Jaspar said nothing, but walking round the rib he gazed along the keel-beam, beyond the lookout in his dead-man's chair, to the south. He lifted his hand to point.
Carnelian followed the finger down the narrowing road to the tiny prong of the next watch-tower. Behind this he noticed a scribble over the dawn. He strained his eyes. 'Smoke?'
Jaspar turned to him a face the colour of the sun. 'Plague sign.'
Carnelian stood for a few moments digesting the words. Then his sight cleared and he saw Jaspar's mask and the anger seized his throat so that he could hardly speak.
'My ... my Lord ...'
Light slid off Jaspar's mask as it angled to one side. 'You forced my brother to come to you.' 'The creature came of its own free will.' 'You promised him he could keep his eyes.' 'Perhaps.'
'Will you honour your promise?'
'One does not consider oneself bound by anything one says to a slave.'
Carnelian fought down a desire to do violence. 'You will have your price for his eyes, I shall betray my father, but you will promise me on your blood never to touch him again.'
Jaspar's beautiful hand rose and signed elegantly, On my blood.
The Masters gathered on the watch-tower roof within the valley of its wooden ribs.
'Surely now we must go back,' said Vennel.
'We are protected,' said Aurum.
Suth had propped himself up against one of the ribs.
'Not so our servants nor the Marula,' said Carnelian, giving him an anxious glance, sickened by planning his betrayal.
'What touching concern for your inferiors, my Lord,' said Jaspar.
'In this matter each Lord must make his own choice,' said Aurum. 'I for one will go on.' He turned to Suth. 'And you, my Lord?'
For a while it seemed that Suth had not heard the question. Then he nodded. '. .. with you,' he said with effort.
Carnelian withered witnessing his father's worsening condition.
Then it is decided,' said Jaspar. 'We shall all go on. Unless the Ruling Lord Vennel wishes to set up palace here, by himself?'
Vennel scanned the circle of gold faces. 'No doubt nothing I can say would make my counsels prevail?'
'No doubt,' said Jaspar.
The world distorted through his tears. With the others, Carnelian had applied fresh unguent to his mask's filter. Aurum was having to threaten the Marula who eyed the distant signal with alarm. They knew how dangerous a crack it was in the sky. As they mounted, Carnelian noticed for the first time their weakness. They had a look of plants in need of water.
At the next watch-tower they all stopped in eerie silence. The air weighed down with increasing heat.
Carnelian saw his father wilt against the wall. He wanted to go to him but could not, and rationalized that it was better not to draw attention to his father's distress. When Aurum moved to support him, Carnelian felt as if he had already betrayed him. He walked his aquar towards the parapet, hunched in self-disgust. He could see the bone-white road. Travellers huddled at the margins of the stopping place or were scattered in pockets through the hri fields. Chariots and wagons were ranged like barricades. The only sound was the creaking of the water-wheels buckling in the heat shimmer as they turned.
Then they were off again. The black line in the sky split in two. Clearly, both were rising from a watch-tower Carnelian could not see. They slowed. Suth fell back so that his aquar came close to Carnelian's. He was sagging in his chair, his head resting on his chest. 'Wind your robe tight... the Black Lord's Dance.'
'Father...' Carnelian began but his father urged his aquar on and it loped forward to join Aurum up ahead.
The smoke swelled into a pair of wavering ribbons. Motes danced in the air above like swarming flies. The aquar were jogging. The Marula were cringing in their chairs. Guiding his aquar near the parapet Carnelian could see the road was no longer white, but flecked with corpses. As they continued, these dark signs of death grew denser, in places spilling off the road far out into the fields. He saw a huimur wandering, dragging a broken chariot, ploughing furrows through the dead.
Carnelian could already see the watch-tower with its horns of smoke.
'Windspeed,' cried Aurum.
They all accelerated. Remembering his father's warning, Carnelian wound himself into his cloak. This melted out some of his love for his father who, though suffering, could still care for his son.
