Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

Coming closer, he saw that something like a small town had engulfed the standing stones. Smoke was spiralling up from many different locations among innumerable emerald pavilions.

As he came into the camp, he saw that the campfires were mostly located on the road where it split to encircle the Stone Dance of the Chameleon. It was covered with people who began to rise as he approached, turning their half-black faces towards him. Such a great gathering of Ichorians suggested the God Emperor must be near. Two gatestones rose behind them like sentinels standing guard on a dark wall where the outermost stones of the Dance were supposed to be. Somehow reminded of the shadowy eaves of the Isle of Flies, Carnelian shuddered.

Figures came through the Ichorians, pulling on helmets. As they approached they knelt before him. From their silver collars he knew they were centurions. He gave them his name and, when he told them he had come to see the God Emperor, he detected a flicker of fear in their eyes. There was something else there: hope. That drained him even more. What was it they were hoping he would save them from? He did not ask, but followed them along the right-hand fork as if he and they were a funerary procession. He distracted himself from this ill omen by observing the Dance, deducing it had been covered up to form some vast pavilion. The ghosts of the stones could be seen pushing through the midnight brocade that clothed them.

They came at last to a second pair of gatestones: those that stood opposite the road that led off to the House of Immortality, from where smoke was still belching ominously. The Ichorians around the two stones were syblings. They knelt. Carnelian waited as his guides communicated his words to them. His gaze became enmeshed in the black wall that rose behind them. Chimeric visions wrought into the silk were picked out with green and yellow jewels like feral eyes. Jade cameos hung here and there from which peered monstrous faces as if up through stagnant water. He tore free to look outwards. The quarter of the camp lying between the Immortality Road and that which led to the Forbidden Door was formed of purple pavilions spotted with silver spirals. He searched for ammonites or a glimpse of one of their masters, but the camp of the Wise seemed lifeless, abandoned. Ill omens were everywhere.

‘Celestial?’ said two voices he knew. He almost exclaimed with relief at seeing it was the Quenthas.

The sisters seemed to have aged, faces wasted, the dark tattoos sinking into Left-Quentha’s cheeks; Right-Quentha’s eyes were haunted by some terror. Twitching a smile, she begged him to follow them. He was drawn past flaps of the black samite into the gloom beyond in which a myrrh fog revolved ponderously in monstrous curls. Pale wraiths haunted the twilight. Were it not that this place was much more confined, he could fancy he had been transported into the Labyrinth. The pale slabs of the second ring of stones formed a broken ring that seemed lit by some dying moon. His mask was smothering him and, knowing he could, he removed it. ‘Are They here?’

Grimly, the Quenthas nodded. Left-Quentha clapped her hands. Slaves approached, naked, cringing. As they converged on him, Carnelian protested.

‘All here must be unclothed, Celestial,’ Right-Quentha said. She and her sister divested themselves of the robe they were wearing. Carnelian was fascinated by their joined body half dipped in the shadow of tattoos; by their small breasts and, for a moment, his gaze lingered on the strange form of their nearly joined sex. He himself removed his military cloak, bundled it up and gave it to the sisters. ‘Keep this for me.’ He could see they thought it strange he should care about such a rough, muddy garment, but they took it in their four hands. Then he submitted to the blind slaves. They stripped him, shaved his head, his face, his body. They cleansed him with pads. Through the sharp menthol he could still smell their sweaty fear.

Even through feather rugs Carnelian could feel the bony network of the pavement that linked the ghost stones to their commentaries. Like worms burrowing just beneath skin. In the gloom, pale flesh huddled to pale flesh, jewel eyes glinted furtively. A whispering like a breeze made him feel he was following the sisters through some enchanted forest haunted by the spirits of the dead.

When they came to a gateway guarded by more naked syblings, Carnelian became aware of a small group of lost children. No, homunculi, twelve of them, their faces hidden by their blinding masks.

‘You alone can save him,’ Right-Quentha whispered in his ear. ‘Prepare yourself,’ her sister said.

They opened a wound in the blackness through which light flooded. Carnelian put his hand on the stone lintel to steady himself. He felt the spiral under his hand. Then he let go of it and stepped into the blindingly bright heart of the Stone Dance of the Chameleon, still open to the sky, even as his stomach clamped, spit welling in his mouth at the charnel stench.

He almost crumpled under the assault of fetor. He would have run, if he had known where to run to. His eyesight returning allowed him to see a pale figure sitting stiffly on red earth. The knobs of its backbone, the shoulder blades seeming ready to tear through the sallow flesh. Skin disfigured with countless angry-looking, blue-lipped wounds. Bands around the swelling of the shaved head showed it must be wearing a mask. His arm across his nose and mouth, Carnelian was for a moment shocked that one corpse could so much pollute the air, but then he saw the stones that walled in that place; saw the things sagging, rotting in the man-shaped hollow in each stone. Green-black. The heads lolling back into the hollows were already more skull than face. Gashes over their bodies showed where the blood must have trickled down their skin, to gather in the hollows and dribble down the channels into the red earth. The slits left by their castrations had been torn open like vulvas by swellings forcing themselves out like babies’ heads, so that it seemed that the Grand Sapients had died in the act of giving birth.

‘Why did you do this?’ Carnelian breathed.

‘They lied,’ said the dead man at the centre of the Dance. ‘I had to force them to tell me the truth.’

With disgusted fascination, Carnelian crept round, wanting to look into Osidian’s face. He stopped when he saw the black, glassy profile. ‘What truth?’

The Obsidian Mask turned its distorting mirror to Carnelian. ‘That the sartlar are the Quyans.’

‘ The Sartlar are the Quyans…?’ repeated Carnelian, stunned .

‘The Wise have always known this,’ said Osidian, his voice wintry. ‘But, obsessed with their computations, they missed the real threat.’

‘They lacked the factor of my true birth.’

The Obsidian Mask turned its malice towards him. ‘Do not flatter yourself, my brother. Even once they had that factor, they found there was another, far greater, missing from their mosaic. Even as they died they held to their certainty. It was the inability of their simulations to predict the uncurling of events that made them powerless to effectively oppose them. What could explain the sartlar behaving as if directed by a single mind? Why, suddenly, are they capable of overthrowing their animal fear of flame that, for millennia, we have used to tame them?’

Carnelian shook his head. ‘But- if they are the Quyans-’

The dark mirror mask slid away, distorting in reflection a hideous corpse in a hollow. ‘Even the Quyans in their glory could not have withstood our legions.’

‘How…?’ Carnelian was struggling to grasp this shift in the bedrock of his reality.