Morunasa was frowning. ‘The Master commanded me to remain with you.’
‘Well, I am commanding you to return to him.’ Carnelian examined Morunasa’s face, unsure he would obey him. ‘Tell the Master that Aurum returned yesterday from the Leper Valleys and that he’s not had the time to replenish his naphtha tanks. You understand?’
Morunasa glared at the ground. ‘Yes, Master.’
‘Then go.’
Carnelian had two of his twenty Marula give up their mounts. One aquar went to the local legionary he had chosen to act as guide. Then he approached the other empty saddle-chair. He removed his cloak and gave it to Sthax, who was holding the aquar’s reins. As Carnelian had hoped, the Maruli had managed to include himself in the twenty Morunasa had left behind. He thanked him, then clambered aboard.
After a Plainsman chair this one felt too loose. There was a problem with his feet. Instinctively, he had been trying to get them in contact with the aquar’s back, but the shape of the chair would not allow this. Besides, he could feel nothing through his ranga soles. He was growing increasingly irritated. He recalled that auxiliaries used stirrups and he managed to find them, then slip his leathered toes into them. It felt unnatural. As he tried to make the aquar rise all that happened was that his feet pushed ineffectually into the stirrups. Then he remembered the reins, which he found wrapped around the pommel of the saddle-chair. He unwound them, then pulled. Startled, the aquar threw back its head, flaring its eye-plumes. Cursing under his breath, Carnelian pulled more gently and the creature finally lifted him into the air. He checked to see Sthax was mounted, then he gave the command for the legionary guide to ride ahead.
As they left the cothon, Carnelian glanced back at Earth-is-Strong. He was reluctant to leave her, but had confidence in his Hands. On reaching the road their legionary guide turned right and Carnelian sped after him. His exhilaration at feeling the familiar rhythm of an aquar’s gait was diminished only by the difficulty of directing the creature with the reins. He worried that the bit in its mouth was hurting it. He disliked not having his feet on its pulsing warmth. He realized with surprise how much he had relied on this contact to sense how the creature was feeling.
Passing through a gateway they came upon the barracks and stables of auxiliaries. Everything looked in order, but empty. The men who had been lodged here he had left as carrion in the Earthsky.
Soon they were leaving the buildings behind. Loping along the edge of the ravine they came to where a branch of it was crossed by a bridge to a wall pierced by a single bronze door that was studded with silver ammonite shells. As he brought his aquar to a halt, he regarded the door, knowing it was the entry to a sanctum. It would probably be as empty as the rest of the fortress save, perhaps, for the households of Aurum and his commanders. Over the sanctum wall he could see, rising in the distance, the tower of the Legate of Makar and, thus, Aurum’s tower. No doubt it had a heliograph on its roof and he could not rid himself of the nagging worry that it was to this tower that the watch-towers on the road had sent a message. He dismounted and, reluctantly, crossed the bridge.
The bronze gate opened before he reached it and a figure appeared in its shadow. It performed a prostration as Carnelian approached. Its head, rising, revealed the silver mirror of an ammonite blinding mask with its solid spiral eyes.
‘Welcome, Seraph,’ the dead silver lips said in pure Quya.
‘On whose behalf do you welcome me, ammonite?’ Carnelian replied, in the same tongue.
The man made an expansive gesture cramped by uncertainty. ‘Makar, the fortress, Seraph… my Lord the Legate is not in residence.’
Carnelian had an intuition. ‘You are the quaestor here?’
‘Just so, Seraph.’
Carnelian wondered that the man had come himself, but then he considered that this quaestor might well suspect something of what had transpired to the north. Perhaps he had even observed it from the Legate’s tower. Carnelian gazed down at the quaestor. The man would have as many questions as he did. Carnelian corrected himself. Not curiosity, but necessity had brought the quaestor here. His duty was to be the eyes and ears for his masters, the Wise. He had much to gain from any information he could send to them; everything to lose if he failed them in any way. Carnelian felt a stab of sympathy for him. ‘How many Chosen lie within this sanctum?’
The blinding mask cocking to one side seemed a pantomime of surprise. ‘Why, none, Seraph. All left some time ago with my Lord Aurum. None have returned.’
‘What instructions did he leave you?’
‘None, Seraph, save that we should await his return.’
Carnelian considered his next question carefully. ‘And you have received none from your masters in Osrakum?’
The mask retreated a little as if Carnelian had threatened him. ‘As the Seraph must know, such information is vouched inviolable by the Protocol of the Three Powers.’
