‘The Dead . . . ?’
‘Our Dead, whom the Horned God had led up from the Underworld to enslave the Living.’
Carnelian stared at her. ‘The Masters—?’ Seeping insight overtook his tongue. Her words were a shadowy reflection of the revelations Osidian had given him in the Stone Dance of the Chameleon. The same events seen, murkily, from the point of view of the sartlar, from that of the Quyans.
‘When you appeared unmasked . . .’
As Kor gazed at him in wonder, he glimpsed the child she might once have been.
She squeezed her eyes closed, grimacing again, shaking her head. ‘The monstrosity we imagined you hid behind your masks from shame.’ Then her eyes opened. ‘But such beauty . . . ?’
Carnelian was struck by the irony: those that the beautiful considered monstrous, believing the beautiful monstrous. Of course the sartlar had been right in so many ways.
She was scowling. ‘Clouds darkened my mind. The world had been turned inside out. When you claimed to be angels, we had had no doubt that you lied.’ She appraised Carnelian. ‘You even showed compassion. I came to believe that perhaps it wasn’t you who were cruel, but the overseers and their masters.’ Her blistered lips curled into a sneer. ‘The other Master showed me otherwise.’
Carnelian knew she meant Osidian.
‘He proved to me that your beauty was indeed a lie; that, though you had the power to take on a pleasing form, beneath it you were being consumed by worms. Things became once again as they had always been. And how could the Living ever hope to fight the Dead?’
Understanding broke over Carnelian like an icy wave. ‘My blood.’
From under her brows, Kor regarded him with baleful eyes. ‘I tasted it.’
‘You discovered we were just men.’
Her voice flat, clipped: ‘I discovered you could be killed.’
So much seemed clear to Carnelian then. The purpose of the Law, the Wise, what the true Great Balance had been. He saw in his mind’s eye how the world had whirled into destruction. He was appalled. ‘From a single drop of blood?’
‘It took more than that spark to ignite our rebellion. When I came up to Makar, of those of my people I found there, few believed me. As for our multitudes across the Land, they were beyond my reach. Generations it would’ve taken to pass on this new creed.’
Carnelian saw what he and Osidian had done to make the disaster inevitable. Gathering the sartlar together. Marching them to the heart of the Commonwealth, and there destroying not so much the legions as the Masters’ aura of invincibility.
‘When, in obedience to the Mother, you gathered up Her Children, my creed found many willing listeners.’ Her face became a dead mask. ‘Those who opposed me, we fed upon.’
Carnelian must have shown his disgust, for she lashed out: ‘Does the Master forget who it was taught us to feed on man-flesh?’
Hatred rose in him against the ugly, filthy creature. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You really do not know?’
It was her surprise that tamed him. His hatred was a defence against the realization rising in him with the vomit: that render was sartlar flesh. He struck the floor with his knees, pumped his stomach out in acidic convulsions.
‘So you’ve eaten from the same pot,’ she said, gleefully. ‘Did you really believe it was only the barbarians who paid you flesh tithe?’
Carnelian wiped his mouth, recalling the mounds of render sacs, glimpsing something of the scale of horror she was revealing to him. Looking up he watched her rage cool until she seemed to be wearing a leather mask.
‘I was born in the rendering caves. It was well after I grew into a woman that I first breathed the Mother’s sweet air. Mostly it was the old who were sent down to us, but also “troublemakers”, rebels, any and all who showed any spirit of defiance. The overseers even sent us children.’ Her glassy eyes slid to meet his gaze. ‘We tried to drug them before smashing out their brains with rocks.’ Her nose cavity changed shape. ‘I’m never free of the stench of their cooking.’
Carnelian cradled his stomach, tears and phlegm running together down his face. He withstood the contempt in her eyes.
‘How did you expect us to stay alive on the march to the Mountain? And on what do you imagine we feed now?’
He wiped his eyes, his nose, lost in horror, desperate to find light somewhere. ‘The meat from the dragons?’
