The Chosen - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 01

by Ricardo Pinto

  Near him the Marula were fidgeting. Over their heads he saw a tiny figure melting towards them in the heat. Its little flame grew slowly larger until he could hear the rhythmic scratching of claws. At last the rider swept up on an aquar identical to the ones they rode, streaming behind him a banner of green and black. Aurum barked an order and the Marula lowered their lances. The rider seemed blind to the thorns awaiting him but at the last moment pulled up, so that the Marula fell back from the frantic flailing of his aquar's hands.

  'Way,' the rider cried, 'way!' He reached forward to stroke calmness into his aquar's neck.

  The Marula waved their lance blades in his face to force him to dismount.

  'Let him through,' said Aurum.

  The Marula put up their weapons as they opened up a lane through their midst. Without looking at them, the rider thrust his reins into one of their hands and paced towards Aurum. As he came nearer, Aurum grew taller and the little man lost his swagger, bowing as far as his padded leather suit would allow.

  'As you must know, Master, I'm a courier and none can stop me.'

  'What do you carry?'

  The man looked horrified. 'A ... communication for the Mountain, Master.' 'From Nothnaralan?'

  The courier shook his head slowly, staring all the time. The Master knows I mustn't speak.' Aurum put out his hand. 'Give it to me.' The courier took a step back from the hand as if it were a serpent's head. He looked round him as if seeing the Marula and the other Masters for the first time.

  'He speaks truth, my Lord,' said Vennel in Quya. 'His office is guaranteed inviolable by the Wise.'

  Ignoring Vennel, Aurum said to the courier, 'You will give me what you carry or else I will have it taken from your corpse.' He made a circling motion with his hands and Marula lance heads appeared at the man's throat. The man licked his lips as he looked into their pitiless yellow eyes. Trembling, he fumbled off one of his gloves and reached behind him to unfasten a packet. He looked at it, hesitated, then handed it to Aurum.

  The Master took the packet and turned away. 'Destroy him,' he said.

  'But, my Lord . . .' cried Vennel.

  Carnelian watched the stabbing, blinking at every thrust.

  'I will take all the responsibility,' he heard Aurum say. The Master flicked his hand and the courier's gory body was hurled over the parapet, then he mounted and began to accelerate off down the road.

  At the next tower they were met by consternation. As the changeover was made, Aurum secluded himself in the tower with its keeper. Carnelian looked in both directions for signals from the neighbouring towers. Aurum returned and, saving nothing, led them off down the road. As he rode, Carnelian looked for and found the usual signal sent ahead to announce their coming to the watch-towers further down the leftway. But that was not all. A long and complex communication followed, flashed from the tower they had just left. He wondered what message was being sent soundlessly through the air to the Wise in Osrakum.

  Thrice more they stopped and thrice more set off again, coursing down the white road that split the world in half. On and on they flew until the sky darkened to night and they slowed, almost blind, lured by a star that seemed to have fallen to the ground.

  The star was a beacon that a watch-tower held aloft. A belt of flames round its waist exaggerated its black mass and cast a lurid glow up into the undersides of its arms. Figures huddled across the bridge, dwarfed by the torso of the tower.

  The Masters slowed and clattered over the bridge. Carnelian gazed out over the light-apron of an encampment that spread round the tower. Beyond its glittering edge there was only night.

  As they dismounted the keeper came towards them.

  'Masters, we are unworthy,' he said, as he and the auxiliaries behind him knelt.

  Aurum swelled vast before him. 'Everything is ready?'

  'All your instructions have been precisely obeyed, my Master. I oversaw the cleansing myself.'

  Aurum swept past him with the others. Carnelian took one look up at the three huge ribs above him, then followed the others behind the monolith into the tower.

  As Carnelian let the quartz beads slide along the abacus strings they made an annoying clink. He angled the frame the other way and grimaced at the sound. He was thinking about his father. His feelings were in turmoil. Clink. Clink. He put the abacus down with a crack on the table and lifted the lamp to look round the cell. It reminded him of the cabin in the baran though it was not so small. He stretched himself out on the sleeping platform. It ran out at his knees. The ceiling was formed by a long barrel of wood that ran diagonally across the cell. He guessed that it was the root of one of the tower's wooden arms. He kept on seeing his bloodied father. Then he had felt such loss and had been unable to show it. Now the love he bore his father had cooled again and Crail's blood still trickled between them.

