Rats and Gargoyles

by Mary Gentle

  Tannakin Spatchet rubbed his forehead where the low doorway caught him, and followed her up the dark stairs.

  She led him through a room with an iron stove to one side and a scarcely less rigid bed to the other, and through into an airy room smelling of paper and leather bindings. She held out a hand for his cloak.

  "Can you help, lady?"

  The White Crow folded the cloak, studying the bulky fair-haired man. He seemed in his fifties, too pallid for health. She dropped the cloak randomly across a stack of black-letter pamphlets.

  "Mayor of the Nineteenth District," she repeated.

  "Of its East quarter. I regret coming to you in this unceremonious manner. I brought no clerks or recorders, thinking the whole matter best kept quiet." He cleared his throat. "Yesterday . . ."

  Tannakin Spatchet touched a finger to the cleared chair, looked distastefully at the book-dust, and seated himself gingerly. Then he met the White Crow’s gaze, his fussiness gone.

  "Yesterday I saw Decans’ acolytes," the Mayor said, "closer than I ever hope to see them again. Five of my people are missing–dead, I should say. I need someone to advise me."

  A beast yipped. The White Crow’s preoccupied gaze snapped back into focus. She crossed the room and squatted down, picking up from a padded box a young fox-cub and reaching for a glass bottle. As she seated herself on the window-sill, the reddish lump of fur in her lap stinking of vixen, and bent her head to feed it, she said: "At a Masons’ Hall, in the East quarter."

  "You know of it?"

  "Evelian told me this morning. I think she knew someone in the hall. I knew that something had been destroyed." She held out a free hand, the bandages on the palm newly bloodstained. "We respond, some of us, to such disturbances."

  The warm wind blew in at the window, easing the fox-stink.

  "What I say must go no further."

  She jerked her head at the room: the books, charts, orreries and globes. "I am what I am, messire. If you want my help, tell me why."

  "I . . . know so little," Tannakin Spatchet confessed. "We’re not admitted to the mysteries of the halls. I heard of the meeting only at the last moment. I and my councilors thought fit to force an entrance. Would to god we never . . . Master Falke spoke there. Of ways to free us from those who rule the city."

  Pain ached in her palm. The fox-cub whined, nipping sleepily at her wrist.

  "Stupid! Stupid. What were you going to fight Decans with, messire–your bare hands?"

  "Lady, I have no proof, but I believed Master Falke to be a secret officer in the Society of the House of Salomon–they having their secret officers infiltrated into almost every hall."

  He glanced over his shoulder at the open window.

  "The House of Salomon say that since we build stone on stone to increase the Fane’s power, then we could raze stone from stone, so raze the Fane and the power of the Thirty-Six with it. Could that be so, lady?"

  "In all the greater and the lesser magias, patterns compel."

  The White Crow rubbed her knuckles along the fox- cub’s rough coat. It opened tiny amber eyes. She yipped under her breath, very softly, and reached down to tap a heavily bound copy of Vitruvius’ The Ten Books on Architecture resting on the sill.

  "This House of Salomon seems to follow orthodox teaching. Vitruvius writes that the measurements of a truly constructed building mirror both the proportions of the human body and the shape of the universal Order. Microcosm mirrors macrocosm; the Fane mirrors the Divine within. Theoretically, break Their mirror and you remove Their channels of power. But we speak of the Thirty-Six."

  Tannakin Spatchet shivered. The White Crow shrugged.

  "It’s foolhardy. The Decans aren’t so easily challenged." She spoke with the contempt of long knowledge. "They loosed the least of their servants on you, and—"

  Tannakin Spatchet rose. "Do I look so much of a fool? Falke called the meeting; I heard of it only by chance. Falke called in Fellowcrafts from half the halls in the quarter; Falke brought in the Rat-Lords, and a Kings’ Memory!"

  "This is the Master of the Hall? And you couldn’t stop it, Master Mayor?"

  "A builder listen to any one of us! Very likely." Deep sarcasm sounded in the Mayor’s voice. He looked down at the White Crow. "Someone betrayed the meeting to those at the Fane. Falke’s dead. So are those others who didn’t get out in time. If they knew who betrayed them, I don’t."

