The Chosen

'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.'