Before the gate was reclosed, Carnelian went out to make sure the way was clear for the next day’s sally. He had just left Earth-is-Strong and the other dragons having wounds tended that their feet had sustained from embedded shards of sartlar bone.
His steps faltered as he came to the edge of the spread of paste the monsters had crushed from the corpses. He wound more turns of cloth across his mouth and nose and pushed on. The outer faces of the immense portals open against the flanks of the towers were coated with gore almost up to the top. The ground was slippery with fat and fluids. Banks rose up on either side that seemed of tallow. Up ahead the Prow rose with its mane of wavering smoke, on its brow its crown of thorns, whose brass throats were vomiting a juddering fury of fire that was keeping the sartlar at bay. A lone colossus amidst the thunder and shrill demonic screaming, it could not hope to keep that rate of firing up for long without being consumed by its own fire.
Carnelian had reached the first bridge. On the other side, upon the killing field, was the escarpment of corpses that had been left when he ordered the dragons back to the fortress. He made his way to the edge of the bridge, going as fast as he could, though loathing each step he took into the quagmire. The rock sloping down to the Cloaca was densely matted with the dead they had shoved over the edge. In the depths he dimly saw that a great mass of corpses now dammed the channel. If the other branch was also choked, the run-off from the Skymere might begin to pool behind it. Perhaps enough to raise the level of the Skymere. The coombs might be flooded. Unexpected rage welled up in him, driving hot tears into his eyes. So what if the palaces of the Masters should be washed into the lake?
‘Celestial?’ It was an Ichorian bleak with horror and disgust. ‘An embassy has come demanding to see you.’
‘An embassy?’
‘Of the Great, Celestial.’
Carnelian watched them approaching, swaying on high ranga, immense in their black shrouds, their masks glinting from within their hoods like the sun through clouds. Ammonites scurried around them ladling a continuous carpet of blue fire before their feet. They came to a halt while still at some distance from him.
‘My Lords,’ he greeted them, coldly.
As they held up their hands to return his greeting, he saw the symbols painted on their pale skin. They were wearing the full ritual protection. One of them stood forward. ‘I am He-who-goes-before.’ He must have sensed Carnelian’s incredulity at such a claim, for he added: ‘Elected, yesterday, by the Clave in full session.’
Without the attendant command of the Red Ichorians, this honour seemed to Carnelian vainglorious. The Master raised his hand, pointing above Carnelian’s head at the smog wreathing the towers of the Blood Gate; the flash and scream of liquid fire. ‘For days all of Osrakum has watched smoke rising from the Canyon. Drifts of it have darkened the skies above the north-west coombs.’
Carnelian lost some composure as he realized that his father and his people must have been oppressed by these signs directly.
‘We have sent demands to the Labyrinth, but They have refused to grant any audience, nor deigned even a reply. So we have been put to the inconvenience of coming here ourselves. What in the names of the Two is happening here, my Lord?’
Carnelian was aware he had not been addressed as befitted his new blood-rank. Such an omission could only be intended as a slight. Perhaps it was an indication of how these Masters were reacting to his appearance. Aloof on their ranga and with the decorum and precaution of their purity, they looked down upon him in his debased, tainted filthiness. He felt nothing but contempt for them.
‘I came here in response to a report that the sartlar gathered outside Osrakum had swarmed into the City. When I arrived I found they had penetrated the Canyon. We do not know what drives them, but they pour towards our defences. Each day we destroy vast numbers of them, but there are always more. They are as numberless as leaves.’
Another of the Masters stepped forward. ‘Why have the legions not been summoned, my Lord, to drive this rabble away?’
‘All contact with the outer world has been broken,’ said Carnelian.
Two more Masters shifted. ‘All?’
The Master who claimed to be He-who-goes-before spoke before Carnelian could repeat his statement. ‘How long, Celestial, do you expect it will be before contact is re-established?’
Carnelian saw no reason to tell them his plans and made a gesture of indeterminacy. ‘The Wise have assured me the Blood Gate has enough naphtha to maintain the present levels of annihilation for many more weeks.’
‘We do not have weeks, Celestial. Soon famine will visit Osrakum.’
This was news to Carnelian.
‘It is inconceivable that these animals should pose such a threat to us,’ said one of the Masters.
Another turned his shadowed face on Carnelian. ‘Who brought this curse down on us?’
Carnelian wondered what the Masters would say were they to find out just how responsible he was for bringing the sartlar to Osrakum. ‘Everything that can be done, my Lords, is being done. Return to your coombs.’
Turning his back on them, he walked away towards the Blood Gate. They called out to him. His eyes filled with the spectacle of fire and smoke, ears assaulted by screaming flame-pipes, he soon forgot them.
He woke, suddenly. It was the middle of the night. He could not at first locate the reason he felt so alert. Then joy flared up in him. Silence. It was so quiet he could hear Fern breathing. He rose carefully, not wanting to wake him, then padded over to the shutters. They creaked as he opened them. He stepped out onto the balcony. Perfect blackness. Gazing towards the killing field he thought he could make out the mass of the Prow like a cave in the night. The tang of naphtha was underlaid by the dull stench of cooked meat and rotting. He could hear a delicate rustling like a million ants pouring across leaf litter. A warm body pressed against his back.