  A knock on the door made him sit up and reach for his mask. He held it before his face. 'Come.'

  The door opened and something like the ghost of his brother Tain slipped in. Carnelian dropped the mask and they looked at each other. Carnelian forced a smile. He could not bear to see him look so limp. He reached out and pulled him into a hug. He winced when he found Tain was like something made of wood.

  He let him go and blustered, 'I should've expected it. Now that I'm free of the other Master, I can have you back.' The reek of incense coming off Tain was stronger than that which still clung to the cell from its fumigation. They cleaned you?'

  'I had to be purified before approaching a Master,' said Tain with no change of expression.

  Carnelian nodded, searching for words.

  'Is the Master OK?' Tain said at last.

  'He says so.'

  More silence.

  'He has no-one to tend to him,' said Tain. Carnelian remembered the boy that Aurum had handed over to be killed. 'Would you mind ... ?' 'No,' said Tain, and began to open the door. 'Please come back ... after you've seen him . . .' Tain nodded without turning, then left.

  While he waited, Carnelian busied himself by rummaging through the cell. He found a small cupboard recessed into the wall that gave off a waft of ink as he opened it. The shelves inside were neatly stacked. Some folding parchments in a rack were crammed with geometrical figures, calculations, tables solid with symbols. A tube holding writing styluses stood beside jars of ink. Most curious of all were strange instruments, organisms of brass and bone, with hinged arms and shell edges filigreed with numbers. All these things confirmed his belief that he had been given the cell of one of the watch-tower ammonites.

  He knelt on the bed to peer through a slit in the wall. His eyes filled with the glimmers of the encampment. He was in the tower's upper storey. There were two more below him, and then the entrance hall with its cistern. He pushed his face into the slit to breathe in the cooking smells, the warm stink of beasts that overlaid the cloying odour of the land.

  The door opened behind him and he turned to see Tain looking ashen.

  'Father?' Carnelian gasped.

  'He's fine, the wound's not too deep, but the bandages that have soaked up the blood are rotting.' Tain scrunched up his nose.

  'I'll go to him,' said Carnelian, crossing the cell.

  Tain took his arm. 'You'd better let him sleep, Carnie.'

  Carnelian reached up to trap his brother's hand against his arm so that he could not pull it away. He examined the narrow face. His little brother had the look of an old man. Their eyes meshed. Carnelian searched Tain's, thinking about Jaspar's price. He wanted to say something but could not find a single word.

  Tain gently pulled his hand away and walked over to the bed and started stroking out the creases. His hands looked painfully thin. Carnelian had to have some air and so he put on his mask and left the cell.

  Three sides of the hall had wooden walls into which were set the doors that led into the other cells. The fourth side was formed by the tower's outer wall. Against its stone was the ladder they had pulled up after them when they had left the Marula
in the dormitory storey below. On either side dangled the counterweights that kept it in place. Perhaps as an attempt at humour, these had been shaped like men around whose necks the cables were attached. Beside the ladder were the cables that went down to a longer ladder they had climbed from the entrance hall, past the grooms' dormitory and into that of the auxiliaries below. Its counterweights were strung up with their heads touching the ceiling. The keel-beam ran over his head and buried itself in the opposite wall. The six ribs coming through the plaster embedded themselves three to each side, in the beam. The whole construction looked like the underside of a grasshopper.

  The floor boxed in by the wooden walls was formed into a cross by the four hatches cut into its corners. Carnelian went to the centre of this cross and peered at the doors that lay at the ends of the arms. Each had an eye daubed on it but only one door, apart from his, had the chameleon. He crept to that, listened but could hear nothing. The desire to see his father was tempered by a fear of disturbing his rest. Their meeting would be painful for both of them. An angry voice rang out. Though muffled, it was still clearly Jaspar's. Carnelian heard a slap and flinched. Maybe it was the attack that had made Jaspar lose so much composure as to actually strike a slave with his own hand.

