The Third God

by Ricardo Pinto

  ‘Ebeny? Poppy?’

  Tain smiled. ‘As safe as worms in an apple.’

  As they walked on in silence, the warmth that came from the thought of seeing Poppy and Ebeny again was slow to fade. Their scuffling footfalls echoing back from distant walls made it seem they were creeping through vast caverns.

  Carnelian jumped when Tain spoke. ‘Why’s the lake rising?’

  ‘It’s already falling.’

  Tain nodded as if Carnelian had given him an extensive explanation. Carnelian sensed his brother was building up to something.

  ‘More than a month ago smoke started drifting out from the Canyon right out over the water. A few days later we heard you’d taken control of the Blood Gate.’

  ‘Who told you that?’ Carnelian said, anxious that news of the disaster might have reached Coomb Suth already.

  ‘Some Masters came to visit Father. We talked to their tyadra.’

  Carnelian judged they must have come to ask his father to attend the Clave. What had they told him about what was going on?

  Tain broke into his musing. ‘The second time they came, Master Opalid left with them.’

  ‘What happened when he returned?’

  ‘He went straight to Father.’

  Carnelian nodded. His heart sank. His father would know about the summoning of the legions, then, but it was he who was going to have to tell him about their destruction. And about the part he had played in all of this.

  ‘How is he?’

  Tain’s face tensed again. ‘Weak and spending most of his time alone.’

  Carnelian nodded, sad. ‘That’s him all right.’

  ‘Even Keal hardly sees him.’

  ‘Ebeny?’

  ‘Mother tends to him when he lets her.’ Tain glanced at him. ‘She’d love to see you.’

  ‘I’ll go to her after I’ve seen Father. And Poppy?’

  Tain lit up. ‘She’ll be with Mother. It’s as if they’ve known each other all their lives.’

  Carnelian drew some much-needed comfort from that.

  ‘Of course, if she’s heard you’re here, we might all be seeing her much sooner than we think.’

  Carnelian saw the wry grin on his brother’s face, then on Fern’s, and all three burst into laughter that soon came swooping back from all directions out of the blackness as if the whole world was laughing with them.

  They came to a guarded door where carved warding eyes gave warning they were about to enter the halls of the first lineage. The guardsmen looked uncertain, but began to kneel. He stopped them with his hand and advanced on one whom he recognized as Naith, who grew tearful recognizing his Master’s son and kissed his hand.

  The chambers beyond were warmed by light and a smell of home that brought tears to Carnelian’s eyes. When far from prying ears, Tain asked him, bluntly, why he had come now and with the black barbarians.

  That reminded Carnelian. ‘Is the homunculus safe?’

  ‘The little man? Safe enough.’

  Carnelian saw his brother wanted his question answered. ‘Difficult times are coming, Tain. I’ve a plan to save us all, but before I can speak of it, I must talk to Father.’

  ‘Of course, Carnie,’ Tain said, leaving Carnelian troubled by the trust in his brother’s face, but also more determined.

  At last they reached immense white doors. Carnelian saw Keal among some guards, and rushed forward to catch him by the arms to stop him kneeling. He kissed him. ‘My brother.’

  Keal blushed. ‘He’s expecting you,’ he whispered, as if he wished not to wake some invalid beyond the doors. Carnelian eyed them with some faltering of his purpose. They looked so much like the doors of his father’s hall in the Hold. Of course, he realized, it was the other ones that were a copy. His child’s eyes had made those seem massive; these doors really were.

  ‘Keal, are we secure from any outside attack?’

  ‘We are, Master.’

  There was a certain look in his brother’s face, the same in Tain’s, in that of the other guardsmen. All there were relating what was happening to what had happened on the island. Then the danger had come from Aurum and the other Masters arriving on their black ship. Though his people did not know it yet, the situation now was even more perilous.

  Carnelian turned to Fern. ‘Please wait here.’

  Fern looked unhappy, but nodded. Carnelian cleared his mind and turned to the doors. They were an ivory mosaic of chameleons whose eyes were rusty iron rivets. He struck one of the doors three times with the heel of his hand. As the doors opened, through the gap between them he saw a fire. Beyond it, sculpted by its light, the shape of a Master. For a moment Carnelian felt the weight of time falling from him. He was a boy again, coming to tell his father of the approach of a black ship.

