Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

‘Follow,’ said a voice in the darkness. Carnelian had heard the footfalls approaching. The rope jerking at his throat forced a groan. Through the rage surging into his head he was aware Fern behind him was crying out. There was a struggle.

‘Just you,’ said the sartlar.

Carnelian’s anger froze to fear. He would never see Fern again! It was no good. They had both chosen this. He let go of hope and followed the sartlar into the darkness.

A torch flared. Its light revealed a shallow slope of sharp-edged undulations, one side of which was wedged into the road. He recognized the hinged, partially lowered flight of steps that gave entry into the Iron House. Its leaning wall of scales faded up into the night. Becoming aware of its bulk haloed by stars, for a moment he was certain it was toppling towards him. Someone was behind him. The bindings on his arms fell loose. He brought his arms forward, rubbing at his wrists as he felt the prickle of blood returning to his fingers. He was shoved forward. A sartlar holding aloft a torch was negotiating the steps. The man seemed to be leaning so much to one side it looked as if he must fall. Carnelian followed, slipping his feet into the angle of the steps.

The torchlight defined the leaning rectangle of the great doorway. The darkness of the Iron House swallowed much of the light so that Carnelian stumbled several times reaching the sloping floor within the doorway. The tang of old conflagration made him remember what had happened here. To his right the sartlar was climbing a flight of steps that leaned towards him precipitously. Carnelian followed, edging towards the wall so that his feet would not be in the sartlar’s shadow.

Concentrating on not slipping from the angled steps, he was not immediately aware of the other odour. Dry, dusty with a sickly meaty tang. Slowly he came up into cavernous space that seemed partially open to the sky. The floor sloped up towards a wall, but the light was moving the other way. Carnelian turned and looked down the slope of the throne-hall and stared. The place was crowded. On either side of the raised central walkway, dark figures packed together leaned with the slope of the chamber.

It was their stillness that convinced him these were not living men. In the wavering light of the torch that was moving steadily away from him, he saw what seemed expressions shifting as the shadows ran across the hollows of their faces. Sunken cheeks, gnarled dark skin. At first he thought they must be barbarians of some kind, but then he realized how, even standing in the pits on either side of the walkway, they dwarfed the sartlar shambling through their midst. Chosen, then, in some way mummified. He became aware that those he could see had empty pits for eyes. Scared, he hurried down the slope after the edge of the torchlight aware of the corpses’ stares.

By the time he reached the steps that rose to the throne dais, the sartlar was already climbing them. The light stopped moving and the man returned down the steps without the torch. Carnelian stepped aside to let him pass. He listened to the footsteps receding behind him. Soon an eerie silence descended, made thicker by the delicate guttering of the torch up on the dais. The shadows of the crowd of Standing Dead slipped up and down the walls as if they were bobbing in some solemn dance. He began to climb the steps. Slowly the throne came into sight. The two gods rose behind it, their faces sinister and glowering. He stepped up onto the dais that sloped down to the throne, empty save for a mound of discarded rags. Carnelian’s heart jumped as a voice spoke from their midst.

‘Master.’

Among the rags, Carnelian located a pair of eyes; eyes that were gazing at him from within the ring scar of a deep branding. A face whose wrinkles seemed a continuation of the folds in the sacking that clung to the head. Carnelian was trapped in a waking dream, gazing upon that red face.

The eyes widened. ‘You?’

He stared back. ‘Kor?’ Could this be the same sartlar woman? He tried to remember when he would have last seen her. Had she even made it as far as the Leper Valleys? He peered at the mutilated face beneath the coating of red ochre. The obscene nasal cavity in her skull had widened, but her eyes had a glint of cunning that was familiar. Was it a vestige of the Quyan humanity millennia of subjugation had crushed from her kind?

He froze. Unlikely as it was that she was here, it was his dreams that had brought him to her. Was it possible that she was the answer to all the riddles; the factor missing from the calculations of the Wise? Was hers the single mind behind the swarming sartlar? Her red face was certainly an echo of his dreams and there she sat upon the throne of the Gods. They stood behind her, Father and Son. Her face marked for the Mother, she completed the Triad. He sounded again the Quyan word for death, ‘kor’. He swallowed past a parched throat. This, then, was where he must offer himself in exchange for the children. He sought mercy in her face, but all he could see in its ruin was a leathery indifference. Any life there had been in her eyes had been murdered by what she had seen.

‘Why have you come here?’ she said.

Carnelian tried to find something artful to say, but only the truth came out. ‘I’m following a dream.’

Her brows eclipsed her eyes as she frowned. Her lower lip consumed the upper. Carnelian wanted to catch her emotion before it sank beyond reach. Frantically, he tried to sort images in his mind. She was slipping away from him. ‘The dream came…’ he said, saw her red face, read the branding, ‘from the earth.’

As her face uncrumpled, the brand became circular again. ‘All are clay in Her hands.’

Enough tension left Carnelian’s chest for him to be able to take a deep breath. It was a start. He regarded her, trying to find the next step. ‘What brought you here?’

Kor squinted at him. ‘You.’

Carnelian thought he could see a path. ‘You mean, because I freed the sartlar from the land?’

Kor’s mouth sagged open, leaving Carnelian uncertain of his footing. He explained the dream that had led him to free the sartlar. As he spoke her head sank into her chest. He realized something. ‘You didn’t know it was me.’ Why should she? All she could know was that a command had come to her people from a watch-tower.

The sartlar raised her head and Carnelian saw a glinting in the grooves around her missing nose. Was she crying? His shock that she might be made him realize he had still been thinking of her as some kind of animal. It made him angry at himself that, in spite of everything that had happened, he was still that much a Master. However mutilated, this was a woman.

‘Clay in Her hands,’ she said.

Carnelian sensed his news had somehow lightened her burdens. ‘What did you mean… before?’

‘Your blood,’ she said, grimacing away the tears.

‘My blood…?’ He was confused.

She frowned. ‘You don’t understand? We believed you to be the Dead.’

‘The Dead…?’

‘Our Dead, whom the Horned God had led up from the Underworld to enslave the Living.’

Carnelian stared at her. ‘The Masters-?’ Seeping insight overtook his tongue. Her words were a shadowy reflection of the revelations Osidian had given him in the Stone Dance of the Chameleon. The same events seen, murkily, from the point of view of the sartlar, from that of the Quyans.

‘When you appeared unmasked…’

As Kor gazed at him in wonder, he glimpsed the child she might once have been.

She squeezed her eyes closed, grimacing again, shaking her head. ‘The monstrosity we imagined you hid behind your masks from shame.’ Then her eyes opened. ‘But such beauty…?’

Carnelian was struck by the irony: those that the beautiful considered monstrous, believing the beautiful monstrous. Of course the sartlar had been right in so many ways.