The Third God sdotc-3

by Ricardo Pinto

  Carnelian, who had felt he was being reduced to a stupid child, could not follow her. ‘Let what happen again?’

  Her mask seemed to regard him for a while. ‘Molochite, I lost control of; you, Nephron, I will not.’

  There was doubt and confusion in Osidian’s face. Carnelian felt no doubt, only fear, but also a longing for the relief of at last confronting what he knew was coming.

  ‘I shall wield not only the power I once had but, now the Balance is broken, vastly more; not only here in Osrakum, but in the world beyond.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Osidian said, anger and anxiety warring in his face.

  ‘About the power I will have after your Apotheosis, once you wed me.’

  Osidian gaped at her, incredulous. ‘Wed you?’

  ‘I shall be your wife, as I was your brother’s and your father’s before him.’

  Osidian stared at her, shaking his head as if he could not believe what he had heard. He looked at Carnelian, seeking confirmation of her madness, but Carnelian only managed a shrug. Osidian swung back towards his mother, grimacing. ‘Recent events must have un-witted you, my Lady.’

  In response, her hands emerged from her robe. The sleeves tore, revealing inner layers of sewn petals more intensely red that released an overpowering odour of roses. The porcelain fingers reached behind her head and her mask came loose. Carnelian flinched as her naked face was revealed.

  At first he was aware of nothing but her eyes: tapering, oval peridots as limpid as dew caught in the calyx of a flower. Her pale skin reddened where it met the stones so that they seemed to have been forced into wounds. The lips were thin and pursed as if from the strain of biting back too many bitter words. It was a beautiful face, but one that betrayed suffering impatiently borne.

  Osidian was gazing at his mother, seeming to seek someone he knew, or thought he knew, or remembered and had lost. ‘I shall lock you away. No one will ever see you again.’

  Ykoriana smiled. Though it seemed that tears might at any time squeeze from under her stone eyes, those lips bore the certainty of victory.

  Osidian rubbed his face, blinking, as if wiping cobwebs from it. ‘I have no need of your blood, mother. To produce an heir, I shall mate with my sister-niece, Ykorenthe.’

  Ykoriana’s face hardened to ice. Her eyes flashed as she pointed over their heads to the steps that rose behind them. ‘We watched your father’s Apotheosis from up there, your grandmothers, your great-aunts and I.’

  Carnelian had a feeling Ykoriana was addressing him as much as she was her son. They were his grandmothers, his great-aunts too.

  ‘All the women of our House watched. We had all taken leave of our brothers, our cousins, our sons. Since the election of your father, they had been held as captives. For days, they had been starved so that they would not pollute the rituals. Even as the Chosen took their places…’ She swept her arms up, taking in the tiers that rose in a cliff behind them. Carnelian looked up and, even though they were in darkness, he imagined the Masters in their glory taking their places on their thrones. ‘… our kin had already been placed within the torsion devices.’

  She pointed to the nearest of several peculiar contraptions that hung from posts up both sides of the stair. In the lamplight they looked like the dried carcasses of huge squid, their heads hanging from the posts on hooks, their tentacles dangling almost to the ground.

  ‘You have not seen these in operation,’ she said, ‘but you will. An ingenious invention of the Wise.’ She raised her left hand with the long fingers drooping. ‘The man or boy is strapped inside.’ She formed her right hand into a beak as if she held a plum stone between the tips of her fingers. She moved this up into the cage of her left hand and withdrew it, closing the cage as if she had left the stone within it. ‘The thongs are all pulled together.’ She drew imaginary threads from the ends of her left fingers. ‘And tied to a capstan.’ Carnelian glanced and saw a capstan beneath the nearest device. ‘Then it is turned, twisting the thongs.’ She spiralled her fingers. ‘Turn after turn, the tentacles above tightening, digging the barbs that line their inner surface deeper and deeper into flesh.’

  Carnelian grimaced, glancing at the device. He saw the barbs like fish teeth.