  ‘Celestial.’

  Carnelian hated his father greeting him thus. It was another barrier between them. As the old man removed his mask, his gaze alighted on him, before flicking away to take in the shadowy limits of the hall. Carnelian was sure he had seen in those grey eyes the love that his father found too difficult to express.

  His father’s frown crumpled further his lined face. ‘You must find these palaces cold, unwelcoming, but as you surely know, Celestial, resources are at the moment restricted.’

  He seemed very old, then. Coming alive again, he fixed Carnelian with his gaze. ‘If only you had sent us warning of your visit.’

  Carnelian grew angry. ‘This is a lot more than a visit!’ The anger left him. His father looked so vulnerable, but he had to know the truth. ‘The legions have all been destroyed.’

  His father’s bones seemed suddenly to soften. He collapsed into a chair that the silk slopes of his robe had concealed.

  ‘Father,’ Carnelian cried, moving forward, but then was stayed by his father flinging up his hand in a barrier gesture. ‘All?’

  ‘All.’

  His father sagged. ‘Then it is over.’

  Carnelian felt sick at heart with the need to help him, to touch him, to be touched by him. ‘It is I who have brought this thing to pass.’

  His father raised his eyes as if trying to make him out at some vast distance. ‘You? Have you forgotten my warnings to you about the Chosen? How dangerous we are? It was only the Balance of the Powers that kept us caged. Without it, it was always fated we should fall upon each other like beasts. The Balance was the only thing keeping us from another internecine war that would lay the whole world waste.’

  Carnelian was afraid that his father had lost his mind. ‘That war was fought and, seemingly, won, but now the world is destined to fall into famine and ruin.’

  His father lifted a bony hand shaping a contemptuous sign of negation. ‘The Great will never submit to domination by the House of the Masks.’ His gaze fell raptor-like on Carnelian, who desperately wanted him to make sense. ‘You think you’ve seen a civil war, my Lord? You’ve seen nothing! If the Chosen are given the means to wage war upon each other, they will do so to the death.’ His father’s hand wavered in more negation. ‘The Balance, bought at the price of the previous war, is our only hope to maintain the harmony of the Commonwealth. It is we, all of us, who have conspired to shatter its mirror.’ His eyes dulled. ‘But perhaps it is foolish to hope that the Balance should stand for ever. Who can hope to build a rampart proof against the sea?’

  Carnelian felt lost. He had so much counted on his father’s strength. The horror of what he had witnessed at the Gates piled onto that of the battlefield. It seemed as if he were succumbing to an avalanche of corpses. ‘I broke the Balance!’

  His father regarded him with a frown of incomprehension. ‘Molochite . . .’

  Carnelian was unable to dam the pouring out of a confession of his actions, of his influence on Osidian, of the influence on everything of his dreams and, as he did so, he was aware of his father’s face softening and, when his father put out his hands, he hesitated, but laid his own upon his father’s, whose thin fingers closed about them, tenderly. ‘Son
, dreams are the chief way by which the gods communicate with men.’ He smiled. ‘Perhaps not “gods”, but those forces that move the world. Why did you follow your dreams?’

  Carnelian frowned back tears, trying to find the words, eventually finding only one. ‘Compassion.’ A strange word; in Quya sounding almost shameful. His father smiled up at him, seeming suddenly very wise. ‘It was your heart that listened.’ He nodded, still smiling. ‘Then you have done only what was necessary.’

  Carnelian gazed down at his father, something of whose former beauty shone out from his wasted face. ‘You say that, even though it has brought us all to ruin?’

  The light went out in his father’s face. He let go Carnelian’s hands and folded his own together over his stomach as if nursing an ache. He gazed up, a strange, fearful expression in his eyes. ‘In truth, my first reaction to your news was relief.’

  Carnelian stared at him.

  ‘It has lifted a burden from me. For a long, long time,’ he sighed the words, ‘I have thought of nothing but the succession here.’ He lifted his chin to take in the vast darkness round them. ‘Several times have you been taken from me. The last time, I knew the ruling of this House must pass to Opalid.’

  ‘But I sent you word to reassure you.’

  His father smiled grimly. ‘The Maruli?’ And when Carnelian nodded, ‘It was not easy for me to believe you.’ He laughed, grimly. ‘How has it come to this: that I should find relief in the ending of the world?’ His eyes fell bright upon Carnelian. ‘You think me selfish?’

