Carnelian heard in her voice her appalling crisis of loss.
‘We’ve sent word to the other refuges. Soon they’ll begin to arrive. We didn’t want to waste you. It would’ve been greedy to keep you all for ourselves.’ The woman’s eyes glittered as they gazed at him. They seemed to linger greedily. She shook her shrouded head. ‘We lack your skill at torture, but we’ll do our best. I’m sure we’ll manage to make it last long enough for everyone to get their fill.’
Animal fear welled up in Carnelian. ‘Why?’
The eyes flashed. ‘Why? You ask me that? We offered you submission. We grovelled before you. Gave you everything we had.’ The voice was swelling the pain in his head. ‘Vowed everything. We even worshipped you!’
The cry echoed around the cave then died. The woman rose and Carnelian saw from her movement that, under her shrouds, she had human proportions. He could see no flesh, no hands, no feet. Even the eyes had disappeared into the narrow slit in the swaddling of cloth strips.
‘Did you feel invulnerable on your dragon? Did you laugh as you watched our people impaled? Did you revel at your feasts lit by the bodies of my people as they burned alive?’
Carnelian remembered the charred remains. ‘Lepers?’ he muttered, growing cold.
The shrouded head turned as if to listen. ‘What was that?’
‘Were they Lepers?’
‘Yes, just filthy lepers,’ the Leper agreed, ‘and you’re a Master, but still you will dance for our amusement.’
The Leper turned away, her shrouds sighing as they dragged on the floor. When silence fell, Carnelian tried his strength against his bonds, but struggling only served to make them bite deeper into his wrists and ankles. Phantasms of shadow were fluttering in crannies in the rock. The Leper thought him Aurum’s ally. Anger burned up in him that he was to die in Aurum’s place. Thoughts of never seeing Fern or Poppy again caused his mind to falter with despair. Images merged, divided. He saw the Lepers burning, impaled, and they merged with the Ochre dead. He had made it all happen. Akaisha burned beneath the arches of her tree. Aurum, a pillar of ice, did not melt even a tear. No, the cold beauty was Osidian’s. He saw his own face in Osidian’s; Osidian’s in his. Even aged Aurum’s. All cut from the same ice. Each guilty of the other’s crimes.
Afloat on a black sea oppressed by glowering sky. Terror slicing through the depths. Is that dawn spreading livid across the waves? Spume turns to choking dust. Whirling towers of it like smoke. Becalmed upon rusty dunes, he stoops to scoop a handful of red earth. Itching palm. Worms sliming into his honeycomb flesh.
Carnelian woke bucking. He calmed down, heart pounding, letting the dream drain away.
The Leper was there. He shuddered at her touch as she cleaned him like a baby. Her skin rasped against his thighs, his buttocks. Wiping him with leprosy. Trapped between waking horror and his dreams Carnelian had nowhere left to flee.
The shrouds rose over him. Water dribbled into his mouth, trickled down his cheek then neck. ‘Drink.’
A lip of rough earthenware opened his mouth wider, clinked against his teeth. ‘Drink.’
A choking flood. He arched his back, spluttering.
‘You’re not what I expected,’ said the Leper once his coughing had subsided.
Carnelian imagined all kinds of faces deep in the black mouth of her hood: deformities more hideous than the sartlar Kor’s.
‘You don’t believe you will die?’
Carnelian did and longed for it, as the only remaining way out. The Leper leaned close enough for Carnelian to see bandages stretched over a mouth and chin and all the way up the bridge of a nose. The eyes were remote stars reflected in a midnight sea.
‘I’m wrong. I can feel your fear.’ The bandages deformed as the Leper spoke. ‘Beg for your life!’
The scene lost cohesion, dissolved.
‘You’ll beg sure enough when we torture you.’
Carnelian felt he was overhearing a faraway conversation.
‘I saw many plead as they were broken. Cut, crushed, impaled, burned. You watch it, because you can’t turn away. Hard to believe they could still be alive. A mere rag of a thing, blood and piss and shit leaking away, but still watching its tormentor with animal eyes, pouring a scream so sharp it’s nothing more than a gasp.’
Silence. A silence that made Carnelian come back, that made the Leper solid again.
