The Third God (78 page)

‘Fern,’ he cried, but his voice was lost in the tumult. He wanted to work a path to his side, but there were too many auxiliaries in the way. He became aware of how desperately they were eyeing the fighting up ahead. He and Fern were being fed into that front with everyone else. He glanced back, contemplating retreat, some attempt at regrouping. Carnage carpeted the land to their rear, but this mess was slowly being overrun by an eddying tide of sartlar creeping around their flank. Ahead, he saw how much the line of auxiliaries had thinned. A surf of hands grasped at man and beast, which the auxiliaries hewed at with their blades, but as a hand was cut away, more replaced it. He saw one aquar struggling to stand as a skirt of sartlar clung to it. The creature flailed its neck as it toppled, spilling its rider into the waiting grasp of dozens.

His sympathy for the sartlar had all dried up. His fingers fumbled the toggle that closed a scabbard. Slipping his fingers around the handle of a sword gave him a thrill of relief. He pulled its fanblade free and glanced round. Their way back was now closed. He focused his gaze on Fern and urged his aquar towards him. In pushing past another rider, their saddle-chairs scraped against each other. Carnelian had no time for the man’s gaping panic. Fern glanced round and their eyes met. The next moment he looked away and Carnelian saw the man before him being pulled down, adding his cries to the pandemonium.

Then, suddenly, at the edge of his vision, an auxiliary disappeared. He spun round and they were upon him. He saw first their filthy mouths. Then their monstrously branded faces. Then the animal gleam of their eyes. He swung the fanblade, pruning off a couple of hands. Twisting, he swung it back, feeling it snag as it bit into bone. It caught, the blade turned transverse and the central ball cracked a skull. Even as his wrist got control of it, he felt the tethers of their fingers hooking his saddle-chair. He dashed the flat along a knobbled run of knuckles and was jerked back by their release, but other hands came and a face slavering for his arm. He sliced the blade into that mouth, clinking against rotten teeth, widening the grin, then the blade struck bone and stuck. Grinning impossibly wide, the corpse fell back, yanking the sword from his grip. He laid about him with his fists as hands and arms hooked over his aquar’s neck. She screeched as they gouged her with their claws, then worked their fingers into her wounds to widen them. More hands were reaching ever higher up her neck as they bent her head down towards them. Her plumes snapped like twigs when a sartlar grabbed her skull and swung up to tear at her throat with its teeth. She convulsed. Her legs buckled. Carnelian was tumbled out. His head cracked against another, even as his elbow dug into flesh. Stunned, he watched the world whip past as he plunged in among their legs.

Then he was lying on the earth, gazing up at an angry sky. A livid crack opened it for a moment. A booming, slow, stuttering voice sounded. He turned into the earth, gouging dust as he sought to stand. His feet under him, pushing up, unbending his spine. He was startled by his whiteness. He was puzzled to be naked under the cloak. Corpses seemed stones scattered over the earth. An aquar, one clawed foot twitching, her belly torn and spilling entrails. Carnelian became aware of the circle round him. At first he could make no sense of it, then he saw they were sartlar kneeling, their heads bowed into the dust. A movement of his head was enough to make them shudder. He regarded them, feeling eerily calm. Then he became aware of a pale figure being pulled down. As he remembered Osidian and the slavers, anger rose. Sartlar were bending to their victim like raveners. Then he knew what it was he was seeing and roared, ‘Fern!’

He ran towards his friend, ready to rend any who opposed him, but the sartlar sprang from his path. Fern was now invisible beneath their frenzy. Carnelian grabbed hair and the dark, coarse stuff of their clothing and pulled two off. Faces came up, snarling, but their maws snapped closed as they ducked away, whimpering, abandoning their victim prostrate upon the earth. Carnelian fell to his knees at Fern’s side, and had eyes for nothing but the blood smearing him. The sartlar assault had been so violent they had torn him almost wholly free of his commander’s leathers. Carnelian felt Fern’s body for wounds. Though his skin was striped with gashes, none seemed deep. Fern groaned. Carnelian was transfixed by the overwhelming relief he was alive. The bloody face opened an eye that stared in wonder.

‘Are you hurt?’

