The Third God (12 page)

It was nearing dusk when they reached the serried rocks of the Backbone that rose up from the fernland in a seemingly unscalable cliff. Fern and the Darkcloud found paths winding up into it. Though negotiable by aquar these would be too narrow for a ravener to climb.

When they reached the summits they saw a wide slope falling gently into the west, strewn with black boulders. As the sun swelled raw on the horizon they gathered fernwood for fires. Carnelian helped Fern build theirs among some stunted trees in the lee of the Backbone’s ragged edge. Afterwards he clambered up to survey the road they had crushed through the ferns. Poppy followed him. ‘If Hookfork comes after us he’ll have no difficulty finding us.’

Grim, they returned to where Fern was coaxing flames from a nest of roots. Osidian had clambered out from his saddle-chair then climbed a few steps to slump against a rock face. Swathed as he was in his Oracle indigos, all Carnelian could see of him was his narrowed eyes. On the horizon nothing was left of the sun but an incandescent filament that branded his vision for a while after it had disappeared. The slopes around him were dotted with huddles of Plainsmen illuminated by the fires in their midst. Further out, on their own, Marula in rings. It was Fern crisping djada in the flames that drew Carnelian’s attention back. The smell evoked times he had spent among the Ochre; happier times. His mind turned reluctantly to the fate of the Woading: another koppie that had suffered holocaust. Hope had once more drained away, leaving nothing but sapping despair.

Poppy called him to eat. As he approached she made a place for him by the fire. She talked brightly, trying to kindle some life in them. ‘Are you sure the raveners won’t come at us up this slope?’

Fern shook his head almost imperceptibly. Without looking up from the flames, he moved his arm vaguely. ‘The Backbone here runs unbroken north and south for a great distance. There’s no water west of here and so no herds. Any raveners will come from the east.’

Carnelian read Fern’s look of misery as he looked around him. The last time he had been camping here it had been with his tribesmen, all now dead.

Carnelian’s eyes snapped open. He could see nothing but the black between the stars. Terror clutched his chest. Raveners had been hunting him in his dreams. Tremors in the ground beneath his back. He sprang up. The slope was peopled by shadow men. The earth under his feet was trembling. A murmur of fear breathed up the slope as if a wind through trees. He scrambled up the incline, slipping, reaching the edge of the Backbone on all fours. Hair rose on his neck. The rising moon was almost blotted out by a spined tower rising black from the earth. Other immensities were sliding forward on either side with a dull clatter of brass. Thin light caught on surfaces, on curves, on infernal machines. The chemical reek of naphtha. Dragons!

Carnelian recoiled, expecting the night at any moment to be turned to day by jetting flame. Losing his footing, he rolled, found his feet, stumbled into their fire, sparking embers into the air. A chaos of rushing figures, men, aquar rising, careering into each other. Poppy tugging at him. Fern was shouting. Carnelian helped him bundle Osidian into a saddle-chair. Then he was clinging to another as its aquar began striding away from him. He heaved himself up. The aquar reeled under him like a boat in a swell. He struggled to find his seat. Flailing around with his feet. Toes found the creature’s back. Both soles slapped onto its warm hide. His feet stroked her calm while he scried the darkness for Fern, for Poppy. ‘Here,’ he heard her cry. He saw her mounted, Fern nearby. Osidian was swept past, carried by his fleeing aquar. Carnelian felt his beast’s desire to follow and lifted his feet to let her run unguided.

The moon peering above the Backbone lit their flight into the west. It was the land that slowed them. Its dry watercourses and hummocks made treacherous footing for the aquar. Carnelian’s voice carried through the night. It took a while, but he rallied them; their leaders finding him in the moonlight.

‘The Backbone’ll not hold him long,’ said a voice and was answered by a murmur of agreement.

‘Hookfork has come after us as Carnie said he would,’ Poppy announced.

‘So now there’s no reason we can’t go home,’ said one of the Woading.

