There were three chairs set side by side. His father lay on the floor between two of them. Carnelian chose a chair next to the wall. He had hardly sat down before the doors closed him into the perfumed glimmering gloom. With a lurch they were off. Carnelian leant over the chair’s arm, slipped his hand under the robe covering his father like a shroud, found his hand and held it.
His father’s hand was so like wax, Carnelian feared he might melt it with his grip. On the floor, his father looked like a corpse wearing its death mask. The chariot seemed hardly to be moving. Carnelian could hear the wheels sighing and the clink of harness. Leaning close, he could detect no sound of breathing coming through the metal face. He sat up and rested his head against the chariot’s quivering wall. He was alone. They had taken everything from him and left him entombed in this gold box with his father. He wanted to cry, to rage, to bellow. His grief threatened to overbrim to tears. He centred himself. This was not the time for such indulgence. He looked back down at his father’s body. If the Lord of the Underworld was not there he was very close; Carnelian could smell his myrrhy breath. To survive, he must free himself from Aurum’s hope. He reminded himself that all the Master wanted was a puppet. At least in death his father would be free. Carnelian could do nothing for him. His duty there was ended. He stretched his hand down to his father’s chest.
‘Forgive me,’ he said, and felt the water begin to spill from his eyes. ‘Duty,’ he growled and clenched his eyes to dam the tears. He still owed his people duty. That was something to cling to. He had promised Tain that he would be there waiting for him and there were the others making the long journey up from the sea. There would be no more Crails. He must make the Suth palaces in Osrakum safe for them. Besides, his father had told him to go there. He looked down again. It was one of the last commands he had given. Carnelian would go to Coomb Suth and alone. Whether his father was alive or dead, Aurum would not allow Carnelian to take him home. The thought of leaving him in the old Master’s hands was sickening. Even dead, Aurum would find some political use for him. With thoughts of Aurum came false hope. Were there limits to the sorceries of the Wise? What if by some miracle his father did survive? Then he would have to go to the Labyrinth to play his part in the election.
Carnelian crushed his ear against the wall and let its panels cut his mask into his skin. It was a distraction. He spotted the catch, lifted it and found that he could slide a panel back. He peered through the window out into the canyon twilight. Its wide empty floor was cracked in two by the Cloaca’s chasm. He narrowed his eyes when he noticed the red square. Marching Ichorians. He could smell blood in the colour of their cloaks. He slapped the panel back over the window and reached down to squeeze out what comfort there was left in his father’s hand. Metal edges bit into his fingers. He lifted the hand to look at them. The Pomegranate Ring on the middle finger. On the little finger, above the blood-ring, sat the Ruling Ring of House Suth. Carnelian chewed his lip staring at it, then worked it off with his free hand. He would not give Aurum the chance to defile his family ring as he had the ring of He-who-goes-before, even if this meant despoiling the dead.
The chariot stopped. He waited for it to move off again. The Ruling Ring was the warm heart of his fist.
‘Seraph?’ said a voice muffled by the chariot’s doors.
Carnelian adjusted his father’s mask, then found the handles on the doors and opened them. He glimpsed the ammonites’ silver masks as they bowed their heads and knelt. Then he saw behind them a tidal wave of bronze that made him flinch. He searched the bronze for an edge and found one, a bloody tower to one side. As he put his ranga shoe out onto the first step he saw the sister tower on the other side.
He hovered round the ammonites as they pulled his father out.
Aurum swept up. ‘Hurry, hurry.’
‘You make them clumsy, my—’ Carnelian stopped, looking past him, feeling vertigo as the world began to shift. Dull thunder rumbled the air. At first Carnelian thought it was an earthquake and braced himself against the bier, but then he realized it was not he but the wall of bronze that moved. A crack appeared in its green-blurred firmament. He narrowed his eyes anticipating its titanic collapse. Then he saw tiny figures walking into the crack. It was only then that he realized it was a gate.
