Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

Wandering lost through a forest of grey trees. His fingers, touching one, recoil. Cold, its bark degloves like corpse skin. Cracked bone revealed could be chapped lips. A baby there, nestling among desiccated, grinning dead. A boy he knows, but has forgotten. No, a girl. His mother? Which mother? He feels the tiny thing’s need and scoops it up. His shadow has a horrible life of its own. A dark presence swirling the air. Itch in his ears. Fearing flies, he flees, cradling the child as if it were his own heart.

A wall crusted with spirals all the way to the sky. He feels its pulse. Puts his ear to the shell. Hearing the sea turns fear to rage. Plunging his spear in he tears a wound he squeezes into. Smothering flesh. Bursting into headache light. Up to his ankles in streaming blood. High banks bristling with bones. Thunder. The dark sea lap lap lapping at a beach of powdered bone. Salt wind murmuring in his face. Trying to tell him something he is desperate to hear, but he claps his hands over his ears in terror. The need in the child’s eyes. No child belongs in the Land of the Dead! His cradling arms become a boat his shadow shoves into the swell. Another with him. Nuzzling the thither shore upon which looms a shape so terrible it blinds him. But he is undeaf to its roaring rage.

He woke in Fern’s arms, sweating, heart hammering. There was comfort in Fern’s warm strength, in his smell. The dread from the dream was slow to fade. Carnelian remembered the sartlar at the gate. That was something solid to worry about. He scanned the cell. Plain plaster walls. Some shelves. A wooden manikin, big-shouldered for wearing armour, mushroom-headed to take a helmet. A rack for weapons. An oblong of brass set into the wall, in which lurked a murky twisted world. A stone basin with a lead spout with a valve around its throat. The night before, the Ichorian commanders had offered to vacate some of their cells for his people. They had been aghast when he had told them he intended to occupy one himself. This chamber was the finest they had: that of the grand-cohort commander. It was certainly not intended for a Master, but he had slept in far worse places. It was clean and private and he found its simplicity soothing.

Thin light was filtering from somewhere at the foot of the bed. He was drawn to it. He kissed Fern and slipped out from his arms. ‘I yearn to see the new day.’

‘It’s cold,’ muttered Fern, getting up with him, his skin sliding against Carnelian’s. He plucked a blanket from the bed and drew it round them both. Light was entering in through gaps in some shutters. They fumbled for the catches. As the panels opened they released more faint light and a shock of cold air. They stepped out onto a balcony that held them with no space to spare. Carnelian turned his head towards the light, squinting against the incandescent rind of the sun rising from a violet horizon framed by the Canyon walls. The dyke of the Black Gate provided a threshold to that view into Osrakum. Half occluded by one of the Canyon walls stood the dark apparition of the Pillar of Heaven. For a moment he was lost in memories of his time in its hollows.

He became aware Fern was gazing upwards and looked up himself. They were standing astride the ridge where two sides of the tower met. Above them, a thicket of flame-pipes ran in a triple band like a nest of snakes. Carnelian let his gaze fall, frowning. Below, two other balconies; a row of six more beneath those, many more in the next row and more and more, like the cliff-ledges gulls nest on; balconies erupting from the stone in a rash that widened then narrowed down the walls. He sensed this reflected the military hierarchy of the officers who occupied the cells below. The rash ran out as tiny blisters in the smooth masonry. This was rooted in rougher stone that went down and further down. His grip tightened on Fern’s arm. They were high in an eyrie teetering on the edge of an abyss. There was a black gleam in the depths of the Cloaca.

‘What is it?’ Fern asked.

Carnelian silenced him with a touch to the lips. Just before Fern spoke he had become aware of a murmur that brought back the horror of his dream. He looked down the Canyon to where a vast bridge emerged from the gloom to touch the circular plain that stretched before the outer gates. It seemed covered with rust rough enough, he felt, to abrade his hand should he reach out to touch it. Subtle motion on that plain so far below made it clear the rust was a teeming multitude. ‘Numberless as leaves,’ he murmured in Quya.

‘What?’

Carnelian turned to Fern, who had worry in his eyes. ‘Something my father once said to me. It’s not important.’ He nodded towards the sartlar. ‘I’d hoped I had dreamed them too.’ He wondered if it was hunger that had driven the poor creatures this far. How difficult was it going to be to herd them back towards the City at the Gates?

Fern focused on their multitude. ‘As placid as earthers cropping ferns.’

Carnelian remembered how violently earthers stampeded when they were spooked and foreboding sent a shiver through him.

Fern reacted to his shudder. ‘Let’s go back in.’

Carnelian was glad to follow him. The light revealed a design upon the wall. A grid, its boxes filled with red, black and green dabs forming diagonals across it. He did not need the colours running along the top and the twelve columns to know these were the months. Down the side of the six rows, pomegranates alternated with lilies, each having a number beside it. The six grand-cohorts of the Red Ichorians. The coloured dabs showed the month on which each grand-cohort was to garrison which of the three gates. It made him sad, this duty rota for men almost all now dead.

He looked away. He had his own duty. The previous night, as he and Fern had gazed down upon the sartlar, an ammonite had appeared, saying their masters had arrived at the Blood Gate and that they insisted he should attend a conclave with them immediately. He had been too weary, too disconsolate, to face them then, but he had promised that, at first light, he would meet with them.

Following the ammonite up into the open air, Carnelian was overwhelmed. All around him the Canyon walls rose up to challenge the majesty of the sky. Such vast space was a shock after the confinement of the military strata, whose spaces, though cavernous, were inhabited by engines of war, reeking of naphtha, around whose bloated brass Ichorians crept like ants around their queen.

Carnelian could see no threat and asked Sthax and his Marula escort to wait for him. His ammonite guide led him off across a plain that was the roof and summit of the Blood Gate tower in which he lodged and that was covered with a sparse forest of chimneys. They were heading for a promontory that curved up from a corner of the tower to a platform crowded with machines. As Carnelian climbed towards it he recognized some as heliographs, though larger than any he had seen before. As for the rest, he could not even guess their function. Sapients stood here and there, directing ammonites working the mechanisms. As he wound his way through the thicket of brass and bone, of lenses and louvred mirrors, he saw three taller figures at the platform edge and knew, from their staves, they must be Grand Sapients.

‘Celestial.’ It was the central homunculus of three who greeted him. Carnelian read the cypher of the staff he held. ‘My Lord Lands,’ he said, then reading the others, ‘My Lords Cities, Legions.’

Their long masks gleamed as they slightly inclined their heads.

‘Our link to the outer world is severed, Celestial,’ said Cities’ homunculus.

Carnelian could not see past them to the sartlar below. At first he thought Cities was referring to them, but then knew he was speaking of their heliographs.