The Third God sdotc-3 Read online

  The Third God

  ( Stone dance of the chameleon - 3 )

  Ricardo Pinto

  Ricardo Pinto

  The Third God

  MOTHERING MASK

  Salty with tears their mother’s milk.

  (fragment – origin unknown)

  Shesqueezed the ruby into her left eye socket, felt a pop, then sensed its shape inside her head. A sister stone nestled its cool weight in her palm. Raising it she filled the other socket, then inclined her head. A hard blink settled the stones, shaped to occupy each socket, their spinel axes aligned to give the orbs the appearance of focus. Though the Wise had robbed her of sight, they could not deprive her of this blood-red gaze. Raking the chamber, Ykoriana heard the uneasy movements that it induced among her slaves. She did not allow her lips to smile. Eyes, even of stone, are weapons.

  As slaves intruded into every part of her with their unguents, perfume blossomed so that in her mind she escaped from her forbidden house and was walking in a garden. Her nostrils drank in the musk of mummified roses. She became intoxicated by attar of lilies. Spidersilk flowed over her, so finely woven it seemed liquid spilling down her shoulders and breasts, her hips and thighs. She had learned to derive some consolation from sensuousness.

  Though it was their daughter her son claimed he was coming to see, he knew well enough that Ykoriana would not allow him near Ykorenthe unless she were safe in her embrace. Molochite knew also that, because he was God Emperor, his mother would have to be cleansed according to the exact procedure demanded by the Law. The Grand Sapient of the Domain of Blood had come himself as usual to oversee the ritual. She felt his presence though he had not yet spoken through his homunculus. All the Wise had earned her hatred, but he most of all, whom she considered chief among her jailors.

  This visit was typical of Molochite. He liked to remind her of her vulnerability. He enjoyed humiliating her. Now they rarely met. She could maintain her control over him through intermediaries. She had exploited his lust for her, but now she had a daughter, she only invited him into her bed to renew her dominance. The rest of the time she let him vent his desires where he would. As for his petty defiances, she could bear them. Though he wore the Masks, it was she who ruled.

  The women of the House of the Masks had always played a major part in the choosing of a God Emperor, but even as they dropped their blood-rings into the voting urns, they squandered their power by fighting each other. Their ichorous blood would not allow them to yield supremacy to another. This disunity Ykoriana had abolished with her birth. The first female of blood-rank four for generations, her rings cast eight thousand votes. Enough power to dominate the House of the Masks. Enough even to empower her to stand alone, if she chose, against half the assembled might of the Houses of the Great. Power coursed in her veins that all her mothers had dreamed and bred for. What a bitter jest, then, that such power had brought her nothing but suffering.

  The Grand Sapient’s homunculus murmured and the slaves began loading her with robes of brocade denser than armour. She conquered the familiar fear of being shut in, smothered.

  She had been only a girl when her father had died. She had loved her brother Kumatuya, but never forgave him gifting Azurea, their sister, to his lover Suth Sardian. Azurea had died bearing him a son, Carnelian. Grief overcoming policy, Ykoriana had demanded her brother exile Suth as the price for her votes in his election as God Emperor. In revenge, Kumatuya had had her eyes put out. She had not imagined the Wise would support him. A foolish misjudgement. All who spun out their lives in the forbidden houses of the Chosen had reason to know how much the Wise feared and hated women.

  A procession was approaching. They were bringing her daughter. Hastily she reached for what she termed her ‘mothering mask’ and hid her face behind it. She loathed that mask. She had had it made so as not to scare her daughter. She did not want her child to see her withered face, her ruby eyes. Those baleful stones she wore to express her bitter anger, to terrorize, but, most of all, in defiance of the Wise who had insisted that, as they did, she should wear eyes of jade or obsidian to reflect whichever of the Masks the God Emperor was wearing.

