The Third God (29 page)

‘Why not?’

As the Legate swept past Carnelian Osidian approached and raised his hand. ‘Come, my Lord.’

‘I shall remain here.’ Carnelian realized the Legate was within hearing and added: ‘Celestial.’

Osidian hesitated. Watching his hand, Carnelian detected a firmness in it that suggested Osidian was about to issue a command. The hand softened. ‘My Lord Legate.’

The Legate turned. ‘Celestial?’

‘Go on ahead, we shall join you presently.’

The man bowed. ‘As you command.’

Carnelian watched the Legate move away, resigning himself to a confrontation with Osidian. He turned to him. ‘Someone needs to keep an eye on things here,’ he said in Vulgate.

‘Morunasa can do that.’

‘I don’t imagine the marumaga would be happy to obey a Maruli.’

‘They will do as they are told!’

Carnelian was shocked at Osidian’s vehemence. He could not understand why this should be so important to him. ‘Surely it is obvious that we must take all precautions? These huimur have been purchased at a heavy price.’

Osidian lowered his head as he crushed one hand with the other. ‘I really want you to come with me, Carnelian.’ His anger had gone. ‘Please.’

Carnelian gazed at Osidian in disbelief, then turned to look at Heart-of-Thunder lurking in his vault. ‘Very well.’

The Legate and his companions had journeyed to the cothon in palanquins. Osidian commandeered one for himself and another for Carnelian. Two of the Lesser Chosen commanders were going to have to walk. As Osidian replaced his bearers and Carnelian’s with Marula, Carnelian looked among them for Sthax, but could not see him there. He dismissed anxiety: there were more immediate things to worry about. As he watched the changeover Carnelian was surprised how much the bearers appeared disfigured by their Masters’ heraldic tattoos. He wondered that he had ever thought it natural that men should be thus marked to show to whom they belonged. Once it had even seemed elegant; now it appeared hardly different from the branding on a sartlar’s face.

When the palanquin was ready he folded himself into it reluctantly. In contrast with the samite brocades, the inlays of tortoiseshell and pearl, his rough-woven marumaga robe appeared to be little more than sackcloth. An Oracle slid closed the lacquered door and the Marula lifted the palanquin. Inside, Carnelian felt imprisoned. Each breath he took was cloyed with the perfume of lilies, the taint of myrrh. Finding a grille he slid it back to let in some air. Framed by its gold filigree, the machines and geometries of the cothon appeared more brutal. The southern gates of the cothon gulped open. He glimpsed gate chains, toothed wheels, then he was being carried through a garden. Trunks showed they were passing down an avenue of gigantic trees. Framed between them, verdant vistas. Shield leaves thrust up fiery flower-spikes. Paths wound among rocks, quaintly carved, banded and spiralled with cultivated lichens. Here and there he managed to snatch glimpses of the sky, but these only served to make the palanquin feel more like a prison. He was uneasy. Perhaps the feeling had been caused by Osidian’s uncharacteristic gentleness towards him back in the cothon. Carnelian hoped he would not regret having agreed to join him. Perhaps his anxiety was about returning to the world of the Masters. Perhaps he was afraid he might be changed back into what he had been.

The palanquin was set down amidst muttering. Carnelian covered his lower face with a fold of his robe before carefully sliding open the door. He cried in Vulgate: ‘Look away, we are unmasked.’

Climbing out he was confronted by a gate that glared at him with a single, tearful eye. Wrought in the bronze, it was surrounded by a silver frieze of ammonite shells. These wards proclaimed whatever lay beyond to be under the jurisdiction of the Wise. Unsanctioned entry was forbidden under penalty of the Law-that-must-be-obeyed.

The gate opened a little and, from behind it, a silver face emerged with solid spiral eyes. ‘Please enter this purgatory, Seraphim. The procedures of purification await you.’

As Carnelian and Osidian approached, more ammonites appeared, hunched as each gripped with both hands the handle of a ladle in which blue fire burned. At a command it was poured over the ground before them. Flames ran across the earth. Carnelian and Osidian were urged forward onto the now purified ground. Fingers fumbled at their feet, trying to free them of their polluted footwear. A hissing made Carnelian turn to see more arcs of blue flame being ladled over the ground on which he and Osidian had walked. The palanquins they had come in were already aflame. The Marula were backing away, eyes bulging.

