The Chosen sdotc-1

by Ricardo Pinto

  When he turned back he saw guardsmen unfurling banners as the embalming procession formed up at the foot of a stair. Carnelian followed Jaspar and his brother and felt the other Masters walking behind him. The Sapients were already moving up the stair.

  The climb was long and arduous. At landings, they stopped just long enough to allow the ammonites to transfer the burden of the corpse among themselves.

  They came up onto a larger landing whose outer edge was lined with stumps like teeth. Carnelian felt a hand on his shoulder.

  'One would speak with my Lord,' said Jaspar. He nipped off the beginning of his brother's protest with a sign and sent him and the other Masters up the next flight of steps after the procession, accompanied by the majority of the guardsmen, all the women and children and the porters with their burdens. Only a few guardsmen remained, hanging their banners above them like parasols. Carnelian saw that the cuts down their cheeks were healing brown.

  'Perhaps, cousin, you would explain to me how my slaves might have been prompted into committing murder?' said Jaspar.

  'Have you had visitors? A message from court?'

  'Some Lords came to conclave. From court…?' Jaspar shrugged a no.

  'Perhaps their entourages…?'

  'My Lord's arguments tend towards a certain circularity, neh?'

  Carnelian had to agree. He used his foot to scrape earth from a ring shape on the ground. 'Are you sure that no person whatever came from court?'

  Jaspar's mask regarded him as if from a great height. 'I suppose there is always the regular traffic in ammonites.'

  'Ammonites?'

  Jaspar fluttered a gesture of disbelief in the air. 'If you draw ammonites into your fantasy then their masters are sure to be close behind.'

  'Why should the Wise not conspire with Ykoriana?'

  'Enough! You would have me believe that two powers work in concert against the third.' He shook his head. 'If that were so, first the Balance and then the Commonwealth would be destroyed.'

  Jaspar dropped his cowled head as if he were deep in thought. So as not to interrupt him, Carnelian looked down at the ring his foot had uncovered. It was of bronze and had a hinge at one end, like a mooring ring. He looked out over the blue waters spread out below. He glanced from side to side along the landing and wondered if in some ancient time it could have been a quay. He felt Jaspar move away. 'Well?'

  Jaspar turned. 'I must follow my father this one last time.' He sighed. 'And, as Funereal Law demands, on foot.'

  Carnelian followed Jaspar, sensing victory. He noticed that the steps had several times been recut deeper into the rock. The dirgeful bells came echoing distantly from above. Striped walls of stone rose up on either side. As they climbed, Carnelian became uneasy, convinced he was being watched. The walls had in them an impression of a crowd. When he squinted, he could make out their faces, vague from uncountable years of rain, furrow-mouthed, scratch-browed, noseless, with pits for eyes.

  The Plain of Thrones,' said Jaspar.

  Carnelian gazed at the walled plain, widening round then narrowing again in the distance to where the wall looked no higher man the thickness of his arm. Behind it rose an immense blackness that overwhelmed him. As the bells' pealing struck him with its hammer blows, Carnelian was again clinging to the deck of the baran. His mind's eye widened looking down into the gyring horror of the well. He blinked. Before him was the plug that would have filled that pit in the sea. It was only motionless rock, he told himself, the flank of the Pillar of Heaven, narrower from this side. The pressure of the bells was fading. He let his eyes slip down to an arrowhead, a hollow pyramid cut into the plain's wall, a buckle in its belt. He realized the stone on either side of it was pricked with windows, ribbed with balconies, striped with colonnades. Below stood a line of shadowy men. He turned to follow them round. Standing one beside the other, they hemmed the wall for fully half its circle. In the west they stood revealed by the sun as solemn stone.

  The funereal pealing and moaning was pulsing round the plain. Remembering his father's stories, Carnelian snatched his eyes back, searching. There, beneath the pyramid hollow, he found a space wedged between two of the stone men and knew that it must hold the Forbidden Door, the entrance to the Labyrinth.

  Carnelian was walking along a road that ran as straight as a shadow towards the Forbidden Door. For a while, he had been noticing something like a clump of people conclaving in the centre of the plain. Heat shimmer had lent them movement but as he came closer Carnelian saw they were stone monoliths set in a ring.

