Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

He stepped onto the design. It felt subtly textured. Closing his eyes, he could feel his feet on a path that he followed. Opening them, he looked back at the meandering trail his sooty feet had left. Not a path he could have easily located by sight. He remembered how the Wise used such paths in their library in the Halls of Thunder.

He became aware of the beautiful and complex inner faces of the commentary stones. Returning to them he reached up to touch one. Its swirling patterns were bewildering, but under his fingers they seemed a pebbled beach. Again he closed his eyes. As he glided his fingers slowly across the surface the nodules seemed to whisper in his mind. He reopened his eyes. ‘Like beadcord,’ he muttered. He noted how tendrils of the floor mosaic lapped at the stone. The nodules were divided into registers, the higher of which could be reached by climbing up onto taller cobbles. Glancing round the whole curve of commentary stones, he saw how, with the floor, they formed a delicate web of meaning emanating from the double ring.

As he approached the inner stones, he saw that their outer faces were patterned in the same way as the commentary stones. Then he became aware that these stones stood each like a ghost behind what appeared to be huge figures. Cracked and round-shouldered, hunching now, but once they had been tall and straight. Entering between a pair of ghost stones, he was confronted by two immense slabs of jade, fissured and veined by pale lichens. As he passed between these, he noticed their inner edges were spotted with round projections. Reaching out to touch one, his finger found its spiralling groove. The same ammonite shells were embroidered into his green robe. Turning, he saw the clear path leading back across the mosaic, through the commentary stones, between the gate stones and on towards the House of Immortality.

He entered the heart of the Dance. Round the mossy space stood the coven of twelve worn stones: two green, two black, eight red. He sensed he was in the presence of something ancient and holy. The inner face of each stone had been cut into. Moving to stand in front of one of these depressions, he realized it was a hollow man, arms and legs outstretched. The hollow was just large enough that he could have climbed into it. From each foot, each hand, a channel ran down to the earth. The channels made the hollow man seem a puppet with rods to move his arms and legs. It did not seem likely their purpose was to drain the hollow of rain water. He sought distraction in the columns of glyphs, worn almost smooth, that covered the surface of the stone. This must be the Law-that-must-be-obeyed. He frowned. Why did it feel like a disfigurement? The glyphs followed the contours of the stone as if they were tattoos or brandings. The Law had been carved into the stone when it was already ancient.

He walked slowly round the Dance, withershins, giving in to his need to understand it. The two green stones led him to the two black. Then began the sequence of eight red stones. Where the black met the red, their inner flanks were carved with circular motifs now almost flush with the stone. Gazing out between these stones, he was looking directly towards the Forbidden Door. The Pillar of Heaven lifted its tornado of stone into a frowning sky. Carnelian looked again at the flank of the black stone, certain the circular carvings had been sky glyphs. Starting with this stone which lay to the sunward of the Rain Axis, the Dance followed the sequence of the months so that the red stone ended the year.

He followed the Dance further round, caressing the time-worn porphyry of the red stones, but when he came to a pair between which Earth-is-Strong’s column of smoke was visible, moving away towards the entrance to the Plain of Thrones, he saw their inner flanks bore more of the faint discs. He ran his fingers over them and found one that had within its slightly raised edge a number of pips. His fingers remembered the red stone coin he had received the first time he had passed through the Blood Gate. That had borne a pomegranate. He saw how the gateway formed by the red stones would give direct access to the Dance to anyone entering the Plain of Thrones. He surveyed the Dance, now certain it must be far more ancient than anything else in Osrakum. More ancient even than the Law. More ancient by far than Grand Sapient Legions had been or his Great Balance. Thinking of that ancient, now dead, Carnelian gazed across the Dance at the black stone opposite. Twelve in all. It was as if the Grand Sapients were the living embodiment of these ancient stones.

At that moment the clouds parted, slanting a ray of light into the centre of the Dance. He was drawn to stand in it, turning his face up to allow the sun to bleach the unease from his heart. He sank to the mossy earth and stretched himself out as he gazed through the opening in the stormclouds into perfect, blue heaven.

Swaying beneath a vast, smiling sky. Memories of his mother, of her smell, of the comfort in her hands. Cedars net the blue in their branches. Clean, resinous perfume of her mother tree. Sifting sand, his hand dries up like a fig. Not the breath of the mother trees, but myrrh. Breathing out and out and out as he wizens into a huskman. He is Legions turning to stone. Trapped in an ivory sarcophagus like a brain in a skull. Seed in a pod. A tickle in him, an itch; the heartbeat of the baby inside him. Carried, sleeping, into the ring of twelve. Entering through the still weeping edges of a freshly cut wound. Singing, so mournful. Then swaying out of the clearing watching clouds streak the sky. Out of the clearing into the ferns. Their croziers knock, knock, knocking their heads together. To whose rhythm the sun bleeds away into the earth. Away, into the earth. Absorbed into it with the blood and the dying light. Something’s burning. He has to become the worm eating his escape through the bread, but then, confused, he is scrabbling into a cradle of bones. His hand drags the nets of his fingers. Dragged down by the weight of fish in his net. Rope burning his hands, running deep in a channel of flesh, as it pulls free of the hooks of his hands, but he holds on, the waters rising.

Carnelian came awake, disorientated. The silhouettes of heads moving back. He rose, aware of giants standing round. It was night. Human-scale figures near him were partially lit. Others were holding the dim stars of lanterns. He recognized the giants behind them as the monoliths of the Dance, their looming shadows the incarnation of the foreboding he had brought with him out of his dream.

‘Master?’

It was Tain offering him a sinister face. Carnelian took the mask. ‘I must’ve fallen asleep.’

Sthax, a shadow with human eyes. Beside him a shrouded figure whose dear face grounded Carnelian. He approached him, embraced him. ‘I’m so glad you’re here, Fern.’ He turned to Tain, to Sthax. ‘So glad you’re all here.’

Still haunted, Carnelian stared deep into the fire. He was reluctant to sleep. One dream and all his hope had turned to despair. He turned the Ruling Ring of House Suth upon his finger. Fern had brought it for him from his father. A proof, if he needed one, that his father still considered him his son.

He turned, sensing someone behind him. Rising above the sentinel monoliths, higher than the glimmering gashes the terraces of the Halls of Rebirth made in the wall of the plain, the Pillar of Heaven loomed a deeper black against the blackness.

He returned his gaze to the flames. Why had he not allowed his people to erect the pavilion they had brought for him? He hungered for the oblivion that, in its privacy, he could have found in Fern’s arms.

He sat up, woken by something. Bells were beating out a funereal dirge. Light throbbed, filtering through the three rings of the Dance. A procession of the Chosen making their way to the Forbidden Door. He recalled the time he had seen another such moving distantly upon the Ydenrim. Then he had been in the Yden with Osidian.