by Mary Gentle
"It isn’t," she said into a gap in Plessiez’s dictation, "an austere Order, the Order of Guiry."
Plessiez chuckled. He slipped his arms into a crimson jacket slashed with gold and, as a brown Rat servant buttoned it up to his throat, remarked: "An academic Order, little one; and austere as–ah, as all academics are."
The silver rim of the water-jug chilled her mouth. She drank, colicky; and belched.
"Plessiez!"
"Here." The black Rat acknowledged the yelp of joy, raising his arms while a servant buckled and adjusted his sword-belt and basket-hilted rapier. He shrugged himself back into it, hand going at once to rest there. The junior priests and servants fell back before two newcomers.
Zari switched round to kneel upright on the couch. She put both hands over her mouth, muffling a giggle. A short plump black Rat slitted her eyes, her gaze passing over the Katayan silhouetted against the rising sun.
"You’re going to see the King?" she asked Plessiez.
"Fleury, of course he is!" A tall and very thin Rat, with raffish black fur and a cheerfully unworldly look, slapped Plessiez’s shoulder. "Must have worked out, eh? When do we give the word to move?"
With a start, he noticed the Katayan.
"Zar-bettu-zekigal," she said gravely, scratching her ear with her tail. The Rat bowed.
"Fenelon," he said.
"Fleury, Fenelon, you’ll come with me to the King." Plessiez beckoned. "Little one."
Zar-bettu-zekigal got off the couch, and bent to rub her calves with both hands. "I’m dead beat!"
"Rest in the coach. Come."
"Messire Plessiez!"
An elderly black Rat stood in the doorway, the white-and-gold-clad captain beside her. Her ears showed ragged, her muzzle gray. The sleeveless open robe over her jacket glowed emerald. Lace foamed at her wrists and at her throat. A gemmed pectoral ankh hung between her rows of dugs.
"I regret I cannot stay to serve the Cardinal-General," Plessiez said, picking up his scarlet cloak and plumed headband. "The Cardinal-General will excuse me."
"What are you doing?" Cardinal-General Ignatia frowned, bewildered. "Captain Auverne reports you asked for an audience with the King. You must, of course, first report to myself anything concerning the use of magia—"
"Is my coach there?" Plessiez asked Zar-bettu-zekigal. She padded across to the window.
"There’s a coach waiting in the courtyard, messire."
"Good."
"Messire Plessiez, you will explain yourself!"
Zari saw the black Rat’s tail sweep into a jaunty curve. With a studied recklessness, Plessiez faced the Rat in the doorway.
"The explanation would be a little too complex for you, Ignatia. Short of force, you won’t stop me seeing the King. And you won’t use force."
The black Rat that Zari identified as Auverne stepped forward. Fleury’s sword scraped out of the scabbard: a ragged raw noise. The Cardinal-General held up her hand.
"Really, Messire Plessiez, the haste, if nothing else, is most unseemly; and, even without that rashness, protocol demands that your superior in the Order first hears whatever information you may possess."
Zar-bettu-zekigal rubbed her eyes, planting her bare feet foursquare on the floorboards; dazzled by whitewashed walls and daylight. The sun-warmed wood thrummed, once, and she winced: the tensile memory of the skin on the soles of her feet still tingling with the dissolution of stone.
"That child has seen magia!" the Cardinal-General protested. Zari opened her eyes to find the elderly Rat peering at her.
"Yes, magia. Thirty years’ study should at least enable you to recognize it when you see it!"
Plessiez snarled, not slowing as he approached the Cardinal-General.
"Or has it been something in books for too long, Ignatia? Don’t you care for it raw? Now, while you’ve been poring over the Library for decades, I’ve acted."
The elderly Rat involuntarily stepped back.
"This is your old talk of power under the heart of the world? Plessiez, you demean yourself, you behave no better than a Treepriest. We have our God at hand, their gaia is nowhere to be seen, and as for beneath the city—"
"Messire Plessiez," a guard interrupted, as he pushed his way through the crowd at the door. "That sewer- shaft. We’ve investigated. It goes down about six feet. Then it’s completely choked by new rubble."