  'My Lord,' said Jaspar, in the silence vibrating between two peals.

  Carnelian turned to him and saw the Master's hands begin to sign.

  Soon I will leave this procession and go into the Labyrinth. If you still wish to accompany me you must do as I say, agreed?

  Carnelian agreed and they continued on their way.

  Inside the outer ring of monoliths, close to its centre, were two more rings, one within the other. Most of the monoliths were the colour of a stormy sky but those forming the innermost ring looked as if they had been painted with blood. All the ground within the outermost ring was slabbed, mosaiced, ridged, or spotted with cobbles. The road they were on divided to curve round the flanks of the stone circle, then joined up again upon the other side. Along the left fork Carnelian could see another procession moving with banners. The Sapients took the embalming procession along the right. A quarter of the way round, a new road branched off towards the northwestern edge of the plain. At this junction the procession came to a halt and Jaspar and his kin began to argue with their hands. Carnelian looked away, not wishing to intrude further. The Sapients stood near a pair of monoliths that lay a little distance out from the circle. Although only half their height, the Sapients bore some resemblance to them. Jaspar glanced over, then chopped an angry sign that caused his kin to bow and move away.

  Carnelian watched Jaspar walk to his father's bier and kneel beside it, then rise and come towards him. His heart warmed to see such filial affection.

  'It must be very hard to lose a father,' he said when Jaspar returned.

  Terrible.' Jaspar's hand went to a chain at his throat and drew a Ruling Ring out from his robe. He dangled it. 'But still, there are compensations, even for such a loss. Long have I coveted this… to wield its power…' He sighed in a kind of ecstasy. 'I cannot count how many times I have wished him dead.'

  'Dead? But… I thought…'

  'What did you think, my Lord?' said Jaspar, as he fed the ring and its chain back into his robe. The crucifixions…'

  'You thought I did that from sentiment?' He laughed, shaking his cowled head. 'How rich. Really, you are too peculiar, cousin dear. It was done for revenge, but, even more, for future security. Could you have conceived a better way to inaugurate one's reign? Admittedly, it is a profligate waste of flesh wealth, but exactly because of that the lesson will live long in the memory of my slaves. If fortune is not unkind to me, it will never have to be repeated.'

  Carnelian was glad of the mask that hid his distaste.

  Jaspar made a gesture of dismissal. 'Enough. This is neither the place nor the time for social banter. I have a gift for you, cousin.' Jaspar held out his hand and waited for Carnelian's to move under his before he dropped something into it.

  Carnelian looked at it. 'A blood-ring?'

  'Hush! Put your hand down.' He turned until one of his mask's eyeslits could see the procession that was already moving down the north-western road in the wake of the Sapients.

  Carnelian obeyed him, concealing the ring in his fist. 'Whose is it?'

  Jaspar grabbed his shoulder. 'Come, my Lord, let us proceed. The sun begins to grow oppressive and we still have a long walk to the Forbidden Door.'

  They journeyed round the circle of monoliths, and as they passed the kneeling guardsmen and retainers Jaspar motioned for them to follow.

  'One would have thought it obvious that the blood-ring in your hand is from a Lord of one of my lesser
lineages. Khrusos, to be precise,' Jaspar said in a low voice. 'You must wear it instead of your own.'

  Carnelian's hands lifted in protest but Jaspar swatted them down.

  'You asked that I take you with me, my Lord, as one of my kinsmen. That is exactly what I am doing.'

  Carnelian's eyes wandered between the outer monoliths to the inner ring. After some thought, he carefully removed his own ring and replaced it with the one that Jaspar had given him.

  'Good. Now you are my inferior,' said Jaspar.

  Carnelian could hear that he was speaking through a smile. Carnelian was not happy. The new ring felt unnatural on his finger. He distracted himself by counting the monoliths. He noticed that the red inner ring was completed with two green and two black stones.

  'What are these stones, my Lord?'

  The Dance of the Chameleon.'

  'A calendar?' said Carnelian, since that was the only meaning the words had for him.

