Carnelian gave a solemn nod. ‘Yes, tomorrow.’
Carnelian sat hunched in Earth-is-Strong’s command chair, listening to the rain drumming on the bone roof above his head. It had been falling incessantly since they set off. Ahead, through its mist, he could just see, across the moat bridge, the mass of the gatehouses. He was not sure, but it seemed that the great brass gate between them was closed, barring access to the Wheel: the heart of the City at the Gates.
He glanced round at Fern and the others. It was too gloomy back there to see their faces. He looked forward again, watching the rain-stained tenement walls slide slowly past on either side. Perforated with unnumbered windows shuttered against the rain – or perhaps it was that none dared look upon this sodden procession of the Masters.
Some steps squeezed down to a mess of boats, many half capsized, lifted by the rising waters of the lake, tethered to mooring posts already submerged. The road was flooding, filthy with scum, the run-off foaming into alleyways, fed from above by spouts vomiting from the roofs as if the sky was trying to scour the city clean. It had been like that all the way. Carnelian had expected, perhaps even hoped for the termite frenzy of the crowds, the views into rooms and lives, even the mouldering stench of the metropolis he had entered as a boy, but he had not seen a soul.
When they had set off along the causeway towards the city, the flinty lake had been unscratched by the ripples of a single boat. True, in many places on either side he had seen wheel ruts in the mud, the churn left behind by feet, but these had held glimmers of reflected sky; had looked as if they had been left there in some ancient time and that nothing but this funeral procession had passed there for long ages of the world.
When they reached the first towers, these had seemed almost ruined, decayed. Above the slurp of the water lapping tunnels and alleys, steps and quays, Carnelian was sure he had heard a child crying, some vague voices, the screeches of an animal being killed, but these could have been the ghosts of the city’s dead inhabitants and were soon lost in the noise of the thunder and the falling rain.
As they slipped through the twilight beneath the crowding tenements, Carnelian felt a lament rising in him and was not sure whether he grieved for the lost city, for the dead, or for himself.
After Osidian and the Quenthas had helped him descend from the watch-tower roof, he had not slept. All night, deprived of Fern, he had struggled alone with his fears and choices. When morning came, he had found that, though his leg ached, it bore his weight easily enough. The sisters had accompanied him down to the road. He had sent them to fetch Fern and his brothers. While he waited, the Wise had given him instructions on how to negotiate the Three Gates.
A grinding sound snatched his attention. Ahead, between the gatehouses, something massive was twisting, changing form. It was just reflections in the brass gates as they opened for him. He realized they must already be on one of the bridges that spanned the Wheel moat. Glancing to starboard, he looked down into the great curving trench and saw how much higher the water was than it had been the last time he had crossed it. Through the opening gates, he glimpsed what seemed the cobbles of the marketplace, but then these began to rise in a surge that faded away in the veiling rain. A dense throng. Earth-is-Strong pounded closer, and ripples of panic moved through the multitude as they struggled to get out of her way. In the milling pattern of heads, Carnelian detected many smaller than the rest. Children. Filling the Wheel as far as he could see were the tributaries and the flesh tithe.
It was Poppy who first moved to peer through the screen at the tributaries. Krow went with her, then Fern. Carnelian watched them for a while then rose and joined them. The crowd below had opened an avenue down which Earth-is-Strong was pounding. Carnelian regarded the sea of humanity, saddened by how different this was from the tumultuous marketplace he had once crossed. How quietly the people below watched their progress. He remembered that Fern had once been among just such a throng with his father and brother. He glanced round and saw Fern braced against the sway of the deck, his face grim as he gazed out.
‘How long have they been here?’ Poppy asked, softly. She had poked her fingers through the bony lattice and clung to it.
Krow put an arm around her. ‘Probably quite a while.’
Carnelian recalled that he too had been with Fern and the tithe children of both their tribes.
‘They will be starving by now,’ growled Fern.
So many children. That such numbers should be given up to the Masters each and every year. The way they watched the Masters pass in such perfect silence. Contempt rose in Carnelian at their docility. Where was their rage?
