The Third God

by Ricardo Pinto

  ‘Celestial?’ said two voices he knew. He almost exclaimed with relief at seeing it was the Quenthas.

  The sisters seemed to have aged, faces wasted, the dark tattoos sinking into Left-Quentha’s cheeks; Right-Quentha’s eyes were haunted by some terror. Twitching a smile, she begged him to follow them. He was drawn past flaps of the black samite into the gloom beyond in which a myrrh fog revolved ponderously in monstrous curls. Pale wraiths haunted the twilight. Were it not that this place was much more confined, he could fancy he had been transported into the Labyrinth. The pale slabs of the second ring of stones formed a broken ring that seemed lit by some dying moon. His mask was smothering him and, knowing he could, he removed it. ‘Are They here?’

  Grimly, the Quenthas nodded. Left-Quentha clapped her hands. Slaves approached, naked, cringing. As they converged on him, Carnelian protested.

  ‘All here must be unclothed, Celestial,’ Right-Quentha said. She and her sister divested themselves of the robe they were wearing. Carnelian was fascinated by their joined body half dipped in the shadow of tattoos; by their small breasts and, for a moment, his gaze lingered on the strange form of their nearly joined sex. He himself removed his military cloak, bundled it up and gave it to the sisters. ‘Keep this for me.’ He could see they thought it strange he should care about such a rough, muddy garment, but they took it in their four hands. Then he submitted to the blind slaves. They stripped him, shaved his head, his face, his body. They cleansed him with pads. Through the sharp menthol he could still smell their sweaty fear.

  Even through feather rugs Carnelian could feel the bony network of the pavement that linked the ghost stones to their commentaries. Like worms burrowing just beneath skin. In the gloom, pale flesh huddled to pale flesh, jewel eyes glinted furtively. A whispering like a breeze made him feel he was following the sisters through some enchanted forest haunted by the spirits of the dead.

  When they came to a gateway guarded by more naked syblings, Carnelian became aware of a small group of lost children. No, homunculi, twelve of them, their faces hidden by their blinding masks.

  ‘You alone can save him,’ Right-Quentha whispered in his ear. ‘Prepare yourself,’ her sister said.

  They opened a wound in the blackness through which light flooded. Carnelian put his hand on the stone lintel to steady himself. He felt the spiral under his hand. Then he let go of it and stepped into the blindingly bright heart of the Stone Dance of the Chameleon, still open to the sky, even as his stomach clamped, spit welling in his mouth at the charnel stench.

  He almost crumpled under the assault of fetor. He would have run, if he had known where to run to. His eyesight returning allowed him to see a pale figure sitting stiffly on red earth. The knobs of its backbone, the shoulder blades seeming ready to tear through the sallow flesh. Skin disfigured with countless angry-looking, blue-lipped wounds. Bands around the swelling of the shaved head showed it must be wearing a mask. His arm across his nose and mouth, Carnelian was for a moment shocked that one corpse could so much pollute the air, but then he saw the stones that walled in that place; saw the things sagging, rotting in the man-shaped hollow in each stone. Green-black. The heads lolling back into the hollows were already more skull than face. Gashes over their bodies showed where the blood must have trickled down their skin, to gather in the hollows and dribble down the channels into the red earth. The slits left by their castrations had been torn open like vulvas by swellings forcing themselves out like babies’ heads, so that it seemed that the Grand Sapients had died in the act of giving birth.

  ‘Why did you do this?’ Carnelian breathed.

  ‘They lied,’ said the dead man at the centre of the Dance. ‘I had to force them to tell me the truth.’

  With disgusted fascination, Carnelian crept round, wanting to look into Osidian’s face. He stopped when he saw the black, glassy profile. ‘What truth?’

  The Obsidian Mask turned its distorting mirror to Carnelian. ‘That the sartlar are the Quyans.’

  THE STONE DANCE OF THE

  CHAMELEON

  Flesh endures longer than iron.

  (sartlar proverb)

  ‘THE SARTLAR ARE THE QUYANS . . . ?’ REPEATED CARNELIAN, STUNNED.