  'In a manner of speaking. Does my Lord see the innermost ring? Well, he will also see that there are twelve stones of the same colours as the months.'

  'Your inferior still does not understand.'

  Jaspar's mask flicked towards him. 'It is a machine, a sorcerous engine that the Wise use to predict the coming of the Rains and all other temporal matters that provide impetus for the actions of the world.'

  'I see,' said Carnelian, seeing nothing but stones. He waved his hand. 'But these others?'

  The calendrical stones also have inscribed on them the Law-that-must-be-obeyed.'

  Carnelian realized he had known this but still he gaped in wonder. The Law itself!'

  Jaspar nodded, taking his utterance as a question. 'And these other stones are commentaries and amendments. The markings on the floor link the whole corpus in some manner unfathomable to any but the Wise.'

  Carnelian was walking blind, stroking his new blood-ring, working through what he would say to his father if they should actually meet An acrid charcoal tang made him see again. The road ended at an edge of sooty stone. Looking up he saw the blackness stretching off towards the wall of the plain.

  'Why do you linger, my Lord?' said Jaspar.

  This burning…?' said Carnelian, pointing.

  'Yes, it has been burned,' Jaspar said impatiently. He waited but Carnelian did not move. He sighed. 'It is here at the ceremony of the Rebirth that our tributaries kneel to worship us' – he pointed up at the pyramid hollow – 'up there.'

  Carnelian surveyed the black field and tried to imagine it covered by a vast and grovelling throng. 'But the burn-ing…?'

  'Carnelian!' Jaspar sounded aggrieved. 'Do you really think that we could allow their pollution to go uncleansed, here…' He lifted his arms, turned round in a circle.'… here at the very centre of our hidden realm? The flame-pipes of the Ichorian Legion sweep this whole space like brooms and then…' He pointed the blade of his hand back the way they had come. '… all the way along that road, down to the quays, round the Ydenrim, over the causeway, through the Valley of the Gate and all the way up to the Black Gate.'

  Carnelian saw the dragonflied faces round them hanging miserably and lost his curiosity. This is all the burning I have seen.'

  'Sometimes, Carnelian, you are like a child. Do you really believe that the Chosen would choose to allow even their servants to walk around leaving black footprints all over Osrakum?'

  'A vast labour,' said Carnelian gloomily.

  There is a sky full of rain to help them.'

  Carnelian looked at the blackness. 'How do we cross?'

  Jaspar made a sign of exasperation. That way, my Lord.' The Master was talking through gritted teeth. That way, past the Cages of the Tithe.'

  Carnelian saw that the road went round the edge of the black field and that along its south-eastern side there ran a fence.

  When they had reached the bronze fence, Carnelian walked slowly along it gazing through the bars. He realized that, through Ebeny's words, he had seen this place before. He looked over to the other side of the road, at the black field. She had told him about a hearth, wide enough to cover half the world. There it was. It was into this plain that Ebeny's people had brought her to pay their flesh tithe. She had told him of the walls that were like the blue mountains she had seen on the migrations of her people. The sky had been filled with thunder. Its blackness had been dragged down to the earth in a monstrous funnel. At its base a jewelled fire burned. He could see her hands making the triangle. He looked at the pyramid hollow and felt the tears aching under his eyes. Her words were making him a boy again, a homesick boy. He recalled the look of terror in her face as she told him of the whimpering, of her people unmanned, gaping at the jewel triangle that was the angry core of the sky. She had talked of giants hemming them in and, most terrible of all, the dragons. A wall of them on either side. Like the glorious creatures the Sky Father had made to thunder as free as a storm over her people's plains. But these dragons were muzzled, their thunder caught in chains, their backs profaned by the terrible machines of the Masters they were forced to carry. It was this that had broken Ebeny's bravery. She had admitted pleading with her people. A few of them had clung to her but others had torn her from their embrace and shoved her towards the dragons. She was carried off in a tide of children. The reek of magic fire tainted the dragons' animal scent. There beneath their mountainous bellies she had been examined by a purple demon that had the same mirror face as the child-gatherer that had chosen her. The demon had prised open her fist to read the picture tattooed on her palm. Its talons had squeezed her skull and probed her mouth with a bronze thorn. It had torn her clothes and touched her everywhere. Even on the island Ebeny would never look in a mirror from choice and she loathed the colour purple.

