The Chosen - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 01

by Ricardo Pinto

  'No, really, I promise, I swear on my blood, your eyes are in no danger, but...' 'But...?'

  'You must be kept apart from us for a month until they're' - Carnelian indicated the ammonites — 'sure that you're clean of plague.'

  'Plague,' nodded Tain.

  Carnelian noticed the ammonites gathering around one of the kneeling aquar. 'Please go with them. I must see to Father. Trust me, Tain.'

  'At the end of it, they'll send me to where you are, Carnie?'

  'I promise.' Carnelian gave his brother's arm a squeeze. There was nothing to grip but bone. Tain looked stuck to the ground. Carnelian pushed him gently away. 'Go on, pull yourself together, endure it, you're strong enough.' He remembered something. He fished out the Little Mother from a pocket and pressed her into Tain's hand. 'She'll look after you.'

  Tain gave a watery smile and hid her in his fist. Carnelian watched him turn, hesitate looking at the ammonites with their sinister silver faces, then pace towards them. Carnelian turned away and strode off towards his father.

  Ammonites were crowding him. Aurum was standing looking in over their heads. Carnelian heard the tearing sound. He pushed through them and saw they were ripping through his father's cloak like a crab's shell to expose the yellow-white body inside. One of the silver masks leant so close that it caught a twisting reflection of the wound-stained bandages.

  The creature straightened up and looked round at the gold masks. 'Seraphim, these bandages have been tampered with.'

  Aurum leaned over to see. 'Perhaps his slave . ..'

  The ammonite whisked round, looking off towards the boys who were undressing. 'Which is he? He must be destroyed.'

  'It is too late for that; he was one of the Lord Aurum's numerous victims,' said Carnelian bitterly.

  Aurum's mask looked down at him from a height.

  'Besides,' Carnelian continued, 'it was I who cut the bandages.'

  'Indeed, my Lord,' said Aurum. 'Now we see why he is dying.'

  Carnelian flared up. 'How dare you accuse me of that? I did it with his agreement. The bandages were rotting...'

  The Law—'

  'Does my Lord speak of the same Law which he has seen fit to break at his every whim?'

  Aurum's mask angled a little to one side. This impertinence—'

  'Are you then, my Lord, He-who-goes-before? You must be since you wear his ring.'

  The boy makes a hit, my Lord, a palpable hit,' said Vennel gleefully.

  'I think, Lord Aurum,' said Carnelian, 'it would be better if the ring was returned to him to whom it legally belongs.'

  Aurum seemed to grow taller, more menacing. The Law must be obeyed,' said the ammonite. 'I merely borrowed it to protect He-who-goes-before when he could not protect himself,' grated Aurum. He put his hand out and opened it to reveal the muted flame of the Pomegranate Ring.

  Carnelian reached out and took it. The ammonite began to protest, but stopped when Carnelian lifted his father's hand, threaded the heavy ring onto the middle finger and closed the hand around the gem.

  Vennel turned to the ammonite. This matter will have to be reported to your masters.'

  'Perhaps, before he does that, he should first attempt to save the Ruling Lord Suth's life, or would you both rather have him die,' said Aurum icily.

  Vennel pulled back like a snake ready to strike.

  The ammonite lifted his hands. 'Seraphim, this behaviour is unworthy of your blood.'

  'His life, ammonite ...' hissed Aurum.

  'It... this wound, it is beyond my skill, Seraph. Only my masters can save him.'

  Then, ammonite, do you not agree that we had better make haste to get him to your masters? I promise you, your skin will not long remain your own if they find that you have let him die.'

  Ammonites led them up a flight of stairs to a hall where the Masters were divested of their riding cloaks. Their long slim bodies were revealed wrapped in bandages sweat-stained yellow. New ranga were brought and jade-green robes spiralled with ferns. Their old cloaks and ranga shoes were gathered up with tongs and burned in a brazier.

  As Carnelian came back down, he clenched and unclenched his hands that were sticky with Marula blood. He watched his father being moved to a bier and then covered with one of the green robes. Tain was a little way off, naked with the other boys, just skin stretched over bones. His head was in the grip of an ammonite being turned this way and that as the ammonite's silver mask peered at him. His shoulders and back were painfully bruised. Carnelian could guess by whom. Another boy whimpered as he was folded for examination. Carnelian turned away, knowing he had to let his brother go.

  As a bright rectangle opened in the further wall, Carnelian strode after his father's bier. The green silk was heavy as he lifted it with his knees. The new ranga were taller than the old ones. He had to swing his feet. It was like walking on stilts.

  He clacked out onto the road with the other Masters. The air had grown hot. Amid kneeling rows of Ichorians were chariots like jewel boxes. His father was being carried to one whose wheel rims rose above the heads of the people round it. Carnelian followed. The back of the chariot was a dull mirror of gold from which a Master was surfacing as if from a bath. Ammonites reached up to the handles with hooks and halved the Master by pulling open the doors. Others lifted the bier, rested its edge on the chariot floor, then, careful to touch nothing, fed his father in feet first.

  Carnelian watched Jaspar climbing into another chariot nearby. He saw that it was yoked to a pair of pale-skinned aquar. Naked half-coloured men held their halters.

  'Fetch riders,' Aurum said to an Ichorian.

  Three ammonites converged on him, protesting.

  '.. . too slow,' Carnelian heard Aurum say, and, 'The Law .. .' one of the ammonites responding.

  Aurum muted the man with an angry gesture and flowed towards Carnelian like a column of green water. He pointed over Carnelian's shoulder. 'Your chariot awaits.'

  'I will travel with my father, Lord Aurum.'

  The Master said nothing though a slight curling in his fingers betrayed his anger as he strode past Carnelian.

  One of the chariots was already being led off at a jog by an Ichorian as Carnelian climbed the steps into his father's chariot. 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 openings 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 where its walls flared up mountain-ously, 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 fi
sh. 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 .. . ?'