‘Celestial.’ It was the central homunculus of three who greeted him. Carnelian read the cypher of the staff he held. ‘My Lord Lands,’ he said, then reading the others, ‘My Lords Cities, Legions.’
Their long masks gleamed as they slightly inclined their heads.
‘Our link to the outer world is severed, Celestial,’ said Cities’ homunculus.
Carnelian could not see past them to the sartlar below. At first he thought Cities was referring to them, but then knew he was speaking of their heliographs.
‘It is imperative we re-establish our link to the outer world,’ said Lands. ‘Without it, we are blind.’
‘The huimur you brought hither, Celestial,’ said Legions, ‘must be sent to the Green Gate to restore the relay there.’
Carnelian was about to ask how they could know that there was where the problem lay – after all the City at the Gates was overrun by sartlar – but then he understood. ‘The Green Gate is not responding to your diagnostics.’
‘Just so,’ said Cities.
‘Can you be sure the watch-towers in the City at the Gates are still intact?’
‘Even to a determined foe they would be nigh on impregnable,’ said Cities. ‘Besides, Celestial, a single link to the network is all we require to restore our vision of the Guarded Land.’
‘A single link will allow our voice to be heard across the Three Lands,’ said Legions.
Carnelian felt uneasy at the thought of the Wise reacquiring such power before the new political balance was in place to restrain them. This situation would have to be played carefully. He took a step towards them. Their homunculi were muttering even as they stood aside. He moved through the Sapients, aware of the dull, resinous odour of their crusted robes. Then he forgot everything except the vision that opened up at his feet. Though still in shadow, it was clear the Canyon floor was clothed with sartlar right up to the turn and beyond. He imagined the solid tentacle of flesh winding through the Canyon and out, spreading over the Wheel, to fray into the alleyways and causeways of the City. ‘What of the sartlar?’
‘They shall return to the Land.’
Carnelian turned to Lands. ‘How do you envisage that this be done?’
It was Legions’ homunculus who answered him. ‘No doubt it is hunger that has driven them into the Canyon. That they have penetrated so far is only because of the breach made in the Green Gate by the previous God Emperor. With fire we shall quickly drive them back from Osrakum.’
Carnelian eyed the multitude below. ‘Do they pose a danger to us?’
The Grand Sapient and his homunculus came to stand beside him. His master’s fingers working at his neck, the homunculus raised a thin arm and pointed at the triangular tower across the circular plain below. ‘That tower there, the Prow, has the firepower of three full legions.’ Legions tapped the floor with his foot. ‘This fortress has the puissance of another three. And, delved into the bedrock upon which these structures stand, there are tanks holding, under pressure, quantities of naphtha seventy-six times that which is held within a legionary fortress of the second class. Even were all our legions to rise up against us, they could not hope to overcome the power here. We are invulnerable.
‘Fire will tame the sartlar brutes as it has always done. We advise that a firestorm should be unleashed from here to clear them from the approaches to the fortress. Issuing forth, the huimur will complete their rout. Be assured, my Lords, the link shall be restored before nightfall.’
Carnelian glanced round at the Grand Sapients, feeling as if he was beneath their notice. Were they attempting to assert their ancient authority? As much could their motives be focused on the internal struggle among them. Under his predecessor’s rule, Domain Legions had been pre-eminent. Perhaps the new Grand Sapient was merely trying to regain something of that lost standing. Carnelian gazed down at the sartlar. He remembered Fern comparing them to earthers. He remembered too the careful way the Ochre sent to fetch water had crept through the earther herds to the lagoons.
‘Would it not be more efficient to merely walk the huimur through the sartlar? Surely they would move from their path?’
‘Celestial, to open the gates without removing the creatures from the killing field would be to compromise our purity,’ said Legions.
‘The creatures are riddled with disease,’ said Lands.
Carnelian remembered that the Ochre had given to the place where they had butchered the heaveners the name ‘the killing field’. Remembering that bloody slaughter, pity rose in him for the sartlar, but he told himself that, if they did not return to the land soon, millions would die from famine. Even the destruction of all the sartlar in the Canyon was not too high a price to pay if it would lead to so many others being spared. ‘I shall go to the Green Gate in the manner you prescribe, my Lord Legions.’
