Carnelian stared at him.
‘The Marula have come for you.’
OVERRUN
Ants fighting on the sand
Even as the tide comes in.
‘ What?’ Carnelian was confused.
Fern’s eyes were sharp with anxiety. ‘Morunasa’s trying to fight his way through to you.’
‘To me?’
‘Your people are even now fighting to hold him back. The Quenthas know a back way-’
‘I don’t understand.’ Carnelian could not focus his mind. He felt so very weary.
A glistening, ebony face filled his vision: Sthax. ‘Oracle come get you.’
A two-headed shape loomed up: the sybling sisters. ‘This Maruli came to warn us.’
The pieces came together in Carnelian’s mind. ‘He has betrayed me.’
They were staring at him, waiting.
‘I have to give myself up to him. To avoid bloodshed.’
Fern threw his head back, grimacing. ‘You know how much that man hates you.’
‘There may still be time to get you to safety, Celestial,’ said Right-Quentha, pointing towards a dark corner of the chamber.
‘Into the depths of the Labyrinth where none will find you,’ her sister added.
Carnelian regarded the sisters. ‘You do realize it is the God Emperor Themselves you are intending to defy?’
Both faces set; indomitable. ‘It is you we serve now, Celestial.’
That touched Carnelian, but he shook his head. ‘How long could we hope to evade Their power? And to what end?’
A scuffing of footfalls in the outer chamber jerked their eyes towards the door. Fern and the sisters turned their gaze upon Carnelian in desperation. He pressed the heels of his hands against his temples. ‘I need time to think.’
Fern gave a resigned nod. Sthax grimaced, his yellow eye following the Quenthas to the door. Carnelian turned, agonized, to the Maruli. ‘The Oracle said nothing about who sent him?’
Sthax shook his head violently. Carnelian tried to pull apart the threads of the power play, but there was no way he could reweave them into anything that made sense. He groaned, desperate for clarity. Then he remembered walking hand in hand with Osidian along the Path of Blood and felt suddenly calm.
‘He’s not behind this,’ he announced.
At that moment the Quenthas moved aside and Tain pushed into the chamber, eyes wild, blood spattered across his face. ‘Carnie, they’ll soon have the outer door down.’
‘Get everyone in here,’ Carnelian said. Tain stared, jerked a nod, then disappeared.
Carnelian rose from his bed, gripping Fern’s arm when it reached out to steady him. He found the strength to stand on his own and indicated the bronze doors of the chamber. ‘How long will those hold?’
Right-Quentha glanced at them. ‘Long enough, Celestial.’
Carnelian had them bring him his green robe, his military cloak. He was already dressed when men crashed into the chamber, skittering on the polished paving, their chameleoned faces glazed with sweat and blood. Seeing him, they began to fall on their knees. Carnelian surged forward and plucked one up. ‘Get up, you fools.’
Tain came in last of all.
‘Anyone left behind?’ Carnelian demanded. When his brother shook his head, Carnelian commanded they engage the door locks. Turning away, he saw a menacing shape looming against the walclass="underline" the glimmering carcass of his court robe. Glinting on the floor before it, cushioned in his neatly folded undergarments, a gold face, his mask.
Right-Quentha, catching the focus of his gaze, made her sister follow her as she went to scoop it up.
‘No, leave it,’ Carnelian said. The sisters frowned as they looked at him.
A thunderous clatter reverberated from beyond the locked gate. The patter of many feet. Something massive struck the bronze doors making them boom, but the locks held. Carnelian grinned grimly at the sisters, his blood up. ‘Get us out of here.’
He did not breathe easily until they had finished the crossing of the Encampment of the Seraphim. Urging his people past him, he looked back. The column sarcophagi stood in sombre rows wreathed in a mist of smoke. The fires were now banked throughout the camp that lay sleeping at the feet of those hollow gods. He and his people had found a way through the camp in the golden twilight cast by the Shimmering Stair. Heads had risen as guardsmen had watched them pass, but it was not their place to challenge a party led by sybling guides.
Fern approached, bringing up the rear of the line.
‘Is that all of them?’ Carnelian asked, almost in a whisper. When Fern nodded, he put his arm round his shoulders and they set off after their people, into the forest of stone trees.
Openings in the high vaults let in the first grey light of dawn. They followed the sisters down winding stairs beneath the gaze of frowning colossi. For a while they moved along ravines flanked by their legs. Here, Carnelian managed well enough, only a few times having to lean on Fern, but when they began to climb countless steps, he found his legs leaden and they had to stop often to let him rest.
Fern gazed with knitted brows at Carnelian, who was wheezing, pain sawing his head in two. ‘What did they do to you?’
‘They bled me,’ Carnelian said and his heart warmed when he saw anger burning in Fern’s eyes.
As they climbed higher, he became aware the columns, though still massive, were more slender. Pausing to regain his breath, he gazed up into the shadows and saw that the stone stems swelled into pods that clung to the underside of the roof like the eggs of some monstrous moth.
At last they came up onto a road whose paving was raised here and there as if something had been burrowing beneath it. The vaults seemed a low stormy sky. Light slanting down revealed that the columns had the form of gigantic poppyheads upon whose spiked crowns the ceiling sat. Small as ants they moved off through this deathly, penumbral meadow. Here and there Carnelian could see the stems were graven with faces worn down to sketches of eyes and mouths. Glyphs that tattooed the stone were soft-edged, unreadable. Walking beside the Quenthas, he eyed these effigies, finding them familiar in a way he could not catch hold of. ‘How do you know of this place?’ he whispered.
‘We used to come here as children, Celestial,’ the sisters replied. Right-Quentha swept a hand round. ‘This place was our playground.’
Such a name seemed to Carnelian incongruous for such a sombre place. ‘The Labyrinth?’
‘It is where we were born, Celestial,’ said Left-Quentha.
‘Our world,’ her sister added.
They came into a green clearing where the vault between four poppyheads had collapsed. There a single tree reached up to the morning. From every crack fresh ferns sprang, uncurling their fronds all the way up the glyphed shafts of the columns. One of these had a verdant beard that showed where water trickled down to fill a pool nestling in some masonry tumbled at its feet. After the sterile wilderness of the Labyrinth, Carnelian was struck by unlooked-for joy at this haven of life. Beside him Right-Quentha smiled, half turning to her sister. ‘It’s still here.’ She turned to him. ‘This was our most secret place, Celestial.’
They formed a ring around the clearing. Carnelian had invited everyone, including the Suth guardsmen, who crouched, heads bowed. When one of them dared to glance up, Carnelian gave him a smile of encouragement, causing the man to blush and duck his head. He did not blame the man for being nervous in his presence and before his strange collection of friends, but the guardsmen had risked everything for him and he felt they had a right to be there.
‘I’ve asked you all to sit with me because the decisions we’re going to make will affect us all.’
There were nods around the ring; Tain and Fern fixed him with fierce attention. Carnelian began by asking Sthax what he knew about Morunasa’s attack.