  Carnelian did not know how to answer. It seemed so, but he too had a yearning to be free of the care of others.

  His father’s head dropped and he seemed to be watching one of his hands as it crushed the knuckles of the other. ‘Whereas you have always followed your heart, I have striven to cut mine out.’ There was fury in his eyes as he glanced up. ‘As we teach and are taught to do.’ He looked away. ‘We face the world with our masks as proud and blind as the Sacred Wall. We raise these ramparts even between ourselves.’ He turned back to Carnelian, haunted. ‘Even on our island, far from Osrakum and the Law-that-must-be-obeyed, I told myself I must maintain this aloofness for your sake; for one day you must return here. Nevertheless, you know, to your cost, how poorly I prepared you to be Chosen.’ His face twisted as if he had something bitter in his mouth. ‘I lied to myself. It was for my own sake that I held onto my pride. In that remoteness, I was terrified I would cease to be Chosen.’ His eyes grew bright with tears. ‘You see, it became so difficult to believe that I was an angel. Even behind my mask, I was changing. I tried to blind myself to my degeneration by keeping before me always a vision of Osrakum and the manufactured hope and fantasy of return.’ He closed his eyes and breathed deep. ‘Powers and Essences forgive me, but when I saw in your face you were not of my blood, I seized on the danger to you as the excuse I needed not to return. In truth I did not want to return and we would not have, had the black ship not come.

  ‘When it did, I turned against my heart; intoxicated by visions of a glorious return; telling myself I had to do it for your sake.’ He looked up at Carnelian, tenderly. ‘Truly, however misguided, for your sake.’ He looked away into the darkness. ‘I hid deep in my heart my fear, my grief. For all my vaunted pride, my world had shrunk down to the limits of that small island. And, yet, it did not feel too small. It was full and warm. Everything I loved was there. Still, I allowed it to be destroyed and brought all that I should have sought to protect, from safety, here to this terrible place.’

  Carnelian reached down to take his father’s hands. ‘By not heeding your warnings before the battle, I have done the same.’

  His father gave him a crooked smile. ‘Well, it seems that everyone we love is now to die.’

  Carnelian shook his head. ‘There is still hope they can be saved.’

  His father regarded him as if he feared him mad, but, as Carnelian explained his plan, that look left his father’s face. ‘Your dreams led you to this?’

  ‘I think so.’

  His father frowned. Carnelian was glad he did not go on to ask about how all the difficulties of his plan could possibly be overcome. What Carnelian was choosing to believe in was already the merest thread upon which to hang their hope, but it was all he had. ‘We will have to survive here for several days.’ Both knew that, once news got out that Osrakum was doomed, violent chaos would soon take possession of the coombs. Theirs would not be proof against it. As they talked, Carnelian sneaked sidelong glances at his father’s wasted face. Some part of him was testing what he felt for this man, who was and yet was not his father, but gradually the tension in his stomach lessened. He knew that what he felt was love.

  ‘You know Ebeny yearns to see you?’

  Carnelian nodded. ‘I shall go to her now.’

  Emerging from his father’s hall, Carnelian saw Krow between Tain and Fern. Carnelian smiled at him. He was not sure what he had expected back – certainly not Krow’s frown and his refusal to meet his gaze. As the guardsmen sank to their knees, clumsily, Krow did so too, even though Tain and Fern remained standing. Krow was dressed in the same way as the other guardsmen and could easily have passed for one of them were it not that his face was free of the chameleon tattoo. Carnelian reminded himself of how long Krow had been here in this daunting world among the tyadra. It was foolish to have expected him to remain unaffected by the awe with which these men regarded their Masters. He glanced round to make sure the white door was closed before he commanded them all to rise. ‘Fern, I’m going to see Tain’s mother. Do you want to come with me?’ Those words put pain in Fern’s eyes, but he gave a nod. Carnelian was aware Krow had glanced up.

  ‘Krow . . . ?’

  When the youth looked again, Carnelian held his gaze. ‘Do you want to come with us?’

  Krow gave a nod, as Carnelian had hoped he would.

  Tain brought them to a door and turned to Carnelian. ‘I won’t come in with you.’

  Carnelian nodded.

