The Third God

by Ricardo Pinto

  ‘You must be cleansed, Celestial,’ they sighed.

  Uneasily, Carnelian eyed the dark behind the silver faces. Other odours wafting towards him made him recall the drugged smoke with which Legions had captured him in Makar. Even if it was nothing more than the standard narcotics employed during purification, he did not want his mind dulled. He wanted to see things as they were; to be entirely himself. Half turning away, he extended his arm to take in the Marula. ‘I wish to pass through with these.’

  ‘Impossible, Celestial. They must go through the quarantine. Would you bring death into the Land of the Everliving?’

  Carnelian almost laughed, mirthlessly, and wondered if they could really be so ignorant of the irony. He peered past the disembodied faces, trying to determine how far there was to go and if he could find his way to the other side without their guidance. ‘You know I am brother to the new God Emperor and that these men are his new Ichorians.’

  ‘The Law does not bow even to Them.’

  Carnelian lowered the halberd. ‘But it will bow to me.’ He advanced and the faces melted away into the darkness. He was glad to hear the shuffle of the Marula following him. Voices round him rose in a keening that had soon drowned out the Blood Gate flame-pipes. Even as he became aware of subtle revolvings in the air above him, he realized his focus was slipping. Gaps in the uncoiling smoke revealed the position of figures surrounding them. As he moved forward, apparitions slid towards him. He traced circles before him in the smoke with the halberd head to clear a path for them. It struck something with a sharp clap, even as one of the apparitions disappeared in a tinkle of shards. A mirror of glass as perfect as water. He was aware of the ammonites drawing back. He swung the halberd into another mirror and another and the ammonites faded, whispering, away.

  His shadow died as he moved away from the light that was streaming through the open door behind them. He glanced round to make sure Fern and the others were still following him. By the time they reached an arch standing all alone, his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He remembered seeing it before and put his hand out to touch it as he had then. Faces as vague under his fingers as they were to his eyes. The faces of corpses submerged in water. His hand recoiled. He could smell the blood rust on his fingertips and wiped them down his cloak. The ghost of an inscription ran around the iron curve. Unreadable beyond a vague whispering in his mind. He stood back. It was not an arch, but a ring partially embedded in the ground. If it were a glyph it would read as ‘death’. He frowned. In Vulgate, his people referred to this fortress as Death’s Gate. Reluctant to walk through it, he moved round it, gesturing to Fern, Sthax and the others to do the same.

  They came at last to a barrier Carnelian knew must be the door that gave entry into Osrakum. As he placed his hand upon its cold surface, the whole world gave a shudder as if it had been struck by some immense hammer. Again, the sound shook the air and ground. A massive bell was tolling, that was soon joined by more, until it seemed to Carnelian the world must convulse itself to pieces. Clamping his hands over his ears, he sought some explanation why the ammonites were ringing the Black Gate bells in this cacophonous manner. Were they sending an alarum to warn of the imminent breach of Osrakum’s sanctity? Or perhaps the warning was for their masters, the Wise. He shuddered as the feeling rose in him that the bells were announcing the ending of the world. Panic welled up in him, he felt trapped, buried alive. His hands fell from his ears and began feverishly scrabbling across the wall in front of him. Shapes stubbed his fingers, grazed his skin, but he kept on pulling, pushing, twisting, seeking anything that would free them from this tomb. His hand alighted on a wheel that turned under pressure. He forced it round and was rewarded by the quivering of some mechanism stirring into life. Several percussive shudders made him imagine counterweights rising, falling. A hairline crack divided the blackness to his left. It widened blindingly.

  When his sight returned, he gasped. He heard other gasps around him. He forgot the bells. The Valley of the Gate fell away from them in a shadow that spilled out across the Skymere and the causeway to lap at the edge of a vision. Emerald shimmer and dance. An achingly beautiful dream – the Yden. For a moment Carnelian was lost again in that garden where he and Osidian had played as innocently as children. It seemed his heart had stopped at the beginning of the world. He dared not breathe out lest that should be enough to eddy that vision like smoke. His lungs forced the air out. The vision remained, but seemed changed. His gaze took in the whole vast lotus of Osrakum. Exquisite bloom that fed upon the life of millions. A flower whose roots had turned so many into corpses that soon it too must wilt and die.

