Haunted by doubt, it was a joy for him to slump beside the fire Fern lit for them upon the road. After they had eaten, Carnelian lay down to sleep, free of his mask, trusting to the homunculi and his friends to keep unwanted eyes away.
In the days that followed, he constantly scanned the vague reaches of the haze wondering if any sartlar would obey his summons and, if they did, whether in sufficient numbers to fulfil the purpose he believed had been shown to him in his dream. Then they began arriving, hobbling under baskets of their rotten bread, trailing infants, coming to form pathetic cringing huddles near the edge of the camp beneath the blind stare of the dragons.
The days merged into a monotonous rhythm. Each morning Carnelian set off with their host. They made lines, they wheeled and charged, churning dust up into red veils. In the evening they would return to find the sartlar numbers swollen. Soon their multitude reached beyond the cisterns and, daily, crept further and further out into the desiccating land. He became aware that, every day, it was taking him longer and longer to reach open ground. At his manoeuvres, in whichever direction he looked into the murk he would see small groups of sartlar crawling towards the dark spire of the watch-tower.
At night he slipped through labyrinthine nightmares threatened always by a dark welling sea. Always the sea, the drowning sea. Waking, his eyes as bleary as the sun, he gazed out over the endless sartlar, hearing the swell in their ceaseless muttering.
Imperceptibly a blood-red sun came to hold sway in a bloody sky. Everything took on that hue; all shapes and outlines softened to ghosts. The only things that seemed truly real to Carnelian were his own hands and the people near him. Every face was bound up: not to breathe through cloth was to choke. The rain wind had picked up and lashed them with scratching sand so that, when he was not in his command chair, he would turn his back upon it and gaze listlessly north-east. Legions’ homunculus told him that, as ever more sartlar left the land, it would turn to desert. It seemed too small an explanation in the face of this new world.
At first the sartlar, heads bowed, had waited around the cisterns patiently for men and beasts to drink their fill. Now, all such decorum had been abandoned. To slake the thirst of their limitless numbers, they now drew their water directly from the sinkhole. Night and day it brimmed with their frantic climbing. As Carnelian passed the sinkhole high in his dragon tower each morning, he would gaze down in a sort of horror at that entrance to some vast ant-nest from which the earth herself seemed to be giving birth to the brutes.
For as long as he could, he had fed the sartlar from his own supplies, sending auxiliaries to hurl scraps into their multitude. As food dwindled, he had sent to Makar for ever more. When the fortress quartermaster came himself to convince him his demands could no longer be met, Carnelian had sent Fern into the city with several squadrons of their auxiliaries. He returned with wagons, but with a grim face and furious eyes, and Carnelian saw the blood drying upon the lances of the men who rode behind him.
At last, one day, Carnelian returned to find the sartlar crawling like lice over the remains of the Ichorians. Disgusted, he almost sent men to drive them away but in the end he turned his back on their scavenging. That night he could not sleep for what he imagined was the sound of their feeding. In the blackness it was harder to feel confident in the rings of dragons and soldiers that lay between them and the sartlar.
Once the road had been picked clean, the brutes began to starve. The nights were now disturbed by an oceanic moaning that moved him with its anguish. Marching out he would look out over the sea of heads and spot clumps of smaller heads. Sartlar squatting, hugging swollen bellies. Not mothers-to-be, but starving children. He knew that, if they did not set off soon, the sartlar would begin to die in vast numbers. So it was with relief that he greeted Morunasa’s news that, at last, Osidian had fallen into the birthing fever.
RED DUSK
What kind of society survives turning to cannibalism?
Carnelian slumped beside the fire stirring the still warm ashes with his foot. He was weary of waiting. Morunasa had said Osidian would wake in five days. It had already been eight, perhaps nine: he had lost count. It seemed a long time since he had suspended manoeuvres. Neither he nor their host had left the camp for days. He had hardly ventured away from their fire. Poppy and Krow went to fetch food for them and water. Fern went out periodically to walk around the camp. Sometimes Krow went with him; sometimes he remained behind, his head hanging, as miserable and worn out as everyone else. No one wanted to look upon the famine stalking the land beyond the dragon wall. They could not avoid hearing the moaning. Night and day it lent a desolate, bleak voice to the choking wind that blew ever more fiercely from the red desert the land had become. Hearing that sound of suffering, Carnelian feared that, if they did not soon march, all that would be left of the sartlar was bones. He glanced up and saw the great crag of towered Heart-of-Thunder looming up in the gloom, against the leftway wall. He had had him moved there so that they could march north the moment Osidian awoke. A fantasy of green land and clear air possessed him. There the sartlar would find food.
He trailed his gloved hand along a crack between two flagstones, heaping red dust. He took some in his palm and prayed Osidian would soon wake.
‘Master?’
The voice made him jump. It was Morunasa’s gravel tone. ‘He’s woken.’ The Oracle was there and gave him a grim nod.
Carnelian put on his mask and sprang to his feet. He gazed out over the auxiliaries huddling against the duststorm, their aquar like rocks in a bloody tide. He saw Fern coming towards him and cried out: ‘Get the legions ready. Send messengers among the sartlar. We’re marching north.’
Relief flooded into Fern’s face even as the news began spreading through the camp, waking men from their lethargy so suddenly that, everywhere, aquar heads were popping up, eye-plume fans half opening. Carnelian lingered for a moment watching the camp come alive like the Earthsky after the rains. Then, as he saw Morunasa turn towards the base of the tower, he grew grim and prepared himself for what lay within.
The red light of the outer world snuffed out and the moans of the starving multitude faded as Carnelian followed Morunasa into the tower. As the portcullis was raised in the mouth of the stables a stench flowed out that made Carnelian flinch. Morunasa stooped and entered. Gathering his courage, Carnelian followed. Doughy shapes formed a pale frieze about the walls. Quick dusk as the portcullis fell, then darkness. He refused to give in to the fear that he was trapped. The sickening fetor thickened as he drew nearer to one of the pale shapes. It must once have been a man. A Master hung on hooks, his flesh sagging away from his bones. A beam of light sprang out to illuminate the corpse. Carnelian glimpsed Morunasa behind him holding aloft a narrowly shuttered lantern. He turned back to what it was the Oracle wanted him to see: a dead body not so unlike how his would be were it hanging there. A half-melted tallow doll. Sallow skin spotted with twisted black wounds like the eyeslits on a mask. Feet and hands dark bloated clubs. He had seen this kind of thing before. He looked up at a face frozen in pantomime surprise. He scanned along the walls and as he did so, the light followed his gaze. The commanders were all there, all surprised, all riddled with the Oracles’ holy vermin. Carnelian steeled himself against guilt. Though he had offered up these Masters as victims, it had been to save the Lepers. Besides, it was Osidian who had carried out this abomination. He might claim his god demanded victims, but what had really killed these Masters was Osidian’s injured pride.