Ricardo Pinto - The Third God

Osidian came to a halt at the edge of a stable entrance. He turned to say something, but his words were lost amidst the rattle and groaning of counterweights falling in their niches. He pointed up. Carnelian saw above them the base of a dragon tower being hoisted, ponderously, off its supporting beams. When these were winched back, the tower base was left hanging, black against the sky. Along the curving run of piers, more were rising, creaking like the hulls of ships at sea.

Movement just in front of Carnelian caused him to step back. The hawsers lying across his path were rising, curving ever more steeply up into the mouth of the nearest vault. As they lost their slack, it became clear they were pulling on something within the shadows. A dragon was being dragged out. Carnelian glanced between the piers towards the bright heart of the cothon. Rows of men, yoked to the hawsers, swayed in rhythm to a chant as they heaved. Other men appeared, carrying cruelly spiked billhooks. Seeing the Masters, they hesitated, but Osidian waved them on and they rushed into the stable. As their billhooks clawed at the monster, it let forth a terrible cry. The last time Carnelian had heard that sound was amidst fire and rolling sulphurous clouds. The cobbles under his feet gave a shudder. Another. Like the prow of a baran sliding out from its boathouse, the monster’s head began emerging from the gloom. The hawsers were attached to rings gripping its horns. Sun splashed up the hill of its forehead. He saw its white eye larger than a shield. Rusty tattoos coating its head seemed the dried encrustings left by a wash of blood.

‘Five, three, four twenties and one,’ Carnelian read. The glyph ‘Battle’ appeared in several places. ‘Bending River’ and ‘I cast down’ he saw, surrounded by other glyphs that folded illegibly into its hide as it flexed. The inscriptions ran up the slope of its crest, sweeping in complex interweaving streams of signs, lapping the rugged cuticle of a horn, enringing its milky eye. Then its shoulder was dragged into the daylight. A cliff monumentally inscribed, spotted with the cartouches of the Lords who had ridden it, dates, paeans to its lineage as ancient as a House of the Chosen. At last Carnelian’s gaze was led to the ‘Nu’ roundel that rouged its forehead: a glyph, one of whose readings was ‘Annihilation’. Circling that was its battle name, pricked into its hide with raised scars. This was Heart-of-Thunder.

‘I must go and talk to the Quartermaster,’ cried Osidian over the tumult, ‘and then I will give the commanders an audience. Will you, my Lord, oversee the re-equipping of the Marula from the legionary stores?’

Carnelian, unable to take his eyes off the vast monster as it was urged past, raised his hand in the affirmative. Each footfall shook the earth. Majestic, vast, Heart-of-Thunder slid between the piers and under the suspended tower base like a finger into a ring. When he next looked, Osidian was gone. He moved round behind the pier so he could gaze up at the monster’s head. Men were lifting bronze rings set into the cothon floor. Heart-of-Thunder shook his head. One of the hawsers whipped loose. Its yoke, yanking back, threw the men who had borne it onto their backs. They lost hold of it. Their cries of alarm mixed with the clatter the yoke made scraping across the cobbles. Other men pounced on it and, with the help of the bearers, they managed to bring the monster back under control.

Carnelian continued to watch as the hawsers were made fast about the bronze rings. Thrice the monster, jerking back, threatened to tear the rings from the ground, but each time, unable to budge them, he subsided. Throughout, he rumbled a growl that reverberated through the cothon floor and off the piers, seeming to threaten a storm.

A man Carnelian had not noticed before, who was sitting astride one of the monster’s lower horns, shuffled along it as if it were a log. When he reached the beast’s head he leaned against it just behind the moon of its lidless eye. Stroking Heart-of-Thunder’s hide, he seemed to be talking to him. Unbelievably, the monster stopped his growling and had soon become as motionless as stone. A barked command, then ropes snaked down the mountainous flanks. Men rushed into the squeeze between the dragon and the pier. Grabbing the ropes, they hung on them. Two massive counterweights began rising in their niches. Glancing up, Carnelian saw the four-prowed tower base descending. Its feet came to rest upon Heart-of-Thunder’s haunches and shoulders. As the feet pressed into his hide, the monster let forth a bellow that rattled the piers. While the keeper calmed him again, others were circling him, peering up at his muscles, tapping them with the curve of their billhooks. When they were satisfied, they waved a signal and men leaping up into the niches took hold of the counterweights and began swinging them in and out like bells. At last, with one coordinated action, the counterweights were swung back onto shelves. Their ropes sagged, as Heart-of-Thunder’s back took the full weight of the tower base.

More men appeared, lugging steaming pails, into which others dipped poles that they lifted, dripping, to begin greasing the belly of the monster.

Voices above him made Carnelian look up to see figures swarming onto Heart-of-Thunder from the pier. He noticed a pole running the length of the tower base onto which one man was working a hook. Carnelian gasped as, gripping a rope attached to the hook, the man leapt into space. He slid to the ground, then pulled the rope after him under the ceiling of the monster’s belly. Another man appeared, coming the other way. Rope in hand, he scrambled up footholds in the pier, back to the tower base. More men descended, more ascended as rope after rope sank into the layer of smeared fat, weaving a tight girdle to fix the tower in place.

Carnelian found Morunasa watching his Marula warriors being cut out of their beaded corselets. To his relief he spotted Sthax among them. Morunasa was frowning. Carnelian shared his unease at seeing the warriors being shelled like oysters, their corselets discarded as rubbish. In lines, the now naked men were being fitted for armour. The leather was more flattering to their long-limbed beauty than their corselets had been, but they were left looking more like slaves.

On the other side of the courtyard, grooms were bringing aquar down ramps. These were not the dun creatures of the Plainsmen, but the larger ones of the Commonwealth, silver as fish. There was no doubt the elegant curves of their saddle-chairs accommodated the lanky Marula better than the cramped wicker of the Plainsman chairs, but Carnelian could see how uncomfortable the warriors were with the stirrups and their frustration at how these new aquar did not respond to the touch of their feet. How long would it take them to adapt to using reins? Just before setting off on a dangerous campaign seemed a bad time to exchange the familiar for the strange. Osidian did not make that sort of mistake. No doubt this change had less to do with efficiency and more with discomfiting the Marula. Osidian wanted to break these proud men into auxiliaries obedient to his commands.

A desire to see Heart-of-Thunder once more drew him back to the cothon. Light from torches set into the piers gleamed off machines and towers. Commanding his escort to wait for him, Carnelian slipped into the shadows. He wandered under piers, passing dragons each bearing a tower base, each being crawled over by men still hard at work.

When he reached Heart-of-Thunder, Carnelian saw the immense girdle was complete. Clambering over it, men were working toggles larger than their hands into its ropes. Carnelian watched one being twisted into a rope a turn at a time, tightening it. When the toggle could be turned no further, it was tucked under the next rope to hold it fast. The rigger drew a fresh toggle from a pouch slung at his hip and with it struck the rope he had just tightened, feeling its tone with his cheek. Satisfied, he moved on to the next.