As dragons pushed the sartlar back to make space for a camp, Carnelian descended to the road from Heart-of-Thunder, glad to escape Jaspar’s incessant babbling. Auxiliaries were pouring off the road, fanning out over the cleared land. Their torrent veered away from him as he approached the ramp. Once he had reached the earth he set off in search of Fern. All around him men were choosing spots upon which to light fires, dismounting, unhitching packs from their saddle-chairs, sacs, waterskins that some were carrying off to fill at the stopping-place cisterns. Carnelian was glad of his mask that filtered the air. Even so, he realized he would be lucky to spot Fern through the churned-up dust. It occurred to him to ask one of the auxiliaries whether he knew Fern’s whereabouts, but his instincts were against the abasement such an enquiry would produce. Already there was a region around him into which none dare stray.
At last his wanderings brought him to the margins of the camp, where the dragons rose as a forbidding rampart, black against the westering sun. As he came closer he noticed men scrabbling up a rope girdle and walked round to get a better view. One man had clambered onto the monster’s haunch and was daubing something on what Carnelian saw was a wound that a leg of the tower had worn into its hide. That disturbed him; clearly the creature had already worn its tower too long.
Then he forgot everything else as he became aware he could hear the sea. At least it seemed the sea, though he knew it to be the murmuring of the sartlar multitude. He was drawn to gaze upon them and slipped into the shadow under the monster’s belly. He saw the silhouette of a beastmaster hefting up a sac to feed the monster. Pulling his cowl over his head, he crept behind its right front leg, making sure the massive column was firmly tethered to the ground. He just wanted a peep, but feared his mask might reflect some ray of the sun. Imagining the panic of the sartlar, he removed it. The tumult swelled as he slipped out of the shadow. Their stench wafted like the miasma from a midden. Squinting against the sun’s orb, at first he could see nothing but swirling currents. Then he began to make out the individual creatures on the margin of the host. Ragged, hunched, they crouched huddling in groups. Some limped among these clumps on stick legs. Everywhere his gaze snagged on filthy, bony limbs. Then he began noticing that some had stomachs swollen like render sacs, above legs that seemed far too brittle to bear them. Pregnant females? Difficult to tell, but then he saw some so small they had to be whelps. Children, he thought. Matted hair, hideous profiles. So many faces made monstrous by the earth glyph burned deep into nose and skin. He saw an old woman with one eye milky from a careless branding. He became aware of a pair of eyes gazing towards him. One of their young. The face already melted by the brand, but such bright eyes. The realization sank in that he was being watched. It was the child who broke their link first. It ran, screeching, into the body of the multitude. Carnelian darted back behind the dragon’s leg, fumbled his mask on even as he heard behind him the commotion building to a roar. Without glancing back he returned to the camp.
Later, when Osidian insisted they must sleep high in the watch-tower, Carnelian gave in, hardly heeding his arguments. Something about the need to maintain the awe with which their men regarded them; how else could they expect their obedience in a battle against his brother, the Gods on Earth?
Morose, Carnelian shared some render with him on the heliograph platform. There was nothing else left to eat. He hardly looked up at all at the dark mass of the sartlar clothing the land. He returned to his cell and gave one-word answers to Poppy’s questions. As he lay trying to sleep all he could see was the sartlar child’s bright, human eyes.
For the next two days they marched along the road. Carnelian was relieved to be back in the tower of Earth-is-Strong with Poppy near him and away from Jaspar. Always, as far north as he could see, sartlar were streaming from the west along the tracks between the hri fields towards the road, concentrating along its margin as if they were sightseers coming to watch a procession pass by. He could not understand how they found their way, for he had summoned them to come to a watch-tower now away in the south.
The hri in the fields ahead turned brown, then yellow, then white as if the land itself was ageing before his eyes. As the green in the world faded, the hope it had brought faded in his heart and memory. Everywhere water-wheels were still. The rain wind picked up steadily. Wafts of dust came dancing from the south-west, cavorting and gyrating in spirals that thinned as they reached for the dead white sky. Then, as they passed a watch-tower near the middle of the third day, the wind angered to a gale that made Earth-is-Strong’s mast rattle in the cabin. A great front like a frothing wave came rolling towards them, eating up the sky.
‘A sporestorm,’ Poppy said, eyeing it with alarm.
‘Just the earth turning to dust,’ Carnelian said, but as it broke over them the day turned to red dusk.
Each day they woke to a thin violet light oozing from the east. The mosaic of the camp came apart even as the dragon rampart broke into its cohorts and loomed up towards the road to follow Heart-of-Thunder north. Dozing in his command chair, Carnelian rarely saw the auxiliaries pouring after them in their column. The nearest dragon seemed like some rock rising up out of the sea. The leftway, a seawall slipping slowly past, faded away into the murk ahead. All sound was muffled, only the nearest murmurous swell of sartlar noticeable.
As the midday sun diffused orange in the haze above, they could look forward to reaching another watch-tower. Like some vast and lonely tree it would loom ever more distinct until its grim bulk was threatening to topple onto them. There, upon the leftway, leading a squadron of riders, Fern would meet them and confirm the land ahead was clear. This done, he would hurtle off with his escort, heading for the tower beyond the next, which he would occupy, spying out the way ahead as best he could until their rendezvous at the same time the next day.
The march would leave the midday tower and soon they would once again be adrift in the ghostly land. Well before nightfall another tower would begin to solidify ahead. Though weary of sitting in his chair, Carnelian would still eye it with some dread. For there, just below its branches, he would have to spend another night of dreams.
When they reached it, while Earth-is-Strong and Heart-of-Thunder remained on the road beside the watch-tower, the other dragons would descend to the earth, fanning out across it to form the margin of a new camp, pushing deep enough into the sartlar to bring the stopping-place cisterns within their curve.
Krow was always there on the road to greet them, having set off at dawn to keep watch from that tower. Sometimes, he and Carnelian would exchange a few words but, mostly, he left Krow and Poppy to each other. He would climb to the summit of the tower as if ascending to his execution. Often he would reach the heliograph platform in time to watch the disturbance the dragons made ripple away to the vague margins of the sartlar multitude. Sometimes he would imagine the tower and camp had just that moment risen up from the depths of the sea. He would sit there watching the auxiliaries pouring off the road into the camp until the dusk bruised the murk purple. Only then would Osidian appear upon the platform and they would share some render. Carnelian loathed the stuff, but there was nothing else and so he ate just enough to sustain his strength.
At last, beneath a starless sky, the time would come he most dreaded. He would descend and the world would close around him to become nothing more than his cell. Every night it seemed to be the same cell. He had tried to catalogue their differences, but it was their similarity that dominated his mind. It was hard to believe he had ever left that cell. As if the journey of that day had been merely a recurring dream. When Poppy appeared he was pleasant enough, but always claimed exhaustion so that he would not have to talk to her. He feared he might pass on his misery to her and so lay down and faced the same stone wall and tried to stay awake until morning. He dreaded the ambiguities of his dreams for they cheated him of certainty about that which he had set in motion.