His anger only caused them to fall flat on their faces. ‘Gods’ blood!’ he spat, throwing his hands up in exasperation. ‘I know the Master’s been here. What did you tell him?’
When none of them spoke up, he jabbed one of them with his toe ‘Get up, man. Tell me.’
The guardsman looked up, his face twitching. ‘Craving your pardon, Master, but . . . we had to tell him . . . he is the Master.’
‘And . . . ?’
‘He demanded to know where you were, Master. We told him we didn’t rightly know . . . we had to tell how long you’d been away . . . that you’d gone away before.’ The man cowered.
‘And he was very angry?’ Carnelian asked.
The man looked up, tearful. ‘He’s going to crucify us all.’
Carnelian felt the blood draining from his face.
The man must have seen this because his eyes darted out of sight like a snail’s.
Carnelian squatted down. Touched their heads, saying gently, ‘Now look at me.’ He waited until he had their eyes. ‘I won’t allow even one of you to be put upon a cross.’ He nodded into each face. ‘Not one of you.’ He stood up. ‘Now get me some people. I need to be dressed, and quickly.’
They stood up, and one of them ran off.
‘Master?’
He looked at the man expectantly.
‘Master, the other Masters of our House . . . ?’
Carnelian frowned. ‘The other lineages?’
The man nodded. ‘They’ve sent word that they’re here and want to meet you, my Master.’
‘I’ve no time for them,’ said Carnelian as he moved towards his chamber. Once inside, he let the ammonite cloak slip off his shoulders and hung his head. Now his father.
‘The Master wishes to be formally attired?’
Carnelian whisked round to see a servant, head bowed, others kneeling behind him. He was sure that they were not part of the household he had left behind.
‘You’ve just come from the coomb?’
‘That’s so, my Master.’
‘Why?’
‘We were sent to bring the Master a court robe.’ The servant indicated the golden suit standing against a wall. Carnelian walked over to it. It was similar to the suit he had worn before but it had different heraldry in the panel running down its front. He touched the chameleons writhing on a field of jades, emeralds and other green stones. Under his fingers their skins were a mottle of pearls. Their black opal eyes blinked. They looked more alive than geckos on a wall. It occurred to him that Fey had talked about sending him such a suit with the first household. He wondered why it had been so long in coming.
‘If the Master’ll allow, I’ll co-ordinate his dressing?’
Carnelian turned to the new servant. ‘As fast as you can.’ He lifted his arms from his sides and they ran in to disrobe him. ‘What news, co-ordinator?’
‘The return of the Master and his son is longed for,’ said the man without the slightest movement of his chameleon tattoo.
‘Has the servant Tain arrived from the gates?’
‘An unchameleoned boy, Master?’
Carnelian grabbed the man’s shoulders. ‘You’ve seen him?’
The co-ordinator went waxy soft in his hands, melting away as Carnelian released him. ‘Y-yes, Master. He was there yesterday, being prepared to come here.’
Carnelian smiled, longing to see his brother’s face. He hardly noticed the cleaning, the putting on of the belt of hooks. He climbed onto the ranga and then they locked the court robe round him. They masked him. They built a crown upon his head. When they knotted a scarlet sash around his left wrist he remembered that all the Chosen were in mourning for the God Emperor. He allowed a few more adjustments then, feeling as large as a house, he strode from his chamber to face his father.
YKORIANA
Often I heard her speak
With a voice of angels
Words barbed and dripping poison
(extract from ‘The Voyage of the Suncutter’)
THE GRAND-COHORT COMMANDER WAS STANDING WITH OTHER Ichorians at the entrance to the Sun in Splendour. He looked at the heraldry on Carnelian’s court robe and let him pass. The hall was smouldering gold, its walls and pillars catching their light from somewhere round the dais. The pillars did not allow Carnelian to see the dais itself. He stopped, closed his eyes to find composure, then opened them and left the shelter of the columns. He moved into the centre of the hall and turned to face the dais. On it and beside it were two Masters; three more faced them like frozen flames. These three rose slowly, pivoting round, the skirts of their robes slightly rising. Each face seemed transfused by a beam of light. They could have been angels caught in the act of forming from fire.
