‘Only one path remains open to us. The legions must be summoned to drive the sartlar back onto the Land; to save what can be saved, of the harvest, of the Land, of the sartlar, of the Commonwealth; to allow food to flow back into Osrakum. We must have the authority to transmit the command codes.’
Still caught in the coils of his dark vision, Carnelian took a while to appreciate what Legions was waiting for. ‘Why ask me? Have you not communicated this to the God Emperor?’
‘For the moment Their condition is beyond any remedy.’
Suspicion leapt into Carnelian’s mind. Even in the throes of the maggot infestation it should have been possible for them to raise Osidian to enough lucidity to make this decision. Doubt ate away at this conclusion. He was remembering how weak Osidian had been, how spiritless. Morunasa had forced this new infestation on Osidian before he had fully recovered from the last. But Carnelian dare not trust the Wise. Nothing they did was free of the shadow of manipulation. Perhaps they feared that if Osidian were to make this decision it would confirm his absolute power, and what might they gain by passing the decision to Carnelian? Perhaps that any disasters consequent on the decision could be laid at his feet. A darker possibility occurred to him. If he gave the command, would he not appear in Osidian’s eyes to be usurping the power rightly his? Did the Wise seek to cleave them from each other the better to control both? Then the thought came that perhaps the Wise wanted to summon the legions to use them to re-establish their Great Balance. Perhaps even to take power for themselves. What did he know about what was really going on in the outer world other than what he had just been told? He looked out along the Canyon, wishing he had followed his heart and ridden to where he could have seen things for himself. He shook his head. He was sinking into a quagmire of self-defeating argument. He knew in his bones the vision Legions had described to him must be true or close to the truth, but did it have to be he who made this decision? Was there time for him to return to the Labyrinth and raise Osidian himself? Then his mind began to drift again towards contemplating, almost as a whisper, what might happen in the palaces of the Masters should famine come to their coombs. There was no time to delay.
‘Will the legions succeed?’ he said, seeking some certainty.
The homunculus murmured and when he fell silent, his master’s fingers began moving at his neck and throat.
‘All animals fear fire. If they are given space to flee it, Celestial, the sartlar will flee.’
Carnelian nodded, wanting to believe it. ‘How will we do it?’
‘We shall bring the legions to a gathering point north of the City. When we have marshalled them, we shall guide them in, using our heliographs. We shall make it possible for you, Celestial, to observe everything from here.’
Carnelian paused for a moment, close to being unmanned by the ghosts of the many decisions he had made that had helped lead them all to this crisis. Then, with a heavy heart, he gave the Grand Sapient leave to transmit the command codes in his name.
Over the next two days, signals came in intermittently from legates acknowledging reception of the summons. Legion’s Thirds oversaw the sending of detailed instructions that were intended to coordinate the meeting of the legions at the designated mustering point. The intention was to weld them into a single, massive, irresistible strike force. The Thirds laboured constantly, providing each legion with a detailed route to the rendezvous so that all could be efficiently resupplied with naphtha and render. All this Carnelian discovered by talking to one of the Seconds, who also informed him that the legions coming to raise the blockade of Osrakum numbered twice as many as those that had fought at the Battle of the Mirror.
Carnelian woke into darkness hearing the sea that had troubled his dreams. Fern sat up beside him. ‘What’s that sound?’
‘You hear it too?’ Carnelian leapt from the bed and peered out through the porthole. Signals were blinking insistently on the faraway Canyon wall, but it was the susurrating sound that made the hackles rise on his neck. A lightning flash caused him to throw his hand up before his eyes. The screaming that followed stunned him. More brilliant, coruscating light revealing the Canyon floor filled from wall to wall with a tide of heads, into which the dragons he had set to hold the breach in the Green Gate wall were pouring fire.
In the corridor outside their cell, Carnelian and Fern ran into one of the Thirds overseeing the evacuation of his masters in their palanquins. The procession slid past his mirror face as he stood there holding the hand of his homunculus like a father with his son. Carnelian reached down and tore their grip apart, holding on to the Sapient’s cloven hand as he tried to snatch it away and forcing it towards the homunculus. The little man saw what he wanted. At his touch, the Sapient calmed, allowing his fingers to be put around the little man’s throat, who muttered something and, then, responding to his master’s touch, said: ‘This position is undefendable. You must cover our retreat, Celestial.’
