Carnelian frowned. 'How can you be so sure there will be need for an election before the coming of the Rains?'
The Wise are sure.' His father motioned. 'Make them bring the staves.'
Carnelian understood his father's meaning. He manoeuvred the syblings to prop their staves in front of his father. They were really standards. One carried the wheelmap of the Commonwealth he had seen before in one of his father's books: a black disc within a red within a green, the whole jewelled roundel surmounted by the horned-ring of divinity. The other staff bore the jade and obsidian faces of the Gods, also crowned with the horned-ring.
His father groaned as he tried to push himself up and failed. Carnelian leaned in to shoulder one of his father's arms like a yoke. He hoisted it till his father had grasped one of the staves and then did the same for the other hand. Holding on to him they rocked him back up onto his ranga. He was suddenly as tall as Molochite had been. Carnelian saw that the woven metals of his court robe were dented as his father, holding on to the staves, came down the steps. Once he had reached the floor, he tentatively let go of the staves and took a few steps without their help. He dismissed the syblings and they and the staves retreated.
'Come, Carnelian, lend me your strength.'
Carnelian gave his father his shoulder to lean on. The warm, heavy pressure filled Carnelian with a love for his father that stung his eyes. Suth pointed out the way he wished to go, and they set off.
'Are you, as Regent, responsible for all this?' asked Carnelian, ignoring his father's weight.
'For this purpose, the Regent is, in everything but name, God Emperor.'
Then who now is He-who-goes-before? Who speaks for the Clave? Aurum?'
The shaking of his father's crowned head vibrated them both. He opened his hand to reveal the red eye of the Pomegranate Ring.
'Surely then, Father, you direct two of the Three Powers?'
'Yes.'
There must be those who object to this concentration of might?'
He felt his father's mirth trembling down his arm. 'Oh, yes. Indeed yes.'
'She of whom we must not speak?'
'She most of all. The God Emperor made me Regent and while They live I am secure.'
'And then…?'
The Regency will pass to her until a candidate is elected.'
'Still, she will be safely locked away in her forbidden house.'
'Not so. She will be let out, brought here to wield the power of the Masks.'
'Will that not endanger us?'
He felt the shaking again. 'Why should it?'
'Why then did you set your lictors upon my door?'
They cannot enter here. I had no other use for them.'
'And the escort of syblings, today?'
To give you state. You are a Lord of the Great, Carnelian, and my son. I would not have you appear before the other Ruling Lords like a beggar.'
There is no danger, then?'
'Not now.'
Then, my Lord, your worry is at an end.' Carnelian glanced off towards the Iron Door. 'Out there…' He stopped. The Hanuses' two faces were gazing down the length of the hall at them.
'Yes?'
Carnelian screwed his head round to look up at his father. 'I saw some of our people… and the Jade Lord Molochite. He spoke to me.'
'Did he? What about?'
'Nothing… he saw my mother in my face.'
'She is there, in your face, in your eyes.'
'He is the most beautiful creature I have ever beheld.'
'Even in a House that breeds so much beauty, Molochite is an emerald among jades.'
'He was amiable enough.'
'Is that not what you once said about Jaspar?'
Carnelian thought about this. 'Where is the other Jade Lord?'
'Nephron? With Aurum to espouse his cause, he has no need to show himself. Only Molochite is forced to bend his pride to canvas for his own votes.'
Their mother is locked away?'
'In the full purdah, although even if she were free I do not think she would stoop to going out among the Great. She has none in her party whose blood the Ruling Lords would respect enough to deal with. So she resorts to sending her own son to negotiate for their block votes.'
'Of course,' Carnelian said, thinking aloud, remembering his lessons on the island. Into a ballot, a Ruling Lord could cast all the rings in his House save for those worn by adult males. This explained why they were come up to court alone. Their block votes would play the major part in the election.