Fern frowned, clearly dazed. Carnelian spat on his fingers and gently began to wipe Fern’s face clean. A metallic screaming echoing beneath the rumbling sky made Carnelian rise and look in the direction from where the sound had come. There the sartlar envelopment was thinning. Through the gaps he could see that, in the centre, unopposed by aquar, the sartlar had continued to advance to well behind his current position. Beyond them dragon towers rose as a crenellated rampart. Another blast sounded even as, beyond the sartlar, a violent dawn erupted that caused him to shield his eyes. Feeling the coruscation dim, he peered over his arms. Thick sooty smoke had risen like a fog. Flashes sliced through the writhing billows. He froze with horror. Molochite’s first line was advancing, vomiting fire. Oceanic surges of terror were rippling back through the sartlar mass as the creatures tried to escape the holocaust. Their numbers choked their flight. He thought it was their shrieks he was hearing, then he recognized the whine and scream of the fire jets as they scythed through their ranks.

As he watched, he saw their flank shivering, vibrating. With each moment, a tremor in the ground was growing stronger. He realized the creatures were fleeing in the only direction they could: towards the flanks. He and Fern were right in the path of their stampede.

That brought him back to life. He spun round. Fern was still lying prone upon the ground. Carnelian cast around for even a single aquar, but all those he could see were dead or dying. The sartlar rout was almost upon them. He stooped, thrusting an arm under Fern’s right shoulder and head, pulling with his other hand on Fern’s left. He managed to sit him up. Still frowning, Fern’s gaze strayed to meet Carnelian’s.

‘You’ve got to get up!’ Carnelian shouted in his face.

Fern’s brow creased deeper as if he did not understand but, clutching at Carnelian, he scrabbled up onto his feet, the tatters of pale leather falling from him. Carnelian dug his shoulder under Fern’s arm, pulling it like a yoke over his neck, then grabbed hold of the hand on the other side. They stood unsteadily for a moment. He could make out bestial shapes hobbling and stumbling towards them. He manoeuvred Fern round and began striding, half carrying, half dragging him. When the sartlar flood smacked into them, it almost lifted them off their feet. Saturated with the odour of fear, the stench of the sartlar further quickened Carnelian’s heart so that he became too frantic to think. Constantly buffeted, he threw everything he had into keeping his footing and steadying Fern. He was slow to become aware of a deeper thunder in the earth. The shrieking of the flame-pipes was now sliding in pitch like a blade whipping past his ear. Ahead the sartlar flood was mounding as it flowed over some obstruction. Then the flow grew turbid; heads were dropping suddenly, arms flung up were then sucked down. He tried desperately to slow down, but the rout swept him and Fern inexorably towards the pile-up.

Closer and closer they were driven towards that bank of threshing limbs. Then his feet were catching in the mesh of bodies. Bones cracked under his heels, flesh slipped under his toes, warm wetness mouthed his bruised feet. He was stumbling, lowering his head, ramming through hard and soft obstructions, screams and yells, elbows arcing into him like pick-axes, thuds and shudders as bodies crashed into him, his arm yanked nearly from its socket as he pulled Fern towards him and, together, on all fours they scrabbled up a writhing slope of struggling flesh. Torrid breath wafted over him, laced with naphtha, thick with the stench of cooking meat. Desperation gave him new strength, but they were hopelessly enmeshed in flailing limbs and maned heads. The whole mound of bodies was quaking. He was engulfed in the aura of the monster. It avalanched towards them, red up to its knees. A footfall like a meteor strike. Another sent a concussion into the earth that shunted Carnelian hard against the sartlar among whom he was embedded; his bones jellied, his brain rattled in his skull. He had an overwhelming impression the Horned God was lunging to crunch them in His maw.

Then an arch of sun erupted so that he was blind to everything save its coruscating arc. Vibrating incandescence forced through his slitted eyes. Its odour a pure, bitter promise of death. His mind, like crystal, resonated to its shrill, terrifying song. He clung to Fern, wanting that they should die together. Among the shrieks of those set alight, he could hear the crackle of their flesh crisping. A bonfire whoosh. The heat intensified and he screwed his eyes closed, waiting for the unbearable touch of fire on his naked skin. Then its scream changed pitch and he opened his eyes and saw it pass, dancing over the arms and legs above him, skin peeling back from chests and faces, hair igniting in quick bushes of flame, all suddenly lost among thick black blossoms. Tar smoke rolled hot over him, oozing an acrid burn into his lungs. Then he was drowning, choking, coughing so hard he could taste blood. Iron in his mouth; iron infusing into his being. Stretching his neck up until he was sure his throat would tear, straining for breathable air. Then a sweet draught, another, another, until he surfaced, eyes raw, blinking, feeling the thunder almost upon them, saw the dim lantern of the high cabin in which a Master sat and, beneath him, the swelling monstrous dragon. Hawsers pulling on its horns caused it to drop its head, so that it was the flat of its skull that rammed the sartlar pyre. Carnelian was aware of the corpses rising round him in a bow wave. He was rolled in tumbling bodies, heavy blows from heads like clubs, a mass sharp with knees and elbows, lubricated with blood, reeking from smouldering flesh and sinew.