From its upheld arms the watch-tower was pumping smoke into the sky in a roiling boil like pitch in a cauldron. They crashed over the wooden bridge. The watch-tower rushed by, its door monolith daubed with tar. The parapet opposite was set with half-charred animals skewered on poles. As these were being left behind, Carnelian realized with horror they were sartlar. His nose filter could not mask the fetor from the road. It was as if an open sewer ran below. Above, scavengers were screaming, floating on the air like ash. Fingers of plague were feeling for them across the plain. Carnelian struck his aquar to make it run faster. Other smoke columns rose off to the left wafting a sickening cooking of flesh. Along the road corpse mounds were smouldering. Hunched sartlar were building more. Mounted overseers rode through them, with whips or carrying fire. One looked up as they hurtled past. He had no face but only funereal windings of brown stained cloth.
All day they sped into the furnace south. Each changeover was made hurriedly. Slowly, the road below began to fill again with people, although only with those who were going towards Osrakum. Carnelian sank back into the chair, closed his eyes, rolled with the smooth pistoning of his aquar. The net of roads and sartlar kraals went slowly by, lulling him into a pounding stupor.
Carnelian became aware of the sun's gory eye bloodying all the clouds. Gilded land slipped past unfocused. Mounds resolved on either side of the road, defined by strokes of shadow. He began to see patterns: immense sweeping rings of red earth, straight edges, terraces. Here and there masonry looked like bone poking out of inflamed flesh. Houses, streets, a vast and ruined city. It was in a watch-tower nearby that Aurum decided they would spend the night.
Carnelian stared at his father lying on the bed. They had all crammed into his cell because he was too weak to rise.
The Marula are failing,' said Jaspar.
The poison is killing them,' said Aurum.
Vennel was rubbing his hands together. 'How can we be certain it is not the plague?'
'If it is, the boys will also be tainted,' said Jaspar.
'It might be prudent to have the boys and Marula all destroyed,' said Vennel.
Carnelian jerked round in horror.
Jaspar winked at him. 'Aesthetic perhaps, Lord Vennel, but certainly not prudent. You find me reluctant to destroy the only servants and guards that we possess. Besides, there is the practicality of whom one would use to do the destroying.'
'It will suffice that we keep them away from us,' grated Suth from the bed.
'Even our servants?' asked Carnelian, alarmed that there would be no-one to tend to his father.
'Especially our body slaves,' Aurum replied. They threaten our ritual protection with every touch.'
Vennel looked like a column of iron. 'Has it finally come to this? Are we now, my Lords, to be stripped of these last shreds of comfort and of state?'
He looked round but none there gave him answer.
Tain and Jaspar's boy seemed to have hardly the strength to hold their little packs. In among the Marula they could have been infants with uncaring parents. Aurum waved them all away with a gesture of dismissal. The Marula looked uncertain, sickly. Aurura made the gesture again with a harsher hand. The Marula began to shuffle off, back the way they had come, over the bridge. Carnelian did not see the malicious glance one of them gave him. He was watching Tain walking off, head drooping as if his thin neck had snapped under its weight. Carnelian hated himself. What use was his impotent wrath?
They ate on the platform held aloft by the watch-tower's six ribs. It was cooler and the air was free of the staleness of the cells. The Masters had
dismissed the lookouts from their deadmen's chairs and even the ammonites who tended the signal flare. With their own hands the Masters had laid out the circle of incense bowls. Once they were lit they could for the first time that day remove their masks. There were sighs of relief all round. Fingers rubbed at mask-grooved skin. Suth's face was sallow; his eyepits looked kohled. He had used what little strength he had climbing the ladders. He breathed in, making a hacking sound. 'Aaah, the beauty and comfort of the night,' he sighed.
Vennel still wore his mask. 'Are we certain that it is safe up here?'
Aurum looked north. The plague rages far away from here, my Lord. The creatures who might carry it are down on the road and forbidden to come near us on pain of death. There is a reasonable margin of safety.' As he looked at Suth, worry creased his face.
Vennel unmasked.
