The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon)

by Ricardo Pinto

She bowed.

  ‘To Lord Spinel then,’ he said in Quya.

  ‘Does the Master have any further instructions?’

  ‘If you would please wait for an answer.’

  ‘As you command, Master.’ She bowed again and walked away.

  Carnelian went to one of the windows. At his feet, the mosaic of the crater spread out its vast circumference. He waited there for a long while drinking in the view. When his mind was all bleached out he went to explore the shadowy halls. Soon he was beyond the chambers that had been furnished for him, wandering among half-seen wonders. Gradually, the echoing emptiness of the halls began to oppress him. The sounds of water haunted the gloom with voices. Loneliness stole the colours from his mind like winter greying the land. He made his way back hoping to find Fey returned, but she was not there. He went to the window, seeking its vision of summer, but shadow swamped the crater, and the Pillar of Heaven had become the heart of the encroaching night.

  He woke and waited. He watched the morning creep down into the crater. Servants came with rare foods on plates of white jade but when he asked them they told him they had not seen Fey nor knew where she was. They bathed, painted and dressed him and he waited standing at the window watching the movement of shadows, the play of colour in the world below.

  It was afternoon when Fey returned. He walked towards her. ‘Where have you been?’

  She knelt and bowed her head.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Where is what, Master?’

  ‘The Seal?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘A letter then?’

  Fey showed him her empty hands.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘The Master Spinel bade me say that the Master will have his response soon.’

  ‘Soon . . . how soon?’

  Fey shook her head.

  ‘I will go to him.’

  Fey looked up with pain creasing her face. ‘Master, if I might presume . . .?’

  Carnelian asked for her words with his hand.

  ‘To go visiting would diminish you, Master.’

  ‘What should I do then?’

  ‘Begging your pardon, Master . . . you could wait.’

  Carnelian frowned. ‘I promised my grandmother.’

  ‘The Mistress has been confined for many years . . .’

  ‘And a few more days will make no difference?’

  Fey’s head dropped.

  ‘To wait?’ Carnelian muttered to himself.

  ‘The life of a Master is filled with pleasures.’

  Mirrors were aligned to bring the sky’s blue deep into the palace. As the chambers lit up like lamps, Carnelian found trees growing up in the walls and through their arches mysterious landscapes glowed and fabled creatures stood startled or sliced cloudscapes with their jewel-mosaic wings. Sluices opened, gushing water down channels, sparking the air with diamonds, frothing in feathering falls, trembling their sheet crystal down rilled slopes.

  For a while he forgot everything as he walked through this enchanted garden. Only when the daylight began to fail and the naves began to fill with shimmering lamps did melancholy settle its leaden cloak about his shoulders. Then Fey had them bring him books, some so small their oblongs could not cover the palm of his hand, others large enough for him to need help to lever their covers back. There were story books so brilliantly illuminated they cast their colours on his face. He opened others like windows and peered through them into miraculous lands.

  Even these wonders began to pale. The night seeped in around him and he went away to hide himself in sleep. His dreams were troubled and he woke before daybreak in a world peopled with guttering flames. A carving in the wall became Fey. He asked her for news but she told him there was none.

  ‘Nothing from court?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said and coaxed him off to a pool into which mirrors were pouring the colours of the dawn. The air seemed more rippled than the water as he slipped in and swam its length and depths like some great white fish. He floated spread-eagled on his back, watching light ribboning over the vaulting and snagging the faces in the walls. He brooded on the life that he had lost and on the pleasures of this new, Chosen existence. He had to squeeze the grief for his father down into the pit of his stomach. Images of Crail, of Tain striped with blood, came unbidden to his eyes. He felt crucified on a slick of their blood. Where were his other brothers, Ebeny, all his other people? And when they came, how could he rule them all? He was not ready to rule. He hated his father for doing this to him. He hated his father for bringing them here. He hated him for dying.