Kor stared at him, then threw her head back and let forth a raucous coughing noise he realized was laughter. The convulsions slowed, and she lowered her head, shaking it. ‘That was barely enough to provide each of us with one meagre meal. Even the City’s inhabitants only fed us for a single day.’ She frowned. ‘We can’t escape hunger, nor do we wish to. Our Mother’s dying. She’s been dying since you enslaved us. Only our love and care have slowed Her decline. Still, each year She’s given us less.’
‘Surely some of the Land can still be saved?’
Kor glanced at him with a misery beyond sadness. ‘Too late. She turns to dust. Once we’ve consumed what lies here at Her heart, our dust will mix with Hers.’
‘Surely you must want something to survive? What about your children?’
As she turned away, he glimpsed a gleam of madness in her eyes. ‘We consumed them all,’ she whispered. ‘I, their mother, made my people do it. I asked them why they didn’t wish to spare their little ones more suffering.’ She gave him a desperate, furtive glance. ‘I feared they were so tired of killing, of dying, that they might give up, settle down to starve to death or attempt to find survival’ – her huge hands flailed the air – ‘somewhere.’ Her gaze fixed predaciously on Carnelian, her face filled with disgust. ‘So I stoked up their hatred. Now they hate me, but they hate you more.’ She leaned closer and spat words at Carnelian with her filthy breath. ‘We shall all die, but first I’ll rid the world of your cancer.’
She subsided, became just a strange, misshapen, mutilated woman. Carnelian was too weary for strategy and so let his heart speak. ‘But what will be left of that world?’
Her madness abated; Kor gazed at him with human eyes. She shrugged. ‘The lands beyond?’
‘The barbarians . . .’
Kor shrugged again.
Carnelian put his trust in his certainty that she was a woman, with a woman’s heart. ‘I have their children here.’
She looked at him, strangely still.
‘I brought their flesh tithe out from the Mountain. Thousands of children.’
Tightness had spread to buckle the upper curve of her branding. He held her old woman’s eyes. ‘Let them go.’
Kor chewed her upper lip, her eyes lensed with tears. He watched her face, breathlessly, as it betrayed the turmoil in her heart. Then, at last, she nodded and joy burst out through him as tears.
She turned. ‘Take them with you.’
‘Me?’ He had expected to pay for this boon with his life.
She gazed at him, seeming blind. He dared more. ‘Some of my people came with me.’ She was not saying no. ‘And some Marula . . .’ Her frowning made him quickly add, ‘whom I freed from their masters the Oracles.’
‘Take them all,’ she said. ‘The Children of the Earth shall show you mercy who have never been shown it themselves.’
Her eyes turned to glass and Carnelian judged his audience was at an end. He rose, turned away.
‘Master?’
Heart beating, he looked round.
‘How did you arrive here?’
At first Carnelian was confused, then he remembered the boats, remembered the water gate they had had to leave raised. His instinct was to lie, but it was a price that must be paid. He hardened his heart against the people in Osrakum. ‘We came by boat from the lake within the Mountain.’
Kor stared as if she could see that far. ‘Our legends speak of water the Dead have to cross.’
Carnelian waited a little, then turned away. His joy at what he had achieved was leavened with horror at the fate of those he had delivered to Mother Death.
‘Is that you, Carnie?’ came a voice from a clump of shadows on the road. He told Fern it was. Lumpen shapes surrounded Carnelian. ‘She’s let us go,’ he said to them. They grumbled and for a moment he did not believe they were going to let him through, but then they shuffled aside.
‘What’s happening?’ demanded Fern.
Carnelian closed in on his voice, gripped him, felt Fern tense then relax as he embraced him, found his mouth and kissed him. He threw his cloak around them both.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’ Fern said into his neck.
Feeling his warmth against him, Carnelian decided there was no reason to burden him unnecessarily. ‘They’re going to let us pass.’
‘How?’
‘They don’t care about us.’
‘All of us, the children too?’
Carnelian heard the incredulity in Fern’s voice and hesitated before answering with a nod. His encounter with Kor already seemed an implausible dream. He remembered her tears. ‘All of us.’
