Then you are handmaidens to the Gods?'
'Mostl
y to Their sons.'
'Nephron and Molochite?'
Right-Que
ntha smiled warmly. 'Most recentl
y, to the Jade Lord Nephron.' 'But also Molochite?'
The sisters became expressionless. 'He also was our master,' said Left-Quentha, smoothing the leggings over his thigh.
'We prefer the Lord Nephron,' said her sister.
Left-Quentha swung round. 'Hush! You will ruin us.'
'Nonsense! This Seraph is son to the Regent who supports our Lord.'
Left-Quentha turned her face away from her sister as if her stone eyes were searching the silk on his leg for wrinkles.
Carnelian grinned behind his mask. He liked these syblings. 'And what of their mother, the Empress?'
The girls' faces froze together. His hand made a fist. He c
ongratulated himself on his subtl
ety. They moved away to the chest and came back holding either end of an elaborate belt from which dangled bony hooks and loops. There was a hardness in their faces that did not invite any more of his questions. They asked him to raise his arms, and when he did they wrapped the belt round his waist, let it slip down to his hips and secured it.
'Does the Seraph find that comfortable?' asked Left-Quentha.
Carnelian looked down at his body, puzzled. He ran his finger round inside the belt. 'I suppose so.'
They brought straps and rods of brass and attached these to his belt. They returned to the chest and each pair of arms pulled out something looking like a leg, with many straps and hollows and human articulation. The girls carried them like logs and, kneeling, placed them carefully on end, a
little
apart, on the floor before Carnelian. He watched their long fingers fiddling with them.
'If the Seraph would please climb onto the ranga?' Carnelian could see no shoes.
Left-Quentha pointed at the wooden contraptions. The court ranga, Seraph.'
Carnelian stepped forward and lifted his foot. Two of their hands fed his toes into a gap halfway up the shoe. The smooth, comfortable hollow swallowed his foot. Then the girls rose and braced his arms to allow him to step up. His other foot was guided into the hollow in the second shoe. Putting his weight onto it he found that he was standing, well balanced. The syblings knelt below him and began clicking levers, tightening ivory screws. At first there was slack in the hollows but soon they fitted his feet as tighdy as gloves.
'I feel ridiculous.'
Left-Quentha's stone eyes looked up at him. 'If the Seraph would please try walking.'
Right-Quentha gave him a wink. Carnelian laughed aloud, surprising her sister. He lifted a leg, expecting the shoe to be heavy, but it was so light his knee came up too
fast and he overbalanced. The syblings managed to catch him and prop him back up. He took another more careful step. The shoe put down first a ridg
e of toes then a heel as it settl
ed to the ground. Soon he was walking comfortably around the chamber. He stopped and beamed down at them. 'What next?'
'Would the Seraph please kneel.'
Carnelian looked at Right-Quentha. She nodded. Gingerly, he bent his knees. The shoes folded in half and for a moment he felt he was falling, but they locked, leaving him kneeling, his shins supported in long ivory grooves. He tried to straighten his knees and found the shoes slid him back to standing.
Carnelian turned to the syblings. 'Why .
..
?'
Left-Quentha looked startled. 'Surely, Seraph—'
Her sister turned to her. 'He has been away in exile all his life. How do you expect him to—'
'Sister!' Left-Quentha stared, appalled. Her sister's hand flew to her mouth.
'No harm done,' said Carnelian and he held up his fingers in a smiling sign.
Still frowning, Left-Quentha turned to him. 'Kneeling on the ranga allows the Seraph to make the robe support its own weight.'
'What robe?'
Right-Quentha gave him a sheepish grin. 'We shall have it brought in, Seraph.'
The syblings walked to the doors and drew them open.
