Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

Carrying Ykorenthe, Carnelian led a group of children along the boardwalks the kharon had laid across the mud to their boats. He was seeing his way by means of the indigo of the dawning sky. He turned to make sure the children were keeping up. They were only the tip of one of many teeming fingers splaying out from the quay. Judging they would soon catch up with him, he set off again towards the pale hulks of the bone boats that seemed the remains of monsters washed up on the shore.

Mud up to his knees, water slapping at his waist, Carnelian handed Ykorenthe up to a man creasing a chameleon tattoo into a grimace. Carnelian had to bark at him to take a firmer hold of her, nervous as the guardsman was to touch a Mistress. An urchin was perched on the end of the nearest board, squinting with fear at the water. Carnelian waded over to him with lolloping lunges, trying to reassure the boy with a smile, cursing as one foot plunged deeper than the other, lurched free, scooped the child up, grabbed his arm to tighten his hold on his pack, waddled back with him, handed him up. He paused, panting, looking along the shore where other boats were being held bow-on to the strand. Across the mud foreshore, a deluge of children was flowing towards them whom Suth people and Marula were steadily lifting up to the boats. He frowned; this was going to take much longer than he had hoped. When he went back for the next child, he had to remember to smile.

Standing with his arm around the trunk of the prow, Carnelian looked back along the deck dense with little heads, adults rising as sparse fences at the edges. He craned over the side. The water was lapping just below the oarlocks. They were riding low, but he was sure the steersman would have said something if he thought it unsafe. He looked back towards the kharon, with his crown, standing like a startled puppet against the sternpost. Carnelian raised his arm. A moment later he heard the port oars begin to thresh the lake and, ponderously, the prow swung away from the strand.

Slowly they ran parallel to the shore. As other boats turned into open water, more slid in to take their place. He had counted more than a hundred in all, perhaps a third of which were already laden with children. Nevertheless, their throng still stretched unbroken up into the Plain of Thrones. The kharon had promised him they would manage to load them all. Carnelian had made sure Keal understood that his was to be the last boat. Still, he fretted, reluctant to set off, anxious not to leave even a single child behind. His hesitation was increasing the danger of boats fouling each other. Already, there were too many of them near the shore and these heavy and sluggish. A collision was the more immediate peril and so he gave his steersman the prearranged signal. The oars began digging into the water. They picked up speed, heading east. Leaning over the side, he saw Fern waving as his boat curved its course to follow. Several more were carving the lake to enter their wake.

As they came round the green flank of the Plain of Thrones, a view of Osrakum opened up that Carnelian had never seen before. The eastern face of the Sacred Wall rose sheer, carved with coombs wider than those he was familiar with, but all consumed by the shadow that still spilled out towards them across the water. Those dark pits showed no hint of being inhabited. In truth nowhere was there a sign this world had ever been touched by human hand. A melancholy settled over him, the threshing oars seeming to become his heartbeat as they carried them all through this empty landscape. What a strange, silent, wild place this would become once men ceased to live here.

His mood of contemplation was broken by the vast barrow mound of the Labyrinth rising from the Isle. His thoughts were haunted by the dark womb that belly concealed, by imagining its fate. The column sepulchres would fall one by one like forest giants. Light and rain would pour in, enough to nurture seedlings to uncurl and grow. Slowly the stone roof would crumble and fall to be replaced by a swaying, breathing green canopy.

He spotted some tiny figures winding down to the Ydenrim shore. No doubt kharon come to watch their boats pass. His gaze returned to the vast, black mass of the Pillar of Heaven. It appeared much wider from this side and more immense than he had seen it since Osidian and he were together in the Forbidden Garden. His gaze lingered on the cleft that seemed to threaten to divide the Pillar in two from its brow to where its feet were lost in the tiny forest of thorn trees. The ladder was there in that cleft, that they had used to visit the Yden. Carnelian closed his eyes and breathed in the earthy perfume drifting towards him across the water. A flashing vision played before him of that bright, innocent time. He opened his eyes and felt the mountain was scowling at him. He relived that second, fateful descent to capture, and expulsion from what they had both then thought paradise.

They gradually passed along the Ydenrim whose gleaming edge held back the green mirrors of the lagoons. Here, the southern sweep of the Sacred Wall was inset with coombs blazing with snowy palaces and the verdant jewels of gardens. Then Carnelian saw the scythe of the lake narrowing off towards the gape of the Valley of the Gate that squeezed up to the Canyon throat. He wished then that they could have left Osrakum along the Canyon floor, but his flood had made that impossible. Squinting, he tried to make out the row of sluices he had broken. From a distance, his plan had seemed reasonable, but the closer they came to its reality, the more it seemed madness.

The nearer they drew to the sluice slots in the cliff edge of the Valley of the Gate floor, the thicker became the slurry of debris floating on the water. Carnelian was at least relieved to see no evidence of flow. As he had hoped, the Skymere had found a level with the outer world.

He watched the prow cleave the thickening mat. Broken branches scratched along the sides of the boat. All kinds of rubbish bobbed past in a sort of procession that sedated him. A thump against the hull shocked him alert. A raft of bodies, bloated, their heads punching the hull, mostly dark-skinned servants bearing wounds so deep it was almost as if attempts had been made to butcher them for meat. A shock of paleness in that dark expanse. The corpse of a Master; two more. Carnelian watched one slumping as its shoulder dragged along the hull. Water welling over a ruined face into which the heraldic cypher of a House had been cut with a knife.

The boat edged towards the sluice, which appeared to be least choked with debris.

‘There’s room enough?’ Carnelian asked the kharon who had come to stand beside him.

The man nodded, ‘If we ship oars, Seraph.’

Carnelian felt the knot in his stomach ease a little. He looked up. In the casements on either side of the slot, counterweights were hanging almost at the bollards. A wooden arch spanned each end of the slot. The cables he had had cut free from them now wallowed beneath the surface like water snakes. Deeper was the murky upper edge of the fallen sluice gate. It was seeing this that caused the kharon to turn to shout something back to the steersman. The boat slowed almost to a halt, as the oars backwatered. The kharon fed a pole down into the water until it touched the sluice gate. Then he lifted it out, dripping, strung with weed, until he had inverted it, so that the steersman could gauge the clearance depth. Carnelian watched the steersman and had a long time to wait for his reluctant nod. Carefully sculling, the banks of oars aligned the boat towards the gap. The oarheads raised, dipped and Carnelian felt their push against the water. The boat slid forward. With a rush and clatter the oars retracted into the hull just in time to avoid the leading ones being snapped off. For a moment he thought they were going straight through, then he was thrown forward as her keel bit into the sluice. A judder as slowly she scraped forward over it. Kharon at the bows slapped their hands out against the rock and pushed against it to keep her moving. Carnelian moved to help them. His hand against the chill of the basalt, shoving, recalled to his memory the entry of the baran into the Tower in the Sea. The children in the bows also tried to help with their tiny hands. The keel struck the second sluice gate and they really had to struggle against the rock on either side to keep the boat juddering forward. Slowly, she edged out. Then, suddenly, everyone was thrown back as she slid free.