Текст книги "The Chosen"

Автор книги: Ricardo Pinto

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'Hush! Put your hand down.' He turned until one of his mask's eyeslits could see the procession that was already moving down the north-western road in the wake of the Sapients.

Carnelian obeyed him, concealing the ring in his fist. 'Whose is it?'

Jaspar grabbed his shoulder. 'Come, my Lord, let us proceed. The sun begins to grow oppressive and we still have a long walk to the Forbidden Door.'

They journeyed round the circle of monoliths, and as they passed the kneeling guardsmen and retainers Jaspar motioned for them to follow.

'One would have thought it obvious that the blood-ring in your hand is from a Lord of one of my lesser lineages. Khrusos, to be precise,' Jaspar said in a low voice. 'You must wear it instead of your own.'

Carnelian's hands lifted in protest but Jaspar swatted them down.

'You asked that I take you with me, my Lord, as one of my kinsmen. That is exactly what I am doing.'

Carnelian's eyes wandered between the outer monoliths to the inner ring. After some thought, he carefully removed his own ring and replaced it with the one that Jaspar had given him.

'Good. Now you are my inferior,' said Jaspar.

Carnelian could hear that he was speaking through a smile. Carnelian was not happy. The new ring felt unnatural on his finger. He distracted himself by counting the monoliths. He noticed that the red inner ring was completed with two green and two black stones.

'What are these stones, my Lord?'

The Dance of the Chameleon.'

'A calendar?' said Carnelian, since that was the only meaning the words had for him.

'In a manner of speaking. Does my Lord see the innermost ring? Well, he will also see that there are twelve stones of the same colours as the months.'

'Your inferior still does not understand.'

Jaspar's mask flicked towards him. 'It is a machine, a sorcerous engine that the Wise use to predict the coming of the Rains and all other temporal matters that provide impetus for the actions of the world.'

'I see,' said Carnelian, seeing nothing but stones. He waved his hand. 'But these others?'

The calendrical stones also have inscribed on them the Law-that-must-be-obeyed.'

Carnelian realized he had known this but still he gaped in wonder. The Law itself!'

Jaspar nodded, taking his utterance as a question. 'And these other stones are commentaries and amendments. The markings on the floor link the whole corpus in some manner unfathomable to any but the Wise.'

Carnelian was walking blind, stroking his new blood-ring, working through what he would say to his father if they should actually meet An acrid charcoal tang made him see again. The road ended at an edge of sooty stone. Looking up he saw the blackness stretching off towards the wall of the plain.

'Why do you linger, my Lord?' said Jaspar.

This burning…?' said Carnelian, pointing.

'Yes, it has been burned,' Jaspar said impatiently. He waited but Carnelian did not move. He sighed. 'It is here at the ceremony of the Rebirth that our tributaries kneel to worship us' – he pointed up at the pyramid hollow – 'up there.'

Carnelian surveyed the black field and tried to imagine it covered by a vast and grovelling throng. 'But the burn-ing…?'

'Carnelian!' Jaspar sounded aggrieved. 'Do you really think that we could allow their pollution to go uncleansed, here…' He lifted his arms, turned round in a circle.'… here at the very centre of our hidden realm? The flame-pipes of the Ichorian Legion sweep this whole space like brooms and then…' He pointed the blade of his hand back the way they had come. '… all the way along that road, down to the quays, round the Ydenrim, over the causeway, through the Valley of the Gate and all the way up to the Black Gate.'

Carnelian saw the dragonflied faces round them hanging miserably and lost his curiosity. This is all the burning I have seen.'

'Sometimes, Carnelian, you are like a child. Do you really believe that the Chosen would choose to allow even their servants to walk around leaving black footprints all over Osrakum?'

'A vast labour,' said Carnelian gloomily.

There is a sky full of rain to help them.'

Carnelian looked at the blackness. 'How do we cross?'

Jaspar made a sign of exasperation. That way, my Lord.' The Master was talking through gritted teeth. That way, past the Cages of the Tithe.'

Carnelian saw that the road went round the edge of the black field and that along its south-eastern side there ran a fence.