He followed the bier and trailed his hand along the thickness of the gate’s edge as he walked through it. Peering behind it he saw its thick wheels taller than the chariot’s and the metalled ruts curving in the ground in which these ran. There were chains and pulleys and the engines that made the gate open and close. At no great distance rose another gate as massive as the first. The walls on either side were filled with doors, tunnel mouths, with galleries growing brighter as they climbed. Far above, the canyon walls held a river of sky.
Ichorians stood everywhere in the shadows. More ammonites crowded round his father’s bier. ‘Seraph Suth,’ they whispered, ‘returning for the election.’
‘Where are the Wise?’ said Aurum and his voice played the gates like mountainous gongs.
The ammonites lifted their hands in mute apology. ‘They could not come so far, Seraph. Purity. During divine election, the court needs them all.’
‘Paagh!’ cried Aurum, flinging up his arms, scattering the ammonites into kneeling clumps.
‘Shall we then proceed to the Halls of Returning?’ said Jaspar. ‘It might be pleasant to have these stinking bandages removed, neh? But perhaps my Lord Aurum would prefer to remain here terrorizing ammonites?’
Portcullises lifted to let them into one of the tunnels. Carnelian kept close to his father. A hissing made him turn to see ammonites ladling blue fire over the path upon which they had just walked. He watched the flames sprint and die across the floor. More fire was being poured in front of them, and when it had gone out Carnelian removed his ranga as he saw the others do and walked across the still warm stone. As he came into the hall he lifted his foot and saw its sole was black.
Arches gave into other halls whose floors were spangled with pools. Ammonites carried lanterns aloft on poles. Some swung feathers of thick smoke into the air from censers.
‘Come with us,’ they sighed. ‘Come with us.’
Carnelian protested as he felt his father’s bier slip away under his hand. He struggled to think. Another wreath of smoke swagged down from a censer. He did not understand what was happening. His head was swelling. They took his hands. They led him down into the water. Fingers fluttered at his ears and he felt the pressure in his head relaxing. He sighed with relief as the mask peeled away from his face. Smoke curled round him like acrobats in a dream. He touched his face in alarm at what harm its nakedness might do. Their stone-blind eyes reassured him. The soaked weight of his robes pulled away from him, leaving him light and bobbing in the water. He sighed as he felt their hands on him, unwinding. Strip by strip his body was released. Aaah, the sensuous arousing pleasure. Their hands were everywhere caressing him, pressing, exploring his cavities with their fingers.
At last, they drew him from the pool and dried him. He looked at their faces, confused. Tain? Was that Tain shaving his head? Sharp menthol swabbed cool tracks over him. Once it stung and he told Tain off. He tried to snare the sinuous smoke in his fingers but his hands were caught like butterflies. His skin was aglide with silk. When he looked down his body was ridged with brocade scars. They put him on low ranga, placed the sweetened mask over his face and pressed something into his hand. They coaxed him along passages out into the morning, slowly, so that his eyes would become accustomed to the glare.
He saw a vast ravine, smooth-floored, into one edge of which the Cloaca cut its chasm. The walls rose near vertical, scarlet, ridged with galleries up to impossible heights on either side. Their skirts were filigreed with brass machinery. He tried to focus his eyes. ‘Where . . . ?’
‘The Red Caves, Seraph.’
The stables and barracks of the Ichorian Legion. Carnelian guided his vision carefully to a black dike blocking the canyon whe
re its walls flared up mountainously, drawing away from each other to reveal a liquid blue vision of sky. His eyes were trying to focus on something solid when he was walked up into a chariot and shut inside its box.
He sat in the gloom feeling the quiver of the chariot, wondering what was happening to him. Poppy? This was different, another drug. Something hard nestled in his hand. He hinged his fingers open. His palm welled with blood as if it had been pierced with a nail. He brought the redness closer. A stone coin. Red carnelian, his name stone. It was too dim to see it clearly but he could feel the vague pips of glyphs around its motif of a halved pomegranate. He closed his fist and rubbed it over his other hand, whose shape seemed unfamiliar. A swollen knuckle. No, a ring. His father’s ring on his hand. The strangeness of it made him laugh, then remember, then search the floor to find his father gone. It was difficult to think. Where had he lost him? The clinking harness fell silent, the chair stopped quivering, then the doors opened.
