Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

‘What is it?’ whispered a voice in Ochre.

In the faint light oozing from the embers of their fire, Carnelian could just make out Fern’s shape.

‘Some Standing Dead,’ he replied in Ochre, feeling a furtive delight in uttering that barbarian tongue in that place. Then a rumble ponderously shook the sky. A sudden breeze set him shivering. ‘I’m cold.’ Fern opened his blanket. Carnelian crept in beside him. They snuggled together. Comfort quickly gave way to passion.

He woke into a world suffused by a faint dawn light, feeling groggy. The sound of bells seemed to have followed him out of his dreams. Sitting up, he saw, to the east and south-east, movement in the gaps between the monoliths. Fern stirring against his belly made him glance down. He watched him come awake and smiled. Fern grimaced and took some moments to register him.

‘You didn’t sleep well either?’

Fern shook his head. He propped himself up on his elbow, watching the procession of the Masters. ‘It’s been going on all night?’

Carnelian nodded, remembering snatches of dream in which the world was carried away in a terrible and irresistible flood.

Sitting with Fern and Tain, Carnelian watched servants with chameleon-tattooed faces laying dishes of jade and silver upon a rug. He offered Tain some food. ‘How’re things with Father?’

His brother dipped his head to one side and looked down, then glanced up at Carnelian. ‘Well enough to send you that,’ he said, indicating with his chin the Ruling Ring on Carnelian’s finger.

Carnelian saw a grimmer truth in his brother’s eyes, but he kept silent. What use was it to know more? He could not go to his father’s side. He glanced at the Ruling Ring. That was its own message. His father expected soon to die. Carnelian was not sure his father had believed the assurances in his message that his adopted son would, in time, rule House Suth. He might only have sent him the ring in the hope that it would give him enough power to affect the succession in their coomb. Certainly it should make it possible for him to get his people out of there, but bring them where? Into safekeeping in the House of the Masks? Glancing at Tain’s face tattoo, he wondered how people wearing that could possibly reside in the Labyrinth. For a moment he became possessed by a fantasy of taking them all with him into the outer world. That possibility seemed even more unreal. He became aware Fern was watching him. He smiled, but only the corners of Fern’s lips twitched in response.

‘What about Poppy and Krow?’

Fern grimaced. ‘You can imagine how she reacted when I told her she would have to stay behind.’

Carnelian smiled grimly. ‘We can’t have her here.’ Fern and Tain’s faces stiffened, as they sensed the threat underlying his words. Carnelian wanted to lighten things a little. ‘Even now she’s probably trying to swim the lake to get here.’

Fern smiled and even Tain who, in his short acquaintance with Poppy, already had some notion of what she was like.

After they had finished eating, he took Fern and Tain with him out through the two inner rings and across the mosaicked stone to the outermost ring. There, with Carnelian in his mask and military cloak, they watched the Masters pass by. Their palanquins were carried by slaves whose faces bore the same heraldry as the standards that glowed like jewels under the sombre skies. Banners streamed rainbows. Feathered parasols fluttered like birds. Bells rang, of dull stone or sharp bright silver. Chariots were pulled among the processions by pale aquar, each led by a Sinistral Ichorian.

Carnelian retired with Fern into the pavilion his people had erected. In the gloom they fed off each other’s bodies. They slept, they woke to more passion and drowsed afterwards, exhausted. They were vaguely aware of the day fading. They lit no lamps. Dawn found them drugged by ecstasy and joy, Carnelian’s tainted by the dregs of dreams.

Carnelian lay half wake, waiting for Fern to return with some food. The pavilion smelled of sex. A movement in a dark corner brought him fully awake. A shadowy form was looming there. He sat up with a jerk, fearing this to be something supernatural, but still casting round for some weapon. A beautiful voice stilled a cry of alarm in his throat. ‘Calm yourself, Seraph.’

Carnelian’s gaze found a child’s face frozen in the shadows. Above floated the murky mirror of its master’s mask. Carnelian saw the emberous finial the homunculus held before it, but could not make out its cypher. ‘Who are you?’ he said, shocked that his people had given him no warning of this visitor.

‘Tribute,’ sang the exquisite voice. ‘I am come to bid you give entry tomorrow to the tributaries.’

Carnelian nodded as the homunculus relayed to him details of how it should be done. Only vaguely did he note the instructions, unease worrying at his concentration. At last, when the homunculus fell silent, Carnelian spoke. ‘Why had you need to come yourself, my Lord? Could you not as easily have sent a letter, or one of your Sapients?’

Tribute’s fingers were a furtive movement at the throat of his homunculus. ‘I have come as the voice of the Twelve.’

‘Does my Lord Nephron know of this?’

‘It is unlikely, Carnelian… of the Masks.’

Carnelian tensed. ‘He has told you then.’

‘The Law demands you be slain at his Apotheosis.’

Carnelian heard the finality of those words reverberate long after silence had returned. ‘And yet the Lord Nephron has seen fit to defy the Law.’

In the further silence that fell after the homunculus finished echoing his words, Carnelian’s heart misgave. He listened out for any evidence of slaughter going on beyond the silken walls of the pavilion. Perhaps Osidian had betrayed him. Perhaps this Grand Sapient had come with Ichorians to take Carnelian captive.

‘He did so even when we told him his transformation into the Gods could not be complete without your blood.’

The homunculus put on those last words an edge that he might, inadvertently, have picked up from some change in pressure in his master’s fingers. Carnelian’s instinct told him that, whatever they might claim, what the Wise sought most of all was his death. He recalled the trap they had set for him that they had baited with his father. With a shudder he remembered their inquisition. The pieces of the mosaic fell into place. ‘It was I whom you tried to assassinate.’

‘We were desperate.’

Carnelian became aware how he was naked, exposed to this cold apparition. ‘Have you come to kill me?’

‘That route is now closed to us, child. Even to you it must by now be clear that you are the agent of a god.’

Carnelian’s mind tried to deflect that, but his heart was ready to believe it. ‘The dreams.’

‘It is through dreams the Gods choose to guide us. Believing you the agent of a god, it would be foolish for us to attempt to slay you, especially in this holy place in which you have taken refuge.’

Carnelian almost protested that he had sought no refuge and yet he wondered if some part of him had.

‘To slay you might precipitate the very cataclysm we dread.’

Carnelian felt that dread soaking into his bones. ‘What, then, do you want from me?’

‘That you should submit yourself, willingly, to sacrifice.’

Stripped of any requisitive or necessitive modes, the words were all the more chilling. ‘Why should I do that?’

‘Because you are possessed of that quality that we have lost and have for so long striven to drive from the hearts of the Chosen: compassion.’

The homunculus must have communicated Carnelian’s shaking head to its master for he had it say: ‘If you do not, the world may die.’

‘Die?’ Carnelian said, feeling defenceless against the Grand Sapient’s bleak certainty.