  As the procession halted, her ears searched among the tinkling metals, the clink of jewels. When she heard her daughter’s faltering steps, it was as if sunlight fell upon Ykoriana’s face. She touched the cold gold of her mask to reassure herself that she was hidden. Her fingers traced its kind smile, the small nose, its loving eyes of embedded shell and sky-blue sapphire. Her robes would not allow her to stoop so she had them lift Ykorenthe. Her hands sought her daughter’s face. She found the familiar warm curve of her chin with a caress. ‘Ykorenthe, my delight,’ she said, brightly.

  Ykoriana longed to hold the child, but the weight of her sleeves had consumed her strength. Little Ykorenthe’s wordless chatter was sweeter than music. Protecting her had become the very heart of Ykoriana’s life. She suppressed the familiar longing to see the tiny face. She had been told the girl had her father’s beauty. The daughter she had lost, Flama, she too had been beautiful. Time had not dulled the blade of Ykoriana’s grief. Her extreme purdah had made her sons Molochite and Osidian Nephron strangers to her, but Flama she had kept as close as the Law permitted. Headstrong, the girl had fought her mother over the election of Kumatuya’s successor. Had she been given time, Ykoriana was confident she would have been able to gently poison Flama’s love for Nephron. Ykoriana’s spies had revealed enough about him for her to have had no illusions about what her role would be should he become the Gods. Flama’s blood was ichor in even greater part than Ykoriana’s. Nephron would have married his sister and their mother would have been exiled to the depths of the imperial forbidden houses. Still, she had loved Flama enough to risk that fate. It was her other son she had underestimated. Molochite had known Flama’s votes would neutralize those his mother could cast for him. Also he had known that his brother was more popular than he, not only in the House of the Masks, but, beyond, among the Great. Fearing to lose, Molochite had murdered his sister. Enraged, Ykoriana had come close to handing him over to the justice of the Wise; that she was no longer so ruled by her passions was what had saved him. Flama was dead and her death had opened a way to power through him.

  As she had vacillated, a rumour had spread through Osrakum that it was she who had murdered her daughter. Outrage and indignation had given way to contemplation as she had observed how much this news made her feared. She had learned from the Wise, that fear is the path to dominion. Her enemies had taken advantage of her distraction. In the midst of the turmoil caused by the preparations the households had been making to move up to their palaces high in the Sacred Wall, the Lord Aurum had convened the Clave and there had managed to get Suth elected He-who-goes-before. This appointment she could have thwarted had she had time to mobilize her supporters among the Great. But, on reflection, she had seen Aurum’s gambit for what it was, an act of desperation. Let the old fool leave his faction leaderless while he went off on a futile mission to that house of exile in the remote north. The world that mattered, the world she knew, lay within Osrakum’s mountain wall. Beyond was nothing more than the squalid barbarism of the Guarded Land. With characteristic eccentricity, Suth had not even chosen to wait out his exile in one of the cities there, but had sailed with his son to some bleak island across the northern sea. She had been, if anything, amused. She had known what Aurum did not, that Suth’s exile had long ago been revoked, but that he had chosen not to return.

  Still she had taken precautions. Hastily her agents had recruited a minor Lord of the Great, Vennel, to go with Aurum and, with promises of a child brought forth from some woman from her House, she had bought his eyes and ears. When she had received a letter from the fool,
she had been less amused. Against her expectations, Suth had returned with Aurum to the Three Lands. Unease had become panic when they had disappeared from the Tower in the Sea. She had feared that, if they reached Osrakum in time, they might influence the Great enough to carry the election for Osidian Nephron. It had been the Hanuses who had offered to organize an attempt to waylay them. She had given those syblings no answer lest she be implicated. They knew that should they fail she would abandon them to the Wise. The syblings’ plot had served only to wound Suth. None had accused her, but most had believed she was behind it. Schism between the factions had deepened. Those who had adhered to her candidate, Molochite, had been drawn closer from fear of her: the opposition had been strengthened in equal measure and blossomed once Suth had arrived in Osrakum. She had bent Molochite to negotiating with the Great for his own election. Coercion and seduction had been employed. The final coup of bringing Imago Jaspar over to her cause had made her certain of victory, but her schemes had come to nothing. The voting had gone against her.