Carnelian walked towards them, timing the placing of each ranga to the robe’s heavy swing. He could feel their eyes watching him and was aware of the shining ovals of their faces, but his eyes were focused on the enthroned being rising behind them, haloed by a corona of flickering flames. The halo’s hub was a Chosen face, his father’s, alarmingly gaunt. The eyes were as sunk under the brows as if they were the heads of nails hammered deep into the skull. A hand, drifting up, lifted a sleeve that was a slab of mosaiced gold.
Is that you?
The question brought Carnelian to a halt. He watched the hand fall. His father glanced at the other Lords. Carnelian saw it was Aurum beside him and that Imago Jaspar was one of the three, standing with two Masters Carnelian did not know. Each nodded to him and he responded vaguely, his eyes already returning to his father’s wary hope.
‘I am come, my Lord, at your summons,’ his own voice said and almost choked on the words when he saw the bright relief fill his father’s face.
‘Your father is glad to see you, my Lord son.’
Carnelian remembered to unmask, and when the metal face was off they exchanged tiny smiles.
Please wait for me there, his father’s hand signed and pointed to a place near Aurum. Carnelian paced to the spot, turned to face the dais and sank to his knees as he saw the other Masters doing.
‘Excuse the disturbance, my Lords. Shall we continue?’ his father said.
The Masters all bowed and began to speak with hands. Carnelian made a point of ignoring Aurum. Jaspar’s fixed, cold-eyed smile forced a twitch of recognition from Carnelian before he focused on his father’s face. The hollow cheeks and recessed eyes appalled him. His father had become an aged man. His hands, when they were not signing, tended to stray to the staves that were planted on either side of him for support. Carnelian watched his father’s bone fingers trace the carved lids of the staves’ sun-rayed eyes that stared through the Masters down the hall, left hand and sun-eye both smeared with the bloody light that filtered down through the emberous pomegranate finial. Carnelian noticed some ammonites squatting on the floor. Three more were in the shadows before the dais, Aurum and himself. He watched them but they sat hunched, doing nothing.
Once or twice his father glanced at him. Anticipation of the coming conflict was grinding in Carnelian’s stomach. He tried to distract himself by following the Masters’ talk but it was all of blood transactions, bride-prices and iron eyes. Carnelian gave up and let their talk flow over him while he lost himself in dreams of the Yden.
Dapples of gold flickering round him made it seem he was among breeze-ruffled trees. Carnelian lifted his head and saw the crusted masses of the Masters grow taller and then turn towards the distant doors, like sails into a wind. One of them remained. The Ruling Lord Aurum. He raised his hand. There is now no need for you to go and see her?
Carnelian looked at his father’s eyes that seemed unaware of Aurum’s signs.
If you go, I want to go with you.
Suth’s hand stirred into motion. If I go, I will go alone.
Aurum’s face became stiff with anger. He stabbed Carnelian with his eyes before glimmering away.
Carnelian felt the opening of the doors as a change of pressure in his ears. They let in a perfume wind
and the roar of the throng. Carnelian watched his father. The doors came ponderously together and, with a clunk, Carnelian was left with his father in the glowing golden gloom.
‘Leave us,’ said Suth.
Carnelian’s eyes were drawn downwards by a scurrying. The ammonites were creeping over the floor and slipping down into a hole over which a lid closed silently. Something like tumbling fire jerked Carnelian’s head up. His father’s head had fallen forward. He looked like a golden puppet. Alarmed, Carnelian opened the angles of his knees and lurched towards the dais. The sunburst crown presented its teeth to him so that Carnelian could not see his father’s face.
‘Father.’ The word came strangled from his throat.
The spiked halo rose, lifting the limestone of his father’s face after it, sighing, ‘Where have you been?’
That close, Carnelian could not avoid seeing the sallow skin, the thinned lips, the eyes deep in their pits all shot with red. Those eyes were on him. He sought their familiar stormy grey but found only pale drizzle. ‘Exploring,’ he said.
