Carnelian considered his next question carefully. ‘And you have received none from your masters in Osrakum?’
The mask retreated a little as if Carnelian had threatened him. ‘As the Seraph must know, such information is vouched inviolable by the Protocol of the Three Powers.’
‘I was merely wondering why a watch-tower would seek to send an alert here before even considering sending one to Osrakum.’
The quaestor retracted his hands into the sleeves of his robe as if he feared they were about to betray him. In reply all he managed was an uneven shrug. Carnelian saw in this behaviour confirmation of his suspicions. He peered over his head into the dark recesses beyond. There was a suggestion of lazy curlings in the air. He could smell the narcotic smoke. ‘I will enter.’
‘As the Seraph wishes,’ said the quaestor. He rose to his feet, stooping as he moved aside.
Carnelian beckoned the Marula, who held back, snatching furtive glances into the dark opening. Even Sthax seemed reluctant to obey him. Carnelian had to motion more insistently before he and the other Marula began to approach. He had taken one step towards the threshold of the sanctum when the quaestor’s hand jerked up to loosen his mask. One eye was revealed and a sliver of his sallow, tattooed face. He fixed the Marula with a glare that stopped them in mid stride. They regarded him as if he were a serpent who had sprung up in their path.
Slipping the mask back over his face, he turned to Carnelian. ‘These unclean animals cannot enter here.’
‘I intend that they should,’ said Carnelian.
The quaestor pointed vaguely to where Carnelian could see some steps cut up the sanctum wall. ‘They must first pass through the quarantine.’
‘Nevertheless, I am determined they will enter with me.’
The quaestor raised his hands as clutching claws. ‘This cannot be, Seraph, the Law forbids it!’
Carnelian sensed the man’s distress was genuine enough. ‘This place is destitute of Seraphim. I myself have no time to be cleansed and no wish to suffer the delay of subjecting myself to fresh ritual protection when I leave. I shall keep the one I wear. If by thus entering the sanctum it shall become polluted, then so be it.’
The quaestor was shaking his head erratically, his hands trembling as if he were having a fit. Carnelian reached out to calm him. At his touch the man jerked back, colliding with the jamb. He wrapped his arms around his chest. ‘At least, Seraph, I beg you, allow yourself. .. and these others…’ His hand trembled out, then quickly returned to grip his shoulder. ‘To be purified as best we can with smoke.’
Carnelian could see no harm in that. ‘Very well.’
As Carnelian edged into the gloom, Sthax and the other Marula followed. Smoke curled thick tendrils round them. The quaestor fussed, muttering instructions. Carnelian felt his face swelling into his mask as if it were the shell of a sprouting seed. Sweet myrrh crept into him with every breath, jellying his bones. When his legs faltered, hands appeared from the darkness to steady him. Censers, swinging, layered the air with thicker smoke that had a peculiar, stale odour he had not smelled before. Needles pierced his temples. He heard his voice far away cry out as he spun down into darkness.
His father in a chair, his back to him, while their hands down his spine find him wanting. He calls out, but his voice is the cry of a gull. Carnelian feels thunder coming. Through the window a cliff of water rolls black towards them. Seaweed smell, so like blood. Dripping red from his father’s fist as it opens offering twin pearls to a charnel mouth. Angling hand, they begin to roll. Carnelian screams: don’t let them go! It is his hand, he tries to close it, but the pearls melt into tears that dribble between his fingers. Watering a hole in the ground. Two pits side by side. His father gazes at him, eyeless.
Carnelian came awake struggling against the undertow of his dreams. He saw a young boy with a face halved by a thread tattoo. On either side an amethyst almond for an eye, a blushing cheek. Split by the tattoo, the boy’s lips were moving. A grim tide was sucking Carnelian back into sleep. He heard the words ‘quaestor’… ‘letter’. He tried to move to break his nightmare’s hold on him. The hollow stone of his head surged with pain. The spasm subsided enough for him to open his eyes. The boy was gone. Carnelian tried to make sense of where he was; to resolve the fractured symmetries of the chamber. Guttering flambeaux gave twisting life to peculiar machines of brass and ivory and glass. Floors and walls meeting at strange angles seemed covered with tapestries and carpets of crusted blood. The boy returned holding a vessel of white jade so thin it looked like ice. Within its milky membrane water swayed. Drinking it quenched the fire in Carnelian’s head and lungs. Straining to resolve the impossible symmetries of the chamber, he realized it was full of mirrors. Contorted surfaces of silver, of gold polished to the consistency of torrid air. Slopes of glass that gave reflections so perfect he could only discern them by their frames. There were far fewer machines than he had imagined. Frameworks of bone slid and turned in subtle, repetitive movement. Discs and pivots. Brass and copper twitching. Liquid silver pouring with a strange inner radiance. He could not understand what anything was.
The blinded boy spoke again. ‘Master, the quaestor is without. He bears a letter addressed to you.’
Carnelian recognized something about the boy’s face. The blue filament that divided his face in two split near his hairline into the broken circle of a horned-ring. A horned-ring staff. Aurum’s cypher. Carnelian gazed around the chamber. The red samite hangings were flecked with the same forked-needle cypher. He glanced down. His eyes confirmed what his skin felt: his body had been freed from the bindings of the ritual protection. His skin felt so clean he imagined he could breathe through it if he chose. ‘This is the tower of the Legate of Makar?’
‘It is, my Master,’ the boy said.
‘How long have I been here?’
‘Less than a day, Master.’
‘And how did I get here?’
The boy hesitated and Carnelian noticed his shivering, which was not from cold. He realized he could smell the boy, smell his fear. There was another odour so pervasive Carnelian had been breathing it in unnoticed. Attar of lilies. A sharp heavy blanketing of it that he was only aware of through its contrast with the odour from the boy.
‘I have no memory of coming here,’ he said as gently as he could, but this only served to terrify the boy more. ‘Whatever you tell me,’ Carnelian said, ‘no harm will come to you.’
The boy was struggling for composure. ‘The quaestor brought you, Master. His ammonites bore you here on a litter.’
Carnelian remembered entering the purgatory. The smoke was still so heavy in his lungs he was momentarily surprised it did not curl out on his breath. ‘And he is here with a letter for me?’
‘He is, Master.’
The boy took some steps back as Carnelian, gingerly, swung his legs out from under the feather blanket. The boy stooped to slipper his feet before they settled on the stone floor. Carnelian considered sending him to fetch the letter, but decided he would like to talk to the quaestor. ‘I must dress.’
‘How does my Master wish to be adorned?’
Carnelian could see how the prospect of fulfilling what was clearly one of his functions calmed the boy. He looked for his cloak and robe, but could see nothing as drab as those among the fleshy tones that Aurum favoured, the glowing golds. ‘Something plain?’
The boy frowned a little, then edged away. As he did so, other boys appeared, each moving to one of a row of lapis lazuli chests the colour of predawn sky. Lifting the lids with willowy arms they drew up robes and turned to display them: thickly embossed samite encrusted with jewels, mosaicked with iridescent feathers. Carnelian rose to his feet swaying, even as the pain abated in his head. He walked among them and they bowed a little, turning their heads as if they were detecting his movement from eddies in the air. Appalled by the awful magnificence of the garments, he settled for a relatively sombre robe that glimmered with rubies so dark they seemed almost jet and that, more importantly, seemed to be the least impregnated with Aurum’s odour.