Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

Soon screaming jets were splashing among the creatures, but he had delayed too long. Their vanguard was already within the minimum range of his pipes. They came on, mouths sagging open, so that it seemed the screaming of the incandescent arcs was their cries. He watched with a kind of paralysed fascination as their bow wave broke over the head of Heart-of-Thunder. Feverishly they leapt up, clambering on his horns. Soon his head was hidden beneath their writhing bodies. Even as his pain was communicated as a shuddering in the cabin, Carnelian saw the dragon’s dark blood slicking the writhing sartlar and found his voice to order a retreat.

Back on the island rock and behind the Blood Gate, he gazed up at Heart-of-Thunder. The dragon’s vast head seemed all raw flesh; his freshly gouged eye a bloody cave. It had been a brutal business cutting the sartlar off him.

As they were retreating, Heart-of-Thunder’s agony had made Carnelian fear they might lose control of him. He was unresponsive to commands and could at any moment have run amok, plunging them all into the Cloaca abyss.

Incredulous with shock, Carnelian looked back to where more and more smoke was pumping up into the midday sky. The holocaust the Prow was pouring down had not proved enough to repulse their onslaught. Even now, enduring the firestorm, sartlar aflame were flinging themselves ineffectually against the bronze gate. The Wise had sent word that their frenzy must be allowed to exhaust itself upon the defences of the Gate.

From the balcony of their cell, Carnelian and Fern gazed down into the inferno. Each time a flame-pipe screamed they shuddered. A cry swooping from the sky would ignite into an arch of lightning that hissed as it kissed flesh. Shadows leapt feverishly. Blackness rolled across the incandescent arcs. Amidst the torment of fire and smoke, glimpses of undulating ground verminous with movement as the sartlar kept coming on. Why were they not even showing animal fear, but pushing on into the firestorm regardless?

All night, the whole tower trembled and shook from the barrage. Carnelian prayed that whatever instinct was driving the sartlar to self-destruction might lose its grip on them, but the screaming of the pipes never ceased.

The world contracted down to the womb of their cell. They lived a liminal existence between slumber and waking; between inner and outer night. Sometimes Carnelian believed he was back in the cabin, crossing the sea. Everything that had happened after that became nothing but a dream, at first bright as a vision of spring, but, inevitably, rotting down to nightmare.

A body stirred against him. Carnelian turned his head. At first he hardly recognized it was Fern. ‘How long?’

In his eyes, Carnelian saw reflected his own despair. ‘Days?’

He focused his hearing beyond the walls. It took a moment to resolve the raging into the scream of flame-pipes. Days? Revulsion woke him fully. He sat up. Days?

They rose and left the cell. Their legs seemed reluctant to carry them up through the entrails of the tower. They reached a high gallery overlooking a world upon which the play of liquid fire was migraine-bright. It was a while before their vision was able to discern a sort of choppy sea of smouldering ridges and troughs that swept up to dash a wave of corpses against the bronze cliff of the outer gate. Raising their eyes, they saw, beyond the smoke-enshrouded Prow, the shadowy throat of the Canyon disgorging a river that was steadily feeding more meat into the holocaust.

Higher they climbed. As they rose through the levels the air became as humid as breath. So much water had spilled down from above that floors were warped, doors jammed half open, wood everywhere swollen as if abscessed. Higher still the heat began. Air reeking of sweat and naphtha, furnace-hot. Floors awash with fluid as warm as blood. Ichorians laboured in the crevices between the machines. Blistered hands wrestled tubes and counterweights; dashed water from pails onto brass so hot it turned instantly into scalding steam. Mechanisms all around convulsed as if the tower were in its death throes. Carnelian and Fern watched the naked men servicing the engines. Some who saw them tried to get to their knees. All were red-eyed, confused, cruelly burned. Carnelian ignored them, searching until he found a purple robe. Not a Sapient, but only a sallow, gaping ammonite.

Your masters? Carnelian signed, certain his voice could not carry above the din.

They sleep, Celestial, signed the ammonite.

The man cowered when Carnelian frowned, incredulous. Wake them!

As the ammonite scrambled away, Carnelian watched the Ichorians. When he became aware his presence was a distraction that might make the poor wretches fall victim to the machines, he took Fern’s shoulder and they left the way they had come.

There was a scratching at the door. Such a small, ordinary sound in a world of such monstrous cacophony. Carnelian rose and opened the door. An ammonite stood outside, silver face reflecting his pale body as a twisting curve.

‘Celestial, Lord Legions, my master, will grant you audience.’

‘He’s here?’ Carnelian tried to pierce the shadows behind the ammonite, but could see only his Marula slumped against the wall. When Sthax looked up, face wooden with terror, Carnelian gestured him to remain where he was.

The ammonite shook his head. ‘Upon the roof, Celestial. He bade me bring you to him.’

Carnelian left Fern sleeping, then followed the ammonite up through the hollows of the tower. All the way, air sucked up from the lower levels rushed past them with ever increasing fury as if racing them to the roof.

As they came up onto the roof, Carnelian felt he was entering some vast forest. A canopy of sullen blackness hung above, fed by the trunks of smoke the chimneys were pumping up. Melancholy rain slapped against him in gusts and a snow of ash and soot that clung to everything.

The ammonite led him towards the edge, where some dark figures stood like burnt posts: Sapients, sheltering beneath parasols other ammonites were holding over them. As Carnelian drew nearer the screaming of the pipes grew so shrill he felt his bones must shatter. The plain below came into view, partially obscured by a steamy miasma. Pockets that seemed horrible chambers were lit here and there by the lightning flicker of the flame jets arcing back and forth. Through the murk he could see that a jerky, agonized scramble of sartlar were struggling to scale the crust of cooked meat that reared up against the outer gate. A flash, then screeching, as liquid fire slashed across them, baking them into the hill.

‘Your plan has failed,’ he cried above the din.

‘To some extent, Celestial.’

Carnelian turned, startled by that angelic voice, serene in the midst of such chaos. He saw the homunculus who had spoken and the staff he held. Behind him his master, Lands, seemed just another chimney.

The Grand Sapient disengaged a hand from the throat of the homunculus and began signing. Once they overran the City, there was always the danger this might happen. They have become like locusts that, once congregating in sufficient numbers, exhaust the food supply around them. Thereafter, they must move on, else perish. Whichever direction they choose they must maintain, for behind them lies only cannibalism.

Carnelian saw the truth of this. He saw also that it was, perhaps, the initial attack upon them in the Canyon that had precipitated this carnage. Unable to retreat, they had surged forward against his incursion. Thereafter, like a siphon, the pressure of those coming on behind had been compelling those in front inexorably towards the Blood Gate and its killing field.

There was only one thing to be done. We must punch through to the entrance of the Canyon and there deflect more from entering.