As the days passed, Carnelian watched the sartlar, waiting for them to weaken, watching for those that would fall behind, searching for signs that famine was winnowing their millions, but each day they maintained their tidal surge.
At last he was driven to pay another visit to the dragon wall. Again he spied on them from the shelter of a dragon. Slumped on the ground, their heads hung weary, but he could see no stick-like limbs, no bellies pregnant with hunger. He retreated back into the camp and wondered if the blackened hri was still capable of providing sustenance. He found a bush and reached out a gloved hand to its fruiting head. At his touch it crumbled to a charred chaff that blew its powder away on the breeze. He tried to take hold of a leaf, a stalk, but, at his touch, each became just a brief stain upon the air. The hri was nothing more than a black ghost.
He returned to the watch-tower, brooding on the miracle of how the sartlar found food in a dead land. His mood darkened further as he passed through the Marula, at whose heart many Oracles lay in the fevered birthing sleep. At least upon the tower summit he could unmask, though he and Osidian had to turn their backs upon the west with its dust-pelting wind. Fishing within his render sac, he drew up a gobbet of meat. Reluctantly he put it in his mouth. Its saltiness stung his tongue. The gelatinous mass came apart under the pressure of his teeth. He jerked forward, spitting out the chewed meat. It was disgusting.
‘You’re right. This stuff is sickening,’ grumbled Osidian, though he continued to eat. He needed to; he was still cadaverous.
Carnelian rose, putting his mask up as a barrier against the sandblast of the wind, and surveyed the scarlet multitude. ‘They’re consuming each other,’ he said, the taste of the render still in his mouth.
‘What?’
Carnelian turned to Osidian. He let the mask fall. ‘That’s how they’re surviving. They’re eating each other.’
Osidian frowned, then began nodding. ‘The Lord provides.’
Carnelian was outraged. ‘Doesn’t it appall you?’
Osidian shrugged. ‘They’re beasts.’
Carnelian was feeling queasy and wanted to be alone. He began walking to the platform edge.
‘You haven’t eaten anything,’ Osidian called after him.
Carnelian kept walking. He wondered if he would ever be able to eat render again.
Waking, it took him some moments to realize he was not in the cabin of the baran. The sound of the sea. The swaying. The sandy wind lashing the dragon tower like spray. Disappointment tore at him. His father was not there to make things right.
He cast a jaded eye out through the bone screen at the blood-red world. The sartlar swarmed the earth like cockroaches. He felt lightheaded. He had not eaten anything for days. Even the hunger pangs had faded. His body ached so that he wondered whether this was, at last, the burning in his blood that was proper to one of the Chosen. There was a dark pinnacle ahead, vague in the ruddy twilight. A watch-tower he would sleep in. He would be initially dizzy when he rose from his command chair. The climb up through a tower now exhausted him. His fear of nightmares was now balanced by a horror of lying awake. Sometimes, in the night, he was sure he could hear the wet sounds of the sartlar feeding.
In his cell, Carnelian woke sensing something had changed. The world seemed brighter so that, for a moment, he almost could believe the long days of red twilight and dust had been nothing more than a nightmare. He rose. A window in the stone wall gave out into clear blue. He was drawn to the freshness of that colour. Below, the camp was in the shadow of the watch-tower. Only the dragon towers reached high enough to catch the first gold of the sun. Beyond stretched the sartlar: an indigo sea. Their murmur reached him.
‘The wind has fallen,’ he muttered, lost in wonder.
‘What is it?’ said a voice.
He turned to see Poppy. ‘Come and see for yourself.’
She rushed to the slit and pushed her head into it to breathe the cool, clear air. He left her there, put on his hooded cloak and picked up his mask.
‘Where’re you going?’ she said.
Carnelian pointed upwards.
‘I’ll come with you.’
Together they left the cell, climbed the ladder to the tower roof, then the staples up onto the platform. As Carnelian stood up he gasped. His mask forgotten, he gaped, turning slowly on the spot to take it all in.
‘So many!’ Poppy exclaimed.
Carnelian’s attention was drawn to the south-west. There, the hem of the sky was steeped in ink. At first he thought the darkness was because the sun was still low – so low it spilled the legs of their shadows over the platform edge – but though the indigo west was brightening fast, the stained horizon stayed obstinately black.
‘The Rains,’ said Poppy.
Her look of wonder suggested she had not imagined that rain ever fell upon the Guarded Land. In truth, he had forgotten how late it was in the year. He looked back at the angry horizon.
‘Look there.’ Poppy was pointing northwards. Another band, but this one was of gold. Carnelian forgot to breathe.
‘What is it?’ Poppy said.
The fear in her voice wrenched the answer from him, though he could not look away. ‘Osrakum,’ he said, in Quya, then, in Vulgate: ‘the Mountain.’
He stared at the Heaven Wall. He could not quite believe he was seeing it. A part of him had been convinced he would never do so again. It was like the longed-for face of a lost lover but, if so, it was a lover who had betrayed him.
‘Osrakum.’ Voiced behind them almost as a groan of pain.
They both turned to see Osidian there. Half his mask blazing in the sun; the other half in murky, glimmering shadow. Carnelian felt compassion for him, but he could not long resist the siren fascination of Osrakum. He turned back to feast his eyes upon her wall.
It was a diamond flash somewhere near the earth that woke them from their trance. Another and another, pulsing in a repeating pattern. A heliograph.
Carnelian turned to Osidian, but realized he was equally unable to read the signal. So he sent Poppy to fetch one of the homunculi. Watching the diamond flicker, something occurred to him. ‘If that’s the next tower…’ Fern was supposed to have been there. Carnelian’s heart faltered from fear of what might have befallen him. Who could be operating the device there?
‘Not the next one, but the one beyond it,’ said Osidian.
Carnelian saw that, indeed, the spine of Fern’s tower rose to the right of and slightly higher than the flashing. ‘What does it mean? Are the Wise trying to contact us?’
Osidian’s mirror face gleamed sinuously as he shook his head. ‘The pattern is too repetitive to carry any complex communication.’ He became stone. ‘My brother is close.’
Carnelian shielded his eyes and scanned the northern horizon. With all the excitement he had forgotten Molochite must be nearby, waiting for them.
The sounds of someone climbing up onto the platform made him put his mask in front of his face before he turned, to see it was Poppy approaching followed by the homunculus. The little man stopped to peer at the flashing.
‘Well?’ barked Osidian at last.
The homunculus flinched and sketched a gesture of apology. ‘I cannot read it, Celestial. The signal is faint, but I have the impression it carries no words.’
‘What then?’ Carnelian said.
The homunculus gestured again. ‘Perhaps some diagnostic.’
‘To check the integrity of the system?’
‘The sandstorms have been blinding the mirrors, Seraph.’
Osidian shifted his weight. ‘Perhaps it seeks to detect any discontinuity.’
Carnelian tensed. ‘They are looking for us.’
‘Homunculus, could we answer it from here?’