The Third God (96 page)

Carnelian frowned, not understanding what it meant, but feeling he should. Threads of blood had reached his armpits. There was a pounding in his head. Or was it? A drumming was swelling the chanting. A scraping sound of copper on copper. A rustling.

The Grand Sapient was painting Osidian’s face wholly red. Carnelian watched the pale fingers dipping into the bowl and recognized it. The blood they were using was his. Osidian wearing his blood for a mask. Unease managed to seep up through Carnelian’s numbness. In that red face he was seeing Akaisha’s, bloated in death. All the women of the Tribe, their faces ochred for burial. It seemed a desecration to paint Osidian so, as if he was mocking the dead; but there was something else disturbing Carnelian about that red face. Then Osidian opened his eyes. Carnelian started, causing the Sapients to tighten their grip on his arms. His dreams were crossing over into his waking world.

‘And it rained blood,’ cried the homunculi.

Wet tearing sounds yanked Carnelian’s gaze up the central stair of the Pyramid Hollow to see the long seed pods of the torsion devices that flanked it untwisting, swelling. Then they began to explode, not all at once, but in a long stuttering release, and the air turned red as if filled with rose petals. Carnelian gasped in shock as he was spattered. Warm, thick spots of it on his face and arms. Pattering on the platform, on the dark pinnacles of the Wise, on Osidian in his court robe. A great sigh went up from the tiers above that seemed one of sexual release. The Masters to either side of the steps were visibly reddened, though some gore reached them all. To Carnelian, gazing up in horror, it seemed the stair was a gash in the cliff, even the vulva of some vast woman.

‘Flesh, knit bone to bone, your withered earth . . .’ the ammonites on either side were chanting.

The odour of freshly spilled blood was overpowering. Carnelian felt as if the tidal wave from his dreams had broken over them.

‘Oh ancient mother, scorched tearless you await . . .’

The Wise were hooking a green face beneath the wheel breastplate. The face of a beautiful, radiant youth. It seemed the same face Molochite had worn in the Iron House, but that had been broken, so this must be a replica. Blood dribbling down its jade brow, cheek and lips from the liver and heart above made it seem as if the face had been freshly flayed from some youth. It looked, besides, incongruous, fringed as it was on either side by the amputated feet and hands of the victim.

Osidian with his scarlet face was being given some of Carnelian’s blood to drink.

‘The Sky Lord come to thunder . . .’

The Wise were holding up what seemed a face reflected in a mirror of night.

‘Rumbling His stormy belly . . .’

The Wise held the obsidian mask over Osidian’s face and he was transformed. Terrible he became, the very blackness of the sky incarnate.

‘Heart-of-Thunder,’ Carnelian heard the homunculi intone.

‘Withholding Your urgent seed . . .’ chanted the ammonites.

‘Lord of Mirrors,’ intoned the homunculi.

‘Until You shall pierce her with Your shafts . . .’ the ammonites sang.

‘Father of Corruption, Lord of Pestilence, Prince of Plagues.’

‘Quench the burning air . . .’

The obsidian mask was peeled away, revealing what seemed the raw meat of Osidian’s face.

‘Rill and pool her dusts . . .’

The jade mask was raised, the obsidian one hung below the breastplate in its place.

‘Fill her wombs with spiralling jades.’

Osidian was drinking another draught of Carnelian’s blood.

‘Until her flesh swells up . . .’

The wise were dipping their fingers in the bowls of blood and sprinkling Osidian.

‘In the midst of breaking waters . . .’

‘Clenching for release . . .’

The jade mask was held over Osidian’s face.

‘Thrust forth are You, oh Green Child . . .’ the ammonites chanted.

‘Lord of Abundance, Lord of the Earth,’ the homunculi intoned.

‘Ten thousand times reborn . . .’

‘Immortal One.’

‘Squeezed into the air . . .’

‘You who taught.’

‘Enjewelled by the morning . . .’

‘First and Last.’

‘That You may dance again . . .’

‘Lord of the Dance.’

‘And once more breathe Your scents beneath the sky . . .’

‘Life . . .’

The voices of the homunculi were drowned by a roaring fanfare.

With a lurch, the Creation Chariot began to climb the spine of the Pyramid Hollow.

‘Our Lord leads the Faithful up from the sea.’

