The Third God

by Ricardo Pinto

  It was Osidian’s voice that broke his reverie. ‘If needs be I will blast my way through to the Labyrinth.’

  Carnelian remembered the thunder in the ground. He knew what power Osidian had brought with him and was not surprised when the Wise capitulated.

  IN THE UNDERWORLD

  Does a dreamer walk in the Underworld?

  (Quyan fragment)

  ARRAYED IN A ROBE OF VIBRANT GREEN, OSIDIAN REMINDED CARNELIAN of Jaspar’s father on his bier of ice. Save for the lances they had had returned to them after purification, the Marula warriors were naked. Morunasa had commanded them to submit to the ammonites as he and the Oracles were doing. Enraged with fear, the Marula had nevertheless allowed their leather armour to be cut from them and burned. Lotus smoke relaxed them enough to allow the ammonites to wash them, to rasp the curls from their heads. Even their mouths were invaded. Every part of them strigils could reach was scraped until, in places, they bled. The ammonites had been more gentle with Carnelian and Osidian, but no less thorough. Something had been put on Carnelian’s wound so that now he hardly felt it. He had insisted on keeping his father’s cloak, but it had had to be thoroughly cleansed before he was allowed to wrap it over the green robe provided by the ammonites. As they were ushered into the tunnel that lay behind the Forbidden Door, the familiar drugged remoteness gave way to dread.

  Tomb shelves on either side cramped their stumbling march. The lanterns the ammonites carried lit their masks from beneath, making them seem to be the vengeful dead. Carnelian tried to find Sthax among the warriors, but they could all have passed for shadows were it not for their staring eyes. The fear in the Marula soon took root in Carnelian as they crept down into the Underworld.

  Around him the Marula collapsed suddenly to the ground. Shocked, Carnelian came to a halt. The tunnel walls had disappeared. Unawares, he had strayed into a vast forest of the night. The girth of the trunks implied monstrous height. He focused on the green flame he had been following: Osidian once again leading them to the hoped-for light of the Earthsky. Carnelian’s eyes filled with tears of longing to look upon those he loved among the Tribe. Only his breath separated him from the dead. He reached out and touched one of the trunks. Cold stone, not bark. This was the Labyrinth. He gazed up and saw the stone, baroqued with glyphs, rising up beyond the reach of the lantern light and knew it to be a sarcophagus whose pith was the mummy of a God Emperor long deceased. For a moment he was haunted by a memory of the pygmies buried in their baobabs. Then he was gazing about him. Dimly, he could see more of the columns marching off in every direction.

  A whimpering around his feet made him look down and see the Marula warriors curled up, cowering, their hands clasped over their smooth heads, their quivering shoulders, muffling their ears. Perhaps they believed they had been brought to the Isle of Flies. Were they wrong? Panic rising, Carnelian glanced up, feeling hunted. The Oracles gaped, staring with wonder. Among them Morunasa, a stranger without his ashen pallor, in whose yellow eyes Carnelian saw what he most feared. Morunasa knew his god was here. Carnelian did not care whether the Darkness-under-the-Trees had come in with them, or if he had always dwelled here. Morunasa cocked his head, his eyes closed. Carnelian listened too. A strange rumbling was pounding the air. His breath caught in his throat. It was so like the sound the Blackwater made as it forked round the Isle of Flies to tumble, roaring, into the Lower Reach. The sound the Oracles maintained was the voice of their god.

  Monsters surrounded them. Sybling Ichorians, two-headed, many-limbed like crabs. Carapaced with bronze, cloaked with darkness. Osidian barked a command that confirmed Carnelian’s fear this was an ambush. Morunasa and the other Oracles reacted by shouting at the Marula, rushing back among them, kicking them, so that the warriors scrambled to their feet, scrabbling for their lances. Beyond this chaos, the sybling Sinistrals fell some on one knee, some on two, lowering their casqued heads, both tattooed and not, their cloaks subsiding like billows of tar smoke. ‘Celestial,’ they murmured.

  Osidian was still tense as he surveyed the guardsmen. The Marula warriors had formed up with their lances. Carnelian saw their eyes and knew that, at a word, they would fall upon the syblings, releasing their fear as bloody rage.