  The vision lost its hold on him. Fern at his side was real and solid. Carnelian reached out and felt the living warmth in him. His touch released Fern from enchantment.

  Carnelian smiled and spoke, in a low voice. ‘There’s still much to do before the darkness comes.’

  He led them onto the road that ran along the Cloaca rim. As they marched on, the clamour of the bells slowly dulled enough for them to hear the water rushing below. He stopped once to look over, but could see nothing other than a blackness that made it seem bottomless. Still, the sediment of his dreams stirred in him.

  The roaring had been growing louder for some time when, on their right, the ground fell away into the immense spillway, upon which everything depended. He scrutinized its further edge where the dyke rose that held back the waters of the Skymere. The dyke was cut with many slots, from each of which tumbled a waterfall. In those slots were the sluices that were controlling the overflow of the lake into the swirling, threshing surface of the spillway. What Carnelian was interested in was the difference in height between that surface and that of the lake. He heaved a sigh of relief as he judged that at least part of his plan was possible.

  Ammonites came to greet Carnelian as he walked onto the dyke. Most fell to their knees, but a few were brave enough to approach him, ducking bows. One spoke up, telling him, apologetically, that he must have come the wrong way; indicating with vague gestures where, behind him, flights of steps led down to the lake and the bone boats, but not daring the impertinence to tell him this, that all the Seraphim knew. ‘This way, Seraph, lie only the sluices.’

  ‘I have an interest to behold their operation.’

  Reluctantly, they led him back the way they had come, towards the first pair of arches. As he followed them, a spark of light caught in the corner of his eye. Turning, he saw a second pulsing in the bright belly of the Labyrinth mound. Perhaps, as he had approached the dyke, these ammonites had had time to slip an alarm to their masters. He did not care. The Wise had more pressing matters to occupy their minds and, if they did not, then what matter? They would find out what he was up to soon enough.

  Approaching the first slot, Carnelian was surprised how much bigger it was than he had expected. He ignored an ammonite giving an explanation, and craned over the edge to look down. A bronze sluice at either end controlled the flow through the slot.

  Everyone was watching him. He indicated to Sthax the cables that held the nearest sluice. ‘Hack those through.’

  The Maruli, frowning, nodded and, soon, paying no heed to the shrill protests of the ammonites, he and the other warriors were chopping at the cables. Carnelian returned to the edge. The first cable snapped with a twang, the second soon after. Ponderously, counterweights began to rise; squealing, the sluice fell, releasing a furious roar and gush that quickly abated as the slot emptied. The sluice at its other end was still holding back the Skymere. Carnelian turned to Sthax.

  ‘Send your men to cut them all.’

  From the top of the northern Turtle Steps, Carnelian gazed across the Skymere to where shadow, having consumed the Ydenrim, was eating its way over the lagoons. He swung the clapper into the bell and, as the sound shimmered the air, he narrowed his eyes, trying to see any sign of a bone boat answering its call. Twilight over the water hid any movement. Fern approached, Sthax and the Marula straggling in his wake. Carnelian’
s ears, recovered from the ringing, allowed him to hear the roar rising from the spillway, into which the Skymere was tumbling in a flood so violent that the more than twenty separate falls were uniting into a frothing foaming mass that ran the whole length of the sluice dyke. He frowned, imagining what chaos and destruction his flood would unleash upon the City at the Gates and its sartlar infestation. Now all that remained to do was to wait until the lake and the spillway reached a common level.

  At last they pushed out into open water, Carnelian and Fern standing on either side of the bony prow. Ahead, shadow had killed the emerald shimmer of the lagoons and was beginning to edge up towards the Forbidden Garden and the Labyrinth. Soon only the Pillar of Heaven would rise gleaming from the blackness and even that must eventually succumb. Looking back along the length of the bone boat, Carnelian had to rid himself of the notion the deck was crowded with that same shadow made flesh. These Marula had been the agents of a malign force, but he was in no position to blame them for that. Whatever the Masters maintained, he believed the eyes anxiously looking at him were as human as his own.

