Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

Osidian’s face saddened. ‘Years I endured living among filthy barbarians.’ Tears lensed his eyes. Carnelian felt that sight awakening his own grief.

‘I was a slave,’ Osidian said, bleakly, gazing up at his mother through tears. ‘A slave.’ Horror paled his face. ‘It was a living death within the funeral urn.’

The halo dulled as the gold face inclined towards them. ‘You forget, Nephron, to whom you speak. All my life I have been confined, much of it in darkness.’

Osidian grimaced. ‘But it was not I who did that to you,’ he pleaded.

Ykoriana straightened. ‘That hardly matters. What I did to you was not out of hatred. It was simply a tactic in the slow, cold war that has been fought within the House of the Masks for centuries. We are all casualties of that war.’

But not the only ones, thought Carnelian. He flinched when he saw Osidian’s face changing. So would Ykoriana had she been able to see his barely contained fury. Many who had seen it had died. ‘Unnatural mother,’ he hissed.

The gold mask above them moved a little to gaze down on them with imperious scorn. ‘I deny your right to make a claim on me. I know you not who hardly ever saw your face, who never felt your mouth upon my breast. Even your voice is a stranger’s. You were taken from me at birth so that I did not even have a touch of you to salve the pain of your release.’

Her head fell. ‘But you cannot know what it is to carry a child within you, to have it torn bleeding from your womb, knowing it is born to die in sacrifice, to be imprisoned, to be used as I have been used. Yet I have done what I could to protect those of my children that I love.’ She raised her head. ‘You know, Carnelian, how far your father was prepared to go to protect you.’

Carnelian, even while he wondered at the softness of her voice, felt a barb in those words that tore at him.

She pulled herself up and became imperial again. ‘A mother’s love is stronger by far than a father’s. To save her child, she would destroy the world.’

There was a terrible edge to her voice that shook Carnelian, not only with fear, but also with a twinge of desire to be that child.

‘And, yet, you gave yourself and the Masks to the murderer of your daughter.’

Carnelian looked at Osidian, stung by the venom in those words, but saw no rage burning in his eyes, only… was it hope?

The petal robe, shivering, gave off a wall of perfume. ‘Would seeking revenge against her murderer have brought my daughter back from her tomb?’ Her voice was as cold as the metal of her mask. ‘Women are forced to see life as it is. In contrast, you men are so ready to believe in your fantasies, to have your every expectation confirmed. In spite of hating your brother for what he had done, I protected him because he was my path to power. You prefer to believe women victims to their passions, but we can be at least as calculating as you. Love does not make us weak, but strong. Do you remember, Carnelian, when your father brought you to see me? He did so hoping that, through love of my sister, I would stay my hand against you and, even, against him.’ She laughed. ‘Why do men prefer to make themselves blind to who we really are? Perhaps this is why you use us as you do, but be certain I will not let it happen again.’

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.’