The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

  Carnelian’s eyes had been pulled back to the corpse. ‘How many of the Marula were slain?’

  ‘A handful,’ Aurum said, without turning. His mouth twisted with contempt. ‘She has used you for a fool, Vennel.’ He snorted. ‘And now you even confess complicity in a breach of the Blood Convention.’

  Vennel turned away to hide frantic, calculating eyes. ‘By all the huimur of the Commonwealth and on my own blood I swear that all I was party to was a temporary abduction, a delay that would ensure the election should go ahead without us, nothing more, no attacks, certainly not bloodshed . . .’

  Jaspar was looking into space. ‘How can one believe that the Brotherhood would dare raise their hands against the Chosen? We have tolerated their activities for so long. This single act invites their annihilation.’

  ‘It is likely they knew not what they did,’ said Suth.

  ‘How did they find us?’ asked Carnelian.

  ‘Well . . .’ said Vennel. They all looked at him. He floated his hands in elegant apology. ‘In good faith, my Lords, and bearing in mind that my blood is as much at risk as yours—’

  Jaspar dropped his forehead into his hand. ‘Do we have to listen to this?’

  Vennel flinched. ‘The Legate and I came to an arrangement. A message was sent to Osrakum.’

  Jaspar chopped a sign of contempt. ‘You imagine we did not know? Why else do you think we forwent the leftway where you expected us to be?’ He turned his back on Vennel and addressed Aurum. ‘Do you think, my Lord, that any of these vermin escaped to carry word of their failure?’

  ‘That is immaterial,’ said Aurum. He swung his arm round in an arc to take in the city wall. ‘It is certain the Brotherhood had eyes up there to monitor the attack.’

  Carnelian searched the wall, but it was as dark as the sky.

  ‘When will Ykoriana know that they have failed?’ asked Jaspar.

  ‘Even by leftway courier, she could not have received Vennel’s message much before the day that we passed Maga-Naralante, ten days after we set off from the sea,’ said Aurum.

  ‘Surely not ten days,’ said Jaspar.

  ‘You ignore the difficulty in getting the message secretly up from the City at the Gates to Osrakum and into Ykoriana’s hand in her forbidden house.’

  ‘Assuming you are right, my Lord, that would allow her at most only nine days to get the assassins here.’

  Aurum jabbed the corpse with the toe of his ranga. ‘We are at least sixty days by road from Osrakum. This thing was already here.’

  ‘Not if it came here on the leftway,’ said Jaspar.

  Suth shook his head. ‘That would be difficult without the complicity of the Wise. Besides, she would not risk being so easily incriminated. The traffic records for the leftways are meticulously kept.’

  ‘Either way,’ said Aurum, ‘it is probable that in a few days Ykoriana will learn that she failed. Desperation will make her doubly dangerous. We must reduce the time she has to spin another web. We must use the leftway.’

  ‘On the leftway we will be exposed,’ said Vennel.

  ‘Thanks to you, my Lord, we are exposed wherever we go,’ grated Suth.

  ‘What of your wound, Lord Suth?’ asked Jaspar.

  Carnelian disliked the way Vennel’s eyes turned to feast on his father.

  Suth smiled. ‘A scratch.’

  Carnelian remembered how much blood there had been. He looked away, over the canvas wall and saw above the gate a paler edge of sky. ‘Behold, the morning,’ he said, with wonder. He had believed the night would never end.

  The clanging of stone bells could be heard all across the field. Beneath the city wall everyone stood waiting, looking towards the still closed gates. Carnelian and the other Masters were formed up within the cordon of the Marula. He was anxious that his aquar as it shifted should not step on the flattened tents. Beneath the canvas the corpses of the assassins lay side by side with the Marula they had killed. Though it was their custom, Aurum had not allowed the Marula to burn their dead. They glanced furtively at the canvas, stroking the salt bracelets they had stripped from the corpses. One of them sat stiffer than the others. Carnelian kept noticing the red corners of his eyes and knew the man was looking at him. When the black face angled towards him, gaunt with fear, Carnelian recognized it as belonging to the Maruli who had seen him unmasked the night before. There was no way he could reassure the man that he was safe, but Carnelian was determined to keep their secret. There was already enough blood on his hands.