Voices rose in agreement from among the other tribes. Carnelian was dismayed. Without seeing a substantial force Aurum would not feel the threat of their northward march credible. ‘Impossible.’

They answered him with growling anger.

‘If Hookfork brings his whole legion against us it’s to match our numbers. Should these noticeably decrease I fear he’ll leave enough dragons behind to devastate more koppies.’

His argument swayed enough of them to encourage all save the Woading, reluctantly, to agree to go with him. The sight of the Woading riding away reminded many of what it was they might find waiting for them at home when they returned. Resentfully they followed Carnelian north with the sullen Marula.

As the sun rose, Carnelian rode up to a spur of the Backbone, unsure whether he was more afraid of seeing Aurum or of not seeing him. Golden in the dawn, the Earthsky seemed innocent of war. Closing his eyes, he drank in its musky perfume.

‘There,’ said Fern.

Carnelian opened his eyes. Fern was pointing south to where the Backbone undulated away to haze.

‘Dragons?’

Fern nodded. They rode back to join the others.

When they reached a break in the Backbone, they rode through onto the plains then resumed their march. North, always north. Shadows moved round until each aquar was treading on her own. Periodically Carnelian would send scouts up among the rocks to reassure himself Aurum was still following.

They visited a lagoon that lay close to their route. Cautious among the giant saurians drinking there, watching for raveners, they filled their waterskins. Carnelian saw in the dancing incandescence of the water a warning of the dragonfire following them. He soaked his uba then wrung it out. As he rode away, its wet cling cooled his skin, but not his anxiety.

As shadows lengthened eastwards they found, high on the Backbone, another refuge known to one of the tribes: a valley that raised a shield of rock against the Earthsky. Once again, with darkness came fear that they tried to keep at bay by huddling round their fires, their aquar still saddled in a ring around them.

Sitting with Fern and Poppy Carnelian could tell that, like him, they were listening with their bodies for any tremor in the ground. It seemed to him better to confront their fear. ‘He intended to take us all alive. Afraid to hurt the Master, he used no fire.’ He gouged a crescent in the earth with a stone. He placed the stone within the curve. ‘He meant to surround us with his dragons. Probably his auxiliaries would form an outer cordon to seal his trap.’

Poppy shuddered.

Fern looked up. ‘He would’ve taken you and the Master and then . . .’

Carnelian watched the flames dancing in his eyes and nodded.

Poppy patted the earth and smiled. ‘It was the Mother’s Backbone saved us. She’ll keep us safe from Hookfork.’

Carnelian could see how much Poppy wanted to believe that. It seemed strange to him that the Plainsmen should have an ancient fear of the name Hookfork. Could this really be a memory of some Lord of House Aurum campaigning in the Earthsky? If so then this might reflect another aberration in the history of the Commonwealth. Peering into the flames he tried to see deep into the past to another Carnelian, another Osidian fugitive in the Earthsky. He could not. Such parallel events seemed implausible. What then was the answer to this riddle? His fingers recalled some beadcord they had read in the Library of the Wise: a story of a God Emperor making war on the Plainsmen. That They should leave Osrakum was also forbidden. The conclusion to be drawn from this was startling. There had been a time before the Balance of the Powers had been set up. His hand shaped Aurum’s cypher: a horned-ring set upon a staff. A representative of the God Emperor might carry such insignia. He caught glimpses of another world in the flames, of a time before the Great and the House of the Masks were caged in Osrakum by the Law-that-must-be-obeyed. He drew greedily on what comfort there was in that. Perhaps the order of things was not as immutable as he had been taught to believe.

The next morning the dust-cloud Aurum’s dragons were raising could be seen rolling up from the south. In punishing heat Carnelian led his host on.

Some time in the afternoon they lost sight of their pursuers. He called a halt and stood anxiously with others on a bluff of the Backbone, searching. Not even the keenest eye could see any sign of the dragons. Fearing some stratagem of Aurum’s, some outflanking, worried that if Aurum found them waiting for him he would deduce he was being lured north, Carnelian made his host push on.

