Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

He was relieved to reach the left bridge without incident. Fear of what might happen in his coomb once the news reached there lent his pace urgency. They crossed, then hurried on. He could not help casting glances at the wall of the Canyon rising on his left. The stone red as if in token of some great slaughter. He glanced up to the barracks galleries. After that he could not rid himself of the feeling that the dead were gazing down from the countless windows, reproachfully. Almost he heard their voices: what has all this blood been shed for? He focused on the racks that now held erect his two legions’ trumpet pipes that had screamed out so much fiery death. Behind them the dragon towers, smoke-blackened, battle-stained. Beneath and further back, the caves where Earth-is-Strong and Heart-of-Thunder lay wounded with the other dragons, all now the remnants of another vanishing race.

All the way he was aware of the gurgle of the Cloaca rising up from the abyss along whose rim they hurried. The Black Gate raised its wall before them. Beyond, the Hidden Land, soon to become a land of the dead.

Suddenly, their shadows leapt away in front of them as a great, flickering light sprang alive at their backs. As they turned, the air was strained, then shredded by the shrilling screams of the Blood Gate’s flame-pipes. Coruscating energies reflected up the cliffs that flanked the towers. On the killing field was a boiling incandescence they had to squint at to endure. Carnelian turned away, printing blue images of that holocaust upon the blackness in front of him. Bitterness in his heart, in his mouth. How typical of the Masters that they should seek to salve their fear with senseless slaughter.

Judging it unlikely the immense dragon gates would open for him, Carnelian led Fern and the Marula towards the central portion of the black wall. There, a single door stood in the cliff of masonry: a door of oiled, precious iron. They came to a halt before it. He was reluctant to go this way: he remembered his previous passage; that first time he had entered Osrakum with his father. He was going to have problems with the ammonites that kept this purgatory. As he waited for the gate to open, the harsh ululating of the flame-pipes came echoing down the Canyon. Surely their approach had been noted? He caught Fern’s eye and, glancing round, Sthax’s and those of the leading files of the Marula. All bright, intense. Carnelian asked Sthax for his halberd. Its pole was crowned by an elaborate nest of iron blades and hooks. Striking iron on iron caused the door to give off a sonorous clang. Moments later it parted into two leaves that swung silently into the blackness within. Moist air swept out over them, intoxicating with myrrh. Carnelian shared the reluctance of his people to enter. The Marula recoiled as ghostly faces coalesced in the gloom. Carnelian held his ground, knowing them to be nothing more than ammonite masks.

‘You must be cleansed, Celestial,’ they sighed.

Uneasily, Carnelian eyed the dark behind the silver faces. Other odours wafting towards him made him recall the drugged smoke with which Legions had captured him in Makar. Even if it was nothing more than the standard narcotics employed during purification, he did not want his mind dulled. He wanted to see things as they were; to be entirely himself. Half turning away, he extended his arm to take in the Marula. ‘I wish to pass through with these.’

‘Impossible, Celestial. They must go through the quarantine. Would you bring death into the Land of the Everliving?’

Carnelian almost laughed, mirthlessly, and wondered if they could really be so ignorant of the irony. He peered past the disembodied faces, trying to determine how far there was to go and if he could find his way to the other side without their guidance. ‘You know I am brother to the new God Emperor and that these men are his new Ichorians.’

‘The Law does not bow even to Them.’

Carnelian lowered the halberd. ‘But it will bow to me.’ He advanced and the faces melted away into the darkness. He was glad to hear the shuffle of the Marula following him. Voices round him rose in a keening that had soon drowned out the Blood Gate flame-pipes. Even as he became aware of subtle revolvings in the air above him, he realized his focus was slipping. Gaps in the uncoiling smoke revealed the position of figures surrounding them. As he moved forward, apparitions slid towards him. He traced circles before him in the smoke with the halberd head to clear a path for them. It struck something with a sharp clap, even as one of the apparitions disappeared in a tinkle of shards. A mirror of glass as perfect as water. He was aware of the ammonites drawing back. He swung the halberd into another mirror and another and the ammonites faded, whispering, away.

His shadow died as he moved away from the light that was streaming through the open door behind them. He glanced round to make sure Fern and the others were still following him. By the time they reached an arch standing all alone, his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He remembered seeing it before and put his hand out to touch it as he had then. Faces as vague under his fingers as they were to his eyes. The faces of corpses submerged in water. His hand recoiled. He could smell the blood rust on his fingertips and wiped them down his cloak. The ghost of an inscription ran around the iron curve. Unreadable beyond a vague whispering in his mind. He stood back. It was not an arch, but a ring partially embedded in the ground. If it were a glyph it would read as ‘death’. He frowned. In Vulgate, his people referred to this fortress as Death’s Gate. Reluctant to walk through it, he moved round it, gesturing to Fern, Sthax and the others to do the same.

They came at last to a barrier Carnelian knew must be the door that gave entry into Osrakum. As he placed his hand upon its cold surface, the whole world gave a shudder as if it had been struck by some immense hammer. Again, the sound shook the air and ground. A massive bell was tolling, that was soon joined by more, until it seemed to Carnelian the world must convulse itself to pieces. Clamping his hands over his ears, he sought some explanation why the ammonites were ringing the Black Gate bells in this cacophonous manner. Were they sending an alarum to warn of the imminent breach of Osrakum’s sanctity? Or perhaps the warning was for their masters, the Wise. He shuddered as the feeling rose in him that the bells were announcing the ending of the world. Panic welled up in him, he felt trapped, buried alive. His hands fell from his ears and began feverishly scrabbling across the wall in front of him. Shapes stubbed his fingers, grazed his skin, but he kept on pulling, pushing, twisting, seeking anything that would free them from this tomb. His hand alighted on a wheel that turned under pressure. He forced it round and was rewarded by the quivering of some mechanism stirring into life. Several percussive shudders made him imagine counterweights rising, falling. A hairline crack divided the blackness to his left. It widened blindingly.

When his sight returned, he gasped. He heard other gasps around him. He forgot the bells. The Valley of the Gate fell away from them in a shadow that spilled out across the Skymere and the causeway to lap at the edge of a vision. Emerald shimmer and dance. An achingly beautiful dream – the Yden. For a moment Carnelian was lost again in that garden where he and Osidian had played as innocently as children. It seemed his heart had stopped at the beginning of the world. He dared not breathe out lest that should be enough to eddy that vision like smoke. His lungs forced the air out. The vision remained, but seemed changed. His gaze took in the whole vast lotus of Osrakum. Exquisite bloom that fed upon the life of millions. A flower whose roots had turned so many into corpses that soon it too must wilt and die.