‘My Lord has chosen the path of wisdom.’
Sitting in Heart-of-Thunder’s command chair, Carnelian could not only feel the monster’s power beneath him, but he was also aware of the other dragons, one on either side, framed by the bronze walls of the open portals of the eastern gate. Before him rose the unscalable cliff of the outer, western gate. Above that, the sky was choked with smoke from the lit ranks of flame-pipes that crowned the Blood Gate towers. His own pipes were lit. Everything was ready.
A vast voice roared; a horn blast that caught, echoing, in the throat of the Canyon, causing Carnelian to grind his teeth. The relief of silence filled him with a terrible anticipation that made him burst into a cold sweat. The air began to tear with high whinings almost beyond hearing. Then suddenly, with atrocious force, screams shredded the world, harsh enough, it felt, to skin him alive. A whoosh, dozens more merging into roaring, then he was near-blinded by continuous, flickering lightning. The portals ahead were shuddering as if being struck by an earthquake. Their bronze gonged. He did not hear this, but felt it through his chair, through the judder of the cabin. Black smoke rose turning day to night.
He endured the shaking, the shrieking that hysterically pulsed its daggers in his ears, as the towers round him lit up, flickering, reflecting the coruscating detonations of energy on the other side of the closed gates.
At last the pipes, spluttering, fell silent. The great gates throbbed and clanged as the opening mechanisms engaged. The firmament of bronze came apart to create a hazy slit that brightened as it gave a widening view onto unimaginable carnage.
He issued the command for Heart-of-Thunder to advance and they slid between the open portals of the outer gate. On the sides of his neck he could feel the heat the bronze walls were radiating. Involuntarily, his gaze was fixed in horror upon the charred meat encrusting the killing field. The stench of it assailed him, making him gag. A mesh of black and red and white and seething gold; of limbs and blackened torsos and heads, crisping. Glistening with bubbling fat. Rags and hair smouldering. And, through his chair, he could feel the delicate concussion as Heart-of-Thunder cracked skulls beneath his feet.
The ride smoothed out. Weak with horror, Carnelian became aware they were now moving along a shelf of the Canyon floor that seemed as clean as sun-bleached bone. All the way there their path had been carpeted with sartlar remains: even the bridge that they had crossed under the malevolent gaze of the Prow with its furious mane of smoke. Those sartlar surviving were ebbing away from him. Red they were, engrained with the dust of the outer world. He watched them with a weary, deepening hatred. All he wanted was to reach the Green Gate, fix the accursed relay, then return.
He was slow to realize the sartlar were no longer receding. Their mass solidified all the way to the turn in the Canyon and, no doubt, beyond so that it was impossible for them to move from his path. Filthy, stupid brutes, forcing on him the choice whether to trample them underfoot or to scythe a way through with fire. Lost in the loathsome contemplation of the decision he must make, Carnelian had to be alerted to their movement by his Left. They were surging towards Heart-of-Thunder. Instinctively he cried: ‘Open fire.’
Back on the island rock and behind the Blood Gate, he gazed up at Heart-of-Thunder. The dragon’s vast head seemed all raw flesh; his freshly gouged eye a bloody cave. It had been a brutal business cutting the sartlar off him.
As they were retreating, Heart-of-Thunder’s agony had made Carnelian fear they might lose control of him. He was unresponsive to commands and could at any moment have run amok, plunging them all into the Cloaca abyss.
Incredulous with shock, Carnelian looked back to where more and more smoke was pumping up into the midday sky. The holocaust the Prow was pouring down had not proved enough to repulse their onslaught. Even now, enduring the firestorm, sartlar aflame were flinging themselves ineffectually against the bronze gate. The Wise had sent word that their frenzy must be allowed to exhaust itself upon the defences of the Gate.