‘Master?’
Carnelian turned on his Lefthand, making the man start. He calmed himself. ‘What is it?’
‘If it please you, Master, which way shall we turn?’
Carnelian glanced back down to the Wheel; they had reached the ring of black stone inlaid into the Wheel that was called the Dragonway. ‘The shortest way.’
His Lefthand muttered into his voice fork and the hawsers on Earth-is-Strong’s horns pulled her head round and she began to turn east.
‘The Standing Dead,’ exclaimed Poppy, pointing.
A vast gash seemed to be opening in Osrakum’s mountain wall that was guarded on either side by figures that might have been men except that those of flesh and blood were mere dust at their feet. Even through the rain Carnelian could see the brooding stare that those giants cast down upon the tributaries. Between them more and more of the Canyon they guarded was coming into view. The deeper he could see into that dark mouth, the greater grew his dread. After everything that had happened, it was miraculous that he should be here again, but it did not feel like any kind of homecoming. He glanced round, seeking some distraction. Perhaps he had hoped to see wonder in the faces of those he loved, at least for a moment, but there was only fear, as if they were looking upon the very gateway to the land of the dead. And why not? Once they went in, what hope had any of them of ever returning?
The ankle of one of the colossi slid past the starboard screen as an immense column of scabrous rock. They heard more than saw the walls of the Canyon funnelling together as the thunder of Earth-is-Strong’s footfalls reverberated, the judder of her tower and harness shivered and echoed. The scuffle of the palanquins following them was a constant scratching on their hearing. More disconcerting than this was a swelling roar. He had started to hear it when they were crossing the bridge over the Wheel moat into the Canyon mouth. The last time he had heard the Cloaca, it had been a murmur. It had been tame then; now it was carrying the run-off from the Skymere swollen by the Rains. The bass rumble reminded him of the Blackwater Falls in the Upper Reach. No doubt Morunasa would hear in that roar his god speaking.
Then he became aware of the twilight illuminating the turn up ahead. He knew what he would see when they rounded it, but even so, as it came into sight it shocked him. The vast hedge of bronze that filled the Canyon from side to side was holding back a glow of morning light but, in one place, this sombre dam was breached. Perhaps as much as a third of it had been torn down.
When Earth-is-Strong moved into the breach in the Green Gate there was more than enough space to spare. The ripped edges of the bronze thicket loomed, its blades and thorns like frayed threads. On their passage through what had been the first of three gates, chambers were exposed on either side like the hollows of a crushed snail shell. Torn floors hung in shreds. Doorways opening like wounds at various heights funnelled away into dark, still-secret recesses of the fortress. Propped up against these ruins were the gates themselves, two slabs of bronze rising higher than they could see. Carnelian had been told to expect this, but still he was appalled that Molochite had been prepared to demolish a part of Osrakum’s defences merely to indulge his whim to go to battle in the ancient relic of the Iron House. Was it his certainty of victory or, perhaps, his concern to maintain his majesty in comfort that had led him to this vandalism?
Once they were through
the Gate, the Canyon opened up before them, its smooth floor running off towards the next turn. Carnelian looked for and found the Lords’ Way running in its groove in the cliff along which he had travelled in a chariot with his father. The roar of the Cloaca had become more remote as it had widened into a black chasm. He knew the shelves of the quarantine were down there somewhere. Remembering Tain’s description of his ordeal in that darkness, Carnelian resisted turning to look at him. Each day being moved to the next shelf down the Canyon before passing under the Blood Gate. His brother had thought the chasm a way down to the Underworld. At least, this time, neither Tain nor the rest of his people were going to have to endure that. Molochite’s breach in the Green Gate had already allowed the pollution of the outer world to reach deep into the Canyon. It was strange they had him to thank for their deliverance. Carnelian watched the next turn approaching and longed to reach the light flooding from it. What he really wanted was to save his people from quarantine altogether. He desired them to go immediately to their coomb with his father. He wanted to have them all as far away as possible from what was going to happen.