‘For . . . five . . . days?’
Carnelian could admit nothing without admitting it all.
‘You were alone . . . saw no-one?’
Carnelian blushed. ‘There was someone with me.’ He withstood the probing of his father’s eyes.
Surprise dawned in his father’s face. ‘So it is that way. The sybling Quenthas?’
‘A sybling but a divided one.’ He watched his father’s yellow forehead creasing. ‘He wears a blood-ring.’
‘Does he?’
Carnelian thought his father looked like a man walking on a rope.
‘His House?’
‘The Masks.’ Carnelian watched the red eyes close. Sepia welled in the eye pits and round the corners of the mouth. Looking at that yellow mask, Carnelian could hardly believe to whom it belonged. ‘You look tired, Father.’
The eyes opened, brightened. His father gave a chuckle and his lips wore something like a smile. ‘You could say that.’
‘Your wound?’
His father gave the merest shrug with his eyebrows. ‘This is no time for convalescence.’
‘Does your wound still bleed?’ Carnelian took a step forward.
His father’s face made the slightest movement side to side. ‘The Wise know ways to preserve life, to hold corruption at bay, even to extend a creature’s natural span of years.’
‘And strength?’
‘What I have comes from their potions.’ He looked into Carnelian’s face. ‘Be not concerned. Once this matter is resolved . . . I will abdicate to Aurum the power that he craves, then I will have all the time I need to rest.’
He went deathly sallow. ‘They who were the mirror to divinity are no more. We are left to live through these broken mirror days. The Commonwealth must be given a new heart lest she should perish.’
Carnelian remembered what the dead Emperor had once been to his father. The need to tell his father of the Yden was burning him but he kept silent.
‘The gates in the Ringwall are open. The barbarians will be coming in, riddling the Commonwealth with their cancer.’
‘And the election?’
‘In five days.’
‘Goes it well?’
‘Very well.’ His father smiled raggedly. ‘The new Imago, our friend Jaspar, has brought his faction behind Aurum’s. At every conclave I buy more votes with imperial blood and iron. The towers of the major blocks are all in place, we merely need to build the curtain walls between them. Barring some unforeseen intervention, Ykoriana and Molochite will be defeated.’
‘She is quite given to interventions, Father.’
The cores of his father’s eyes showed indomitably. Carnelian felt something of their usual power as they settled on him. ‘That is why you must promise me that until the election you will not leave the Sunhold save with me.’
Carnelian felt a yearning for Osidian. If he made this promise he would have no way of letting him know about it. He groaned, imagining that they would never again touch.
His father’s hand jumped to his shoulder like a grappling hook and drew him in. Carnelian stared into the yellow red-veined eyes. His father’s words began with a hiss in which Carnelian could smell the illness and the sickly odour of the drugs sustaining him. ‘The tighter she is caught in my trap . . . the more desperate will be her efforts . . . to . . . break . . . free.’
Carnelian rocked back as he was released.
‘Your oath, my Lord.’
Seeing his father locked into those weak, drug-ravaged remains, Carnelian spoke, ‘On my blood.’
His father closed his eyes, nodding, breathing heavily. Carnelian had not forgotten his duty to his people but waited until he saw his father had regained some strength.
‘My Lord has threatened my guardsmen with crucifixion.’
His father smiled at him. ‘Fear for you made me wrathful. Rest assured they will suffer no further punishment.’ His face lost colour. ‘You and I will go and have some words with your aunt, now Dowager Empress and Regent.’
‘Me?’
‘I need your strength. Besides, now that I have you back I find myself reluctant to let you out of my sight.’ He looked away down the length of the hall to its doors, growing older as he did so. ‘I do not relish wading through that sea outside, so I shall take a boat.’ He turned to look down at Carnelian. ‘I am afraid you will have to swim in its wake.’
Carnelian did not understand.
‘Put on your mask,’ his father said. Carnelian obeyed. His father masked himself with some difficulty and then motioned with his hand towards one of the staves. ‘Lift this thrice and each time bring it down hard.’