  ‘When they can twist it no further, the capstan is locked. Then, at the right time during the ritual…’ The silence made him turn to see Ykoriana frowning. Her hands formed two cones touching at their points. ‘… they are released.’ Her hands spiralled apart in opposite directions so violently her sleeves shed a mass of scarlet petals into the air. ‘The bodies within them, ripped apart. Their flesh sieved through an obsidian-bladed mesh. Scattering blood across the Chosen. Creation through blood sacrifice.’

  Carnelian remembered his father speaking those very words when they had sighted a turtle, as they stood together in the prow of the baran on the approach to Thuyakalrul. Right after the massacre he had sparked off by appearing on deck unmasked.

  ‘Kumatuya, your father…’ Ykoriana lingered, gazing down with her fiery green eyes upon neither of them, but both. ‘… stood there.’ She pointed at the plinth that rose between them to their waists. ‘The Twelve about him, bearing the Masks and the Crowns and all the other divine insignia. As this chariot rose to the apex of the pyramid and they transformed him into the Gods…’

  Carnelian could not see why this was a chariot, but he noted for the first time the cables that ran up the steps.

  Her rose-petal robe sighing, she moved to one side, revealing a slab of iron rising at an angle behind her in which there was the impression of a man spreadeagled. ‘In which procedure my other brother played the Turtle.’

  Her hand lingered for a moment, tracing the edge of the man-shaped hollow in which some petals lodged like spots of blood. Her brow knitted and the lids narrowed her stone eyes. ‘The Wise gouge out his eyes to be the sun and moon. They take his tongue, his hands, his feet. Each portion plays a role in the ritual. Finally, as your father watches…’ Carnelian was as close to the hollow now as Kumatuya had been. ‘… the closed doors of his ribs are broken open one at a time.’ She spread her fingers. ‘His still beating heart is torn out and held above him. The warm blood gushes, from which your father drinks, so that as he takes the life of his brother, two become one. From death, divine life risen.’

  She regarded them both, her face blank with horror. She had seen this with her own eyes before they were taken from her.

  ‘My uncle was drugged,’ Osidian declared. He swung his arm round to take in the torsion devices. ‘They were all drugged. They felt nothing.’

  Ykoriana frowned. ‘That certainly is what the Wise claim. It is true my brother made no movement; he did not cry out.’ She leaned towards them. ‘But your father, who witnessed his mutilation at close hand, told me afterwards he had seen in our brother’s eyes, before they were plucked out, a terrible, animal fear. It haunted him.’ She grew aged beyond her years. ‘It haunted me.’

  Her hand strayed back to the hollow in the iron, caressing its edge as if the fingers wished to reach inside but dared not for fear of what they might touch. ‘It was I who had to make the choice between them. It was I who chose who would lie here… and who would stand there.’ She pointed towards them. ‘Suth Sardian with his exile saved your father from lying here.’ She tapped the iron. Her brows knit again. ‘I demanded this proof of love from your father, Nephron. I loved him, though I had reason to hate all men. I submitted myself to his touch, though it brought me little joy.’ Her face grew sour with remembered pain. ‘For an unripe fruit will carry any early touch as rot when it ripens. And though Sardian was no longer there between us, your father hated me for it.’ She clinked one of her stone eyes. ‘And he took my sight.’ She frowned. ‘Once I thought it was in revenge for depriving him of his lover; now I am not so sure. Perhaps it was vengeance for what he was forced to witness.’ Her face darkened. ‘Though it was the Wise he should hate, and the Great who cast their votes but hazard nothing.’
>
  She put on a smile. ‘Still, that is politics.’ She raised her head and her green eyes glittered as if she was seeing something far away. ‘But then Sardian chose to stay away.’

  Carnelian tensed.

  ‘Year after year when he could have returned, he chose not to. Almost I had forgotten him when that fool, Aurum, had the Clave elect him He-who-goes-before. I was confident Sardian would not return; but then he did and the minion I sent to find out why now, why not before, came back to me with nothing.’

  ‘What has this to do with anything?’ Osidian said, looking weary, upset. Carnelian gazed at him, wondering if it could possibly be the description of the blood rituals that had penetrated to his heart. He had looked on massacres unmoved, but this was bloodshed and torture among his own.

  ‘It has everything to do with your Apotheosis. To save himself, Aurum told me at last. For he had seen it when he arrived on Suth’s island.’