‘I was merely wondering why a watch-tower would seek to send an alert here before even considering sending one to Osrakum.’
The quaestor retracted his hands into the sleeves of his robe as if he feared they were about to betray him. In reply all he managed was an uneven shrug. Carnelian saw in this behaviour confirmation of his suspicions. He peered over his head into the dark recesses beyond. There was a suggestion of lazy curlings in the air. He could smell the narcotic smoke. ‘I will enter.’
‘As the Seraph wishes,’ said the quaestor. He rose to his feet, stooping as he moved aside.
Carnelian beckoned the Marula, who held back, snatching furtive glances into the dark opening. Even Sthax seemed reluctant to obey him. Carnelian had to motion more insistently before he and the other Marula began to approach. He had taken one step towards the threshold of the sanctum when the quaestor’s hand jerked up to loosen his mask. One eye was revealed and a sliver of his sallow, tattooed face. He fixed the Marula with a glare that stopped them in mid stride. They regarded him as if he were a serpent who had sprung up in their path.
Slipping the mask back over his face, he turned to Carnelian. ‘These unclean animals cannot enter here.’
‘I intend that they should,’ said Carnelian.
The quaestor pointed vaguely to where Carnelian could see some steps cut up the sanctum wall. ‘They must first pass through the quarantine.’
‘Nevertheless, I am determined they will enter with me.’
The quaestor raised his hands as clutching claws. ‘This cannot be, Seraph, the Law forbids it!’
Carnelian sensed the man’s distress was genuine enough. ‘This place is destitute of Seraphim. I myself have no time to be cleansed and no wish to suffer the delay of subjecting myself to fresh ritual protection when I leave. I shall keep the one I wear. If by thus entering the sanctum it shall become polluted, then so be it.’
The quaestor was shaking his head erratically, his hands trembling as if he were having a fit. Carnelian reached out to calm him. At his touch the man jerked back, colliding with the jamb. He wrapped his arms around his chest. ‘At least, Seraph, I beg you, allow yourself. .. and these others…’ His hand trembled out, then quickly returned to grip his shoulder. ‘To be purified as best we can with smoke.’
Carnelian could see no harm in that. ‘Very well.’
As Carnelian edged into the gloom, Sthax and the other Marula followed. Smoke curled thick tendrils round them. The quaestor fussed, muttering instructions. Carnelian felt his face swelling into his mask as if it were the shell of a sprouting seed. Sweet myrrh crept into him with every breath, jellying his bones. When his legs faltered, hands appeared from the darkness to steady him. Censers, swinging, layered the air with thicker smoke that had a peculiar, stale odour he had not smelled before. Needles pierced his temples. He heard his voice far away cry out as he spun down into darkness.
His father in a chair, his back to him, while their hands down his spine find him wanting. He calls out, but his voice is the cry of a gull. Carnelian feels thunder coming. Through the window
a cliff of water rolls black towards them. Seaweed smell, so like blood. Dripping red from his father’s fist as it opens offering twin pearls to a charnel mouth. Angling hand, they begin to roll. Carnelian screams: don’t let them go! It is his hand, he tries to close it, but the pearls melt into tears that dribble between his fingers. Watering a hole in the ground. Two pits side by side. His father gazes at him, eyeless.
Carnelian came awake struggling against the undertow of his dreams. He saw a young boy with a face halved by a thread tattoo. On either side an amethyst almond for an eye, a blushing cheek. Split by the tattoo, the boy’s lips were moving. A grim tide was sucking Carnelian back into sleep. He heard the words ‘quaestor’… ‘letter’. He tried to move to break his nightmare’s hold on him. The hollow stone of his head surged with pain. The spasm subsided enough for him to open his eyes. The boy was gone. Carnelian tried to make sense of where he was; to resolve the fractured symmetries of the chamber. Guttering flambeaux gave twisting life to peculiar machines of brass and ivory and glass. Floors and walls meeting at strange angles seemed covered with tapestries and carpets of crusted blood. The boy returned holding a vessel of white jade so thin it looked like ice. Within its milky membrane water swayed. Drinking it quenched the fire in Carnelian’s head and lungs. Straining to resolve the impossible symmetries of the chamber, he realized it was full of mirrors. Contorted surfaces of silver, of gold polished to the consistency of torrid air. Slopes of glass that gave reflections so perfect he could only discern them by their frames. There were far fewer machines than he had imagined. Frameworks of bone slid and turned in subtle, repetitive movement. Discs and pivots. Brass and copper twitching. Liquid silver pouring with a strange inner radiance. He could not understand what anything was.
