Ricardo Pinto - The Chosen

As the Great began to cover the platform of the Guarded Land, Carnelian led the Suth Lords along its rim, until he found the post in the north-west that represented Nothnaralan. From this the silver line of the Great Sea Road ran towards the Osrakum platform. Carnelian leaned on the lantern post and saw the road run down to be lost among the Lesser Chosen. He found Maga-Naralante, a spire rising in their midst, and against the chamber's flaming wall, Thuyakalrul's post.

'What are you doing, my Lord?' asked Tapaz.

Carnelian had forgotten the other Lords. 'I was looking for my past,' he said. Around them the Great were obscuring the red stone with their gold. Already he could not see over their heads to the avenue he had come along but only the upper part of the eastern door.

The Turtle's Voice fell silent. A muttering seemed to be coming from the Chosen but as Carnelian listened it grew into an insistent modulating grumble. It was the firewall singing a slow, sonorous song. It soaked into him. The rumble of the chanting slid up to a peak, down and up again and took his heart with it.

When the other sound started he gasped with shock. A whining at first that tore into a braying, ululating cry. More shawms joined their voices to it, interweaving, fraying into great vibrating surfaces of sound. He saw the mirror faces round him turning to the north-east to where a black doorway was opening in the firewall. Out from the darkness came a light, a flaming apparition. A green path opened up in front of him. The shawms slid in a shrilling pitch, shredding the air as He-who-goes-before came coruscating, towering through the Lesser Chosen. His lictors walked before him, holding up his standards like glowing coals. Carnelian worried that their support was out of his father's reach, but his progress seemed as relentless as a comet's through the sky as he pulled a flaming tail of the Ruling Lords of the Great with their lightning crowns.

Then his father was hidden. Carnelian could still follow the red eyes of his standards above the heads of the Great. As his father climbed onto the Guarded Land, the opaque pulsing brilliance of the shawms swelled louder. The sunburst of his father's head rose into sight and slid across Carnelian's vision and then, preceded by his lictors, moved up and through the horned-ring fence to stand facing the Turtle's Voice.

Carnelian felt the Great turning around him. He followed their gaze and saw the Ruling Lords were moving along the edge of the Osrakum platform. A ripple of bowing accompanied them. One of the Ruling Lords was being bowed to by the Great. A stone grew heavy in Carnelian's stomach. He knew it was Jaspar to whom they were already paying the homage due a victor.

A myriad crashes of breaking glass made Carnelian imagine for a moment that around him the Chosen were splintering into shards. His father stood as motionless as an idol. Behind him, in the south, a door was opening. Among a hailstorm of cymbals and crotala, Carnelian noticed the Chosen turning to look into the west. There too a door was opening and in it a pale pageant was appearing, of creatures far taller than the Lesser Chosen who moved back to let them through. The Grand Sapients' row of icy pinnacles slid along a curve withershins through the Chosen. Each wore the horns of the crescent moon and an icicle crown. Each was preceded by a pair of glittering standards that seemed to move of their own volition. All were clothed in a flash and fold of moonlight. Carnelian counted all twelve Grand Sapients and saw that like snails they were leaving behind them a gleaming track of smaller Sapients. He watched their pavane move into the south-east until all he could see of them over the crowned Great was a twinkling froth like the wake a ship might leave upon a moonlit sea.

A while later he saw another procession of the Wise churning towards him through the Lesser Chosen. The angle of their approach suggested they formed part of a long spiral feeding in from the southern door. Their course brought them right to the edge of the Guarded Land, close enough for him to see the starry glisten of the tears upon their blind masks. With sistrums trembling they slid past, walking with their staves and homunculi, winding their procession tight around the Guarded Land.

Then, above the cymbals, Carnelian heard a hiss that made him turn. Under the Turtle's Voice the crowns of the Grand Sapients were drifting like thisdedown. The tail of their march had formed up around the edge of the Osrakum platform. As the tinkling music abated, Carnelian saw the horned-ring posts begin to melt and waver, then turn into smoke that grew up into the starless night. This slowly blossomed into vast ghostly trees that hung their serpent branches over the Chosen and showered them with attar of lilies.

Carnelian's crowns lost their weight. His robe became no more burden than air-thin silk. He looked up and saw the white smoke uncurling in the air like ferns. Rain was falling in the distance. He watched the smoke weave its tendrils into a misty ceiling and realized it was drugged. The Great around him buffeted him as they moved towards the centre of the chamber, casting glances to the south-west. He lifted a hand to touch the landscape of a jewelled robe. 'What…?'

The coming of the House of the Masks.'

He let the Master go and found himself following him, lifting his ranga shoes with ease, feeling pleasure in his liquid motion. The thrumming was not rain but drumming. A pounding of a heart as massive as the Pillar of Heaven. Lighter rhythms pattered long patterns that took his mind with them even as he crushed in with the brocaded wall of the Great, gazing off to see the door in the south-west opening. The massive heart quickened its beating, making the air rock with its excitement. When the doors were fully open, Carnelian could see the Stairs of the Approach running all the way up into a remote distance where the Iron Door seemed a window onto a thunderous sky. The screaming began, grumbling, tearing metal, rasping into harshness even as the door began parting. More trumpets were pumping, bruising the air and ears with fanfares as the Iron Door fed an incandescing procession onto the stair. Down the steps it poured like burning tar. The anger of the music shifted into an ever more frantic fraying until Carnelian was convinced that it would split him from crowns to ranga shoes.

He stared appalled, grinding his teeth, as the procession bubbled down its syblings, carrying with it a gory eye, a bloody gathering of knives, Ykoriana and the other women of her House.

He let his gaze fall to the sybling vanguard of that march as they reached the chamber and carried tall flames into the Lesser Chosen as if they were burning a path through a forest. Ykoriana came on behind, floating into the chamber on a gale of horns and trumpets. Her hands were folded across her chest sheathed in the jade of her four Great-Rings. Before her went the staves of the Regent with their horned-rings, their targets of the Commonwealth. Beside her paced four smaller amethystine women. Around them blood-eyed eunuchs pale as bones faced outwards, displaying their mutilations. Behind came the Lords of the Masks, scores of them with jewelled nest crowns and the faces of angels reflecting sunrise, and Chosen syblings as wide in their robes as chariots, and their brethren flanking them in greens and blacks, with iron casques and masks and poles bearing jade and obsidian faces.

Amidst the imperious tumult, Carnelian gaped as the glorious mass broke against the Great and shattered, sending syblings out in branches to outflank the platform of the Guarded Land. The core broke free, climbing onto the Osrakum platform, surrounding it, filling it up so that Carnelian saw his father was engulfed.

Then the whole world shook to its foundations as one by one the doors slammed closed. Ripples ran along the firewall that seemed to shower the Lesser Chosen with sparks. The trumpets boomed, then grumbled silent. Carnelian could feel the resonant humming of the Turtle's Voice. His eyes followed the firewall round and found it was complete. The Chosen were all trapped within its fiery ring. With a rustling the Chosen lifted their hands to their faces and removed their masks. Carnelian was slow to follow, shivering, startled by the winter of faces. He looked up and saw his father, clean and bright like an unsheathed sword. Facing him on the other side of the bell, across the Grand Sapients, still masked, Ykoriana looked like an instrument of murder.