Carnelian reeled. They had resumed bleeding him into the bowls. It was an effort to stand. The vast, bloody apparition of the Black God was looming over them all. Carnelian had watched the Obsidian Mask replace the Jade. The glimpse of Osidian’s red face had reminded him it was he beneath that carapace, but once he was wearing the black mask, there was nothing left of Osidian.

Carnelian gave his attention to the weird braided voice of the homunculi. He knew they were quoting from the Il Kaya, but it seemed they were describing the journey he, Fern and Osidian had made through the swamps. The horror of it, long forgotten, saturated their words. ‘Then our Lord brings them up to the Land He had promised would be theirs . . .’

Carnelian recalled that first view of the Earthsky and smiled. His vision expanded to take in the sea of ferns and then the fragrant hill of cedars of the Tribe. He breathed deep, but the perfume of the mother trees had aged and was now laced with iron. Myrrh mixed with blood. Carnelian blinked and became half aware of where he was. The homunculi’s talk of conquest cast a shadow over his heart.

‘Men lower than beasts,’ they said.

Carnelian shook his head weakly, anger rising in him. The Masters believed that, but he knew his Plainsmen and his beloved Fern were men. Desperate horror washed over him. Osidian, corrupted, corrupted them. Carnelian wept at what he had allowed him to do.

Shawms were braying. The banners that ammonites were carrying up the steps on either side fluttered like birds in flight. Among them glimmered the crescents of the Wise, the silver ammonite spirals of the Law. The music swelled, borne up on the growling of massive trumpets and a clattering and a constant shattering of glass. The ammonites were singing, joyfully, of peace. Carnelian’s heart rose on the tide. He basked in this omen. Peace after war. A rebuilding, a remaking of the world, a new shape, a flowering of love.

‘Their Commonwealth, to Heaven a perfect mirror,’ the homunculi declared, and Osidian was once more jade-faced.

Carnelian watched a vast disc rising among the Wise like a red sun. He frowned. Except that it was hollow, so that it was a vast glyph of death. An annulus of his birth stone polished to a mirror in which the world was reflected as if in blood. Still the ammonites sang of harmony and blessings but, through the red mirror’s central hole, Carnelian saw the Wise were once more transforming Osidian into the Black God.

‘But sin casts its shadow over their hearts,’ cried the homunculi.

The shawms and trumpets shrieked in hideous cacophony. The red mirror shattered, shards gouging the bloody floor like talons.

‘Brother falls upon brother. Canker spreads from flesh to flesh, carried upon the plague wind. Men fornicate with beasts. Mothers devour their children.’

Carnelian would have plugged up his ears, but Sapients were clinging to his arms. Defenceless, he was exposed to their descriptions of the destruction he and Osidian had brought upon the world. Famine and pestilence as the Darkness-under-the-Trees stalked the land.

‘You He chose to be His own, for you alone held to your faith in Them.’

Carnelian relived the march on Osrakum, described as the Apostates coming against the Chosen. He relived the great battle in which the Chosen were defeated. He clung on, waiting for the hope there is even in despair. The hope of what he might yet do to heal the world with the power he had taken for himself, but the gloom of the symphony did not abate, but darkened further. The voices of the Wise were speaking of the Apostates coming with black hearts even into Holy Osrakum. In a great crescendo the last great battle was described, within the Valley of the Gate. The symphony of chaos rose to an excruciating pitch, then subsided as if tumbling into an abyss.

‘Our Lord leading us, we are victorious. Joyously we bring Them hither for Their coronation.’

‘You come with victory bright on Your brow,’ sang the homunculi.

Carnelian was confused. They were speaking to the Gods and Osidian was Them, or possessed by Them, but Osidian had also come here from victory, a victory the Wise begrudged him.

‘On the plain below You have written Your Law upon the twelve calendar stones. Upon this foundation stands the Commonwealth of the Chosen.

‘Thrones You have erected here, upon which You will sit in judgement on the world. Here, now, as a symbol of Your mastery of the Three Lands, shall we crown You Emperor.’