The blinded boy spoke again. ‘Master, the quaestor is without. He bears a letter addressed to you.’
Carnelian recognized something about the boy’s face. The blue filament that divided his face in two split near his hairline into the broken circle of a horned-ring. A horned-ring staff. Aurum’s cypher. Carnelian gazed around the chamber. The red samite hangings were flecked with the same forked-needle cypher. He glanced down. His eyes confirmed what his skin felt: his body had been freed from the bindings of the ritual protection. His skin felt so clean he imagined he could breathe through it if he chose. ‘This is the tower of the Legate of Makar?’
‘It is, my Master,’ the boy said.
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Less than a day, Master.’
‘And how did I get here?’
The boy hesitated and Carnelian noticed his shivering, which was not from cold. He realized he could smell the boy, smell his fear. There was another odour so pervasive Carnelian had been breathing it in unnoticed. Attar of lilies. A sharp heavy blanketing of it that he was only aware of through its contrast with the odour from the boy.
‘I have no memory of coming here,’ he said as gently as he could, but this only served to terrify the boy more. ‘Whatever you tell me,’ Carnelian said, ‘no harm will come to you.’
The boy was struggling for composure. ‘The quaestor brought you, Master. His ammonites bore you here on a litter.’
Carnelian remembered entering the purgatory. The smoke was still so heavy in his lungs he was momentarily surprised it did not curl out on his breath. ‘And he is here with a letter for me?’
‘He is, Master.’
The boy took some steps back as Carnelian, gingerly, swung his legs out from under the feather blanket. The boy stooped to slipper his feet before they settled on the stone floor. Carnelian considered sending him to fetch the letter, but decided he would like to talk to the quaestor. ‘I must dress.’
‘How does my Master wish to be adorned?’
Carnelian could see how the prospect of fulfilling what was clearly one of his functions calmed the boy. He looked for his cloak and robe, but could see nothing as drab as those among the fleshy tones that Aurum favoured, the glowing golds. ‘Something plain?’
The boy frowned a little, then edged away. As he did so, other boys appeared, each moving to one of a row of lapis lazuli chests the colour of predawn sky. Lifting the lids with willowy arms they drew up robes and turned to display them: thickly embossed samite encrusted with jewels, mosaicked with iridescent feathers. Carnelian rose to his feet swaying, even as the pain abated in his head. He walked among them and they bowed a little, turning their heads as if they were detecting his movement from eddies in the air. Appalled by the awful magnificence of the garments, he settled for a relatively sombre robe that glimmered with rubies so dark they seemed almost jet and that, more importantly, seemed to be the least impregnated with Aurum’s odour.
The boys guided him to a place encompassed by mirrors of gold. There they worked on him, their amethyst eyes turning black, pulling strigils from racks, wielding brushes and pads, glazing his skin with pigments, floating undergarments over him that might have been stitched together from the wings of dragonflies. He submitted to them and was several times fooled into thinking they could see him when their stone eyes caught a flake of light. He disliked how tall he looked among them when reflected in the mirrors, above which rose the quivering limbs of the machines.
Finally they masked him, then slipped away. Startled, Carnelian glanced round, but was too slow to see them disappear. He was alone, but for the other sinister versions of himself inhabiting all those other mirror worlds. He was wondering why it was Aurum had so much need to see himself, when there was a rapping at a distant door.
‘Enter,’ he said, echoes rippling some of the mirror worlds.
The door gasped open and guardsmen entered with the faces he remembered, round and yellow and bisected by Aurum’s tattoo. So familiar were they that, when a dark figure approached, he drew back, alarmed, certain it must be Aurum himself. Then he saw the figure was far too diminutive and, as its mask caught the light, its metal was too wintry to be gold. The guardsmen knelt to form an avenue flanked by their forked spears, down which the quaestor approached him. The man came close enough for Carnelian to smell the myrrh that wafted off his dark brocades as he knelt and bowed his head. ‘Seraph,’ he breathed, offering up a folded parchment.
Carnelian took the letter and turned its seal to the light. It was not bright enough for him to read the impressions in the purple wax. Besides, at that moment, he was anxious to find out what had happened to him. A sudden thought caused him to glance up at Aurum’s guardsmen. ‘Where are my Marula?’