  Carnelian retreated. In the light flickering up through the hatches he spotted a ladder going up into the ceiling. He swung onto it and began to climb. When his head butted against a trapdoor, he fumbled around until he found the catch that opened it. He clambered through it onto the tower roof.

  The six ribs rose around him like the boles of trees. The air was thick with naphtha fumes. A flicker led his eyes up one of the ribs to where it held aloft a beacon. Cut black from the starry sky was a platform suspended between all six ribs. He made towards the beacon rib, cursing as he stumbled over pipes, around machinery. Bronze staples formed a ladder up the rib towards the beacon flare. He stopped dead, hearing a scratch of voices. They were coming from where the keel-beam projected out into space pointing north towards the pinhead of the next tower's beacon. A man-shape unfolded up into view. Behind, another was spread-eagled in the hoop of the dead-man's chair fixed to the keel-beam's end.

  Carnelian decided to ignore the men and began climbing the staples. The rib carried him out over the leftway. He passed a board twice his height bolted to the rib that he recognized as one of the plaques that advertised the watch-tower's number to the road below.

  He reached the top and found that the rib's end formed a platform. A pipe swelled open in a dragon mouth from whose jaws spluttered a smoky flame. From this eyrie, Carnelian could gaze out across the night-black land. Below, the ribbon of the leftway faded off north and south. He could see the flares of the nearest towers in both directions.

  A sound made him look down. Something large and black was coming up the rib towards him. It looked up, allowing the flare light to well in the hollows of its Master's mask.

  'You have come to escape the odours below, my Lord?' It was Vennel.

  Carnelian backed against the flare. 'In search of solitude.'

  Vennel came up to join him, unfolding to his full height. 'Prolonged proximity to the Great can be wearying. It is said, and truly, that the Chosen require the solitude of their coombs.'

  Carnelian felt that the Master's bulk would push him off into space.

  'Behold the brutish masses.'

  Carnelian looked at the swathe of campfires twinkling at their feet. The encampment's murmur blew on the warm night wind with scents of smoke. There was also a persistent nagging like the creak of axles on the road.

  Vennel coughed. This will be quite a homecoming for you, my Lord.'

  Carnelian stared at him. 'What do you mean?'

  Vennel turned to face him. His ivory hands began to rub each other. 'Only that my Lord must be looking with keen anticipation to returning to his coomb. That is, after being so long away.'

  This was the second time that day that Vennel had tried to be pleasant. 'Yes,' said Carnelian. It was the easiest answer to give.

  Vennel's hands made a dry sound as they slid round each other. Carnelian stared out into the night. His finger traced the cold curves of the flare. He noticed the creaking again. 'What makes that sound?'

  'My Lord?'

  The creaking.'

  The creaking? Aaah, you do not know?' 'I would not ask if I did.'

  'Of course, my Lord. It is made by the wheels that draw up water to irrigate the Guarded Land.'

  Carnelian squinted into the darkness and thought perhaps he could just see them turning.

  'Exile from Osrakum is the hardest burden to bear.'

  'What exactly do these towers watch for?' Carnelian asked quickly.

  'Watch ... ?'

  'Barbarian incursions?'

  Vennel opened a hand. 'Sometimes, my Lord, but mostly they are used to anticipate rebellion.' The sartlar?'

  'Just so, my Lord. They are like locusts, singly innocuous, but when they swarm causing great damage. These leftways are a web spanning the land. If the local tower garrisons are unable themselves to quell a disturbance they can summon a nearby legion.'

  'But there must be regions far from the roads.'

  That is true, my Lord. The Guarded Land is a vast sea across which few even of the barbarians venture. Away from the roads, unseen, the cancer of rebellion can spread unchecked for months. It is only the walls of the leftways that make sure the infection is contained within a province. Once detected, huimur fire will soon destroy it.'

  'It looks so peaceful.'

  'Often, so does the sea.'

  The roads are like causeways...' said Carnelian, thinking aloud. 'My Lord?'

