrils as familiar as his own smell.

  Light thrust into his face, searing his eyes closed. ‘Where?’

  Carnelian tried to turn away, but fingers digging into his cheek forced his head back.

  ‘Dead,’ he said, moving his jaw against the Leper’s grip. ‘All dead.’

  The grip released. ‘Do you take us for fools?’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’

  ‘We killed them all.’

  ‘What’re you talking about?’

  Carnelian tried to describe the battle as he recalled it, in snatches. As each jewel-bright impression flashed into his mind he tried to hook words to it. He fell silent, aching for his loved ones.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me the Plainsmen defeated you?’

  Carnelian registered the Leper’s incredulity as it mixed with his confusion. Clarity came as a vision of a landscape columned by rising smoke.

  ‘Are you?’

  Carnelian managed a nod.

  ‘All were destroyed?’

  ‘All,’ Carnelian said, as memory dug its roots into him. Pyres burned the smiling dead. Trees burned. The Koppie Crag with darkness coiled around it like a snake. Poppy’s face striped by tears. Flashes of light, smothering dark, faces, familiar, strange. The living and the dead. Enmeshing memory and dream.

  When he surfaced again in the cave the Leper was gone. A lamp guttering was causing shadows in the walls to shudder like mourners.

  ‘You were travelling with Marula. We followed you. We’re sure they had no brass around their necks.’

  Carnelian groaned. ‘I told you before: the auxiliaries are all dead.’

  The Leper shifted her shapeless shrouds. ‘There was a girl with you, a Plainsman girl.’

  Carnelian’s heart leapt. ‘Poppy.’

  ‘Your slave?’

  Carnelian tried to shake his head.

  ‘Why weren’t you wearing a mask? Why the rags? Were you disguised? It doesn’t make sense.’

  Carnelian began rambling, discovering his past even as he was coining it into words.

  ‘Living with them? You were living with Plainsmen?’

  Carnelian brought the Leper into focus. ‘They gave us sanctuary.’ That last word chimed like a bell, then he was overwhelmed with loss, with the horror of what he had allowed to happen.

  ‘Why are you crying?’ said the Leper, her voice huskier with alarm.

  Carnelian staunched his tears. The dead demanded not tears, but atonement.

  ‘Sanctuary from whom?’

  Carnelian responded to the gentleness in the Leper’s voice. ‘Other Masters.’

  Carnelian sensed her surprise.

  ‘You fought with the Plainsmen against the auxiliaries?’ she whispered. ‘You were fighting the Master who is our enemy . . . ?’

  ‘Aurum,’ Carnelian said, tasting the syllables as if his breath had become that of a corpse.

  ‘Au-rum,’ the Leper repeated. ‘It’s strange to know our enemy by name.’ She leaned towards him. ‘You hate him too. I can see it in your face.’

  ‘I hate all the Masters. All.’

  The Leper waited for the echoes to fade. ‘But him most of all.’

  Carnelian almost explained how Aurum had had his uncle put to death, but that did not feel right. The Lepers had primacy when it came to loss at Aurum’s hand.

  ‘Then you weren’t involved in . . . in the atrocities . . . ?’

  Carnelian managed a dry chuckle, almost a cough. ‘You’re wrong. I am involved. Aurum came down here searching for . . . for me.’

  The shrouded head nodded. ‘But if he’s your enemy why are you prepared to die in his place?’

  Carnelian grew suddenly fatigued, worn out, despairing that he could not find enough energy to confess his crimes.

  His buttocks were raw. The discomfort he could bear, but he was enough himself to feel the humiliation of being cleaned like a baby. When the Leper had finished she brought a bowl of water to his lips. He drank, trying to pierce the shadow in her shrouds.

  ‘There’s no need for you to have to keep doing this,’ he said. He lifted his ankles to show their bindings. ‘Loose me then I can relieve myself decently.’

  The Leper drew back. ‘So you can try to escape?’

  Carnelian’s heart leapt at the thought of rejoining his people. He shook his head
. He had been a prisoner for days; they must be long gone.

  ‘Even if you managed to pass through our caves, you’d be lost in our land. We’d hunt you down.’

  Carnelian smiled. ‘Well then.’

  The Leper looked down her cowl at him for a while. ‘Roll over.’

  Carnelian did as he was told. He felt her working at the knots and bore the pain as the rope peeled away from his wounded flesh. His arms seemed wood as he brought them round in front of him. He grimaced as he saw his wrists; the colours of bronze and so swollen that they did not seem to belong to him at all. He sat up to watch the Leper free his legs. Her bandaged hands were nimble. He imagined the skin beneath the bandages with its sores, its thickened plaques. It quickened fear in him that he must now be a leper.

  When his feet came loose, he gingerly drew them apart, grimacing at the ache and stiffness.

  The Leper laughed. ‘You’ll have difficulty standing on those, never mind escaping.’

  Her laughter was a warm sound. Not meant unkindly. Relief perhaps.

  ‘What’re you called?’ he said.

  The Leper regarded him in her motionless way. ‘Lily.’

  His face must have betrayed his surprise because she added: ‘Do you think a leper has no right to a pretty name?’

  Carnelian shrugged, discomfited.

  ‘And you?’ Lily said.

  Carnelian told her and was charmed by how she pronounced it. ‘Do you wear those shrouds even among your own kind?’

  Lily turned her head to one side. ‘Why do you ask?’

  Carnelian shrugged. ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s because I’m monstrously disfigured.’

  ‘I’ve seen much disfigurement.’

  He sensed her anger in the cast of her shoulders. ‘How like a Master that you should only be capable of seeing this from your own perspective.’

  Carnelian was stung by this rebuke, not least because it was justified. ‘I’m sorry.’