  Evening was carried in on an intertwining of nasal-voiced reed flutes. Their aching melody closed his eyes with a wasting melancholy. Morning opened them again and he eased the ball of iron in his stomach by floating it in the pool or standing in waterfalls till he was completely washed away. Sometimes he found himself at a window but the world outside was too soft a mirage. He rejected its slipping colours, preferring to hide himself in the coruscating caverns where he would stroke faces in the walls, dive down into deep books or linger over foods and wines or music that wafted like perfume.

  Night would always return like a mood and then he had them wreathe the air with incense smoke till the tears were running down his face. Often he would see Fey watching him with his father’s eyes and turn away to find sad rapture from a lute whose strings took their delicate vibrato from the player’s own pulse. Carnelian would sleep wherever he was and wake when he did. His only notion of time came from whether it was the mirrors or the lamps that were the brighter.

  Carnelian had languished on the marble floor till its chill soaking up through his bones had turned him to stone. He felt a tremor in the floor that was pressing against his back like ice. He opened his eyes and saw one of the lighting mirrors was filled with stars. The floor tremored again. He turned his head feeling like a spider sensing something on its web. Footfalls coming towards him stopped. The sound of hurried, terrified breathing. He located the creature. A woman, gaping at him, visibly shaking. He saw her bucket, her scrubbing brush. He smelled her body and her fear. He imagined how vast and luminously white he must seem to her, a Master stretched out as if dead upon the floor. His eyes were turning her to jelly and so he closed them and turned his head away to let her flee. He heard her scurry, a click, then silence.

  His ears searched for other sounds as he waited for his body to thaw. He rolled over to wedge his hands under his chest and then pushed himself up, groaning at the stiffness, bending limbs, rubbing muscles. He stood up, scanning the gloom. Away off in the distance was a glimmering jewelled world where a hall had been lit with lamps. Of the woman there was no sign.

  He loped off, hunting her, stooping as if he could smell her footprints, and came quickly to a wall. Its bas-reliefs grimaced as they caught some light. He could hear creaking close but muffled. When he pressed his ear against the wall, the sound grew clearer. He slid his hands over the reliefs until his fingers found a straight edge. He searched for a handle and was on the verge of giving up when his thumb slipped over a hole. Probing inside, he felt a lever and tried to work it. With a click, a small door opened and the creaking grew louder.

  He hunched, then fumbled his way into the darkness. Rough stone grazed his skin as he moved along a narrow passage. He ignored his dislike of confinement. Water was gulping up ahead. The air was stale with sweat and frying. Light welled bright enough for him to see. Curiosity drew him on. There was a smell of wet rock, light pulsing, and then he came into a cavern where one wall curving up carried wooden scoops from which water dribbled and spluttered over the floor. He stepped towards the huge rotating drum. The floor fell away before it, allowing him to see the cistern from which the drum was lifting water. He leant over and saw another drum further down, and another further still that closed off any further view. His eyes rode up with a scoop and he saw another drum turning in a higher cavern.

  He watched the drum shudder and squeal as it turned. H
e saw the narrow ledge running round its side. He edged along it, crouching under the grimy axle, and saw the animals walking in the drum’s treadmill hub. He peered and could hear above the din their wheezing breath. One looked up and Carnelian gaped. It was a man’s face, a face that bore the chameleon tattoo. The tattoo was scrunching into the pain-grimace of the man’s face. Carnelian could not understand why the man made no sign of noticing him until the guttering light showed the empty eye pits into which Carnelian could have poked his finger.

  *

  When Fey appeared before Carnelian his glare made her fall prostrate to the floor. He made her rise, oblivious of how she was withering in the face of his wrath.

  ‘I couldn’t help it, Master . . .’

  ‘Help it?’ He tried to clear his mind.

  The tears were running down her cheeks. ‘As the years passed and we’d no news of you, I crumbled . . . the Master was unrelenting . . .’

  ‘Spinel?’

  ‘Forgive me, Master. I’ve betrayed you.’ Fey collapsed and hid her head under her arms.

  Carnelian felt tears coming to his eyes. ‘We Masters are all terrible. The fault’s not yours.’

  Fey sobbed. Carnelian crouched, touched her gently on the arms. ‘Come on, it’s fine. I forgive you, and my father will too when he comes. He’s not cruel.’