  ‘The Wise have always known this,’ said Osidian, his voice wintry. ‘But, obsessed with their computations, they missed the real threat.’

  ‘They lacked the factor of my true birth.’

  The Obsidian Mask turned its malice towards him. ‘Do not flatter yourself, my brother. Even once they had that factor, they found there was another, far greater, missing from their mosaic. Even as they died they held to their certainty. It was the inability of their simulations to predict the uncurling of events that made them powerless to effectively oppose them. What could explain the sartlar behaving as if directed by a single mind? Why, suddenly, are they capable of overthrowing their animal fear of flame that, for millennia, we have used to tame them?’

  Carnelian shook his head. ‘But— if they are the Quyans—’

  The dark mirror mask slid away, distorting in reflection a hideous corpse in a hollow. ‘Even the Quyans in their glory could not have withstood our legions.’

  ‘How . . . ?’ Carnelian was struggling to grasp this shift in the bedrock of his reality.

  ‘When the plagues of the Great Death humbled them, we issued forth as conquerors. Perhaps it would have been better had we slain them all, but the land needed to be tilled and we desired to make them our slaves. To ensure our dominion over them, we forced them to build the roads that would contain them; the watch-towers to keep unsleeping vigilance over them. We raised the legions and perfected them. But, most of all, we wrote here the Law-that-must-be-obeyed.’ Osidian indicated the grim stones enringing them. ‘Its codicils described a system, independent of the hearts of those who would come after, that, relentlessly and without pity, would grind them down into such abject bestiality that it would become impossible for them to regain their previous state.’

  Though Carnelian had felt something of the weight of the Law, had suffered himself and witnessed more suffering than he could bear to remember, he could not even begin to grasp the immensity of horror that had been inflicted upon the sartlar by the Masters and their Law.

  His mind recoiled. It was too much. He veered away, protecting himself. ‘But does not this Law weigh down also upon the Chosen?’

  Unexpectedly a chuckle came from behind the Obsidian Mask. ‘Chosen?’ It turned a little towards him. ‘It was not enough that the Quyans should forget what they had been; we too had to forget. So we hid this history even from ourselves, appointing these’ – he indicated the corpses around them – ‘as its guardians, and in a few generations we had forgotten it utterly.’

  ‘Why? Surely it is from our ignorance the current disaster has sprung?’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Osidian said, with what seemed a groan of pain. ‘What we sought to forget was not their glory, but our shame.’

  ‘That our blood runs in the veins of the sartlar?’

  Osidian hunched forward as if he bore the whole weight of time and disaster as a yoke across his neck. ‘Even when I excruciated them’ – his hand feebly indicated the corpses – ‘they would not tell me, until at last I prised open their minds with one of their drugs. You see, Carnelian,’ his tone strained, appeasing, ‘we were not always as we have believed ourselves to be.’

  Carnelian felt desperate curiosity. The black mask gazed westwards to where smoke was still rising from the House of Immortality. ‘The Quyans brought their kings here. Within this circle they evoked the Creation through blood sacrifice. There, to the west, they entombed them to await their reawakening.’

  As Carnelian grasped at what Osidian might mean, bleak realizations dawned on him. Death’s Gate, the Shadowmere, the Quays of the Dead. ‘This is the Isle of the Dead.’

  Osidian’s head dropped again, as if the weight of the stone mask was too much for him to bear. Carnelian watched the smoke fraying i
nto the morning sky. There, in the Quyan tombs, the House of Immortality, the Chosen mummified their own dead. He remembered that Quyan treasures were the most prized possessions of the Chosen. ‘We robbed their tombs.’ He frowned. ‘But then who are we?’ Revelation came upon him. He muttered the words he had once spoken in the Labyrinth: ‘Where do we get this obsession with death?’ The most secret books in the Library of the Wise were on embalming. ‘We were the keepers of the dead.’

  Osidian nodded. ‘Glorious Osrakum was the necropolis of the Quyan kings.’

