The Chosen - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 01 (51 page)

On the quay, as he searched the darkness for the kharon boat, Carnelian felt the ceiling sky begin to redden. Twilight still filled the crater right up to its brim. Mist seemed to be teasing out from the bobbin of the Pillar. A thin birdsong stirring only thickened the silence. The Yden's lagoons were reflecting some murky alien sky. Beyond them, the Labyrinth seemed a burial mound. Carnelian shivered though he was immersed in the hot humid breathings of the lake. He began to ask Fey about the crater mosdy to feel breath moving in the cavity of his mouth, to bring his world back to a scale in which he was more than just a sliver of fleshed bone. He drew answers out of Fey as if they were arrowheads buried in her flesh, but then paid no attention to them.

Suddenly, Fey turned to him. 'Please tell the Master that though I failed his trust I never betrayed his love.'

'You can tell him yourself when we both return,' said Carnelian.

Fey would not look at him. Carnelian felt he was being judged.

'We'll come back, Fey. We will, and when we do, we'll put right all the wrongs.'

Fey put her hand on his arm. 'You've already put things right with your forgiveness.'

He put his hand over hers. As they watched the pallid boat ruffling the fiery mirror of the lake, Carnelian checked his hand to make sure he had brought the jade rings he needed for payment. He looked down at Fey. 'When Tain's finished his quarantine, will you see if you can find a way to send him to me?'

'Of course, Master.'

The bone boat was slipping along the quay, a ferryman at her bow, his one eye spying out her way. Carnelian squeezed Fey's hand and let it go. There were tears in her eyes.

'It'll take a few days to get a household to you. I'll make sure to include a court robe.' That's good.'

They looked at each other. 'Goodbye, Fey.' 'Goodbye, Carnelian.'

He stood for a moment, unsettl
ed by her use of his name, then climbed aboard. As the boat sighed away he looked back at her. She was a forlorn stump on the quay. For a moment he was sure he could hear a wind keening over the lake. He shuddered, not understanding where the feeling came from. Perhaps this parting reminded him too much of sailing away from the Hold. He told himself it was not the same at all, lifted his hand and waved.

The bone boat rippled the shadowy reflection of the Sacred Wall. Far above, its edge caught fire in the dawn. Sunlight burned quickly down the buttresses and deep into the coombs. Carnelian watched it reveal palaces and the jewelled colours of the gardens.

They rounded a promontory, into a coomb bay that gouged deep into the wall. He looked along the blazing deck, wondering where the ferryman was taking him. He could see no palaces, no gardens. One more outcrop swung past the starboard bow, allowing him to look into an inlet whose upper reaches were filled with a dazzling avalanche of sculpted stone. Terrace piled on terrace. Spires and towers frowned and stared with faces. Giants stood impaled, disembowelling balconies, their skin riddled with windows. Where terraces came out over the water they were held up by buttresses shaped like men up to their waists in the lake.

The boat was nearing a white caryatid colonnade. The figured columns looked down, their faces desperate, enraged as they bent under a mountainous piling of balconied halls. As the boat came to rest, Carnelian squinted into the cavernous atrium framed by their shins. He used the bone post to swing himself onto the quay, and swivelled round into the blinding sun. He could feel his mask aflame. His sight was slow to return. Like an Ichorian, the crater was half in shadow, half in light. The division of the two vibrated along the ridge of the Labyrinth mound and up the flank of the Pillar of Heaven. Into this vision the kharon's bone-patchwork stern was shimmering away.

Carnelian turned to peer into the atrium. He walked round a lichened foot and column leg. For a time there was nothing but blackness. Then from the gloom there emerged a wall of crowding Masters, tall as trees. He discovered in their midst a doorway that even they could have entered without stooping. It opened onto a flight of steps flanked by oily mosaics. He ran his hand over the amber and jade. Hearing footfalls, he looked up the endless stair. Men were coming down looking smaller than his hand, their faces crossed with dragonflies.