Carnelian shuffled closer and then, with both hands, lifted the staff with its sun-eye and its pomegranate and cracked it down. A ringing tone reverberated round the hall. Twice more he lifted the staff and twice more brought it down. His father’s lictors dewed out from the shadows.
Summon the forty-eight, his father’s hand signed.
The lictors went off into the dark and then came back with more Ichorians, in groups carrying poles like battering rams, their half-black bodies concealed only by the golden rings of their collars. Carnelian took some steps back as they collected round the sides of his father’s dais. A pole was lowered almost to the ground and then pushed into a hole in the dais’s edge. Carnelian watched the pole feed in and its head appear at the other side. Other poles were being pushed through the dais like yarn through a needle’s eye. When the poles were all in place, the Ichorians moved in between them. They bent as one like rowers to their oars, strained, and the dais and his father rose slowly into the air.
*
The dais was a raft drifting through the gloom towards the doors. The lictors walked ahead of it carrying the two staves of He-who-goes-before. Carnelian walked behind between files of Ichorians. On his right their shoulders and faces had the hues of barbarian skin. On his left these hues were clothed in swirling black tattoos. His father was a pillar of gold from whose apex rayed the sun disc that hid fully a third of his height. Carnelian watched the doors ahead opening. The elegant hubbub of the Great wafted through with their lily perfumes and the shimmer of their court robes. Around Carnelian, the Ichorians lifted shawms to their lips and began a ragged braying. Floating on this, the dais carrying his father slipped burning into the light, parting the Great before it. Carnelian angled his head so that his mask would shield his eyes from the glare as he too came into the nave. More Ichorians appeared pumping more volume into the pulsating fanfare of the shawms. The Great loomed like towers in a fortress wall hung with the mirror shields of their masks. Carnelian narrowed his eyes further against their dazzle. Incense puffed up in clouds into a region where lanterns larger than men hung ablaze. Higher than these flapped banners like sails that carried all the heraldry of the Houses of the Chosen. The weight of his crowns forced Carnelian’s eyes down to look along the avenue of the Great. Between flashes he caught
glimpses of his father in their faces like an idol being carried aloft. The music shrilled on. The Great spoke with flickering hands. Trying to read the signs made him dizzy. He locked his eyes to the ambered rubied edge of the dais and concentrated on the opening and closing of his knees.
The wall of the radiant Great fell suddenly away as they came among the Lesser Chosen. On his taller ranga, Carnelian overtopped even their Ruling Lords by a head. He could see a river of them running all the way down the nave between the dingy colonnades.
Carnelian reached the looming bronze wall of the Chamber of the Three Lands in a dream. His eyes took a while adjusting to the lack of summer gold. The Emperor’s heart no longer trembled the massive doors. The shawms frayed with echoes as they left the nave to follow the bronze wall round. When the Approach came into sight, Carnelian saw that syblings were crowding its lower steps. Something was coming down that looked like water seen at the bottom of a well. The dais broke through the sybling tide and washed up onto the first step. Carnelian walked round it watching his father for signs of life. Syblings took the staves from the lictors and held them upright before his father, whose gold mass flickered and flamed as he rose. His sleeves hinged up like doors, his hands caught hold of the staves and he seemed to be pulled by them onto the first step.
The Ichorians stopped Carnelian pushing through to his father’s side. Arms outstretched, his father seemed crucified between the staves. One hand uncurled to beckon Carnelian through the half-coloured men.
Now I will, the hand flickered. It recurled itself around the stave, and slid down to rest upon its sun-eye. Carnelian saw it move. He wanted it to speak again. It detached and began signing, Stay close. I will have to find the strength to climb these steps.
Looking up, Carnelian saw the vast black Lord was almost upon them. Syblings covered the steps around him like an extension of his raven jewelled court robe. Others carried a pair of court staves before him bearing the jade and the obsidian masks. His gold mask shone high above like the sun peering through a pillar of smoke. His crowns threatened an eclipse. A porcelain hand appeared.
The Chosen (The Stone Dance Of The Chameleon) Page 53