Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

The vision lost its hold on him. Fern at his side was real and solid. Carnelian reached out and felt the living warmth in him. His touch released Fern from enchantment.

Carnelian smiled and spoke, in a low voice. ‘There’s still much to do before the darkness comes.’

He led them onto the road that ran along the Cloaca rim. As they marched on, the clamour of the bells slowly dulled enough for them to hear the water rushing below. He stopped once to look over, but could see nothing other than a blackness that made it seem bottomless. Still, the sediment of his dreams stirred in him.

The roaring had been growing louder for some time when, on their right, the ground fell away into the immense spillway, upon which everything depended. He scrutinized its further edge where the dyke rose that held back the waters of the Skymere. The dyke was cut with many slots, from each of which tumbled a waterfall. In those slots were the sluices that were controlling the overflow of the lake into the swirling, threshing surface of the spillway. What Carnelian was interested in was the difference in height between that surface and that of the lake. He heaved a sigh of relief as he judged that at least part of his plan was possible.

Ammonites came to greet Carnelian as he walked onto the dyke. Most fell to their knees, but a few were brave enough to approach him, ducking bows. One spoke up, telling him, apologetically, that he must have come the wrong way; indicating with vague gestures where, behind him, flights of steps led down to the lake and the bone boats, but not daring the impertinence to tell him this, that all the Seraphim knew. ‘This way, Seraph, lie only the sluices.’

‘I have an interest to behold their operation.’

Reluctantly, they led him back the way they had come, towards the first pair of arches. As he followed them, a spark of light caught in the corner of his eye. Turning, he saw a second pulsing in the bright belly of the Labyrinth mound. Perhaps, as he had approached the dyke, these ammonites had had time to slip an alarm to their masters. He did not care. The Wise had more pressing matters to occupy their minds and, if they did not, then what matter? They would find out what he was up to soon enough.

Approaching the first slot, Carnelian was surprised how much bigger it was than he had expected. He ignored an ammonite giving an explanation, and craned over the edge to look down. A bronze sluice at either end controlled the flow through the slot.

Everyone was watching him. He indicated to Sthax the cables that held the nearest sluice. ‘Hack those through.’

The Maruli, frowning, nodded and, soon, paying no heed to the shrill protests of the ammonites, he and the other warriors were chopping at the cables. Carnelian returned to the edge. The first cable snapped with a twang, the second soon after. Ponderously, counterweights began to rise; squealing, the sluice fell, releasing a furious roar and gush that quickly abated as the slot emptied. The sluice at its other end was still holding back the Skymere. Carnelian turned to Sthax.

‘Send your men to cut them all.’

From the top of the northern Turtle Steps, Carnelian gazed across the Skymere to where shadow, having consumed the Ydenrim, was eating its way over the lagoons. He swung the clapper into the bell and, as the sound shimmered the air, he narrowed his eyes, trying to see any sign of a bone boat answering its call. Twilight over the water hid any movement. Fern approached, Sthax and the Marula straggling in his wake. Carnelian’s ears, recovered from the ringing, allowed him to hear the roar rising from the spillway, into which the Skymere was tumbling in a flood so violent that the more than twenty separate falls were uniting into a frothing foaming mass that ran the whole length of the sluice dyke. He frowned, imagining what chaos and destruction his flood would unleash upon the City at the Gates and its sartlar infestation. Now all that remained to do was to wait until the lake and the spillway reached a common level.

At last they pushed out into open water, Carnelian and Fern standing on either side of the bony prow. Ahead, shadow had killed the emerald shimmer of the lagoons and was beginning to edge up towards the Forbidden Garden and the Labyrinth. Soon only the Pillar of Heaven would rise gleaming from the blackness and even that must eventually succumb. Looking back along the length of the bone boat, Carnelian had to rid himself of the notion the deck was crowded with that same shadow made flesh. These Marula had been the agents of a malign force, but he was in no position to blame them for that. Whatever the Masters maintained, he believed the eyes anxiously looking at him were as human as his own.

He gazed past the stern. It must be because the lake was so immense that its surface showed no sign of the maelstrom where it was flooding into the spillway. The second boat was nudging away from the stepped slope. When the first boat had arrived, a kharon had told him that his vessel was not big enough to take them all. As they had waited for the second, he had imagined the one-eyed men struggling to launch the vessel from a boathouse. He recalled lying captive in one such boathouse with Osidian before they had been packed into funerary urns. It seemed some other life than his, but in his heart a desire stirred to see Osidian again. Only when the ferrymen had demanded payment had Carnelian realized he had no jade rings. At a loss, he had turned to the Marula, had considered using force, but then had had an inspiration. He had asked two of the warriors for their swords and given one to each ferryman. Even though they were masked, he had sensed their shock. Each of the iron blades in their hands was worth more than the boat they steered; probably more than all the boats of the kharon and their lives too. He was glad that such economics would not survive the Masters.

Slicing the dark mirror of the Skymere, the prow creased its water, mixing the lights from the coombs as sparks into the ripples. Carnelian watched Fern gaze at the palaces, entranced. Vague sweeps and outlines, heavy hanging masses all lit with what seemed countless burning jewels. As their eyes tried to grasp shape and form, Carnelian wondered what miracles of art and beauty lay behind those soaring facades. In his heart there was an ache for how much was going to be lost. For a moment, he perceived each of the myriad lights as a human life that must be soon snuffed out. His mind veered away from thoughts of atrocities in paradise.

The eerie silence was broken only by the sculling oars, the bow wave silkily slipping. He glanced back over his shoulder. Though the glory of the Yden was now muffled beneath a pall of shadow, the longer he looked, the more he saw the lagoons were still reflecting something of the blue sky, which its mirrors transformed into infinite, mysterious depths. Tearing up through the blackness, the double spire of the Pillar of Heaven. There at its summit, which was bathed in the last light of the sun, were the hollows where the glorious Chosen had gathered for sacred election. Beneath, the caverns in which the Wise had lodged the spooled beadcord of their library. He could not imagine all of that gone. Was beauty and wisdom then to perish from the earth?

His gaze followed the long back of the Labyrinth and climbed the slope of the cone that wore a crown upon its summit of molten gold as if to mark the place where, below, Osidian, the Gods on Earth, was camped at the heart of the Plain of Thrones. In spite of everything, some compassion rose in him for his once lover, now brother, imagining his despair. In seeking to possess Osrakum, Osidian had only brought it to utter destruction.

Carnelian was musing melancholically on these and other losses when he glanced up. They were sliding past a vast hollow in the Sacred Wall filled with a twinkling scree, among which he could discern a shadowy gathering of colossi. He recognized Coomb Imago and recalled his visit there; the tortured innocents dying on crosses. Other memories began to seep into his mind. The eyeless slaves living their life out in the dark like maggots, turning the wheels that lifted water up to cool the echoing palaces of his own coomb eyries. Then, in riotous recall, the death and maiming that was the lot of most in the outer world; the misery and fear. It was upon such suffering this paradise was built.