  ‘In all the greater and the lesser magias, patterns compel’. From A Perfit Description of the Caelestiall Orbes, Thomas Digges, London, 1576

  He wiped his forehead. "I’m sorry, lady. I’ve spent the morning with widows and children. It isn’t easy explaining to them how I am still alive and the others dead."

  The White Crow put the fox-cub back into its box. She brushed orange hairs from her shirt and knee-breeches, sniffed her fingers, and wrinkled her nose. She raised her head and stared through the open window. No dark in her vision, no taste in her mouth but sour wine.

  "Decans. As if," she said, "you or I were to pour boiling water into an ant’s nest. Does it matter if a few escape? With only a little more effort they could cauterize the city itself, humans and Rats together."

  Tannakin Spatchet sat down slowly. He absently began to straighten the edges of the stacked papers on the table. "What are we? Their hands. Their builders. Of no more significance than a trowel, a hod, a pair of compasses. The least we need is warning, when they exercise their power. Lady, can you help me?"

  "If I can, I will."

  The determination in that seemed to surprise even her. She stood and briskly began sorting through books on a low shelf.

  "You tell me other halls were involved? And so there’ll be more meetings . . . ?" The White Crow straightened, a hand in the small of her back.

  Tannakin Spatchet said: "Is a scrying spell possible?"

  She looked questioningly at him.

  "To discover who betrayed them to the Decans," the Mayor amplified. "And why."

  "More difficult. I can try. Tell me, first, who was there. Who was in the hall when it was destroyed."

  The White Crow looked out into the courtyard, and saw Mistress Evelian, golden hair shining in the sun, pegging out washing; and holding a shouted conversation with the dark-haired student, Lucas, at his attic window.

  "The Master of the Hall, Falke; and his sister, Awdrey, who was Mistress Royal to the Children of the Widow. Two Apprentices from out of the quarter. A man and two women I didn’t recognize. The Captain- General of the King’s Guard, Desaguliers."

  Tannakin Spatchet paused. The White Crow scratched at rough parchment with a quill pen, noting names.

  " ‘. . . Captain-General.’ I’ll have to ask questions carefully in that quarter. Who else?"

  He watched her handwriting: stark and sloping across the page.

  "A brown Rat. I believe she was a soldier. A priest: a black Rat that the Captain-General called by the name of Plessiez. And the girl who gave the warning, the Kings’ Memory. Lady, she was very young. I don’t know her name. She is the one who died–a Katayan."

  On the highest pinnacle yet built, among scaffolding lashed with hemp rope and net-cradled blocks of masonry, men are talking in whispers. Any sun is absorbed by the black stone. Acres of stone fall away below them, in crevasses and coigns.

  Distance hides the ground below.

  "They know!" .

  The hooks dangle from the derricks, empty, ropes creaking. All the cranes are abandoned.

  "I tell you, they know what we’re doing!"

  They are in working clothes, silk and satin, each with the mark of his own particular Craft.

  "We must act as if we were innocent. They need us to build for them. "

  This ziggurat will rise between two pyramidical obelisks that are equal in thickness to the building itself. A mile away an identical pair of obelisks rises, completed two generations ago. Great hieroglyphs are burned into their stone sides. This burning of stone happened during an eclipse of the s
un that lasted four days.

  "No. We don’t wait. " This speaker is the most assured. "You’re right: they need us to build, because they can’t. So—"

  "If we stop work, they’ll kill enough of us that the rest will go back to work. We’ve tried that before."

  To north and east and aust of the ziggurat, more of the Fane’s perpendicular frontages cut the sky. Here, the sky itself is the color of ashes.

  "They can force us to work," the first speaker says, "but who can force a man to eat or to sleep?"

  The ceiling-fan’s eight-foot blades circled a slow wck . . . wck . . . wck . . . The only other noise came from the clerk’s quill pen. Afternoon heat slanted in through pale- green shutters, drawn closed on the large room’s south-austern side.

  A breath of air came in from the opposite full-length shutters, open to the terrace, and touched the forehead of the man sleeping in the chair behind the desk. His eyelashes flickered. The Candovard Ambassador saw through sleep-watered vision the whitewashed walls, the pale-green fretworked wood that decorated doors and shutters and terrace balustrade.