When they had reached the bronze fence, Carnelian walked slowly along it gazing through the bars. He realized that, through Ebeny's words, he had seen this place before. He looked over to the other side of the road, at the black field. She had told him about a hearth, wide enough to cover half the world. There it was. It was into this plain that Ebeny's people had brought her to pay their flesh tithe. She had told him of the walls that were like the blue mountains she had seen on the migrations of her people. The sky had been filled with thunder. Its blackness had been dragged down to the earth in a monstrous funnel. At its base a jewelled fire burned. He could see her hands making the triangle. He looked at the pyramid hollow and felt the tears aching under his eyes. Her words were making him a boy again, a homesick boy. He recalled the look of terror in her face as she told him of the whimpering, of her people unmanned, gaping at the jewel triangle that was the angry core of the sky. She had talked of giants hemming them in and, most terrible of all, the dragons. A wall of them on either side. Like the glorious creatures the Sky Father had made to thunder as free as a storm over her people's plains. But these dragons were muzzled, their thunder caught in chains, their backs profaned by the terrible machines of the Masters they were forced to carry. It was this that had broken Ebeny's bravery. She had admitted pleading with her people. A few of them had clung to her but others had torn her from their embrace and shoved her towards the dragons. She was carried off in a tide of children. The reek of magic fire tainted the dragons' animal scent. There beneath their mountainous bellies she had been examined by a purple demon that had the same mirror face as the child-gatherer that had chosen her. The demon had prised open her fist to read the picture tattooed on her palm. Its talons had squeezed her skull and probed her mouth with a bronze thorn. It had torn her clothes and touched her everywhere. Even on the island Ebeny would never look in a mirror from choice and she loathed the colour purple.

When it was done, she was herded into a cage. Carnelian looked through the bars. He recalled Ebeny's descriptions of her life in the cage. The misery. The endless mouldering rain. The feeding. The cruelties the children visited on each other. Carnelian could almost smell the fear behind the bars. He saw stains on the clay floor and had some notion about what might have made them.

'I loathe this flesh tithe,' Carnelian said. 'Why so?' said Jaspar.

'It is not just.'

'Is it just that we should pay it too?'

Carnelian turned to look at him. 'Pay what?'

'A tithe on our own flesh. Are marumaga not appropriated from our Houses to be turned into the Wise? Besides, the barbarians are pitifully poor. They have nothing but their children with which to pay our tribute. Your loathing is hypocrisy, my Lord. From where do you think your own household came?'

The marble guardians looked imperiously down. Each stood astride a door, a door of heart-stone, the crack between its leaves sealed with a disc of red clay. There was one guardian and one door for each House of the Chosen. The doors led into tombs.

'We honeycomb the rock like termites and fill the cavities with our pupating dead,' said Jaspar.

Carnelian shuddered, imagining the chambers beyond lodging their embalmed Masters.

'Each year our forefathers' ghosts rise up from the Underworld to feed on the worship of all the peoples of the Three Lands.'

Jaspar was looking up. Carnelian leaned back to see one guardian's empty eyes and gaping mouth, holes giving into a chamber into which the dead might climb. He could almost see his father's ghost peering out. 'Where is the tomb of my House?'

Jaspar pointed off along the wall of the plain.

Carnelian would have made off in that direction except that Jaspar touched his arm. This is not the time to take in the sights. We are being observed.'

Carnelian saw a palanquin and, beside it, a Master waiting with a host of his attendants.

Jaspar's hands made a furtive gesture of annoyance.

There is no way we can avoid him. One had hoped he would have passed through the door well ahead of us.' He kept walking, muttering, This Lord was of Aurum's faction but will have been one of the first to defect to Ykoriana.'

They were now close enough for Carnelian to see the Master's autumn-plumaged robe and the cloud glyphs tattooed on the faces of his people.

'Greetings, my Lord Cumulus,' said Jaspar.

'Is that you, Imago Jaspar?' said Cumulus.

'With one of my House.'

'He accompanies you to the door?' Cumulus sounded surprised. To the sky.'

'Indeed.' Cumulus examined them for some moments before lifting up enormous hands to make the sign for grief. 'All the Great share the sorrow of your loss, my Lords.'

'Alas, our time in this world is brief,' said Jaspar.

'Still, none should be hastened unlawfully to their tomb. I am not the only Ruling Lord who has carried out precautionary reprisals among his household.'

'My Lord is very wise.'

Cumulus made space for Jaspar. 'Perhaps we can walk together.'

The Law only requires that the mourners walk, my Lord.'

Then, with your indulgence, and for a while, I will become a mourner.'

Carnelian saw Jaspar making covert signs to him. Behind us. He fought resentment but did what he was told, taking a place behind the two Masters.

Cumulus' guardsmen formed up on one side while those of House Imago formed up on the other. The households merged into a mass behind. Carnelian watched the men with cloud tattoos look over warily at the blood-crusted faces of Jaspar's men.