  He gazed past the stern. It must be because the lake was so immense that its surface showed no sign of the maelstrom where it was flooding into the spillway. The second boat was nudging away from the stepped slope. When the first boat had arrived, a kharon had told him that his vessel was not big enough to take them all. As they had waited for the second, he had imagined the one-eyed men struggling to launch the vessel from a boathouse. He recalled lying captive in one such boathouse with Osidian before they had been packed into funerary urns. It seemed some other life than his, but in his heart a desire stirred to see Osidian again. Only when the ferrymen had demanded payment had Carnelian realized he had no jade rings. At a loss, he had turned to the Marula, had considered using force, but then had had an inspiration. He had asked two of the warriors for their swords and given one to each ferryman. Even though they were masked, he had sensed their shock. Each of the iron blades in their hands was worth more than the boat they steered; probably more than all the boats of the kharon and their lives too. He was glad that such economics would not survive the Masters.

  Slicing the dark mirror of the Skymere, the prow creased its water, mixing the lights from the coombs as sparks into the ripples. Carnelian watched Fern gaze at the palaces, entranced. Vague sweeps and outlines, heavy hanging masses all lit with what seemed countless burning jewels. As their eyes tried to grasp shape and form, Carnelian wondered what miracles of art and beauty lay behind those soaring façades. In his heart there was an ache for how much was going to be lost. For a moment, he perceived each of the myriad lights as a human life that must be soon snuffed out. His mind veered away from thoughts of atrocities in paradise.

  The eerie silence was broken only by the sculling oars, the bow wave silkily slipping. He glanced back over his shoulder. Though the glory of the Yden was now muffled beneath a pall of shadow, the longer he looked, the more he saw the lagoons were still reflecting something of the blue sky, which its mirrors transformed into infinite, mysterious depths. Tearing up through the blackness, the double spire of the Pillar of Heaven. There at its summit, which was bathed in the last light of the sun, were the hollows where the glorious Chosen had gathered for sacred election. Beneath, the caverns in which the Wise had lodged the spooled beadcord of their library. He could not imagine all of that gone. Was beauty and wisdom then to perish from the earth?

  His gaze followed the long back of the Labyrinth and climbed the slope of the cone that wore a crown upon its summit of molten gold as if to mark the place where, below, Osidian, the Gods on Earth, was camped at the heart of the Plain of Thrones. In spite of everything, some compassion rose in him for his once lover, now brother, imagining his despair. In seeking to possess Osrakum, Osidian had only brought it to utter destruction.

  Carnelian was musing melancholically on these and other losses when he glanced up. They were sliding past a vast hollow in the Sacred Wall filled with a twinkling scree, among which he could discern a shadowy gathering of colossi. He recognized Coomb Imago and recalled his visit there; the tortured innocents dying on crosses. Other memories began to seep into his mind. The eyeless slaves living their life out in the dark like maggots, turning the wheels that lifted water up to cool the echoing palaces of his own coomb eyries. Then, in riotous recall, the death and maiming that was the lot of most in the outer world; the misery and fear. It was upon such suffering this paradise was built.

  Shadow had now reached across the crater to turn the whole Skymere into an obsidian mirror. All around its rim the lit coombs formed a necklace of stars. Carnelian’s hand rose, his fingers finding the scar that the slave rope had left around his neck. No less was this collar of palaces a scar about the neck of the peoples of the earth. Wonder died in him. Let the Masters and all their works perish.

  FAREWELLS

  What then do we make of an atrocity in Paradise?

  (a Quyan dialectic)

  COOMB SUTH WAS SO MUCH MURKIER THAN THE OTHER COOMBS THEY had passed that, as they slid towards it, fear gnawed at Carnelian that it had already become a tomb. A flickering thread of pinprick lights winding down towards the lake revived his spirits: people were coming to the visitors’ quay to meet them. He searched within the arc of moving lamps for the carved pebble beach upon which he had landed on that first visit so long ago. He recalled a jade pebble, its spiral cracked in two. He could not remember if, then, he had seen it as an omen. A lurid red glimmer reflected from the sky showed the beach submerged. It seemed that, after all, news of a sort from the Blood Gate had reached here before him.

