The Third God sdotc-3

by Ricardo Pinto

  The voice soared up into the vault of the Pyramid Hollow, finding resonances that caused the air to reverberate.

  ‘… in token of which They gave you victory perpetual over your foes… dominion unbroken over earth and sky… this They did, for you alone remained faithful to Them when all others had turned away.’

  The last syllable rang, only slowly fading away.

  ‘A narrow path of safety they gave you to walk in power absolute into eternity. This path is the Law and it must be obeyed. Shall you continue to obey it?’

  Thunderous came the response from the serried tiers. ‘We shall.’

  The voices of many homunculi rose in eerie concert. ‘What is this path of Law?’

  ‘It is the tangling Labyrinth,’ boomed out the wall of angels.

  ‘It is the roiling sea,’ sang the homunculi.

  ‘It is the spiralling ammonite,’ a multitude rumbled from somewhere beneath the platform on which Carnelian stood.

  The homunculi sang out in unison again. ‘Through the mystery of this covenant your Commonwealth shall be reborn anew.’

  The Chosen thundered out the response. ‘As it has been done, so shall it be done, for ever, because it is commanded to be done by the Law-that-must-be-obeyed.’

  The voices of the homunculi rose up again, as one, but subtly timbred. ‘When our Lords returned to Their realms They swore that though They would no longer dwell incarnate among the living, They would pour of Their dual essence into a vessel of your choosing, filling it brimful with ichor from whence you might all drink so that its fire might renew your blood.’

  The Chosen roared out the same response. Carnelian gazed into the airy heights and it seemed their thunder was louder than the sky’s. He became aware of light moving sinuously among those jewelled beings as their masks turned to gaze at a point somewhere behind the empty court robe.

  ‘Is this the vessel you have chosen?’ said a single homunculus.

  ‘It is,’ came the answer from the heavens.

  Carnelian saw alabaster forearms and hands outstretched beyond the court robe. Osidian was displaying himself naked to them. The hands seemed to flash as they were retracted. The court robe quivered. From this side it was a spire of densely woven dull silver thread that Carnelian judged must be tempered iron. Running down its centre was an exquisite mosaic of cut gems, at once a rainbow, but also a glowing battle scene, a hunt, a view into a fabled garden. On its chest hung a great circular breastplate, something like a wheel, though eccentrically spoked. It had a thick rim of black stones above, of red below; there were hollows in the rim and more located on the spokes and in the hub. It seemed to Carnelian sinister, like some instrument of torture. His mind veered away from guessing at its purpose.

  Osidian’s perfect gold face appearing at the summit of the robe was a sunrise that woke him from nightmares. Osidian inhabited the robe, bringing it to life. His arms raised the ponderous sleeves and his pale hands, appearing at their extremities like doves, reached out to clasp the trees of two court staves. One smouldered with emeralds, peridots and jades, all feverish tendrils and growth, curling up into a monstrous crozier topped by a perfect youth that seemed water in the act of turning to stone. The other was of jet, adamants and mirror obsidian, gnarled with figures whose curves spoke of blades, whose contorted postures, of punishment and triumph, evolving up into a four-horned demon who gazed down malevolently upon the victim lying in the iron hollow.

  A hush fell. The Pyramid Hollow became the cavity of an open mouth. That mouth spoke. ‘In the beginning an ocean seething, primordial, without boundary, without light, without thought, filling the void with its voiceless currents, its colourless eddies.’

  The voices of the homunculi were one voice.

  ‘Darkness concentrated birthed a seed, a mote, a single tear of jade. The Lord Turtle. The vast rivers in the sea he swam, arrowing the fathomless depths, cleaving the flood, scouring the abyss with his beacon eyes, searching the emptiness for another. Great heart pounding his straining flesh. Oar paddles threshing the black waters. Long he searched, but found he was alone. Until, at last, he began pouring forth, in song, his desolation.’

  An eerie cry rose up that made the hackles rise on Carnelian’s neck. Modulating, swelling, stretching its pitch, curling slowly, a sound equivalent to a rising blade of smoke. No human throat could shape such a song.

  ‘One vast bell, the night-black ocean.’

