aquar and his father's round to shield him. His own chair lurched suddenly to the left. Hands were grasping the rim. His father's chair bobbed free as Carnelian was forced to let it go. Faces grimaced up at him as he fumbled for one of his ranga shoes. He stamped at their fingers and heard bones crack but still they clung on.
Master voices crying out in wrath made Carnelian look up. They were revealing themselves, huge and golden-faced. He pushed his own hood back. Instantly most of the hands released their grip as if his mask were shooting flames at them. His chair righted a little, but fingers still gripped like grappling hooks. The faces over the rim showed doubt as round them the crowd was falling to its knees. Still they pulled, gnashing their teeth as he struck repeatedly. His chair's lean was increasing. Soon he would fall out. He could see enraged men waiting below with their flint knives.
A voice boomed so loud it made the crowd seem quiet. 'Brothers of the Wheel.' The assassins looking up at Carnelian faltered. He was jolted to one side as his saddle-chair was released. He looked round and saw the gold- faced figure sitting tall in his father's saddle-chair. 'I am the voice of the Masters.'
Carnelian stopped breathing. His father had come back to life. The crowd stilled.
The Mountain knows who you are, Oh Brothers of the Wheel, and what
… you do here… today. Slip… slip…' His father crumpled.
A voice could be heard giving commands in thin Quya but Carnelian could see the blood lust returning to the eyes below. Fingers curled slowly over his chair's rim. Carnelian watched them, his ranga shoe held high. He allowed his arm to sink and put the shoe across his knees. He lengthened his back, lifted his chin. He moistened his lips. 'Slip away.' He felt his mask quivering with the words. 'Slip away, Oh Brothers of the Wheel.' His voice was finding its strength. 'Slip away now and this sin'll be forgiven you.' He felt the power. He was a spindle of iron. He raised his hand to point up at the sky. 'Persist and you may be certain that as surely as that sun'll set tonight, so shall the vengeance of the Masters find you to exterminate you root and branch even to the remotest of your kin.'
His words had turned the crowd to stone. A lone voice warbled a command. Carnelian saw his attackers fleeing, chasing the ripple of prostration that was spreading away through the crowd. Around him the marketplace might have been a plain of ferns flattened by a whirlwind. A murmur came from those distant parts of the Wheel that the silence had not reached. As Carnelian looked round he felt the power drain away. An aquar was wandering with what was left of his father crumpled in its saddle-chair. The moaning of the crucified was a wind through winter trees.
THE THREE GATES
Three lands
Three gates
And three tall crowns
'Suth has killed himself,' shrilled Vennel.
Jaspar's mask was surveying the further reaches of the crowd. 'I had thought him already dead.'
Aurum rode to stoop towards Suth's cloak.
Vennel looked at Carnelian. 'Grieve not, my Lord, your father's death was not in vain. He saved us and now you are the Ruling Lord Suth.'
The reins sagged in Carnelian's hand. His aquar began ambling.
Jaspar looked round. 'We must haste to the gates. This is no place to linger.'
Carnelian felt as if he were bobbing in icy water.
'He yet lives.'
They all turned to Aurum.
'He lives, you say?' cried Vennel. 'Are you sure?' Aurum straightened. Though his blood grows cold.' Carnelian yanked his aquar back into control and moved to his father's side. He reached over to touch him. His father's cloak could have been stuffed with clay. No sound of breathing came from behind his mask. Carnelian rummaged among the cloak's folds for a hand. He lifted the lank flesh and placed his finger to the blue cord bridging the wrist. There was a flutter like a taper flame. He sighed and stroked it, before replacing it in the folds. He felt a shadow fall on him and looked up. It was Jaspar.
'Are we safe?'
Aurum's mask seemed to melt and flame as he nodded. The danger has passed for now. Her web is torn a second time.'
'And the Marula?'
The crowd's tide had crept away, stranding the corpses of three of the black men in their puddling blood. Aurum ignored the question and began barking commands at those still alive. Carnelian's eyes lingered on their pinched faces. They seemed not to have heard. Their red eyes slid sidelong to their fallen comrades.
'On, I say, on!' cried Aurum.
Marula eyes glanced off the mirror of the Master's face to stare up to the faces of the Gods sneering down at them from the canyon's throat.
Aurum swept his hand around his head like a blade to indicate the encircling crucifixions. 'If you don't want to end this day hanging on a cross, you'll move on.'
The Marula hunched reluctant, then first one and then the rest urged their aquar forward towards the prostrate edge of the crowd. Their lances stiffened as they coughed battle cries and began to pick up speed. There was a screaming scramble as people splashed out of their way like water at a ford.
Aurum looked over at Carnelian. 'Come, my Lord.'
Carnelian tied his father's aquar to his saddle-chair, then, with a lash of his reins, he crashed after the Marula, pulling his father and the other Masters in his wake.
The feet of the colossus appalled the Marula. Great wedges of scabrous stone. Toenails like the roofs of houses. An instep that was a cave. Each foot narrowed up several storeys to an ankle thicker than the gatehouses of the Wheel. The legs barrelled up their leprous towers, leaning towards each other, swelling towards the knees that were bending the mountainous thighs towards them. They shuddered imagining the kneeling avalanche of so much stone. The waist and belly seemed a more remote and solid part of the mountain. A fist supported an arm that in turn buttressed the slab of a shoulder. Strangely, the head looked no bigger than a human head. The head of the other colossus leaned close as if they might be talking together, oblivious of the ant world milling at their feet. The eyes of the Marula were forced to scale further up the Sacred Wall. Crag piled on crag up the slope. The whole skyful of rock leaned out as the canyon walls came together. The black men stared unblinking at the narrow ribbon of blue nipped between them. It was like tottering on the edge of an abyss in whose remote depths a brilliant river ran. They could imagine falling. They screwed their eyes closed, dropped their heads, dizzy, their nails gouging a grip on the rims of their saddle-chairs.
Wind acrid with smoke blew hard against Carnelian's mask. He felt his aquar slowing. He could make out that the ramp he had been riding up from the canyon floor ended abruptly in a promontory. His aquar's narrow head angled up and back, flaring plumes, as he yanked it to a halt. The plume fans folded and he saw the gloomy nave of the canyon. Its slope milled with traffic. Far above, the sky was an improbable painted ceiling.
The scrape of claws made him turn to see the Masters sweeping up with Aurum at their head.
'I will take responsibility for the Lord Suth.'
'You will not,' Carnelian said.
Aurum came very close to tower over him. Carnelian straightened his back and faced him. Aurum flicked the air in anger and turned his aquar, bellowing commands that sent the Marula hurtling past onto the road grooving off along the left-hand canyon wall.
Jaspar came up. 'Why have we stopped, my Lords?'
The Marula are the danger now,' said Aurum, the eye-slits of his mask following the black men as they grew smaller and smaller in the groove road.