  As the bone boat curved a course to present her port bow to the quay, Carnelian and Fern pushed through the Marula. Reaching the bow, he saw lamp-lit faces watching the boat nuzzle into the quay. He felt a burst of love. These were his people, and not only because they wore the chameleon that made him feel a child again, but because the faces beneath those tattoos were Plainsman.

  He watched Fern’s eyes and wondered if his frown meant he was seeing his own, lost Tribe. Feeling the first touch of grief, Carnelian turned away from it, put on a smile, threw his hood back so the people on the quay could see his face. As they recoiled, he gasped, for an instant fearing he had done something wrong; realizing he had not, even as a familiar voice spoke up. ‘Can’t you see it’s the Master’s son?’

  Carnelian located his brother among the guardsmen and relaxed as Tain led them to kneel upon the stone. The bone boat juddered as it touched the quay. Carnelian was surprised to see how far below the level of the deck it was, but thinking no further on it, swung himself round one of the mooring posts and jumped down onto the quay. As he landed, he realized that, of course, it was the lake that was higher. The corpse dam had raised its level further than he had supposed. He was going to have longer to wait for it to drain to the level he needed. On the other hand it might give him more time to sort matters out in the coomb.

  He straightened, approached his brother and, stooping, drew him close and, to Tain’s surprise, kissed him.

  Tain, at first flustered by this breach of decorum, was soon grinning. ‘Carnie.’

  ‘Brother.’ Carnelian told them all to get up and Tain’s grin spread among them as he greeted those he recognized by name. Tain shocked them all by barking a command that brought everyone back into formal order. Though startled, Carnelian regained his smile: Tain had acquired something of the manner of their eldest brother, Grane.

  ‘You’ll be wanting to see the Master.’

  Carnelian nodded, feeling a grimness come upon him, glad now that Tain had tamed the informality. Fern landed with a thump on the quay. Carnelian urged the Suth tyadra to move back from the boat, then motioned the Marula to disembark. He noticed Tain sending a messenger back up to the palaces. Further along the quay, the rest of the warriors were disembarking from the second bone boat. Carnelian asked Sthax to leave ten of his men, then to take the rest and go with the guardsmen. ‘Make sure you keep
them under control. I’ll send for you as soon as I can.’

  The man gave him a sober nod. Carnelian put the ten selected warriors under Fern’s command. He felt perfectly safe among the tyadra, but he wanted to make sure Sthax did not feel he and his people had been forgotten. No more did he want Fern to feel ignored, a barbarian, among the guardsmen. These arrangements made, he followed Tain away from the quay.

  ‘When will we be receiving more food, Master?’ said Tain.

  Carnelian did not know how to answer that. ‘How much hunger is there here?’

  His brother shrugged. ‘We’ve known for more than a month that resupply was likely to be delayed. Since then we’ve been rationing the stores. Still, things are getting tight.’ He grinned, wanly. ‘Those who suffered hunger in the Hold after we left keep saying this is nothing. The Master’s made sure everyone’s given a share appropriate to their need.’

  Carnelian looked at Tain. ‘Everyone?’

  His brother nodded with satisfaction. ‘The Masters too. Even himself.’

  Carnelian saw the pain tensing Tain’s face, but turned away. He did not want to learn more about their father just then. ‘How tight?’

  Tain made a face. ‘For more than ten days we’ve had nothing to eat but that stuff from the “bellies”.’

  ‘Render,’ Carnelian said and saw in Fern’s face he was sharing their disgust. ‘What about the mood of our people?’

  Tain leaned closer. ‘There’s unease among the tyadra and between the households.’

  Carnelian remembered Opalid’s animosity. ‘How secure are our people?’

  Tain eyed him cautiously. ‘From the others?’ Then, when Carnelian nodded, ‘Keal keeps guards on all the gates between our halls and theirs. We’ve turned ours into a fortress.’