He endured the shaking, the shrieking that hysterically pulsed its daggers in his ears, as the towers round him lit up, flickering, reflecting the coruscating detonations of energy on the other side of the closed gates.
At last the pipes, spluttering, fell silent. The great gates throbbed and clanged as the opening mechanisms engaged. The firmament of bronze came apart to create a hazy slit that brightened as it gave a widening view onto unimaginable carnage.
He issued the command for Heart-of-Thunder to advance and they slid between the open portals of the outer gate. On the sides of his neck he could feel the heat the bronze walls were radiating. Involuntarily, his gaze was fixed in horror upon the charred meat encrusting the killing field. The stench of it assailed him, making him gag. A mesh of black and red and white and seething gold; of limbs and blackened torsos and heads, crisping. Glistening with bubbling fat. Rags and hair smouldering. And, through his chair, he could feel the delicate concussion as Heart-of-Thunder cracked skulls beneath his feet.
The ride smoothed out. Weak with horror, Carnelian became aware they were now moving along a shelf of the Canyon floor that seemed as clean as sun-bleached bone. All the way there their path had been carpeted with sartlar remains: even the bridge that they had crossed under the malevolent gaze of the Prow with its furious mane of smoke. Those sartlar surviving were ebbing away from him. Red they were, engrained with the dust of the outer world. He watched them with a weary, deepening hatred. All he wanted was to reach the Green Gate, fix the accursed relay, then return.
He was slow to realize the sartlar were no longer receding. Their mass solidified all the way to the turn in the Canyon and, no doubt, beyond so that it was impossible for them to move from his path. Filthy, stupid brutes, forcing on him the choice whether to trample them underfoot or to scythe a way through with fire. Lost in the loathsome contemplation of the decision he must make, Carnelian had to be alerted to their movement by his Left. They were surging towards Heart-of-Thunder. Instinctively he cried: ‘Open fire.’
Soon screaming jets were splashing among the creatures, but he had delayed too long. Their vanguard was already within the minimum range of his pipes. They came on, mouths sagging open, so that it seemed the screaming of the incandescent arcs was their cries. He watched with a kind of paralysed fascination as their bow wave broke over the head of Heart-of-Thunder. Feverishly they leapt up, clambering on his horns. Soon his head was hidden beneath their writhing bodies. Even as his pain was communicated as a shuddering in the cabin, Carnelian saw the dragon’s dark blood slicking the writhing sartlar and found his voice to order a retreat.
Back on the island rock and behind the Blood Gate, he gazed up at Heart-of-Thunder. The dragon’s vast head seemed all raw flesh; his freshly gouged eye a bloody cave. It had been a brutal business cutting the sartlar off him.
As they were retreating, Heart-of-Thunder’s agony had made Carnelian fear they might lose control of him. He was unresponsive to commands and could at any moment have run amok, plunging them all into the Cloaca abyss.
Incredulous with shock, Carnelian looked back to where more and more smoke was pumping up into the midday sky. The holocaust the Prow was pouring down had not proved enough to repulse their onslaught. Even now, enduring the firestorm, sartlar aflame were flinging themselves ineffectually against the bronze gate. The Wise had sent word that their frenzy must be allowed to exhaust itself upon the defences of the Gate.
From the balcony of their cell, Carnelian and Fern gazed down into the inferno. Each time a flame-pipe screamed they shuddered. A cry swooping from the sky would ignite into an arch of lightning that hissed as it kissed flesh. Shadows leapt feverishly. Blackness rolled across the incandescent arcs. Amidst the torment of fire and smoke, glimpses of undulating ground verminous with movement as the sartlar kept coming on. Why were they not even showing animal fear, but pushing on into the firestorm regardless?
All night, the whole tower trembled and shook from the barrage. Carnelian prayed that whatever instinct was driving the sartlar to self-destruction might lose its grip on them, but the screaming of the pipes never ceased.
The world contracted down to the womb of their cell. They lived a liminal existence between slumber and waking; between inner and outer night. Sometimes Carnelian believed he was back in the cabin, crossing the sea. Everything that had happened after that became nothing but a dream, at first bright as a vision of spring, but, inevitably, rotting down to nightmare.