Carnelian came awake, shivering. Cold had penetrated to his bones. He smiled as Fern snuggled into him. The sky was greying in the gap between the sombre, leaning mass of the Iron House and the vague blackness of the Sacred Wall. He regarded that mountainous mass. Within lay the Land of the Dead. He frowned, trying to focus on what he had left back there, but it already seemed a fairytale. Even the mist rising from the water in front of him seemed more substantial. He watched the pale edge of dawn. A new day with hope of life that raised his spirits so that he no longer cared about the cold.
His muscles tensing must have woken Fern. ‘What . . . ?’ He saw the intense look on Carnelian’s face, slipped his chin free of the edge of the cloak and followed his gaze. The flood-lake shore curved away, the dry land beyond was textured by a vast encampment. Between it and the water the shoreline was encrusted with rafts and all manner of makeshift boats.
On the edge of the road they sat hunched and shrouded though the sun was still low and they welcomed its heat. Carnelian in particular wanted to conceal his height, his pale skin. He did not want to needlessly provoke the sartlar. He gazed at his feet, kneading his toes. When he had decided to stay by the Iron House, he had been relieved that Fern insisted on remaining with him. They had reassured each other that, finding them gone, Keal, or Tain, or Poppy, or Krow would have the sense to march the children south towards them. Carnelian had not wanted to go and fetch them because he feared that what hope there was for them all depended on him; depended on his tenuous link with Kor.
His gaze was drawn back to the Iron House, as shocking now as when the rising sun had revealed it. Molochite’s black chariot was now a furious red. It was hard not to believe it a sign that the Mother had claimed the chariot for Herself. An angry marker at the very edge of Her earth defiant against the flood, but also the place where the Horned God had died with the children of the Great. The womb tomb in his dream.
He watched the crowd milling its duller reds around the rusty ruin and pouring in and out of its door in a constant, frantic, anthill activity. It soothed him to watch, for he needed to believe that this red tower was the centre of their swarm. For if Kor were not their queen . . . ? He shuddered and curled forward until his chin nearly touched the stone. His slitted eyes slipped eastwards from the broken wheel of the chariot. Water clotted with debris lapped at the feverish raft-building along the shore. Everywhere, trails of sartlar were filtering down to the water edge, filling pots, staggering back burdened with the filthy stew. To quench the thirst of . . . Carnelian could not help following the water carriers away from the shore. His heart raced. As far as the horizon, the land teemed with spindly life that seemed to him not people, nor even sartlar, but only a voracious plague of man-eating vermin.
As the sun rose higher, they grew increasingly worried about the children. Fern was the first to rise to gaze north. Carnelian joined him, feeling too tall. At first they could only see the heat hazing above the road, then, far away, that something was dulling its incandescence.
Three figures came ahead of the children. By their face tattoos, Carnelian recognized two of them as of his tyadra and guessed the man shrouded in their midst must be one of his brothers. All three seemed to be staring at the sartlar multitude. Carnelian did not greet them, but waited until they came close before opening his cowl.
‘Carnie,’ exclaimed the central figure, pushing back his hood so that they could see it was Tain. ‘Thank the Gods,’ he said, his eyes flicking anxiously back to the sartlar.
‘I’ve arranged safe passage,’ Carnelian said.
His brother stared at him, frowning. ‘How—?’
Carnelian interrupted him with questions about the dispositions of the children and the others. He nodded as Tain explained.
‘There’s nothing like enough of us if things should turn nasty,’ said the youth.
Carnelian nodded. ‘We can’t do anything about that. What we can do is keep them under control. We need to get through as quickly and quietly as we can.’
Standing alone in the shadow of the Iron House, Carnelian watched them file past, shuffling, scuffling. Sometimes a child’s voice would rise, but would be quickly hushed. Children filled the road from side to side, except where they had to pour around the chariot. The ant tide of sartlar clambering in and out through its door had been pushed into a narrow corridor running to and from the nearest ramp. He hardly breathed, longing for the march to reach open road. Fern and the vanguard were already lost in the haze to the south, but the river of children still stretched back as far the other way.
When the last children walked past, Carnelian sighed in relief, then left the bloody aura of the rusting chariot and attached himself to the rear of the march. Sthax was there with a couple of Marula herding the children with the hafts of their lances, all the time their yellow eyes darting fearful glances out over the sartlar-clad earth.