  ‘Seen what?’ Osidian cried, exasperated.

  Almost Carnelian answered him, but felt a need to hear it told by Ykoriana. ‘Aurum was intimate with that old monster, my father. He was often at court.’

  ‘Please, tell me what you are talking about.’

  Carnelian saw the weariness in Osidian’s face, but saw also how he had to listen, because this woman was still his mother.

  ‘That Carnelian here is the living image of your father.’

  Osidian’s face folded in confusion.

  ‘The living image of his father.’

  Carnelian watched the realization smooth Osidian’s face. For a moment, shocked, he looked like a stupid child. Then he gazed at Carnelian as if he were seeing him for the first time. His eyes narrowed. ‘You knew this already.’ His face darkened. ‘How long have you known?’

  Carnelian explained how his father had told him when he came secretly to their camp.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell-?’

  Carnelian watched the realization dawn.

  ‘That’s why you deserted me.’ The blood left Osidian’s face and he looked at his mother, then beyond her to the hollow man, in horror.

  Ykoriana smiled. ‘That you ignored Sardian’s warning, that you are here, proves, Carnelian, does it not, that you know to what lengths my son will be prepared to go to save you.’

  ‘On the contrary, my Lady, it proves only that I came here knowing what you would threaten and to make sure Osidian does not submit to you.’ Carnelian turned to find Osidian staring at him and smiled at what was left in him of the boy in the Yden. ‘For I would not wish him enslaved again.’

  Osidian’s lips seemed to be trying to return the smile, tears starting, but then his chin fell and there was a twitching at the corners of his eyes, his mouth, as if he were seeing scenes in rapid succession, or having fleeting conversations. Almost imperceptibly, his head sank further, his shoulders rounded, so that instinctively Carnelian glanced at Ykoriana, fearing that, by not even trying to mask his feelings of defeat, Osidian was making her victory over him, over them both, more complete.

  But then Carnelian remembered that her eyes were stones and saw, besides, no trace of victory in her face, but only confusion and a pale fear. In his bones he felt it was not for herself she feared. ‘So as you see, Celestial’ – he paused, ready to gauge every nuance in her face – ‘your son will have no need to wed you. I will die at his Apotheosis and, afterwards, he will take Ykorenthe to be his empress.’

  There! At the mention of her daughter’s name, he had seen the blade of fear cut deeper into her heart. It was the girl she sought to protect. Carnelian regarded Ykoriana afresh. Perhaps she had wed her other son for power, but what she sought now was to put her body between Osidian and her daughter. She was trying to protect the girl in the way no one had protected her. He no longer saw a terrible empress in her bitter pomp, but only a woman, aged by suffering beyond her years, who had dressed herself in a robe of rose petals in her attempt to seduce her own son, to protect a child; to protect what was left of the child that she had been.

  Carnelian blinked back tears and looked from mother to son and back again. How defeated they looked. Both trapped and he along with them. Rage rose in him, as his heart sought to free itself from this ensnarement. ‘It is the Wise who bind us,’ he cried.

  They both turned their green eyes upon him, stone and living, both needing, demanding more. Carnelian tried to think it through, but the pressure rising in him was beyond analysis. ‘We came here believing you had sought your son’s life.’ He described the assassination attempt and believed the shock in Ykoriana’s face was real, knew he had expected it. ‘It makes no sense now that you would do this, but the use of the Brotherhood of the Wheel must be intended to implicate you. So if not you, my Lady, who?’

  Osidian’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘The Wise?’

  ‘Why not the Wise?’ Carnelian said. ‘Would the Brotherhood attempt such a thing on their own? Or the Great, who could only expect to be decimated by it?’ He frowned, considering what his heart was urging him to. Feeling it was a kind of madness, but unwilling to dam its flow. ‘We are all three here of the House of the Masks.’

  There, he had said it. It was the first time he had felt it.

  ‘Instead of fighting each other, we should unite against our common foe.’ Carnelian paused and saw in their faces they were waiting for his words. He glanced into the hollow man. ‘I do not want to die here, nor do I want to live under a perpetually deferred sentence of death.’