  When it was done, she was herded into a cage. Carnelian looked through the bars. He recalled Ebeny's descriptions of her life in the cage. The misery. The endless mouldering rain. The feeding. The cruelties the children visited on each other. Carnelian could almost smell the fear behind the bars. He saw stains on the clay floor and had some notion about what might have made them.

  'I loathe this flesh tithe,' Carnelian said. 'Why so?' said Jaspar.

  'It is not just.'

  'Is it just that we should pay it too?'

  Carnelian turned to look at him. 'Pay what?'

  'A tithe on our own flesh. Are marumaga not appropriated from our Houses to be turned into the Wise? Besides, the barbarians are pitifully poor. They have nothing but their children with which to pay our tribute. Your loathing is hypocrisy, my Lord. From where do you think your own household came?'

  The marble guardians looked imperiously down. Each stood astride a door, a door of heart-stone, the crack between its leaves sealed with a disc of red clay. There was one guardian and one door for each House of the Chosen. The doors led into tombs.

  'We honeycomb the rock like termites and fill the cavities with our pupating dead,' said Jaspar.

  Carnelian shuddered, imagining the chambers beyond lodging their embalmed Masters.

  'Each year our forefathers' ghosts rise up from the Underworld to feed on the worship of all the peoples of the Three Lands.'

  Jaspar was looking up. Carnelian leaned back to see one guardian's empty eyes and gaping mouth, holes giving into a chamber into which the dead might climb. He could almost see his father's ghost peering out. 'Where is the tomb of my House?'

  Jaspar pointed off along the wall of the plain.

  Carnelian would have made off in that direction except that Jaspar touched his arm. This is not the time to take in the sights. We are being observed.'

  Carnelian saw a palanquin and, beside it, a Master waiting with a host of his attendants.

  Jaspar's hands made a furtive gesture of annoyance.

  There is no way we can avoid him. One had hoped he would have passed through the door well ahead of us.' He kept walking, muttering, This Lord was of Aurum's faction but will have been one of the first to defect to Ykoriana.'

  They were
now close enough for Carnelian to see the Master's autumn-plumaged robe and the cloud glyphs tattooed on the faces of his people.

  'Greetings, my Lord Cumulus,' said Jaspar.

  'Is that you, Imago Jaspar?' said Cumulus.

  'With one of my House.'

  'He accompanies you to the door?' Cumulus sounded surprised. To the sky.'

  'Indeed.' Cumulus examined them for some moments before lifting up enormous hands to make the sign for grief. 'All the Great share the sorrow of your loss, my Lords.'

  'Alas, our time in this world is brief,' said Jaspar.

  'Still, none should be hastened unlawfully to their tomb. I am not the only Ruling Lord who has carried out precautionary reprisals among his household.'

  'My Lord is very wise.'

  Cumulus made space for Jaspar. 'Perhaps we can walk together.'

  The Law only requires that the mourners walk, my Lord.'

  Then, with your indulgence, and for a while, I will become a mourner.'

  Carnelian saw Jaspar making covert signs to him. Behind us. He fought resentment but did what he was told, taking a place behind the two Masters.

  Cumulus' guardsmen formed up on one side while those of House Imago formed up on the other. The households merged into a mass behind. Carnelian watched the men with cloud tattoos look over warily at the blood-crusted faces of Jaspar's men.

  Cumulus' gold face turned to Jaspar. 'Is it not somewhat unusual at this time for a Ruling Lord to go to court accompanied by others of his House?'

  These are unusual times,' said Jaspar. 'Besides, I am not yet fully become a Ruling Lord.'

  'One can see that your father's mantle would be a heavy burden to bear alone, especially when it has fallen upon my Lord's shoulders so unexpectedly.'

  'One's father carried it alone and he was aged. One expects his son might carry it lightly enough.'

  'And has his son decided to carry all his burdens?' asked Cumulus.