  Carnelian, who had lived through the filth and horror of preparing the dead, was left, by this knowledge, feeling more unclean. ‘We are not descended from the Gods? Our forefathers were outcasts?’

  ‘Untouchables,’ Osidian spat out. ‘Chosen we were from among the people of the outer world. Those who were as pallid as corpses; who had the pale eyes of the people who long ago had come up from the sea seeking the Land of the Dead; who were sent here to tend the dead.’

  Carnelian felt Osidian’s madness seeping into him. Disgust and shock and a feeling of coming adrift, of losing his footing in a flood. ‘But, still, we conquered them.’ This said still in some hope that the Gods had seen fit to raise the lowly to angelic heights.

  Osidian groaned with anger. ‘The plague had brought our masters low.’

  ‘But why were we spared its ravages?’ Still Carnelian was casting around for some sign that providence had chosen them for greatness.

  Osidian sank his head again between his shoulders as if he were some carrion crow. ‘The procedures for processing corpses had made us skilled in protecting ourselves from putrefaction.’

  Carnelian recalled the elaborate precautions the Masters took before exposing themselves to the outer world. ‘The ranga, the ritual protection, our masks.’ He saw the links with the Law. ‘Wearing a mask was not only a precaution against contagion, but a means of separating us from and terrorizing the survivors.’

  ‘The Quyans wore masks only in death. To them it must have seemed as if the Dead themselves had risen from the Underworld to enslave them.’

  Carnelian gazed at Osidian wearing his stone mask. Why was he still wearing it who could no longer have any illusions of his divinity? Carnelian’s heart answered him. There was perhaps another reason the keepers of the dead had worn their masks, as Osidian was doing: to hide their shame not only from their former masters, but even from themselves. Weariness and blackness overwhelmed him. ‘It is all a lie then.’

  Osidian sprang up. ‘One that, had Legions confided it to me, I could have saved the Commonwealth!’

  Carnelian understood then the real reason why Osidian had killed the Grand Sapients. ‘Search your heart, Osidian,’ he said, compassion softening his voice. ‘Even had he told you everything, would you really have turned back?’

  Osidian stood for a moment, as if turned to stone, then sagged back to the earth. Even now Carnelian could not be certain that Osidian had faced up to what they had done. It was a flaw in him that he inflicted upon others what, in his heart, he really wanted to do to himself. Carnelian looked round at the twelve hollows. Not that the Wise were innocent. ‘Knowing this, why did they not fear the sartlar more?’

  Osidian’s voice sounded like a boy’s when he spoke. ‘Because nothing that was happening made any sense to them. They believe— they believed their blindness protected them against the seductions of this world. For them, sight revealed only the mendacious surface of things and not the flows of reality beneath. It was these currents they sought to study and control.’ The black face came up. ‘For centuries they had been attempting to stop a power rising again; a power they had thought was, if not slain, at least in chains.’

  Carnelian regarded him, feeling a tide rising in him. ‘What power?’

  ‘The third God.’

  ‘The third God?’ Carnelian asked, knowing already what Osidian would answer.

  ‘The Lady of the Red Land.’

  Her red face broke into Carnelian’s mind with the shock of revelation. ‘The Mother,’ he breathed.

  The eyeslits of the Obsidian Mask seemed to be scrutinizing him. ‘The Wise said that you would know Her; that you were one of Her major pieces in the game.’

  Carnelian felt faint, knowing it to be true.

  Osidian indicated the stones around them. ‘Those are the Black God’s; those the Green God’s. The eight red stones are Hers.’

  And the eight red months and the ground upon which he sat that was a portion of the vast red land outside the Sacred Wall that was no longer guarded. Other impressions flashed into Carnelian’s mind. ‘Her pomegranates everywhere.’

  ‘What?’ Osidian said.

  ‘We shared one in Her Forbidden Garden.’

  Osidian’s shock was revealed by the cast his shoulders took. ‘Her garden?’

  ‘Forbidden to men.’

  ‘Except, perhaps those who serve Her.’

  ‘The urns,’ Carnelian gasped. Everything seemed so sickeningly clear. ‘The Three Gates.’