  Ykoriana lowered her head a little. ‘Does Aurum still live?’

  ‘I believe that unlikely.’

  ‘Well, then, assuming Sardian will not betray you, if I choose not to speak of it, I doubt if any could discover your secret.’

  ‘And the reason we cannot announce the truth of my birth openly is what?’

  ‘The Law-that-must-be-obeyed,’ she said.

  ‘And yet have we not all three defied it?’

  Osidian frowned. ‘The blood rituals are essential for Rebirth, for Apotheosis.’

  ‘Are they?’ Carnelian could not shape in his mind what was coming; the words would have to find their own shape. ‘It seems to me these blood rituals have been conceived to set the House of the Masks against the Great. Further, to divide our House against itself. Are these mutilations, this massacre of our own, necessary? Can we not invoke the Creation without reproducing it? Or is it, perhaps, that the Wise wish to bring the candidate face to face with his own mortality? Even as they give him the symbols of power, even as they transform him into the Gods, they show him the flesh of which he is made, how easily his blood flows. Even if they can give you divinity, Osidian, you know they cannot give you immortality.’

  ‘Nevertheless, the Chosen will not accept my Godhead unless it is consecrated with ichorous blood.’

  Carnelian saw in Osidian’s face that, on this issue, he was immovable. He feared losing impetus and so he turned to Ykoriana, the mother. ‘What if you were given your daughter to raise until she was of age to become empress and wife?’

  Carnelian watched Ykoriana grow younger with hope.

  ‘That would destabilize my throne,’ Osidian said. ‘To rule without possibility of an heir for so long.’

  Carnelian turned to him. ‘If you were to die this instant, who would most likely become the next God Emperor?’

  Almost imperceptibly, Osidian’s eyes narrowed. ‘You would.’

  ‘Ever since my father came to speak to me, I could have sought the Masks, but, clearly, I have not.’

  Osidian nodded.

  ‘Do you really believe I covet such power?’

  Osidian’s face became brittle. ‘To save your beloved barbarians, perhaps.’

  Carnelian saw the truth in this. It seemed for a moment as if everything would founder on that doubt. ‘Well, then, let me rule the outer world as your viceroy. Anyone who moved against either of us would have to fear the vengeance of the other. Until either of us produces an heir, the Great will live in fear that we should both
die, for then one among them would have to be chosen to wear the Masks and the Law would force many of his peers to be slaughtered at his Apotheosis.’

  Carnelian could see Osidian was still not entirely convinced. ‘For years you will be needed here to hold Osrakum together. How much energy would you have left to rebuild and safeguard the Commonwealth?’

  ‘You want to save your barbarians.’

  ‘I will not deny it, but also, and more pressing, there is the need to work against the famine that is coming.’

  ‘And when Ykorenthe comes of age and we produce an heir?’

  ‘I will retire to my coomb, to Coomb Suth.’

  ‘You will no longer be Suth.’

  ‘The Great will be unable to defy you when you give me the coomb as a gift.’

  Osidian regarded him, weighing his judgement of this new brother. Carnelian knew there were several political attractions in such a scheme, but he wished to remove the last vestiges of doubt. ‘By then I will have done enough to appease my conscience.’

  Osidian nodded.

  ‘And in the meantime you can keep an eye on me through the Wise and their watch-towers.’

  Ykoriana stirred. ‘There is hope in this.’

  As they both turned to regard her, it seemed she was holding her breath, waiting for Osidian’s response. He gazed at Carnelian, then sank his head. The wind soughed in the vast space above them. At last Osidian raised his eyes to Carnelian and smiled, grimly. ‘Let it be as my brother says.’

  All three touched hands and swore oaths upon their blood.

  Even if they had wished it, they knew they could not return by the Path of Blood, so it was necessary to climb the stair to the apex of the Pyramid Hollow where portals gave into the imperial strata of the Halls of Rebirth. Ykoriana removed her ranga and they began the climb, Osidian on her right hand, Carnelian on her left. The steps were steep so they supported her. Her robe tore upon the steps leaving a trail of petals. Glancing down it seemed to Carnelian to be the blood that had been shed there, but sweet and fluttering away on the wind.