Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

‘When the plagues of the Great Death humbled them, we issued forth as conquerors. Perhaps it would have been better had we slain them all, but the land needed to be tilled and we desired to make them our slaves. To ensure our dominion over them, we forced them to build the roads that would contain them; the watch-towers to keep unsleeping vigilance over them. We raised the legions and perfected them. But, most of all, we wrote here the Law-that-must-be-obeyed.’ Osidian indicated the grim stones enringing them. ‘Its codicils described a system, independent of the hearts of those who would come after, that, relentlessly and without pity, would grind them down into such abject bestiality that it would become impossible for them to regain their previous state.’

Though Carnelian had felt something of the weight of the Law, had suffered himself and witnessed more suffering than he could bear to remember, he could not even begin to grasp the immensity of horror that had been inflicted upon the sartlar by the Masters and their Law.

His mind recoiled. It was too much. He veered away, protecting himself. ‘But does not this Law weigh down also upon the Chosen?’

Unexpectedly a chuckle came from behind the Obsidian Mask. ‘Chosen?’ It turned a little towards him. ‘It was not enough that the Quyans should forget what they had been; we too had to forget. So we hid this history even from ourselves, appointing these’ – he indicated the corpses around them – ‘as its guardians, and in a few generations we had forgotten it utterly.’

‘Why? Surely it is from our ignorance the current disaster has sprung?’

‘You don’t understand,’ Osidian said, with what seemed a groan of pain. ‘What we sought to forget was not their glory, but our shame.’

‘That our blood runs in the veins of the sartlar?’

Osidian hunched forward as if he bore the whole weight of time and disaster as a yoke across his neck. ‘Even when I excruciated them’ – his hand feebly indicated the corpses – ‘they would not tell me, until at last I prised open their minds with one of their drugs. You see, Carnelian,’ his tone strained, appeasing, ‘we were not always as we have believed ourselves to be.’

Carnelian felt desperate curiosity. The black mask gazed westwards to where smoke was still rising from the House of Immortality. ‘The Quyans brought their kings here. Within this circle they evoked the Creation through blood sacrifice. There, to the west, they entombed them to await their reawakening.’

As Carnelian grasped at what Osidian might mean, bleak realizations dawned on him. Death’s Gate, the Shadowmere, the Quays of the Dead. ‘This is the Isle of the Dead.’

Osidian’s head dropped again, as if the weight of the stone mask was too much for him to bear. Carnelian watched the smoke fraying into the morning sky. There, in the Quyan tombs, the House of Immortality, the Chosen mummified their own dead. He remembered that Quyan treasures were the most prized possessions of the Chosen. ‘We robbed their tombs.’ He frowned. ‘But then who are we?’ Revelation came upon him. He muttered the words he had once spoken in the Labyrinth: ‘Where do we get this obsession with death?’ The most secret books in the Library of the Wise were on embalming. ‘We were the keepers of the dead.’

Osidian nodded. ‘Glorious Osrakum was the necropolis of the Quyan kings.’

Carnelian, who had lived through the filth and horror of preparing the dead, was left, by this knowledge, feeling more unclean. ‘We are not descended from the Gods? Our forefathers were outcasts?’

‘Untouchables,’ Osidian spat out. ‘Chosen we were from among the people of the outer world. Those who were as pallid as corpses; who had the pale eyes of the people who long ago had come up from the sea seeking the Land of the Dead; who were sent here to tend the dead.’

Carnelian felt Osidian’s madness seeping into him. Disgust and shock and a feeling of coming adrift, of losing his footing in a flood. ‘But, still, we conquered them.’ This said still in some hope that the Gods had seen fit to raise the lowly to angelic heights.

Osidian groaned with anger. ‘The plague had brought our masters low.’

‘But why were we spared its ravages?’ Still Carnelian was casting around for some sign that providence had chosen them for greatness.

Osidian sank his head again between his shoulders as if he were some carrion crow. ‘The procedures for processing corpses had made us skilled in protecting ourselves from putrefaction.’

Carnelian recalled the elaborate precautions the Masters took before exposing themselves to the outer world. ‘The ranga, the ritual protection, our masks.’ He saw the links with the Law. ‘Wearing a mask was not only a precaution against contagion, but a means of separating us from and terrorizing the survivors.’

‘The Quyans wore masks only in death. To them it must have seemed as if the Dead themselves had risen from the Underworld to enslave them.’

Carnelian gazed at Osidian wearing his stone mask. Why was he still wearing it who could no longer have any illusions of his divinity? Carnelian’s heart answered him. There was perhaps another reason the keepers of the dead had worn their masks, as Osidian was doing: to hide their shame not only from their former masters, but even from themselves. Weariness and blackness overwhelmed him. ‘It is all a lie then.’

Osidian sprang up. ‘One that, had Legions confided it to me, I could have saved the Commonwealth!’

Carnelian understood then the real reason why Osidian had killed the Grand Sapients. ‘Search your heart, Osidian,’ he said, compassion softening his voice. ‘Even had he told you everything, would you really have turned back?’

Osidian stood for a moment, as if turned to stone, then sagged back to the earth. Even now Carnelian could not be certain that Osidian had faced up to what they had done. It was a flaw in him that he inflicted upon others what, in his heart, he really wanted to do to himself. Carnelian looked round at the twelve hollows. Not that the Wise were innocent. ‘Knowing this, why did they not fear the sartlar more?’

Osidian’s voice sounded like a boy’s when he spoke. ‘Because nothing that was happening made any sense to them. They believe- they believed their blindness protected them against the seductions of this world. For them, sight revealed only the mendacious surface of things and not the flows of reality beneath. It was these currents they sought to study and control.’ The black face came up. ‘For centuries they had been attempting to stop a power rising again; a power they had thought was, if not slain, at least in chains.’

Carnelian regarded him, feeling a tide rising in him. ‘What power?’

‘The third God.’

‘The third God?’ Carnelian asked, knowing already what Osidian would answer.

‘The Lady of the Red Land.’

Her red face broke into Carnelian’s mind with the shock of revelation. ‘The Mother,’ he breathed.

The eyeslits of the Obsidian Mask seemed to be scrutinizing him. ‘The Wise said that you would know Her; that you were one of Her major pieces in the game.’

Carnelian felt faint, knowing it to be true.

Osidian indicated the stones around them. ‘Those are the Black God’s; those the Green God’s. The eight red stones are Hers.’

And the eight red months and the ground upon which he sat that was a portion of the vast red land outside the Sacred Wall that was no longer guarded. Other impressions flashed into Carnelian’s mind. ‘Her pomegranates everywhere.’

‘What?’ Osidian said.

‘We shared one in Her Forbidden Garden.’

Osidian’s shock was revealed by the cast his shoulders took. ‘Her garden?’