  A grinding grumble drew his eyes away to where a crack was widening down the centre of the gate. The faces on the doors swung inwards to look at each other. The crowd murmur rose in pitch. Everything began to shuffle forward. A slow rhythm of huimur bells, axles and wheel trundle answered the steady ringing from the towers. Fully opened, the gates released a river of travellers coming out from the city. The two flows sheared against each other with a continuous protest. Consternation spread outwards from their meeting. Something fearful. The uproar hissed towards the Masters like flames across a parched fernland. Carnelian snatched the single, chilling word ‘Plague’ again and again from the chatter.

  Aurum barked an order and the Marula dismounted round them to form a ring of spear points. It looked to Carnelian a frail defence. Still, when he looked for Tain, he was relieved to see him with the baggage inside the ring.

  Carnelian watched Aurum’s hunch lean down to one of the Marula. As the old Master sat back his action seemed to jerk the man up into his saddle-chair. The Maruli strode his aquar off into the crowd. For a moment he was consumed by it, his head bobbing in the boil. Then he came back and spoke to Aurum, pointing his arm towards the gate.

  Aurum turned to shout something at the other Masters. Carnelian strained to hear.

  ‘. . . mere rumour carried here from . . . south. If plague exists . . . far away . . . might . . . burn itself out before . . . reach it. We go on.’

  Vennel straightened up. ‘Should we not consider remaining in Nothnaralan?’ His high voice carried more clearly than the old Master’s. ‘We could wait it out. Surely it would be foolish to ignore the peril.’

  ‘We shall go on,’ shouted Aurum. ‘If it is your wish . . . remain here.’

  Carnelian saw his father and Jaspar lift their hands in agreement.

  Aurum nodded, then commanded the Marula to remount. Their saddle-chairs rocked as they clambered up. Aurum’s hand punched more commands into the air. The Marula reversed their lances and began to bludgeon a path with the hafts. Their aquar cleaved into the flow like boats. Carnelian could see the animals’ distress. Their heads flicked from side to side, plume fans quivering open and closed. The Marula jerked tight their reins and continued hacking into the crowd. Carnelian’s chair jolted as he rode after his father into their wake. One hand struggled with the reins while the other clenched the chair.

  The crowd surged in waves against him. He grew tired. When he looked up, the gate seemed further away. The tide was against them. More and more people were pouring out from the gateway into the field. Their stench maddened him. More impacts shook him to anger.

  ‘This is unbearable!’

  For a moment Carnelian fancied it was his own voice crying out, but his teeth were clenched, his lips pressed closed.

  ‘Digging a ditch in water.’

  His father’s voice rang clear above the turmoil. Carnelian saw his shrouded mass unfolding to betray his height. His huge hand appeared, like a spotted dove, floating, alighting on his head. Then, with a sudden motion, it pulled the hood back. The bandaged head was revealed and the mask that was a piece of sun. Carnelian was transfixed. His father’s golden face was the serene centre of the storm. Carnelian’s gaze followed its lunging forward. He watched his father’s saddle-chair collide with one of the Marula, watched him grab the man’s salt-bangled arm. The Maruli turned, lifting his lance in menace, stared wide-eyed at the mask, then down at the white Master’s hand that held him. Suth shouted something before
he let go. The Maruli bowed so low his head disappeared between his thighs. When he came up he was bellowing and holding his arm out as if he were cooling it from the Master’s touch. The other Marula craned round, saw the Master’s terrible mirror face, slitted their eyes and brayed battle cries as they turned their lance blades on the crowd.

  ‘We are revealed Lords of the Hidden Land,’ boomed Aurum as he too pushed back his hood. The crowd slid distorted across his mask as he scanned it. ‘Take care, this riot might conceal our enemies.’

  Jaspar gave a fierce cry and straightened in his chair as he revealed himself. Vennel unbent more slowly. Carnelian watched his hand waver but then the Master followed the others. Reluctant to give up his hold on the chair, Carnelian was last of all. He glanced uneasily at the throng but realized it was futile to search it for assassins.

  The Marula’s aquar were striding forward. The crowd was giving way grudgingly, snarling. Faces were turning to look, then a chorus of voices struck up. ‘Masters! Masters!’