A body stirred against him. Carnelian turned his head. At first he hardly recognized it was Fern. ‘How long?’
In his eyes, Carnelian saw reflected his own despair. ‘Days?’
He focused his hearing beyond the walls. It took a moment to resolve the raging into the scream of flame-pipes. Days? Revulsion woke him fully. He sat up. Days?
They rose and left the cell. Their legs seemed reluctant to carry them up through the entrails of the tower. They reached a high gallery overlooking a world upon which the play of liquid fire was migraine-bright. It was a while before their vision was able to discern a sort of choppy sea of smouldering ridges and troughs that swept up to dash a wave of corpses against the bronze cliff of the outer gate. Raising their eyes, they saw, beyond the smoke-enshrouded Prow, the shadowy throat of the Canyon disgorging a river that was steadily feeding more meat into the holocaust.
Higher they climbed. As they rose through the levels the air became as humid as breath. So much water had spilled down from above that floors were warped, doors jammed half open, wood everywhere swollen as if abscessed. Higher still the heat began. Air reeking of sweat and naphtha, furnace-hot. Floors awash with fluid as warm as blood. Ichorians laboured in the crevices between the machines. Blistered hands wrestled tubes and counterweights; dashed water from pails onto brass so hot it turned instantly into scalding steam. Mechanisms all around convulsed as if the tower were in its death throes. Carnelian and Fern watched the naked men servicing the engines. Some who saw them tried to get to their knees. All were red-eyed, confused, cruelly burned. Carnelian ignored them, searching until he found a purple robe. Not a Sapient, but only a sallow, gaping ammonite.
Your masters? Carnelian signed, certain his voice could not carry above the din.
They sleep, Celestial, signed the ammonite.
The man cowered when Carnelian frowned, incredulous. Wake them!
As the ammonite scrambled away, Carnelian watched the Ichorians. When he became aware his presence was a distraction that might make the poor wretches fall victim to the machines, he took Fern’s shoulder and they left the way they had come.
There was a scratching at the door. Such a small, ordinary sound in a world of such monstrous cacophony. Carnelian rose and opened the door. An ammonite stood outside, silver face reflecting his pale body as a twisting curve.
‘Celestial, Lord Legions, my master, will grant you audience.’
‘He’s here?’ Carnelian tried to pierce the shadows behind the ammonite, but could see only his Marula slumped against the wall. When Sthax looked up, face wooden with terror, Carnelian gestured him to remain where he was.
The ammonite shook his head. ‘Upon the roof, Celestial. He bade me bring you to him.’
Carnelian left Fern sleeping, then followed the ammonite up through the hollows of the tower. All the way, air sucked up from the lower levels rushed past them with ever increasing fury as if racing them to the roof.
As they came up onto the roof, Carnelian felt he was entering some vast forest. A canopy of sullen blackness hung above, fed by the trunks of smoke the chimneys were pumping up. Melancholy rain slapped against him in gusts and a snow of ash and soot that clung to everything.
The ammonite led him towards the edge, where some dark figures stood like burnt posts: Sapients, sheltering beneath parasols other ammonites were holding over them. As Carnelian drew nearer the screaming of the pipes grew so shrill he felt his bones must shatter. The plain below came into view, partially obscured by a steamy miasma.
Pockets that seemed horrible chambers were lit here and there by the lightning flicker of the flame jets arcing back and forth. Through the murk he could see that a jerky, agonized scramble of sartlar were struggling to scale the crust of cooked meat that reared up against the outer gate. A flash, then screeching, as liquid fire slashed across them, baking them into the hill.
‘Your plan has failed,’ he cried above the din.
‘To some extent, Celestial.’
Carnelian turned, startled by that angelic voice, serene in the midst of such chaos. He saw the homunculus who had spoken and the staff he held. Behind him his master, Lands, seemed just another chimney.
The Grand Sapient disengaged a hand from the throat of the homunculus and began signing. Once they overran the City, there was always the danger this might happen. They have become like locusts that, once congregating in sufficient numbers, exhaust the food supply around them. Thereafter, they must move on, else perish. Whichever direction they choose they must maintain, for behind them lies only cannibalism.