‘Enough! I have no patience for this,’ boomed Osidian, chasing ammonites from his path. ‘Morunasa, come with me. Bring your people.’

The Oracle gathered up the Marula and they swarmed after him. Ammonites flung themselves in their way, screeching, forbidding entry, but the Marula beat them aside. Some of the ammonites lost their blinding-masks and fell, grovelling, on the still burning earth. Carnelian glanced at the Legate and his commanders, who were watching in stiff disbelief, then followed after the Marula, who were pouring through the gate Osidian had thrown open.

Drugged smoke unfurled like ferns in the gloomy halls beyond. Carnelian felt a languor settle about his shoulders. His face began to swell, his bones to liquefy. He recognized the feeling from his entry into Osrakum. The drug was meant to encourage their submission to intrusive cleansing. A deafening clatter brought his eyes back into focus. Swaying, the Marula were knocking smoking brass bowls from their tripods. Carnelian squinted against the undulating surface of a pool in which mouths and tongues of light were kissing, separating. Backing away into the shadows were metal faces distorting reflections of their whole drunken procession. He saw a rectangle of daylight opening far away and did what he could to herd the Marula towards it. At last he was stumbling out with them into eddying daylight.

He found himself with Morunasa and the Marula in a gully between limestone walls pierced with gates. The place was already in afternoon shadow. Only the crest of the eastern wall still caught the sun. Bronze hoops held poles whose banners were swimming in a breeze. Guardsman niches were empty. A gate opened a crack. For a moment he glimpsed an eye widening with horror. Then the gate slammed closed and a voice beyond it began keening an alarm. Bolts were shot home. Commotion spread beyond the walls and a scurrying, so that Carnelian felt he was invading a termite city. Faces peered down from the battlements above. Carnelian felt as shunned as a leper.

He located Osidian, a shadowy shape striding away along the gully towards where a tower rose, tier on sculptured tier. Morunasa asked for instructions, but Carnelian ignored him and set off after Osidian. The Marula opened a path through their midst to let him through. Carnelian was only vaguely aware of their faces. He was concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. As the effect of the drug faded, each footfall felt more solid than the last. When he caught up with Osidian, he spoke: ‘Why . . . why break through?’

‘I had my reasons,’ Osidian growled.

Carnelian saw no point in pressing him further and fell in step with him. Behind them came scuffling Marula.

The gully terminated at a gate from which the two faces of the Commonwealth sneered down. Carnelian and Osidian threw their weight against the bronze and the gate opened, exhaling a waft of lilies. Penetrating the gloomy hall beyond, Carnelian noticed figures flitting away through openings all along its rim. Members of the Legate’s household, no doubt. He glanced round anxiously to make sure the Marula were keeping close; he did not want any massacres. Huddled hesitantly on the threshold, they came when he beckoned them.

They crossed the hall among the echoes of their creeping footfalls. Carnelian did not blame the Marula for their wariness. Even to him this place felt like a tomb. The pillars on either side seemed guardians. Figures writhing in the pavement beneath his feet might have been a view down into the Underworld.

Their route took them within sight of archways that opened into the gold of late afternoon. Carnelian longed to escape through them, but Osidian always turned away into the shadows. The cold grandeur seeped into Carnelian’s heart until he began to shiver. The polished floor seemed frozen meat whose veins had turned to stone. Columns might have been the corpses of trees. As he walked he became aware he was clutching his marumaga robe. Its coarse but honest weave brought him some little comfort.

They skirted one last court by means of a cloister. Walking close to its edge Carnelian was able to see they were nearing the tower whose tiers were borne upon the curved backs of humbled men. The cloister curved to deliver them to a stair that they began ascending. They passed chambers panelled with malachite and purple porphyry whose sterile beauty Osidian declared to be that of reception chambers. ‘It is the Legate’s private halls we seek.’

Higher they climbed until they came to a landing where they were challenged by guardsmen bearing the Legate’s cypher on their faces. Osidian stayed the Marula with a command then climbed the last few steps towards the guardsmen and their levelled spears. If his height had not been enough to alert them that he was a Master, his disregard for their weapons proved it. Their spear blades clattered to the floor as they knelt.

‘Clear this level. These chambers I claim for my own. Any creature left behind shall be slain.’