With each sway of the cabin, a tower had been solidifying in the twilight ahead, like the blade of some immense axe half embedded in the Canyon floor and splitting the Cloaca in two. The closer they came, the deeper Carnelian could see the roots of the tower going down into the fork of the chasm. As the tower reared above them, the spikes in its crown which he had taken for the ends of joists glimmered. He saw they were brass, these structures, shaped like the calyxes of lilies swelling their trumpet mouths down towards him. They were the throats of massive flame-pipes; passing under their gape, Carnelian imagined with horror what would happen to them should these weapons begin vomiting fire.
A lurching shift in the monster’s gait made him drop his gaze and see her turning to move onto a slab that spanned the nearest branch of the forking chasm. Under the looming flame-pipe tower, they crossed to the great oval space that lay within the embrace of the chasm branches and that was in the deep shadow of a vast rampart rising at its further end. A massive fortress, gloomy against the morning. Carnelian felt the hackles rising on his neck. He had seen this place before, though then, so close up, he had not fully appreciated its scale. This was the Blood Gate whose portals, he judged, would overtop a watch-tower of the Guarded Land as much as a Master did a sartlar. Gate-towers on either side rose loftier still. Disturbed, he remembered the instructions the Wise had given him before setting off. ‘Is there enough light?’
His Lefthand murmured into his voice fork, then, nodding a few times, turned to Carnelian. ‘Just enough, apparently, Seraph.’
‘Send the signal.’
As the man relayed the command to the mirrorman on the roof, Carnelian became aware of a glimmering coming as if from the sky. He rose from his chair and advanced towards the screen. Gripping it against the cabin sway he looked up. The towers swooped so high, he could not see their summits, but he saw they grew gills in which clusters of flame-pipes nested like worms. Together with the pipes on the tower behind them, the space upon which Earth-is-Strong was walking was a plain of death. Molochite had not, after all, left Osrakum undefended. In comparison to these structures, the Green Gate was nothing but a flimsy fence. Legions’ boast had not been vainglorious. Had Molochite chosen to remain behind these defences, he would have been invulnerable. Had Osidian dared bring his dragons in so far, they would have been incinerated.
Carnelian fought vertigo as, with a dull shudder, the gates began to open, making it seem the whole world was collapsing. Soon they were moving in between the receding cliffs of bronze. A spindle of grey light widened up ahead as the second pair of portals began to open. The walls of the fortress, its doors and tiers, grew increasingly substantial as their edges caught the light. Rows of tiny figures lined the avenue between the gates. Half-black they were, but not girded with the blood-red cloaks of the Ichorians who had once manned these gates. Instead their garments were green and black and their collars wintry in the gloom.
Carnelian had agreed to lead the funerary procession. Osidian wanted to bring up the rear in case he should have need to linger at the Blood Gate to ensure the Ichorians there swore fealty to him. He had no wish to become imprisoned in Osrakum as had been his fathers for centuries.
The second set of portals parting gave them access to the Canyon beyond. Its walls had been reddened up to a great height as if by a tide of blood. As Earth-is-Strong crossed over the lefthand chasm branch on another span, Carnelian’s gaze descended the barracks’ galleries to the colonnades below, with their machines and piers and counterweights. When he, long ago, had seen these structures, he had not known what they were. Now he recognized them as the mechanisms of a cothon. Arches and berths upon which the Red Ichorian dragon towers had rested disassembled. Racks where their flame-pipes had been stowed. Behind, the shadows must conceal the openings to the stable caves in which the dragons of the Red Legion had slept. All empty now, all smashed and broken and dead at Makar. He brooded over this as they continued down the Canyon; how much had already been lost, how much destroyed.
Ahead, running from cliff to cliff, the final fortress reared its sombre wall. Behind was the Hidden Land of Osrakum. Carnelian’s heart began to beat so loudly he was amazed none in the cabin seemed to hear it. Even as they moved into the shadow of the Black Gate, the leftmost of two portals began to open. Poppy and Krow were standing against the screen, though Carnelian had not noticed them moving forward. He rose, a childlike enthusiasm rising in him to watch the wonder on their faces. Bells began bruising the air. Not a single bell to announce his blood-rank as had happened when he last entered, but a multitude of them, their pealing building echo upon echo until he became sure the Black Gate and the walls of the Canyon must shatter from the reverberation. He did not care, for he had reached the screen and, with a quick glance at Poppy and Krow, he fixed his gaze upon the opening gate.
