The Third God (5 page)

Poppy looked incredulous.

‘Really. I knew him. He’s an old man.’

‘A kindly one, no doubt,’ said Fern, whom grief seemed to have made old too. ‘Is this all you came to say?’

Carnelian hesitated.

Fern frowned.

‘The Master means to display the Tribe as a lesson to the others.’

With a trembling hand, Fern returned to scooping earth, cold fury in his eyes.

When the charred horn had cooled enough, Fern began crumbling it into a bowl, then ground it with a mortar. As Carnelian watched him, he listened to the rumble of aquar moving along the Homing. It seemed that the procession of riders would never end.

Earlier, leaving Fern burying his women, Carnelian had climbed to the Crag summit and watched Osidian’s vassals arriving from the south and east. Marula at the Outditch bridges had dammed their flood until they had been forced to spill into the ferngardens. At Osidian’s command, the Marula had retired with him to the Poisoned Field and the Plainsmen had flowed into the Grove. Seeing how numerous was Osidian’s host, Carnelian had begun to believe it possible Aurum could be defeated. He had also reached another, grimmer conclusion: if all had joined the Ochre in revolt, Osidian and his Marula would have been overwhelmed.

Carnelian had returned to Akaisha’s mother tree fearing Fern’s reaction to this further desecration, all those strangers staring up into the hearths of his tribe, gawping at his people hanging like meat, but Fern had just continued labouring on the rituals, apparently oblivious.

He was now adding fat to the bowl to make a black paste. Carnelian watched him carry the bowl to where the males of their hearth were laid out naked on blankets. Carefully, Fern began to daub his brother Ravan black; the colour of the Skyfather’s rain-filled sky. This scene made Carnelian recall another, seemingly so long ago it might have been merely the memory of a dream, when Fern’s father and uncle had been laid out similarly. From the moment Fern had set eyes upon Carnelian, his kin had begun to die. None now were left.

Carnelian gazed down the slope and caught glimpses of the riders and aquar rumbling by. Turning back, he edged closer to Fern. The desire to help him was an ache in his chest, but he dare not break his trance, not until Osidian and his host were gone.

Fern did not pause when he was done; he leaned his shoulder into his brother’s corpse, working it onto his back. He rose, unsteady under the bloated burden, then staggered off to the rootstair and began climbing it towards the Crag.

‘He goes to expose him,’ Poppy whispered and Carnelian gave a nod. Itching to help, his hands squeezed each other. Hard as it had been to watch Fern work, it was worse being left there with no distraction but the swing of corpses hanging from the other mother trees. Carnelian crouched over the bowl of hornblack. Its acrid smell was a clean relief from the miasma of decay that clung to the whole hillside.

‘I’ll be back . . .’ Poppy said, then was off after Fern.

Carnelian gazed at the hornblack, trying to work out how Fern might react if he were to return to find him blackening the dead. He looked towards the mother tree and thought how much he now loathed her shade with its aura of death. A patter of feet made him turn to see Poppy running towards him. The look on her face made him run to meet her. She grabbed hold of him, tears smearing the dirt on her face. ‘He can’t do it . . .’

‘Can’t do what?’

But she was shaking her head, too distressed to make sense. They rushed up to the clearing under the Ancestor House. Carnelian saw Ravan’s corpse draped over the lower steps. Seeing Fern prostrate, his shoulders shuddering, Carnelian ran up to him, reached out, but could not bring himself to touch him, to comfort him. ‘I’ll take his legs, you take his arms.’

Fern fumbled under Ravan’s head, lifting it so that Carnelian could not help looking upon the bloated face, twisted in its death grimace. Black tears had formed in the corners of the sunken eyes. They struggled up the steps. So close, the stench was overpowering. Sick with horror and grief, he longed to reach out to Fern, but he did not know how.

DRAGONS

The terror from a weapon diminishes in proportion with its use.