  The spiralling song seemed to have loosened some vast thing up in the dark apex of the Pyramid Hollow. He gazed up, but could see nothing. Then he felt a waft on his face from the air displaced as something massive moved. The next moment he would have snatched his hands up to cover his ears if they had not been held by the Sapients. Air avalanched with a thick reverberation that made everything shake, down to the marrow in his bones. A pealing so loud, he feared the crater of the Plain of Thrones must shatter and fall.

  ‘Shimmering, shivering, shearing at the touch of the Turtle’s song.’

  Another ear-numbing peal.

  ‘A shudder speeding towards the limit of the limitless.’

  Clang.

  ‘The ocean convulsed in agony and joyful exultation.’

  Clang.

  ‘Convulsed to this new-formed centre.’

  Clang.

  ‘Pressure beyond squeezing.’

  Clang.

  ‘Rage beyond violence.’

  Clang.

  ‘Passion beyond annihilation.’

  Clang.

  ‘And Lord Turtle was rent asunder,’ shrilled the homunculi.

  Carnelian cried out as pain leapt up his arms. He would have snatched them free, but the Sapients held them fiercely with their four-fingered hands. He looked down in shock. Watched the blood dewing from the cuts they had made. Running down his fingers to dribble into the jade bowls.

  A sharp crack made him jerk his head up. A Sapient who was hovering over the victim in the iron hollow raised his hand gripping a cobble of black stone and smashed it down again upon the sternum of the prostate man. Ribs gave way like rotten wood.

  ‘The upper shell becomes the dome of heaven,’ cried the homunculi.

  Other Sapients fell upon the victim; their fingers sheathed with blades tore at his chest like beaks. Prising the ribs loose. Snapping them back, one after another after another, hands gloved with blood. Carnelian flinched as some spat over his face. Reek of iron, the odour of his dreams.

  ‘The lower shell becomes the foundations of the earth.’

  The victim’s chest was now a basket of bones like two splayed hands between which, in the seething cavity, his heart still beat. One of the Sapients reached in and plucked out the pulsing organ, pulled it up while others severed the vessels that the next moment were spraying blood everywhere. Carnelian’s eyes followed the heart as it was carried to Osidian’s court robe.

  ‘Lord Turtle’s heart becomes the mountain at the centre of the world.’

  The heart was pushed into the centre of the wheel breastplate. Carnelian watched it convulsing there, dribbling a trickle of blood to wind down through the jewel mosaic. Then it stopped. Soon the victim’s liver was filling a cavity beneath the heart on the wheel frame, as it became the earth. The tongue went above the heart to be the voice of the winds of heaven. The eyes sat to either side as sun and moon. With brushes blood was spattered over the wheel as stars. The severed hands and feet were hung beneath it from hooks to be the lobed caverns of the underworld. More organs were harvested to adorn the wheel. The carcass of the victim no longer resembled a man.

  When the great bell fell silent a grumbling chanting was heard. A burr in Carnelian’s ears that he tried to dislodge by shaking his head. He felt his arms being raised. Blood trickled warm down his forearms. A grating sound near his feet made him glance down. Ammonites were carefully lifting the bowls that had been collecting his blood. He thought they had not been careful enough. So much seemed spilled upon the floor. The more he looked the more he saw. Blo
od everywhere as if a tide of it had washed in. He felt it licking at his toes.

  A flash seemed to give his head a glancing blow. He looked up and saw four-fingered hands removing a mask. Osidian’s face came into view. He was staring past the Grand Sapients, whose stellated crowns made them appear astonished. Carnelian focused on Osidian’s face, which seemed translucent alabaster. His eyes were so intense. He knew what Osidian was gazing at, but refused to look too.

  The rhythm of the chanting was speeding up, deepening. He watched a Grand Sapient dip a finger into a bowl held up to him and with it he dabbed a spot upon Osidian’s forehead, covering his black birthmark. The smudge leaked a drop that found its way to the bridge of Osidian’s nose. The Grand Sapient dabbed another spot to the left of Osidian’s mouth, then one to the right. Dipping his finger again, the Grand Sapient raised it to Osidian’s forehead, touched the smudge of blood there and then drew his finger down towards his left eye, lightly over its lid, closing it, and on down to meet the smudge to the left of his mouth. Dipping his finger yet again, he linked that smudge with a trail across Osidian’s lips to the smudge on the other side. With more blood he traced a track up Osidian’s cheek to his right eye, closed it and reddened the lid, then up over the brow to close the triangle.

