He lay dazed, feeling thunder and the detonations through his ribs and jaw. He pushed himself up. Fire spirits uncurled like serpents, spun like acrobats. Fern’s voice drew him. Carnelian could see him dwarfed by the pillars of smoke, in the path of a blade of quivering light. He lunged towards him. Felt heat peeling his skin, turning his eyes to leather. In front of him Fern arched his back as the flame roared towards him. His hair was crisping. He danced and twitched in a shower of sparks. He threw his arms up to deflect the light and screamed. Carnelian reached out for him, gazing into the sun. He clutched his body. Pulled its weight onto him.
Slumped under what was left of Fern, Carnelian staggered away from the inferno.
BARGAINS
Sexual attraction is a dangerous and chaotic force. If we were not free of it the mirror-like clarity of our thought would be stirred to opacity. Though this force cannot be excised from the Chosen it can and must be controlled. The incarceration of fertile females, while it ensures the accuracy of the blood calculus, as importantly constrains the sexual force between the genders to run along channels that we control and supervise. The fraction of the force that remains at least partially unconstrained between females within a forbidden house is a small and measurable factor. Far more dangerous is the fraction that remains unconstrained between males and for which no effective system of control has yet been devised. This free sexuality is to be considered dangerous in the extreme. It has the potential to severely disrupt the astrological calculus with the consequence that our ability to project our thought into the future could become fatally compromised.
A sickening odour of cooked meat was wafting over him as he rolled with the gentle pace. A sinking feeling, then cool hands lifting him. Carnelian rolled his head and saw Sthax. He smiled.
The profile of the rock under his back was forcing him to lie a little twisted. In the dim light he could just make out a ceiling of fractured stone. He was waking from another awful dream. Was he still among the Lepers? He jerked as he remembered Fern burning in the flames. The movement released a stinging pain on his arms, his shoulders, his cheek. Enduring it he rolled over and saw a familiar, small shape stooping. ‘Where?’
It turned, and was Poppy, her face in the moonlight blank with fear. She rushed to him. ‘How do you feel?’
‘Fern?’
A grimace squeezed tears from her eyes.
Carnelian sat up, reeled. ‘Not dead?’
Poppy shook her head, shrugged, tried a smile. She helped him get up. He leaned on her as he took some steps to where a body was lying naked on the rock. It had Fern’s face with lips blistered and hair burned away, but it was not his body. What lay there was swollen. Carnelian fell to his knees beside him and dared to touch him. Fern’s left arm had the texture of dead leaves. Carnelian edged in close to peer at his face. He winced at the cooked smell coming off his flesh.
Poppy knelt on the other side of Fern. ‘We’ve poured water on his burns. We don’t know what else to do.’
He glanced up and saw her despair. Then back down at Fern’s face. He put his ear to Fern’s mouth. ‘He breathes.’
He straightened up, staring, stunned by the disaster. A small inner voice said: Are you surprised?
Poppy was there in front of him. ‘You’re burned too.’
Carnelian looked down at his arms. They stung. His robe was charred, but the skin beneath seemed unbroken. He glanced back at Fern.
‘You saved him. You brought him out of the fire. We brought you here.’
‘We?’
‘Marula.’
‘Sthax?’
Poppy nodded. ‘He was one of them.’
Carnelian looked around him at the cave they were in.
A shadow loomed over them. ‘What now, Master?’
It was Morunasa. Carnelian was overcome by a surge of rage. ‘Why ask me?’
‘The Master won’t speak to me.’
Carnelian rose and saw shadowy forms scattered through the cave. ‘Where is he?’
Morunasa walked off and Carnelian followed him. As they wound through the cave, scared faces turned up to watch them pass. One man whimpered, another embraced him with a long, trembling arm. Leaving them behind, they came to the mouth of the cave. The moonlight made the Pass seem a delicate picture engraved on glass. Osidian, leaning against a rock, seemed part of it.
Carnelian moved round to stand in front of him. Osidian’s gaze rose. ‘You countermanded my order.’
Carnelian felt sick. ‘What?’
‘You sent the Marula back.’
Carnelian groaned. ‘Do you really imagine the aquar would have ridden through that firestorm?’
Osidian glanced at Morunasa, who was making no attempt to hide his resentment of their use of Quya. ‘I would have thought it would suit you to have the Marula dead.’
‘I no longer know what I want.’
Osidian nodded as if this were some great wisdom. ‘It is time to admit defeat.’
Carnelian stared at him. It felt as if the last prop holding him up had been pulled away. Though he had never believed in Osidian’s plan, opposition to it had defined his own. ‘So that is it, you are simply going to give up?’
Osidian glanced up the Pass. ‘I will wait here for Aurum. I want to die in Osrakum.’
Carnelian looked at him with contempt. ‘Never a thought for anyone but yourself.’
Osidian looked around as if wounded. ‘You can come with me. The Wise will punish you, but you will survive.’
Carnelian looked back into the cave. ‘And these others?’
Osidian shrugged. ‘I do not imagine my Lord Aurum will let them live, but you can try to bring some with you.’
Slow anger simmered in Carnelian. ‘I will not so easily abandon them.’ He turned to Morunasa. ‘Oracle, at first light, we’ll leave this infernal canyon.’
‘And go where, Master?’
Carnelian felt suddenly so tired it was an effort to remain standing. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. Perhaps we might find some Lepers and get some help for our wounded.’
He gazed at Osidian. ‘Stay here by yourself if you want.’
He walked back into the cave. When he reached Fern he sank down, drawing Poppy towards him and putting his arm around her.
Before he led the Marula out from the caves Carnelian waited until the sky was bright enough to light the Pass. In spite of the care with which he and Krow had loaded Fern into his saddle-chair, with each step his aquar took, he jigged like a doll. Many Marula were nursing livid burns. Some were crammed two to a saddle-chair. Aquar that had been badly scorched had become uncontrollable. Looking back along the line, Carnelian saw not a military force but a mob of mauled and beaten men.
As the morning passed, the wind following them seemed to urge them to greater speed. Still, he was not keen to risk the wounded on the uneven ground. Allowing his aquar to find her own route down he had plenty of time to think. Osidian was there, riding at his side, brooding. Carnelian nonetheless thought it unlikely Osidian would change his mind: he meant to give himself up to Aurum. Carnelian knew he should be thankful Osidian was not bent on returning to the Earthsky, but all he could feel was resentment. It sickened him that Aurum had won. The Lepers would have no justice. Unbearably, the destruction of the Ochre would become nothing more than an incidental occurrence utterly peripheral to the political upheaval their absence from Osrakum had caused. It was as if everything he and Osidian had suffered, all the destruction they had brought about, all the atrocities, were to become nothing more than an inelegantly played gambit in a game of Three. With Osidian’s capture and return to Osrakum Aurum and the Wise would have pulled off a major coup. As for him he was a minor piece. Depending on the movements of the major pieces he might end up merely chastised. His House would lose influence. Ultimately, he would be returned to the splendours and luxuries of his palaces. The massacres in the Earthsky and the Leper Valleys would merely elicit some small adjustments in the tributary lists and some measured reprisals of terror against the errant tribes. The ripples that had spread out from Osrakum would undulate away to nothing. Order would return. Everything would be as it had always been. How he yearned to stay behind somewhere, anywhere that he could live in peace with Fern and Poppy, but this desire had been shown for the madness that it was. He had no place out here among the subjects of the Commonwealth. What little he could still do he must endeavour to do well.