Cumulus' gold face turned to Jaspar. 'Is it not somewhat unusual at this time for a Ruling Lord to go to court accompanied by others of his House?'

These are unusual times,' said Jaspar. 'Besides, I am not yet fully become a Ruling Lord.'

'One can see that your father's mantle would be a heavy burden to bear alone, especially when it has fallen upon my Lord's shoulders so unexpectedly.'

'One's father carried it alone and he was aged. One expects his son might carry it lightly enough.'

'And has his son decided to carry all his burdens?' asked Cumulus.

Tell me, my Lord, why are you come so late?' said Jaspar. The other Lords will already have been gathered in the sky for many days.'

Cumulus attempted other lines of enquiry but Jaspar refused to say whether or not he was intending to hold together his father's faction. Carnelian grew weary of trying to follow their word games and watched another tomb door pass. He allowed his eyes to climb its guardian. Above it, the pyramid hollow gaped cavernously. A fishbone stair climbed to a pitchy apex, tiers coming off it like spines, each dimpled with thrones. On either side of the hollow, the cliff was scribed with long terraces like the ripples the sea leaves on sand.

It was the sounding of his House name that brought Carnelian's attention back to earth.

'… it is true, he is returned,' Jaspar was saying.

To support Aurum?' asked Cumulus.

Jaspar answered with one of his elegant shrugs.

'If Suth were to support him, Aurum would no doubt be once more a power to be feared.'

'No doubt,' said Jaspar as he looked away. 'Behold, my Lord, we are arrived at last.'

Two guardians stood among the others but neither had a tomb door between its shins. Instead, the door they guarded lay between them both.

Jaspar glanced back at him. 'Come.'

Carnelian made no sign that he had heard.

'We must prepare to pass through the Forbidden Door, neh?'

Carnelian stared at the door. Its plain green-black heart-stone and modest size made it seem like nothing more than the entrance to just another tomb.

One of the door's marble guardians had an archway cut into its ankle. From this ammonites emerged and then a homunculus behind which a Sapient towered with his hands around its throat. The creature and its master stood themselves before the door.

When Carnelian and the other Masters had drawn close enough, the homunculus put out its hand. Jaspar allowed Cumulus to give his blood-ring for examination first before he pulled his own off and gave it to the creature. Its rheumy old man's eyes flickered along the ring's rim, then it glanced at Carnelian before turning to Jaspar. 'Imago Jaspar, at this time only Ruling Seraphs are permitted at court.'

'I am not yet a Ruling Lord, Sapience.'

Muttering, and then with the Sapient's fingers playing its neck, 'We had not thought your succession was in doubt.'

'Still, one is inexperienced, Sapience. I have brought Imago Khrusos to help me take my first shaky steps at court.'

Jaspar moved aside and the homunculus extended its hand. Carnelian hesitated, removed the ring Jaspar had given him and put it on the hand. The creature examined it, muttering. The Sapient uncoiled a hand from round its neck and flashed out a series of commands. A while later an ammonite put a string of beads in the Sapient's translucent palm. The Sapient freed his other hand and holding one end of the string dropped the rest to the ground. Its beads shone and tinkled. Carnelian watched the Sapient's fingers descend the cord like a spider, feeling the beads as they went. The hands returned the cord to the ammonite before returning to strangle the homunculus. For a while, the Sapient's long silver mask froze, then his fingers twitched and his creature said, 'Very well, Seraphim, the door shall open for you.'

EARTH AND SKY

Even the sky's Heart of Thunder

Is silenced By the darkness under the trees

(from the 'Book of the Sorcerers')

Carnelian was disappointed. He had expected some wonder to lie behind the door but all he could see was a tunnel plainly cut through the rock. There were niches carved into the walls long enough for one of the Chosen to lie in. He became uneasy. He seemed to be standing in the entrance to a tomb.

'We shall meet again in the sky, my Lord,' said Cumulus.

'No doubt,' said Jaspar.

Carnelian watched the Lord Cumulus climb into his palanquin and slide its door closed. The box was lifted and slipped into the tunnel, pulling after it the Master's attendants.

Jaspar flourished his hand in front of Carnelian. 'After you, my Lord.'

Carnelian walked into the tunnel, Jaspar followed him, and the Imago guardsmen and the procession fed in behind. In the plain stone walls, narrow passages could be seen running off on either side. The scuffling seemed to make the air too thick to breathe. Their many-headed shadow stretched longer, moving away from them as if it were being sucked into the gloom ahead. The door closed behind them with a dull thunk, plunging them all into sudden night.

