An eerie cry rose up that made the hackles rise on Carnelian’s neck. Modulating, swelling, stretching its pitch, curling slowly, a sound equivalent to a rising blade of smoke. No human throat could shape such a song.
‘One vast bell, the night-black ocean.’
The spiralling song seemed to have loosened some vast thing up in the dark apex of the Pyramid Hollow. He gazed up, but could see nothing. Then he felt a waft on his face from the air displaced as something massive moved. The next moment he would have snatched his hands up to cover his ears if they had not been held by the Sapients. Air avalanched with a thick reverberation that made everything shake, down to the marrow in his bones. A pealing so loud, he feared the crater of the Plain of Thrones must shatter and fall.
‘Shimmering, shivering, shearing at the touch of the Turtle’s song.’
Another ear-numbing peal.
‘A shudder speeding towards the limit of the limitless.’
Clang.
‘The ocean convulsed in agony and joyful exultation.’
Clang.
‘Convulsed to this new-formed centre.’
Clang.
‘Pressure beyond squeezing.’
Clang.
‘Rage beyond violence.’
Clang.
‘Passion beyond annihilation.’
Clang.
‘And Lord Turtle was rent asunder,’ shrilled the homunculi.
Carnelian cried out as pain leapt up his arms. He would have snatched them free, but the Sapients held them fiercely with their four-fingered hands. He looked down in shock. Watched the blood dewing from the cuts they had made. Running down his fingers to dribble into the jade bowls.
A sharp crack made him jerk his head up. A Sapient who was hovering over the victim in the iron hollow raised his hand gripping a cobble of black stone and smashed it down again upon the sternum of the prostate man. Ribs gave way like rotten wood.
‘The upper shell becomes the dome of heaven,’ cried the homunculi.
Other Sapients fell upon the victim; their fingers sheathed with blades tore at his chest like beaks. Prising the ribs loose. Snapping them back, one after another after another, hands gloved with blood. Carnelian flinched as some spat over his face. Reek of iron, the odour of his dreams.
‘The lower shell becomes the foundations of the earth.’
The victim’s chest was now a basket of bones like two splayed hands between which, in the seething cavity, his heart still beat. One of the Sapients reached in and plucked out the pulsing organ, pulled it up while others severed the vessels that the next moment were spraying blood everywhere. Carnelian’s eyes followed the heart as it was carried to Osidian’s court robe.
‘Lord Turtle’s heart becomes the mountain at the centre of the world.’
The heart was pushed into the centre of the wheel breastplate. Carnelian watched it convulsing there, dribbling a trickle of blood to wind down through the jewel mosaic. Then it stopped. Soon the victim’s liver was filling a cavity beneath the heart on the wheel frame, as it became the earth. The tongue went above the heart to be the voice of the winds of heaven. The eyes sat to either side as sun and moon. With brushes blood was spattered over the wheel as stars. The severed hands and feet were hung beneath it from hooks to be the lobed caverns of the underworld. More organs were harvested to adorn the wheel. The carcass of the victim no longer resembled a man.
When the great bell fell silent a grumbling chanting was heard. A burr in Carnelian’s ears that he tried to dislodge by shaking his head. He felt his arms being raised. Blood trickled warm down his forearms. A grating sound near his feet made him glance down. Ammonites were carefully lifting the bowls that had been collecting his blood. He thought they had not been careful enough. So much seemed spilled upon the floor. The more he looked the more he saw. Blood everywhere as if a tide of it had washed in. He felt it licking at his toes.
A flash seemed to give his head a glancing blow. He looked up and saw four-fingered hands removing a mask. Osidian’s face came into view. He was staring past the Grand Sapients, whose stellated crowns made them appear astonished. Carnelian focused on Osidian’s face, which seemed translucent alabaster. His eyes were so intense. He knew what Osidian was gazing at, but refused to look too.
The rhythm of the chanting was speeding up, deepening. He watched a Grand Sapient dip a finger into a bowl held up to him and with it he dabbed a spot upon Osidian’s forehead, covering his black birthmark. The smudge leaked a drop that found its way to the bridge of Osidian’s nose. The Grand Sapient dabbed another spot to the left of Osidian’s mouth, then one to the right. Dipping his finger again, the Grand Sapient raised it to Osidian’s forehead, touched the smudge of blood there and then drew his finger down towards his left eye, lightly over its lid, closing it, and on down to meet the smudge to the left of his mouth. Dipping his finger yet again, he linked that smudge with a trail across Osidian’s lips to the smudge on the other side. With more blood he traced a track up Osidian’s cheek to his right eye, closed it and reddened the lid, then up over the brow to close the triangle.
Carnelian frowned, not understanding what it meant, but feeling he should. Threads of blood had reached his armpits. There was a pounding in his head. Or was it? A drumming was swelling the chanting. A scraping sound of copper on copper. A rustling.
The Grand Sapient was painting Osidian’s face wholly red. Carnelian watched the pale fingers dipping into the bowl and recognized it. The blood they were using was his. Osidian wearing his blood for a mask. Unease managed to seep up through Carnelian’s numbness. In that red face he was seeing Akaisha’s, bloated in death. All the women of the Tribe, their faces ochred for burial. It seemed a desecration to paint Osidian so, as if he was mocking the dead; but there was something else disturbing Carnelian about that red face. Then Osidian opened his eyes. Carnelian started, causing the Sapients to tighten their grip on his arms. His dreams were crossing over into his waking world.
‘And it rained blood,’ cried the homunculi.
Wet tearing sounds yanked Carnelian’s gaze up the central stair of the Pyramid Hollow to see the long seed pods of the torsion devices that flanked it untwisting, swelling. Then they began to explode, not all at once, but in a long stuttering release, and the air turned red as if filled with rose petals. Carnelian gasped in shock as he was spattered. Warm, thick spots of it on his face and arms. Pattering on the platform, on the dark pinnacles of the Wise, on Osidian in his court robe. A great sigh went up from the tiers above that seemed one of sexual release. The Masters to either side of the steps were visibly reddened, though some gore reached them all. To Carnelian, gazing up in horror, it seemed the stair was a gash in the cliff, even the vulva of some vast woman.
‘Flesh, knit bone to bone, your withered earth…’ the ammonites on either side were chanting.
The odour of freshly spilled blood was overpowering. Carnelian felt as if the tidal wave from his dreams had broken over them.
‘Oh ancient mother, scorched tearless you await…’
The Wise were hooking a green face beneath the wheel breastplate. The face of a beautiful, radiant youth. It seemed the same face Molochite had worn in the Iron House, but that had been broken, so this must be a replica. Blood dribbling down its jade brow, cheek and lips from the liver and heart above made it seem as if the face had been freshly flayed from some youth. It looked, besides, incongruous, fringed as it was on either side by the amputated feet and hands of the victim.
Osidian with his scarlet face was being given some of Carnelian’s blood to drink.
‘The Sky Lord come to thunder…’