The Third God (80 page)

Across the mud-glazed plain a dragon lay collapsed, its tower heeling over so that it seemed a ship left stranded on the mud by a receding tide. Then they heard paired trumpet screams, scratching from the south. As the sound repeated, Carnelian and Fern lurched into a lope, breathing hard against the strain of running through the mud. They reached the island of the fallen dragon. Dangling above were the brass mouths of its flame-pipes. They walked round the monster, keeping an eye on the tower leaning towards them. Up past the boulders of the dragon’s knees and thighs, the brassman had fallen onto the rear haunch, one of its chains broken, dangling from one ankle. Carnelian was the first to advance under the shadow of the tower. He halted at the back knee, glancing up warily. He reached out to touch the hide. It was still warm. He scrambled up onto the monster’s shin, then scrabbled up its rain-slicked thigh, grabbed hold of the edge of the brassman. It rattled as he pulled himself up onto it. He smelled the burnt thing before he saw it. The charred remains of a man cooked to the brass. Fern was waiting to come up. Carnelian eyed the gaping maw of the tower entrance, then climbed towards it. The brassman gave a shudder as Fern came up onto it. Carnelian approached the doorway, wrinkling his nose against its charcoal breath. He reached up, caught hold of some of the rigging, then pulled himself up to stand to one side of the doorway. The brassman juddered with each step as Fern climbed it to take a place on the other side of the door. They both leaned in.

A black cavity sloped down into a pit where the deck should have been. At first they could make no sense of it but then Fern pointed and Carnelian saw the arch in the bottom of the pit with its individual stones and knew it was the exposed backbone of the monster. How fierce had been the inferno that had eaten its way down through decks and tank and flesh? The tower rose black and hollow like a chimney to the sky. Everything inside had been consumed.

Another doubled trumpet blast made them look south, but they could not see over the corpse ridge. Using the rigging, they clambered up the remains of the tower. As he pulled himself up onto the ledge around the topmost tier, Carnelian peered through a porthole. The command chair and the Master who had sat in it had fallen into the conflagration below. Using a guy rope, he pulled himself up the mast onto the narrow ledge that was the remains of the roof. There was just enough space for Fern to join him. It was only then they gazed out over the land. Dark ripples stretched away behind the first corpse ridge like those a tide leaves in sand. Here and there tiny dragons with their towers gave scale. Both stared, appalled, unable to comprehend how many dead there must be to make up such a landscape. A flashing in the midst of this carnage drew Carnelian’s eye. There upon the thread of road, a fire was burning. It died. Its smoke spiralled up, thinning into a haze, and he saw the dragon on the road and more behind it in a long column. The flame-pipes spoke again, the fire igniting against the road just before everything was obscured by naphtha smoke. At the root of that boiling black column, fire pulsed.

‘A signal,’ Carnelian and Fern said together. Carnelian looked further south and saw the ripples of the dead growing fainter and a scattering of ruined dragons like pebbles. He glanced east and saw a line of dragons there. There was another in the west. The two flanks of Molochite’s first line turned inwards, facing each other across the labyrinthine ripples of the dead and at its heart those flame-pipes signalling.

Sitting with their backs against the mast, Carnelian and Fern were frozen together like two blocks of ice. The rain pouring over them had drained their flesh of life, their minds of thought. Their eyes might have been glass as they gazed towards Heart-of-Thunder and Osidian. Who else could it be? In response to his signals, the two surviving wings of Molochite’s first line had exchanged communications by means of torches. As a result of all those firefly signals, a dragon from each wing had wound its way through the corpse labyrinth to meet Osidian on the road. By means of the torches their attendants lit, Carnelian and Fern had watched the commanders descend to the road and, there, in the shelter of Heart-of-Thunder’s belly, they had spent a long time, no doubt negotiating terms. After this the emissaries had returned each to his wing, where, after more torch signals, they had all moved south and had, a long while past, disappeared into the rain haze.

