some vast door had been left open in the cliff. They came round the headland. Light swelled and burned on every side. Carnelian could hear the captain shouting. The ship was swinging round on the coruscating mirror of the sea. He had to screw his eyes shut.

'Behold, Thuyakalrul, the Blue Ring of Stone,' his father intoned, 'greatest of the Cities of the Sea, gateway to the Three Lands.'

The colours in Carnelian's vision oozed slowly back from whiteness. He gasped. The sea was so green it might have been liquid jade. Two long arms of cliffs embraced the bay, the eastern a curving sweep of stone made turquoise by the sun, the western dark in its own shadow.

Sunk between them he saw a many-towered citadel. Above that, a misty blue valley faded up into the sky.

The deck rolled up and down as the ship passed through the doorway in the cliff. Its starboard jamb, a stone column, rose shadowy-vast from a collar of rafts floating chained around its foot. Ropes dangled down from above and ladders formed a dizzying scarring up its flank. Shadowing his eyes, Carnelian looked up and narrowed his gaze in disbelief. Cranes and other machines formed a crown of spikes around the column's head, which was plumed with a billowing of smoke that made Carnelian sway with vertigo.

The beacon seemed so slight from out at sea, did it not?' his father said.

Carnelian gripped the rail, closed his eyes and nodded. He felt the ship's bucking calm. He opened his eyes and saw that they were through into the bay. The cliffs on either side were banded with grey houses. A filigree of walkways traced across the stone. Here and there a palace formed a silver crust mossed with the heads of tiny trees. His eyes darted everywhere.

'Here people nest like gulls,' he cried in delight.

They flee the stench of the town,' his father said.

There it lay, crowding the depression in the cliff and tumbling down to fill the further side of the bay with brown confusion.

'It is warmer here,' sighed Carnelian in a trance. The drumbeats shook up from the deck and pulsed the air. From across the bay there came a distant murmur like summer bees. Everything appeared to stand still, trapped motionless in the sun's amber.

The ring traps the-sun's rays,' his father said remotely, making a circular motion with his hand to take in the cliffs. His fingers fell to stroking his mask as if he were thinking of hiding his face from the sun. He turned to check that all of his son's skin was painted. Carnelian was smiling closed-eyed, basking in the sun's warmth.

'You should take care, my Lord,' Suth said. The sun can taint even painted skin.'

Carnelian opened his eyes. His father was like an ivory carving of a god seeing the future. The more Carnelian looked the more he could see the man. With a pang he saw that the face had lost some of its beauty. The paint could not hide the faded youth. It made him melancholy.

His father came back to life with a sigh. 'See the ships.'

With each thump of the baran's heart her oars sliced into the syrup of green water. She was making for the wharves of the town. Carnelian could just make out the moorings, the masts like a stand of reeds, the clusters of white tenements that rose up behind. 'So many ships,' he said.

They sleep now, but soon they will slip out from this harbour and sail up the coasts, navigate rivers, cross to islands and fetch back for us all that is curious and wonderful.'

And our people, Carnelian thought. He said nothing. He did not want to take the brightness from his father's eyes. He watched his white hand point here and there among the nesting ships. Some were large, some small, some as brightly painted as kites.

'In less than a month this whole bay will be filled with a waft of sails.' His father's hands made airy gestures that were almost words. 'As a boy I came here and passed disguised through the markets. The smells… aaah, the smells and the shimmer and the play of colour. So many people.' He looked down with his cloud-grey eyes. 'Sometimes, however mean and squalid, however poor, sometimes I have almost envied our subjects their earthy lives.'

Closer and closer came the mess of boats. The baran swung slowly round to starboard. All the time his father recited a litany of names, of places, of the rare and costly goods that were bartered all along the edges of the sea. Strange scents of spice, rotting fish and wood and tar mixed with the underlying stink of the town. Though Carnelian curled up his nose, delight was in his eyes. Looking above the forest of masts and rigging, up at the town's mud-tower tenements, he saw the purpling haze of the valley beyond. He was sure that he could see the thread that was the road winding up into the interior. Everything was gleamed by the sun, making the- town seem a trinket fashioned for a Master. Carnelian turned and saw that the sun was already melting its yoke down behind the cliff ahead where the rock swelled into a buttress. The town leached towards it but only a few buildings and some roads clung to its black flank. The rest of its body was naked rock.

The marble of his father's face had sagged a little. He was looking up the valley as if his eyes could see all the way into the far south, to Osrakum. His thoughts had retired somewhere deep inside him.

'Do we not go to the town, my Lord?' Carnelian said, trying to reach in.

His father did not respond for some time. He seemed not to have heard, but then his head began moving from side to side as if he were trying to rid himself of a dream. 'No. We shall disembark in the Tower in the Sea.'

Carnelian looked at the swollen cliff ahead. 'If that is a tower, then it was not one made by mortal hand.'

'Men often use what the Gods have made for them,' his father said.

The cliff and its tower were daubed with birds. Specks wheeled in the sky making screams like tearing copper.

His father tore his gaze at last away from the valley. 'I must take counsel with the other Lords.' He put his mask up over his face. 'Remember what I have said about the game, my Lord.'

Carnelian stiffened at the return of formality. He masked. The metal face made it hard for him to breathe. The wall of screens came apart and his father walked away trailing guardsmen after him. Carnelian sent off one of the two men who had been left with him to fetch Tain. He wanted to please his brother with the view but, more than that, he needed a friend.

Tain looked uneasy when he came up. The masts ran their logs the length of the ship. The deck was clean but his brother picked his way across it as if it had just been painted. He knelt before Carnelian.

'Come on, get up. I thought you'd like to see all this,' Carnelian said, opening his arms wide. He was desperate to make everything as normal as possible between them.

Tain stood up, fished inside his tunic and came out with something that he offered furtively. 'I thought you might want this.'

Carnelian took the silver box. Its tearful eye looked up at him. He could taste its bittersweet memory of dreams, the dreams that had led him to slaughter. His hand closed. He was glad of the mask that concealed his desire. He drew back his arm and hurled the box in a glinting arc into the sea. He clenched his fingers into a fist, trying to squeeze out the feel of the solid shape.

Nothing more was said. Tain found a place beside his brother. Together they watched the tower rising from the sea bulge out to meet them. Its head was lost in the sky's deepening blue. It made a sombre sight.

The drum beat dolefully under their feet. The two wings of obedient oars plunged into the sea and then flew out sowing curves of foam. The ship carried them into the tower's cold shadow. At its base gaped a blacker mouth. Only the curving of its high arch bore witness to men's work. Above them flickered a screeching shroud of birds. The sky began to disappear as the ship passed under the pot-bellied rocky swelling. They could smell wet rock. Grey-blue stone rose around them from the sea and made the ship seem as fragile as a poppy.

'If she touches the sides she'll shatter to driftwood,' whispered Tain.

The tunnel arched above them. Bird excrement streaked its walls. A pair of sky-saurians flapped screaming out from the blackness. Dank shadow swallowed the ship and made the boys stand closer together.

The drum fell suddenly silent. Its last beat echoed away to nothing. There was a terrible scraping. Carnelian felt the pull of Tain's hand on his cloak. He dared to look over the rail. He watched the bend then splinter of a shadowy oar that had not been drawn into the hull quickly enough. Behind them the captain was shuttling from side to side, shouting orders, guiding them through. Slaves thrust bronze-shod poles against the rock. Straining, leaning against them, with sparks, cursing, they coaxed her down the narrow channel.

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