‘Resurrection,’ a voice intoned. ‘From the Dead Land to the Everliving.’
The silver-faced creatures had extracted Carnelian from the chariot, prised the stone coin from his hand and brought him into a world of mirrors where he was a thousand times reflected.
‘My father . . .’ Nobody listened to him.
‘Leave the debris of the other world behind. Those grave goods. Those shrouds. Cross the water. Live again.’
A single voice sang with many tongues. Silk slid off him. Lilies.
Fields of lilies crushing out a wall of perfume. His skin burned hot then cold. Long licks of paint enstriped him. He gulped thick lilied air. He opened his eyes and saw that he had been transformed into a pillar of ice existing in many worlds.
The moon ray of his body hid behind a green cloud. Then he was pacing through the night, a void beneath his feet. He watched them dart out from under the robe like white fish. His mask was kissing his face all at once. Gold faces blew towards him like luminous kites.
‘The Black Gate,’ sighed Jaspar as if something were appearing to him in a vision.
Carnelian followed him to a little arch standing all alone. His fingers reached out to stroke the faces inhabiting it. Worn, indistinct, like half-forgotten memories. Then he was through it and each of his footfalls was shaking the air. He stopped walking, desperate to silence the thunder of his tread but the air still shook. A bell. He had been pacing in time to the tolling of a bell. Just then a vertical crack of sky swelled in front of him and swam him out into its coruscating furnace glare.
A STRANGER in PARADISE
How high then must we build the wall
Around the fields of Paradise?
(fragment - origin unknown)
THEY SMILED AND HE SMILED BACK, BLACK ANGELS RISING UP INTO the glorious sky on columned smoke. Carnelian put his foot on the honeycomb pavement and could feel its scorch even through his shoe. He stepped carefully from one cobble to the next, recalling that he must not touch the cracks. He played the game in time to the clanging of the bell. It brought him to one of the columns. He tried to embrace it but its girth was too wide for his arms. It was not smoke, but lichened stone. He frowned, then hooked his fingers into a horizontal joint. There was another above it, and another. At the edges, they all curved up and were rounded, like dirty bowls, piled ready to be washed. He looked further up the stack and smiled again when he saw the angel carved up there. Its face was vague, clay left in the rain, but it had his father’s smile.
His father. Where was his father? He whisked round and saw the bier in among the kneeling poppy-red Ichorians. Carnelian went through them towards his father. He took slower steps as the bier came into sight. There was a flash in the corner of his eye. Two creatures were approaching, fish-scaled, gleaming, crowned with summer rain. Each carried a standard. Carnelian stepped back, narrowing his eyes against the dazzle of their armour as they knelt beside the bier and bent to kiss his father’s hands.
Jaspar was there beside him. Carnelian had to rummage in his mind to find his voice. ‘Who . . .?’
‘The lictors of the Ichorian Legion, shadows of He-who-goes-before.’
Carnelian looked up at their standards. The rayed eye of the sun was surmounted on one by the lily and on the other by the pomegranate, both wrought with emberous stones. The guardsmen were rising around him. All had the fruit embossed on their cuirasses, halved to show its bellyful of seeds. All had the half-black faces of the Ichorians.
As the bier began to move, Carnelian walked beside it. He looked over the helmets down the widening valley and his eyes threatened to burst the limit of their sockets. His chest ceased rising so that he could not breathe. He feasted on the blue, richer than any sky, till he began to fear that his eyes might for ever lose their ability to see that colour. He forced his gaze to follow a strand across the water. This swelled into a triangle that attached itself like a handle to a vast green-mottled mirror. No bowl of jade held up to the sun had ever filtered such emerald. Jutting into this region was an island, a turquoise ridge that swept up into a narrow peak. Beyond lay more of the lake’s blue, the colour faded enough by distance and molten air to no longer hurt his eyes. Round the outer shore of this sea was a purple vapour of mountains that the wind might have streamed out in an arc from its mouth to wall this heaven in.
Carnelian remembered to breathe. He gulped the crystal air. It was a perfume of such richness that he had to close his eyes else be overwhelmed. One breath, another. He strained to hold its vibrant burn in his lungs and felt it swell him like a bud to flowering. He stumbled and felt a hand supporting him.