‘What about the heliographs?’
‘Instructions have been given to leave them passively aligned. Then the operators are to flee with us so that the brutes will have no reason to go up there.’
Carnelian began to question this, feeling in his bones this was a mistake, but the Sapient had already disengaged and was shuffling off after his homunculus. Carnelian saw the panic banked in Fern’s eyes and realized he had other responsibilities. ‘We’ve got to get Sthax and his people out of here and see if we can’t find a way to cover our retreat.’
Carnelian scrambled up the last ladder knowing Fern was just behind him. Clambering up onto the command deck, he ignored his prone officers and flung himself into his chair. The breach was a flickering screen set into the black mass of the Green Gate wall. The continuous firing of the flame-pipes there was a pulsing screech that made his eardrums feel as if they were about to rupture. Vast smoky shapes cavorted in the flash and dance of light that lit the cauldron on the other side of the wall. Carnelian had hoped that seeing it would inspire in him a way to extract his dragons. He was faced with the grim reality that they were a dam barely managing to hold back the flood. If he were to unplug the breach, the sartlar would gush through. As he sent a command to the rest of his forces for a general retreat, he tried to draw some comfort from the certainty that, whatever he did, the dragons in the breach were lost.
Once more upon the Blood Gate tower summit, Carnelian gazed past the Prow to where, just beyond the range of its pipes, the edge of the sartlar sea had reached. His retreat had been more orderly than he expected, though of the dragons in the breach there was no news. The heliograph relays had failed. Osrakum was once more severed from the outer world. Grand Sapient Legions had reassured him that the legions had received enough information to be able to operate without further guidance. It was always foolhardy to attempt to deduce what one of the Wise was thinking, but Carnelian had sensed the ancient was uneasy.
A black sky shed incessant rain. Carnelian gladly agreed with one of Legions’ Seconds that the dragons should be serviced. Facilities were available at the nearby Red Caves and there was plenty of time. It would be nearly a month before the legions would reach the mustering point. Watching the dragons filing off across the bridge towards the caves, he was glad also for the relief the creatures would feel when their towers were lifted off them. They had been carrying them so long that the towers had worn sores into their backs. Other wounds needed tending. Mostly lacerations on feet and legs.
As the days passed, Carnelian would sometimes climb to the tower summit to gaze along the Canyon. The sartlar were always there beyond flame-pipe range, becalmed, as if they too were waiting. Rain soaking into his cloak sapped at his will and made him wonder what it must be like for them to endure such unrelenting exposure. Their hunger was likely to be a greater torture. He did not want to think about how they might be filling their stomachs.
Most of his time was spent in their cell with Fern. When they were not making love, they slept. In slumber Carnelian was haunted by floods:
of dust, of water, of blood. Given his ever-present feeling of foreboding, it was strange that he would sometimes wake with a seed of hope in his heart, which he and Fern kept warm between them, as they whispered to each other of their hopes for the life they might have together when all of this was over.
Five days after his return from the Green Gate, with Legions at his side, Carnelian watched another embassy of the Great approach. Shadowy they looked, deprived of most of their pomp by the ritual protection. The only signs of their wealth were the jewels that sparkled and gleamed on their hands and the unearthly serenity of their masks. Because of the rain, Carnelian had chosen to site the audience in one of the Gate’s chambers-of-returning. Pools spangled arches with wavering light. Man-shaped hollows stood round them in the brass walls. An odour of camphor almost occluded Legions’ aura of stale myrrh. They had agreed to confront the embassy together because they knew the Great were coming to complain. They knew also that whatever was said there would determine the mood that would prevail throughout the coombs. Carnelian feared panic spreading among the Masters at least as much as did the Wise.