‘What’s happening?’ whispered Fern.
Carnelian hardly dared to voice his hope. ‘The sartlar are leaving.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know!’
Once more in Earth-is-Strong’s command chair. The creaking of the tower, the mutter of voices remote on other decks, the clink of brass: all these sounds seemed strange, alien. Beyond their little world, a deafening silence. How long was it since the flame-pipes had fallen silent? His ears still felt raw. It was as if the screaming of the flame-pipes had worn deep channels in his head that now, empty, ached.
Dawn was casting the shadow of the monster and her tower upon the brazen cliff of the closed gate before them. Carnelian glanced round, glad to see Fern there. He gave him a nod and was rewarded with a grin. A grinding of brass teeth shocked him back to staring through the screen. It was only the mechanisms working open the gate. Morning spilling through the widening gap illuminated more and more of the edge of the plateau of dead, where everything was eerily still.
They emerged from the corpse quagmire of the killing field into open ground. The sudden drop of ground level to relatively clean rock almost gave him vertigo. Before them stretched the Canyon, still inhabited by the night. A sudden fear possessed him. What if this was a trap? ‘Open fire!’ Arcing incandescence drove back the shadow. The liquid light sputtered and dimmed, leaving glimpses of the empty Canyon burned into Carnelian’s sight. As they lumbered on, he told himself his fears were groundless. A trap presupposed some strategic will directing the sartlar. He could not believe in that, even if he did not think them animals. But he could derive no hypothesis as to why they had left. Uneasy, he lit their way with sporadic bursts of naphtha burn.
They turned into another gloomy stretch. When at last they reached the second turn, Carnelian felt a hand on his shoulder and knew it was Fern come to stand behind him. He reached up to hold him there, even as the next section of the Canyon swung slowly into view. Its nearest portion was in darkness, but far away the morning slanted down to the Canyon floor, and there they saw, strung across the throat of the Canyon
, the necklace of towers and curtain walls of the Green Gate. Carnelian felt Fern’s grip tighten and his heart beat faster as fierce hope rose in him of freedom.
On the ground, the ripping of the breach from the fabric of the Green Gate seemed an act of wanton destruction. Though the Canyon beyond appeared to be free of sartlar as far as its final turn, he had plugged the breach with dragons. The smoke from their chimneys was hazing the upper part of the gap. The plug seemed flimsy in comparison with the massive torn masonry on either side. He took in the gaping hollows of exposed chambers. These had spilled the debris of their walls and floors in a scree up which the Marula were clambering in their search for any live sartlar lurking on this side of the wall. Dead sartlar were plentiful.
When a voice cried out, he looked up and saw a figure framed by the greater darkness of the cavern behind: it was Sthax. Carnelian could not make out what he was shouting, but could read his meaning in his shaking head. The place was empty.
‘What killed them?’ Fern said, gazing down through a grimace at a sartlar corpse long dead.
Carnelian rolled a reddish boulder with his foot. It turned out to be hollow. The interior still showed some unrusted black. It was an iron casque. ‘The Bloodguard who garrisoned this fortress.’
Fern scanned the blood-soaked ground, which was scattered with more of these helmets and other armour and, here and there, a trampled cloak still showing a slash or spot of green.
‘But where—?’ Fern paled and Carnelian nodded grimly, gazing down at an empty cuirass of rusting precious iron: a shell from which a Sinistral had been extracted like an oyster.
Carnelian turned towards Earth-is-Strong and raised his hand in the prearranged signal. He could not see the message being relayed to the Blood Gate to say they had secured the Green. As he turned back, he glimpsed something strange in an alleyway that ran between the Green Gate proper and a tower that rose behind it. Fern followed him into the gap. As the blackness deepened, a foul stench swelled until they could go no further. An uneven wall rose, blocking any further progress. It was from this the stench was emanating. Craning, Carnelian saw this blockage filled the gap between the walls to a level higher even than the fortress wall and right to the very summit of the tower. Up there it was clear what composed this mound. Sartlar dead. Weary disgust gave way to unease. A desperation to find a way through the fiery holocaust might explain the mound the sartlar had piled up with their corpses against the Blood Gate, but here it seemed uncannily as if they had contributed their bodies to bridge the gap between the fortress and the tower.
The Sapients unfolded themselves from their palanquins. They had approached along a road of fluttering blue fire flanked by files of ammonites. A space had been cleared with billhooks; the corpses being dragged away like beached, rotting fish.
As the Sapients approached him on their ranga, Carnelian saw their leader was Legions. The Grand Sapient took his homunculus by the throat. ‘You are certain the area is secured, Celestial?’
‘We have found no living sartlar, my Lord Legions.’ Since the discovery of the corpse bridge Carnelian had felt a need for urgency. ‘We must hurry in case they should return.’