‘My Lord?’
Carnelian gasped his eyes open. A face like a golden apple. A Master’s mask. Jaspar.
‘You reel, my Lord.’
‘The . . . the air . . .’ Carnelian managed to say.
‘You mean the smoke,’ Jaspar said, laughing like a child, indicating with his head the way they had come.
Carnelian wrenched his head round. The pleated stone of the Black Gate concertinaed between the hands of the Sacred Wall.
‘The ammonites used lotus smoke to free our minds, to detach them from the bodies that had to be . . . shall we say, intrusively cleansed. Enjoy your flight; soon mind and body will be reunited.’
Preoccupied with breathing and walking, Carnelian hardly heard him. ‘The air,’ he sighed, ‘the perfumed air.’
Jaspar breathed deep through his mask. ‘The exhalation of thrice blessed Osrakum. This air . . . it is unfouled by the lungs of the creatures beyond our mountain wall.’
‘Like . . . like . . . like breathing the sky,’ said Carnelian. Two new bells were tolling together in the Black Gate. He looked back over his shoulder at the wall. ‘Those bells . . .?’
‘Announce the entry of four Lords of blood-rank two. Those chimes tell Osrakum that we are here.’
A deeper voice rang out. Carnelian felt it coming up from the ground, vibrating him, then fading enough to free his feeble heart to beat again.
‘The bell for He-who-goes-before,’ said Jaspar as Carnelian fought the intoxication of the air.
Kerbs contained the river of the road. Beyond, hexagons pushed up giant stairways, raised tables and dikes, or speared skyward their shafts tipped with angels. In places columns were formed wholly of angels standing one upon the other. Angels? He concentrated. Not angels, but the host of the Quyans turned to stone. He tried to make out their battle-lines but was distracted. Through the thicketing knuckled stone, he glimpsed the indentations in the crater wall burning like shards of jewel-stained glass.
The valley widened its sky-seeking walls and Carnelian noticed that every stone Quyan had two faces. The one gazing back up at the Black Gate was joyful, but the other looked grieving down towards the lake. Following that gaze he was snared again by the blue addiction of the water. His heart trembled when his eyes touched the Isle with its single peak for he knew that somewhere, melted into that vision, was the house of the Gods, the Labyrinth.
Their Ichor
ian escort formed a wall that Aurum breached and walked through. Further down the road, Carnelian could see a silver house. Tarnished, windowless, eyed with stars, nail-gouged with moons. Doors opened in its grey side and a procession came out pushing glittering crescents aloft on poles. Rising behind them was a spindle figure walking with the aid of a staff whom a child was leading by the hand. The pair came up the road fringed by standard-bearers. Aurum met them and gave a curt bow. Carnelian was made uneasy when he saw that the purple figure with the child was more than a head taller than the old Master.
Aurum came back, bringing with him the child, the purple figure and their procession. For a moment all were absorbed into the Ichorians so that Carnelian could see only the silver crescents waving in the air. The child emerged from the guardsmen first, leading the purple being whose face was a long oblong of silver. The right eye was just a crease. The left eye seemed to be cataracted with ice and spilled tears down the silver cheek. From the mask’s brow a crescent moon curved up like horns.
As this apparition poled its staff towards him Carnelian withstood a compulsion to hide. He looked sidelong at the child. It had the body of a boy but the wrinkled face, the eyes, the thin compressed lips of an old man. Carnelian watched this homunculus release the hand of the apparition, take the staff and, with both hands, plant it with a clack before them both. The apparition peeled off gloves to reveal hands so pale they seemed hollow alabaster. Each middle finger and knuckle had been removed so that neither hand could help making the sign of the horns. The hands articulated sinuously as if they had been boned like fish. The homunculus reached round and with a practised movement took first one and then the other, forming them into a loose collar of fingers around its throat. The fingers coiled, interlinking around its larynx, and then began to flex.
‘We are not used to being kept waiting,’ the homunculus said. Its voice was high, beautiful but unhuman.
The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon) Page 31