Legions had informed him that the Clave had met the day before and had sent another embassy to the Labyrinth to beg an audience with the God Emperor, but had been turned away. To Carnelian’s surprise Legions had answered his questions about Osidian. It seemed that, on the day they had fled from the Green Gate, Osidian had woken from a period of tortured dreaming, too confused and disorientated to deal with the Great. Carnelian had revealed to Legions what he knew about the maggot infestation: that, probably, Osidian would be in this state for some time and might then fall into unconsciousness from which he would emerge only when the worms came out from his flesh.
The Great were upon them, several of them speaking at once. Carnelian was made wary by their lack of decorum. Making no attempt to portray unity, they were complaining of how little food was left. Seventeen days. Less. He could feel that their hauteur concealed uncertainty, fear even. He watched them as the Grand Sapient explained about the mustering of the legions. They seemed to grow taller as they contemplated the fiery brushing away of the sartlar blockade. Carnelian noted that no mention was made of the broken heliograph link to the outer world. When Legions declared that there was no prospect of any immediate relief, the Masters drew back like cobras.
He continued: ‘You should not expect the Canyon to be open again for at least a month.’
The Masters’ hands sketched angry gestures. Their ire ignited into bitter complaint, but, again, underlying this demonstration, Carnelian could sense their fear and that increased his dismay at how they might vent this upon their slaves.
‘There is another matter,’ said one. ‘The level of the Skymere rises.’
‘By three hand-breadths,’ said another.
‘Four!’
‘Many low-lying palaces will be flooded.’
‘I myself have had to evacuate a suite of halls.’
‘Are we now also to be washed from our coombs?’
Carnelian found their talk connecting to some core of unease inside him. The terrible, recurring forms of his nightmares seemed to rear at the edges of his vision.
‘Clearly, the Cloaca is not draining properly,’ sang Legions’ homunculus.
‘The corpses of the sartlar we cleared from before the Gate have dammed the flow,’ Carnelian said. Even as his voice was making promises to do something about it he was brooding over how it was that Osrakum was being threatened with a flood by the dead.
Carnelian pulled a fold of his military cloak over the nostrils of his mask, but it was not enough to dull the miasma. To his right rose a bronze grille, acid green mottled with black, streaked with the excrement of the anvil-headed sky-saurians that roosted above it in the shadows. The grille was a defence against any attackers making their way up the Cloaca. Above, a stair scaled the ravine wall, becoming a vague scratch lost in the blackness lurking beneath the bridge that linked the killing field to the outer Canyon. Up there was a door from which a passage joined the supply tunnel that ran from the Blood Gate to the Prow. It was along that route they had come to this stinking sewer.
Barring the opening between the grille and the Cloaca bed was a massive portcullis clogged with filth. In slots cut into the walls on either side, Ichorians were greasing the tracks in which ran the counterweights that controlled the portcullis. Eventually, it would have to be raised. Reluctantly, Carnelian looked upstream to where the Cloaca was choked by the immense corpse dam.
In the Cloaca, his feet squelched deep into a stinking putty. On the opposite wall, superimposed tidelines showed the levels where water had run. Through the portcullis, he could make out the Cloaca curving left, out of sight. He lingered, trying to resolve a feeling that he had seen this place before, then turned to face the dam. He began wading towards it through the filth, the fetor so thick it was almost a physical barrier.
The slope rising before him was like the midden mound beneath Qunoth, though immeasurably vaster. Of corpses, mouldering, mulching down to squeeze out their juices which were licking around his feet. He surveyed that mountain, judging the labour needed to release the waters it was damming. When he had stood upon the Blood Gate tower so far above, gazing down, it had seemed a simple thing to describe the opening they must make, as if with a single sword-cut. Sapients had described how, given a narrow channel through, the pent-up fury of the lake waters would quickly flush the whole mass away. Standing before it, Carnelian found it harder to believe their plan could work.
Around him, Ichorians, chins soiled with vomit, were trying not to see the limbs, the rotting faces in the mound they were going to have to dig through. Carnelian knew his impulse to work alongside them was inappropriate.
Climbing back up to the Blood Gate, he released more Ichorians and sent them down to the Cloaca. Thereafter, each day, standing among the mute heliographs, he watched them labouring far below in those sewers. Sometimes, when the breeze died, the charnel stench reached even his eyrie. Too slow the work, too slow for him so that, in desperation, he denuded the Gate of its garrison. Legions’ Thirds protested that he was compromising their defences, but he held his ground, stating that the Prow could break up any sartlar surge long enough for the Ichorians to return to their posts.
