Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

‘You really believe you can stop Aurum’s legion?’

The shadows in Osidian’s face deepened. ‘If that becomes necessary …’

At first Carnelian did not understand, could see no alternative, then he remembered that Aurum had been, with his father Suth, the prime supporter of Osidian’s election. ‘You hope he might come over to you?’

‘If he becomes convinced I have a chance to regain the Masks.’

Aurum had once before risked all on a not dissimilar gamble. Dread reared in Carnelian at the thought of Osidian in control of a legion. Horrors flashed through his mind, but from these a thought emerged. Possessed of such power, could Osidian resist striking directly at Osrakum before the Wise had a chance to muster a sufficient defence? With the Masters’ focus shifted to the Guarded Land, the Plainsmen must surely become a peripheral concern. Then, perhaps, when the gaze of the Wise turned back towards the Earthsky, they might take more measured retribution.

Carnelian made his way back to the hearth nursing the hope that his plan would save Fern. The stench from the dead snuffed this out. He could bear the nausea better than their pendular swing among the creaking cedars.

When he reached Akaisha’s rootearth, his eyes could not pierce the darkness beneath the cedar. He yearned for the light that once had radiated from the hearth; its warmth filtering out through the huddle of his hearthmates to welcome him. He remembered how it had illuminated the embracing branches of their mother tree like the rafters of his old room in the Hold. Anger rose in him. All such comforts were now dead. What remained to him was to make amends. He wanted to call out, but it felt to him that his voice would be a desecration. Was it possible Fern and Poppy were sleeping in their hollows among the corpses? Trusting to his feet, he crept forward. It was only when he became aware he was listening out for breathing that he realized this had always been an unconscious part of his navigation. Now the only human sound was his heart, louder even than the creak of the mother tree.

When at last he reached his hollow, he crouched and inched his hand into it. His fingers, touching flesh, recoiled.

‘Carnie?’ Poppy’s terrified whisper.

He slipped in beside her. She clung to him and wept, but he could not weep with her, though he wanted to.

Floating, warm. Soft shapes kiss his outline. Liquid, lapping thick-tongued, coats his skin like honey. Reek of iron, taste of salt. Sinking, he flails. Strikes the logs of tiny limbs bloating sodden. His desperate fingers gouge into children’s heads as soft as rotten melons, into tooth-rimmed holes, eye sockets. His grip slips free from slimy flesh. Gasping, he drinks, drowning in a surge of clotting blood .

He woke gulping. Cedar branches formed black veins against a fleshy sky. Render. He had been swimming in render. He remembered the briny soup of pygmy flesh the sartlar had kept in a hollow baobab. His tongue scoured the inside of his mouth anticipating the taste of blood. But in his dream they were children, not pygmies. It felt like an omen. He thought about the children Osidian had taken hostage from his vassal tribes. Morunasa had told him they were not here when he had come with Osidian. Then where were they? The answer was obvious and yet he was surprised. The Ochre had given them back in the hope of winning over the other tribes to their rebellion. Why should that surprise him? Because, like any other Master, he had assumed the Plainsmen incapable of strategy. His shame deepened. Had he helped bring about so much disaster because he had seen everything that was happening as a quarrel between him and Osidian, or as a game?

The dream still saturated his mind. The last time he had had such a nightmare was in the Upper Reach. He remembered a tree with strange, overripe fruit. He heard again the creaking of its burdened branches. Disbelief came with a certainty that that dream had predicted the massacre. Shock that he had not seen its warning gave way to disgust. A warning from where? From whom? A god? He felt polluted. Was he now going to allow himself to become as possessed by dreams as Osidian?

He became aware Poppy was gone. Sitting up, he saw the things occupying the hollows round him with their swollen purple faces veined with green and black: monstrous, familiar strangers. He rose into the aura of their putrefaction. Nauseous, he cast around for Poppy. A scraping was coming from beyond the trunk of the mother tree. He hurried to find someone else alive, but not fast enough to avoid recognizing Koney and Hirane with their greenish baby between them.

With a mattock, Fern was clawing at the black earth of the hearth, revealing red beneath. Poppy was crouched over a corpse. She turned up a blank face as Carnelian approached. He saw who it was she was rouging with ochre: Akaisha, her wrinkles stretched smooth by her ballooning cheeks and forehead. Her face had already been painted the colour of fresh blood. Her belly had a green cast as if she were pregnant with jade. Whin, near her, looked fat, though in life she had been so thin. Fern’s wife Sil was there too, her beauty distorted in a net of purple-black veins, their daughter Leaf beside her, a discarded doll. All three had livid collars cut into the flesh of their necks and throats by the ubas that had been used to hang them. Carnelian’s hand strayed up to the scar the slavers’ ropes had left around his own neck. Osidian was similarly marked. That he might have chosen hanging because of what he himself had suffered numbed Carnelian with hatred.

He watched Fern gouging the earth. Each stroke tore a grunt from his throat. His eyes seemed stones. Carnelian knew where the mattocks were kept and fetched one. Returning, he leapt down into the hole with Fern and began to take out his rage on the earth. A shove threw him out of the hole onto the ground. Carnelian surged to his feet, but Fern’s hopeless face cooled his anger. He watched the man who had been his friend return to his digging. ‘These were my hearthmates too.’

Fern turned cold eyes on him. ‘You’re not the first to claim that.’

Carnelian struggled to understand what he meant. ‘Krow?’

Fern snorted sour laughter. ‘He came here claiming that my mother had sent me a message through him.’

Carnelian could make no sense of this.

‘I asked him how it could be that, coming here with the Master, he’d had time to talk to my mother.’

Carnelian could not help glancing towards dead Akaisha.

Another snort from Fern, ‘Yes, he helped murder her.’

‘He told you this?’

‘He didn’t need to. Guilt reeked off him.’

Carnelian gazed at Fern, not knowing what to say.

‘I told him that, once I’ve saved the souls of my kin, I’m going to kill him.’ Fern’s lips curled contemptuously. ‘He ran away.’ He raised his mattock, then brought it down murderously.

In the clear morning light, Carnelian remembered the hope he had had the night before. ‘We must save the souls not only of your kin, but of all the Ochre.’

Fern lost the rhythm of his strokes.

‘Please let me help.’

The mattock bit again into the red earth.

‘Me too,’ said Poppy.

Carnelian looked into her face and saw her need. His gaze caught on Akaisha’s face, disfigured by the way she had died. She had become merely a thing. He felt the pain of grief rising and forced it down. Anything she might have said to Krow now had more of her in it than her body.

He put his arm around Poppy and drew her away. They stumbled towards the stair. Morning was revealing the grotesquely laden trees. Lime flames were lit along the branches. Drawn to the nearest, he saw it was a fresh young cone. It gave off a green fragrance that cut through the charnel air. It kindled a little hope in his heart.