He waited till they were close before he stepped out into the light. 'I've come to visit your Master.'

His words produced a hunching commotion on the stair. He moved back to give them space to kneel. Their faces were so tight with fear it narrowed their eyes and made them unable to close their mouths. He was lifting his hands in reassurance but they were throwing glances back the way they had come. Carnelian looked up the stair expecting to see the horror that stalked them.

'Your Master
...
?' he asked gently.

They shook their bowed heads erratically. 'Sorrow, sorrow
...'
one of them began.

Another looked up, eyes popping from between the wings of his dragonfly tattoo, brown blood smearing his forehead. 'Expected?'

'Well,' Carnelian began, but stopped when the guardsmen started squashing themselves against the stone. Carnelian could feel their shaking. Silk was sighing down the stair. A Master was descending, wrapped in the flame of a scarlet cloak, his mask smouldering in his cowl. The guardsmen backed away as if the Master were on fire, and as he planted his bright foot among them they began to thud their heads bloodily on the stone.

Carnelian lost his voice watching that reddening.

'You trespass,' said the Master with Jaspar's voice.

Carnelian gestured appeasement, found words. 'You know I have some understanding of your grief, Jaspar.'

'You are mistaken, my Lord, I am not he,' said the scarlet Master. Then who
...
?'

'You are the stranger here, my Lord. It seems hardly appropriate that you should question me. Who are you that dare intrude upon our grief?'

'I regret the intrusion, my Lord, but I am come as a friend
...
a friend of Imago Jaspar.'

'Even at a normal time your demeanour, my Lord, would invoke suspicion. Is it your habit to appear naked like a beggar at the door of a Great House? What is your rank, my Lord?'

'As high as yours,' snapped Carnelian, feeling he was twisting in a trap.

Up in the palace somewhere, a shapeless voice swelled a moaning song then faded away.

'I see,' said the Master. He inclined his head and his mask rushed with reflections. Tell me what it is you have come to say and I will make sure my brother hears your words.'

'Your brother? Then we are cousins.' Jaspar's brother's head straightened and he gave a humourless laugh. 'You are Suth Carnelian?' 'I am.'

'My brother has told me
all
about you.' The Master's mask sneered at him but Carnelian stood his ground.

'Very well, my Lord, I shall accede to your request though I cannot imagine what you want here.' He turned and began to climb the stair. He stopped, turned, chuckled. 'Be warned. My brother is grown dangerous with grief.'

Carnelian followed Jaspar's brother through a multitude of sombre halls, his footsteps echoing among the scuffling of their escort. Several times the inhuman wailing broke out far away. Each time shivers ran up Carnelian's back.

At last they came to where a door opened into a chamber walled and floored with shifting rainbows. As Jaspar's brother passed through, yellow filaments moved across him edged with orange and turquoise. The chamber was cool and damp. From somewhere there came a continuous hissing. Carnelian located the sound, a waterfall windowing the chamber, made brilliant diamond by the risen sun.

'He is there, my Lord, if you have the courage to approach him,' Jaspar's brother said beside him.

Turning, Carnelian saw an immense and shadowy stair climbing with many landings up to remote heights. Each landing was flanked by a pair of idols around whose feet puddled light. On the first landing stood a being like a column of blood.

Carnelian began to ascend the steps. Sensing he was alone, he looked round to see Jaspar's brother below him. 'You will not come with me, my Lord?'

The Master's mask smeared colour as he shook it.

Carnelian resumed his climb, keeping the blood-red giant in the centre of his sight. The figure shifted and Carnelian saw Jaspar's face, a shell cameo imbedded in the welter of mourning red. He was holding to his nose a pale mottled orchid. Carnelian saw a frown begin to crease the perfect face.

'It is Carnelian, cousin,' he called up to Jaspar, giving him a little bow. Although the air was laced with incense, Carnelian's nostrils caught an incongruous whiff of foulness.