  Carnelian frowned, not understanding what it meant, but feeling he should. Threads of blood had reached his armpits. There was a pounding in his head. Or was it? A drumming was swelling the chanting. A scraping sound of copper on copper. A rustling.

  The Grand Sapient was painting Osidian’s face wholly red. Carnelian watched the pale fingers dipping into the bowl and recognized it. The blood they were using was his. Osidian wearing his blood for a mask. Unease managed to seep up through Carnelian’s numbness. In that red face he was seeing Akaisha’s, bloated in death. All the women of the Tribe, their faces ochred for burial. It seemed a desecration to paint Osidian so, as if he was mocking the dead; but there was something else disturbing Carnelian about that red face. Then Osidian opened his eyes. Carnelian started, causing the Sapients to tighten their grip on his arms. His dreams were crossing over into his waking world.

  ‘And it rained blood,’ cried the homunculi.

  Wet tearing sounds yanked Carnelian’s gaze up the central stair of the Pyramid Hollow to see the long seed pods of the torsion devices that flanked it untwisting, swelling. Then they began to explode, not all at once, but in a long stuttering release, and the air turned red as if filled with rose petals. Carnelian gasped in shock as he was spattered. Warm, thick spots of it on his face and arms. Pattering on the platform, on the dark pinnacles of the Wise, on Osidian in his court robe. A great sigh went up from the tiers above that seemed one of sexual release. The Masters to either side of the steps were visibly reddened, though some gore reached them all. To Carnelian, gazing up in horror, it seemed the stair was a gash in the cliff, even the vulva of some vast woman.

  ‘Flesh, knit bone to bone, your withered earth…’ the ammonites on either side were chanting.

  The odour of freshly spilled blood was overpowering. Carnelian felt as if the tidal wave from his dreams had broken over them.

  ‘Oh ancient mother, scorched tearless you await…’

  The Wise were hooking a green face beneath the wheel breastplate. The face of a beautiful, radiant youth. It seemed the same face Molochite had worn in the Iron House, but that had been broken, so this must be a replica. Blood dribbling down its jade brow, cheek and lips from the liver and heart above made it seem as if the face had been freshly flayed from some youth. It looked, besides, incongruous, fringed as it was on either side by the amputated feet and hands of the victim.

  Osidian with his scarlet face was being given some of Carnelian’s blood to drink.

  ‘The Sky Lord come to thunder…’

  The Wise were holding up what seemed a face reflected in a mirror of night.

  ‘Rumbling His stormy belly…’

  The Wise held the obsidian mask over Osidian’s face and he was transformed. Terrible he became, the very blackness of the sky incarnate.

  ‘Heart-of-Thunder,’ Carnelian heard the homunculi intone.

  ‘Withholding Your urgent seed…’ chanted the ammonites.

  ‘Lord of Mirrors,’ intoned the homunculi.

  ‘Until You shall pierce her with Your shafts…’ the ammonites sang.

  ‘Father of Corruption, Lord of Pestilence, Prince of Plagues.’

  ‘Quench the burning air…’

  The obsidian mask was peeled away, revealing what seemed the raw meat of Osidian’s face.

  ‘Rill and pool her dusts…’

  The jade mask was raised, the obsidian one hung below the breastplate in its place.

  ‘Fill her wombs with spiralling jades.’

  Osidian was drinking another draught of Carnelian’s blood.

  ‘Until her flesh swells up…’

  The wise were dipping their fingers in the bowls of blood and sprinkling Osidian.

  ‘In the midst of breaking waters…’

  ‘Clenching for release…’

  The jade mask was held over Osidian’s face.

  ‘Thrust forth are You, oh Green Child…’ the ammonites chanted.

  ‘Lord of Abundance, Lord of the Earth,’ the homunculi intoned.

  ‘Ten thousand times reborn…’

  ‘Immortal One.’

  ‘Squeezed into the air…’

  ‘You who taught.’

  ‘Enjewelled by the morning…’

  ‘First and Last.’