A landscape wrought from flint. Not blue and smiling, the Skymere, but dark, opaque. Certainly no mirror to heaven. Carnelian looked for the Yden, but its emerald had lost its fire. Dull, it looked, lifeless, its once verdant riot seeming to have been smothered by mould. From its faded heart the Pillar of Heaven rose, a black thorn that seemed to be pricking the brooding sky. The Labyrinth mound seemed no less forbidding than the Isle of Flies. Osrakum’s sacred mountain wall, the curving grin of a greying corpse. The coombs, rotted pockets in which palaces lodged their grey moraine.
Carnelian’s elation drained away. His memory of Osrakum’s beauty died. He was reluctant to look at Poppy’s face, but he could not help himself. It reflected the grey crater. Her expression was very far from wonder. Krow had his arm around her and together they looked, stone-faced, upon what was to be their home. Almost Carnelian said to them that it could be glorious in the sun, but he remembered how dangerous a place this was. Could any amount of beauty compensate for such danger? As he gazed upon the Hidden Land, it occurred to him, grimly, that the face she was showing them now might be her true one.
Down through the Valley of the Gate they went, between the thickets of polygonal columns whose tips bore the shape of men. Not angels, as they had appeared to him the previous time he had seen them; instead a miserable near-faceless multitude, seeming to watch them pass. He brooded on the accepted belief that they were the Quyan host turned to stone.
As a more human assemblage came into sight, at first he felt relief. A rising pyramid of gilded, perfect Masters that enringed the bowl in which the Great were wont to hold their Clave. When last he had gazed upon them, he had been wandering at their feet. From this height, however finely wrought, they seemed mere carvings. The furious fire the sun had lent them then had died. As they slipped past, he watched the bulk of Earth-is-Strong reflected in their gold, fragmented into a many-scaled shadow. It made him shudder. He could not help feeling it was a glimpse of the Darkness-under-the-Trees creeping into Osrakum.
The Valley columns bristled to a sudden end
where they reached the Skymere shore. To either side, as far as Carnelian could see, flights of steps cascaded down to the water. Only the road they were on continued, borne out over the lake on the back of a vast causeway. Sartlar numberless as sand grains had built it and mortared it with their blood. For a moment, Carnelian brooded on the mounds of their dead he and Fern had wandered among upon the battlefield. It seemed that, whatever happened, it was the flesh of the brutes, their blood, that was the matter from which all else was built.
He was woken from his musings by noticing what appeared to be leaden blocks forming a neat barricade across the mouth of the Great Causeway. Not of lead, but silver: the many-wheeled chariots of the Wise. Cordons of dark figures formed a barrier before the steps from amongst whom tendrils of smoke were beginning to rise. Here and there along their line, some furtive glimmers. He leaned forward, squinting through the slits of his mask. Ammonites, crowds of them spilling down the steps, amongst them all manner of structures.
He sat back, thinking. What had to be said would be better said unmasked, even though his face might betray his doubts. ‘Be blind.’
Immediately his Left and Right clasped their hands to their faces and bent forward to touch the backs of their hands to the deck. Carnelian removed his mask and looked at Fern, then Poppy, then Krow. ‘You must leave me and accompany my father and brothers to our . . .’ He tried to find an Ochre word for coomb, but failed. He half pointed in the direction where he knew Coomb Suth lay. ‘Across the water.’
‘Why can’t we stay with you, Carnie?’
‘I need to go on alone, Poppy. Where I’m going, you’d only get in the way. I need to know you’re all safe. And I want you to take care of my father.’
‘What is it you need to do?’ asked Fern, sensing his fear.
‘It’s something dangerous, but something I have to do. Do you trust me?’
Fern, slowly, gave a nod.
‘When will we see you again?’
The Third God Page 64