From the balcony of their cell, Carnelian and Fern gazed down into the inferno. Each time a flame-pipe screamed they shuddered. A cry swooping from the sky would ignite into an arch of lightning that hissed as it kissed flesh. Shadows leapt feverishly. Blackness rolled across the incandescent arcs. Amidst the torment of fire and smoke, glimpses of undulating ground verminous with movement as the sartlar kept coming on. Why were they not even showing animal fear, but pushing on into the firestorm regardless?
All night, the whole tower trembled and shook from the barrage. Carnelian prayed that whatever instinct was driving the sartlar to self-destruction might lose its grip on them, but the screaming of the pipes never ceased.
The world contracted down to the womb of their cell. They lived a liminal existence between slumber and waking; between inner and outer night. Sometimes Carnelian believed he was back in the cabin, crossing the sea. Everything that had happened after that became nothing but a dream, at first bright as a vision of spring, but, inevitably, rotting down to nightmare.
A body stirred against him. Carnelian turned his head. At first he hardly recognized it was Fern. ‘How long?’
In his eyes, Carnelian saw reflected his own despair. ‘Days?’
He focused his hearing beyond the walls. It took a moment to resolve the raging into the scream of flame-pipes. Days? Revulsion woke him fully. He sat up. Days?
They rose and left the cell. Their legs seemed reluctant to carry them up through the entrails of the tower. They reached a high gallery overlooking a world upon which the play of liquid fire was migraine-bright. It was a while before their vision was able to discern a sort of choppy sea of smouldering ridges and troughs that swept up to dash a wave of corpses against the bronze cliff of the outer gate. Raising their eyes, they saw, beyond the smoke-enshrouded Prow, the shadowy throat of the Canyon disgorging a river that was steadily feeding more meat into the holocaust.
Higher they climbed. As they rose through the levels the air became as humid as breath. So much water had spilled down from above that floors were warped, doors jammed half open, wood everywhere swollen as if abscessed. Higher still the heat began. Air reeking of sweat and naphtha, furnace-hot. Floors awash with fluid as warm as blood. Ichorians laboured in the crevices between the machines. Blistered hands wrestled tubes and counterweights; dashed water from pails onto brass so hot it turned instantly into scalding steam. Mechanisms all around convulsed as if the tower were in its death throes. Carnelian and Fern watched the naked men servicing the engines. Some who saw them tried to get to their knees. All were red-eyed, confused, cruelly burned. Carnelian ignored them, searching until he found a purple robe. Not a Sapient, but only a sallow, gaping ammonite.
Your masters? Carnelian signed, certain his voice could not carry above the din.
They sleep, Celestial, signed the ammonite.
The man cowered when Carnelian frowned, incredulous. Wake them!
As the ammonite scrambled away, Carnelian watched the Ichorians. When he became aware his presence was a distraction that might make the poor wretches fall victim to the machines, he took Fern’s shoulder and they left the way they had come.
There was a scratching at the door. Such a small, ordinary sound in a world of such monstrous cacophony. Carnelian rose and opened the door. An ammonite stood outside, silver face reflecting his pale body as a twisting curve.
‘Celestial, Lord Legions, my master, will grant you audience.’
‘He’s here?’ Carnelian tried to pierce the shadows behind the ammonite, but could see only his Marula slumped against the wall. When Sthax looked up, face wooden with terror, Carnelian gestured him to remain where he was.
The ammonite shook his head. ‘Upon the roof, Celestial. He bade me bring you to him.’
Carnelian left Fern sleeping, then followed the ammonite up through the hollows of the tower. All the way, air sucked up from the lower levels rushed past them with ever increasing fury as if racing them to the roof.
As they came up onto the roof, Carnelian felt he was entering some vast forest. A canopy of sullen blackness hung above, fed by the trunks of smoke the chimneys were pumping up. Melancholy rain slapped against him in gusts and a snow of ash and soot that clung to everything.