  A fist rapped the shutters. The thin young clerk stood up.

  "Mhrumhh?" Andaluz raised his head alertly.

  A young man held one shutter open, slatted shadow barring his body: bare feet and knee-breeches, and a doublet carried slung over one shoulder. Chest and shoulders and arms were rounded with muscle. He looked at Andaluz from under meeting brows.

  "My dear Lucas!" Andaluz sprang up, waved the clerk back and came round the desk. "My dear boy! I’ve been waiting for you to call."

  The younger man dropped his doublet over a chair, and the smaller man embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks. He put Lucas back to arm’s length, studying him.

  "I hear that you came in on the Viper yesterday morning. You should have called. Do I take it from this dress that you’re still determined on disguise? Your mother wrote to me some months ago about that. Most censoriously, I might add."

  The young man laughed, holding up both hands. "I’ll tell you, Uncle, if you’ll let me speak."

  "Tea." Andaluz snapped his fingers. The clerk left silently. Andaluz tugged at the hem of his sleep-creased white jacket, not bothering to do up the neck buttons. He scratched at his curled, grizzled hair.

  "And how is my dear Pereluz?"

  "Mother’s fine."

  The youth looked up at a portrait hanging above the mahogany filing-cabinets. A patch of light picked out the woman who sat beside a sun-haired man. She wore a coronet, as her husband did, on hair as dark as Lucas’s; and her fine brows came within a hair of meeting.

  Andaluz saw, reflected in the glass covering, his and the young man’s same features: forty years between them. Andaluz’s hair was grizzled sharply black and white, with little gray in it.

  "She told me to tell you she misses her favorite brother at court."

  "Ah, Pereluz." The Ambassador patted Lucas’s shoulder as he bustled back behind his desk. He picked up gold-rimmed spectacles and put them on. "What can I arrange for you, Prince?"

  He saw the dark gaze glint out from under heavy brows. Lucas moved in the heat-shadowed room like a breath of the outside world: sweet-tempered, smelling of sweat and sunshine.

  "Yes, I do want you to do something for me. I want it made clear to the university that I start there tomorrow, not today." The young man paused, as the clerk returned with iced tea.

  Andaluz scribbled a short note, handed it to the clerk and sent her off with whispered instructions.

  "Done, I think. What else?"

  Lucas smiled. "Does it show so clearly?"

  "My dear Lucas, if this were a social visit, you would have called yesterday. Besides, I’m told that your stay here, short as it is, hasn’t been uneventful." Andaluz broke off, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "Tell me about it. I can cease to be official for a few minutes."

  The young man shook his head decisively.

  "I want you to investigate a death. A girl. She was a student, a Katayan; I can give you her full name."

  Andaluz’s bushy eyebrows rose. "A friend?"

  "No. No . . ." The young man looked away. "I didn’t like her, and I haven’t changed my opinion because she died. I suppose I feel guilty about—De mortuis nil nisi bonum. But I want the full story. There are friends of hers who need to know. Her name was Zar-bettu-zekigal."

  Andaluz copied down the carefully enunciated syllables.

  "Assume that I know something of this," he said. "The Embassy keeps an eye on you. What else?"

  The young man paced across the faded carpet. He stopped for a time, looking out on to the wooden terrace, and across the stretch of yellow earth that, if not for the heat, would be a garden.

  "I had another message for you, Uncle, but the person who sent it probably died when Zari did." Lucas turned. "A priest, a black Rat by the name of Plessiez. He said he knows . . . knew you. He sent his regards."

  Andaluz took off his spectacles, laying them on the papers on the desk. The ceiling-fan’s wck-wck sounded loudly.

  "The little priest is dead?"

  "It’s almost certain. Sorry."

  "I always told Plessiez that he’d go too far. Tell me all of it," Andaluz directed and, when he had heard the boy out, shook his head slowly. "The Embassy Compound’s been quiet. I don’t think we’ve had to deal with more than the Fane’s intermediaries in five years. Now three secretaries and two ambassadors summoned by the Decans in half a day . . ."

