She subsided, became just a strange, misshapen, mutilated woman. Carnelian was too weary for strategy and so let his heart speak. ‘But what will be left of that world?’
Her madness abated; Kor gazed at him with human eyes. She shrugged. ‘The lands beyond?’
‘The barbarians…’
Kor shrugged again.
Carnelian put his trust in his certainty that she was a woman, with a woman’s heart. ‘I have their children here.’
She looked at him, strangely still.
‘I brought their flesh tithe out from the Mountain. Thousands of children.’
Tightness had spread to buckle the upper curve of her branding. He held her old woman’s eyes. ‘Let them go.’
Kor chewed her upper lip, her eyes lensed with tears. He watched her face, breathlessly, as it betrayed the turmoil in her heart. Then, at last, she nodded and joy burst out through him as tears.
She turned. ‘Take them with you.’
‘Me?’ He had expected to pay for this boon with his life.
She gazed at him, seeming blind. He dared more. ‘Some of my people came with me.’ She was not saying no. ‘And some Marula…’ Her frowning made him quickly add, ‘whom I freed from their masters the Oracles.’
‘Take them all,’ she said. ‘The Children of the Earth shall show you mercy who have never been shown it themselves.’
Her eyes turned to glass and Carnelian judged his audience was at an end. He rose, turned away.
‘Master?’
Heart beating, he looked round.
‘How did you arrive here?’
At first Carnelian was confused, then he remembered the boats, remembered the water gate they had had to leave raised. His instinct was to lie, but it was a price that must be paid. He hardened his heart against the people in Osrakum. ‘We came by boat from the lake within the Mountain.’
Kor stared as if she could see that far. ‘Our legends speak of water the Dead have to cross.’
Carnelian waited a little, then turned away. His joy at what he had achieved was leavened with horror at the fate of those he had delivered to Mother Death.
‘Is that you, Carnie?’ came a voice from a clump of shadows on the road. He told Fern it was. Lumpen shapes surrounded Carnelian. ‘She’s let us go,’ he said to them. They grumbled and for a moment he did not believe they were going to let him through, but then they shuffled aside.
‘What’s happening?’ demanded Fern.
Carnelian closed in on his voice, gripped him, felt Fern tense then relax as he embraced him, found his mouth and kissed him. He threw his cloak around them both.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me?’ Fern said into his neck.
Feeling his warmth against him, Carnelian decided there was no reason to burden him unnecessarily. ‘They’re going to let us pass.’
‘How?’
‘They don’t care about us.’
‘All of us, the children too?’
Carnelian heard the incredulity in Fern’s voice and hesitated before answering with a nod. His encounter with Kor already seemed an implausible dream. He remembered her tears. ‘All of us.’
Carnelian came awake, shivering. Cold had penetrated to his bones. He smiled as Fern snuggled into him. The sky was greying in the gap between the sombre, leaning mass of the Iron House and the vague blackness of the Sacred Wall. He regarded that mountainous mass. Within lay the Land of the Dead. He frowned, trying to focus on what he had left back there, but it already seemed a fairytale. Even the mist rising from the water in front of him seemed more substantial. He watched the pale edge of dawn. A new day with hope of life that raised his spirits so that he no longer cared about the cold.
His muscles tensing must have woken Fern. ‘What…?’ He saw the intense look on Carnelian’s face, slipped his chin free of the edge of the cloak and followed his gaze. The flood-lake shore curved away, the dry land beyond was textured by a vast encampment. Between it and the water the shoreline was encrusted with rafts and all manner of makeshift boats.
On the edge of the road they sat hunched and shrouded though the sun was still low and they welcomed its heat. Carnelian in particular wanted to conceal his height, his pale skin. He did not want to needlessly provoke the sartlar. He gazed at his feet, kneading his toes. When he had decided to stay by the Iron House, he had been relieved that Fern insisted on remaining with him. They had reassured each other that, finding them gone, Keal, or Tain, or Poppy, or Krow would have the sense to march the children south towards them. Carnelian had not wanted to go and fetch them because he feared that what hope there was for them all depended on him; depended on his tenuous link with Kor.
His gaze was drawn back to the Iron House, as shocking now as when the rising sun had revealed it. Molochite’s black chariot was now a furious red. It was hard not to believe it a sign that the Mother had claimed the chariot for Herself. An angry marker at the very edge of Her earth defiant against the flood, but also the place where the Horned God had died with the children of the Great. The womb tomb in his dream.
He watched the crowd milling its duller reds around the rusty ruin and pouring in and out of its door in a constant, frantic, anthill activity. It soothed him to watch, for he needed to believe that this red tower was the centre of their swarm. For if Kor were not their queen…? He shuddered and curled forward until his chin nearly touched the stone. His slitted eyes slipped eastwards from the broken wheel of the chariot. Water clotted with debris lapped at the feverish raft-building along the shore. Everywhere, trails of sartlar were filtering down to the water edge, filling pots, staggering back burdened with the filthy stew. To quench the thirst of… Carnelian could not help following the water carriers away from the shore. His heart raced. As far as the horizon, the land teemed with spindly life that seemed to him not people, nor even sartlar, but only a voracious plague of man-eating vermin.
As the sun rose higher, they grew increasingly worried about the children. Fern was the first to rise to gaze north. Carnelian joined him, feeling too tall. At first they could only see the heat hazing above the road, then, far away, that something was dulling its incandescence.
Three figures came ahead of the children. By their face tattoos, Carnelian recognized two of them as of his tyadra and guessed the man shrouded in their midst must be one of his brothers. All three seemed to be staring at the sartlar multitude. Carnelian did not greet them, but waited until they came close before opening his cowl.
‘Carnie,’ exclaimed the central figure, pushing back his hood so that they could see it was Tain. ‘Thank the Gods,’ he said, his eyes flicking anxiously back to the sartlar.
‘I’ve arranged safe passage,’ Carnelian said.
His brother stared at him, frowning. ‘How-?’
Carnelian interrupted him with questions about the dispositions of the children and the others. He nodded as Tain explained.
‘There’s nothing like enough of us if things should turn nasty,’ said the youth.
Carnelian nodded. ‘We can’t do anything about that. What we can do is keep them under control. We need to get through as quickly and quietly as we can.’
Standing alone in the shadow of the Iron House, Carnelian watched them file past, shuffling, scuffling. Sometimes a child’s voice would rise, but would be quickly hushed. Children filled the road from side to side, except where they had to pour around the chariot. The ant tide of sartlar clambering in and out through its door had been pushed into a narrow corridor running to and from the nearest ramp. He hardly breathed, longing for the march to reach open road. Fern and the vanguard were already lost in the haze to the south, but the river of children still stretched back as far the other way.