Judging progress still too slow, Carnelian sent a command that work in the northern branch was to be abandoned and all effort concentrated on the southern. The Cloaca haunted his dreams. He longed to see its disgusting blockage flushed away as much as if it were a clot in his own arteries.
Infrequently, messages were heliographed from the Labyrinth. One reported that the God Emperor had slipped into a sleep from which he could not be woken. Knowing Osidian would soon wake, Carnelian wondered how he would react to what had been happening while he slept. In darker moments Carnelian brooded as to who it was who would emerge from such terrible dreams wearing the face of a god. At last, one of the Thirds came to inform him the God Emperor had taken up residence in the Stone Dance of the Chameleon. The Sapient had no answers for Carnelian’s questions. He said only that Osrakum was now hungry. When Carnelian learned that Osidian had been deaf to the appeals of the Wise that the render in the Red Caves should be distributed to the coombs, he authorized it himself. That night, Fern and he stood on the summit of the South Tower in a world made frosty by a full moon. The only warmth came from the patch of gold that flickered in the Cloaca far below where the Ichorians had made their camp. Though both were starving, neither could stomach eating render.
One morning Carnelian woke feeling that a burden had lifted from his heart. He went to stand upon their balcony as had become his habit. Night still filled the Cloaca. He raised his eyes towards the open Canyon. His glance hardened to a stare of scrutiny. He called into the cell for Fern to join him. When he came, tousled, bleary-eyed, Fern confirmed what Carnelian already believed. Their spirits soared. The sartlar were gone.
Carnelian watched Ichorians scurrying along the Cloaca bed to cla
mber up into the counterweight slots. He could imagine how they were struggling to raise the portcullis. Filthy water was already gushing out of the channel they had delved in the corpse dam. As the stream widened, the edges of the channel crumbled into it like a sandbank into water escaping to the sea. The rush roared as it snagged more and more corpses and swirled them off along the channel. Carnelian felt it all as a physical release.
The sun falling beneath the clouds set them aflame. Light drained from the world, but the fire did not die in the west. Carnelian thought it was just another storm coming. It was Fern who recognized its true nature. ‘Dragonfire.’
Carnelian caught hold of Fern and they grinned at each other like boys. It began to rain and they laughed as it ran down their faces. At last the legions had come to lift the siege.
The next day was dark and brooding. Even atop the Blood Gate, Carnelian felt as if there was no room for movement. Sounds were dulled by the thick air. The black, smothering sky felt close enough to touch. In the west, the cloudbase was reflecting the release of titanic energies. Masters started arriving. More and more came until, by nightfall, the summits of both Blood Gate towers were crowded. All profane eyes had been commanded to remain below, so that the host of the Great could look towards the west unmasked.
By the following morning the conflagration in the west had become a flicker. By late afternoon there was nothing except, now and then, a sudden, wavering discharge. By nightfall, the sky seemed eerily dead. As Carnelian left the roof, he detected the salty tang of render. Elegant voices rose and fell. The Masters, congratulating each other on their victory, talked greedily of the delicacies that would soon be flooding into Osrakum.
Cowled against the midday sun, Carnelian had been able to remove his mask to see better. Legions was beside him with his Seconds. Their homunculi, after having described to their masters what they could see, had fallen silent. The edges of the tower roof, west and south, were crammed with Masters. Every eye was fixed on the outer reach of the Canyon. It was some time since sartlar had appeared from around the corner and the sounds of consternation across the summits had had time to fade. Carnelian’s mind had ceased to devise scenarios to explain them being there when he had been expecting towered dragons, or some aquar-mounted auxiliaries dashing ahead to bring news of her relief to Osrakum. Dread gripped him as he tried to pierce the intervening distance. Among their multitude, pale pyramids like bloodied ravener teeth, but large enough to rise above the dust of their march. Then there were the white grains that floated above the procession. He pulled himself back from the drop as terror possessed him. He could no longer deny what he was seeing.
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