At first Carnelian thought it was a Master who was coming glittering in to fill the chamber, but then he saw the figure had no head and that several syblings, half hidden in its skirts, were carrying it. As the suit came into the light it seemed to ignite. It was a column of brocade densely woven from gold in which a tall and narrow panel
running from neck to floor was set like a window into some heavenly realm. A verdant garden blossomed, each leaf a cut peridot or emerald. Roses petalled with spinel rubies. Orchids, opals. Creatures
ran among the foliage, the mottl
e of their hides blemished bloodstone. Sapphire rivers foamed diamond spray. Jade trees filtered the light from iolitic skies. Rainbows brighter than parrots formed ladders up to a storm among black coral and moonstone clouds in which fire topaz lightning flashed. As the robe came closer he put his hand out to touch the miraculous mosaic.
'But this looks like Earth and Sky, the heraldry of the Masks.'
The Regent petitioned the House to have his son adorned thus,' said Right-Quentha.
The robe has been adjusted for the lower ranga the Seraph i
s entitl
ed to,' said her sister.
The suit began to spin slowly round until his fingertips were grazing metallic threads. He was surprised they did not give sound off like a harp. The suit opened like a fist. Its innards were filled with scaffolding.
'Please, Seraph, would you walk into the robe and then kneel,' said Left-Quentha.
Carnelian did so. Its hinged ivory collar was at his throat. He fumbled blindly at the scaffolding.
The bones of birds and the smaller saurians, for lightness,' said Right-Quentha, who must have seen his fingers move. She coaxed his arms down into the sleeves. He felt the robe closing behind him.
'With care, would the Seraph please slowly stand to carry the burden of the robe?'
Carnelian tried to straighten his knees and at first met so much resistance he could not. More adjustments were made and at last he found he could stand, supporting the robe, which felt like a shell of bronze.
He knelt again and they began to build a crown upon his head. First a diadem of misty jade from which fell tresses of beaded tourmalines. Over this they set a helmet of jewel-ribbed leather that flared from his neck like the hood of a cobra. Above this they placed a final coronet that spread a jewelled halo behind his head, upon whose summit sat side by side a face of jade and one of obsidian.
They produced two Great-Rings. 'My own?' he asked, surprised.
'Come from the Three Gates,' they answered and urged him to rise again.
When he did so he felt as if he were wearing a house. He took a few tentative steps and was amazed that the whole mass moved with him. The syblings scurried around below, clearing obstacles from his path. Before Carnelian left, Right-Quentha bullied her sister into setting up a mirror, angling it so that the Seraph might see how he had been transformed into a towering, glimmering apparition.
The syblings formed a ring at whose centre Carnelian paced slowly along the curving corridor, pumping his knees open and closed in slow rhythm. His breathing roared inside his mask. The court robe swung languidly like a huge bell in which he was the clapper. He felt mountainously tall. A precipice of gold fell away towards the floor, casting glimmers on the faces of the syblings so that it seemed as if an open furnace were being carried in their midst.
The corridor opened into a sun blaze. Carnelian narrowed his eyes and walked into the glare. He tried to rotate his head but the crown's neck flares resisted him. He discovered it was easier to turn his whole frame to look. A sky of flame was pulsing in time to the Gods' heartbeat. Against this, the syblings seemed to be made from charred sticks. It took Carnelian a while to realize that he stood before a mosaic of amber rising to such heights it made the window appear narrow. 'Is that the sun?' he gasped.
'Does the Seraph refer to the door?' asked Right-Quentha.
The door? What door?' He followed her eyes and saw to the right of the window, smouldering in its lurid glow, a door in whose gold the sun's rayed eye was wrought.
'No, I meant, is it the living sun shining through that window?'
'It lends the window its fire, Seraph.'
Carnelian began a nod but stopped when he imagined his crowns toppling from his head. He carefully turned his back on the light. 'Which way?'
Both Quenthas pointed. 'Down the nave, Seraph.'