  She looked up. ‘You don’t understand, Master, even here.’ She shook her hands at the chamber. ‘I’ve conspired with them to cheat you of your rights. Seduce him with luxuries, they said. In exile he’ll have had no experience of them and might succumb to their temptation.’ She sobbed. ‘I betrayed you to them, Master, I betrayed you.’

  He put his arms round her. ‘It doesn’t matter, I tell you. If as a Master I showed such weakness, how can I expect more strength from you?’ He rocked her until her sobbing slowed to groaning. He kissed her wet forehead and whispered, ‘You’re of my blood. Now please, get up.’

  Fey rose shakily, leaning on his arm, wiping her face, and flickered red-eyed looks at him.

  ‘Come on, let me see you smile.’

  She managed a crooked one and let go of him.

  ‘That’s better. I’d already intended to do something about this, and now . . .’ As he described the treadwheel she saw the haunted look in his eyes.

  ‘Once they were put there as a punishment, but for years now it happens to those the Master . . . Master Spinel can find no further use for.’

  Carnelian’s eyes were burning. ‘But why?’

  ‘At this time of year, Master, there’s not enough water in the Sacred Wall and so it must be lifted from below.’

  ‘Not enough . . .?’

  She pointed to the waterfall that formed one of the walls of the chamber. She watched him go deathly pale and fought the desire to hide her face.

  ‘Close the sluices,’ he said in a level, dangerous tone.

  ‘But they cool the air, Master.’

  ‘Damn the air, I said close them.’

  ‘As you command, Master.’

  ‘After you’ve done this you will please go to Spinel. Tell him that if he’s not here with the dawn, with the Seal in his hand, he’ll regret the day he ever laid eyes upon my face.’

  Fey stared.

  ‘Say it just like that. I’ve had enough of these Masters, of all Masters.’

  Fey opened her mouth to speak, closed it, then opened it to say, ‘As you command.’

  Amidst tyadra and others of his household, Carnelian sat on a throne watching the approach of the Masters of the second lineage. Each was a jewelled spire pulling behind him a train carried by many boys. Behind them, among their guardsmen, walked Fey. She and Carnelian exchanged a look of understanding.

  The Masters stopped in front of him, their faces impassive marble.

  ‘You are welcome, my Lords,’ Carnelian said and waited for their obeisance, but all they gave him was a nod.

  ‘Have you heard the news, my Lord?’ said Spinel.

  ‘News?’

  ‘Rebellion . . .’

  ‘What rebellion?’ Carnelian said, exasperated, wishing to come immediately to the matter of the Seal.

  ‘In a nearby coomb, a Ruling Lord has been most heinously done to death by’ – Spinel sketched disbelief in the air – ‘apparently, by one of his slaves. Such a singular event shakes one’s world to its very foundation.’

  ‘What concern is this of ours?’

  ‘It will affect the election and that is the concern of all the Great.’

  ‘The election?’

  ‘The Lord Imago was—’

  ‘Imago? You speak of the Ruling Lord of that House?’

  ‘Just so, my Lord.’

  ‘And you say his murderer was a slave.’

  Spinel threw his hands up. ‘It is entirely beyond comprehension.’

  ‘Will the Lord Jaspar now lead his father’s faction?’

  ‘He will if he has the courage to put on the mantle of his father’s power along with the Ruling Ring of his House.’ Spinel looked at Carnelian expectantly. ‘He was your companion on the road, was he not, my Lord?’

  ‘He was, but you were not summoned here, my Lord, so that we might discuss politics. You will surrender the Seal to me.’

  ‘My Lord, the Seal is your father’s.’

  ‘My Lord might have noticed that my father is not here. Until he returns, I am the head of the first lineage.’

  ‘Still, the customs of this House do not sanction what my Lord requests.’

  Carnelian was determined to break the stony resistance in the Master’s eyes. ‘To spare your grief I have kept something from you.’

  Spinel’s eyes narrowed.

  ‘When last I saw my father he was mortally wounded. For all I know he might now be dead.’

  ‘We suspect otherwise,’ said Opalid.

