ring from his finger, remembered to offer it with his left hand and stepped onto the cobbled deck. The other Masters of House Imago followed him. Feeling out of place, Carnelian watched the other boats being loaded with the people and baggage streaming out from the palace.
His own boat was the first to turn her prow towards the lake and slide off. Carnelian felt sad for the old Chosen woman left standing off to one side, alone on the quay. Swinging more freely on their poles, the silver mouths summoned up for them a wind of keening that seemed to carry the bone boats across the water with only the merest effort from their oars.
Jaspar sat on the middle chair with his brother on his right. Carnelian had been set on his left. The other Imago Lords stood behind them. Carnelian kept his back as stiff as the chair's and tried to shut out the bells and moaning. Before him the corpse of Jaspar's father lay on the ice like a fish in a kitchen waiting to be gutted. Although the ammonites held a canopy over the body, the sun was still low enough to slip under it. Rivulets ran down the ice, sparkling indigo, puddling the skull-cobbled deck.
The corpse looked so much like Carnelian's father in the Ichorian chariot that Carnelian warmed with sympathy for Jaspar and for his brother. But his stomach reminded him of the crucifixions and he grew cold.
On the water, the bone boats turned towards the slope behind which lay the Plain of Thrones. Carnelian saw a cleft in its green that came slicing down to the water's edge.
The Quays of the Dead,' murmured Jaspar's brother. Carnelian was sure he could hear grief catching at his throat.
The boats began nestling into the quay. Ammonites carefully unloaded the corpse as the other boats began disgorging their passengers. Carnelian watched each Sapient disembark leaning his bulk on his homunculus. The little creatures stooped among the purple skirts of their masters' robes, reached inside behind the cloth and came out with ranga. Descending, the Sapients seemed to be sinking into the quay. Carnelian looked back across the Skymere to where the circling cliff of the Sacred Wall crimped with coombs and realized that even there the ground was too profane for the Wise to walk without ranga.
When he turned back he saw guardsmen unfurling banners as the embalming procession formed up at the foot of a stair. Carnelian followed Jaspar and his brother and felt the other Masters walking behind him. The Sapients were already moving up the stair.
The climb was long and arduous. At landings, they stopped just long enough to allow the ammonites to transfer the burden of the corpse among themselves.
They came up onto a larger landing whose outer edge was lined with stumps like teeth. Carnelian felt a hand on his shoulder.
'One would speak with my Lord,' said Jaspar. He nipped off the beginning of his brother's protest with a sign and sent him and the other Masters up the next flight of steps after the procession, accompanied by the majority of the guardsmen, all the women and children and the porters with their burdens. Only a few guardsmen remained, hanging their banners above them like parasols. Carnelian saw that the cuts down their cheeks were healing brown.
'Perhaps, cousin, you would explain to me how my slaves might have been prompted into committing murder?' said Jaspar.
'Have you had visitors? A message from court?'
'Some Lords came to conclave. From court…?' Jaspar shrugged a no.
'Perhaps their entourages…?'
'My Lord's arguments tend towards a certain circularity, neh?'
Carnelian had to agree. He used his foot to scrape earth from a ring shape on the ground. 'Are you sure that no person whatever came from court?'
Jaspar's mask regarded him as if from a great height. 'I suppose there is always the regular traffic in ammonites.'
'Ammonites?'
Jaspar fluttered a gesture of disbelief in the air. 'If you draw ammonites into your fantasy then their masters are sure to be close behind.'
'Why should the Wise not conspire with Ykoriana?'
'Enough! You would have me believe that two powers work in concert against the third.' He shook his head. 'If that were so, first the Balance and then the Commonwealth would be destroyed.'
Jaspar dropped his cowled head as if he were deep in thought. So as not to interrupt him, Carnelian looked down at the ring his foot had uncovered. It was of bronze and had a hinge at one end, like a mooring ring. He looked out over the blue waters spread out below. He glanced from side to side along the landing and wondered if in some ancient time it could have been a quay. He felt Jaspar move away. 'Well?'
Jaspar turned. 'I must follow my father this one last time.' He sighed. 'And, as Funereal Law demands, on foot.'
Carnelian followed Jaspar, sensing victory. He noticed that the steps had several times been recut deeper into the rock. The dirgeful bells came echoing distantly from above. Striped walls of stone rose up on either side. As they climbed, Carnelian became uneasy, convinced he was being watched. The walls had in them an impression of a crowd. When he squinted, he could make out their faces, vague from uncountable years of rain, furrow-mouthed, scratch-browed, noseless, with pits for eyes.
The Plain of Thrones,' said Jaspar.
Carnelian gazed at the walled plain, widening round then narrowing again in the distance to where the wall looked no higher man the thickness of his arm. Behind it rose an immense blackness that overwhelmed him. As the bells' pealing struck him with its hammer blows, Carnelian was again clinging to the deck of the baran. His mind's eye widened looking down into the gyring horror of the well. He blinked. Before him was the plug that would have filled that pit in the sea. It was only motionless rock, he told himself, the flank of the Pillar of Heaven, narrower from this side. The pressure of the bells was fading. He let his eyes slip down to an arrowhead, a hollow pyramid cut into the plain's wall, a buckle in its belt. He realized the stone on either side of it was pricked with windows, ribbed with balconies, striped with colonnades. Below stood a line of shadowy men. He turned to follow them round. Standing one beside the other, they hemmed the wall for fully half its circle. In the west they stood revealed by the sun as solemn stone.
The funereal pealing and moaning was pulsing round the plain. Remembering his father's stories, Carnelian snatched his eyes back, searching. There, beneath the pyramid hollow, he found a space wedged between two of the stone men and knew that it must hold the Forbidden Door, the entrance to the Labyrinth.
Carnelian was walking along a road that ran as straight as a shadow towards the Forbidden Door. For a while, he had been noticing something like a clump of people conclaving in the centre of the plain. Heat shimmer had lent them movement but as he came closer Carnelian saw they were stone monoliths set in a ring.
'My Lord,' said Jaspar, in the silence vibrating between two peals.
Carnelian turned to him and saw the Master's hands begin to sign.
Soon I will leave this procession and go into the Labyrinth. If you still wish to accompany me you must do as I say, agreed?
Carnelian agreed and they continued on their way.
Inside the outer ring of monoliths, close to its centre, were two more rings, one within the other. Most of the monoliths were the colour of a stormy sky but those forming the innermost ring looked as if they had been painted with blood. All the ground within the outermost ring was slabbed, mosaiced, ridged, or spotted with cobbles. The road they were on divided to curve round the flanks of the stone circle, then joined up again upon the other side. Along the left fork Carnelian could see another procession moving with banners. The Sapients took the embalming procession along the right. A quarter of the way round, a new road branched off towards the northwestern edge of the plain. At this junction the procession came to a halt and Jaspar and his kin began to argue with their hands. Carnelian looked away, not wishing to intrude further. The Sapients stood near a pair of monoliths that lay a little distance out from the circle. Although only half their height, the Sapients bore some resemblance to them. Jaspar glanced over, then chopped an angry sign that caused his kin to bow and move away.
Carnelian watched Jaspar walk to his father's bier and kneel beside it, then rise and come towards him. His heart warmed to see such filial affection.
'It must be very hard to lose a father,' he said when Jaspar returned.