  ‘I’m not allowed . . . not allowed to enter,’ said Krow.

  Carnelian gave him a glance of concern, wondering why not: only Chosen women were subject to restrictive access. Clearly, Krow knew whose door this was, yet his tone implied he did not feel welcome there; but, if so, why had he agreed to come with them?

  Fern’s face arrested any more conjectures. He seemed to be on the crumbling edge of some precipice. Carnelian’s pounding heart forced even this from his mind. Somewhere behind that door was Ebeny, whom he thought of as his mother. Almost he rapped upon the door in the special way that, in the Hold, had announced to Ebeny it was he. That had been another time. He gave the door a simple knock. Moments later it opened just enough to reveal a sliver of a face he recognized. The eye and mouth lit up. It was Poppy and he expected her to fling the door open and run to him, but she did not, instead biting her lip, half turning. ‘It’s Master Carnelian . . .’

  ‘Well, let him in, dear,’ said a voice in the chamber beyond. A voice that put a stone in Carnelian’s throat.

  The door opened fully and Poppy was there, looking past him, blushing. He was aware of Krow shuffling, but Carnelian’s eyes were all for the small woman standing waiting for them.

  ‘Krow’s here, Aunty. Can I talk to him?’

  The little woman gave a slow nod, her attention on Carnelian as he advanced towards her. She knelt before he could reach her. ‘Master.’

  Carnelian frowned, angry, upset, but respecting her wish for decorum, in some ways welcoming it as a way to keep his feelings under control. His instinct was to rush forward, to kneel before her, to kiss her, but he was no longer a child. Looking down at her bowed head, he saw with a kind of anguish how grey her hair had become.

  ‘Please get up,’ he said and stooped to help her rise, her smell stinging his eyes with tears.

  She gazed up at him. She was so much smaller than he remembered, but with the same dear face, a little more lined, and the same bright eyes shining out b
etween the legs of her tattoo. He stooped again, embraced her, resisted the desire to pick her up, to show her his strength. Now, that felt inappropriate. He kissed her face and she kissed his, then, as he unbent, she took his hands and lifted them to her cheek, stealing wet-eyed looks at him. They nodded at each other, little nods to punctuate their taking stock of each other.

  ‘It seems we’ve both survived.’

  He grinned through his tears at her. ‘Yes, little mother.’

  She warmed at his words, even as they both settled back into the comfort of their love for each other. Then he remembered Fern. Turning, still holding Ebeny’s hands, Carnelian saw him standing stunned. ‘This is—’

  ‘Fern. I know . . .’ she said. Carnelian saw the pain in her face. At first he was confused, then it became clear: of course Poppy had told her everything. Ebeny knew they had come from the Koppie, the home the childgatherer had torn her from. She knew of their years there, of the massacre of her tribe, of Akaisha, her sister.

  She squeezed his hands then released them, moving past him, approaching Fern, tears glistening down creases in her cheeks. ‘Sister’s son,’ she whispered, in Ochre, opening her arms for him.

  Fern gazed at her, a forlorn child. Carnelian made himself blind, not wanting to see him so vulnerable. Fern knelt as he entered her embrace. She turned enough for Carnelian to see her eyes, wild, speaking to him. He gave a nod, slipped away, aware of her small body trying to comfort Fern’s sobbing.

  While he waited for Fern, Carnelian summoned the homunculus. When the little man arrived, he confirmed he had enough knowledge of the metallurgy of the Wise to help restore the ladder to the Marula’s Lower Reach.

  Fern emerged from his meeting with Ebeny transformed. He smiled, he laughed a lot and cried too in Carnelian’s arms. He seemed much more the man he had been before grief had overwhelmed him.

  Carnelian had need of him in the days that followed. He and his father made plans for the attempt to escape Osrakum. No one would be forced to go, and only those who had been with them on the island would be invited. Carnelian asked many himself. Tain and Keal approached the others. Most of the older people chose to stay, claiming the Master and the household were the only world they knew. When the young lit up, eager for the adventure, their parents exchanged sad glances with each other, and with Carnelian. As well as they, he knew how quickly innocent hope could be crushed by bleak reality. Still, they put on smiles, so as not to take the light from their children’s eyes, urging them to go, comforting them when they realized they were going to be leaving their grandparents behind.