‘Stripped of your power you’re not so different from us.’ She lifted a shrouded arm from which hung a ball of stained cloth. ‘You foul yourself as a man does.’ The arm dropped. ‘Though your beauty is unearthly; your eyes. I can see why you hide behind a mask. Your face is more terrifying than leprosy. But don’t imagine that weakness.. .’ The Leper waved an arm over Carnelian. ‘It won’t save you. My people were more helpless than you look now. We’ll show you we can be as merciless.’
Silence and Carnelian enduring it, trying to stay in the cave.
‘Why did you do it? We offered you submission.’
Carnelian tried to find words.
The Leper jabbed a foot into his ribs. ‘Why?’
Carnelian moistened his mouth to speak. ‘Do Masters need a reason to be cruel?’
The Leper was there again. ‘Where’ve you hidden your auxiliaries?’
Carnelian strung the words together. Auxiliaries?
‘You’re hoping we’ll go back to our homes. You call us vermin. Extermination is a Master’s word.’
Carnelian remembered the pyres and the stench of death in his nostrils as familiar as his own smell.
Light thrust into his face, searing his eyes closed. ‘Where?’
Carnelian tried to turn away, but fingers digging into his cheek forced his head back.
‘Dead,’ he said, moving his jaw against the Leper’s grip. ‘All dead.’
The grip released. ‘Do you take us for fools?’
‘It’s true.’
‘You expect me to believe that?’
‘We killed them all.’
‘What’re you talking about?’
Carnelian tried to describe the battle as he recalled it, in snatches. As each jewel-bright impression flashed into his mind he tried to hook words to it. He fell silent, aching for his loved ones.
‘Are you trying to tell me the Plainsmen defeated you?’
Carnelian registered the Leper’s incredulity as it mixed with his confusion. Clarity came as a vision of a landscape columned by rising smoke.
‘Are you?’
Carnelian managed a nod.
‘All were destroyed?’
‘All,’ Carnelian said, as memory dug its roots into him. Pyres burned the smiling dead. Trees burned. The Koppie Crag with darkness coiled around it like a snake. Poppy’s face striped by tears. Flashes of light, smothering dark, faces, familiar, strange. The living and the dead. Enmeshing memory and dream.
When he surfaced again in the cave the Leper was gone. A lamp guttering was causing shadows in the walls to shudder like mourners.
‘You were travelling with Marula. We followed you. We’re sure they had no brass around their necks.’
Carnelian groaned. ‘I told you before: the auxiliaries are all dead.’
The Leper shifted her shapeless shrouds. ‘There was a girl with you, a Plainsman girl.’
Carnelian’s heart leapt. ‘Poppy.’
‘Your slave?’
Carnelian tried to shake his head.
‘Why weren’t you wearing a mask? Why the rags? Were you disguised? It doesn’t make sense.’
Carnelian began rambling, discovering his past even as he was coining it into words.
‘Living with them? You were living with Plainsmen?’
Carnelian brought the Leper into focus. ‘They gave us sanctuary.’ That last word chimed like a bell, then he was overwhelmed with loss, with the horror of what he had allowed to happen.
‘Why are you crying?’ said the Leper, her voice huskier with alarm.
Carnelian staunched his tears. The dead
demanded not tears, but atonement.
‘Sanctuary from whom?’
Carnelian responded to the gentleness in the Leper’s voice. ‘Other Masters.’
Carnelian sensed her surprise.
‘You fought with the Plainsmen against the auxiliaries?’ she whispered. ‘You were fighting the Master who is our enemy…?’
‘Aurum,’ Carnelian said, tasting the syllables as if his breath had become that of a corpse.
‘Au-rum,’ the Leper repeated. ‘It’s strange to know our enemy by name.’ She leaned towards him. ‘You hate him too. I can see it in your face.’
‘I hate all the Masters. All.’
The Leper waited for the echoes to fade. ‘But him most of all.’
Carnelian almost explained how Aurum had had his uncle put to death, but that did not feel right. The Lepers had primacy when it came to loss at Aurum’s hand.
‘Then you weren’t involved in… in the atrocities…?’
