Carnelian had reached the first bridge. On the other side, upon the killing field, was the escarpment of corpses that had been left when he ordered the dragons back to the fortress. He made his way to the edge of the bridge, going as fast as he could, though loathing each step he took into the quagmire. The rock sloping down to the Cloaca was densely matted with the dead they had shoved over the edge. In the depths he dimly saw that a great mass of corpses now dammed the channel. If the other branch was also choked, the run-off from the Skymere might begin to pool behind it. Perhaps enough to raise the level of the Skymere. The coombs might be flooded. Unexpected rage welled up in him, driving hot tears into his eyes. So what if the palaces of the Masters should be washed into the lake?
‘Celestial?’ It was an Ichorian bleak with horror and disgust. ‘An embassy has come demanding to see you.’
‘An embassy?’
‘Of the Great, Celestial.’
Carnelian watched them approaching, swaying on high ranga, immense in their black shrouds, their masks glinting from within their hoods like the sun through clouds. Ammonites scurried around them ladling a continuous carpet of blue fire before their feet. They came to a halt while still at some distance from him.
‘My Lords,’ he greeted them, coldly.
As they held up their hands to return his greeting, he saw the symbols painted on their pale skin. They were wearing the full ritual protection. One of them stood forward. ‘I am He-who-goes-before.’ He must have sensed Carnelian’s incredulity at such a claim, for he added: ‘Elected, yesterday, by the Clave in full session.’
Without the attendant command of the Red Ichorians, this honour seemed to Carnelian vainglorious. The Master raised his hand, pointing above Carnelian’s head at the smog wreathing the towers of the Blood Gate; the flash and scream of liquid fire. ‘For days all of Osrakum has watched smoke rising from the Canyon. Drifts of it have darkened the skies above the north-west coombs.’
Carnelian lost some composure as he realized that his father and his people must have been oppressed by these signs directly.
‘We have sent demands to the Labyrinth, but They have refused to grant any audience, nor deigned even a reply. So we have been put to the inconvenience of coming here ourselves. What in the names of the Two is happening here, my Lord?’
Carnelian was aware he had not been addressed as befitted his new blood-rank. Such an omission could only be intended as a slight. Perhaps it was an indication of how these Masters were reacting to his appearance. Aloof on their ranga and with the decorum and precaution of their purity, they looked down upon him in his debased, tainted filthiness. He felt nothing but contempt for them.
‘I came here in response to a report that the sartlar gathered outside Osrakum had swarmed into the City. When I arrived I found they had penetrated the Canyon. We do not know what drives them, but they pour towards our defences. Each day we destroy vast numbers of them, but there are always more. They are as numberless as leaves.’
Another of the Masters stepped forward. ‘Why have the legions not been summoned, my Lord, to drive this rabble away?’
‘All contact with the outer world has been broken,’ said Carnelian.
Two more Masters shifted. ‘All?’
The Master who claimed to be He-who-goes-before spoke before Carnelian could repeat his statement. ‘How long, Celestial, do you expect it will be before contact is re-established?’
Carnelian saw no reason to tell them his plans and made a gesture of indeterminacy. ‘The Wise have assured me the Blood Gate has enough naphtha to maintain the present levels of annihilation for many more weeks.’
‘We do not have weeks, Celestial. Soon famine will visit Osrakum.’
This was news to Carnelian.
‘It is inconceivable that these animals should pose such a threat to us,’ said one of the Masters.
Another turned his shadowed face on Carnelian. ‘Who brought this curse down on us?’
Carnelian wondered what the Masters would say were they to find out just how responsible he was for bringing the sartlar to Osrakum. ‘Everything that can be done, my Lords, is being done. Return to your coombs.’
Turning his back on them, he walked away towards the Blood Gate. They called out to him. His eyes filled with the spectacle of fire and smoke, ears assaulted by screaming flame-pipes, he soon forgot them.
He woke, suddenly. It was the middle of the night. He could not at first locate the reason he felt so alert. Then joy flared up in him. Silence. It was so quiet he could hear Fern breathing. He rose carefully, not wanting to wake him, then padded over to the shutters. They creaked as he opened them. He stepped out onto the balcony. Perfect blackness. Gazing towards the killing field he thought he could make out the mass of the Prow like a cave in the night. The tang of naphtha was underlaid by the dull stench of cooked meat and rotting. He could hear a delicate rustling like a million ants pouring across leaf litter. A warm body pressed against his back.
‘What’s happening?’ whispered Fern.
Carnelian hardly dared to voice his hope. ‘The sartlar are leaving.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know!’
Once more in Earth-is-Strong’s command chair. The creaking of the tower, the mutter of voices remote on other decks, the clink of brass: all these sounds seemed strange, alien. Beyond their little world, a deafening silence. How long was it since the flame-pipes had fallen silent? His ears still felt raw. It was as if the screaming of the flame-pipes had worn deep channels in his head that now, empty, ached.
Dawn was casting the shadow of the monster and her tower upon the brazen cliff of the closed gate before them. Carnelian glanced round, glad to see Fern there. He gave him a nod and was rewarded with a grin. A grinding of brass teeth shocked him back to staring through the screen. It was only the mechanisms working open the gate. Morning spilling through the widening gap illuminated more and more of the edge of the plateau of dead, where everything was eerily still.
They emerged from the corpse quagmire of the killing field into open ground. The sudden drop of ground level to relatively clean rock almost gave him vertigo. Before them stretched the Canyon, still inhabited by the night. A sudden fear possessed him. What if this was a trap? ‘Open fire!’ Arcing incandescence drove back the shadow. The liquid light sputtered and dimmed, leaving glimpses of the empty Canyon burned into Carnelian’s sight. As they lumbered on, he told himself his fears were groundless. A trap presupposed some strategic will directing the sartlar. He could not believe in that, even if he did not think them animals. But he could derive no hypothesis as to why they had left. Uneasy, he lit their way with sporadic bursts of naphtha burn.
They turned into another gloomy stretch. When at last they reached the second turn, Carnelian felt a hand on his shoulder and knew it was Fern come to stand behind him. He reached up to hold him there, even as the next section of the Canyon swung slowly into view. Its nearest portion was in darkness, but far away the morning slanted down to the Canyon floor, and there they saw, strung across the throat of the Canyon, the necklace of towers and curtain walls of the Green Gate. Carnelian felt Fern’s grip tighten and his heart beat faster as fierce hope rose in him of freedom.
On the ground, the ripping of the breach from the fabric of the Green Gate seemed an act of wanton destruction. Though the Canyon beyond appeared to be free of sartlar as far as its final turn, he had plugged the breach with dragons. The smoke from their chimneys was hazing the upper part of the gap. The plug seemed flimsy in comparison with the massive torn masonry on either side. He took in the gaping hollows of exposed chambers. These had spilled the debris of their walls and floors in a scree up which the Marula were clambering in their search for any live sartlar lurking on this side of the wall. Dead sartlar were plentiful.