The Chosen - Stone Dance of the Chameleon 01 Read Online Free Page A

The barracks were never silent. It was unnatural. He shivered. The air was dank. When they passed along the arcade it was all he could do to stop himself escaping through the door into the familiar warmth of the Great Hall.
    He noticed his men stiffen and then he straightened too as he saw the strangers. They were ranged in groups up the steps, men whose faces bore the marks of other Houses. He stared. Until then, every adult face he had ever seen, other than his father's, had had its chameleon. The strangers' faces were different. Some were bisected from hairline to chin by a horned-ring staff. Others were marked with the cross of dragonfly wings. A third group had the disc and crescent of the evening star tattooed like manic smiles. As these faces were variously marked, so did they differ in other ways. The. bisected ones were round and yellow. The dragonflied ones were oval, with almond eyes that peeped out from between the wings of their tattoos. Those who wore painted smiles were swarthier than any people Carnelian had seen before. All the strangers were swathed in stained brown travelling cloaks. While some had two-pronged spears, others had their hands on sheathed sickles or four-bladed cross-swords. All this Carnelian saw in the instant before the strangers fell with a clatter before him into the prostration.
    He froze and his escort halted round him. The only men still standing had chameleoned faces. Two of these were his brothers: Grane, grim commander of the tyadra, and handsome Keal. Carnelian saw the uncertainty in the guardsmen's faces as they looked at him. He watched them glance at Grane, anxious, looking for an order. The commander ignored them. Instead, he gave Carnelian an almost imperceptible nod. Carnelian watched his own hand rise up before him. It shaped the sign, Kneel. In twos and threes they went down. Proud Grane, the eldest of his brothers, was last of all to kneel. He pressed his brown hands together and pushed them out, as the others had done, as if offering himself to be tied up like a slave. Carnelian went cold, disliking their abasement. He stood alone as if in a field he had just reaped. His hand was there before him, the sign still locked into it. It looked like his father's hand, for only he used such a command gesture. Carnelian forced himself to ascend the stairway. The doors of sea-ivory opened before him and he passed between them into his father's hall.
    Four masks turned towards him. Carnelian faltered under their gaze, awed by the serene, unearthly beauty of those faces of gold. Four giants stood there beside the circular hearth. One he knew: his father in his jewelled robe. The other three, though much like him, were enveloped in great black hooded cloaks greyed with brine. In all his life Carnelian had seen no other Master save for his father. He realized that in spite of all he had been told, until that moment he had believed his father a being without peer.
    Behind him the doors closed and the giants dropped their masks into the cradles of their hands, revealing white faces, long, finely boned, with eyes the colours of winter. Carnelian remembered that the Law commanded he must unmask when those higher than him did so. When he had fumbled the thing off he felt like a snail teased from its shell. He clutched the mask as he approached. Their skin was like light passing through ice. It took strength to keep his eyes up looking back at them. He found it. He would not bring shame on his father or himself.
    'Great Lords, behold my son, Suth Carnelian,' his father said, looking at him. Emotions were shifting in his eyes like fish in a pool.
    ‘ So, Lord Suth, this is the son whom you have been hiding from us all these many, long years.' The voice came as from a bronze throat. Its owner was even larger than his father. He was also older, much older, though unlike any old man Carnelian had ever seen. His skin had not wrinkled, rather it had thinned to alabaster. His eyes' intense blue