Dapples of gold flickering round him made it seem he was among breeze-ruffled trees. Carnelian lifted his head and saw the crusted masses of the Masters grow taller and then turn towards the distant doors, like sails into a wind. One of them remained. The Ruling Lord Aurum. He raised his hand. There is now no need for you to go and see her?

Carnelian looked at his father's eyes that seemed unaware of Aurum's signs.

If you go, I want to go with you.

Suth's hand stirred into motion. If I go, I will go alone.

Aurum's face became stiff with anger. He stabbed Carnelian with his eyes before glimmering away.

Carnelian felt the opening of the doors as a change of pressure in his ears. They let in a perfume wind and the roar of the throng. Carnelian watched his father. The doors came ponderously together and, with a clunk,

Carnelian was left with his father in the glowing golden gloom.

'Leave us,' said Suth.

Carnelian's eyes were drawn downwards by a scurrying. The ammonites were creeping over the floor and slipping down into a hole over which a lid closed silendy. Something like tumbling fire jerked Carnelian's head up. His father's head had fallen forward. He looked like a golden puppet. Alarmed, Carnelian opened the angles of his knees and lurched towards the dais. The sunburst crown presented its teeth to him so that Carnelian could not see his father's face.

'Father.' The word came strangled from his throat.

The spiked halo rose, lifting the limestone of his father's face after it, sighing, 'Where have you been?'

That close, Carnelian could not avoid seeing the sallow skin, the thinned lips, the eyes deep in their pits all shot with red. Those eyes were on him. He sought their familiar stormy grey but found only pale drizzle. 'Exploring,' he said.

'For… five… days?'

Carnelian could admit nothing without admitting it all.

'You were alone saw no-one?'

Carnelian blushed. There was someone with me.' He withstood the probing of his father's eyes.

Surprise dawned in his father's face. 'So it is that way. The sybling Quenthas?'

'A sybling but a divided one.' He watched his father's yellow forehead creasing. 'He wears a blood-ring.'

'Does he?'

Carnelian thought his father looked like a man walking on a rope. 'His House?'

The Masks.' Carnelian watched the red eyes close.

Sepia welled in the eye pits and round the corners of the mouth. Looking at that yellow mask, Carnelian could hardly believe to whom it belonged. 'You look tired, Father.'

The eyes opened, brightened. His father gave a chuckle and his lips wore something like a smile. 'You could say that.'

'Your wound?'

His father gave the merest shrug with his eyebrows. This is no time for convalescence.'

'Does your wound still bleed?' Carnelian took a step forward.

His father's face made the slightest movement side to side. The Wise know ways to preserve life, to hold corruption at bay, even to extend a creature's natural span of years.'

'And strength?'

'What I have comes from their potions.' He looked into Carnelian's face. 'Be not concerned. Once this matter is resolved… I will abdicate to Aurum the power that he craves, then I will have all the time I need to rest.'

He went deathly sallow. They who were the mirror to divinity are no more. We are left to live through these broken mirror days. The Commonwealth must be given a new heart lest she should perish.'

Carnelian remembered what the dead Emperor had once been to his father. The need to tell his father of the Yden was burning him but he kept silent.

The gates in the Ringwall are open. The barbarians will be coming in, riddling the Commonwealth with their cancer.'

'And the election?'

'In five days.'

'Goes it well?'

'Very well.' His father smiled raggedly. The new Imago, our friend Jaspar, has brought his faction behind Aurum's. At every conclave I buy more votes with imperial blood and iron. The towers of the major blocks are all in place, we merely need to build the curtain walls between them. Barring some unforeseen intervention, Ykoriana and Molochite will be defeated.'

'She is quite given to interventions, Father.'

The cores of his father's eyes showed indomitably. Carnelian felt something of their usual power as they settled on him. That is why you must promise me that until the election you will not leave the Sunhold save with me.'

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.