She regarded them both, her face blank with horror. She had seen this with her own eyes before they were taken from her.
‘My uncle was drugged,’ Osidian declared. He swung his arm round to take in the torsion devices. ‘They were all drugged. They felt nothing.’
Ykoriana frowned. ‘That certainly is what the Wise claim. It is true my brother made no movement; he did not cry out.’ She leaned towards them. ‘But your father, who witnessed his mutilation at close hand, told me afterwards he had seen in our brother’s eyes, before they were plucked out, a terrible, animal fear. It haunted him.’ She grew aged beyond her years. ‘It haunted me.’
Her hand strayed back to the hollow in the iron, caressing its edge as if the fingers wished to reach inside but dared not for fear of what they might touch. ‘It was I who had to make the choice between them. It was I who chose who would lie here… and who would stand there.’ She pointed towards them. ‘Suth Sardian with his exile saved your father from lying here.’ She tapped the iron. Her brows knit again. ‘I demanded this proof of love from your father, Nephron. I loved him, though I had reason to hate all men. I submitted myself to his touch, though it brought me little joy.’ Her face grew sour with remembered pain. ‘For an unripe fruit will carry any early touch as rot when it ripens. And though Sardian was no longer there between us, your father hated me for it.’ She clinked one of her stone eyes. ‘And he took my sight.’ She frowned. ‘Once I thought it was in revenge for depriving him of his lover; now I am not so sure. Perhaps it was vengeance for what he was forced to witness.’ Her face darkened. ‘Though it was the Wise he should hate, and the Great who cast their votes but hazard nothing.’
She put on a smile. ‘Still, that is politics.’ She raised her head and her green eyes glittered as if she was seeing something far away. ‘But then Sardian chose to stay away.’
Carnelian tensed.
‘Year after year when he could have returned, he chose not to. Almost I had forgotten him when that fool, Aurum, had the Clave elect him He-who-goes-before. I was confident Sardian would not return; but then he did and the minion I sent to find out why now, why not before, came back to me with nothing.’
‘What has this to do with anything?’ Osidian said, looking weary, upset. Carnelian gazed at him, wondering if it could possibly be the description of the blood rituals that had penetrated to his heart. He had looked on massacres unmoved, but this was bloodshed and torture among his own.
‘It has everything to do with your Apotheosis. To save himself, Aurum told me at last. For he had seen it when he arrived on Suth’s island.’
‘Seen what?’ Osidian cried, exasperated.
Almost Carnelian answered him, but felt a need to hear it told by Ykoriana. ‘Aurum was intimate with that old monster, my father. He was often at court.’
‘Please, tell me what you are talking about.’
Carnelian saw the weariness in Osidian’s face, but saw also how he had to listen, because this woman was still his mother.
‘That Carnelian here is the living image of your father.’
Osidian’s face folded in confusion.
‘The living image of his father.’
Carnelian watched the realization smooth Osidian’s face. For a moment, shocked, he looked like a stupid child. Then he gazed at Carnelian as if he were seeing him for the first time. His eyes narrowed. ‘You knew this already.’ His face darkened. ‘How long have you known?’
Carnelian explained how his father had told him when he came secretly to their camp.
‘Why didn’t you tell-?’
Carnelian watched the realization dawn.
‘That’s why you deserted me.’ The blood left Osidian’s face and he looked at his mother, then beyond her to the hollow man, in horror.
Ykoriana smiled. ‘That you ignored Sardian’s warning, that you are here, proves, Carnelian, does it not, that you know to what lengths my son will be prepared to go to save you.’
‘On the contrary, my Lady, it proves only that I came here knowing what you would threaten and to make sure Osidian does not submit to you.’ Carnelian turned to find Osidian staring at him and smiled at what was left in him of the boy in the Yden. ‘For I would not wish him enslaved again.’
Osidian’s lips seemed to be trying to return the smile, tears starting, but then his chin fell and there was a twitching at the corners of his eyes, his mouth, as if he were seeing scenes in rapid succession, or having fleeting conversations. Almost imperceptibly, his head sank further, his shoulders rounded, so that instinctively Carnelian glanced at Ykoriana, fearing that, by not even trying to mask his feelings of defeat, Osidian was making her victory over him, over them both, more complete.
But then Carnelian remembered that her eyes were stones and saw, besides, no trace of victory in her face, but only confusion and a pale fear. In his bones he felt it was not for herself she feared. ‘So as you see, Celestial’ – he paused, ready to gauge every nuance in her face – ‘your son will have no need to wed you. I will die at his Apotheosis and, afterwards, he will take Ykorenthe to be his empress.’
There! At the mention of her daughter’s name, he had seen the blade of fear cut deeper into her heart. It was the girl she sought to protect. Carnelian regarded Ykoriana afresh. Perhaps she had wed her other son for power, but what she sought now was to put her body between Osidian and her daughter. She was trying to protect the girl in the way no one had protected her. He no longer saw a terrible empress in her bitter pomp, but only a woman, aged by suffering beyond her years, who had dressed herself in a robe of rose petals in her attempt to seduce her own son, to protect a child; to protect what was left of the child that she had been.
Carnelian blinked back tears and looked from mother to son and back again. How defeated they looked. Both trapped and he along with them. Rage rose in him, as his heart sought to free itself from this ensnarement. ‘It is the Wise who bind us,’ he cried.
They both turned their green eyes upon him, stone and living, both needing, demanding more. Carnelian tried to think it through, but the pressure rising in him was beyond analysis. ‘We came here believing you had sought your son’s life.’ He described the assassination attempt and believed the shock in Ykoriana’s face was real, knew he had expected it. ‘It makes no sense now that you would do this, but the use of the Brotherhood of the Wheel must be intended to implicate you. So if not you, my Lady, who?’
Osidian’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘The Wise?’
‘Why not the Wise?’ Carnelian said. ‘Would the Brotherhood attempt such a thing on their own? Or the Great, who could only expect to be decimated by it?’ He frowned, considering what his heart was urging him to. Feeling it was a kind of madness, but unwilling to dam its flow. ‘We are all three here of the House of the Masks.’
There, he had said it. It was the first time he had felt it.
‘Instead of fighting each other, we should unite against our common foe.’ Carnelian paused and saw in their faces they were waiting for his words. He glanced into the hollow man. ‘I do not want to die here, nor do I want to live under a perpetually deferred sentence of death.’
Ykoriana lowered her head a little. ‘Does Aurum still live?’
‘I believe that unlikely.’
‘Well, then, assuming Sardian will not betray you, if I choose not to speak of it, I doubt if any could discover your secret.’
‘And the reason we cannot announce the truth of my birth openly is what?’
‘The Law-that-must-be-obeyed,’ she said.
‘And yet have we not all three defied it?’
Osidian frowned. ‘The blood rituals are essential for Rebirth, for Apotheosis.’
‘Are they?’ Carnelian could not shape in his mind what was coming; the words would have to find their own shape. ‘It seems to me these blood rituals have been conceived to set the House of the Masks against the Great. Further, to divide our House against itself. Are these mutilations, this massacre of our own, necessary? Can we not invoke the Creation without reproducing it? Or is it, perhaps, that the Wise wish to bring the candidate face to face with his own mortality? Even as they give him the symbols of power, even as they transform him into the Gods, they show him the flesh of which he is made, how easily his blood flows. Even if they can give you divinity, Osidian, you know they cannot give you immortality.’