Osidian sank his head again between his shoulders as if he were some carrion crow. ‘The procedures for processing corpses had made us skilled in protecting ourselves from putrefaction.’
Carnelian recalled the elaborate precautions the Masters took before exposing themselves to the outer world. ‘The ranga, the ritual protection, our masks.’ He saw the links with the Law. ‘Wearing a mask was not only a precaution against contagion, but a means of separating us from and terrorizing the survivors.’
‘The Quyans wore masks only in death. To them it must have seemed as if the Dead themselves had risen from the Underworld to enslave them.’
Carnelian gazed at Osidian wearing his stone mask. Why was he still wearing it who could no longer have any illusions of his divinity? Carnelian’s heart answered him. There was perhaps another reason the keepers of the dead had worn their masks, as Osidian was doing: to hide their shame not only from their former masters, but even from themselves. Weariness and blackness overwhelmed him. ‘It is all a lie then.’
Osidian sprang up. ‘One that, had Legions confided it to me, I could have saved the Commonwealth!’
Carnelian understood then the real reason why Osidian had killed the Grand Sapients. ‘Search your heart, Osidian,’ he said, compassion softening his voice. ‘Even had he told you everything, would you really have turned back?’
Osidian stood for a moment, as if turned to stone, then sagged back to the earth. Even now Carnelian could not be certain that Osidian had faced up to what they had done. It was a flaw in him that he inflicted upon others what, in his heart, he really wanted to do to himself. Carnelian looked round at the twelve hollows. Not that the Wise were innocent. ‘Knowing this, why did they not fear the sartlar more?’
Osidian’s voice sounded like a boy’s when he spoke. ‘Because nothing that was happening made any sense to them. They believe- they believed their blindness protected them against the seductions of this world. For them, sight revealed only the mendacious surface of things and not the flows of reality beneath. It was these currents they sought to study and control.’ The black face came up. ‘For centuries they had been attempting to stop a power rising again; a power they had thought was, if not slain, at least in chains.’
Carnelian regarded him, feeling a tide rising in him. ‘What power?’
‘The third God.’
‘The third God?’ Carnelian asked, knowing already what Osidian would answer.
‘The Lady of the Red Land.’
Her red face broke into Carnelian’s mind with the shock of revelation. ‘The Mother,’ he breathed.
The eyeslits of the Obsidian Mask seemed to be scrutinizing him. ‘The Wise said that you would know Her; that you were one of Her major pieces in the game.’
Carnelian felt faint, knowing it to be true.
Osidian indicated the stones around them. ‘Those are the Black God’s; those the Green God’s. The eight red stones are Hers.’
And the eight red months and the ground upon which he sat that was a portion of the vast red land outside the Sacred Wall that was no longer guarded. Other impressions flashed into Carnelian’s mind. ‘Her pomegranates everywhere.’
‘What?’ Osidian said.
‘We shared one in Her Forbidden Garden.’
Osidian’s shock was revealed by the cast his shoulders took. ‘Her garden?’
‘Forbidden to men.’
‘Except, perhaps those who serve Her.’
‘The urns,’ Carnelian gasped. Everything seemed so sickeningly clear. ‘The Three Gates.’
Osidian nodded. ‘The Quyans believed Osrakum to be her womb. The Pillar of Heaven the cord with which she nurtured the sky.’
Carnelian gazed up to where its bright shaft was lost in the morning light. ‘Why did we forget Her?’
‘Her power was great in the Land. When we closed the Gates we turned our back on Her. We feared Her. We feared Her revenge and so we built the Gates to keep Her out. Not just spatially, but in our minds. Of this even the Wise are not certain. It seems, perhaps, there was in Osrakum already alive a vestige of an ancient heresy of duality.’
Carnelian contemplated how the Father and the Son might have become the Twins. Osidian and Molochite. He, as the third brother, made the Two once again Three. Carnelian felt a rush of emotion that almost choked him. ‘She was always there in my dreams. She brought me here.’ He saw the angry red scar about Osidian’s neck and felt his own itching and touched it. ‘She brought us both here.’
He clawed at the red earth. It had been black. He looked to the edges of the Dance and saw there what remained of the moss and black earth that had covered up the red.
He sank to Her ground. ‘What now?’
The black mask glanced round at the stones. ‘They tried to buy their lives with a vision. That, taking their elixir, I might escape with them into the far future. The sartlar threat will subside naturally. Those the famine does not destroy might, perhaps, become true men again, but, if so, far from here. The Red Land will become a terrible desert that shall protect Osrakum more completely than the Sacred Wall. Eventually, they believed, the Land will come back to life. When the time is ripe, we would emerge from the chrysalises of our millennial sleep.’
Osidian’s voice had grown stronger as he spun this vision in Carnelian’s mind, the words reverberating from the stones. In the silence that followed, Carnelian hung half entranced, half in horror.
Osidian, shaking his head, brought them both back to earth. ‘Though I sought to conquer the world, I will not countenance lingering like a ghost, rebuilding with infinite patience the world I helped destroy.’ He reached behind his head and loosed the bands that held his mask on, then leaned forward to rest it in his palm. Carefully he laid the mask on the red earth. The pale face revealed, Carnelian hardly recognized. Lines of suffering had aged it; its eyes were as lifeless as stones.
‘You may not believe this, but I did seek to build; even though all I have ever done is to destroy; even those things I most loved.’ His sad eyes fell upon Carnelian.
Osidian frowned. ‘I choose to die with the only world I know or wish to know.’
Carnelian was overcome by a surge of rage. ‘Not everything or everyone needs to die! Can you think of no one but yourself?’
Pity cooled his anger. Osidian was a broken man. But he still had some power left. Carnelian sat down beside him. ‘Will you help me save something from this?’
As Osidian gazed at him, lost, Carnelian began explaining his plan of escape. Osidian seemed puzzled as if he could not grasp it. Carnelian did not need his understanding, only his compliance. He was about to explain to Osidian the part he would have to play, when he found himself recalling the homunculi he had passed when he entered the Dance, huddled like abandoned children. The flesh-tithe children! He felt again the ache he had always felt when Ebeny had told him of when she had been such a child. He lived again the agony of the Tribe beneath the Crying Tree as they said goodbye to their children. How many hearts in the greater world ached for their lost children? Then his heart swelled up as he became possessed by a mad, glorious yearning. Logic fought against it, but he could not, would not, let it go. He saw Osidian, weary beyond measure, like an old man, all his failures crushing him. ‘Help me save the flesh-tithe children.’
Osidian frowned at him as if he was unsure he could mean what he had said.
‘Help me take them with me.’
Osidian looked incredulous. ‘All of them?’ As he saw that was, indeed, what Carnelian meant, he began to list the obvious and insurmountable obstacles to such a plan. Carnelian took Osidian’s hands in his, looked into his eyes. ‘The dreams I have followed are not yet wholly spent.’
There was a hardness of doubt and failure and horror in Osidian’s face. His heart seemed almost to have turned to stone, but something of love passed between them and Osidian began to cry, and Carnelian cried too, for the hope there was in Osidian’s eyes of at least that much redemption.