A light came suddenly from the west, shocking Carnelian and Fern to life. The curves and windings of the corpse labyrinth were thrown into sharp relief with a texture of piled-up fishbones.

A growl emitted from Fern’s throat brought Carnelian’s head up to see Heart-of-Thunder was turning. Shadows moved and melted upon his tower, and soon Osidian and his dragons were marching south along the road. Watching this, Carnelian felt a yearning to follow him, but as quickly as he felt this, he rejected it. He looked at Fern. For a moment his face seemed that of a stranger, but when Fern’s eyes came alive surveying the scene Carnelian’s heart jumped. It was then he determined that, come what may, he would share Fern’s destiny.

A bleak warmth upon his cheek made him turn to see the sun fallen beneath the ceiling of black cloud, already westering. Beneath its orb, the wheeled box of the Iron House was all burnt out. Imagining its oven horrors was not enough to deter his need to go there. He lingered for a while, examining without success the motives of his heart before he turned to Fern. ‘We must find shelter for the night.’ The words seemed spoken by a stranger. Fern was looking back at him, a question in his eyes. Then he must have seen Carnelian had no answers, for he shrugged. They broke their immobility with difficulty. Their limbs and backs felt stiff enough to snap off at the joints. Like old men, they began the descent to the earth.

The wreck loomed black against purple sky. Above hung the gory clot of the sun. They were weary from the long slog through the mud. Chilled to the bone by the rain, at first they welcomed the warm aura of the ruined Iron House. Until, that is, they began to smell its funeral-pyre reek. Half off the road it lay, like a ship run aground upon a reef. Carnelian imagined how it had happened. In pain and panic, the two blind draught dragons had pulled it off the road so that one side had tipped, a wheel rolling for a moment in the air before landing heavily enough on the earth below to buckle. In all, three dragons were piled up against the wreck like foothills. The nearest, having lumbered completely off the road, had avalanched down, shattering its forelimbs, plunging its massive head into the rubble of the demolished leftway. One of its lower horns had snapped off at the skull, from which a pool of blood had oozed. Its beak had buckled as it punched into the ground. Its rump and back formed a fleshy buttress crushed beneath the toppling mass of the Iron House. The second dragon had crashed down into bloody ruin and now lay slumped half on, half off the road. The third was one of Osidian’s that had been caught up in the disaster. Its head lay hidden, but by the way the body lay, it must somehow be wedged between the wheel still on the road and the further wall of the Iron House. The monster sloped up from its collapsed haunches, suggesting its head was lying upon the axle. Its tower, angled back, was blackened but had not burned, so that perhaps its crew had been able to abandon it. The same fire that had licked the tower had burned furiously upon the backs of the two draught dragons. The summits of their backs were black craters ringed about by ashen flesh. Charcoaled gashes and clefts cutting deep into the meat showed where the wooden housings and the yokes as large as bridges had been consumed in the holocaust.

It was the wall of the Iron House, sheer and forbidding, that showed the greatest damage. The same long line of windows through which Carnelian, crucified, had seen the sartlar approaching that morning – had it really only been that morning? – those windows were now nothing more than a ragged slit from whose fissured upper lip wisps of smoke were still hazing up. Above, the wall had blackened and thinned. Through the surviving sooty filigree, Carnelian and Fern could glimpse hideous cavities the colour of charcoal. The whole smouldering mass rose mountainously before them, its cliffs and clefts, its mounds and gullies running with sheets and streams and rivulets from the rain that glazed it.

Overwhelmed, they almost fell to their knees, overcome by weariness and horror, weighed down by the immensity of death they had already witnessed that day.