'How do we see?' blurted Carnelian among the mutter-ings of fear.

'We still have the Lord Cumulus' radiance to guide us,' said Jaspar.

Carnelian saw, some way off, lanterns hovering like fireflies around the dark cocoon of Cumulus' palanquin. They carried on, keeping them in sight. Carnelian could hear Jaspar's heavy footfalls, and behind him the clink and patter of his people. His own breathing seemed as loud as the wind.

'Is this then-?' He stopped, startled by how much his voice reverberated. 'Is this then the fabled Labyrinth?' he whispered.

Walking beside him, Jaspar made no reply. Carnelian dropped the matter and they continued in silence. On and on they went with nothing ever changing so that only the movement of his legs convinced Carnelian that they were going forward at all. A dusty odour floated round them that might have been ancient, faded myrrh. Jaspar's people were clearly terrified. Carnelian sensed their trembling in the air. He himself was fighting a growing conviction that they were all descending into the Underworld.

The lanterns up ahead gradually lulled him into a kind of stupor from which a vision only slowly released him. It was like a forest in a dream. The tunnel was coming out into a clearing among twilit trees. It was their appalling immensity that brought Carnelian fully aware. When he looked for it he saw Cumulus' palanquin among the mossy trunks, moving off up a hill accompanied by shadow men. With each step, the vision widened, brightening to a brooding gloom. As he reached the tunnel's end, Carnelian was able to see deeper in among the columned trees. He followed the trunks up and further up to find the canopy of their branches, but when he reached it his eyes could make no sense of what they saw. The branches joined the trees to each other with soaring arches through which he could not see even a glimpse of sky. Angling his head to one side, he found a hole, a scallop-edged disc of blue whose aching incandescence forced him to look away. Wandering high in the half-light, his gaze fell upon a face. Beneath the vaults of branches, one of the trees had a face. It was such a face as a god might have, serene, seeing past all horizons, with thoughts that were clouds in a sky of mind. Peering, Carnelian found that every tree had its face. Focusing on the nearest trunk, he saw it was jointed and that it rose in tiers. It was only then he realized they stood not at the edge of a forest but on the threshold of an endless hall of carved colossal stone.

An Ichorian melting out from the gloom seemed still to carry its stain of shadow all down his left side. There were other signs that this was not an Ichorian of the gates: his collar was of silver, he was armoured with bosses of green bronze like large coins and the cloak that fell about him could have been tar smoke. This was one of the God Emperor's own Sinistral Ichorians. Green and black together were the heraldry of the Gods.

'Where do the Seraphim wish to go?' the Sinistral said, lifting up his tattooed left arm and pointing upwards. To the sky?'

To the sky,' answered Jaspar. Then we shall bear you there, Seraph.' Jaspar turned to Carnelian. 'Is this fabulous enough, cousin?'

Carnelian turned to him in a trance. When he looked back, the Sinistral had disappeared. Only Jaspar's people were there, huddling together like lost children, looking to their feet as if ashamed.

Carnelian's eyes drifted up to roam the vast volumes between the branches where the stone trees had their faces. By moving his head he discovered that some had faces on two sides, one looking to the Plain of Thrones, the other in the direction of the Pillar of Heaven, into the south-west whence the Rains came. He knew that the Labyrinth was built over the birthplace of the Two Gods.

'Do these all represent the Twins?' he asked, keeping his voice low as if he feared he might wake the stone colossi.

'Rather, they are the sarcophagi of God Emperors a thousand years asleep, of their sons, of their Empresses.' Even Jaspar had lowered his voice and Carnelian could hear in it a tinge of awe. Jaspar opened his arms. This columned hall stretches from here to the Pillar, and on either side almost to the shores of the Skymere.'

Carnelian gazed off, hoping to see some distant glimmer of the lake. 'Where do we get this obsession with death?' he murmured.

'My Lord?'

Carnelian had difficulty focusing on something as close as the Master's mask. 'Let us go on, my Lord.'

Jaspar shook his head. 'If we were to go in there unguided we would certainly be lost for days, perhaps indeed for ever.'

Carnelian's eyes searched and found many paths winding off into the twilight. He could not begin to calculate the labour in the building of such a place. His imagination was not large enough to grasp the measure of it. It oppressed him. He felt he was trapped somewhere deep beneath the earth. He longed for a single ray of sun to reach him through the vaults.