  Osidian nodded. ‘The Quyans believed Osrakum to be her womb. The Pillar of Heaven the cord with which she nurtured the sky.’

  Carnelian gazed up to where its bright shaft was lost in the morning light. ‘Why did we forget Her?’

  ‘Her power was great in the Land. When we closed the Gates we turned our back on Her. We feared Her. We feared Her revenge and so we built the Gates to keep Her out. Not just spatially, but in our minds. Of this even the Wise are not certain. It seems, perhaps, there was in Osrakum already alive a vestige of an ancient heresy of duality.’

  Carnelian contemplated how the Father and the Son might have become the Twins. Osidian and Molochite. He, as the third brother, made the Two once again Three. Carnelian felt a rush of emotion that almost choked him. ‘She was always there in my dreams. She brought me here.’ He saw the angry red scar about Osidian’s neck and felt his own itching and touched it. ‘She brought us both here.’

  He clawed at the red earth. It had been black. He looked to the edges of the Dance and saw there what remained of the moss and black earth that had covered up the red.

  He sank to Her ground. ‘What now?’

  The black mask glanced round at the stones. ‘They tried to buy their lives with a vision. That, taking their elixir, I might escape with them into the far future. The sartlar threat will subside naturally. Those the famine does not destroy might, perhaps, become true men again, but, if so, far from here. The Red Land will become a terrible desert that shall protect Osrakum more completely than the Sacred Wall. Eventually, they believed, the Land will come back to life. When the time is ripe, we would emerge from the chrysalises of our millennial sleep.’

  Osidian’s voice had grown stronger as he spun this vision in Carnelian’s mind, the words reverberating from the stones. In the silence that followed, Carnelian hung half entranced, half in horror.

  Osidian, shaking his head, brought them both back to earth. ‘Though I sought to conquer the world, I will not countenance lingering like a ghost, rebuilding with infinite patience the world I helped destroy.’ He reached behind his head and loosed the bands that held his mask on, then leaned forward to rest it in his palm. Carefully he laid the mask on the red earth. The pale face revealed, Carnelian hardly recognized. Lines of suffering had aged it; its eyes were as lifeless as stones.

  ‘You may not believe this, but I did seek to build; even though all I have ever done is to destroy; even those things I most loved.’ His sad eyes fell upon Carnelian.

  Osidian frowned. ‘I choose to die with the only world I know or wish to know.’

  Carnelian was overcome by a surge of rage. ‘Not everything or everyone needs to die! Can you think of no one but yourself?’

  Pity cooled his anger. Osidian was a broken man. But he still had some power left. Carnelian sat down beside him. ‘Will you help me save something from this?’

  As Osidian gazed at him, lost, Carnelian began explaining his plan of escape. O
sidian seemed puzzled as if he could not grasp it. Carnelian did not need his understanding, only his compliance. He was about to explain to Osidian the part he would have to play, when he found himself recalling the homunculi he had passed when he entered the Dance, huddled like abandoned children. The flesh-tithe children! He felt again the ache he had always felt when Ebeny had told him of when she had been such a child. He lived again the agony of the Tribe beneath the Crying Tree as they said goodbye to their children. How many hearts in the greater world ached for their lost children? Then his heart swelled up as he became possessed by a mad, glorious yearning. Logic fought against it, but he could not, would not, let it go. He saw Osidian, weary beyond measure, like an old man, all his failures crushing him. ‘Help me save the flesh-tithe children.’

  Osidian frowned at him as if he was unsure he could mean what he had said.

  ‘Help me take them with me.’

  Osidian looked incredulous. ‘All of them?’ As he saw that was, indeed, what Carnelian meant, he began to list the obvious and insurmountable obstacles to such a plan. Carnelian took Osidian’s hands in his, looked into his eyes. ‘The dreams I have followed are not yet wholly spent.’

  There was a hardness of doubt and failure and horror in Osidian’s face. His heart seemed almost to have turned to stone, but something of love passed between them and Osidian began to cry, and Carnelian cried too, for the hope there was in Osidian’s eyes of at least that much redemption.