Free The Chosen - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 01 by Ricardo Pinto Page A

turned to the books. He looked sidelong at his father. The beautiful, tired face seemed intent upon the jewelled oblongs. A wave of dread washed its ice over Carnelian. His father was powerless. The Master, powerless. The Hold seemed suddenly precarious, as if a single wave might wash it into the sea.
    That night, Carnelian slept hardly at all. Tain was having difficulty too. They played dice so as not to have to talk. They both played badly. Neither dared confess his dreams.
    With first light Carnelian woke. He had left the shutters open just a chink and set a table against them to keep them from flying open. A thin light slipped into the room. Tain had turned away from it. In the corner, his blankets held him in their tight knot. Carnelian lay for a moment thinking. Noise carried up from the ship. Hammering. Voices. He rose and woke Tain to help him dress in his Master's robes.
    From the alleyway, the Long Court looked like the carcass of one of the sea monsters that sometimes washed up in the bay that the gulls soon turned into a basket of bones. The remains of his home stood as stark against the colourless sky.
    There was a sickening smell. Cauldrons had been set up from which palls of steam were spiralling into the air. Beyond, the cobbles were red with slaughter. Dread drew Carnelian to look closer. One cauldron was filled with bird-like heads and three-fingered hands jiggling in the boil. The long narrow saurian heads quivered white-eyed on pillows of pink-brown scum. He looked across to where they were skinning them, hacking the flesh free from the bones. Red hunks were being wrapped in leaves, and pushed into jars, and the spaces between were packed with icicles. Carnelian was horrified. He surveyed everything with pain-ringed eyes. All around him the mottled bodies lay, their gashed necks bleeding puddles over the stone, their arms and legs and tails curled stiff. This flock had been one of their chief treasures, the only source of eggs. He had loved to feed them from his hand. He recalled their bustle and their chatter.
    He snatched at someone walking past. This was done for the meat?'
    The man was all fear. He tried to fall to his knees but Carnelian held him up by one shoulder. 'And for glue, Master.' The man pointed crookedly at another of the cauldrons.
    Carnelian let him go and went to look. Bones, and skin, the few feathers, all boiling up in a thick translucent broth. He recoiled from the stench. Through the steam he could see parchment laid out on the ground being glued up into sails.
    He turned away, disgusted. Once more he plunged past the visitors' doors and onwards, but before he reached his father's steps he turned right. A small door gave onto a passage lit by a slit in the end wall. Once this had been his way to and from the Hold. It led to his old room overlooking the sea. Ebeny would be there. She had always been there.
    He rapped on the door in the special way so that she would know it was him, then opened it gently. The room was large, frescoed with squid-headed ammonites and saurians with paddle limbs. The floor was scented grey-wood. This was his room. It would always be his room. Her room was off to the left. He took off his shoes to feel the whorls of the greywood with his toes. He unmasked and drank in the smell of the place. He walked across to the w indow. Through its panes of cuttl efish cartilage he could see the sea and the familiar curve of the bay. He frowned when he saw the ship there, sucking onto the quay like a slug.
    She called out. He went through the doorway. 'Carnie, it is you.' Her brown, chameleoned face was filled by her bright smiling eyes. She stood up. She was less than half his height and had been beautiful. With a pang he remembered something his father had said about a barbarian's beauty being but a spring flower and quick to wither. He went forward and knelt before her.
    'Come, come. You mustn't kneel to me, and certainly not in your Master's robes.'
    He stiffened,