  Carnelian waved his hand, Nothing.

  'Outside Osrakum there is only wilderness.'

  Carnelian turned to Vennel, disliking the lurid reflections in his mask. 'As you said before, my Lord, I am weary. I need solitude. If you would please move aside... ?'

  The Master did not move. 'It is hard to imagine what reasons the Lord your father might have to stay so long out here.'

  Carnelian tried to gauge whether he might manage to push past the Master.

  'Of course his blood oath bound him.'

  'If you know about the oath, my Lord, then you have all the reason you require. My father is an honourable man.'

  'Most certainly, my Lord, most certainly, though such oaths when sworn before the Wise are enforced more by the Law than by honour. Even honour cannot explain why your father would insist on keeping an oath from which he had been released so long ago.'

  ‘So ... so long ago?' said Carnelian. He felt as if he was trying to swallow a stone. 'How long ago?'

  'Oh, many years. Oh, I see ... this is news to you?'

  The stone was stuck in his gullet.

  Vennel grabbed him by the shoulders. 'What ails my Lord?'

  Carnelian loathed the Master's touch, but the more he squirmed, the tighter Vennel held on to him. 'It is nothing. I need to sleep. Please, let me go.'

  'But—'

  'I bid you good night, my Lord,' Carnelian said through his teeth, jerking free, almost falling from the platform before reaching the ladder. Vennel was speaking after him but Carnelian heard nothing, saw nothing. His hands and feet moved by themselves as he descended the rib. He could still feel the Master's fingers gripping his flesh. Vennel had frightened him, but far worse was the knowledge that his father had lied to him.

  PLAGUE SIGN

  Round and round the mirror

  A teacher, ruler, giver

  We kiss you, we kiss you

  You all fall down

  (nursery rhyme)

  Carnelian woke in another ammonite cell wearing a frown and for a moment did not know where he was. There was a face in the wall. He reached up to touch its stone-smooth swelling cheek. Really, it was only a bit of a face, clipped off where one block joined another. He sat up and found there were other fragments everywhere, chipped, worn, at angles. Each leaf, eye, hand on its own block in the jigsaw of the
wall.

  He fell back again and stared at the snake belly of wood that crossed the ceiling. A day had passed since Vennel had told him of his father's lie. A long hard day during which they had flown along the leftway deeper into the south. He had watched his father making the changeovers with increasing stiffness until his fear for him had become a constant ache but still there was the lie; and the lie had reopened the wound of Crail's death

  and gushed his blood between them. Though he cursed himself for weakness, Carnelian could see no way to cross over.

  The previous night, Carnelian had sent Tain to tend his father. When his brother had returned ashen-faced, Carnelian had no need to ask questions. He had turned his face to the wall and struggled for sleep.

  Now he could see through a slit the sky paling blue. The air was still cool and carried the sounds of waking up from the encampment. He would soon have to confront another day.

  He heard the door opening and pretended to be asleep. Through slitted eyes he watched Tain creep in and wondered where he had been. Tain looked over at him with sunken eyes then, without looking away, his foot stirred the blankets on the floor. Where had he spent the night? A picture came unbidden to his mind. Jaspar talking to Tain the day before as they were making a changeover. Carnelian had thought the slump in his brother's shoulders a result of one of the Master's threats. Cold flushed up from Carnelian's stomach. There was another explanation.

  'Where have you been?' he said. The cold had reached his throat to chill his words.

  For answer his brother hung his head and Carnelian knew. Wrath made him dress with icy speed. He left the cell to go hunting for the Lord Jaspar.

  He found him on the watch-tower roof standing near one of the corner ribs gazing down into the encampment. Carnelian marched up to him and had opened his mouth to speak when he saw, past a winch leaning out into space, a roiling crowd below. People were streaming off the road back into the stopping place, their flight only stemmed by those already there. An incessant angry buzz mixed with the lowing of beasts. Wagons at the encampment's far edge were flattening tracks off into the hri fields. Beyond, the flat umber plain was already crawling with sartlar amidst the lazy water-wheels. 'What is happening?' he said.