Carnelian managed a dry chuckle, almost a cough. ‘You’re wrong. I am involved. Aurum came down here searching for… for me.’
The shrouded head nodded. ‘But if he’s your enemy why are you prepared to die in his place?’
Carnelian grew suddenly fatigued, worn out, despairing that he could not find enough energy to confess his crimes.
His buttocks were raw. The discomfort he could bear, but he was enough himself to feel the humiliation of being cleaned like a baby. When the Leper had finished she brought a bowl of water to his lips. He drank, trying to pierce the shadow in her shrouds.
‘There’s no need for you to have to keep doing this,’ he said. He lifted his ankles to show their bindings. ‘Loose me then I can relieve myself decently.’
The Leper drew back. ‘So you can try to escape?’
Carnelian’s heart leapt at the thought of rejoining his people. He shook his head. He had been a prisoner for days; they must be long gone.
‘Even if you managed to pass through our caves, you’d be lost in our land. We’d hunt you down.’
Carnelian smiled. ‘Well then.’
The Leper looked down her cowl at him for a while. ‘Roll over.’
Carnelian did as he was told. He felt her working at the knots and bore the pain as the rope peeled away from his wounded flesh. His arms seemed wood as he brought them round in front of him. He grimaced as he saw his wrists; the colours of bronze and so swollen that they did not seem to belong to him at all. He sat up to watch the Leper free his legs. Her bandaged hands were nimble. He imagined the skin beneath the bandages with its sores, its thickened plaques. It quickened fear in him that he must now be a leper.
When his feet came loose, he gingerly drew them apart, grimacing at the ache and stiffness.
The Leper laughed. ‘You’ll have difficulty standing on those, never mind escaping.’
Her laughter was a warm sound. Not meant unkindly. Relief perhaps.
‘What’re you called?’ he said.
The Leper regarded him in her motionless way. ‘Lily.’
His face must have betrayed his surprise because she added: ‘Do you think a leper has no right to a pretty name?’
Carnelian shrugged, discomfited.
‘And you?’ Lily said.
Carnelian told her and was charmed by how she pronounced it. ‘Do you wear those shrouds even among your own kind?’
Lily turned her head to one side. ‘Why do you ask?’
Carnelian shrugged. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘Perhaps it’s because I’m monstrously disfigured.’
‘I’ve seen much disfigurement.’
He sensed her anger in the cast of her shoulders. ‘How like a Master that you should only be capable of seeing this from your own perspective.’
Carnelian was stung by this rebuke, not least because it was justified. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘A Master apologizing to a leper?’ She laughed. ‘Incredibly, you seem to have the capacity for pity. Keep it for yourself, Master.’
Her bandaged hands rose to her cowl. As she pulled it back, a cascade of white hair was released that, for a moment, blinded Carnelian to anything else. It was not old woman’s hair, but thick and lustrous. Then he saw her skin, rosy, pale as one of the Chosen. There was something strange about her eyes. She held his gaze and he saw they were the colour of watered blood.
‘You like my eyes?’
Carnelian could not think what to say.
Lily began to unwrap the lower half of her face. Each unwinding showed more of a wide, flat nose. He tensed, fearing the ragged wound of a mouth that would make a mockery of her strange beauty. Her lips appeared, a washed-out coral, but unflawed.
The last bandage fell away from her small chin. Her eyebrows and lashes were white. Carnelian gazed, mesmerized. ‘You’re beautiful.. .’
Her eyes darkened. ‘Who did the Enemy, Au-rum, kill? Someone you loved?’
Carnelian told her about Crail, then: ‘And you?’
She looked puzzled. ‘Is it possible all Masters are like you under their masks?’
Carnelian frowned. ‘No. Most of them are like Aurum. Pray you never see him unmasked. The atrocities against your people he carried out with indifference or for his amusement.’
Lily’s eyes grew dark as roses. ‘Lust for revenge withers my heart; the hearts of all the Lepers. He murdered everyone I loved.’
On the cave wall, shadows played out the scenes of torture and death that Carnelian had witnessed the Masters inflicting; that he had inflicted.
‘You’re not to blame.’
Carnelian turned on her. ‘You don’t know that!’
