Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

Drugged smoke unfurled like ferns in the gloomy halls beyond. Carnelian felt a languor settle about his shoulders. His face began to swell, his bones to liquefy. He recognized the feeling from his entry into Osrakum. The drug was meant to encourage their submission to intrusive cleansing. A deafening clatter brought his eyes back into focus. Swaying, the Marula were knocking smoking brass bowls from their tripods. Carnelian squinted against the undulating surface of a pool in which mouths and tongues of light were kissing, separating. Backing away into the shadows were metal faces distorting reflections of their whole drunken procession. He saw a rectangle of daylight opening far away and did what he could to herd the Marula towards it. At last he was stumbling out with them into eddying daylight.

He found himself with Morunasa and the Marula in a gully between limestone walls pierced with gates. The place was already in afternoon shadow. Only the crest of the eastern wall still caught the sun. Bronze hoops held poles whose banners were swimming in a breeze. Guardsman niches were empty. A gate opened a crack. For a moment he glimpsed an eye widening with horror. Then the gate slammed closed and a voice beyond it began keening an alarm. Bolts were shot home. Commotion spread beyond the walls and a scurrying, so that Carnelian felt he was invading a termite city. Faces peered down from the battlements above. Carnelian felt as shunned as a leper.

He located Osidian, a shadowy shape striding away along the gully towards where a tower rose, tier on sculptured tier. Morunasa asked for instructions, but Carnelian ignored him and set off after Osidian. The Marula opened a path through their midst to let him through. Carnelian was only vaguely aware of their faces. He was concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other. As the effect of the drug faded, each footfall felt more solid than the last. When he caught up with Osidian, he spoke: ‘Why… why break through?’

‘I had my reasons,’ Osidian growled.

Carnelian saw no point in pressing him further and fell in step with him. Behind them came scuffling Marula.

The gully terminated at a gate from which the two faces of the Commonwealth sneered down. Carnelian and Osidian threw their weight against the bronze and the gate opened, exhaling a waft of lilies. Penetrating the gloomy hall beyond, Carnelian noticed figures flitting away through openings all along its rim. Members of the Legate’s household, no doubt. He glanced round anxiously to make sure the Marula were keeping close; he did not want any massacres. Huddled hesitantly on the threshold, they came when he beckoned them.

They crossed the hall among the echoes of their creeping footfalls. Carnelian did not blame the Marula for their wariness. Even to him this place felt like a tomb. The pillars on either side seemed guardians. Figures writhing in the pavement beneath his feet might have been a view down into the Underworld.

Their route took them within sight of archways that opened into the gold of late afternoon. Carnelian longed to escape through them, but Osidian always turned away into the shadows. The cold grandeur seeped into Carnelian’s heart until he began to shiver. The polished floor seemed frozen meat whose veins had turned to stone. Columns might have been the corpses of trees. As he walked he became aware he was clutching his marumaga robe. Its coarse but honest weave brought him some little comfort.

They skirted one last court by means of a cloister. Walking close to its edge Carnelian was able to see they were nearing the tower whose tiers were borne upon the curved backs of humbled men. The cloister curved to deliver them to a stair that they began ascending. They passed chambers panelled with malachite and purple porphyry whose sterile beauty Osidian declared to be that of reception chambers. ‘It is the Legate’s private halls we seek.’

Higher they climbed until they came to a landing where they were challenged by guardsmen bearing the Legate’s cypher on their faces. Osidian stayed the Marula with a command then climbed the last few steps towards the guardsmen and their levelled spears. If his height had not been enough to alert them that he was a Master, his disregard for their weapons proved it. Their spear blades clattered to the floor as they knelt.

‘Clear this level. These chambers I claim for my own. Any creature left behind shall be slain.’

Carnelian had reached Osidian’s side and could now see the great door upon which the men had been standing guard. Abandoning their weapons they fled through it into the chambers beyond. He noticed that the stair continued climbing. ‘The roof,’ he said, remembering the heliograph he suspected to be up there. Osidian nodded and bade Morunasa approach him. He selected some of the Marula to stand guard upon the door. ‘Take these others,’ he said to the Oracle, ‘and bring me anyone you find up there.’

The Oracle was about to scale the steps when Osidian stayed him. ‘I want them alive.’

The Oracle darted a nod and soon he and most of the Marula had disappeared up the stairs. Carnelian waited with Osidian as the Legate’s household cowered past to scurry down the steps. The guardsmen were the last to leave.

‘Nothing living?’ Osidian asked them.

‘Nothing, Master.’

As they ducked past him and away down the stair after the others, Osidian indicated to the Marula the recesses flanking the door in which they were to stand guard. Then he and Carnelian passed into the chamber beyond.

They emerged into a suite of rooms more humanly proportioned, graced with gilded furniture, with hangings of featherwork, walls pierced by ivory doors. Wandering, they came into a chamber in which bronze lecterns shaped like hands cradled books. Osidian took one, opened its jewelled cover and read. He looked at Carnelian.

‘An inferior edition,’ he said, stroking the binding.

There were tears running down his face. This sadness, that was also joy, made Osidian look young again. As they explored further together Carnelian watched him sidelong. Osidian professed disdain for such provincial architecture, aloofness towards the minor treasures that were all about them, but when he turned his gaze from something his fingers would linger on it a while as if he feared that, should he lose touch of it, it might disappear. Indeed, the polished stone in which they moved as shadows, the hanging silks that floated on the breeze like smoke, the narrow views some windows gave down into the hazy infinities of the land below, all these things seemed unreal, so that it was as if they moved together through a dream.

At last they came to a chamber in which water ran in channels in the walls. Here Osidian let his marumaga robe crumple to the floor and soon was standing in an iris-scented waterfall. He beckoned for Carnelian to join him. The eyes looking at him had something of the boy in the Yden, but now they were set in a face that had been hardened by pain. The water was making Osidian’s maggot wounds redder than his mouth. The mark of the rope was livid round his neck. His once flawless limbs had been weathered by the margins of garments into different shades so that he seemed assembled from unmatched pieces of ivory. Pity became an ache in Carnelian’s chest. He felt anew the agony of loss for what Osidian had been and sadness for what he had become. Undressing, he joined him in the waterfall. They stood together, sheathed in its warm pulsating embrace. Osidian’s eyes seemed emeralds lost in the sea. ‘Forgive me.’

Carnelian’s heart responded to the appeal. There was still a part of him that yearned for the way it had been between them, but he could not so easily forget the dead. ‘Forgiveness is not in my gift,’ he said and endured the hurt that came into Osidian’s face.