He jumped. Their Sinistral guide had returned. The gloom between two towers was dewing more of his kind. Some were carrying chairs, one of which they settled on the floor beside Carnelian. He sat himself upon it and was lifted up beside Jaspar. Trailing the latter's people, they marched into the column forest.

Craning round, Carnelian soon lost sight of the tunnel mouth. For a while he could still catch snatches of the dark outer slope that walled off the Plain of Thrones. Then the chair leaned forward and he had to brace himself against its footboard. Past the two files of their left-tattooed heads he saw the steps his bearers were descending; the towers' roots formed buttresses on either side. Between their trunks he glimpsed meandering avenues, or he found himself looking up into valleys from which paths and stairs came tumbling like streams. Leaning his head back he saw a flock of birds flying their tiny crosses against the vaulting. The faces up there awed him with their disdain, causing his eyes to drop, forcing him back to his proper level at their feet. Their presence pressed down like the unbearable anticipation of thunder from a stormy sky. This was a place where mortals must creep or else be trampled underfoot. This was the Gods' sepulchre. The deathly stillness was making the air too heavy to breathe. Wherever he looked, constantly shifting perspectives ensnared his eyes. When he tried to escape by closing them, the rise and fall, the shifting angle of the chair, made him seem always on the edge of falling.

Deeper and deeper they wound their way into that forest of the night. It was an underworld meagrely lit by a rind of moon he searched for but could not find. They came into a region where the Gods were reflected in a black tarn. Once, he was sure he spied through a faraway edge of the forest the Yden: an alluring string of slivered emeralds hanging in the gloom. Lost in the terrible twilight, Carnelian found it harder and harder to believe that he had ever been anywhere else. Only the rasping rhythm of his bearers' breathing, and the sight of Jaspar's chair, reminded him of who and where he was. Then, for moments at a time, he was able to cling to the faith that one day they might find their way back into the living world above.

Miraculous light was seeping towards Carnelian through the trees. He could hardly believe that it might be the forest's end. As it grew brighter he looked around him as if he were coming awake. The trunks' grooved drapery folds reminded him that they were not trees but gods, and then only gods of carved stone. As they passed between the last of them into the clearing, the nightmare was already lifting.

His chair stopped, suddenly, shockingly. He had learned to know all its rhythms save stillness. Half-black faces looking back past him made him crane round. Stooping, Jaspar's people were stumbling out from the columns that faded away behind them into impenetrable darkness. 'Just a cave,' Carnelian said, but his shudder betrayed the lie.

Jaspar came alive in his chair. 'My… Lord… cousin?'

Carnelian focused on the Master. The Labyrinth… it is only a cave.' He tried to force conviction into his voice.

Jaspar's mask stared at him for some moments before turning away. The stair.' His voice sounded dreamy.

Carnelian looked and was crushed as if the green cliff rising all around them were a tidal wave of water.

The Pillar… of course,' he muttered, daring to lift his eyes.

They were in a fissure of the Pillar rock that opened raggedly to the north-west. Up it funnelled, shadow-mottled, filled with heads and limbs. The fissure was all carved. His eyes floated higher and higher. The rock turned black but still it climbed and Carnelian's eyes could find no end to it. He gaped, stunned. This mountain dwarfed even the cliff edge of the Guarded Land, yet it was carved all the way to the sky.

The Rainbow Stair,' said Jaspar.

Carnelian's eyes came clambering back down the crags. They took a while to grow accustomed to the nearer scales. He could see nothing like steps, only, in the shadows, rills of water winding down among the mossy men. The ground was sodden, with a road crossing it. He narrowed his eyes to look out through the fissure's open side. He blinked several times. The stone forest of the Labyrinth fell away down a slope till over its green undulating roof he could see the Yden's melting emerald spreading out to meet the Skymere. His gaze crossed the causeway to where the wedge of the Valley of the Gate was cut into the girding mass of the Sacred Wall.

'We have waited for them long enough!' cried Jaspar, his anger stinging their chairs into movement.

Carnelian hung over his chair's arm, reluctant to disengage his eyes from the glorious vision of the crater. After the Labyrinth its airy freedom was a salve for his eyes. The mouldy smell of the Pillar's stone drew him back to the creatures that lurked in it. Like ferns, they grew up from the boggy earth, uncurling their limbs and smiles over the heart-stone. He saw the stair. Steps, striped with red chalcedony and amber, gold, jade, turquoise and lapis blue, and, where they touched the Pillar's wall, bordered by a band of amethyst. Among the green spiralled men, the stair's rainbow ribbon climbed as far as he could see.