  Spinel gave his son a sharp look, then reached into his sleeve and pulled out a letter. ‘Then who is this from, my Lord?’ The Master beckoned a servant and gave him the letter to take to Carnelian.

  Carnelian hesitated, then took the parchment and brought its seal close. In the wax, a pomegranate showed its seeds. The letter began to tremble in his hands. It could only be the seal of He-who-goes-before. Carnelian looked at the letter, reluctant to open it.

  ‘My Lord?’ said Spinel.

  The look Carnelian gave Spinel made the Master flinch. ‘How came this into your hand?’

  Spinel’s hands were apologetic. ‘I rule this coomb . . .’

  Carnelian broke the wax, unfolded the parchment and read:

  My son, I have sent this letter sealed with the Pomegranate because my ring has gone, none knows whither. Leave the House Seal in my mother’s hand. Avoid disrupting the flow of power in the coomb. Have a household prepared and send it to me here. Include a letter from yourself. I am making a fair recovery and will come to you as soon as I am free to do so.

  Your father, in the Halls of Thunder.

  He should have felt joy instead of unease. He examined the glyphs. They were not in his father’s hand, though they were very like. There was a difference in the faces that proved to him the letter had been written by someone else. He could feel a corner of his mind steeping in dread. Was this one of Aurum’s schemes? He felt sick. What if his father was dead and Aurum had arranged this whole charade to conceal it?

  ‘Is our Ruling Lord well?’ asked Spinel.

  Carnelian looked at him, striving to keep the misery from his face, trying to gauge the man’s intentions. ‘Apparently, he is recovering.’

  Spinel’s face was blank but Opalid’s betrayed disappointment before it set like plaster.

  ‘I must go to join him in the Halls of Thunder.’ Carnelian heard the emotion breaking into his voice and saw that Spinel could hear it too.

  Opalid framed a questioning gesture. ‘It is forbidden, my Lord.’

  ‘By whom?’

  ‘The Law, my Lord.’

  Carnelian stared, not understanding.

  Opalid read h
is face and his lips took on a sneer. ‘Surely you know that at this time only Ruling Lords are permitted at court? It is—’

  ‘It is part of the Balance,’ Spinel broke in. ‘Intended to dissuade the House of the Masks from seeking to take the Ruling Lords hostage, or worse.’

  Carnelian fought a frown. He could see that Spinel was thinking furiously. The Master took a step forward, trying a smile. ‘However, if my Lord feels it essential that he join his father, there might be a way.’

  ‘What way, my Lord?’

  ‘The Ruling Lord Imago, now sadly deceased, was expected at court. It is almost certainly the Lord Jaspar’s intention to go there in his father’s place. The Law insists that he will have to accompany the body to the Plain of Thrones for its embalming. It is likely that he will go from there straight up to the Halls of Thunder. He might be worked upon . . . but of course I am neglecting to take into account his grief.’

  ‘Finish your thought, my Lord.’

  Spinel opened his hands. ‘I was just thinking that perhaps the new Imago might be worked upon to take you with him, my Lord . . . passing you off as one of his minor kin. It is unusual to take a companion, but then Imago Jaspar is not yet fully a Ruling Lord and in the electoral negotiations he might well desire to lean upon the experience of an older Lord.’

  ‘You propose that I deliberately break the Law?’

  Spinel shrugged. ‘It is a minor infringement, my Lord. The penalty would not be above a little wealth.’

  ‘And Jaspar?’

  ‘He could pass it off as an amusing jape. He might do it for a friend.’

  Carnelian thought about it. ‘We know each other well enough. It might not go amiss if I were to pay him my condolences personally.’

  ‘Such an act of compassion would be . . . eccentric, but then—’

  ‘Imago Jaspar is well used to my eccentricities,’ said Carnelian, reliving the road.

  ‘My Lord could join his father, and return here with him once the election is over. Meanwhile, in the time we still have before we ourselves shall go to court, we could continue to prepare the coomb for your return.’

  Carnelian nodded. ‘I will go to Coomb Imago.’

  Spinel smiled. ‘My Lord will have need to plan his journey.’ The Master bowed. ‘We shall return to our halls and immediately resume our labours.’ He began to turn.