(a precept of the Wise of the Domain Legions)

THEY TENDED THE DEAD ONE HEARTH AT A TIME. AKAISHA
’
S WAS FIRST
, then those that lay in the eastern, upwind part of the Grove, so that at least they might sleep free of the waft of putrefaction. Days merging one into another, they worked their way round the hearths that lined the Blooding and towards the Southing.

At each hearth, Fern cut down the women first, laying them out for Poppy to ochre as best she could. Carnelian dug graves among the roots. The men were next. They made hornblack overnight. While Poppy applied this, Carnelian and Fern would carry the corpse she had already blackened up to the Crag. Dead, the men were heavier than they had been living. They seemed huge waterskins that they had to wrestle with as they released foul gas or dribbled slime down their arms and chests and legs. Though lighter burdens, the boys were heavier on the heart. When the funerary trestles were piled high, they laid the corpses on naked rock. The place became submerged beneath the frenzied wings of scavengers. At first the dead were picked clean, but with so much carrion, only the choicest morsels were consumed. The summit became a brown mesh of bones and tendons, frayed-lipped smiles, skin turned to curling leather by the sun.

There was no spare water in the cistern with which to wash and Osidian had seen fit to maroon them without aquar to fetch more. Their skins became so grimed with putrid matter they began to look and smell like the corpses. The charnel stench tainted everything. They took to sleeping as far apart as possible.

Their work grew harder as the corpses began slipping off their skin. There came a time when Poppy had no need to make the women red. Later, all the dead turned greenish-black and they stopped making hornblack. Ritual faded. Laments ran dry in their throats. By the end, corpses with living eyes, they laboured mindless in a new Isle of Flies Osidian had consecrated for his Marula god with his holocaust.

Osidian’s face, burial black. Pits for eyes. The tree burning. Her screaming is the flames, is the branches piercing him like spears. He falls before the swelter of her approach. Ebeny aflame, wild-eyed, masked with blood. No, it is Akaisha mouthing words, her hair, flames beaded with iron. Bloated ochre face mouthing words he cannot, will not hear. Horror of her corpse breath. Her dead lips kiss him, suck him into her. Struggling against her fiery walls squeezing him to blood
.

Carnelian woke transfixed by the moon. Osidian dead in the dream, the fire; both seemed omens of defeat. Plainsmen against dragons: he could hear again the mocking laughter of the men who had served in the legions. Such futile defiance would only provoke Aurum’s terrible retribution. Only the Wise could have given him a legion. Why else but because they wanted Osidian, alive so that he could accuse his mother. Carnelian was another witness to her crime. The bright stare of the moon possessed him. Cypher of the Wise. The same cool clarity that characterized their thought. Left to them, just enough would be done to restore order in the Earthsky and nothing more. Aurum was the real danger.

The moon was as colourless as the Marula salt Krow was bringing from the Upper Reach. If such a treasure were to fall into Plainsman hands they would cease to provide military service to the Masters. That the Wise would not allow. Greed for its possession would enflame the tribes to wars amongst themselves. It had to be destroyed. But what of the mine it came from?

As his nostrils filled with the reek of death, Carnelian felt his resolve fraying. Who was he to find a way through such a labyrinth? Merely another victim of the forces he had helped unleash.

The corpse they were lugging up to the summit of the Crag was so putrid they had had to wrap it in a blanket to keep it intact. The blanket was soaked through with the fluids weeping from the decomposing flesh. Carnelian and Fern struggled up the last step onto the summit and paused, panting through ubas wound several times over mouth and nose. The glare squeezed their eyes to slits. Ravens hopped, screeching, among the charnel heaps. Even through the layers of cloth the stench was overpowering. They dragged the corpse with a bandy-legged waddle to avoid treading in the dark trail it oozed over the brown-crusted rock. When they found a space they gripped the blanket edge then rolled the corpse free. They averted their eyes, but could still feel the sodden release of weight; were still enveloped in the aura released by its moist collapse. Carnelian let go the blanket as dry retching racked him like a cough. Ravens rushed in to fight over this new feast. Flies eddied like smoke. The dream had stripped his mind of the dullness that had protected him. Under the repeated stabbings of their beaks the corpse was releasing its rot-soft meat. Jet eyes blinked their beads at the root of gore-clotted plumage.