Carnelian saw the truth of this. He saw also that it was, perhaps, the initial attack upon them in the Canyon that had precipitated this carnage. Unable to retreat, they had surged forward against his incursion. Thereafter, like a siphon, the pressure of those coming on behind had been compelling those in front inexorably towards the Blood Gate and its killing field.
There was only one thing to be done. We must punch through to the entrance of the Canyon and there deflect more from entering.
It was Legions’ hand that answered him. Not so far, Celestial. We need only reach the Green Gate.
Where a link can be re-established to your systems?
Once that is done, we can summon sufficient force to effect your deflection.
Carnelian regarded the Grand Sapients with the growing suspicion that they had engineered this crisis as the means to acquire control of the outer world and, with it, Osrakum.
‘First you will have to remove this mound that blocks our gates, Celestial,’ Cities’ homunculus said above the din.
The three Grand Sapients seemed nothing more than protrusions of the tower roof. Such stillness on the edge of the abyss. Carnelian wondered what it was they were perceiving. Directly, perhaps all they could sense was the rain on their hands, the whispering glancing tickle of ash. Through their feet, they would be aware of the vibration from the flame-pipes operating. But the infernal scene before them they could appreciate only from the throats of their homunculi, as nothing more substantial than a fairytale. Not for him such abstraction. The abomination spread out at their feet was screaming at all his senses. It had to be stopped at whatever cost.
Sitting in Earth-is-Strong’s command chair staring at the locked gate, Carnelian was aware, with a prickly horror, of the mountain of carnage pressing against its other side. He glanced round at the two other dragons that stood close behind him as part of the wedge. The screech of the flame-pipes rising in pitch made him turn back. The Prow was initiating the furious barrage he had planned with Legions, in the hope of holding the sartlar flood back. Grimly he watched the massive crossbars on the gates slide away to both sides, groaning as the gate visibly quivered. Unlocked, the portals began to open. Shrieks of metallic agony came from either side as the mechanisms that opened the gates struggled against the weight they were holding back. A crack was widening between the two portals. At first he could see nothing. Then a dark stream began to pour through. A gush of corpses gradually increasing to a waterfall. An avalanche advancing towards him, one tumbling layer at a time, of things that looked like scraps of leather. A vast belch of fetid air struck them that made his officers recoil, moaning. Fluid welling in his mouth, in shock and horror, he gave the command and the beast beneath them lurched forward, lowering her head to form an immense ram. As the monster’s head punched into the corpse avalanche, the cabin juddered, throwing Carnelian forward so that he was almost unseated. The cabin jerked erratically, yawing, pitching back and forth. He realized it was because the dragon’s great feet were sliding. He tried not to imagine on what. Instead he fixed his attention on the monster’s head as it clove like a prow into the wave of dead. Soon corpses were building up against the raised shield of her bony fringe, until they spilled over and poured out on either side, until her head was entirely submerged beneath the filthy carnage. His officers were soon retching at the stench. Grimly, Carnelian refused nausea, feeling through his chair Earth-is-Strong taking the strain, leaning her immense bulk into pushing the dead before her.
Before the gate was reclosed, Carnelian went out to make sure the way was clear for the next day’s sally. He had just left Earth-is-Strong and the other dragons having wounds tended that their feet had sustained from embedded shards of sartlar bone.
His steps faltered as he came to the edge of the spread of paste the monsters had crushed from the corpses. He wound more turns of cloth across his mouth and nose and pushed on. The outer faces of the immense portals open against the flanks of the towers were coated with gore almost up to the top. The ground was slippery with fat and fluids. Banks rose up on either side that seemed of tallow. Up ahead the Prow rose with its mane of wavering smoke, on its brow its crown of thorns, whose brass throats were vomiting a juddering fury of fire that was keeping the sartlar at bay. A lone colossus amidst the thunder and shrill demonic screaming, it could not hope to keep that rate of firing up for long without being consumed by its own fire.