Her shock chased away his anger. ‘My actions, my inaction, have brought disaster on those I’ve loved. I was a fool to believe I could escape what I am. We’re a cancer.’
Lily nodded. ‘One for which there is no cure.’
‘Perhaps,’ Carnelian said, not seeing her, seeing only Osidian’s face, Aurum’s, the sheer, invulnerable ramparts of Osrakum. ‘I would cut it out and burn it if I could find a way.’
He became aware of how intensely Lily was looking at him. ‘I believe you would.’
She chewed her lip. Carnelian waited, knowing she wanted to tell him something. She made her decision. ‘Your Marula are looking for you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They search the Valleys for you.’
Carnelian had been certain that the Marula, driven by Osidian’s obsession with reaching the Guarded Land before Aurum, must be far away by now. ‘Have they done violence to your people?’
Lily shook her head. ‘Though they threaten it if you’re not returned.’
Such restraint on Osidian’s part made Carnelian uneasy. ‘You shouldn’t trust him.’
‘Him?’
‘They’re led by another Master who’s more like Aurum than he’s like me.’
‘But he too is Au-rum’s enemy?’
Carnelian considered this. ‘For the moment.’ When it came to wars between themselves, Masters were driven more by whatever might bring political advantage than by their feelings.
‘So you don’t want to be given back to him?’
Carnelian probed Lily’s red eyes. He thought of Fern and of Poppy. He thought of playing the game. ‘You told me your people are being gathered to watch me die.’
‘They are, but it’s not you they really hate.’
‘One Master will seem to them very much like another.’
‘That’s true, but I now believe you are different.’
Lily offered him a shroud. She looked angry at his hesitation. ‘Take it. Put it on – or are you too proud?’
Carnelian regarded the rags. To take them was to confirm what he already knew. He might prefer death to living as a leper. He imagined Poppy shunning him, Fern. ‘I don’t think I can return.’
‘Why not?’ she demanded.
He indicated the shrouds she was holding out to him.
She looked puzzled. Then her white eyebrows ros
e. ‘You mean as a leper?’
Grimly, Carnelian nodded.
To his surprise Lily threw back her head and laughed. ‘I thought you would’ve noticed I’m clean.’
Carnelian stared at her. ‘But… why then do you wear a shroud?’ Before she had a chance to answer he knew it already. ‘A disguise…’
‘A leper’s all but invisible to the Clean. As an object of horror we’re almost invulnerable. They may cast stones, but that’s just fear. We slip through their cities like shadows.’
Carnelian felt as if she had given him the gift of life. When she offered him the shrouds again, he took them and she helped him put them on.
They crept through the darkness along the edge of a river. Though Lily held a lamp aloft it cast little light. Carnelian felt his way with feet and hands. Then the rock fell away, opening into a cavern, its ceiling low enough to force him to stoop. A diamond-bright slot oozed light in from the outside. Squinting, Carnelian could make out furtive movements. Soon they were passing through an encampment. Chambers had been made by hanging rugs from the rock. Within these lurked thickly shrouded shapes. As he drew closer to the source of light Carnelian almost had to close his eyes against its intensity. People shuffled like ghosts. They drew away from his path as if it were he who was a leper.
When they reached the entrance of the cave Carnelian had to turn his back on the flood of light. His head ached. He felt dizzy.
Lily touched his arm. ‘Are you strong enough?’
‘I just need some time for my eyes to adjust.’
Looking back into the cavern, he could see people more clearly. Hunched, bony women. Tiny mounds of filthy cloth from which children’s limbs projected as thin as sticks.
‘Where’re your men?’ he said.
‘I lied to you. Most died defending their families.’ She pulled at his arm. ‘Come on.’
Lily led him down to the bank. There, concealed under some ferns, was a boat sewn from bundled reeds. Carnelian helped her launch it on the stream. The water was a braided mirror to the fully risen sun. Its rays sliced into his head. The slow rocking of the boat soothed him. A gentle breeze cooled his face as they drifted along the bank. Squinting, he could see Lily using a pole to keep them from running aground.
When he offered to take the pole, she shook her head. ‘I’ll do it better.’
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