  ‘That You may dance again…’

  ‘Lord of the Dance.’

  ‘And once more breathe Your scents beneath the sky…’

  ‘Life…’

  The voices of the homunculi were drowned by a roaring fanfare.

  With a lurch, the Creation Chariot began to climb the spine of the Pyramid Hollow.

  ‘Our Lord leads the Faithful up from the sea.’

  Carnelian reeled. They had resumed bleeding him into the bowls. It was an effort to stand. The vast, bloody apparition of the Black God was looming over them all. Carnelian had watched the Obsidian Mask replace the Jade. The glimpse of Osidian’s red face had reminded him it was he beneath that carapace, but once he was wearing the black mask, there was nothing left of Osidian.

  Carnelian gave his attention to the weird braided voice of the homunculi. He knew they were quoting from the Il Kaya, but it seemed they were describing the journey he, Fern and Osidian had made through the swamps. The horror of it, long forgotten, saturated their words. ‘Then our Lord brings them up to the Land He had promised would be theirs…’

  Carnelian recalled that first view of the Earthsky and smiled. His vision expanded to take in the sea of ferns and then the fragrant hill of cedars of the Tribe. He breathed deep, but the perfume of the mother trees had aged and was now laced with iron. Myrrh mixed with blood. Carnelian blinked and became half aware of where he was. The homunculi’s talk of conquest cast a shadow over his heart.

  ‘Men lower than beasts,’ they said.

  Carnelian shook his head weakly, anger rising in him. The Masters believed that, but he knew his Plainsmen and his beloved Fern were men. Desperate horror washed over him. Osidian, corrupted, corrupted them. Carnelian wept at what he had allowed him to do.

  Shawms were braying. The banners that ammonites were carrying up the steps on either side fluttered like birds in flight. Among them glimmered the crescents of the Wise, the silver ammonite spirals of the Law. The music swelled, borne up on the growling of massive trumpets and a clattering and a constant shattering of glass. The ammonites were singing, joyfully, of peace. Carnelian’s heart rose on the tide. He basked in this omen. Peace after war. A rebuilding, a remaking of the world, a new shape, a flowering of love.

  ‘Their Commonwealth, to Heaven a perfect mirror,’ the homunculi declared, and Osidian was once more jade-faced.

  Carnelian watched a vast disc rising among the Wise like a red sun. He frowned. Ex
cept that it was hollow, so that it was a vast glyph of death. An annulus of his birth stone polished to a mirror in which the world was reflected as if in blood. Still the ammonites sang of harmony and blessings but, through the red mirror’s central hole, Carnelian saw the Wise were once more transforming Osidian into the Black God.

  ‘But sin casts its shadow over their hearts,’ cried the homunculi.

  The shawms and trumpets shrieked in hideous cacophony. The red mirror shattered, shards gouging the bloody floor like talons.

  ‘Brother falls upon brother. Canker spreads from flesh to flesh, carried upon the plague wind. Men fornicate with beasts. Mothers devour their children.’

  Carnelian would have plugged up his ears, but Sapients were clinging to his arms. Defenceless, he was exposed to their descriptions of the destruction he and Osidian had brought upon the world. Famine and pestilence as the Darkness-under-the-Trees stalked the land.

  ‘You He chose to be His own, for you alone held to your faith in Them.’

  Carnelian relived the march on Osrakum, described as the Apostates coming against the Chosen. He relived the great battle in which the Chosen were defeated. He clung on, waiting for the hope there is even in despair. The hope of what he might yet do to heal the world with the power he had taken for himself, but the gloom of the symphony did not abate, but darkened further. The voices of the Wise were speaking of the Apostates coming with black hearts even into Holy Osrakum. In a great crescendo the last great battle was described, within the Valley of the Gate. The symphony of chaos rose to an excruciating pitch, then subsided as if tumbling into an abyss.

  ‘Our Lord leading us, we are victorious. Joyously we bring Them hither for Their coronation.’

  ‘You come with victory bright on Your brow,’ sang the homunculi.

  Carnelian was confused. They were speaking to the Gods and Osidian was Them, or possessed by Them, but Osidian had also come here from victory, a victory the Wise begrudged him.