  It was Osidian relaxing a little that calmed everyone. ‘Have the Halls of Rebirth been made ready to receive me?’

  The syblings kneeling in front of Osidian bowed their two heads further. ‘As much as could be done in the time available, Celestial.’

  Osidian extended a hand to raise the guardsmen from their knees. ‘Lead on.’

  The commander of the Sinistral Ichorians looked uncertainly at the Marula. It seemed to Carnelian the syblings were reluctant to cede their place at the Jade Lord’s side to these barbarians, but when Osidian gestured more insistently, they obeyed. At Osidian’s command Morunasa and some of his Oracles put themselves between him and the Sinistrals, then they all set off.

  As he walked, Carnelian listened again for that distant roar. It had to be rain being drained by gutters from the vast canopy of stone above their heads. Still, glancing into the crowding blackness all around, he felt a creeping unease that, in such a place, Osidian should choose to put so much faith in the Oracles of the Darkness-under-the-Trees.

  Then, through the columns, Carnelian glimpsed a trembling spire of light. They moved towards its beacon. With every step it widened, but also it grew taller until it seemed to him the path of the sun lay twinkling across a brooding sea. They were entering a world that appeared lit by the melancholy, slanting amber of a northern late afternoon. The columns of the sarcophagi soared in the reflected glow, until the soft wavering light had reached up to reveal the faces surmounting them and the lofty arches that flew from one to the other upon which sat the distant ceiling. He realized that the reason everything was bathed in glimmering light was because the columns and vaults were all skinned with gold.

  ‘The Shimmering Stair,’ Osidian breathed and Carnelian saw the source of light was a flight of steps of mirror gold climbing a hill flanked by sarcophagus columns and banistered by walls in which fluttered countless flames. Dark mouths, in pairs, opened all the way up the stair, culminating in a single gape.

  As they continued to advance, a vast moat opened up before their feet whose mirror doubled the glowing golden vision. Crossing this on a causeway, squinting against the coruscating air, Carnelian only slowly became aware of a dark figure standing at the foot of the stair, haloed by its shimmer. The hackles rose on his neck. Was this Morunasa’s god in human form? The closer they approached this apparition, the more mortal it appeared to be. It had a strange globular head, a crown, perhaps, except that Carnelian had a nagging feeling he had seen it before. A few more steps and he knew who it was. He looked for and found upon its dark head the glimmer of its double mask: two gold Master’s faces set side by side.

  ‘You!’ Osidian exclaimed.

  Carnelian had good reason to remember the sybling Hanuses: Ykoriana’s lackeys who had overseen him and Osidian being forced, drugged, into funeral urns to meet a certain and terrible death.

  The syblings bent forward, leaning to one side and reaching for the ground with a thin arm. Thus supported, they folded into a prostration so painfully that Carnelian felt they must be wounded. Osidian waved the Sinistrals and Marula out of his path and went forward, Carnelian at his side. They both gazed down at the double-lobed head. It had changed. One side of it was smaller, wrinkled.

  ‘Rise,’ Osidian said, his voice tight.

  Carnelian observed with what difficulty the syblings came to their feet. The twin faces of gold, though imperious and beautiful, hung at an angle that cheated them of their power.

  ‘Unmask,’ Osidian commanded and Carnelian could hear how dangerous he was.

  A single, tremulous voice sounded from behind the double mask. ‘Celestial . . . the barbarians . . .’ The syblings lifted a hand to indicate the Marula.

  Coldly, Osidian informed them that, since he had taken the barbar
ians into his service, they were now a part of the household of the House of the Masks. The syblings bent their head to comply. Their right hand struggled up to worry at the bindings behind the misshapen head. Carnelian looked for and found the left arm hanging withered, useless at the syblings’ side. Then their faces were revealed. The left was unlike Carnelian’s memory of it, but he could adjust to how much it had aged, to the folds in the putty flesh, and in its pitted eyes it had the same black diamonds. The right shocked him. Shrunken, wizened like a dried fig. Where it met the living face, it dragged down the corner of its mouth, the empty cheek, the right eye so that it seemed that, at any moment, the black jewel might be squeezed out like a pip, might run down the cheek like an oily, black tear. Clearly, it was Left-Hanus alone who stood before them. His brother had died. Carnelian gazed with horror at the shrivelled remains of Right-Hanus. In his bones he knew this was Ykoriana’s handiwork.

