‘Why have you come here?’ she said.
Carnelian tried to find something artful to say, but only the truth came out. ‘I’m following a dream.’
Her brows eclipsed her eyes as she frowned. Her lower lip consumed the upper. Carnelian wanted to catch her emotion before it sank beyond reach. Frantically, he tried to sort images in his mind. She was slipping away from him. ‘The dream came…’ he said, saw her red face, read the branding, ‘from the earth.’
As her face uncrumpled, the brand became circular again. ‘All are clay in Her hands.’
Enough tension left Carnelian’s chest for him to be able to take a deep breath. It was a start. He regarded her, trying to find the next step. ‘What brought you here?’
Kor squinted at him. ‘You.’
Carnelian thought he could see a path. ‘You mean, because I freed the sartlar from the land?’
Kor’s mouth sagged open, leaving Carnelian uncertain of his footing. He explained the dream that had led him to free the sartlar. As he spoke her head sank into her chest. He realized something. ‘You didn’t know it was me.’ Why should she? All she could know was that a command had come to her people from a watch-tower.
The sartlar raised her head and Carnelian saw a glinting in the grooves around her missing nose. Was she crying? His shock that she might be made him realize he had still been thinking of her as some kind of animal. It made him angry at himself that, in spite of everything that had happened, he was still that much a Master. However mutilated, this was a woman.
‘Clay in Her hands,’ she said.
Carnelian sensed his news had somehow lightened her burdens. ‘What did you mean… before?’
‘Your blood,’ she said, grimacing away the tears.
‘My blood…?’ He was confused.
She frowned. ‘You don’t understand? We believed you to be the Dead.’
‘The Dead…?’
‘Our Dead, whom the Horned God had led up from the Underworld to enslave the Living.’
Carnelian stared at her. ‘The Masters-?’ Seeping insight overtook his tongue. Her words were a shadowy reflection of the revelations Osidian had given him in the Stone Dance of the Chameleon. The same events seen, murkily, from the point of view of the sartlar, from that of the Quyans.
‘When you appeared unmasked…’
As Kor gazed at him in wonder, he glimpsed the child she might once have been.
She squeezed her eyes closed, grimacing again, shaking her head. ‘The monstrosity we imagined you hid behind your masks from shame.’ Then her eyes opened. ‘But such beauty…?’
Carnelian was struck by the irony: those that the beautiful considered monstrous, believing the beautiful monstrous. Of course the sartlar had been right in so many ways.
She was scowling. ‘Clouds darkened my mind. The world had been turned inside out. When you claimed to be angels, we had had no doubt that you lied.’ She appraised Carnelian. ‘You even showed compassion. I came to believe that perhaps it wasn’t you who were cruel, but the overseers and their masters.’ Her blistered lips curled into a sneer. ‘The other Master showed me otherwise.’
Carnelian knew she meant Osidian.
‘He proved to me that your beauty was indeed a lie; that, though you had the power to take on a pleasing form, beneath it you were being consumed by worms. Things became once again as they had always been. And how could the Living ever hope to fight the Dead?’
Understanding broke over Carnelian like an icy wave. ‘My blood.’
From under her brows, Kor regarded him with baleful eyes. ‘I tasted it.’
‘You discovered we were just men.’
Her voice flat, clipped: ‘I discovered you could be killed.’
So much seemed clear to Carnelian then. The purpose of the Law, the Wise, what the true Great Balance had been. He saw in his mind’s eye how the world had whirled into destruction. He was appalled. ‘From a single drop of blood?’
‘It took more than that spark to ignite our rebellion. When I came up to Makar, of those of my people I found there, few believed me. As for our multitudes across the Land, they were beyond my reach. Generations it would’ve taken to pass on this new creed.’
Carnelian saw what he and Osidian had done to make the disaster inevitable. Gathering the sartlar together. Marching them to the heart of the Commonwealth, and there destroying not so much the legions as the Masters’ aura of invincibility.
‘When, in obedience to the Mother, you gathered up Her Children, my creed found many willing listeners.’ Her face became a dead mask. ‘Those who opposed me, we fed upon.’
Carnelian must have shown his disgust, for she lashed out: ‘Does the Master forget who it was taught us to feed on man-flesh?’
Hatred rose in him against the ugly, filthy creature. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You really do not know?’
It was her surprise that tamed him. His hatred was a defence against the realization rising in him with the vomit: that render was sartlar flesh. He struck the floor with his knees, pumped his stomach out in acidic convulsions.
‘So you’ve eaten from the same pot,’ she said, gleefully. ‘Did you really believe it was only the barbarians who paid you flesh tithe?’
Carnelian wiped his mouth, recalling the mounds of render sacs, glimpsing something of the scale of horror she was revealing to him. Looking up he watched her rage cool until she seemed to be wearing a leather mask.
‘I was born in the rendering caves. It was well after I grew into a woman that I first breathed the Mother’s sweet air. Mostly it was the old who were sent down to us, but also “troublemakers”, rebels, any and all who showed any spirit of defiance. The overseers even sent us children.’ Her glassy eyes slid to meet his gaze. ‘We tried to drug them before smashing out their brains with rocks.’ Her nose cavity changed shape. ‘I’m never free of the stench of their cooking.’
Carnelian cradled his stomach, tears and phlegm running together down his face. He withstood the contempt in her eyes.
‘How did you expect us to stay alive on the march to the Mountain? And on what do you imagine we feed now?’
He wiped his eyes, his nose, lost in horror, desperate to find light somewhere. ‘The meat from the dragons?’
Kor stared at him, then threw her head back and let forth a raucous coughing noise he realized was laughter. The convulsions slowed, and she lowered her head, shaking it. ‘That was barely enough to provide each of us with one meagre meal. Even the City’s inhabitants only fed us for a single day.’ She frowned. ‘We can’t escape hunger, nor do we wish to. Our Mother’s dying. She’s been dying since you enslaved us. Only our love and care have slowed Her decline. Still, each year She’s given us less.’
‘Surely some of the Land can still be saved?’
Kor glanced at him with a misery beyond sadness. ‘Too late. She turns to dust. Once we’ve consumed what lies here at Her heart, our dust will mix with Hers.’
‘Surely you must want something to survive? What about your children?’
As she turned away, he glimpsed a gleam of madness in her eyes. ‘We consumed them all,’ she whispered. ‘I, their mother, made my people do it. I asked them why they didn’t wish to spare their little ones more suffering.’ She gave him a desperate, furtive glance. ‘I feared they were so tired of killing, of dying, that they might give up, settle down to starve to death or attempt to find survival’ – her huge hands flailed the air – ‘somewhere.’ Her gaze fixed predaciously on Carnelian, her face filled with disgust. ‘So I stoked up their hatred. Now they hate me, but they hate you more.’ She leaned closer and spat words at Carnelian with her filthy breath. ‘We shall all die, but first I’ll rid the world of your cancer.’