Carnelian was nibbling crumbs from his hri cake. He was sick of purified food. The Masters were just so much animated marble. Only his father's sweat-glazed face betrayed the possibility of Chosen mortality. His mouth twitched as if a needle were darning his flesh. He was seated a little away from the others, leaning against one of the turning-handles of the strange mechanism that stood in the middle of the platform. Carnelian had examined its square mirror of louvred silver strips attached to pivots at each end; the long handles to turn and dull the strips; the toothed arcs that allowed the whole mirror to tilt; the turning board that allowed the machine to swivel round. A heliograph, Aurum had called it, the means by which the ammonites turned the rays of the sun and sent them glancing to the neighbouring towers carrying messages.
Carnelian looked at his father bleakly. Perfume could not entirely smother the rot of his bloodied bandages. The continuing discomfort had been forced on him by Aurum's invoking the support of ammonites against his father's plea to be washed. The old Master had insisted that, however unpleasant, the bandages were necessary to give Suth protection against the plague. His father had been too weak to fight him.
Thoughts of the treachery he was planning made Carnelian turn away, but also fear, and embarrassment that he should witness his father thus. Out past the rising bars of myrrh smoke, past the empty hoop of the dead-man's chair, out beyond the glimmers of the stopping place, the night was patterned with lozenges, patchy ovals, a suggestion of lines.
'What are all those tumbled walls?' Carnelian said at last, just to say something.
'Ruins,' said Aurum.
'One of the Quyan cities,' said Jaspar.
There are many such ... many ... scattered across the land,' his father said in a throaty voice.
'All ruined?' said Carnelian, keen to encourage any life in his father.
'All. The last book of the Ilkaya tells of their fall.'
"The Breaking of the Perfect Mirror,’ said Carnelian, naming the book.
Teh! Children's stories with which the Wise seek to cow the Great,' said Aurum.
'Stories? Perhaps . . . though even a pearl. . . needs a grain around which to grow,' said Suth.
'By the blood! My Lords, you speak lightly of holy scripture,' scolded Vennel.
'... do not deny spirituality ... but... even Wise hold its truths metaphorical,' said Suth.
There is nothing metaphorical about those ruins there,' said Jaspar, 'and they have a look of hoary age.'
'... city was there ruined . . . long before this road built,' said Suth.
Carnelian turned to him, remembering the faces in the wall of his cell. Those ruins were plundered in the making of this road.'
His father nodded.
'Such antiquity commands awe if not reverence,' said Vennel.
'I see no reason why the living should revere the dead,' said Aurum.
'Is it not reason enough that the dead have built the world into which we were born?'
'Did the Gods have no part in that, my Lord?' asked Carnelian.
'I meant... of course, initial creation ... but the latter part ... also of course under divine ...' As Vennel closed his mouth, Carnelian resisted the temptation to smile.
'Certainly, gratitude is due the Quyans for bequeathing us their treasures. One possesses many perfectly exquisite pieces from the period of the Perfect Mirror,' said Jaspar.
‘So do all but the meanest Houses,' snapped Vennel. 'And, my Lord, you would know all about the meanest Houses,' returned Jaspar. 'I dislike your imp—'
'What does my Lord think is the grain lying at the core of the scriptures?' said Carnelian quickly to his father. The heat of the arguments was wilting Suth. Carnelian sought for him the healing there is in telling stories.
'Conjectural, but...' Suth grimaced and held his side.
Carnelian became alarmed that he had coaxed his father into wasting his dwindling strength.
Suth closed his eyes and then opened them, smiling crookedly, his eyes as brilliant as jewels. '... previous book describes long period during which Quyans prospered.' He breathed in heavily. They achieved harmonious balance ...'
Carnelian had heard his father speak thus before. 'Between the Two Essences?'
The bright eyes regarded him for a while, making him uneasy, until his father nodded.
'I thought that esoteric doctrine defunct,' said Jaspar.
'Its precepts ... foundation of all the creeds,' said Suth.'... merely a matter of emphasis.'
'An emphasis that once caused schisms among the Great,' said Vennel coldly.