Carnelian had reached the first bridge. On the other side, upon the killing field, was the escarpment of corpses that had been left when he ordered the dragons back to the fortress. He made his way to the edge of the bridge, going as fast as he could, though loathing each step he took into the quagmire. The rock sloping down to the Cloaca was densely matted with the dead they had shoved over the edge. In the depths he dimly saw that a great mass of corpses now dammed the channel. If the other branch was also choked, the run-off from the Skymere might begin to pool behind it. Perhaps enough to raise the level of the Skymere. The coombs might be flooded. Unexpected rage welled up in him, driving hot tears into his eyes. So what if the palaces of the Masters should be washed into the lake?
‘Celestial?’ It was an Ichorian bleak with horror and disgust. ‘An embassy has come demanding to see you.’
‘An embassy?’
‘Of the Great, Celestial.’
Carnelian watched them approaching, swaying on high ranga, immense in their black shrouds, their masks glinting from within their hoods like the sun through clouds. Ammonites scurried around them ladling a continuous carpet of blue fire before their feet. They came to a halt while still at some distance from him.
‘My Lords,’ he greeted them, coldly.
As they held up their hands to return his greeting, he saw the symbols painted on their pale skin. They were wearing the full ritual protection. One of them stood forward. ‘I am He-who-goes-before.’ He must have sensed Carnelian’s incredulity at such a claim, for he added: ‘Elected, yesterday, by the Clave in full session.’
Without the attendant command of the Red Ichorians, this honour seemed to Carnelian vainglorious. The Master raised his hand, pointing above Carnelian’s head at the smog wreathing the towers of the Blood Gate; the flash and scream of liquid fire. ‘For days all of Osrakum has watched smoke rising from the Canyon. Drifts of it have darkened the skies above the north-west coombs.’
Carnelian lost some composure as he realized that his father and his people must have been oppressed by these signs directly.
‘We have sent demands to the Labyrinth, but They have refused to grant any audience, nor deigned even a reply. So we have been put to the inconvenience of coming here ourselves. What in the names of the Two is happening here, my Lord?’
Carnelian was aware he had not been addressed as befitted his new blood-rank. Such an omission could only be intended as a slight. Perhaps it was an indication of how these Masters were reacting to his appearance. Aloof on their ranga and with the decorum and precaut
ion of their purity, they looked down upon him in his debased, tainted filthiness. He felt nothing but contempt for them.
‘I came here in response to a report that the sartlar gathered outside Osrakum had swarmed into the City. When I arrived I found they had penetrated the Canyon. We do not know what drives them, but they pour towards our defences. Each day we destroy vast numbers of them, but there are always more. They are as numberless as leaves.’
Another of the Masters stepped forward. ‘Why have the legions not been summoned, my Lord, to drive this rabble away?’
‘All contact with the outer world has been broken,’ said Carnelian.
Two more Masters shifted. ‘All?’
The Master who claimed to be He-who-goes-before spoke before Carnelian could repeat his statement. ‘How long, Celestial, do you expect it will be before contact is re-established?’
Carnelian saw no reason to tell them his plans and made a gesture of indeterminacy. ‘The Wise have assured me the Blood Gate has enough naphtha to maintain the present levels of annihilation for many more weeks.’
‘We do not have weeks, Celestial. Soon famine will visit Osrakum.’
This was news to Carnelian.
‘It is inconceivable that these animals should pose such a threat to us,’ said one of the Masters.
Another turned his shadowed face on Carnelian. ‘Who brought this curse down on us?’
Carnelian wondered what the Masters would say were they to find out just how responsible he was for bringing the sartlar to Osrakum. ‘Everything that can be done, my Lords, is being done. Return to your coombs.’
Turning his back on them, he walked away towards the Blood Gate. They called out to him. His eyes filled with the spectacle of fire and smoke, ears assaulted by screaming flame-pipes, he soon forgot them.
He woke, suddenly. It was the middle of the night. He could not at first locate the reason he felt so alert. Then joy flared up in him. Silence. It was so quiet he could hear Fern breathing. He rose carefully, not wanting to wake him, then padded over to the shutters. They creaked as he opened them. He stepped out onto the balcony. Perfect blackness. Gazing towards the killing field he thought he could make out the mass of the Prow like a cave in the night. The tang of naphtha was underlaid by the dull stench of cooked meat and rotting. He could hear a delicate rustling like a million ants pouring across leaf litter. A warm body pressed against his back.
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