The door opened fully and Poppy was there, looking past him, blushing. He was aware of Krow shuffling, but Carnelian’s eyes were all for the small woman standing waiting for them.
‘Krow’s here, Aunty. Can I talk to him?’
The little woman gave a slow nod, her attention on Carnelian as he advanced towards her. She knelt before he could reach her. ‘Master.’
Carnelian frowned, angry, upset, but respecting her wish for decorum, in some ways welcoming it as a way to keep his feelings under control. His instinct was to rush forward, to kneel before her, to kiss her, but he was no longer a child. Looking down at her bowed head, he saw with a kind of anguish how grey her hair had become.
‘Please get up,’ he said and stooped to help her rise, her smell stinging his eyes with tears.
She gazed up at him. She was so much smaller than he remembered, but with the same dear face, a little more lined, and the same bright eyes shining out between the legs of her tattoo. He stooped again, embraced her, resisted the desire to pick her up, to show her his strength. Now, that felt inappropriate. He kissed her face and she kissed his, then, as he unbent, she took his hands and lifted them to her cheek, stealing wet-eyed looks at him. They nodded at each other, little nods to punctuate their taking stock of each other.
‘It seems we’ve both survived.’
He grinned through his tears at her. ‘Yes, little mother.’
She warmed at his words, even as they both settled back into the comfort of their love for each other. Then he remembered Fern. Turning, still holding Ebeny’s hands, Carnelian saw him standing stunned. ‘This is-’
‘Fern. I know…’ she said. Carnelian saw the pain in her face. At first he was confused, then it became clear: of course Poppy had told her everything. Ebeny knew they had come from the Koppie, the home the childgatherer had torn her from. She knew of their years there, of the massacre of her tribe, of Akaisha, her sister.
She squeezed his hands then released them, moving past him, approaching Fern, tears glistening down creases in her cheeks. ‘Sister’s son,’ she whispered, in Ochre, opening her arms for him.
Fern gazed at her, a forlorn child. Carnelian made himself blind, not wanting to see him so vulnerable. Fern knelt as he entered her embrace. She turned enough for Carnelian to see her eyes, wild, speaking to him. He gave a nod, slipped away, aware of her small body trying to comfort Fern’s sobbing.
While he waited for Fern, Carnelian summoned the homunculus. When the little man arrived, he confirmed he had enough knowledge of the metallurgy of the Wise to help restore the ladder to the Marula’s Lower Reach.
Fern emerged from his meeting with Ebeny transformed. He smiled, he laughed a lot and cried too in Carnelian’s arms. He seemed much more the man he had been before grief had overwhelmed him.
Carnelian had need of him in the days that followed. He and his father made plans for the attempt to escape Osrakum. No one would be forced to go, and only those who had been with them on the island would be invited. Carnelian asked many himself. Tain and Keal approached the others. Most of the older people chose to stay, claiming the Master and the household were the only world they knew. When the young lit up, eager for the adventure, their parents exchanged sad glances with each other, and with Carnelian. As well as they, he knew how quickly innocent hope could be crushed by bleak reality. Still, they put on smiles, so as not to take the light from their children’s eyes, urging them to go, comforting them when they realized they were going to be leaving their grandparents behind.
Carnelian had guessed what Ebeny’s choice would be. That same determination was in her face as when he had begged her to go with him across the sea. His father would not go, and she would not leave him behind. Carnelian bowed his head, accepting her decision. When he looked up again, he saw her tears through his own. They clasped hands as if holding off for a moment their final separation.
The pain of the coming partings spread through the household. It was as if those who were leaving were already on the boats; those left behind lining the quay holding their hands, grips tearing as the boat pulled away. His brothers too would be losing their father and also their mother without hope of seeing either again. Child and man fused in each one of them. One wanting to cling, the other knowing he had to pull away. The unbearable had to be borne. Their burden was made lighter when Grane announced he would stay behind to look after their parents. He did not have to tell them why: they could see his stone eyes.
Inevitably, these partings, the gathering of stores that the Master had had the foresight to set aside, all this brought back to many the destruction of the Hold and the famine that those who had been left behind had had to endure. Still, even those who had known terrible hunger gladly gave up what food there was for their children to take with them.
The first morning after Carnelian had appeared at the coomb, he and Fern had watched the boats bringing the Masters back from the Gates. After that, nothing disturbed the eerie calm of the Hidden Land except, sometimes, a torn banner of smoke drifting across the sky from the Valley of the Gate.
On the third day after they had reached the coomb, Fern spotted a pale grain where the carved pebble beach touched the Skymere. Something had washed up on the mud.
The two of them, alone on the mud, an immense white corpse at their feet. Already bloating, its greasy marble was slashed with blue-lipped wounds. The hands had been hacked off, the face sliced away, leaving a mask of blood. Carnelian recalled, with a deep resonant horror, the red faces in his dreams. It was a Master.
He gazed out across Osrakum. A beautiful morning. The sapphire waters of the lake. The emerald Yden. The jade hump of the Labyrinth. The pure green slopes that concealed the Plain of Thrones. To the north, coombs were revealed by the rising sun as jewels.
At his feet, the water level had fallen enough to reveal a band of greened-black rock that edged the Skymere as if it were a vast well. He shuddered at what might be revealed were the lake entirely to drain.
He looked once more upon the corpse. It shocked him to the core, this mutilated Master. It was not just that he felt in his gut horror at the tortures the man had had to endure, but at who it was must have done this. He gazed back at the palaces piling up behind him, porticoes and friezes and, among the columns and pierced marble, all kinds of openings, each seeming as blind as a Sapient’s eyepit. Yet, from any one, a Master could be looking down; worse, one of their slaves.
Carnelian removed the blanket he had thrown on and covered the corpse with it. Its border was quickly darkened by the stream winding down from under the skirt of carved pebbles. He watched it washing the noisome liquids leaking from the corpse down to pollute the lake.
There were signs that the drop in water level was slowing, but they dare not set off until it stopped altogether. The sky was a clear blue, untainted by smoke. Though he had been expecting that for days, it still seemed shocking.
‘The attacks on the Blood Gate have stopped,’ Fern said.
Carnelian nodded. ‘Soon it’ll be time to go.’ He saw the relief on Fern’s face and allowed himself to see past his grim determination to follow his plan, through to the hope there was in this sign. He glanced up towards the Plain of Thrones. Was Osidian still there, in the Stone Dance of the Chameleon? He became aware Fern was looking at him, but decided not to notice. He was not clear enough about how he felt to talk about it. He indicated the corpse with his chin. ‘We need to do something about this.’
That night, one of the coombs on the far shore of the Skymere lit up, luridly, as if it were a fire in a grate. When morning came a lazy column of smoke could be seen uncurling into the sky. More smoke seemed to be rising from a neighbouring coomb, but its origin was concealed from them by a buttress of the Sacred Wall. Bloody rebellion was spreading around the shore of Osrakum.