LIKE A TREE
A passion for permanence
Is nothing more than a fear of death.
Everything changes.
The wise man lets go.
Lurid fires smouldered in depressions in the ground. The earth was everywhere ploughed up. A drifting mist of smoke and dust tearing across his vision made Carnelian cough behind his mask. At least he had its filters. The dozen or so men he had brought with him were squinting, stumbling around him, wheezing, grimacing, their swords drooping from their hands. Ahead, through the miasma, Carnelian could make out a swathe running east to west that looked like a ridge of debris washed up by a tide of tar. Peering through the eyeslits of his mask, he could make out furtive movements suggesting something there was still alive. He regarded them with more horror than hope. How could anyone have survived that firestorm or the stampede of dragons enraged by their own flesh burning? Though he had managed to herd his half of Jaspar’s dragons away from Fern’s wing into the open space to the west, Osidian’s attack had driven the other half directly into Lily’s wing.
As Carnelian plodded closer each step was more reluctant than the last. He did not want to see, but had no choice. Lily might be there somewhere, still alive. Looking west along the curve of carnage, it was obvious none of her wing had escaped the dragon tidal wave. Even the mounted auxiliaries of their left flank had been overwhelmed. An arc of smoke and dust running from the south round to the north-west showed where Osidian was still carrying on a relentless pursuit. With its flashes of dragonfire, its black angry clouds, it seemed a receding thunderstorm. Carnelian could still feel its tremor in the earth, but there was another, deeper thunder. A slow, rhythmic pounding. He glanced round and saw Earth-is-Strong following him, churning up spiralling tatters of dust, sheets of smoke tearing on her horns, her tower a pale slab upon her back. Her brassman, hanging open, was dangling the rope ladder that danced in time with the monster’s tread. He had left his Hands in charge and told them to follow him at a distance, vigilant for any command he should send them by means of the mirrorman he had brought with him. Poppy was up there. He had had to forbid her to accompany him, putting her in the keeping of the homunculus, whom she had come to respect.
Behind the dragon, dust was fluttering off in russet banners from a ridge moving south-east towards their camp. No smoke there and it was closer to the ground, Fern’s wing riding down the Ichorian aquar who had broken even as Carnelian turned their burning dragons away from them. Perhaps it had been the explosion of the tower, perhaps the flames and smoke and smoulder burning all along their line that had made the Ichorians flee. Carnelian suppressed a fear that Fern and his Lepers and auxiliaries might yet find the Bloodguard more than a match for them. Before he had had a chance to make a choice, they had already sped too far away for him to intervene. So he had detached Earth-is-Strong from the pursuit and turned her towards Lily and the left wing to see what he could do there.
A whiff of burnt flesh made him return his attention to what lay ahead. How could anything in that black strand have survived?
As the miasma cleared, Carnelian saw he had reached the dead. His gaze flitted across the charred carpet of mangled men and aquar hoping not to see anything clearly, but so much blood and shit had soaked the earth it had become too wet to rise as dust. He looked back to where Earth-is-Strong loomed, wreathed in smoke. The rest of the world seemed insubstantial in comparison with the reality at his back. He turned slowly until the edge of the carnage came into view in the corner of his left eyeslit. Most likely, Lily would lie somewhere at the end of that forbidding curve. He began walking. He stopped. ‘Too easy,’ he muttered. He spied what seemed a rock rising from that dark surf. Pale it was, though blackened by the tide. Finding a dark path slicing away through the dead, he set off along it, hardly aware of his attendants lurching after him. He kept his head down, walking around the smoking boulders that were strewn all along the path. It intersected another. Lifting his head, he determined which seemed more likely to lead him to the rock. As he watched his feet, he became aware that the path he walked must be an arc branded into the earth by a scything flame-pipe. The organic shapes of the boulders were threatening to become limbs and torsos and heads. He pressed on, switching naphtha paths, his pale-leathered feet blackening.
He came to a depression filled with brown paste. Its rim of limbs made it seem the remains of some gigantic crab a vast footfall had crushed. Then he saw a torso rising from it: a bag whose contents had been squeezed out to add to the paste. The vomit rose and he struggled to release his mask. Too late. His stomach pumped acid against the barrier of his mask. Vomit thrust up into his nose and oozed out under the chin. Stinging, it choked him. The mask came loose and he almost flung it away. With his free hands he scraped the filth from his face, blew his nostrils clean and gulped at the air. The noisome miasma was so thickened by the stench of decay his lungs clamped tight. Tears in his eyes, blinked clear. He was confronted by the crazed skull-grin of a face stripped by fire of its nose and lips. He doubled over and pumped more vomit out on the ground. His mask was digging into his hand. He glanced at it and saw its gold lips were rouged with filth. He pulled his cowl down over his face and cautiously looked round. The crewmen were all either being sick or reeling, sickly pale, staring blindly. He began to move on, and they staggered after him.
He walked through that realm of filth and death, his stomach clenching in dry heaves. His gaze darted from horror to horror, but there was always more. What steadied his steps was the discovery that some still lived among the dead. Of these, most had faces already greyed with death, but others looked as if they might survive. It gave him a focus: the hope of salvaging something from this atrocity.
At last he came to a region where the irregular contours of the dead gave way to rings. There the Lepers lay fallen in the hornwalls he had taught them to make. Rimmed by the ridged leather cuirasses of the half-tattooed Ichorians, the Leper formations were still unbroken. He felt a manic pride that they had withstood the Ichorian onslaught.
He reached his beacon rock and found it to be a ruined dragon tower heeled over on its roof. Its mast, now a splintered stump, propped it up. Charred and shattered, in places its bone walls had blistered, exposing its decks, spilling its entrails of pipes and ropes and furnaces. The wreck lay in an ooze of naphtha like black blood. Raising his eyes, Carnelian saw the trail of carnage the tower had made as it rolled to a halt and realized he had witnessed its meteor fall. As far as he could see, the earth was clothed by the dead and dying. A moaning exhaling from many throats stirred in him again the need to save those he could.
It was the pale corona of her hair that showed him where she lay. An Ichorian corpse half covering her had torn the shrouds from her head. Carnelian took hold of the man’s black-tattooed arm, then rolled him off. He gaped at Lily. Between her legs a still wet welling of blood glued her shrouds to her thighs and oozed out to join the gore soaking the earth so that, for a moment, it seemed it was her menstruation that had flooded the battlefield. He crouched and, gingerly, pulled aside the cloth looking for a wound. The flesh below was rosy, but whole. The blood was not hers. He moved up her body, peering into her face, smearing red finger-marks on her white hair as he carefully turned her head. A bruise there was already blackening, but under it her skull seemed unbroken. He let go of her as she groaned, eyelids fluttering open. Her ruby eyes stared at him. She frowned in a way that suggested she was not sure what she was seeing.