The quaestor curled so tight the forehead of his mask clinked against the floor. ‘They were sent back to the cothon, Seraph. It is not permitted that they should enter here save through quarantine.’
Carnelian was trying to remember what he could about the moment he had entered the purgatory with them, but he could recall almost nothing. He sensed the quaestor’s unease. ‘Unmask.’
The man lifted his head from the floor, but not enough for the light to reveal his metal face. ‘Seraph?’
‘Remove your mask.’
Another clink as the man abased himself. He reached behind his head and fumbled his mask loose, then laid it upon the floor as if it were made of the thinnest glass.
‘Look at me, ammonite.’
The quaestor hesitated, but then his pale face came up all written over with numbers. His eyes were still cast down.
‘How did I end up here?’
The quaestor suppressed a shrug, licked his lips. ‘My Lord the Seraph reacted badly to one of the purifying drugs. We are mortified, but-’
‘I have been through many such purifications and never before have been affected thus…’
Numbers folded into the wrinkles of his grimace. ‘The creatures that entered the purgatory on the insistence of the Seraph panicked like animals. They overthrew censers. They spilled fluids. Because of this, prodigious quantities of the drugs were released…’ The quaestor cracked his forehead against the stone floor. ‘Your servants did what they could for the Serap
h. Forgive them for what they could not do.’
Carnelian did not feel it likely he would get much more out of him. It could wait. Curiosity over the letter now took precedence in his mind. He felt the seal. The wax was smooth. At first he did not understand, but then it occurred to him. It must be from Osidian, who had no seal to use. He broke it open and saw with some excitement that the glyphs were indeed drawn in Osidian’s hand. He read it.
Expect visitors in the cothon. Equip them as best you can.
Carnelian turned the parchment, looking for more, but the rest of it was blank. Osidian had written nothing that could not be read by anyone. Carnelian read the letter again. Visitors? The quaestor, fidgeting, drew his eyes. Carnelian’s mask hid a bitter smile. It was fully possible the wax had been broken, the letter read, then resealed. What did it matter? Its import seemed innocuous enough. His mind turned again to what had happened when he had entered the purgatory. The quaestor’s explanation did not ring true. Carnelian regarded the letter. Visitors? What visitors? Obliqueness from Osidian was always a reason to worry. Carnelian tried to gather his thoughts. How could he think with all these people grovelling before him? His gaze fell on the face of one of the guardsmen. Aurum’s mark there on that round face filled him with disgust. He shaped a gesture of dismissal and turned his back on them. As he waited, listening to them creep away, he became aware that, at the far end of the chamber, there was the merest diamond-bright crack. The promise of clean daylight drew him and a lust for unperfumed air to breathe. To his delight, as he approached, a waft sliced fresh through the stale lily odour of the chamber. He had to squint against the glare leaking through the crack like first light on a horizon. Shadows appeared; their litheness suggested they were the amethyst-eyed boys.
‘I wish to gaze upon the day,’ he rumbled.
They released a blinding flood of light that brought back his headache. He paused until the spasm had subsided, then strode into the blaze. He turned his face up towards the sun, waiting until he could feel its heat seeping through the gold of his mask. The scene began emerging round him. More of Aurum’s guards kneeling. Stretching away behind them, a garden. Commanding the guardsmen to remain where they were, he wandered out along a path, delighting in the open space, in the dappled shade. Magnolia perfume soaking the air for a moment took him back to the Koppie. Disturbed, he pushed on. At last he reached a ragged wall, broken down here and there by dragon-blood trees. Moving into the shade of one he gripped its trunk. At his feet yawned a canyon. This could be nothing else than the same Pass they had tried to fight their way up, only to be repulsed by Aurum’s fire. He pondered this, feeling again the agony of separation from his friends. So much had happened since, it seemed an age ago. He peered down that chasm, his heart yearning to carry him on wings down to the green land below. In his melancholy, it was some time before he noticed the dust hazing up from the canyon. At first he thought it smoke until he saw its pallidness was mixed with rust. He had seen enough such clouds to know that only a saurian herd could lift so much, or dragons, or perhaps a great body of riders. He tensed. Osidian had told him to expect visitors. Visitors! His eyes tried to pierce the hazy canyon below. He fought down panic. He had suspected Osidian had some hidden reason to take Makar. Those he had believed safe were now returning into the very heart of danger. A seedling of joy grew up through the dread. He turned his back on the canyon and returned to the tower. He must go to the cothon to see what could be done to avoid what he now most feared.
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