They climbed the Rainbow Stair into the sky. The Labyrinth's roof stretched below as a vast scrubby plain merging its edge into the emeralds of the Yden. Beyond was the blinding blue of the Skymere. Humid air rose carrying hints of perfume that mixed with the wafting sweating of the bearers. The sun's heat was terrible. Carnelian was glad of the cowl of his robe.

The stair darned its way back and forth across the fissure. They kept to the red and amber bands so that if on one flight they were walking close to the fissure's carved wall, on the next they would be at the stair's edge where Carnelian would be able to see down the great fall to the ground. Parties of ammonites and Sinistrals passed them, returning to earth.

When the floor of the fissure looked the size of a shield, doorways began appearing among the carved men. The rock became riddled with windows, with stairs as steep as ladders. Hanging banners proclaimed the presence of Masters whose retainers were huddled up the steps. Tattooed faces turned to watch them pass as Jaspar's party picked its way through them.

They came to a long landing. On one side the Pillar's rock rose carved with avatars and balconies, all pierced with doors and windows. On the other a narrow pool ran alongside the rainbow paving. Here Jaspar had his chair put down and Carnelian, observing him climbing out, took the chance himself of stretching his legs.

The pool ruffled with sunlight. Its furthest edge was a bone of rock beyond which was the vast fall. Carnelian saw that Jaspar's people were hoisting chests up a stair to one of the apartments cut into the cliff. Two of them were feeding an Imago dragonfly banner over a balcony.

Carnelian went up to Jaspar. 'Are you planning to stay here?'

This is as good a halfway house as any to spend the night.'

The night?'

Jaspar's mask regarded Carnelian with contempt. He sighed. 'It is customary to spread one's journey up the stair over two days.'

'Why?'

'Because, my Lord, otherwise one can be afflicted by the sky sickness.' 'My Lord?'

Jaspar looked up and his mask mirrored the sheer cliff of the Pillar they still had to climb. 'Up there one breathes the sky. Even the Chosen must accustom themselves gradually to such purity.'

Carnelian gazed. The mountain was lodged like a thorn in the infinite depths of the heavens. 'One recovers from this sky sickness?'

'In time.'

'A day or two?'

Jaspar's hands made a gesture of exasperation. 'Sometimes three.'

'I am young, my Lord, I will take the hazard. I intend to see my father today.'

'It is unlikely they will let you see him.'

'Nevertheless, I will go, my Lord.'

Jaspar stood motionless, looking up the next flight of the stair. He shook his head. 'I will not come with you, my Lord.'

'I will gladly go alone.'

Jaspar gave a snort. 'Even the lowest Lord of the Lesser Chosen would not appear at the Skygate without an escort.'

'I was hoping my Lord would see fit to lend me some of his people.'

'You did, did you?'

'Currently, I am one of the Lords Imago. As such, I would not wish to bring such shame upon your House.'

Jaspar's mask regarded him.

'If I have to, I will go alone.'

'Oh, very well! If you will insist on this ludicrous course of action I will not stop you.' Jaspar clapped his hands and one of his guardsmen came instantly to throw himself before his Master. Jaspar arranged an escort, then turned to Carnelian. 'You will need a household.'

'For one day I can do without one.'

'One day, my Lord?'

'A household is being sent up from my coomb.'

'Indeed, my Lord, and you expect it to be up there with you so soon?' He made a fist. They will not.'

'But Jaspar, how can I use your people?'

'Aaagh, the delicate sensitivity shows itself again like the horns of a snail. My dear, I will give you blinded slaves who will suffer no punishment whatsoever should you appear before them unmasked. Does that assuage your scruples?'

Carnelian nodded.

'Well, let us give thanks that at least we have managed that.'

Carnelian sighed his relief as the Sinistrals carried him away from Jaspar. Behind him came dragonfly-faced guardsmen leading two blind slaves. Once they were out of sight of the pool, Carnelian settled into the gentle rhythm of his chair. They had to pass other halfway houses with their encampments of retainers. When at last they had left these behind, Carnelian was isolated in the rushing wind, watching the graven gods slip by or gazing out over vertiginous views of the crater.

The air grew progressively cooler until Carnelian was forced to pull his robe tightly round him for warmth. The crater had become a remote floor. Several times when the stair doubled back at a northern landing, he glimpsed the disc of the Plain of Thrones. However high they climbed, there always remained a vast mass of the Pillar looming above.