‘Certainly perturbed its stream.’
‘Perhaps he is, after all, irrelevant.’
THE IRON HOUSE
Run, run from Iron House
Though he’ll always catch you
Turn him round and knock him down
You’re all locked up.
Cramp twisting in his thighs forced Carnelian conscious. He clamped his teeth against the pain. The spasm releasing allowed him to open his eyes. His chin dug into his chest which felt as heavy as a plate of lead. Struggling against the weight he managed one breath. Then another. A smell of blood, perhaps his own. He lifted his head to remove its added burden from his chest. The movement was arrested by a tearing, rending in his shoulders. Blearily, he saw a flickering filigree of light giving form to shapes vaguely human in the gloom. Brightness was glowing from below. Carnelian became aware of his own skin and followed it down to his distended belly, his genitals in the fork of his splayed legs, his feet spreading on ledges of red flecked black. Iron. Rusty, precious iron. His ankles bound to the sky-metal with leather thongs. The iron was draining the heat from his flesh. He heaved his chest up for another breath. He groaned as he forced his head round against the agony. His white arm ran up along more iron to a bound wrist. His body betrayed him and his head fell, punching into his sternum. He struggled for more air even as his mind reeled, flailing as he tried to make sense of why he was bound naked upon an iron cross.
Myrrh and the fresh blood smell of the iron seeping with other rare scents in through his nostrils made him strive to lift again the boulder of his head. Balancing upon the blade of unbearable pain, his gaze flickered, searching for any understanding of where he was. In the gloom, a pattern of bright flecks spattering over human forms. In the corner of his eye he could see the screen through which the light was filtering. Achieving focus, he became able to distinguish the shapes of each face pushed up against it. Sinuous markings broke up their outlines, making it difficult to see where one ended and another began. Subtle jewel fire sparkled at ears, nostrils, glimmered around throats, over breasts. A woman eyed with stones that had dark fire at their cores had her ear turned, waiting, into the light. A beautiful boy, his head slick with feathers, regarded Carnelian with a smirk, eyes devouring him. Carnelian wanted to cross his arms over his body, hide, find shelter. All he could do was collapse his head, the first boulder in an avalanche. His knees seemed as soft as warmed wax. His legs trembled, threatening to buckle. His guts and organs were swelling his abdomen so that he felt he was ripe, that at any moment he would spill his innards out upon the floor. His arms, two leashes of sinew, snapped taut, stopped him falling. Hanging on them he was sure they must tear.
A voice cut through his collapse; mellifluous, a pouring of honeyed Quya syllables. The peculiar pronouns it was using forced themselves through his pulsing agony. In the first person, declined in the divine mode, dual. Only the Twin Gods spoke thus, or their incarnation on Earth. A God Emperor speaking? Molochite!
Carnelian focused his attention like a needle through the raw pain.
‘… his rebellion pitiful. Though he managed to destroy the Red Ichorians, what does that demonstrate except the impiety of their sending? A folly in which the Wise and those of you who call yourselves the Great conspired, led by incompetent Imago, betrayed by perfidious Aurum, came inevitably to disaster. Are We surprised?’
As he listened, Carnelian’s gaze had been crawling across the contorted, writhing surfaces of the floor. He frowned, unable to understand what it was he was seeing.
‘So have We been forced to come out from the Hidden Land seeking with Our power to heal this wounded Commonwealth.’
Carnelian lost hold of the beautiful voice as his eyes tried to unravel the exquisite traceries of the pavement upon which his cross was set. He lifted his head enough to allow his gaze to scale the wall to where it emerged into the light. Ribbed stone? Through its peculiar, dark patina, he saw evidence it was assembled from fragments. Bonework? An Ancestor House? He squeezed the confusion drop by drop. This was no barbarian work. Besides, it was pocked all over with holes. The ribbing curved up from the floor. Was it possible he was in the hold of some immense bone boat?
The cross trembled under his skin to the rhythm of feet approaching. Shadowy forms swam into his vision, crablike, each with several arms and legs and double-headed. Hands, some pale, some so densely tattooed they seemed veined ebony, curled into the handles that grew from his cross. He knew these odd but graceful creatures. Syblings: the joined twins of the elite cohorts of the Sinistral Ichorians.
One pale woman’s face arrested his gaze. Though she was not as she had been, he knew her. ‘Quentha,’ he sighed.
The sybling’s eyes pierced him. ‘Seraph?’ An urgent whisper.
‘Have you forgotten…?’ he managed.
Her sister turned the jet almonds of her stone eyes upon him, but then the sisters responded to a gesture of command from the other syblings. Together they took the strain. The cross rising into the air caused Carnelian’s shoulders to threaten dislocation. He threw back his head, choking off a cry.
‘Behold Suth Carnelian!’ cried the beautiful voice.
Spreadeagled on the cross, as the syblings carried him into the light Carnelian was blinded by pain. The impact as they put him down sent through him a surge of nausea. He pushed his consciousness into the soles of his feet, clawing his toes, digging his heels into the ledges, finding just enough strength in his legs to push back, squeezing his stomach, drawing up his innards, adjusting his shoulders gingerly to relieve their tearing agony.
‘Behold another of the Great who threw in his lot with Our rebel, apostate brother.’
Blearily Carnelian tried to locate the source of that pure voice. His racked body gave a shudder as he saw the towering horned shape that could only be the Darkness-under-the-Trees having assumed a near-human form. Then he saw this was just the shadow of the apparition sitting upon an iron throne. Jade its sublime face, its head encased within a four-horned helm that gave it the look of a spider. Behind rose a green man, above whom a black man loomed with vast glimmering obsidian mirror wings stretching like startled hands. All around the throne, children huddled naked, their Chosen skin a dazzling headache.
The apparition rose, its body clothed in a sinuous metal skin that might have been that of a fish, along the midline of which a lightning bolt jagged down. Taller by far than any mortal should be. Carnelian knew this was the God Emperor. Molochite extended Their hands, which were sheathed in what appeared to be shadowed, glimmering water. In obedience two of the children rose, extending trembling fingers. The God Emperor took their hands, then slid across a fur of blue fire towards Carnelian, whose attempt to recoil was thwarted by the cross. The apparition loomed over him, its horns like scorpion stings. He could not bear to look upon the jade of that perfect face. His gaze fell and was for a moment snared by the exquisite mail. Metal duller than silver, each link no larger than a fingernail. It chinked as They gestured. In response the syblings leaned against the cross and turned it.
Below, beneath the vaulted ribs of the ceiling, stretched an assemblage of Masters. A field of gold masks, gleaming. Squinting, Carnelian saw the white cross of his body reflected, melting, over noses and brows and lips; displayed for them like a whore.
Molochite drifted back into sight. ‘Now suffers he the fate to which all shall be consigned who dare raise their hand against Us.’ They offered Their left hand to one of the children. The Chosen girl looked up, her blue eyes frozen terror. Not only had the hair been shaved from her head, but even her eyebrows. The rims of her eyes were red from where the lashes had been plucked. Tiny fingers fumbled at the hand of the God Emperor and peeled off the glimmering glove. Molochite’s hand was living porcelain as it floated towards Carnelian’s throat. He turned his head away as far as he could. Molochite’s touch settled finger by finger along his jaw line. He tried to shake it off, but this only caused the touch to slide down to his throat, where it lingered on the scar around his neck.