Carnelian had reached Osidian’s side and could now see the great door upon which the men had been standing guard. Abandoning their weapons they fled through it into the chambers beyond. He noticed that the stair continued climbing. ‘The roof,’ he said, remembering the heliograph he suspected to be up there. Osidian nodded and bade Morunasa approach him. He selected some of the Marula to stand guard upon the door. ‘Take these others,’ he said to the Oracle, ‘and bring me anyone you find up there.’

The Oracle was about to scale the steps when Osidian stayed him. ‘I want them alive.’

The Oracle darted a nod and soon he and most of the Marula had disappeared up the stairs. Carnelian waited with Osidian as the Legate’s household cowered past to scurry down the steps. The guardsmen were the last to leave.

‘Nothing living?’ Osidian asked them.

‘Nothing, Master.’

As they ducked past him and away down the stair after the others, Osidian indicated to the Marula the recesses flanking the door in which they were to stand guard. Then he and Carnelian passed into the chamber beyond.

They emerged into a suite of rooms more humanly proportioned, graced with gilded furniture, with hangings of featherwork, walls pierced by ivory doors. Wandering, they came into a chamber in which bronze lecterns shaped like hands cradled books. Osidian took one, opened its jewelled cover and read. He looked at Carnelian.

‘An inferior edition,’ he said, stroking the binding.

There were tears running down his face. This sadness, that was also joy, made Osidian look young again. As they explored further together Carnelian watched him sidelong. Osidian professed disdain for such provincial architecture, aloofness towards the minor treasures that were all about them, but when he turned his gaze from something his fingers would linger on it a while as if he feared that, should he lose touch of it, it might disappear. Indeed, the polished stone in which they moved as shadows, the hanging silks that floated on the breeze like smoke, the narrow views some windows gave down into the hazy infinities of the land below, all these things seemed unreal, so that it was as if they moved together through a dream.

At last they came to a chamber in which water ran in channels in the walls. Here Osidian let his marumaga robe crumple to the floor and soon was standing in an iris-scented waterfall. He beckoned for Carnelian to join him. The eyes looking at him had something of the boy in the Yden, but now they were set in a face that had been hardened by pain. The water was making Osidian’s maggot wounds redder than his mouth. The mark of the rope was livid round his neck. His once flawless limbs had been weathered by the margins of garments into different shades so that he seemed assembled from unmatched pieces of ivory. Pity became an ache in Carnelian’s chest. He felt anew the agony of loss for what Osidian had been and sadness for what he had become. Undressing, he joined him in the waterfall. They stood together, sheathed in its warm pulsating embrace. Osidian’s eyes seemed emeralds lost in the sea. ‘Forgive me.’

Carnelian’s heart responded to the appeal. There was still a part of him that yearned for the way it had been between them, but he could not so easily forget the dead. ‘Forgiveness is not in my gift,’ he said and endured the hurt that came into Osidian’s face.

‘At least, stay with me.’

Compassion and the dregs of their love fought within Carnelian with what his heart felt he owed the dead. At last he yielded nothing more than a nod though even that felt like a betrayal.

A clanging brought them back to the outer door. Putting his ammonite mask over his face, Carnelian opened the door. Morunasa was on the landing. He moved aside to indicate a huddle of ammonites ringed by Marula. There was another ammonite laid out on the floor. Carnelian approached the prone figure, crouched, then, using one hand to hold his own mask, with the other he released the ammonite’s. Beneath was a sallow face marred with examination tattoos. Carnelian leaned closer. ‘He’s dead.’

Osidian had followed him. ‘It is the quaestor of this city.’

Carnelian turned to look up at him. ‘How can you tell?’

Osidian interpreted for him some of the markings on the corpse’s face. Then he turned on Morunasa. ‘Did I not tell you to bring all of them to me alive?’

The Oracle presented a stiff face. ‘We found him like that on the roof.’

Carnelian leaned closer to the corpse. ‘Look at how his tongue is swollen.’

Osidian crouched to see for himself. ‘Poison.’

Carnelian was about to ask how Osidian knew that, but then remembered that he had grown up at court where such things were not uncommon.

Osidian rose and stood statue still. Carnelian sensed he was pondering something and chose not to disturb him. Instead he addressed Morunasa. ‘On the roof, you say?’