  ‘What made you dare appear before me?’ Osidian said.

  The sybling’s face grew moist. ‘Your mother, Celestial, bade me come and bring you to her.’ The sybling’s speech was slurred by him being forced to speak out of the left corner of his mouth. ‘To bring you both to her.’

  It was as much the sound of that voice as the words it had spoken that chilled Carnelian. The moment was upon him. That Ykoriana had sent the sybling must be a sign that she felt no remorse for what she had done to them. On the contrary, she was clearly determined to brazen it out. Carnelian grew grim. She had reason to be so confident.

  ‘Take us to her then,’ said Osidian, a weariness in his voice that suggested he was thinking similar thoughts.

  Left-Hanus ducked a bow, then motioned with his good hand. A child rose from the shadow at his feet and nestled its head under his hand. Then, hobbling, the sybling turned to the steps and began a slow ascent. Carnelian watched the man as they followed him. He felt no rage, not even anger, but only pity. He could imagine what it was to lose a brother, but even then he could claim none as close to him as the sybling’s. For Carnelian, if one of his brothers were to die he would bury him; he would not have to carry the corpse as part of him all the remaining days of his life.

  They climbed the central, raised stair of the Shimmering, passing several of the immense portals that penetrated the slope in pairs. At last they came to the final gateway that gaped at the summit of the steps. Two colossi flanked it, one of jade, the other of mirror obsidian. Osidian came to a halt gazing up to either side. Carnelian could not see what he was looking at, but then noticed the hinges twisting out of the rock from which massive gates had been wrenched. This made him recall the gap torn in the fabric of the Green Gate. Most likely this desecration had the same cause. Portals of iron had stood here, that Molochite had melted down to sheath his chariot. Brooding on this, Carnelian looked through the gateway. His eyes found it hard to grasp the strange geometries of the spaces beyond.

  ‘The Halls of Rebirth,’ Osidian said, sounding surprised, as if he had never again expected to see them.

  They entered a realm of dream. Vast halls they crossed, giving onto perspectives apparently infinite. Forests of gleaming stone. Cliffs of filigreed marble liked bleached bone. Walls of translucent alabaster hung like mist. Pools bisected landscapes of stone polished to a sheen like oiled skin, that was veined with fiery filaments. Chambers echoed to falls of water. Hanus led them through sequences of spaces like the hollows of a seashell, all hung with lamps like clouded stars. Up flights of steps they followed, each stair bringing them into some new world of form, of shimmering colour, of sound. Every surface was slick with subtle reflections. Gargoyles pushed out through membranes of coral, of lapis lazuli. Faces everywhere vanished when you looked at them directly. Feeling eyes upon him, Carnelian, turning, saw only jewel mosaics so fiendish they mesmerized him. Shadows flitted at the edge of vision but, when he looked round, there was nothing there.

  Among these wonders the Marula stumbled, their thick feet leaving trails across the mirrored stone which blushed then faded like breath on glass. Some of the Oracles looked around them wild-eyed, their mouths hanging open. The rest hung their heads, gripping each other, like children skulking through a haunted wood.

  Rising into open air was like coming awake. Glancing back the way they had come, Carnelian could see nothing but shadow. The splendour of the palace was already fading. They were on the roof. Terraces spilled their cataracts into the immense pit of the Plain of Thrones. He felt a vast presence behind him so menacing it took courage to turn. As the towering blackness came into sight he stopped breathing, certain it was the Darkness-under-the-Trees rearing to engulf him. He gasped back to life as he recognized the Pillar of Heaven: a black shaft plunging down from the light-veined clouds to impale the earth way off down the broad belly of the Labyrinth.

  A distorting shadow, Hanus guided them across the Labyrinth roof. When he came to a halt, at his command the Ichorians lit lamps. Carnelian followed Osidian to stand beside the sybling on the brink of a well, still partially covered by an immense slab. Osidian snatched a lamp from one of the guardsmen and held it aloft. Its light found steps spiralling down into blackness.

  ‘The Path of Blood,’ Osidian muttered and his words seemed to find an echo in the rumbling sky. He turned to the sybling. ‘My mother went this way?’

