His shadow died as he moved away from the light that was streaming through the open door behind them. He glanced round to make sure Fern and the others were still following him. By the time they reached an arch standing all alone, his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. He remembered seeing it before and put his hand out to touch it as he had then. Faces as vague under his fingers as they were to his eyes. The faces of corpses submerged in water. His hand recoiled. He could smell the blood rust on his fingertips and wiped them down his cloak. The ghost of an inscription ran around the iron curve. Unreadable beyond a vague whispering in his mind. He stood back. It was not an arch, but a ring partially embedded in the ground. If it were a glyph it would read as ‘death’. He frowned. In Vulgate, his people referred to this fortress as Death’s Gate. Reluctant to walk through it, he moved round it, gesturing to Fern, Sthax and the others to do the same.
They came at last to a barrier Carnelian knew must be the door that gave entry into Osrakum. As he placed his hand upon its cold surface, the whole world gave a shudder as if it had been struck by some immense hammer. Again, the sound shook the air and ground. A massive bell was tolling, that was soon joined by more, until it seemed to Carnelian the world must convulse itself to pieces. Clamping his hands over his ears, he sought some explanation why the ammonites were ringing the Black Gate bells in this cacophonous manner. Were they sending an alarum to warn of the imminent breach of Osrakum’s sanctity? Or perhaps the warning was for their masters, the Wise. He shuddered as the feeling rose in him that the bells were announcing the ending of the world. Panic welled up in him, he felt trapped, buried alive. His hands fell from his ears and began feverishly scrabbling across the wall in front of him. Shapes stubbed his fingers, grazed his skin, but he kept on pulling, pushing, twisting, seeking anything that would free them from this tomb. His hand alighted on a wheel that turned under pressure. He forced it round and was rewarded by the quivering of some mechanism stirring into life. Several percussive shudders made him imagine counterweights rising, falling. A hairline crack divided the blackness to his left. It widened blindingly.
When his sight returned, he gasped. He heard other gasps around him. He forgot the bells. The Valley of the Gate fell away from them in a shadow that spilled out across the Skymere and the causeway to lap at the edge of a vision. Emerald shimmer and dance. An achingly beautiful dream – the Yden. For a moment Carnelian was lost again in that garden where he and Osidian had played as innocently as children. It seemed his heart had stopped at the beginning of the world. He dared not breathe out lest that should be enough to eddy that vision like smoke. His lungs forced the air out. The vision remained, but seemed changed. His gaze took in the whole vast lotus of Osrakum. Exquisite bloom that fed upon the life of millions. A flower whose roots had turned so many into corpses that soon it too must wilt and die.
The vision lost its hold on him. Fern at his side was real and solid. Carnelian reached out and felt the living warmth in him. His touch released Fern from enchantment.
Carnelian smiled and spoke, in a low voice. ‘There’s still much to do before the darkness comes.’
He led them onto the road that ran along the Cloaca rim. As they marched on, the clamour of the bells slowly dulled enough for them to hear the water rushing below. He stopped once to look over, but could see nothing other than a blackness that made it seem bottomless. Still, the sediment of his dreams stirred in him.
The roaring had been growing louder for some time when, on their right, the ground fell away into the immense spillway, upon which everything depended. He scrutinized its further edge where the dyke rose that held back the waters of the Skymere. The dyke was cut with many slots, from each of which tumbled a waterfall. In those slots were the sluices that were controlling the overflow of the lake into the swirling, threshing surface of the spillway. What Carnelian was interested in was the difference in height between that surface and that of the lake. He heaved a sigh of relief as he judged that at least part of his plan was possible.
Ammonites came to greet Carnelian as he walked onto the dyke. Most fell to their knees, but a few were brave enough to approach him, ducking bows. One spoke up, telling him, apologetically, that he must have come the wrong way; indicating with vague gestures where, behind him, flights of steps led down to the lake and the bone boats, but not daring the impertinence to tell him this, that all the Seraphim knew. ‘This way, Seraph, lie only the sluices.’
‘I have an interest to behold their operation.’
Reluctantly, they led him back the way they had come, towards the first pair of arches. As he followed them, a spark of light caught in the corner of his eye. Turning, he saw a second pulsing in the bright belly of the Labyrinth mound. Perhaps, as he had approached the dyke, these ammonites had had time to slip an alarm to their masters. He did not care. The Wise had more pressing matters to occupy their minds and, if they did not, then what matter? They would find out what he was up to soon enough.
Approaching the first slot, Carnelian was surprised how much bigger it was than he had expected. He ignored an ammonite giving an explanation, and craned over the edge to look down. A bronze sluice at either end controlled the flow through the slot.
Everyone was watching him. He indicated to Sthax the cables that held the nearest sluice. ‘Hack those through.’
The Maruli, frowning, nodded and, soon, paying no heed to the shrill protests of the ammonites, he and the other warriors were chopping at the cables. Carnelian returned to the edge. The first cable snapped with a twang, the second soon after. Ponderously, counterweights began to rise; squealing, the sluice fell, releasing a furious roar and gush that quickly abated as the slot emptied. The sluice at its other end was still holding back the Skymere. Carnelian turned to Sthax.
‘Send your men to cut them all.’
From the top of the northern Turtle Steps, Carnelian gazed across the Skymere to where shadow, having consumed the Ydenrim, was eating its way over the lagoons. He swung the clapper into the bell and, as the sound shimmered the air, he narrowed his eyes, trying to see any sign of a bone boat answering its call. Twilight over the water hid any movement. Fern approached, Sthax and the Marula straggling in his wake. Carnelian’s ears, recovered from the ringing, allowed him to hear the roar rising from the spillway, into which the Skymere was tumbling in a flood so violent that the more than twenty separate falls were uniting into a frothing foaming mass that ran the whole length of the sluice dyke. He frowned, imagining what chaos and destruction his flood would unleash upon the City at the Gates and its sartlar infestation. Now all that remained to do was to wait until the lake and the spillway reached a common level.
At last they pushed out into open water, Carnelian and Fern standing on either side of the bony prow. Ahead, shadow had killed the emerald shimmer of the lagoons and was beginning to edge up towards the Forbidden Garden and the Labyrinth. Soon only the Pillar of Heaven would rise gleaming from the blackness and even that must eventually succumb. Looking back along the length of the bone boat, Carnelian had to rid himself of the notion the deck was crowded with that same shadow made flesh. These Marula had been the agents of a malign force, but he was in no position to blame them for that. Whatever the Masters maintained, he believed the eyes anxiously looking at him were as human as his own.
He gazed past the stern. It must be because the lake was so immense that its surface showed no sign of the maelstrom where it was flooding into the spillway. The second boat was nudging away from the stepped slope. When the first boat had arrived, a kharon had told him that his vessel was not big enough to take them all. As they had waited for the second, he had imagined the one-eyed men struggling to launch the vessel from a boathouse. He recalled lying captive in one such boathouse with Osidian before they had been packed into funerary urns. It seemed some other life than his, but in his heart a desire stirred to see Osidian again. Only when the ferrymen had demanded payment had Carnelian realized he had no jade rings. At a loss, he had turned to the Marula, had considered using force, but then had had an inspiration. He had asked two of the warriors for their swords and given one to each ferryman. Even though they were masked, he had sensed their shock. Each of the iron blades in their hands was worth more than the boat they steered; probably more than all the boats of the kharon and their lives too. He was glad that such economics would not survive the Masters.