  The word spread panic more rapidly than had the rumour of plague. Swathes of people were collapsing to their knees. The Marula trampled ahead regardless, scything their lance blades before them. Carnelian watched the crowd, in flight, yawn a corridor all the way to the gate. The Masters rushed down it and he was drawn after them. On either side the gates flung up their walls of wood. He glimpsed the bronze sneers of the faces high above. The space between the gates swirled with people. He was clattering up a ramp into a screaming, echoing canyon. A continuous mass of beasts and men was slipping by. His aquar loped on, dodging between wagons. A mudbrick wall coursed past on his right. Women flattened against it open-mouthed. Buttresses pulsed past. Shrilling children dashed from his path.

  Ahead the road forked round a tower. It loomed up as he rode into its shadow. He could make out windows, a parapet. There was a rush of noise. At the edge of his vision the Masters and the Marula were rearing back. Plumes flared as Carnelian’s own aquar juddered to a stop. As he toppled to one side he yanked the reins in panic. The world swept before his eyes.

  ‘Toll, toll,’ coarse voices cried in Vulgate above the roar.

  Carnelian’s aquar struck something. There was a clatter of many things hitting the ground. His world steadied. He saw a tinker’s angry face. The woman behind him went bloodless. Her look leapt to the other faces looking up. People began bending, grovelling, moaning.

  Carnelian’s hand strayed up to his mask. After so long hiding he had felt naked when they looked at him. Over their heads, he could see the toll-gatherers. Their high conical caps bore the city’s cypher of the ladder and the sea. For a moment their faces showed fierce defiance but then the moaning spread to them. Their mouths fell open as they let out the sound of fear. Slimed teeth. Mouths gaping so wide they squeezed tears from the slitted eyes above them. Their billhooks toppled like scythed reeds.

  ‘Make way,’ Aurum cried in Vulgate as he hung above them vast and menacing.

  People shuffled aside bleating. A wagon was rolling out of the way. All around, the road seemed carpeted with dead. The Marula moved forward between the toll posts and the Masters followed. The party picked up speed. Echoes flattened as they came into the open, into a marketplace, that swelled wide then narrowed in the distance almost to a point. Like an almond, Carnelian thought, an almond they were entering by one corner. The road was a loop raised around its edge upon which crowds were slowly circling the sunken centre with its mess of stalls. As they rode nearer, chariots rolled their man-high wheels left to right across Carnelian’s vision. Among their arches people ambled and the heads of saurians bobbed floating. It seemed an impenetrable flow.

  Carnelian felt the rising anger of the Masters. Sitting tall and terrible in their midst, his father lifted his arm and with it sent the Marula crashing headlong. Their chevron cut into the crowd. The Masters followed them, clinging to their chairs as if they were riding small boats down rapids. They were picking up speed as they drove everything before them. Carnelian felt the power pistoning up through his saddle-chair as they blew along the road like a gale. A woman scrambled screaming from Carnelian’s path. His aquar swung round a wagon that was turning ponderously out of his way. He felt the shatter of each dropped pot. Gourds rolled like heads. Someone slipped, tumbling scrunched into a ball. Carnelian gritted his teeth as his aquar kicked and stumbled through the obstruction. The buildings on his right were wearing the first lurid colours of the sun. He had dizzy glimpses of the mudbrick façade with its porticoes and tiers in which cracks led down into alleyways. From the corner of his eye he had a persistent impression that a storm was rising in the east. He looked off between the jumbled stalls and saw the gloomy rampart that defined the other side of the marketplace. His aquar’s slowing to a walk caused him to turn back to see that their route was being choked by a convoy of wagons. The rest of the road had been cleared by the Masters’ aura of terror.

  Carnelian watched the wagons snare each other as they hurried to get out of the way. He did not want to look back at the destruction they had left behind them and so distracted himself by examining a huge tower that rose up behind the wagons. It stood back from the marketplace behind a thick stone wall that came to just below its waist. At its foot a road left the marketplace leading westwards. Half the height of the tower that could be seen above the wall was a truncated pyramid pricked with windows. Growing up from that were spars, as if some ship had run aground and rotted away leaving only its ribs. These curved up from the corners with two more between them. The three ribs on each side resembled the prongs of a fork. The middle prong of the closest carried a plaque. When Carnelian screwed up his eyes he could make out the ring glyph and below it the two spots and three bars of the number seventeen. From the tower the wall ran further round the marketplace to two more identical towers.

