Your masters? Carnelian signed, certain his voice could not carry above the din.
They sleep, Celestial, signed the ammonite.
The man cowered when Carnelian frowned, incredulous. Wake them!
As the ammonite scrambled away, Carnelian watched the Ichorians. When he became aware his presence was a distraction that might make the poor wretches fall victim to the machines, he took Fern’s shoulder and they left the way they had come.
There was a scratching at the door. Such a small, ordinary sound in a world of such monstrous cacophony. Carnelian rose and opened the door. An ammonite stood outside, silver face reflecting his pale body as a twisting curve.
‘Celestial, Lord Legions, my master, will grant you audience.’
‘He’s here?’ Carnelian tried to pierce the shadows behind the ammonite, but could see only his Marula slumped against the wall. When Sthax looked up, face wooden with terror, Carnelian gestured him to remain where he was.
The ammonite shook his head. ‘Upon the roof, Celestial. He bade me bring you to him.’
Carnelian left Fern sleeping, then followed the ammonite up through the hollows of the tower. All the way, air sucked up from the lower levels rushed past them with ever increasing fury as if racing them to the roof.
As they came up onto the roof, Carnelian felt he was entering some vast forest. A canopy of sullen blackness hung above, fed by the trunks of smoke the chimneys were pumping up. Melancholy rain slapped against him in gusts and a snow of ash and soot that clung to everything.
The ammonite led him towards the edge, where some dark figures stood like burnt posts: Sapients, sheltering beneath parasols other ammonites were holding over them. As Carnelian drew nearer the screaming of the pipes grew so shrill he felt his bones must shatter. The plain below came into view, partially obscured by a steamy miasma. Pockets that seemed horrible chambers were lit here and there by the lightning flicker of the flame jets arcing back and forth. Through the murk he could see that a jerky, agonized scramble of sartlar were struggling to scale the crust of cooked meat that reared up against the outer gate. A flash, then screeching, as liquid fire slashed across them, baking them into the hill.
‘Your plan has failed,’ he cried above the din.
‘To some extent, Celestial.’
Carnelian turned, startled by that angelic voice, serene in the midst of such chaos. He saw the homunculus who had spoken and the staff he held. Behind him his master, Lands, seemed just another chimney.
The Grand Sapient disengaged a hand from the throat of the homunculus and began signing. Once they overran the City, there was always the danger this might happen. They have become like locusts that, once congregating in sufficient numbers, exhaust the food supply around them. Thereafter, they must move on, else perish. Whichever direction they choose they must maintain, for behind them lies only cannibalism.
Carnelian saw the truth of this. He saw also that it was, perhaps, the initial attack upon them in the Canyon that had precipitated this carnage. Unable to retreat, they had surged forward against his incursion. Thereafter, like a siphon, the pressure of those coming on behind had been compelling those in front inexorably towards the Blood Gate and its killing field.
There was only one thing to be done. We must punch through to the entrance of the Canyon and there deflect more from entering.
It was Legions’ hand that answered him. Not so far, Celestial. We need only reach the Green Gate.
Where a link can be re-established to your systems?
Once that is done, we can summon sufficient force to effect your deflection.
Carnelian regarded the Grand Sapients with the growing suspicion that they had engineered this crisis as the means to acquire control of the outer world and, with it, Osrakum.
‘First you will have to remove this mound that blocks our gates, Celestial,’ Cities’ homunculus said above the din.
The three Grand Sapients seemed nothing more than protrusions of the tower roof. Such stillness on the edge of the abyss. Carnelian wondered what it was they were perceiving. Directly, perhaps all they could sense was the rain on their hands, the whispering glancing tickle of ash. Through their feet, they would be aware of the vibration from the flame-pipes operating. But the infernal scene before them they could appreciate only from the throats of their homunculi, as nothing more substantial than a fairytale. Not for him such abstraction. The abomination spread out at their feet was screaming at all his senses. It had to be stopped at whatever cost.
Sitting in Earth-is-Strong’s command chair staring at the locked gate, Carnelian was aware, with a prickly horror, of the mountain of carnage pressing against its other side. He glanced round at the two other dragons that stood close behind him as part of the wedge. The screech of the flame-pipes rising in pitch made him turn back. The Prow was initiating the furious barrage he had planned with Legions, in the hope of holding the sartlar flood back. Grimly he watched the massive crossbars on the gates slide away to both sides, groaning as the gate visibly quivered. Unlocked, the portals began to open. Shrieks of metallic agony came from either side as the mechanisms that opened the gates struggled against the weight they were holding back. A crack was widening between the two portals. At first he could see nothing. Then a dark stream began to pour through. A gush of corpses gradually increasing to a waterfall. An avalanche advancing towards him, one tumbling layer at a time, of things that looked like scraps of leather. A vast belch of fetid air struck them that made his officers recoil, moaning. Fluid welling in his mouth, in shock and horror, he gave the command and the beast beneath them lurched forward, lowering her head to form an immense ram. As the monster’s head punched into the corpse avalanche, the cabin juddered, throwing Carnelian forward so that he was almost unseated. The cabin jerked erratically, yawing, pitching back and forth. He realized it was because the dragon’s great feet were sliding. He tried not to imagine on what. Instead he fixed his attention on the monster’s head as it clove like a prow into the wave of dead. Soon corpses were building up against the raised shield of her bony fringe, until they spilled over and poured out on either side, until her head was entirely submerged beneath the filthy carnage. His officers were soon retching at the stench. Grimly, Carnelian refused nausea, feeling through his chair Earth-is-Strong taking the strain, leaning her immense bulk into pushing the dead before her.
Before the gate was reclosed, Carnelian went out to make sure the way was clear for the next day’s sally. He had just left Earth-is-Strong and the other dragons having wounds tended that their feet had sustained from embedded shards of sartlar bone.
His steps faltered as he came to the edge of the spread of paste the monsters had crushed from the corpses. He wound more turns of cloth across his mouth and nose and pushed on. The outer faces of the immense portals open against the flanks of the towers were coated with gore almost up to the top. The ground was slippery with fat and fluids. Banks rose up on either side that seemed of tallow. Up ahead the Prow rose with its mane of wavering smoke, on its brow its crown of thorns, whose brass throats were vomiting a juddering fury of fire that was keeping the sartlar at bay. A lone colossus amidst the thunder and shrill demonic screaming, it could not hope to keep that rate of firing up for long without being consumed by its own fire.