Carnelian looked up and saw that they had reached a door. It was barred by huge billhooks, each held by the four hands of the sybling pairs on either side. His father's weight on him grew lighter as he straightened up. Carnelian let him go reluctantly. They took some steps towards the syblings. The billhooks clinked as they uncrossed.
Carnelian stopped. 'My Lord.' He waited for his father to look down at him. 'Did you know that there are many Lords waiting outside your door?'
His father gave a nod.
Carnelian looked at the syblings and saw that they were either blind or wearing eyeless masks. Aurum among them, he signed. Let him wait.
He was angry seeing me here. So, he is always angry. I was rude to him.
His father made a dismissive wave and beckoned Carnelian to follow him through the door. The hall beyond was walled with opals so that as they moved through it, iridescing waves followed them. The floor was a mosaic of different-hued pearls. Feather rugs changed colours like flitting hummingbirds. The furniture was all spired ebony and jade.
As they passed another sybling-guarded door, Carnelian asked, 'Is the Lord Hanus of the Chosen?'
The Lords Hanus. They are two beings, and yes, they are Chosen.'
'But they are syblings.'
The Wise teach that the Chosen are all conceived as twins. The rarity of twin births they put down to fratricidal conflict in the womb. They use this to explain our predatory spirit and even the love yearnings that we sometimes feel for one another.'
These syblings are then the natural offspring of the Chosen?'
'Of the God Emperor, Their sons and Their Lesser Chosen brides.'
'Is that perhaps because the Twin Essence is so hot in imperial blood?'
'Perhaps, though I suspect the drugs the Wise feed their mothers might make some contribution.'
Carnelian considered this. 'Still, they are two in one, just like the Gods.'
Their joining is imperfect, demonstrating all the ways in which a man can be wedded to his reflection in a mirror. Unlike the Twins they are not complementary beings. Even when they are born entirely unjoined, they are merely a reflection of each other.'
They reached a door and passed into another chamber that was mosaiced with clouds of amethyst. His father stopped him there. He turned to him and stooped to hold Carnelian's face in his hands, then kissed him on the forehead. 'Did you think your father had forgotten your birthday?'
'I had forgotten it myself, Father,' Carnelian said in surprise. 'Is it already the thirty-third day of Jalod?' Suth nodded.
They had left the island in the last few days of the ninth month and here they were at the end of the eleventh. Perhaps seventy days in all. Those seventy days seemed a memory of years.
His father smiled at him. 'You are fifteen, a ripe old age.' He straightened up, looking away off into his memory, regaining for a moment something of his familiar beauty. 'I have never told you before that the day of your birth was also the day when the last God Emperor died. Birth during the broken mirror days of an imperial interregnum has momentous astrological implications. The first such day has particular significance. The Wise prophesied that fateful consequences accrued to your birth.' His eyes focused back on his son. 'At least your birthday has come before another such interregnum.' He frowned. 'What are those stains upon your supplication robe?'
Carnelian looked and saw the blood streaks. He looked up at his father and showed him the grazes on his palms. His father grimaced,
glancing down his own gold brocades, and made a sign of apology.
There is no pain, Father.'
Suth jerked a nod. 'Come, let us hurry. I cannot afford to be long away from my responsibilities.' 'Where are we going?'
His father's sad face managed a smile. 'You shall see soon enough, my son.'
The echoing apartments grew colder and gloomier. Their wall mosaics became dark shifting nightmares. Everywhere there were doors and more doors, each guarded by its complement of syblings.
'Is it safe, my Lord, to wander thus unmasked?' Carnelian asked his father.
'Here there are no seeing eyes but ours,' Suth replied.
Carnelian longed to reach up and grasp his father's hand, but he was no longer a child.
At last they came to a door beside which a Sapient stood among a brood of homunculi. Their silver faces could have been snatched from sleeping children.
As Carnelian and his father came closer, one of the homunculi moved into the Sapient's cloven embrace.
'Who comes to the door of the Dreamchamber?' it said, eerily, a dead child speaking.
The Regent,' said Suth.