‘Before it is possible to act, Celestial, it is essential to have a complete understanding of a situation.’
Carnelian felt irritation. What was there to understand? And then there was that word ‘complete’. How could any situation be understood completely? He wanted to act and to act now. ‘We need to know what is happening in the City, my Lord. I will take some aquar down the Canyon scouting.’
‘This should be our last resort, Celestial. How much could you hope to see? Even were it possible for you to travel near and far across the Commonwealth your report would be nothing more than a single track through space and time.’
‘You wish to reconnect to the heliograph system.’
‘Even if a single device remains intact, it should be possible to achieve a link.’
Carnelian realized he had seen no sign of a heliograph. ‘Where are these devices?’
Even as Legions’ homunculus was murmuring an echo to these words Carnelian knew the answer. He was already gazing up to the tower that rose behind the fortress when the homunculus raised its arm to point to it.
Climbing the steps up onto the summit, Carnelian was immediately aware of the brass mechanisms around him: a double row of them running off to either side along the width of the narrow space. The military gates they had had to open all the way up through the tower had been closed from within, but evidence of bloodshed had been everywhere. Here on the summit was more blood and, scattered between the machines, discarded silver masks like the ones the ammonites attending Legions were wearing. As these men swarmed the machines, Carnelian wound his way to the edge, following his nose. There he found the corpse causeway. A ramp of the dead sloping up from the ramparts of the fortress. He felt a presence and turned to find Legions and his homunculus behind him.
‘The devices are undamaged, Celestial.’
Carnelian glanced at the machines. ‘So the link was broken when the ammonites were carried off?’
‘Operators are not essential to maintain the link. The heliographs can be set up in pairs to relay signals, though there is an associated risk of degradation with this passive mode.’
‘None were so aligned?’
‘Either the operators had no time to set this up or else the devices were disturbed in the ensuing struggle.’
The homunculus must have reported Carnelian’s glance at the corpse ramp to his master, for he said: ‘Ants will cross a gutter on the bodies of their fallen.’
Carnelian glanced at the Grand Sapient’s impassive mask and saw himself reflected there. Still disturbed, he gazed towards the last turn in the Canyon, wanting to know what was happening out there, but also dreading it.
‘Celestial, may we make the attempt to re-establish the link?’
Carnelian turned back to the Grand Sapient. If he allowed this, the Wise would restore Osrakum’s control of the legions and, with those, dominion over the Three Lands. In the present political situation, it would be their voice the world obeyed.
‘We must re-establish a vision of the Commonwealth.’
‘A vision of the Commonwealth?’
‘An amalgamation of what has been and can currently be perceived from every watch-tower and fortress across the Land.’
‘How long would that take?’
‘Depending on how many channels remain intact, Celestial, little more than a single day.’
Carnelian stared. ‘It would take a signal that long to go to Makar and return.’
‘Still, it can be done.’
‘From every watch-tower?’
‘With a single command code, the entire system can be set into a seeing mode. All sources will supply data in a fixed, compact format along five channels. Of course, Celestial, to achieve a synthesis of the data it will all have to be relayed to the Labyrinth. We have not the facilities here to process it.’
Remembering the system of networked ammonites he had seen in the Halls of Thunder, Carnelian nodded. ‘Ammonite arrays . . .’
There was a noticeable stiffening of Legions’ fingers. ‘Just so, Celestial.’
‘What then, my Lord?’
‘Our collective mind will possess a fully integrated temporal and spatial vision of everything that is happening in the Commonwealth.’
Carnelian tried to grasp what possessing such an understanding might be like. He failed. One thing was certain, though: thereafter, if they chose to act on this vision, they would be doing so trusting the Wise utterly. How, after all, could he or Osidian verify or question their analysis, never mind the vision upon which it was based? Carnelian yearned for the ride around that corner to look upon the outer world with his own eyes, but he could see only as far as a man could. There was no alternative.
‘Re-establish the link.’
The heliographs were greased, swung round, angled back and forth. Ammo
nites pulled at the handles that caused their newly polished mirrors to louvre into strips. At last everything was ready. Five of the devices were chosen and, by means of sighting tubes, they were aligned towards points out on the far Canyon wall near the last turn. All five heliographs began sending signals. Several times they repeated the procedure. A while later a flashing began on the faraway Canyon wall. Another joined it and another, until five distinct stars were flashing signals that Carnelian knew must be coming from the watch-towers set in the gatehouses of the Wheel. Even as this was happening, five other heliographs had been aligned back into the Canyon and, soon, they too had obtained confirmation of a link back to the Blood Gate and, no doubt, on to the Wise in the Labyrinth.
It was some time later that the first signals started coming in from the outer world. At first it was only from one of the relay mirrors, but soon all five were flashing. Reports streaming in along the great roads from ever deeper into the Guarded Land. Two observers watched each channel and passed on what they were reading to the operators who were relaying the signals back into Osrakum. Watching all this, Carnelian imagined the minds of the Wise slowly filling with the light of landscapes far away.
The Third God Page 78