'You prefer the literal interpretation in which their lords fell into evil ways and so led their people into the worship of false gods?' said Aurum.
'It is what is written.'
'If one stands on the wording of the texts then one should apprehend it exactly as written,' said Jaspar. 'It is written "false avatars".'
Vennel stared. 'You are a fundamentalist?'
'I believe that the Lord Suth's Two Essences form the matrix of creation and that each has a number of centres of divine sentience that form distinct avataric manifestations.'
'Avataric manifestations .. . ?' said Carnelian.
'Jaspar believes ... not single united pair of twins ... but many. .. like reflections in facing mirrors.' His father stopped, showing gritted teeth between his parted lips.
Carnelian flinched. 'If this is too painful... ?'
'Perhaps you should heed your son, my Lord,' said Aurum.
His father waved his hand in negation. He looked at Jaspar. 'How does my Lord interpret ... the choosing of the Chosen?'
'Divine favour. As it says in scripture, the Twins came to Osrakum in dreams to certain of its lords, to show the shape Their wrath would wear. Osrakum was commanded to close her gates lest Their wrath find its way into her hidden land.'
'Implausibly, I find myself agreeing with you, Jaspar,' said Vennel.
'... their dreams came from within,' said Suth.
'You deny the agency of the Twins?' said Vennel.
'I say virtue ... virtue is that agency.'
'You hold then, my Lord, that the Chosen survived through higher virtue?'
'Harmony with Essences, or virtue ... yes.'
Jaspar smiled. 'I had always understood that we gained our empire through conquest. ..'
'Perhaps,' said Suth, 'but we hold it by maintaining... various harmonious balances ... Reeds bend with wind yet can be woven to make shields.'
'Disharmony lost the Quyans their empire?'
'Each city put ripples . .. into Perfect Mirror of their commonwealth.' Suth shook his head. Till it could reflect no divinity ... only fragments of themselves.'
'Nonsense,' said Aurum. They weakened themselves with internecine strife and were then annihilated by the plague they had themselves stirred up among their sartlar.'
Jaspar's mouth twisted with distaste. 'Even now, the plague appears among those creatures as spontaneously as maggots do in meat.'
'Certainly, Lord Aurum,' Vennel said, 'but from whence did the plague come if not from the Black God?'
Jaspar shook his head. 'It is the breath of the Lord of
Plagues, an avatar of Him whom the Wise unify with all the others into the Black God: a hotchpotch deity, convenient only because He is a concept small enough to squeeze into the minds of the barbarians.'
'But the plague did come to Osrakum?' said Carnelian.
'It was burning like a fire across the land,' said Jaspar. The fire-breaks of our quarantines were not yet in place. Is it any surprise that the plague entered? When the desperate came from the dying cities, we let them in.'
The affliction would soon have spread to the whole of Osrakum had not the Obedient Ones, who later became the Great, cast out the polluted refugees that had been let in,' said Vennel.
That was foolishness,' said Aurum. 'Our forefathers would have done better to destroy them. Letting them return to spit their poison of resentment into every ear... Peh!'
'And they gathered up their ruined strength and came to Osrakum with vengeance in their eyes,' said Vennel.
'And we came out and were defeated and so on and so on ...' droned Jaspar. 'And how was it that this defeated rabble were able to overwhelm the pursuing Quyan host so that the Skymere became a lake of their blood?'
The Black God with dragons came—' The Lord of Mirrors,' said Jaspar, 'divine Lord of War...'
'Inspired by virtue,' said Suth, 'our forefathers found a strength hidden in themselves ...'
'Was it virtue that in the Valley of the Gate turned their host to stone? Did virtue inspire the gift of fire that the Lord of Mirrors gave the Chosen with which then and now we make victorious war?'
'Naphtha burns whatever hand, Chosen, marumaga or barbarian, ignites it,' said Aurum. 'Flame-pipes are mechanisms through which the naphtha is driven by pressure. It is wisdom not divinity that has given us these weapons.'
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