As silence settled he fell victim to misery. He was playing a game he did not believe he could win, for stakes he could not bear to lose. The Grand Sapient had made it clear what would happen should he and Osidian admit defeat. Only an outright victory over the Commonwealth would give him any chance of stopping the Wise meting out retribution upon his loved ones, upon all those others who were already victims of what he and Osidian had brought about – but could he hope for such an implausible outcome when even Osidian no longer believed it possible? And even were they to continue doing what they could to widen their rebellion, would this not serve only to bring more innocents under the shadow of inevitable punishment?
These arguments swung back and forth in his mind like the pendulums of Aurum’s clocks. Back and forth. Back and forth. Until he became a slave to the click of the escapements and, weary to his bones, he hung suspended in despair, denied the comfort of sleep.
Akaisha, bloated, her dear face ochred for burial. Earth, or is it dried blood, on his hands? ‘Eat me,’ she sighs, fire peeling her skin. Carnelian breaks off a charred curl and puts it into his mouth. Too salty. Tears, perhaps? Flames in a black mirror find the contours of a face. A mask with green eyes. He fits his face into the hollow. Sees an emerald lagoon. Breathes with rapture its mossy air. Green water laps at white feet. He looks up. Osidian sitting on a throne. A black living face in his left hand, a green in his right. Osidian’s own, lifeless, eyeless. The pits well tears. Wet on his lips. Tasting the sea. Liquid-iron blood running down white legs into the ebb. Roaring makes him turn to see a cliff of it avalanching to drown them all.
Carnelian came awake, gulping, tasting iron in his mouth. He sat up, choking, and spat blood into his hands. He rolled his tongue, making sure he had not bitten it through, swallowed it.
‘Seraph?’ The homunculus was there with its metal child’s face. It called again from the other side of its blinding mask as if it were a door.
Carnelian reassured the creature. ‘Bit my tongue in my sleep.’ His voice was distorted by his swollen tongue.
In his mind’s eye, Osidian sat eyeless on a throne, the Masks of the God Emperor in his hands. Carnelian could not rid himself of the conviction that he had had such dreams before and had always ignored their warnings. Why were his dreams always awash with blood? He could still taste its metal in his mouth. Osidian enthroned, but eyeless like the Wise. Why had Akaisha wanted him to eat her? He had to think clearly. At any time, Osidian might lose his grip on the Lesser Chosen commanders. The memory of what had happened to the Ochre unmanned him. He could not bear making such a mistake again. He dared not act until he was certain.
He sought distraction in some books he found. The titles were uninspiring. It seemed that Aurum was interested in nothing but war and intrigue. Dry treatises on strategy and manuals written for the Lesser Chosen by the Wise on correct legionary operation were only marginally alleviated by memoirs of Lords of the Great that were all about the minutiae of Clave politics, blood-trading and the elegant exercise of power over minions.
Abandoning these, he fell back into turmoil. At one point he determined to quit Makar and go to meet Osidian, but immediately his mind began listing the difficulties in getting there and the vital reasons why he should not go. Besides, what would he say to Osidian once he reached him? He feared sharing his dreams with him.
Then he remembered the interest Legions had shown in his dreams. If anyone could interpret them it would be the Grand Sapient. Madness. Any such consultation would lead only to manipulation. Legions would tell him what he wanted to hear.
Back and forth the battle raged in him, between doubt and hope. As he grew weary almost to tears, the vision of Osidian eyeless, enthroned, hung in his mind like an ache.
When the homunculus came to ask if he might go down to minister to his masters and their homunculi, Carnelian saw from one of Aurum’s clocks that it was long past nightfall. The sun-eye hidden beneath the iron earth seemed a defeat. A whole day had passed and still he was as trapped in indecision as a fly in amber. The opportunity to accompany the homunculus was a blessed relief. At least it gave him something to do. Something real.
In the vault, the first lid they opened was Legions’. When the homunculus climbed up to remove his mask, Carnelian saw the faint misting in the mirrored hollow above the mouth spike. His gaze fell on the Grand Sapient’s skull face. He wondered at the mind behind such hideousness and was tortured by the temptation that it might make the solution to his problems clear, shedding upon his dilemma the terrible, cool clarity of the Wise.
He was glad when he saw the elixir bead melt into the lipless mouth and was relieved when Legions’ skull face was rehidden behind the shell of his mask. The homunculus closed and resealed the capsule. Each of the other two capsules contained not only a Sapient, but also a homunculus. Carnelian made sure to observe that all were fed an amber bead. He plucked a bead from its cavity on the capsule rim. When he brought it up to the nostrils of his mask, he could detect no odour. The eyes of the homunculus had grown round. Amused by the creature’s alarm, Carnelian made a smiling gesture. ‘I had no intention to eat it.’ He replaced it where he had found it and the homunculus closed the capsule.
‘What does it contain?’
‘Mostly nectar, Seraph.’
‘To mask the bitterness of the elixir?’
Busy sealing the lid, the homunculus shook its head. ‘I do not imagine so, Seraph. My masters cannot taste sweetness. I believe its function is to supply the necessary sustenance.’
Leaving the Sapients and homunculi sleeping in their cocoons, they climbed the stair. As Carnelian came up into the chamber, he felt the vision of his dream coalescing around an interpretation he realized he had been resisting all day. Lying on his makeshift bed staring at the ceiling, he could no longer deny that, whatever else the dream might portend, one part of it seemed clear enough. Wading through blood, Osidian would win a throne, but how much blood and whose?
He came fully awake as if washing ashore. The ritual windings clung to him like flayed skin. He longed to escape their sickly embrace, to feel clean sun on his bare back, his face, to have the wind caress his skin. More, he wanted to be free of the dreams. Their omens oppressed him like the pressure of a coming storm. He had preferred hopelessness to a promise of a victory bought at the cost of the Gods only knew how much suffering.
He had crossed and recrossed this territory so many times that it had become a churned sump. What chance was there to pick a single path through such a morass?
He needed to externalize it; to talk to someone. There was no one, except perhaps Osidian, and Carnelian knew, with a bleak certainty, that his dreams would almost certainly mesh with the bloody conviction Osidian drew from his dark god.
He rose from the bed, fumbled and found his mask, ignored the homunculus’ questions and went in search of a window. Even the night sky might restore him to some balance.
When he found some shutters he drew them back and was blinded. Squinting, he went out into the light. The sun was risen. He could feel its touch beginning to warm the gold against his cheeks. The land’s bony limestone blazed in the morning, but shades of night still haunted the Pass below.
Returning to the shadows, Carnelian considered what he could do. When he contemplated a visit to Osidian, anxiety pulled like a barb in his flesh. Dare he leave Legions unsupervised? A feeling of being trapped produced a surge of anger. Why not kill him and his staff and be done with it? Dread soaked into him. At first he thought it was horror at the idea of slaying even a Sapient in his sleep, but he decided it was something else. Some kind of superstitious fear. The kind that thrills a child at the unknown consequences of killing a sorcerer in a fairytale. There were good reasons against a meeting with Osidian, in any case. Not least how they affected each other. Besides, there were many practical difficulties.