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.