  Carnelian’s survey was interrupted by one of the wagons rolling free. The Marula were already streaming through the gap and the Masters fell in behind them.

  Tower seventeen rose on the intersection of the marketplace and the western road. At its foot stood a monolith not much taller than a man. As soldiers appeared from behind this, Suth formed the Marula into a cordon to keep back the throng. Aurum rode into the soldiers as they were trying to kneel. Carnelian edged his aquar closer. He could see that their bright auxiliary collars were inscribed at the throat with the ring glyph on either side of which were the service and rank rings.

  ‘. . . bear a pass,’ Aurum was saying to one of the soldiers, who was a marumaga. He passed down a jade tablet ridged with spirals into the marumaga’s hand.

  ‘This pass allows what you demand, Master, but I have my instructions from the Legate of this city.’ He pointed across the marketplace to the black rampart.

  ‘It is you who are the keeper of this watch-tower and must obey the pass unconditionally,’ Aurum rumbled.

  The marumaga keeper faltered, chewed his quivering lip. ‘This watch-tower, although part of the Ringwall, still lies within the jurisdiction of the Legate, my Master.’

  ‘Enough,’ cried Suth, who had joined Aurum.

  The keeper took a nervous step back as this second Master brought his aquar towards him.

  ‘Keeper, you’ve seen our pass. Now you’ve a simple choice: either you let us through or else you delay us. If you choose the latter I’ll have a chair upholstered with the skin from your back.’

  The keeper looked ill. His watery eyes flicked from one mask to the other. His head nodded in an uneven rhythm. ‘Of course, Master, of course . . . the pass is entirely valid.’

  Jogging, looking back many times, he led them to the monolith where the Masters dismounted. Carnelian handed his aquar’s reins to one of the auxiliaries as he saw the others do. Although the monolith lay very close to the watch-tower, a passage angled behind it with space enough for the aquar to pass through in single file. Behind, a doorway led into dank gloom.

  In lantern light, Carnelian saw the doors that ran along one wall. A ramp angled
up against another. As they began to climb he was deafened by the scrape of aquar claws and the clatter of their ranga shoes. The ramp brought them up to another level whose flagstones were smothered with straw. The place stank of the aquar that could be seen in stalls.

  Several more ramps took them up through the watch-tower. Carnelian glimpsed machinery and the counterweights that spoke of other doors. Skeletal men with large eyes hid as they passed. Their thin fear reminded him of the massacre of the sailors on the baran. He disliked their cringing even more than the rings and seventeens branded into their faces.

  At last they came up into a lofty hall, cheered by purling water. Squat columns held up a weave of heavy beams. Shafts let some light in from the floors above. Ladders hung on the walls. One whole side of the hall was a cistern filling from a spout. Men climbed on either side of a portcullis to release the counterweights that allowed others to lift it. Carnelian led his aquar into the archway, out past another monolith into the bright morning.

  He walked to a parapet to see the market’s roaring seethe laid out below him.

  ‘A leftway, at last a leftway,’ said Jaspar.

  Carnelian turned. It was only then that he realized they were standing on a road. In one direction it crossed the west road by means of a narrow bridge. In the other, it curved off to the next watch-tower.

  As their aquar loped round above the marketplace, Carnelian saw that the tower ahead bore the number eighteen high in its ribs. He made a broad scan from the west, where the Guarded Land fell away into the sky, to the south where it ran flat to the horizon. Nothnaralan’s half-circle seemed scorched into the land’s rusty painted edge. He could see a wall running alongside the western road the top of which carried the continuation of the leftway along which he rode. If instead of coming this way they had turned to cross the bridge beside watch-tower seventeen they could have ridden its pale thread through the city and out beyond it to fade into the hazy western sky.

  They slowed as they drew closer to watch-tower eighteen where the leftway forked. One way crossed to the watch-tower over a narrow bridge that spanned the southern road. The other turned south.