Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

They both turned their green eyes upon him, stone and living, both needing, demanding more. Carnelian tried to think it through, but the pressure rising in him was beyond analysis. ‘We came here believing you had sought your son’s life.’ He described the assassination attempt and believed the shock in Ykoriana’s face was real, knew he had expected it. ‘It makes no sense now that you would do this, but the use of the Brotherhood of the Wheel must be intended to implicate you. So if not you, my Lady, who?’

Osidian’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘The Wise?’

‘Why not the Wise?’ Carnelian said. ‘Would the Brotherhood attempt such a thing on their own? Or the Great, who could only expect to be decimated by it?’ He frowned, considering what his heart was urging him to. Feeling it was a kind of madness, but unwilling to dam its flow. ‘We are all three here of the House of the Masks.’

There, he had said it. It was the first time he had felt it.

‘Instead of fighting each other, we should unite against our common foe.’ Carnelian paused and saw in their faces they were waiting for his words. He glanced into the hollow man. ‘I do not want to die here, nor do I want to live under a perpetually deferred sentence of death.’

Ykoriana lowered her head a little. ‘Does Aurum still live?’

‘I believe that unlikely.’

‘Well, then, assuming Sardian will not betray you, if I choose not to speak of it, I doubt if any could discover your secret.’

‘And the reason we cannot announce the truth of my birth openly is what?’

‘The Law-that-must-be-obeyed,’ she said.

‘And yet have we not all three defied it?’

Osidian frowned. ‘The blood rituals are essential for Rebirth, for Apotheosis.’

‘Are they?’ Carnelian could not shape in his mind what was coming; the words would have to find their own shape. ‘It seems to me these blood rituals have been conceived to set the House of the Masks against the Great. Further, to divide our House against itself. Are these mutilations, this massacre of our own, necessary? Can we not invoke the Creation without reproducing it? Or is it, perhaps, that the Wise wish to bring the candidate face to face with his own mortality? Even as they give him the symbols of power, even as they transform him into the Gods, they show him the flesh of which he is made, how easily his blood flows. Even if they can give you divinity, Osidian, you know they cannot give you immortality.’

‘Nevertheless, the Chosen will not accept my Godhead unless it is consecrated with ichorous blood.’

Carnelian saw in Osidian’s face that, on this issue, he was immovable. He feared losing impetus and so he turned to Ykoriana, the mother. ‘What if you were given your daughter to raise until she was of age to become empress and wife?’

Carnelian watched Ykoriana grow younger with hope.

‘That would destabilize my throne,’ Osidian said. ‘To rule without possibility of an heir for so long.’

Carnelian turned to him. ‘If you were to die this instant, who would most likely become the next God Emperor?’

Almost imperceptibly, Osidian’s eyes narrowed. ‘You would.’

‘Ever since my father came to speak to me, I could have sought the Masks, but, clearly, I have not.’

Osidian nodded.

‘Do you really believe I covet such power?’

Osidian’s face became brittle. ‘To save your beloved barbarians, perhaps.’

Carnelian saw the truth in this. It seemed for a moment as if everything would founder on that doubt. ‘Well, then, let me rule the outer world as your viceroy. Anyone who moved against either of us would have to fear the vengeance of the other. Until either of us produces an heir, the Great will live in fear that we should both die, for then one among them would have to be chosen to wear the Masks and the Law would force many of his peers to be slaughtered at his Apotheosis.’

Carnelian could see Osidian was still not entirely convinced. ‘For years you will be needed here to hold Osrakum together. How much energy would you have left to rebuild and safeguard the Commonwealth?’

‘You want to save your barbarians.’

‘I will not deny it, but also, and more pressing, there is the need to work against the famine that is coming.’

‘And when Ykorenthe comes of age and we produce an heir?’

‘I will retire to my coomb, to Coomb Suth.’

‘You will no longer be Suth.’

‘The Great will be unable to defy you when you give me the coomb as a gift.’

Osidian regarded him, weighing his judgement of this new brother. Carnelian knew there were several political attractions in such a scheme, but he wished to remove the last vestiges of doubt. ‘By then I will have done enough to appease my conscience.’

Osidian nodded.

‘And in the meantime you can keep an eye on me through the Wise and their watch-towers.’

Ykoriana stirred. ‘There is hope in this.’

As they both turned to regard her, it seemed she was holding her breath, waiting for Osidian’s response. He gazed at Carnelian, then sank his head. The wind soughed in the vast space above them. At last Osidian raised his eyes to Carnelian and smiled, grimly. ‘Let it be as my brother says.’

All three touched hands and swore oaths upon their blood.

Even if they had wished it, they knew they could not return by the Path of Blood, so it was necessary to climb the stair to the apex of the Pyramid Hollow where portals gave into the imperial strata of the Halls of Rebirth. Ykoriana removed her ranga and they began the climb, Osidian on her right hand, Carnelian on her left. The steps were steep so they supported her. Her robe tore upon the steps leaving a trail of petals. Glancing down it seemed to Carnelian to be the blood that had been shed there, but sweet and fluttering away on the wind.

A vast bloated corpse floats on a dark sea.Flesh awrithe with maggots. Sartlar consuming each other? Blood and render licking up his body. Sucking at his armpits so that he is forced to raise his arms as branches. His hands and face are dry, caked earth. Dry earth everywhere. Catching in his throat so that he is racked by coughing. Carnelian scratches at his eyes so as to see her clearly. A woman clothed in plates and clods of blood-red earth, shedding it in flakes and dust away on the wind. He grips her hand as a child would his mother’s. Smug, he gazes up at her, but the face she turns down to him is a grinning skull.

Carnelian jerked awake, hugging the black cloak around him. It was a while before he fully surfaced from the dream. Morning was slipping in through high windows. He sat up, swinging his legs out so he could perch on the edge of the niche he had slept in. Lifted the pits of his knees away from the chill stone lip. He saw the wound in his thigh and was surprised how little he felt it. He looked towards the vast bed, bare of its silk and feather coverlets. Even from this distance he could smell its aura of lilies. Away across the chamber the hearth was now grey and cold because he had forbidden anyone to come to tend it while he slept.

He stared blindly, filled with dread. Was the dream a foretelling of the famine that was coming? A flash of anger. He had felt so certain he could work against it, but was it already too late? Was he fated to return to the outer world to do nothing more than witness the sartlar, driven by unbearable hunger, devouring each other? Fear rose in him. Was Ykoriana the woman with the skull face? In trusting her, had he committed a fatal error?

Submerged in a deluge, he stood trying to wash away the taint of the dream. The warm water was caressing life back into his body. He raised his arm against the pressure into the air space in the shelter of his bowed head. He looked at his hand as if he hoped to see some mark left by the dream woman’s clasp. Thinking of her brought Ebeny into his mind, made him yearn like a child to go to her. There was another pressing reason he must cross the Skymere: he needed to talk to his father before the revelation of his birth became common knowledge throughout Osrakum.