The ammonite led him towards the edge, where some dark figures stood like burnt posts: Sapients, sheltering beneath parasols other ammonites were holding over them. As Carnelian drew nearer the screaming of the pipes grew so shrill he felt his bones must shatter. The plain below came into view, partially obscured by a steamy miasma. Pockets that seemed horrible chambers were lit here and there by the lightning flicker of the flame jets arcing back and forth. Through the murk he could see that a jerky, agonized scramble of sartlar were struggling to scale the crust of cooked meat that reared up against the outer gate. A flash, then screeching, as liquid fire slashed across them, baking them into the hill.
‘Your plan has failed,’ he cried above the din.
‘To some extent, Celestial.’
Carnelian turned, startled by that angelic voice, serene in the midst of such chaos. He saw the homunculus who had spoken and the staff he held. Behind him his master, Lands, seemed just another chimney.
The Grand Sapient disengaged a hand from the throat of the homunculus and began signing. Once they overran the City, there was always the danger this might happen. They have become like locusts that, once congregating in sufficient numbers, exhaust the food supply around them. Thereafter, they must move on, else perish. Whichever direction they choose they must maintain, for behind them lies only cannibalism.
Carnelian saw the truth of this. He saw also that it was, perhaps, the initial attack upon them in the Canyon that had precipitated this carnage. Unable to retreat, they had surged forward against his incursion. Thereafter, like a siphon, the pressure of those coming on behind had been compelling those in front inexorably towards the Blood Gate and its killing field.
There was only one thing to be done. We must punch through to the entrance of the Canyon and there deflect more from entering.
It was Legions’ hand that answered him. Not so far, Celestial. We need only reach the Green Gate.
Where a link can be re-established to your systems?
Once that is done, we can summon sufficient force to effect your deflection.
Carnelian regarded the Grand Sapients with the growing suspicion that they had engineered this crisis as the means to acquire control of the outer world and, with it, Osrakum.
‘First you will have to remove this mound that blocks our gates, Celestial,’ Cities’ homu
nculus said above the din.
The three Grand Sapients seemed nothing more than protrusions of the tower roof. Such stillness on the edge of the abyss. Carnelian wondered what it was they were perceiving. Directly, perhaps all they could sense was the rain on their hands, the whispering glancing tickle of ash. Through their feet, they would be aware of the vibration from the flame-pipes operating. But the infernal scene before them they could appreciate only from the throats of their homunculi, as nothing more substantial than a fairytale. Not for him such abstraction. The abomination spread out at their feet was screaming at all his senses. It had to be stopped at whatever cost.
Sitting in Earth-is-Strong’s command chair staring at the locked gate, Carnelian was aware, with a prickly horror, of the mountain of carnage pressing against its other side. He glanced round at the two other dragons that stood close behind him as part of the wedge. The screech of the flame-pipes rising in pitch made him turn back. The Prow was initiating the furious barrage he had planned with Legions, in the hope of holding the sartlar flood back. Grimly he watched the massive crossbars on the gates slide away to both sides, groaning as the gate visibly quivered. Unlocked, the portals began to open. Shrieks of metallic agony came from either side as the mechanisms that opened the gates struggled against the weight they were holding back. A crack was widening between the two portals. At first he could see nothing. Then a dark stream began to pour through. A gush of corpses gradually increasing to a waterfall. An avalanche advancing towards him, one tumbling layer at a time, of things that looked like scraps of leather. A vast belch of fetid air struck them that made his officers recoil, moaning. Fluid welling in his mouth, in shock and horror, he gave the command and the beast beneath them lurched forward, lowering her head to form an immense ram. As the monster’s head punched into the corpse avalanche, the cabin juddered, throwing Carnelian forward so that he was almost unseated. The cabin jerked erratically, yawing, pitching back and forth. He realized it was because the dragon’s great feet were sliding. He tried not to imagine on what. Instead he fixed his attention on the monster’s head as it clove like a prow into the wave of dead. Soon corpses were building up against the raised shield of her bony fringe, until they spilled over and poured out on either side, until her head was entirely submerged beneath the filthy carnage. His officers were soon retching at the stench. Grimly, Carnelian refused nausea, feeling through his chair Earth-is-Strong taking the strain, leaning her immense bulk into pushing the dead before her.
The Third God Page 77
