Today all our fates shall be decided.' Carnelian could hear the sorrow in his father's voice. 'Perhaps, even now, we shall be victorious.'
'Aurum said—'
His father cut his reassurances from his mouth with a scissoring motion of his hand and left.
When Tain returned he came with others and Carnelian was forced to hide his distress behind a stony face. He could not rid himself of the harrowing conviction that his father had come to say goodbye.
As they put him into his court robe he bit his tongue to stop himself from spraying them with bitter words. He could not bear to look at Tain's remote expression. When they were finished he almost snatched his Great-Rings from their hands and, ordering the door open, he strode through it so fast he almost toppled over.
The Ichorians lifted the portcullises for him. Carnelian walked through into the nave and was suddenly among giants.
'Cousin Carnelian,' said a voice he recognized as Spinel's. Carnelian saw him there with the others, the nine Lords of House Suth with their chameleon-cyphered court robes. Carnelian looked past them to the gleaming Great. Beyond, the nave ran empty to the closed door of the Chamber of the Three Lands.
Carnelian bowed his head. 'My Lords. My father told me you would be here.'
Then you have spoken to him today, cousin?' asked one of the Lords.
'I have . . .' Carnelian read the name glyph on his crowns, 'Cousin Veridian.'
The Lord bowed. 'At the service of your lineage, cousin.'
'I am heartened to receive it,' Carnelian said.
'Does our Ruling Lord anticipate victory for his party?'
Carnelian shrugged his hands. 'It hangs in the balance and why should it not when even those of his own House betray him?' He looked at Spinel.
The Lord lifted his right hand to show his blood-ring. This is no mere bauble, my Lord. I will cast its votes as I will. That is my right.'
'And you feel no duty whatever to your Ruling Lord?'
Spinel opened his arms to take in the gleaming concourse. 'Only when we vote does the tyranny of our Ruling Lords lift enough to let us for a moment into the light. Like many others here, I will not be persuaded to walk back into the shadows merely by some rhetoric about family loyalty. Are you making me an offer for my votes, cousin?'
Carnelian controlled his anger, tried to think of something. 'My father is a fair man.' He turned to the other Suth Lords. 'He will treat you as you treat him.'
'I see,' said Spinel. 'So on the basis that your father is a "fair man" you would have me declare myself apostate before all the gathered Great and make the new Gods and Their mother my foes.' He shook his crowned head. 'I think not. I shall honour the agreement I have made with Molochite and we shall see what transpires.'
A Ruling Lord appeared towering at the edge of their group. Carnelian saw the House Imago dragonflies on his robe.
'Internecine conflict within the House Suth, tsk, tsk,' said Jaspar. 'Not that one can own to much surprise, to judge from the lack of care with which its Ruling Lord is wont to treat its interests.'
'My father's interests are his own, Jaspar.'
Looking at Jaspar, Spinel pointed at Carnelian. 'Lord Imago, my kinsman here was attempting to detach me from my agreements.'
'Indeed. That would be foolish, S
uth Spinel. One should not lightl
y abandon one's commitments.'
'Spare us your threats, my Lord,' said Carnelian. 'My kinsman is already determined in his act of treachery. He had better only hope that when this election is over, Ykoriana will be able to protect him from my father's wrath.'
'Carnelian, you should not concern yourself overmuch with that. Once Molochite wears the Masks he will reward his friends and, no doubt, become an inconvenience to those whose lack of foresight led them to become his enemies.'
'We are not afraid—'
Carnelian was interrupted by a chime that shook the air all the way from the Chamber of the Three Lands.
'Aaah, cousin dear, we must discuss your fears some other time. You are summoned into the chamber.'
Another chime rang out. Carnelian waited for its reverberations to dull. 'In spite of all your treacheries, Jaspar, the victory will be ours.'
Jaspar laughed at him through his mask and walked off, dragging a train like a sunset sky.
Carnelian stood rigid, feeling set about with enemies as the bell's pealing shuddered over him. He felt a pulling at his sleeve. He looked up to see his own mask reflected in that of one of the third lineage Lords.
'Come, cousin, we must obey the call of the Turtle's Voice.'
Leading the Suth Lords, Carnelian made his way along the nave as the pealing gusted like a gale. The nave was filling with the processions of the Great like an armada of sails. The bronze trees of the chamber wall rose menacingly ahead. The moat caught their sinister reflection. The Great did not sail across the bridge, for the north
-
eastern gate was shut. They tacked round towards the south-east, making the gloomy journey to where Carnelian eventually could see the eastern doors were opening like sluice gates, releasing a flickering flood of light. The jewelled oblongs of the Great began bunching as they crossed the bridge accompanied by a shadowy reflected host moving in the moat's black depths. As they passed into the doorway they smouldered and then caught fire.
Carnelian slowed with the others, feeling the dazzle falling on him. A chime hit him with its wave. He began crossing the bridge and saw before him the interior of the chamber filled with a ring of the Lesser Chosen like a lake from which there rose an island fenced about with lantern posts. A wall feathered with fire hedged the Lesser Chosen in. Its whole flickering circuit was breached only where he saw a door open in the north and by the eastern door through which he was entering. Naphtha dragon odour wafted in the swell of the pealing bell.
He looked for the source of all that sound. A mound rose on the low island lying in the midst of the Lesser Chosen. Above this something floated like a summer moon. As he walked towards it down the avenue between the throng, he saw a hammer wielded by syblings hit this moon. It gave out a ripple of sound as if at that moment it had fallen from the sky into the sea. As the vibration rolled over him he faltered and, re-establishing the rhythm of his steps, he became aware of the void above his head. The chamber was open to the night sky. Looking upwards, his eyes could find nothing to see. Fathomless darkness, a dead sky unpricked with stars. He felt its emptiness pouring into his mind through the holes of his eyes and, dropping his gaze, he reminded himself how deep inside the Pillar's rock he was.
He was glad to reach the island's blood-red stone. He had disliked seeing himself twisted in the metal faces of the Lesser Chosen. Steps climbed between the lantern posts, which were tall and slender and grew six branches, each holding aloft a light. He saw the resemblance they bore to the watch-towers he had seen on the road and as he climbed past them he had a notion. The island he had come up onto was a perfect red circle inlaid with a network of silver lines. This was the Guarded Land with its roads. The lantern posts were set around its edge in the positions of the Ringwall cities. The floor of jade and malachite the Lesser Chosen were thronging represented with its greens the encircling lands of the barbarians. The platform that rose at the centre of the chamber seemingly of black glass was fenced by posts carrying the horned-ring of divinity. That was surely Osrakum with its Sacred Wall. The carved stone bell that hung above it in the black air was the Turtle's Voice, and, like the Pillar of Heaven, a connection between earth and sky. The chamber was a wheelmap made stone, the Commonwealth become geometry, the Three Lands captured within a ring of fire.
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, b
ut his progress seemed as relentl
ess 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 ghostl
y 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.