Carnelian took Fern’s shoulder and drew him away to where something lay embedded in the mud. A black bowl that either of them could have lain outstretched in, strangely contoured, filled up with water. Carnelian bent to touch it and brought his fingers to his nose. Iron. He unbent and regarded it, thinking it had a look of Osrakum with its lake. Then he realized it was Osrakum, or at least a representation of it. The iron hollow was, in form, a turtle. Looking round, he saw the wheel from which this hub cap had fallen. They approached it together, gazing up to see where the green arch of its bronze tyre had come loose. The ruin of the Iron House loomed over them. Their eyes fixed on the wheel. The end of the axle showed the cracks and rings of the vast tree it had once been. The red spokes radiating up from it were whole, but many of those below had shattered. The massive rim had cracked in two places so that it now folded in like lips of a mouth in which the spoke stumps were uneven teeth. Gold discs studded the rim, which Carnelian knew must represent the cities of the Ringwall. Gazing at this immense, broken wheelmap, then glancing back at the Osrakum hub thrown away, half-buried in the red mud, he could not help feeling this was some kind of omen for the Commonwealth.

As if speaking to him, another of the spokes snapped, causing the wheel to fold in on itself a little more. Fern pulled him away as, with a hideous grating, the chariot slid towards them, shedding panels of iron. Stumbling, Fern fell with Carnelian almost on top of him. They gaped up. They flinched as panels clattered to the ground, right and left. Then the sombre stillness of the scene returned and the rain hiss. They rose, still gazing up uncertainly at the Iron House.

Fern was the first to walk away. Carnelian followed him, glancing at the bloody sky over the pale horizon formed by the edge of the road. Night was nearing: they needed to find a place to sleep. Fern was heading towards a strangely textured green ramp leaning up against the road. As Carnelian neared it, he became aware of the huge upside-down face embossed into the verdigrised slope of copper. The face smiled up at the black sky, surrounded by a halo of curls and spirals. He knew this thing. It was the Twins’ fallen standard. He remembered the hope it had given him that morning. He watched Fern reach up to touch its spiralled edge and, though he could not see his face, Carnelian saw the slump in the shoulders and dread rose in him that Fern was remembering the ferngardens of the Koppie. Fern ducked under the standard and disappeared into the gloom beneath it. Carnelian stood for a while, unable to focus his emotions. He glanced west, where the sun was making a bloody end to a bloody day, then he followed his friend.

In the cavern beneath the standard, Carnelian could hear Fern struggling for breath. Rain drummed upon the copper roof and some dim red light oozed in, but they were in a place separate from the world; safe from it. Listening to Fern’s struggle for air, Carnelian at first chose to believe it a reaction to all the death outside. He told himself he was too numb to care, but the sound was stirring up panic in him. He moved towards Fern’s barely defined shape, wanting, fearing to touch him. As he came closer, the sound Fern was making was like a cough, as if he were trying to rid his lungs of smoke. The strained wheezing was pulling Carnelian apart. He reached out. At his touch, Fern began sobbing. The grief in that sound sent cracks through Carnelian’s frozen heart. Each shudder in Fern’s body brought them closer. Carnelian felt his own grief spilling out, racking his whole frame. They collided and clung to each other as the grief overflowed. They sobbed for all their mothers, for all their fathers, for the children, for the Tribe and for love lost and the suffering of the world that was their own and for the dead forming the hills of the earth. Clutching each other so hard helped to squeeze out the poison and the tears. In the pressure of Fern’s arms, Carnelian felt he was being forgiven and he abandoned himself to forgiveness; forgiving all those others, forgiving himself. He was not the sky, nor the earth. He was nothing more consequential than a blown leaf. He was too small a thing to be responsible for all the suffering, to be the reason for it. The forces of the world shaped him; were not shaped by him. Carnelian drew Fern against him, wanting him to feel that too; feel the pain drain away. The heat in their bodies awoke a fire in them. Amidst so much death there was a need to assert the flame of their lives. For them both, it was a miracle to explore each other’s body by touch. The warmed brass around Fern’s neck. The scar about Carnelian’s. Fern’s fire scars. His four-fingered hands upon Carnelian. Warm tears on cheeks lubricated the turning of their faces to each other. Lips guiding them to that first kiss. The world forgotten. Breathing love names. Though Carnelian was the younger, it was Fern who was like a boy. They fell into their own joined flesh, both lost and found.