  Fondling Ykorenthe, Ykoriana smiled behind her mask. While Suth and Aurum had celebrated their triumph, she had snatched victory from their grip. Before the election, Imago had told her that Osidian Nephron had descended to the Forbidden Garden of the Yden with Suth’s son, Carnelian. The parallels between their actions and those of their fathers had disturbed her, but when the votes had gone against Molochite, she had become desperate enough for one last throw. She had already let Molochite into her bed. He had been sniffing after her for years and it had been essential to bind him to her before the imperial power became his. Subverting her purdah, before witnesses, she had allowed him to put a child in her. If it were a daughter and should one day seek to stand against her mother, Ykoriana would be able to prove the child had been conceived before her sire had been made the Gods and thus strip her of her voting rings. That was before Ykoriana came to love her, though she had vowed she would never be so weak again. A loved child was a terrible vulnerability.

  She treasured the iron rings she had demanded the Hanuses bring as proof Osidian and his lover were slain. This triumph had brought another when Suth had drawn the Wise into making a fatal error that had put them in her power. Of course they suspected her hand was behind the disappearance but, without proof, they dared not accuse her. Ykoriana had made certain no bodies would ever be found. The Wise had had no choice but to deify Molochite at an Apotheosis. The new God Emperor had inaugurated Their reign by marrying her.

  Her daughter’s breath was warm against her hand. Ykoriana stroked the little head.

  Forcing the Clave to depose Suth had not brought her the pleasure she had anticipated. Aurum she had had impeached. Struggling to save himself, the old fool had revealed to her why it was that Suth had chosen not to return from exile as soon as it had been revoked. Vennel, having failed to solve this riddle for her, had suffered for it. It was this secret that Aurum had used to control Suth during the election, expecting to wield influence over Osidian Nephron once he was God Emperor. The information had not been as valuable to her as the old fool had hoped. She had been minded only to commute his deposal to exile. She smiled, imagining his despair. Denied the heir he craved, he would waste his remaining years far from Osrakum, imprisoned in the desolation of the outer world.

  THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

  From death shall they awake who cross the water to the Shadow Isle.

  (from the ‘Ruaya’, the first book of the ‘Ilkaya’, part of the holy scriptures of the Chosen)

  A gouged eye, the sun hung low above the reddened earth.

  Carnelian was standing on the porch of the Ancestor House. Once again he had spared Osidian, had listened to that butcher even in the midst of the slaughtered Ochre. Those dear people who had overcome their terror of the Masters to offer him and Osidian sanctuary were now all hanging down there from their sacred mother trees, not even a child spared.

  Behind him like his own shadow, he could feel Osidian’s malign presence in the Ancestor House. Carnelian glared at the bloodshot sun. Threads of smoke rose tethered to the circling horizon. Osidian claimed these to be a Plainsman sign a thousand years old warning that the Masters had come down to ravage their Earthsky. Carnelian strained his eyes northwards. Was he even certain Aurum was really coming? What of Osidian’s claim that only he could defeat him? Carnelian recalled Aurum setting ants alight. As casually would the Master torch men. Carnelian regarded the spear in his hand with which he had intended to take Osidian’s life. He slumped. It seemed he was destined always to listen to Osidian’s arguments, though their logic always concealed poison.

  He looked once more upon the mother trees. He must go down there and submit to the gaze of the dead. He must face Fern’s grief though Fern had the right to kill him. Was it only that morning they had been so close? Their friendship was dead with everything else. He moved to the steps that led down to the clearing. First he must return to where he had left Poppy, though he had no idea what he might say to her. Then he would go to Fern and begin making whatever atonement he could.

  The Oracle Morunasa was at the foot of the steps with some other Marula. Uncertainty was in his amber eyes as he regarded the spear in Carnelian’s fist – the spear he had given him to kill Osidian. Morunasa was desperate to be free of Osidian, but after the profound visions he believed his god had shown him, he dared not do it himself.

  Carnelian offered him the spear. ‘Where are the hostage children?’

  Morunasa registered that its blade was unbloodied. ‘Not here, Master.’