He tore free of that horrid fascination and sent his gaze soaring up into the clean sky. That blue so pure above the corruption of the world restored him to his centre. When he returned his gaze to earth he looked south and west, searching for Krow. That morning he had been doing that every time he came up to the summit. Fernland spread to incandescent lagoons. Acacias, spaced like the towers of the overseers in the Guarded Land, danced languidly in the haze. The only other movement was the slight creeping of the herds along the edge of the lagoons. He saw Fern was gazing northwards and sought the focus of his attention. Carnelian’s heart leapt. Riders. The omen of his dream, of his conjectures overwhelmed him with dread. ‘Plainsmen . . .’ he murmured.

‘Marula,’ said Fern in a flat tone, looking as if he was barely managing to stay on his feet.

Carnelian almost asked him how he knew, before seeing for himself that they lacked the easy grace of Plainsman riders. Too few to be a rout, they had to be bringing a message from Osidian. If this were verbal, then most likely it would be Morunasa who was the messenger. It was strange that the thought it might be this man he loathed should kindle hope. What would Fern do? Turning, Carnelian saw he was moving away, crouched, towards the steps, dragging the blanket after him. He followed him. Reaching the edge he watched him descend. When Fern reached the clearing below, he turned west. Carnelian sighed relief. They had just carried the last of Mossie’s hearth up and the next one they had meant to clear was further down the Westing. It seemed that Fern was intent on ignoring the visitors. If Poppy remained with him, Carnelian might have a chance to tackle Morunasa alone.

He quit the shade to cross the earthbridge. The withering heat was preferable to the region he had just come through. Being the furthest from Akaisha’s tree, they had left the Northing and Sorrowing hearths for last. The cedars there were still laden with dead. The air choked with flies.

Unwinding his uba he breathed deep, not caring about the scorch of the clean air, his gaze fixed on the riders ambling up the Northing in the shade of its magnolias. As they drew closer he could see by the indigo robes that most of them were Oracles. Their leader pulled the cloth down from his nose and mouth.

‘We must have water.’

The voice was so hoarse, the face so gaunt, that Carnelian did not at first recognize it was Morunasa.

Ribbons of light writhed up the Crag rock when they pulled back the cistern cover. Morunasa was the first to drink. He downed one bowl and then another, exposing his sharpened teeth in a grimace of relief. He handed the bowl to one of his fellows and looked off among the trees. ‘This place feels something like our sacred grove.’

As they had climbed the rootstair from where they had left the aquar and Morunasa’s warrior escort, Carnelian had noticed with what frowns of recognition the Oracles had regarded the corpses and the swarming flies.

Morunasa looked at him. ‘And you have the look . . . and odour of an offering to our Lord.’

Carnelian glanced down at his body encrusted with filth, but it was the awe in Morunasa’s face that made him feel most polluted.

‘Perhaps our God has followed us here,’ Morunasa said, voicing one of Carnelian’s fears.

Another Oracle, reaching awkwardly for the bowl, winced as his sleeves slid down his arms revealing seared flesh, crusted and weeping. Morunasa saw what Carnelian was looking at. ‘Dragonfire.’

Turning, Carnelian almost believed he could see flames reflecting in Morunasa’s eyes. Dread seeped into him. ‘Defeat then?’

‘Hookfork invited the Master to negotiate, then betrayed the truce. Many were lost to the firestorm as we covered his escape.’

Remote from Morunasa’s voice, Carnelian stood stunned by an outcome even worse than any he had feared. ‘How many dead?’

Morunasa’s eyes burned. ‘Among the Flatlanders?’

‘I know the Marula are mortal too.’

Morunasa’s glare softened. ‘The Flatlanders suffered worse.’

‘He’s protecting the Marula?’

Morunasa snorted. ‘Not from love.’

Carnelian understood. ‘He believes you are more fully under his control.’