The Sapient reached out and tweaked the necks of the homunculi one by one. Carnelian recoiled as they crept forward feeling for his father with their hands. He watched them pull the crowns one by one from his head, then peel him free of his court robe. He stepped out of it, pale, narrow, like a worm cut from an apple. He climbed down from his ranga and was a man again. He turned and offered his hand. Carnelian could not read the strange, sad expression on his father's face but took it.
The Sapient turned and with his fist stroked the lintel of the door. It rang with a sound like a cymbal and after some moments began to open.
Myrrh misted the chamber. Ferns frothed up from the floor, curling, pushing up a giant sleeping. Sagging down towards them from the ceiling was a huge figure, like a man hanging face down in a hammock of spider's silk. Apple-green jade formed the circular floor that sloped up to the sleeping giant. Sapients squatted around the walls, their bleached skin tight as a drum's, their jet eyes staring, their lipless mouths valving open and closed. A dirge was oozing from them, a grating, grumbling chant that rose and fell as wordless as a wind. Somewhere a bell was being struck with a rhythm slower than Carnelian's breathing.
He followed his father towards the sleeping giant and saw that it was formed of the same jade as the floor. His father released Carnelian's hand. He felt the ceiling pressing down ominously and looked up at its black turmoil. It was like a man stuck to a ceiling with thick tar who gradually, under his weight, was dragging the whole sticky mass down.
Busy with this obsession, Carnelian did not at first register the feeling against his side. Then he gave in to its nagging, its brushing against his leg. He turned to see someone prostrate on the floor. For a moment he thought it one of the Wise who had slipped by him as quietly as a shadow, but when he looked anxiously for the comfort of his father Carnelian found it was him on the ground. Staring at him making the prostration, the hackles rose on Carnelian's neck. He looked up at the jade giant and felt a chill understanding seep into his head.
It was his father's grip on his coarse-weave robe that pulled him down to the floor and then a while later back onto his feet. Together they crept forward and began to climb the sloping jade. Carnelian's heart was louder than the chanting. As his eyes rose higher he saw that the jade giant was a kind of bed and that lying on it was a man, or something shaped like a man, a man whose face was mirror-black obsidian.
'Deus,' said his father, his head bowing. 'I have brought my son at Your bidding.'
Carnelian gaped at the Gods. Horror floated on the chanting of the Sapients. He saw one standing behind the giant's head that was a pillow for They. The Sapient leaned forward so that his fingers were touching the Gods' throat. He saw the thin yellow arm laid out along the giant's arm. Another Sapient, kneeling, had his cloven hands pressing on a vein running down the yellow arm. It looked as if he were preparing to play it like a flute. Yet another of the Wise, who held the wrist, was also striking the heart-stone bell. Carnelian's heart slavishly followed its peal.
'Even now, child, they use Us as an instrument to probe the sky for its Heart of Thunder.'
The voice rumbled from nowhere. Carnelian's eyes searched for its source.
'Later, when We shall dream, they assure Us that they will be able to chart its movement up from the sea.'
The non-singular pronouns registered. Carnelian stared at the Mask's obsidian lips and waited for it to speak again.
The other one, child, waits for a sign of Our dissolution. The moment of Our death will form a crucial part of their astrological calculations,' the Mask said. 'Release Us, Immortality.'
The Grand Sapient's noseless face frowned as he relinquished hold of the Gods' throat.
'Child, are you as mute as they?' the Gods said.
Carnelian swallowed several times, moistened his lips, breathed his voice to life. 'Perhaps… Deus… perhaps You will cheat them.'
The glassy face began a chuckle that came apart into coughing. 'We shall soon be occupying Our jade suit. A column in the Labyrinth gapes ready to receive Us into the second waking.' There was more laboured breathing. 'Sardian, the Mask impedes Our breathing.'
Carnelian watched his father's long fingers reach for the Gods' face.
Suth glanced first at Immortality and then at his son. Close your eyes, he signed.