  ‘She did, Celestial.’

  ‘It is forbidden.’

  ‘She waits for you, Celestial, alone.’

  ‘Without attendants?’ Osidian’s tone was incredulous.

  ‘I myself watched her descend, Celestial. None followed her.’

  ‘Only a candidate may walk this path, accompanied by the primary sacrifice.’

  Carnelian’s heart misgave at that word.

  ‘She asked that you should bring the Lord Suth with you.’

  ‘She expects us to walk defenceless into her trap?’

  The sybling bowed his misshapen head. Carnelian saw a trail of spots leading down the first few steps. He crouched and reached out to touch one. He expected it to be wet and was surprised when it felt like skin. He pinched the thing up, brought it to the nose holes of his mask. Inhaled. Rose. He extended his hand into the light. The petal sat in his palm like a wound. He looked again at the petals on the steps that still seemed like a trail of blood. The well was exuding from its black throat the odour of blood. The hackles rose on his neck. Was this the well that had so often haunted his dreams? He glanced back at the Pillar of Heaven remembering the stair that had taken him to his first meeting with Osidian. In his gut he knew it was his fate to descend into its depths. Even though what lay down there might be his mortal enemy and his own certain death. ‘I think we should go.’

  Osidian’s mask turned to him, imperious. ‘Even after what happened last night?’

  ‘I am certain she will be alone.’ Carnelian was. Ykoriana would want no witnesses for what she was going to say.

  ‘You saw this in a dream?’

  In so many dreams, Carnelian thought, but said: ‘Trust me.’

  Osidian’s gold face regarded him impassively. ‘Very well.’ He raised the lantern, perhaps to check it had enough oil.

  ‘Light is forbidden—’ the sybling began, but Osidian cut him off with a harsh gesture. He passed the lantern to Carnelian, then commanded two of the Sinistrals to give him their swords. Taking them, he offered one to Carnelian, who shook his head. Osidian handed back the unwanted sword, then muttered some instructions to Morunasa. Carnelian set his foot on the top of the stair and, holding the lantern out so that its light fell on the next few steps, he began the descent. As he followed the wall of the well round, he glanced back to make sure Osidian was following him. A grating sound made him aware the slab was being pulled over the opening.

  ‘We will not be coming back this way,’ Osidian said.

  Carnelian suppressed a thrill of panic as the last rind of the dark sky was eclipsed by the stone. Then he resumed the descent, their footfalls having acquired a disturbing echo.

 
The steps spiralled them down, down into the blackness. Fearing his sight dangerously impaired by the eyeslits through which he was peering, Carnelian removed his mask and hung it at his waist. A moist exhalation rising up from the depths made his skin clammy. The air was thick with the odour of spilled blood. Carnelian put his hand out to touch the wall. It was gritty, slimy. He brought his fingers to his nose.

  ‘Rust,’ said Osidian.

  Carnelian glanced up and saw he too had unmasked. He watched Osidian squinting into the blackness below.

  ‘If you were going to your Apotheosis, I would be going to my death.’

  Osidian focused on Carnelian’s face and he frowned. ‘Go on.’

  Carnelian resumed the descent, each step taking him closer to his doom. Notions flitted through his head: of murder and becoming a god; of despair and a striving for absolution.

  Down and further down they went. The breeze from below slowly died. It grew hotter until their robes were clinging to their skin. It became harder to breathe. The lantern flame was guttering.

  At last they reached the ground and saw a tunnel leading off into blackness. As they moved into it, their hackles rose: shapes were following them. Carnelian convinced himself they were only reflections given feverish life by the pulsing flame. Then the light died and they were in blackness. They came to a halt. The only sounds in the world were their breathing and his own heartbeat. The blackness was smothering. A touch on his hand made him recoil.

  ‘Just me,’ Osidian whispered.

  Carnelian let his hand fall, questing in the darkness for Osidian’s. Their fingers found each other. They crept forward, hand in hand.

  Ahead, beyond the end of the tunnel, was what appeared to be a clot of blood glowing. Carnelian and Osidian slowed, unsure of what it was they were approaching. Osidian slipped his hand free of Carnelian’s as they advanced. He raised his mask to set it before his face. Reluctantly, Carnelian copied him and was glad when its slits subdued the glare.