When they came to a gateway guarded by more naked syblings, Carnelian became aware of a small group of lost children. No, homunculi, twelve of them, their faces hidden by their blinding masks.
‘You alone can save him,’ Right-Quentha whispered in his ear. ‘Prepare yourself,’ her sister said.
They opened a wound in the blackness through which light flooded. Carnelian put his hand on the stone lintel to steady himself. He felt the spiral under his hand. Then he let go of it and stepped into the blindingly bright heart of the Stone Dance of the Chameleon, still open to the sky, even as his stomach clamped, spit welling in his mouth at the charnel stench.
He almost crumpled under the assault of fetor. He would have run, if he had known where to run to. His eyesight returning allowed him to see a pale figure sitting stiffly on red earth. The knobs of its backbone, the shoulder blades seeming ready to tear through the sallow flesh. Skin disfigured with countless angry-looking, blue-lipped wounds. Bands around the swelling of the shaved head showed it must be wearing a mask. His arm across his nose and mouth, Carnelian was for a moment shocked that one corpse could so much pollute the air, but then he saw the stones that walled in that place; saw the things sagging, rotting in the man-shaped hollow in each stone. Green-black. The heads lolling back into the hollows were already more skull than face. Gashes over their bodies showed where the blood must have trickled down their skin, to gather in the hollows and dribble down the channels into the red earth. The slits left by their castrations had been torn open like vulvas by swellings forcing themselves out like babies’ heads, so that it seemed that the Grand Sapients had died in the act of giving birth.
‘Why did you do this?’ Carnelian breathed.
‘They lied,’ said the dead man at the centre of the Dance. ‘I had to force them to tell me the truth.’
With disgusted fascination, Carnelian crept round, wanting to look into Osidian’s face. He stopped when he saw the black, glassy profile. ‘What truth?’
The Obsidian Mask turned its distorting mirror to Carnelian. ‘That the sartlar are the Quyans.’
THE STONE DANCE OF THE CHAMELEON
Flesh endures longer than iron.
‘ The Sartlar are the Quyans…?’ repeated Carnelian, stunned .
‘The Wise have always known this,’ said Osidian, his voice wintry. ‘But, obsessed with their computations, they missed the real threat.’
‘They lacked the factor of my true birth.’
The Obsidian Mask turned its malice towards him. ‘Do not flatter yourself, my brother. Even once they had that factor, they found there was another, far greater, missing from their mosaic. Even as they died they held to their certainty. It was the inability of their simulations to predict the uncurling of events that made them powerless to effectively oppose them. What could explain the sartlar behaving as if directed by a single mind? Why, suddenly, are they capable of overthrowing their animal fear of flame that, for millennia, we have used to tame them?’
Carnelian shook his head. ‘But- if they are the Quyans-’
The dark mirror mask slid away, distorting in reflection a hideous corpse in a hollow. ‘Even the Quyans in their glory could not have withstood our legions.’
‘How…?’ Carnelian was struggling to grasp this shift in the bedrock of his reality.
‘When the plagues of the Great Death humbled them, we issued forth as conquerors. Perhaps it would have been better had we slain them all, but the land needed to be tilled and we desired to make them our slaves. To ensure our dominion over them, we forced them to build the roads that would contain them; the watch-towers to keep unsleeping vigilance over them. We raised the legions and perfected them. But, most of all, we wrote here the Law-that-must-be-obeyed.’ Osidian indicated the grim stones enringing them. ‘Its codicils described a system, independent of the hearts of those who would come after, that, relentlessly and without pity, would grind them down into such abject bestiality that it would become impossible for them to regain their previous state.’
Though Carnelian had felt something of the weight of the Law, had suffered himself and witnessed more suffering than he could bear to remember, he could not even begin to grasp the immensity of horror that had been inflicted upon the sartlar by the Masters and their Law.
His mind recoiled. It was too much. He veered away, protecting himself. ‘But does not this Law weigh down also upon the Chosen?’
Unexpectedly a chuckle came from behind the Obsidian Mask. ‘Chosen?’ It turned a little towards him. ‘It was not enough that the Quyans should forget what they had been; we too had to forget. So we hid this history even from ourselves, appointing these’ – he indicated the corpses around them – ‘as its guardians, and in a few generations we had forgotten it utterly.’
‘Why? Surely it is from our ignorance the current disaster has sprung?’
‘You don’t understand,’ Osidian said, with what seemed a groan of pain. ‘What we sought to forget was not their glory, but our shame.’
‘That our blood runs in the veins of the sartlar?’
Osidian hunched forward as if he bore the whole weight of time and disaster as a yoke across his neck. ‘Even when I excruciated them’ – his hand feebly indicated the corpses – ‘they would not tell me, until at last I prised open their minds with one of their drugs. You see, Carnelian,’ his tone strained, appeasing, ‘we were not always as we have believed ourselves to be.’
Carnelian felt desperate curiosity. The black mask gazed westwards to where smoke was still rising from the House of Immortality. ‘The Quyans brought their kings here. Within this circle they evoked the Creation through blood sacrifice. There, to the west, they entombed them to await their reawakening.’
As Carnelian grasped at what Osidian might mean, bleak realizations dawned on him. Death’s Gate, the Shadowmere, the Quays of the Dead. ‘This is the Isle of the Dead.’
Osidian’s head dropped again, as if the weight of the stone mask was too much for him to bear. Carnelian watched the smoke fraying into the morning sky. There, in the Quyan tombs, the House of Immortality, the Chosen mummified their own dead. He remembered that Quyan treasures were the most prized possessions of the Chosen. ‘We robbed their tombs.’ He frowned. ‘But then who are we?’ Revelation came upon him. He muttered the words he had once spoken in the Labyrinth: ‘Where do we get this obsession with death?’ The most secret books in the Library of the Wise were on embalming. ‘We were the keepers of the dead.’
Osidian nodded. ‘Glorious Osrakum was the necropolis of the Quyan kings.’
Carnelian, who had lived through the filth and horror of preparing the dead, was left, by this knowledge, feeling more unclean. ‘We are not descended from the Gods? Our forefathers were outcasts?’
‘Untouchables,’ Osidian spat out. ‘Chosen we were from among the people of the outer world. Those who were as pallid as corpses; who had the pale eyes of the people who long ago had come up from the sea seeking the Land of the Dead; who were sent here to tend the dead.’
Carnelian felt Osidian’s madness seeping into him. Disgust and shock and a feeling of coming adrift, of losing his footing in a flood. ‘But, still, we conquered them.’ This said still in some hope that the Gods had seen fit to raise the lowly to angelic heights.
Osidian groaned with anger. ‘The plague had brought our masters low.’
‘But why were we spared its ravages?’ Still Carnelian was casting around for some sign that providence had chosen them for greatness.