‘There are none, Master.’
Carnelian nodded and glanced up the steps, resigned. He looked back at the guardsmen, then round at the cowering children. It was clear this was not the first time they had known terror. ‘Send to the purgatory for myrrh and censers. The sanctity of this place is breached. I must purify the chambers above.’
The guardsman punched his forehead into the floor. ‘As the Master commands.’
Carnelian gave a nod, then advanced towards the stairs, morose.
A wheel divided in two by a horizontal russet bar. Wide-rimmed, its ratcheted hub meshed with a long brass pawl that was rooted in a float within a vessel of jade carved in the form of meshing chameleons. As a child, he had discovered a water clock like this discarded, and had tried to make it work. He slid a finger lightly around the wheel rim, of gold with a delicately chased arabesque of flames. His had been gilded copper. He touched the rays of the sun-eye showing above the russet bar, which was a solid piece of precious iron, unoiled so that it would rust to the colour of earth. On his clock the land had been merely carnelian. The sun on Aurum’s clock had fallen beneath the iron horizon. The arc of rim following it represented the firmament of night. Squatting above this was a figure wrought from obsidian: the Black God, Lord of Mirrors. Carnelian reached up and caressed each of His four horns in turn, remembering Osidian and the legion they had stolen and the war they were making upon the Masters. His own clock had been crowned merely with a crude turtle shell. The God’s empty eyepits glared down at him. He sought distraction in the finer points of the mechanism. The reservoir of such thin jade made the liquid it held seem blood in a bruise. A scale ran up its side, numbered from zero to nineteen. The liquid was above fifteen. He glanced up at the hidden sun-eye. This clock seemed to be keeping time, but there was no sound of water dripping. Peering above the jade, he saw a siphon. No drops were falling from it, but there was a glint like spider thread stretching between the siphon and the jade. He put his finger out to break it and was amazed when dribbles of light flashed across his skin. Upon his finger pad there rested a tiny bead. He touched his fingernail to the lip of the jade and let the bead roll off. Standing back he admired the clock. The liquid silver made it seem sorcerous, as if it were measuring time with moonbeams. He had always assumed the clock he had found at home had once been his father’s. That was why he had repaired it, then taken it to him. Now he realized it had been no Master’s device. In comparison with Aurum’s it was less than a crude toy. His father had dismissed the gift saying he had no desire to measure time; it passed slowly enough already.
Anger rose in Carnelian, the same he had unleashed in the hall below. Almost he smashed Aurum’s clock, but he knew that destroying its beauty would achieve nothing. His anger had its roots in fear: fear for Poppy, for Fern, for Lily, for all those innocents he and Osidian had brought into danger. He feared for Sthax, whom he had left outside, without a word, when the Maruli had risen with his fellows, clearly hoping for some reassurance Carnelian had not felt he could give them. His fear was like the first twinges of a recurring fever made worse because he had let himself believe he was cured of it. As it burned more strongly it was heating to panic. It was actually worse here in Makar. At least in the lands below it had been Osidian who had made the Law, who, though monstrous, was a man – and a man could be pleaded with, persuaded, killed even. Here, though he might defy ammonites, he knew that, ultimately, the Law was unassailable. He coughed a laugh. Had it come to this? That he was nostalgic for Osidian’s murderous tyranny?
He grew more morose. What hope was there for his friends, his loved ones? He turned away from the liquid-silver clock. As he passed a mirror of polished gold he gazed sidelong at himself. All he could see was a shadowy Master. A fabulous creature: beautiful, but deadly. He stroked his hand down a pyramid of crystal standing on its point upon the point of another. Through the narrow waist of their meeting poured green sand. Powdered jade, no doubt. Perhaps malachite. Tiny emeralds, even. One emptying slowly into the other a few grains at a time. To contemplate this was to slow time. For a moment he fantasized that, should he invert them, he might be able to make time run backwards. Reaching back he might seek to unmake the past.
‘Pathetic,’ he said. Today they had been within reach, but he had not dared touch them. A wall stood between them, more impenetrable than bronze: his mask, his caste and the Law-that-must-be-obeyed. It was a barrier he could not breach.
A tiny hope flickered. Surely a door could be opened through which they could come to him. He could adopt them into his House. Poppy would come, even Fern. He imagined their faces disfigured by his chameleon tattoo. Poppy perhaps might accept it, but would Fern welcome becoming his servant, his slave? Carnelian’s anger flared again as he felt trapped. His hands, reaching up, found the hard metal of his face. Even were he to manage somehow to bring them into his House, would he be achieving anything other than assuaging his loneliness at the cost of bringing others in to share his prison?
He glared at a copper disc on spindly ivory legs. An arc of numbers seemed to be grinning at him in derision. It had delicate arms holding sighting lenses, a fin. Some kind of sundial, no doubt.
Even his House was not a certain refuge against what might come. Besides, there was no assurance he would survive. Nor that, whether he did or not, the Wise would sanctify any adoptions he made. Nor, for that matter, even that his father would. Would his father see them as anything but barbarians?
Carnelian wrung his hands. What he really wanted was for them never to have come at all. There must be some way to persuade them to return to the Leper Valleys. He let out a grunt. To hope for this was foolish. Osidian had bound them to him with some accursed agreement. Carnelian tried to imagine what this could be. Promises of wealth? Power? Perhaps it was nothing more than revenge that brought them up to fight against Aurum, whom they hated. So was there anything he could do to save them?
He had been noticing a clicking sound for quite a while. Something was swinging, glinting back and forth in an arc. A stone chameleon swinging by its tail from a hive of wheels. Of brass and gold and silver. Toothed and meshing with each other, in convoluted, furtive movement. This mechanism had a face very like the liquid-silver clock, and had not only a sun-wheel but also another wheel for the moon, whose tearful eye hung just above the last rays of the westering sun. And there were other rings. One for the morning star and many more, concentric, stars and planets revolving round a silver ammonite shell. If this was a clock, it was surely one that had been made for the Wise. Carnelian backed away from it, glancing round the chamber. Why was this place filled with clocks? Unease descended upon him. He felt like a child lost in a place where there was nothing he could understand.
Then he saw the pool. It seemed water except that it was set vertically up a wall. A miraculous thing. As he came before it, he saw a Master in its depths. His heart jumped a beat. It was a doorway through which another Master was gazing at him. Then he moved and the other Master mimicked him. The illusion was broken. He approached his reflection, amazed. When close enough, he reached out to touch his reflection’s fingers. It was cold. Glass perhaps. He pulled his fingers from its surface and watched the ghost of his touch slowly disappear. It was a mirror, but one more perfect than water. He leaned closer, seeing his eyes behind the mask. He seemed a man peering through a prison window. The longing to escape from that hated shell suddenly overwhelmed him. Glancing round to make certain he was alone, he freed his face. It appeared like the moon from behind a cloud. He jumped. It seemed he was seeing Osidian. He cursed softly. It was clearly not Osidian’s face, but it had the same green eyes. Uncannily the same. The face frowned and that too seemed Osidian, though there was no birthmark folding into the wrinkles. The eyes again. That same intense look. He looked at himself in a new way. Why was it always Osidian who led and he who followed?