Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

Emerging from the confines of the stairs into open space, he clutched at his court staves, reeling. Below was a drop spanned at many levels by bridges and staircases all alive with a glittering flow of the Chosen pouring from the Pyramid Hollow into this honeycomb behind.

An Oracle escort preceded him as he made to join the glimmering throng. With each ponderous step, the sibilant cacophony of chatter grew louder. His eyes were bewildered by the flash of their masks, the gleaming of their robes, the flutter and flap of their jewelled fingers as they accentuated their chatter with gesture.

They became aware of him, as of a stone dropping into their pool. Excitement rippled outwards, as they turned to greet him, speaking all at once, fawning on him. He looked down at them from the eminence of his ranga, unable to untangle their questions, aware of an odour undermining their attar of lilies. It was coming from the blood that had spattered their splendour.

They entered a chamber whose fleshy marble was banded with seams and filaments of coral. Ruby chandeliers filtered a bloody radiance over the Masters. Servants swarmed to meet them, their left sides dense with swirling tattoos. These Ichorians raised the skirts of some court robes to crawl under with bowls, while other Masters knelt on their ranga to allow their crowns to be disassembled and their faces to be unmasked. At the unexpected winter of their eyes, the snowy volumes of their naked heads, Carnelian almost cried out, but it was already too late. Throughout the chamber a blizzard of faces was already exposed to the gaze of the Ichorians. He tensed, anticipating massacre. When none came, he focused on the face of a nearby Ichorian, seeing how thin his lips were, how shadow ringed his untattooed eye. He glanced at another and another. All bore the same bleak expression. Carnelian was sickened, knowing in his bones that the prescribed punishment for this infringement of Masking Law was only being deferred. These Ichorians knew they were destined to lose their eyes and suffer other mutilations. As he watched them move among the towering Masters, Carnelian felt complicit, certain this was his House, the House of the Masks, choosing to display profligate extravagance.

Some of the Great within his hearing were venting irritation. He did not catch enough of what they said to know what it was they were complaining about, except that the object of their ire were the ‘barefoot’.

He became aware that an Ichorian was kneeling before him. ‘Does the Celestial wish to relieve himself?’

‘No, rise.’

The man obeyed him.

‘Does this happen every year?’

The Ichorian looked confused. ‘Celestial…?’

‘This unmasking?’

‘Only at an Apotheosis, Celestial.’

Carnelian frowned behind his mask. Behind this the cunning of the Wise. How better to ensure the loyalty of servants, than by linking their sight and limbs directly to the continued life of the God Emperor whom they served.

‘Come, unmask me and remove this confounded weight from my head.’

The man grimaced, arresting a shake in his head. ‘There are Seraphim present, Celestial, to whom it is forbidden to look upon your face.’

Carnelian saw how, beyond the promontory of the Great, stretched a crowd of smaller Masters, the ‘barefoot’. Lesser Chosen, most of whom were not entitled to wear court ranga and who, newly enfranchised, had been invited for the first time to a coronation masque. A sign of the new political balance, that, if the reaction of the Great was anything to go by, the new God Emperor was going to have a struggle making them accept. If the new order was to have any chance, the barriers between the Lesser Chosen and the Great must be cast down. It might be that he would have to spend much of the rest of his life behind a mask, but he did not want to have to wear it in the presence of the Lesser Chosen, many of whom would soon be serving him in the outer world.

‘Nevertheless, unmask me.’

Looking scared, the Ichorian did as he was told.

Carnelian’s act of defiance against the Law did not go unnoticed among the Great. It drew them to him as wasps to honey. He was finding their attention unbearable when trumpets and shawms began braying. He sighed with relief at the temporary respite. More Ichorians appeared, swinging censers high on poles. The serpents of smoke they loosed soon dissipated into acrid fog. Breathing it, Carnelian could feel it catching at his throat and knew it to be drugged. Even as he felt his thoughts fraying, there came a rustling like autumn leaves stirred to fury by a gust. A dense cloud of butterflies had taken flight. A symbol of rebirth, of sacred transformation. At their core, the God Emperor, upon a long dais, drifting among the Grand Sapients with their cloven hands and staves, their skull faces. The Twins on Earth: a glittering, gorgeous apparition, like an idol carried in procession.

A surge among the Great carried Carnelian into a chamber of sardonyx dadoed with brown mottled turtle shell. Amber globes cast down a late evening light. More Ichorians circulated, carrying delicacies on plates of creamy jade. Gold beakers frothing over with bitter chocolate. Hollowed jewels holding exquisite liqueurs. Meats cooked and perfumed with flowers. Fruits like cut gems. Beasts, some entire, some still marginally alive, others dissected to form enticing symmetries with their organs, bones and plumage.

Carnelian found himself increasingly besieged by the Great. As he gazed on their porcelain faces, he struggled to order his thoughts. Perhaps it was the effects of the narcotic smoke that were dulling the brilliance of their conversation. He tried to listen, but was distracted by the flash of their eyes, the flutter of their hands. He feared the drug the ammonite had given him was failing; that at any moment his body, drained of so much blood, would collapse. He rallied sufficiently to begin deflecting their elegant flattery, their delicate enquiries about what the intentions of the new God Emperor might be. He could not tell them how the new political arrangements were to be enshrined in law. He could give them no insight into how much the God Emperor expected them to acquiesce in the erosion of their ancient privileges. He grew angry with them when they expressed anxiety about how the enfranchisement of the Lesser Chosen might affect the division of the flesh tithe.

He found himself in a chamber of beaten gold. Here the Masters were accompanied by vague reflections that made him feel he was watching murky, barely remembered scenes from his childhood. Pale summer light from citrine lamps shone down upon Masters dancing duelling pavanes with double-headed halberds. In time to stately music their ritual combat evolved with ponderous grace. Several young Lords invited Carnelian to demonstrate his puissance with them in a measure, but he declined, dizzied even by just watching the elegant gyrations.

He wandered into a more sombre chamber, violently striped with malachite and floored with speckled jade. Emerald columns filtered light like a forest canopy. In pits sunk into the floor frantic creatures, maws brimming with needle teeth, claws sheathed in bronze and obsidian, tore at each other, their screeching seeming to counterpoint the fierce symphony of horns and cymbals. Around these pits, Masters in a fury brought on by consuming juices harvested from glands being offered by Ichorian slaves demonstrated their wealth by gambling with each other on the bouts, using double-eyed iron coins.

He escaped to a dismal chamber in which sapphire rays lit contortionists undulating like denizens of the deep, coupling improbably while, around the walls, men sat with silver bowls upon their laps, running pestles round and round within their rims, producing pulsing, throbbing notes that sliced through Carnelian’s head.