  Carnelian surveyed the warriors standing round. They would not look at him and seemed afraid. He dismissed a twinge of empathy. Though forced to it by Osidian and the Oracles, it was their hands had strung up the Ochre.

  He turned back to Morunasa. ‘I don’t know what part you played in what happened here, but I do believe that you and your people will suffer for it.’

  As he offered the spear again, Morunasa glanced up to the Ancestor House uneasily, then back, penetratingly, at Carnelian, so that he was left feeling they were making some agreement. It was only then the Oracle took back his spear.

  At the edge of the clearing, Carnelian hesitated. The horror of what the gloom concealed made his heart pound.

  ‘Poppy,’ he whispered to himself, setting her up as a beacon to guide him through the nightmare. He edged into the shadows, afraid to make a sound. Fetor wafted, thick, sickening-sweet. He blessed the slope that rose up to meet the pendant branches, so concealing what lay further down the hill. He crept forward, his right hand sliding and crawling along the Crag rock. He heard furtive splashing up ahead. A figure came into sight, washing at the cistern. Carnelian watched it scoop water then trickle it over its head. As the hands fell the figure saw him; it was Krow. The youth’s eyes bulged. He reached down to pluck up some clothing, as if ashamed of his nakedness.

  Carnelian moved forward and recognition lit Krow’s face with hope.

  ‘Carnie…’

  Carnelian noticed the dark stains on the clothing he was clutching and frowned. Krow began to tremble. His chin fell. Water dripped from his hair into the dust. Carnelian pushed past him. Just then, he could not bear to know what had caused those stains.

  As he passed Akaisha’s mother tree, Carnelian averted his gaze. Nevertheless, at the edge of his vision, a corpse seemed to be standing in the gloom. One of his hearthmates. The stench of its rotting smothered him. He doubled up, vomiting, then lurched down the rootstair, his eyes half closed and his feet finding the hollow steps.

  The ferngarden was an emerald framed in the gateway. The bright air beckoned him as if he were struggling up through water to breathe it. Stumbling over the earthbridge, he gulped the breeze. Arid musk of fernland laced with acacia and magnolia. He gaped at the sun making a gory end to the day. Turning away, with each blink he printed its turquoise ghost on the ferns.

  Poppy? He spun round, checking to see where he was relative to the earthbridge. This was the Bloodgate. He
was certain it was here he had made her promise to wait for him. There was no movement but the swaying ferns. What if some Marula had found her? Panic choked him. He had abandoned not only Poppy, but also Fern. What if Osidian had commanded the Marula to leave no one in the Koppie alive?

  He took the roots of the stair three at a time, desperate to find Poppy and Fern. Akaisha’s mother tree was caging twilight. He came to a halt when he realized her branches were now bare. Squinting, he managed to make out a shape lying in a root hollow like a seed in a pod. Edging closer he first smelled then saw, in its green marbled face, that it was a corpse. He circled it; saw another, then another. Then he spotted one still hanging. His heart jumped when it moved. It was changing shape like a chrysalis erupting. Then it began to fall so that he almost cried out, but it halted, sagging, before reaching the ground and he saw that it was being held; saw it was Fern holding it. He was cutting down the dead.

  A smaller shape rose from a crouch. Poppy. She wandered a little, then crouched again. Drawing closer, Carnelian saw she was straightening the body of a child that lay within a root hollow as if asleep. He was grateful the gloom did not allow him to see which one it was of the hearth’s children. He watched Poppy’s tender movements, unsure what to do, unable to speak. Already she had had to endure the massacre of her own tribe; now this. He wished he could see her face. Surely she must be aware of his presence. She rose. He reached out to touch her, but she pushed his fingers away. A chill spread over his chest. Did she hate him too? Then he felt a hesitant touch, a tiny squeeze, before she moved away to another corpse. The one Fern had been carrying was laid out on the ground. Already he was embracing another. Carnelian, determined to help, found an occupied hollow, crouched, then leaned forward into the sickening aura of decay, feeling for something he could grab hold of.