Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

‘We do not have weeks, Celestial. Soon famine will visit Osrakum.’

This was news to Carnelian.

‘It is inconceivable that these animals should pose such a threat to us,’ said one of the Masters.

Another turned his shadowed face on Carnelian. ‘Who brought this curse down on us?’

Carnelian wondered what the Masters would say were they to find out just how responsible he was for bringing the sartlar to Osrakum. ‘Everything that can be done, my Lords, is being done. Return to your coombs.’

Turning his back on them, he walked away towards the Blood Gate. They called out to him. His eyes filled with the spectacle of fire and smoke, ears assaulted by screaming flame-pipes, he soon forgot them.

He woke, suddenly. It was the middle of the night. He could not at first locate the reason he felt so alert. Then joy flared up in him. Silence. It was so quiet he could hear Fern breathing. He rose carefully, not wanting to wake him, then padded over to the shutters. They creaked as he opened them. He stepped out onto the balcony. Perfect blackness. Gazing towards the killing field he thought he could make out the mass of the Prow like a cave in the night. The tang of naphtha was underlaid by the dull stench of cooked meat and rotting. He could hear a delicate rustling like a million ants pouring across leaf litter. A warm body pressed against his back.

‘What’s happening?’ whispered Fern.

Carnelian hardly dared to voice his hope. ‘The sartlar are leaving.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know!’

Once more in Earth-is-Strong’s command chair. The creaking of the tower, the mutter of voices remote on other decks, the clink of brass: all these sounds seemed strange, alien. Beyond their little world, a deafening silence. How long was it since the flame-pipes had fallen silent? His ears still felt raw. It was as if the screaming of the flame-pipes had worn deep channels in his head that now, empty, ached.

Dawn was casting the shadow of the monster and her tower upon the brazen cliff of the closed gate before them. Carnelian glanced round, glad to see Fern there. He gave him a nod and was rewarded with a grin. A grinding of brass teeth shocked him back to staring through the screen. It was only the mechanisms working open the gate. Morning spilling through the widening gap illuminated more and more of the edge of the plateau of dead, where everything was eerily still.

They emerged from the corpse quagmire of the killing field into open ground. The sudden drop of ground level to relatively clean rock almost gave him vertigo. Before them stretched the Canyon, still inhabited by the night. A sudden fear possessed him. What if this was a trap? ‘Open fire!’ Arcing incandescence drove back the shadow. The liquid light sputtered and dimmed, leaving glimpses of the empty Canyon burned into Carnelian’s sight. As they lumbered on, he told himself his fears were groundless. A trap presupposed some strategic will directing the sartlar. He could not believe in that, even if he did not think them animals. But he could derive no hypothesis as to why they had left. Uneasy, he lit their way with sporadic bursts of naphtha burn.

They turned into another gloomy stretch. When at last they reached the second turn, Carnelian felt a hand on his shoulder and knew it was Fern come to stand behind him. He reached up to hold him there, even as the next section of the Canyon swung slowly into view. Its nearest portion was in darkness, but far away the morning slanted down to the Canyon floor, and there they saw, strung across the throat of the Canyon, the necklace of towers and curtain walls of the Green Gate. Carnelian felt Fern’s grip tighten and his heart beat faster as fierce hope rose in him of freedom.

On the ground, the ripping of the breach from the fabric of the Green Gate seemed an act of wanton destruction. Though the Canyon beyond appeared to be free of sartlar as far as its final turn, he had plugged the breach with dragons. The smoke from their chimneys was hazing the upper part of the gap. The plug seemed flimsy in comparison with the massive torn masonry on either side. He took in the gaping hollows of exposed chambers. These had spilled the debris of their walls and floors in a scree up which the Marula were clambering in their search for any live sartlar lurking on this side of the wall. Dead sartlar were plentiful.

When a voice cried out, he looked up and saw a figure framed by the greater darkness of the cavern behind: it was Sthax. Carnelian could not make out what he was shouting, but could read his meaning in his shaking head. The place was empty.

‘What killed them?’ Fern said, gazing down through a grimace at a sartlar corpse long dead.

Carnelian rolled a reddish boulder with his foot. It turned out to be hollow. The interior still showed some unrusted black. It was an iron casque. ‘The Bloodguard who garrisoned this fortress.’

Fern scanned the blood-soaked ground, which was scattered with more of these helmets and other armour and, here and there, a trampled cloak still showing a slash or spot of green.

‘But where-?’ Fern paled and Carnelian nodded grimly, gazing down at an empty cuirass of rusting precious iron: a shell from which a Sinistral had been extracted like an oyster.

Carnelian turned towards Earth-is-Strong and raised his hand in the prearranged signal. He could not see the message being relayed to the Blood Gate to say they had secured the Green. As he turned back, he glimpsed something strange in an alleyway that ran between the Green Gate proper and a tower that rose behind it. Fern followed him into the gap. As the blackness deepened, a foul stench swelled until they could go no further. An uneven wall rose, blocking any further progress. It was from this the stench was emanating. Craning, Carnelian saw this blockage filled the gap between the walls to a level higher even than the fortress wall and right to the very summit of the tower. Up there it was clear what composed this mound. Sartlar dead. Weary disgust gave way to unease. A desperation to find a way through the fiery holocaust might explain the mound the sartlar had piled up with their corpses against the Blood Gate, but here it seemed uncannily as if they had contributed their bodies to bridge the gap between the fortress and the tower.

The Sapients unfolded themselves from their palanquins. They had approached along a road of fluttering blue fire flanked by files of ammonites. A space had been cleared with billhooks; the corpses being dragged away like beached, rotting fish.

As the Sapients approached him on their ranga, Carnelian saw their leader was Legions. The Grand Sapient took his homunculus by the throat. ‘You are certain the area is secured, Celestial?’

‘We have found no living sartlar, my Lord Legions.’ Since the discovery of the corpse bridge Carnelian had felt a need for urgency. ‘We must hurry in case they should return.’

‘Before it is possible to act, Celestial, it is essential to have a complete understanding of a situation.’

Carnelian felt irritation. What was there to understand? And then there was that word ‘complete’. How could any situation be understood completely? He wanted to act and to act now. ‘We need to know what is happening in the City, my Lord. I will take some aquar down the Canyon scouting.’

‘This should be our last resort, Celestial. How much could you hope to see? Even were it possible for you to travel near and far across the Commonwealth your report would be nothing more than a single track through space and time.’

‘You wish to reconnect to the heliograph system.’

‘Even if a single device remains intact, it should be possible to achieve a link.’

Carnelian realized he had seen no sign of a heliograph. ‘Where are these devices?’