When they stopped to make a camp for the night, the southern horizon was still empty. There was a whispering around the hearths. Sharp in every eye was the fear that Hookfork had turned back towards their koppies.

In the morning the Plainsmen lingered at their breakfasts. Watching them eat in silence Carnelian hoped his face did not betray that he shared their fear. On the rocks above their camp, scouts were gazing south. He would have been there with them if he could. Cries from these lookouts made every Plainsman surge to his feet. Carnelian scrambled up with them onto the heights. Relief moved along the ridge like light released by a passing cloud. Carnelian’s height allowed him to look over the others’ heads to where the Backbone faded into the stirred-up dust of Aurum’s pursuit.

By midday they had once again left Aurum behind. Though the Plainsman commanders urged Carnelian to slow their pace he refused. He wanted to force Aurum to continue his night marches to catch up with them.

Later, consternation up ahead made Carnelian ride to the head of their column with Fern. When they saw him men pointed north. Carnelian’s heart sank as he saw the hazing touching the Backbone. ‘It can’t be,’ he muttered.

‘Not dragons,’ Fern said. He looked Carnelian in the eye. ‘The cloud is smaller, closer.’

Carnelian saw Fern was right. ‘It must be a render convoy.’

Hundreds of pack huimur lumbered by, weighed down by frames like pitched roofs hung with rows of what in size and shape could have been human heads. Their legs were lost in the dust they raised, clouds of which were rolling up into the defiles of the Backbone. Crouching, Carnelian shifted his attention to the escort of riders. Auxiliaries on pacing aquar, lances across their laps, heads sagging. He looked to either side where his men formed a ragged ambush, squatting concealed among the ferns, cradling the heads of their aquar to keep them stretched out upon the ground.

He gave the signal then edged back, clucking to his aquar. He slipped his legs around the pommel and over the crossbar. Grasping his saddle-chair he put his feet onto her back, encouraging her to rise. Her head came up, flicking from side to side as she blinked to look around her. The jerk of her rolling onto her feet wrenched him fully into the chair. She rocked forward, her hands touched the ground, then she rocked back and thrust him into the air. Carnelian could see others rising all around him, but he did not wait. He freed his spear from its scabbard then launched his aquar at the convoy. He chose a target and watched the man becoming suddenly aware of the threat, reining his mount round, swinging his lance up. Carnelian saw how his charge was threatening to impale him on the auxiliary’s bronze blade. Striking the lance with the haft of his spear, he rolled it from his path. He registered the auxiliary’s terror as he realized it was a Master coming at him, but then the spear pierced the man’s leather cuirass. Carnelian felt momentary resistance then his blade penetrating flesh. It jerked in his hand as it struck a rib. His aquar pulled up, trying to avoid colliding with the auxiliary’s. He managed to hold onto his spear. The man grimaced as Carnelian twisted it out. He slumped, blood running down into his lap. Carnelian used his feet to swing his aquar deeper into the melee.

The auxiliary line dissolved into chaos. A few in flight were pursued by Plainsmen but mostly it was riderless aquar that were running away into the ferns. Carnelian turned to the huimur, who were backing away, lowering their heads to present the stumps of their sawn-off horns. Riders astride their necks cowered behind the shields of the monsters’ crests. Plainsmen were throwing themselves onto the sloping sides of the wicker frames. Scrabbling up them they struck at the riders with mattocks. Though some managed to put up a fight with their goads, they soon joined the others tumbling to the ground, where they were crunched, screaming, under the huge feet of the huimur.

Astride the necks of the huimur the Plainsmen managed to bring them under control. More men clambered up the frames and began releasing the objects that Carnelian could now see were like huge leather pomegranates. Plainsmen queued up to catch the things. Grinning, a Darkcloud came to offer Carnelian one. It was a bottle of some kind, of leather held in a net of rope. It had a stumpy neck topped with a crown of bony knobs.

‘A belly,’ the man said.