Carnelian obeyed him, scrunching them closed, preparing himself for the blast of light as the Gods' face was revealed.
Carnelian heard the tempo of the bell increase a little. The tone of the Sapients' chanting changed as they reacted to it. He jumped when a hand touched his face.
'Kiss Their hand as a token of love. As much as They are Lords of Earth and Sky, They are your uncle,' rustled his father in Carnelian's ear.
Suth's hand guided his face. Smelling myrrh, Carnelian anticipated the scald of the Gods' skin. He cried out as something snagged and tore his lip; his eyes opened. He saw the narrow hand, the sharp ring, the blood pooling on the yellowed skin. His eyes snapped closed.
'Kiss,' whispered his father insistently.
Carnelian pushed his lips forward to kiss the slick of blood he had spilled on the Gods' palm. He drew back, licking the saltiness from his lips, muttering, 'Forgive, forgive…'
'It is only a little blood, child. What is a little blood between an uncle and his nephew,' said They.
The bell was ringing very fast in Carnelian's ears. 'Come, nephew, let Us kiss your hand. We will not meet again.'
Still tasting salt, Carnelian stretched out his hand, trembling for the touch of the Gods' radiant face. Cold fingers grasped his and drew his hand further. Carnelian flinched as the lips touched his hand. His thumb strayed onto other skin. Wetness. A thread of it under his thumb. Touching the tear track made him numb with terror. He withdrew his hand and stood back as his father and the Gods exchanged a muttering of words. He struggled to make sense of the sounds.
'… you must save my true son,' the Gods were saying.
Carnelian tasted his thumb. It seemed miraculous that Their tears should be as salty as mortal blood.
THE MOON-EYED DOOR
Without wings
He soared the sky
But when he fell
He fell like a star
(from the myth The Tale of the Three Gods')
His father had Carnelian move with his household deep into the Sunhold. From the nave of the Encampment of the Seraphim, they passed into a guardroom between bastions that lay to the right of the sun-eyed door. They traversed passages lined with loopholes and several double sets of portcullises before they reached his new chamber with its ambered walls.
It was there that he sat hunched, squinting at his thumb, hardly believing that it could be whole. He was outraged that its whiteness bore not the least stain to show where the divine tears had touched it. He remembered the gaunt yellow hands of the Gods: he h
ad expected starlight diffusing through a membrane of adamantine. He remembered the weary voice from behind the Mask: he had expected it to shake the Dreamchamber as thunder shook the vaulting sky. The air had not thrilled with the ozone tang of lightning, but had been wreathed heavy with funereal myrrh. Inside the withered body, the divine blood had at best fluttered, a candle flame in a pavilion of stained parchment.
Was that a scratching at the door?
'Enter,' he said, then had to repeat the word more loudly.
The door trembled open to show a man holding a box. The familiarity of the chameleon on his face made Carnelian smile. The face froze, making its tattoo look like a gecko startled on a wall.
'Well, come in then,' said Carnelian. He had sent for one of his new household to clean him. It was a pretext. In truth, what he desired was to build a bridge over which he might cross to his new people. He needed friends.
The man was standing there as if the floor between them were strewn with blades.
'Come on, I don't bite. Are you intending to clean me from the other side of the room?' He intended this as a joke, but it only made the man more frightened. The wretch shuffled nearer, his shoulders curved, and, with maddening care, made sure to place the box soundlessly on a rug.
Carnelian stood up.
The man flinched.
Carnelian tried to smooth the frown from his face by smiling.
The man crouched and began to unpack the box onto the rug. Carnelian watched his short brown fingers with increasing irritation. He waited until the man had stood up with a pad, looking at Carnelian's skin as if it were some tower wall he had to whitewash.
'How're the lads?' Carnelian said.
The man stared at him.
Carnelian nodded, sculling his hand, trying to scoop some words out of the man's mouth.
'Master?' the man said, as yellow as a corpse.
The tyadra, the guardsmen, you know, the people outside with the weapons?'
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