The incandescence flooding over his shoulders could not reach the end of that cavernous space. There, dimly, a mossy column rose like the rotted trunk of some immense tree. It was from this that the beating of the God Emperor's heart seemed to come. The pulsing drew him. The syblings followed in a cordon round him. There was something flickering in the corner of his eye. He peered sidelong through his mask's slits. It was one of the lictors, his armour set alight by the window. Carnelian had forgotten them. He watched the uneasy glance the man cast over the syblings. He himself was surprised how quickly he had accepted their strangeness. He looked around him. One pair were barely joined. Another were melted so close they had only two legs between them and but a single, wizened arm squeezing out from where their shoulders were. Every pair seemed to have two living eyes and two of stone. Their bronze armour looked as if it had been cast directly onto their flesh: the left half baroqued with spiral inlays, the right smoothly imitating the contours of the skin beneath. Several dragged green and black tessellated cloaks. As his eyes fell on one of their halberds, they widened behind his mask. Its black blade could only be iron. He looked and saw that all their weapons were made of iron. It was a display of fabulous wealth.
This discovery made Carnelian hungry for more wonder. As the light from the window waned, he found his eyes could see better. The Quenthas walked in front with a fluid three-legged gait, arms about each other's shoulders. A breeze laced with strange perfumes was blowing. Away up ahead, the gold spindle of a Master was moving amidst a retinue of guardsmen. Carnelian felt more than heard a strange flapping like birds in a dream. He peered into the gloomy stillness of the colonnades that flanked them on either side. More columns marched off as far as he could see. The slow continuous beating of immense wings was unnerving him. He searched above the colonnades where the carved stone rose sheer like the wall of a ravine. When his head was angled back he saw the furtive movement of shadowy banners wafting like unbrailed sails.
His crowns wearied his neck and forced his head down. They entered an even wider cavern where the Gods' heartbeat was tremoring the air and floor. What had seemed the trunk of some vast tree was a curving wall of green rusted bronze almost filling the centre of the cavern and ringed by a mirror moat. A bridge crossed over to a gate that he saw was part of the wall's dense interweaving of branches. For a moment, he was convinced that he was peering into a forest's dark, secret core. He shuddered, remembering the Labyrinth.
He leaned towards the sybling sisters and pointed across the bridge, whispering, 'Is the God Emperor in there?'
Right-Quentha smiled up at him. 'Only Their heart.'
'Within lies the Chamber of the Three Lands, Seraph,' her sister added, 'where the Seraphim cast their votes in divine election.'
Carnelian turned to look back towards where the window was glowing its tall oblong flame. 'And this vast hall?' he whispered, his eyes catching in the languid movements of the banners high above.
The Encampment of the Seraphim.'
Right-Quentha reached up to take his hand and the sisters led him along the edge of the mirror moat. They passed two more bridges that crossed to gates in the bronze wall. Opposite a third, a crowd of guardsmen spread. All were turned to an opening in the cavern's outer wall into which climbed a flight of steps that might have been the foothills of a mountain. Carnelian gazed up over the heads of the guardsmen. The steps were hewn from the Pillar's heart-stone but these were jammed between two rows of giants, on one side of translucent leaf-green stone, on the other of black glass. All were avatars of the Two Gods, their heads vague in the high shadows. This then was the inspiration for the stair in Jaspar's palace, though in comparison that seemed fit only for servants. A glinting on the slope caught Carnelian's eye. He focused and saw a filament of gold, a Master halfway up the stair..
'You must climb, Seraph,' said Left-Quentha.
Carnelian regarded the crowds that lay between him and the first step. Both Quenthas lifted their chins and swept forward. The crowds parted, and as Carnelian paced between them they knelt. He saw they clumped
according to the cyphers on their faces. Each retinue had its uniform: feathered cuirasses, bronze-banded armour and chainmail, breastplates of striped or spotted leathers; he saw spears, tridents, swords curved and straight. A familiar heraldry drew his eyes. Chameleoned faces. His escort followed as he opened a path to them. When he was close enough to cast yellow light on them with his robe, Carnelian could see their eyes darting looks of horror at the syblings. When closer still, the Suth people fell to their knees and Carnelian was forced to look down at them from on high. The familiarity of their tattoos cheered him. 'Fey sent you lot up here?' he asked, using the Vulgate.