The echo of the Quyan words reverberating round the Pyramid Hollow slowly died away, even as sistra began shaking out a bright, brittle rustling. One of the Grand Sapients was holding a hood of purple leather above Osidian’s shaved head. As he lowered it, it flowed down on either side of the Obsidian Mask. Two long tresses of jewelled beadcord glittered and chinked as they snaked over the gory breastplate. Carnelian saw that the hood was bound to a silver diadem that sat now upon Osidian’s brow. Emberous rubies ran round the circle of the diadem. By their spacing he judged there to be twelve stones and, though he could see only rubies, he was sure that, round on the side hidden to him, there would be two green stones and two black. It had to be a representation of the Stone Dance of the Chameleon. From what he could deduce of its orientation, it was as if the Black God, approaching the dance along the Rain Axis, had stooped to raise it and put it upon His head. It must signify His authorship of the Law. Carnelian expected some utterance from the Wise to confirm this, but they remained silent. Perhaps they did this as tacit acceptance of the new balance of power.

Carnelian was distracted by something rising into view that seemed an emerald glade. Hope of deliverance after stumbling lost through the glooms of some infernal jungle. It was a crown three Grand Sapients were holding above Osidian’s head. From a diagonal cross centred on a horned-ring of translucent jade, the crown flared down into a cobra hood that seemed to have been cut from the hide of some fabulous, bejewelled saurian. This hood split in two, and through the slit between the halves, Carnelian glimpsed delicate scaffolding, but his eyes could not long resist being drawn up to the verdant explosion above the horned-ring. A great shimmering nest set about by a thicket of quills sheathed with emeralds and peridots, malachites and prase. The whole thing shivered and glimmered like a thing alive. As this sank to rest upon Osidian’s head and shoulders, Carnelian expected he would be unable to support its weight, but the structure of the robe held. The Obsidian Mask, framed by the flaps of jewelled leather, seemed a secret darkness lying at the heart of a fabulous forest.

‘Behold the Green Crown,’ cried the homunculi, ‘symbol of Your dominion over the wildernesses beyond the Ringwall, over sward and jungle, over fernland and fen, dominion eternal over the savages who lurk there far from the light of Your countenance, who, in fear and adoration, bring to You as tribute their children to be Your slaves . . .’

The homunculi, reunited with their masters, turned outwards to face the plain and in stentorian tones cried out in Vulgate: ‘Prostrate yourselves before your God!’

For a moment Carnelian was aware of the rustling and glimmer as the Chosen around him turned in their roosts to view the tributaries below. Vast trumpets blasting forth from beneath his feet made him turn too and gaze out. Along the edges of the multitude, the dragon towers were blaring a fanfare in reply. Smoke was drifting across the tiny figures so that for a moment Carnelian was breathless with terror that the flame-pipes were lit and that he was about to witness another incineration, but then, with a great sigh, the multitude subsided in abasement. He did not feel the pride he should have as one of the Chosen, but only shame.

Three of the Wise held aloft a hollowed globe, tapering upwards like a bud, or perhaps a half-scooped-out pomegranate, and indeed its inner surface was studded with rubies like sweet seeds and Carnelian realized it could be read as the glyph for ‘womb’. Its outer shell, a rolling mosaic of almandines and pyropes, of coral, jasper and carnelian, made the swollen mass seem as if it had been freshly torn from a body. He watched as it was fitted into the emerald nest of the Green Crown.

‘Behold the Red Crown,’ the homunculi sang, ‘symbol of Your dominion over the fertile earth of the Guarded Land from which the world draws sustenance . . .’

Carnelian frowned, remembering famine.

‘. . . over its cities that teem under Your gaze, who, in fear and adoration and in gratitude for the protection You bestow unto them, bring You the tribute of their taxes in Your coin . . .’

Again the Wise turned to demand abasement from the plain, but Carnelian could not stop looking at the Red Crown swelling up from Osidian’s head. As it had been lowered, Carnelian had noticed the bruising of purple leather at its base that could signify the Ringwall. An amethystine band edged the mouth of the hollow and if this were symbolic of the Sacred Wall, passage through which the Wise regulated with their Law, then the womb hollow it enclosed must be the crater of Osrakum. These deductions, for some reason, Carnelian found disturbing.

As the Creation Chariot neared the apex of the Pyramid Hollow, a single Grand Sapient held aloft a glinting shaft. Fluted it was, split in two from top to bottom by a lightning zigzag of gold. In form it seemed to be the Pillar of Heaven rising up from a horned-ring of midnight coral. Of jet and obsidian and adamantine were its ridges and planes.

The voices of the homunculi rose in unison. ‘Behold the Black Crown, symbol of Your dominion over the Hidden Land of thrice-blessed Osrakum, where dwell the Seraphim who bask in the light of Your countenance and at whose heart now stands this vessel that You inhabit with Your double Godhead.’