Carnelian felt a yearning for Osidian. If he made this promise he would have no way of letting him know about it. He groaned, imagining that they would never again touch.
His father's hand jumped to his shoulder like a grappling hook and drew him in. Carnelian stared into the yellow red-veined eyes. His father's words began with a hiss in which Carnelian could smell the illness and the sickly odour of the drugs sustaining him. The tighter she is caught in my trap… the more desperate will be her efforts
… to… break… free.'
Carnelian rocked back as he was released.
'Your oath, my Lord.'
Seeing his father locked into those weak, drug-ravaged remains, Carnelian spoke, 'On my blood.'
His father closed his eyes, nodding, breathing heavily. Carnelian had not forgotten his duty to his people but waited until he saw his father had regained some strength.
'My Lord has threatened my guardsmen with crucifixion.'
His father smiled at him. 'Fear for you made me wrathful. Rest assured they will suffer no further punishment.' His face lost colour. 'You and I will go and have some words with your aunt, now Dowager Empress and Regent.'
'Me?'
'I need your strength. Besides, now that I have you back I find myself reluctant to let you out of my sight.' He looked away down the length of the hall to its doors, growing older as he did so. 'I do not relish wading through that sea outside, so I shall take a boat.' He turned to look down at Carnelian. 'I am afraid you will have to swim in its wake.'
Carnelian did not understand.
'Put on your mask,' his father said. Carnelian obeyed. His father masked himself with some difficulty and then motioned with his hand towards one of the staves. 'Lift this thrice and each time bring it down hard.'
Carnelian shuffled closer and then, with both hands, lifted the staff with its sun-eye and its pomegranate and cracked it down. A ringing tone reverberated round the hall. Twice more he lifted the staff and twice more brought it down. His father's lictors dewed out from the shadows.
Summon the forty-eight, his father's hand signed.
The lictors went off into the dark and then came back with more Ichorians, in groups carrying poles like battering rams, their half-black bodies concealed only by the golden rings of their collars. Carnelian took some steps back as they collected round the sides of his father's dais. A pole was lowered almost to the ground and then pushed into a hole in the dais's edge. Carnelian watched the pole feed in and its head appear at the other side. Other poles were being pushed through the dais like yarn through a needle's eye. When the poles were all in place, the Ichorians moved in between them. They bent as one like rowers to their oars, strained, and the dais and his father rose slowly into the air.
The dais was a raft drifting through the gloom towards the doors. The lictors walked ahead of it carrying the two staves of He-who-goes-before. Carnelian walked behind between files of Ichorians. On his right their shoulders and faces had the hues of barbarian skin. On his left these hues were clothed in swirling black tattoos. His father was a pillar of gold from whose apex rayed the sun disc that hid fully a third of his height. Carnelian watched the doors ahead opening. The elegant hubbub of the Great wafted through with their lily perfumes and the shimmer of their court robes. Around Carnelian, the Ichorians lifted shawms to their lips and began a ragged braying. Floating on this, the dais carrying his father slipped burning into the light, parting the Great before it. Carnelian angled his head so that his mask would shield his eyes from the glare as he too came into the nave. More Ichorians appeared pumping more volume into the pulsating fanfare of the shawms. The Great loomed like towers in a fortress wall hung with the mirror shields of their masks. Carnelian narrowed his eyes further against their dazzle. Incense puffed up in clouds into a region where lanterns larger than men hung ablaze. Higher than these flapped banners like sails that carried all the heraldry of the Houses of the Chosen. The weight of his crowns forced Carnelian's eyes down to look along the avenue of the Great. Between flashes he caught glimpses of his father in their faces like an idol being carried aloft. The music shrilled on. The Great spoke with flickering hands. Trying to read the signs made him dizzy. He locked his eyes to the ambered rubied edge of the dais and concentrated on the opening and closing of his knees.
The wall of the radiant Great fell suddenly away as they came among the Lesser Chosen. On his taller ranga, Carnelian overtopped even their Ruling Lords by a head. He could see a river of them running all the way down the nave between the dingy colonnades.
Carnelian reached the looming bronze wall of the Chamber of the Three Lands in a dream. His eyes took a while adjusting to the lack of summer gold. The Emperor's heart no longer trembled the massive doors. The shawms frayed with echoes as they left the nave to follow the bronze wall round. When the Approach came into sight, Carnelian saw that syblings were crowding its lower steps. Something was coming down that looked like water seen at the bottom of a well. The dais broke through the sybling tide and washed up onto the first step. Carnelian walked round it watching his father for signs of life. Syblings took the staves from the lictors and held them upright before his father, whose gold mass flickered and flamed as he rose. His sleeves hinged up like doors, his hands caught hold of the staves and he seemed to be pulled by them onto the first step.
The Ichorians stopped Carnelian pushing through to his father's side. Arms outstretched, his father seemed crucified between the staves. One hand uncurled to beckon Carnelian through the half-coloured men.
Now I will, the hand flickered. It recurled itself around the stave, and slid down to rest upon its sun-eye. Carnelian saw it move. He wanted it to speak again. It detached and began signing, Stay close. I will have to find the strength to climb these steps.
Looking up, Carnelian saw the vast black Lord was almost upon them. Syblings covered the steps around him like an extension of his raven-jewelled court robe. Others carried a pair of court staves before him bearing the jade and the obsidian masks. His gold mask shone high above like the sun peering through a pillar of smoke. His crowns threatened an eclipse. A porcelain hand appeared.
Sardian, I was coming to see you.
'I must meet with your mother, Celestial.'
The black Lord turned his vast head a little as if he could hear someone calling for him down the stairs. She will not welcome you, my Lord.
'Nevertheless.'
Have you strength enough to climb these steps? 'I will find it, Celestial.'
/ shall wait for you in the Sun in Splendour. The black Lord made a gesture to hook Carnelian's eyes. Take good care of him, my Lord.
Carnelian stared, then inclined his head as the Lord swept past and began to move off towards the bronze wall.
'Molochite?' Carnelian asked, puzzled.
'His brother, Nephron,' his father replied. 'Now, let us begin the climb.'
For father and son, the climb was an ordeal. At first Suth managed to keep up a reasonable pace but after a while it was obvious that he was spent. They stopped. Carnelian could hear his father's laboured breathing. Looking down the steps, the floor seemed far away. Above them, the summit seemed further. 'Can you not be carried?'
His father stretched open his hand. The Sun cannot be carried. It would be as much as admitting that I am unfit to wear the Pomegranate Ring.
'But Father, why must you do this at all?'
His father's hand trembled, ‘ I must.
They resumed the climb a step at a time. Even for
Carnelian, lifting his ranga was an effort. He could imagine what it was costing his father, whose ranga were besides much taller. He leaned close and tried to help push him up. In front of them, the syblings carried the staves that his father clung to as if they were walking sticks. Carnelian waited for the clack of each shoe, chewing his tongue, fearing that one would not find its step. The last few steps, when they could look onto the landing, were the worst. Rasping each breath, his father climbed them. When he reached the top he sank down in among the empty court robes that forested the landing. As the disrobing syblings came, Carnelian tried to mask his father's breathing with his voice as he told them to attend to his father first.