The children did not need to be told to be quiet. Dread spread from those on the edge of the road into the heart of their march. All eyes able to look out could not help doing so. Sartlar smothered the land like locusts. Stick women wound their way through the squatting multitudes, bowls of brackish water on their heads that looked as if they must snap their necks like twigs. Men huddled around pots from which steam billowed, wafting a stench of cooking meat towards the road, mixing with the odour of shit and urine, of rotting, of indescribable filth. Many of those passing on the road above were fighting nausea. Below, among the multitude, some rose to watch them pass with enormous eyes. Their sagging, disfigured faces might have been angry, or sad, or in shock. Few looked as if they would survive the day, but Carnelian remembered the rafts and he shuddered at the thought of this army of the near-dead, determined to force their way into the Land of the Dead. He sought solace in the healthy faces and bright eyes of the flesh-tithe children. For moments at a time he managed thus to avoid being aware of the sea of despair and hatred through which they were winding their thread.
They came into a region of pink dunes. Dazed with horror, Carnelian thought for a moment they must have reached some sea shore. Then he saw how pallid were the ridges and knew they were composed of the piled-up remains of the sartlar dead. Upon that battlefield, the matrix of their bones was ensnaring great drifts of ruddy sand. The road carried them through that eerie landscape in whose valleys sartlar crouched, in places having delved hollows in which they hid like crabs. Here too cauldrons bubbled their noisome stench. Carnelian slipped into a dream rhythmed by the movement of his legs, in which everything in the world was or had been a body that they were crossing on a causeway of human bone.
He became aware the world was turning red. A clean, dry russet red. He looked around. At last they were leaving the sartlar camp! Behind them Osrakum was lit from the west. How low the sun was. He squinted against the glare from which the road emerged: the flood-lake, around which there lay a stain that merged with the Sacred Wall to form a black ring. Kor, the sign of death. He turned away and saw the
ir march like a bleeding cut in the raw meat of the Land. Gently, he began to push his way forward through the children.
Shadows were long when they reached a watch-tower. Carnelian glanced up and saw, beneath a disc, a bar and four spots. Nine. He stared, stunned. Watch-tower sun-nine. This was where they had received the Wise. Where he had met his father and brothers. Where he had deserted Osidian. He could make no sense of that memory, nor of the intervening time. That other, Chosen reality no longer seemed credible. Just a story in which he had imagined he had played a role.
When Tain came up to him, Carnelian asked him to get the children settled down for the night; find places for them to sleep, draw as much water as they could, light fires where possible.
Carnelian caught hold of Fern’s arm. ‘Come with me.’
Fern was about to ask where, but when he saw Carnelian was looking up at the watch-tower, he nodded.
Standing upon the heliograph platform, they gazed south. A vast land spread out before them, shapeless behind drifting red veils of dust.
‘It’ll all soon be desert,’ Fern said and turned anxious eyes on Carnelian. ‘How can we hope to get them all through?’
They both gazed down at the stopping place overflowing with children. Carnelian set his jaw. ‘We’ll have to manage somehow, there’s no going back.’
They looked round. Osrakum was a sombre crust rising from the rotten heart of a land that soon would die. Death would pursue them all the way to the Ringwall. Carnelian felt Fern’s arm around him. They smiled at each other, then together peered south as if trying to glimpse the Earthsky.
CODA
SUDDENLY THE RED FOG CLEARS. CARNELIAN STARES. HE LIFTS YKORENTHE down from his shoulders because he fears his legs might buckle. If he were not so desiccated, tears would be running down his face. The verdant vision hurts his eyes. Green veined with silver. Intimidating colours. Hues so strange, so unreal. A vast stretch that in his dreams would have been the lush water meadows of the Leper Valleys. Everything was turned upside down. Could the dust ocean of the dying Land really have washed them up on this wet and smiling shore? Unbelievable glitter of free, running water almost enough to quench the thirst that long ago had dried up his mouth and eyes. On his tongue the ever-present taste of death.
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