Jaspar moved back to give him space to come up onto the landing. The orchid's trumpet drooped away from his nose. 'Has the smell of holy blood drawn you, dear cousin? One little expected that you would be the first of my father's scavengers.'

'I came in sympathy.'

'Another of your curiously barbaric emotions?' 'I know what it is to fear one's father dead.' 'Suth has recovered, then?'

'Well, yes
...
at least, I have a letter from him in which he claims recovery.'

'So. Your
sympathy
then does not seem well grounded. Your father is not dead; nor, if one recalls correctly, was he struck down by one of his own filthy slaves, neh?'

Carnelian looked round and saw the fragile look of the attendants, the queasy guardsmen leaning on their blade-winged dragonfly halberds, some painted boys huddling together and a woman playing the lute, its neck against her chest where a breast had been cut off.

'Was it really one of your own people that slew your father?' asked Carnelian.

'I will not rest until I have bled this murderous conspiracy out of them.'

Carnelian followed Jaspar's eyes. In front of a horned altar stood a cross in the form of a youth with legs and arms outstretched. A living man of flesh was spread-eagled on its bronze, his dragonfly tattoo creasing into the agony of a face that seemed frozen in hysterical laughter. Carnelian looked along one arm and saw its yellowing extremity. Wire creasing into the elbow was hung with weights shaped like apples. The end of his other arm was also being slowly pruned. Nausea almost buckled Carnelian's knees.

Jaspar clapped his hand on Carnelian's shoulder. 'Come, cousin, one must show you the craftsmanship in these frames.'

Carnelian yielded to the pressure from Jaspar's arm. The Master lifted up an icy hand and ran it down the green-brown thigh of the metal youth. These are exquisite pieces. Can you see, it is a single casting?' He reached above the crucified man's agony to the metal face hovering over him. 'Have you ever seen such a beatific expression? Scandalously, the whole set has not been used for years.' Jaspar ran his finger along under the man's bloodless forearm. He held his finger up to show Carnelian its red. 'See, the channel carries the blood away so that there is no spillage
...'
He pointed to where a bowl was set into the bronze youth's foot.
'...
and collects it there. From whence it may be fed to the avatar.'

Jaspar pointed to the altar on which Carnelian could see many such bowls. Carnelian turned his back on it all but was unable to free himself from the odours of blood and excrement and sweaty fear that the incense could not mask. He saw the people kneeling, staring at the crucifixion, the cross of their dragonfly tattoos a sinister reflection of its shape, their eyes like wounds dribbling tears, the noses of the children painting mucus down to their quivering lips.

'Why do they watch this?' Carnelian said, horrified.

Jaspar sniffed his orchid. 'Because if they do not, they themselves shall end up on the frame.'

'How could all these poor creatures be responsible?'

Malice cooled Jaspar's eyes to ice. They are all responsible. How can my House make claim to leadership among the Great when it cannot control its own slaves? Before any of their filthy hands should be raised against me, I would nip all their arms off at the shoulder.'

Carnelian took a deep breath. 'My father too was struck with a knife, Jaspar, but was it really the barbarian's hand wielding it?'

Jaspar turned to stone. 'What you suggest
...
is inconceivable.'

That is what you said on the road, and yet my father bled.'

'But here
...
within the Sacred Wall
...
it is simply inconceivable.'

'My Lord seems to have forgotten to whom he attributed the death of the Lady Flama Ykoria, who died not only within the wall, but in the Labyrinth itself.'

Jaspar crushed the orchid and let it drop from his hand like a broken butterfly.

'How many of your people have you crucified?'

'Many,' Jaspar waved his hand, 'notwithstanding the cost.'

'And have you found even a whisper of a conspiracy or of rebellion?'

Jaspar regarded him. 'Under excruciation they confess to all the fanciful plots their animal minds can conceive, but none have rung true
...
so far.'