Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

‘Celestial, the Sinistral Ichorians are the proper guardians of your life.’

‘Who then will guard the Gates?’

The Grand Sapients absorbed his words through the throats of their homunculi. For a moment, it seemed they would respond, but their fingers faltered.

‘I intend to breed from these creatures a new caste of Ichorians that shall be in their person a joining of the two previous castes. Their skin shall symbolize the unity of my rule.’

Carnelian’s unease rose in unspoken protest: Have you forgotten the promise you made to save their Lower Reach? He found among the Oracles Morunasa’s sombre face. Was he aware of Osidian’s plans for them? He bit his tongue when it would have warned that the wealth of Osrakum would corrupt these barbarians. He had enough problems of his own. Behind the Grand Sapients, he could see the Forbidden Door. What dangers might lie beyond that portal? If he were to be slain before he had a chance to put in place the necessary arrangements, his people would suffer. He focused upon the long, blind masks floating above. The fingers of the Grand Sapients formed collars of ice around the throats of their homunculi. Carnelian wondered what thoughts, what calculations were flashing through their masters’ minds.

It was Osidian’s voice that broke his reverie. ‘If needs be I will blast my way through to the Labyrinth.’

Carnelian remembered the thunder in the ground. He knew what power Osidian had brought with him and was not surprised when the Wise capitulated.

Arrayed in a robe of vibrant green, Osidian reminded Carnelian of Jaspar’s father on his bier of ice. Save for the lances they had had returned to them after purification, the Marula warriors were naked. Morunasa had commanded them to submit to the ammonites as he and the Oracles were doing. Enraged with fear, the Marula had nevertheless allowed their leather armour to be cut from them and burned. Lotus smoke relaxed them enough to allow the ammonites to wash them, to rasp the curls from their heads. Even their mouths were invaded. Every part of them strigils could reach was scraped until, in places, they bled. The ammonites had been more gentle with Carnelian and Osidian, but no less thorough. Something had been put on Carnelian’s wound so that now he hardly felt it. He had insisted on keeping his father’s cloak, but it had had to be thoroughly cleansed before he was allowed to wrap it over the green robe provided by the ammonites. As they were ushered into the tunnel that lay behind the Forbidden Door, the familiar drugged remoteness gave way to dread.

Tomb shelves on either side cramped their stumbling march. The lanterns the ammonites carried lit their masks from beneath, making them seem to be the vengeful dead. Carnelian tried to find Sthax among the warriors, but they could all have passed for shadows were it not for their staring eyes. The fear in the Marula soon took root in Carnelian as they crept down into the Underworld.

Around him the Marula collapsed suddenly to the ground. Shocked, Carnelian came to a halt. The tunnel walls had disappeared. Unawares, he had strayed into a vast forest of the night. The girth of the trunks implied monstrous height. He focused on the green flame he had been following: Osidian once again leading them to the hoped-for light of the Earthsky. Carnelian’s eyes filled with tears of longing to look upon those he loved among the Tribe. Only his breath separated him from the dead. He reached out and touched one of the trunks. Cold stone, not bark. This was the Labyrinth. He gazed up and saw the stone, baroqued with glyphs, rising up beyond the reach of the lantern light and knew it to be a sarcophagus whose pith was the mummy of a God Emperor long deceased. For a moment he was haunted by a memory of the pygmies buried in their baobabs. Then he was gazing about him. Dimly, he could see more of the columns marching off in every direction.

A whimpering around his feet made him look down and see the Marula warriors curled up, cowering, their hands clasped over their smooth heads, their quivering shoulders, muffling their ears. Perhaps they believed they had been brought to the Isle of Flies. Were they wrong? Panic rising, Carnelian glanced up, feeling hunted. The Oracles gaped, staring with wonder. Among them Morunasa, a stranger without his ashen pallor, in whose yellow eyes Carnelian saw what he most feared. Morunasa knew his god was here. Carnelian did not care whether the Darkness-under-the-Trees had come in with them, or if he had always dwelled here. Morunasa cocked his head, his eyes closed. Carnelian listened too. A strange rumbling was pounding the air. His breath caught in his throat. It was so like the sound the Blackwater made as it forked round the Isle of Flies to tumble, roaring, into the Lower Reach. The sound the Oracles maintained was the voice of their god.

Monsters surrounded them. Sybling Ichorians, two-headed, many-limbed like crabs. Carapaced with bronze, cloaked with darkness. Osidian barked a command that confirmed Carnelian’s fear this was an ambush. Morunasa and the other Oracles reacted by shouting at the Marula, rushing back among them, kicking them, so that the warriors scrambled to their feet, scrabbling for their lances. Beyond this chaos, the sybling Sinistrals fell some on one knee, some on two, lowering their casqued heads, both tattooed and not, their cloaks subsiding like billows of tar smoke. ‘Celestial,’ they murmured.

Osidian was still tense as he surveyed the guardsmen. The Marula warriors had formed up with their lances. Carnelian saw their eyes and knew that, at a word, they would fall upon the syblings, releasing their fear as bloody rage.

It was Osidian relaxing a little that calmed everyone. ‘Have the Halls of Rebirth been made ready to receive me?’

The syblings kneeling in front of Osidian bowed their two heads further. ‘As much as could be done in the time available, Celestial.’

Osidian extended a hand to raise the guardsmen from their knees. ‘Lead on.’

The commander of the Sinistral Ichorians looked uncertainly at the Marula. It seemed to Carnelian the syblings were reluctant to cede their place at the Jade Lord’s side to these barbarians, but when Osidian gestured more insistently, they obeyed. At Osidian’s command Morunasa and some of his Oracles put themselves between him and the Sinistrals, then they all set off.

As he walked, Carnelian listened again for that distant roar. It had to be rain being drained by gutters from the vast canopy of stone above their heads. Still, glancing into the crowding blackness all around, he felt a creeping unease that, in such a place, Osidian should choose to put so much faith in the Oracles of the Darkness-under-the-Trees.

Then, through the columns, Carnelian glimpsed a trembling spire of light. They moved towards its beacon. With every step it widened, but also it grew taller until it seemed to him the path of the sun lay twinkling across a brooding sea. They were entering a world that appeared lit by the melancholy, slanting amber of a northern late afternoon. The columns of the sarcophagi soared in the reflected glow, until the soft wavering light had reached up to reveal the faces surmounting them and the lofty arches that flew from one to the other upon which sat the distant ceiling. He realized that the reason everything was bathed in glimmering light was because the columns and vaults were all skinned with gold.

‘The Shimmering Stair,’ Osidian breathed and Carnelian saw the source of light was a flight of steps of mirror gold climbing a hill flanked by sarcophagus columns and banistered by walls in which fluttered countless flames. Dark mouths, in pairs, opened all the way up the stair, culminating in a single gape.