Buried alive. Terror consumed him as he lay there, smothered. Bodies sheathed him. Writhing in gore and shit and piss. He was one worm among many. He managed to turn his head to find a pocket of air to suck at. Among the moaning, the rustle, the gasping, he found the sound of his own breath. He listened to it, slowed it, deepened it, fighting for calm. Fern’s warm body under his arm. He managed to work this up his chest. He squeezed his hand up to the side of Fern’s neck, his jaw. A finger pressed up over the angle of his lips. Moist breath against his skin. Carnelian let out a sob of relief. For a moment all he could think about was how to save Fern. Eventually he realized that, to help him, he must first free himself. Focusing on his body, he became aware his left hand was cooler than the rest of him. He lay for a moment gathering his strength, then pushed towards that coolness through the press, wriggling like a maggot in flesh. His arm came out into space, he worked his shoulder free, then his face. He gasped at the air as if he had swum up out of the deep. He used his free arm to lever himself out, sliding more skin out with each try. When his right arm came free, he shoved down with both hands and slid out in a rush. Then he was tumbling and hit the ground with a stunning thud.

He came to feeling the good earth cradling him. He rose, groaning at the ache that was his whole body. A ridge of limbs and bodies and lolling heads rose up before him that twitched and slid against itself. The ridge ended abruptly at a gaping wound as if it were a gum from which a tooth had been torn. On the other side of the gap, the ridge continued. The edges of the gap were ripped and bloodied, but its floor was raw with a dark paste squeezed from sartlar bodies by the dragon’s feet. Carnelian stared in horror and the horror stared back: eyes gaping at him from a mangled, branded sartlar face. A mane clotted with gore. The creature propped up on a crooked arm. Her breasts sagging gourds. Her body squeezing to gore and skin merging into the quagmire of blood.

‘Is this the Land of the Dead?’ she rasped, with her thick sartlar voice.

Carnelian managed to free his gaze from her and saw around him a landscape ridged and rutted by corpses. Perhaps she was right. His finger remembered Fern’s warm, living breath. Soon he was scrambling up the slope, clasping at the fleshy flowers of hands and feet, treading on thighs and heads. He heard a moaning rising from his chest and knew it was fear he would not find Fern. He clambered, peering, into the nest of bodies, interspersing his moans with barks of ‘Fern, Fern.’

And then he saw a brown leg. He slid his fingers between its warm skin and the matted hair of a head that lay upon it like a boulder, past the ear to the stomach underneath, shoving his hand up then over, following the ridge of the rib cage until he had a good grip of him. Then, digging his feet in, he leaned back and tugged and slowly, one heave at a time, the body came out and then the face. Fern, eyes filled with wonder, as if he were being born. His brows contracted, his lips opened in a circle. ‘What . . . ?’

Carnelian ignored the question, putting his strength into freeing him completely, then propping him up upon the slope.

‘What . . . ?’ Fern said again, but Carnelian hardly heard him, his gaze snared by another in the heap. The small, bright eyes of a child. Its little hand reached out for him. He avoided the grip, caught the tiny wrist, slid his other hand in seeking an armpit, aware of nothing but the desperation in those eyes. He managed to work the morsel of a body free, but it was still attached by a thin arm. He reached in to prise its grip loose, but it shook its head in violent distress repeating a sound, a word, over and over: ‘Mya, mya . . .’ And feeling along that bony sliver, Carnelian found the tiny fist held fast in a larger one and soon he was working to free their owner and was struggling to loose her, when two strong brown arms came to help him: Fern was there beside him. Together they fought to free the child’s mother.

A remote detonation brought Carnelian’s head up. As the sound reverberated under the sky, he and Fern looked at each other. After freeing the sartlar mother, they had gone back for more. Even though she had been dead, there were many still alive among the corpses. Carnelian had become hardened to their fear of him and blind to their deformities. All he had been able to think of was that they were trapped as he had been. He had laboured ceaselessly, ignoring the pain in his muscles, finding in the work a way to avoid looking into that dark place deep inside in which lurked the conviction that all this carnage was, in great measure, his doing.