  Lucas said: "I also need to know if you have a file on a woman. A natural philosopher: she calls herself the White Crow. Most of what I’ve heard about the hall, I’ve heard through her. I want to know how reliable she is." Andaluz picked up a bell on his desk and rang it. After a few seconds, another clerk appeared; and the Candovard Ambassador handed him a slip of paper with two names on it. He sipped at his iced tea while he waited, studying the Prince’s face.

  "You’re no longer incognito," he said. "Will you be moving in here? I’ve plenty of room."

  A chessboard occupied one corner of the large desk. Lucas leaned on his forearms, studying the game in progress, and reached to move a jet-carved pawn with dirty fingers. Andaluz all but saw images in the boy’s mind: of the odd house off Carver Street to which the university had sent him. He restrained himself from comment.

  "I’ll stay where I am, Uncle, for the moment."

  The second clerk returned, putting a thick file of papers down in front of Andaluz. The Ambassador began to skim over the notes. When he spoke, it was without looking up.

  "Your ‘White Crow’ is easily identifiable. There aren’t too many foreign natural philosophers in the city. Even though this one appears to change her name and move around–six months here, eight months there . . ."

  Andaluz sat back. "We have records for her going back five years. No reason in particular, except that, as a philosopher, she’s kept under observation. She practices a little natural magic in order to make a living, it would seem."

  The boy had leaned forward. Now he bent his head, rubbing with both hands at the back of his neck. When he straightened, that might have been the reason for his heat-reddened cheeks.

  Andaluz said gently: "I hope you’ll come here often, Lucas. I miss my countrymen, and family."

  The young man nodded, shifting awkwardly. "Of course."

  "Sending you to the university was your father’s idea. Of course, the Ortiz have always had a strain of eccentricity in the blood—"

  "And the Luz haven’t?"

  "My dear Lucas."

  A pair of blowflies buzzed around the tea-bowl, and Andaluz carefully fitted the weighted net cover over the ceramic. The flies settled on the cracked plaster ceiling, crawling there, beyond the fan-blades, with several dozen other insects.

  "I intended to say, only, that this is not the summer I would choose to have the heir of Candover here."

  Lucas shrugged. "I’m staying."

  "So I perceive." Patience stayed Andaluz’s tongue, lon
g assumed and long practiced. He looked up as the first clerk returned, handing him a written note in return for his message.

  "Is there going to be trouble with the university?"

  Andaluz read, and then looked up.

  "I think not. All today’s lectures were canceled," the Ambassador said. "Term starts tomorrow. It seems that one of the lecturers has gone missing. A Reverend Master Candia?"

  Lucas stared, startled. "He was there yesterday with us. With the new intake."

  Andaluz shrugged. "And now, apparently, drunk or dead or whatever the reason might be, completely vanished."

  Voices sound in the dark. The tones echo, as if from an immense space: bouncing back from hard surfaces. Mixed with those echoes is the sound of dripping water.

  No light; no slightest peripheral gleam.

  "Will you wait for me!" A scuffle and thud. "You bastards can see in the dark and I can’t!"

  "Are you hurt, little one?"

  An inaudible mumble.

  Further off, another voice demands: "What’s she doing here?"

  "She blundered in, Charnay, rather as you have a habit of doing. Don’t complain. You have her to thank for your life."

  "Where the hell are we?"

  "Not, I hope, in hell, although I confess to some doubt on the subject."

  Another voice speaks: "Listen!"

  The silence resumes. Far off, there is a noise that might be water, or wind, or some element of flux peculiar to darkness.

  Chapter Three

  "The use," Reverend Mistress Heurodis announced, "of the knife. You. Lucas. Come here."

  Light shone from perpendicular windows down into the university’s training-hall. Lucas rubbed the sleep of his second night in the city from his eyes and walked out of the group of students.

  "The knife can kill quickly, efficiently and, above all, silently."

  Heurodis’s smoky blue eyes moved to Lucas. He hunched his shoulders unconsciously: her head only came up to the level of his collar-bone.

  "Here." She offered him the bone hilt of a knife, with a hand upon which the veins stood up, skin brown-spotted with age.