Zari’s feet tingled, remembering the floorboards’ tremor. She tried to catch Plessiez’s eye, but the black Rat only beckoned her and Fleury and Fenelon.
As they passed the Cardinal-General, Zar-bettu- zekigal glanced first at her and then sympathetically up at the raffish Fenelon.
"End of a long fight?"
"About six years’ worth," he agreed. He put himself between Zar-bettu-zekigal and Auverne’s novice-guards.
Plessiez carried his slim body taut, swinging cloak and headband from his free hand. As Zari caught up, he called back over his shoulder: "Make the most of your time, Ignatia. I’ll be asking the King to appoint a new Cardinal-General of the Order of Guiry."
Far into the Fane, day and night are lost memories. The light that shines on the stonework is cool green. There is no slightest hint of decay in the air.
–Why did you betray your people?–
He hears no audible voice. It writes, instead, in lines of blood forming behind his shut eyelids. The Bishop can croak air through ripped vocal cords. But he will not speak.
His wrinkled lids, blue-veined, open to disclose rheumy eyes. No matter how he tries to look down (head held immobile by the iron spike upon which it is impaled) he cannot see the peripheral obstructions of chest or shoulders. They no longer exist.
–Why did you betray the Builders’ conspiracy?–
Lines of blood, forming in the empty air.
His creased lower jaw works. Drying blood and sinews constrict his throat.
–How did they think to threaten god-daemons?–
"I . . . don’t . . . know . . ."
–Answer and it will count well in your favor. Those are coming who need to ask no questions, all-knowing and all-seeing. The Decans will be less kind than we who are only their servants.–
"Lady . . . of . . . the . . . Woods . . ."
Unable to see his interrogators, unable to move anything but that once-eloquent mouth, the Bishop of the Trees begins to pray.
The heat of the early sun drew vapor from the black wooden sill. Earth and cobbles in the courtyard below steamed, the previous night’s rain drying. The young man on the truckle-bed rolled over. Half-asleep, sweating, he got up on one elbow. The vibrations of Clock-mill striking eight jarred his brown eyes open.
"Awshit," Lucas of Candover muttered. "Awshit- shit . . ."
A long cre-eak disorientated him. He kicked free of the sheet and sat up. Something large, pink and swathed in wet towels loomed over the bed. Lucas swallowed the foul taste in his mouth.
"Wh—?"
The Lord-Architect Casaubon said: "Step across the landing for a moment, Prince. I need help."
"Mmhrm–What?"
The door to Lucas’s room creaked shut. He rubbed granules of sleep from his eyes, staring around the tiny room. Only the smell of steam spoke of recent occupation. He groped for his breeches.
"Shit!" Struggling into his clothes, he barged out and across the tiny landing to the Lord-Architect’s door. "What is it? What’s wrong? Is it her–White Crow?"
The Lord-Architect sat on his creaking truckle-bed, toweling his hair vigorously. A claw-footed iron bathtub in one corner was surrounded by sopping-wet towels. Crates and brass-bound trunks occupied what space that was left. Through the leaded window, a blue summer sky grew pale and hotter by the second.
"Is she in danger?"
"What?" The Lord-Architect emerged from his towel, wet hair standing up in red-gold spikes. He beamed at Lucas. "Some ridiculous ordinance in the city–a human being can’t hire servants! Of all the pox-rotted pig’s-tripe. Hand me my vest, will you?"
"Body-servants," Casaubon amplified. He pushed himself up from the bed, and the wooden frame creaked a protest. The wet towel joined the others on the floorboards. Pulling a vest over his head, he repeated from the depths of the folds of cloth: "Hand me that, there."
Lucas glared. "I’m a Prince of Candover and no man’s servant!"
"Hmm?" The Lord-Architect thrust his head out of the muffling cloth. "Hurry it up, will you? There’s a good lad."
Something in the Lord-Architect’s tone convicted Lucas of dubious manners at best. Lucas picked up the canvas garment hanging over the back of a chair and passed it across. He caught a jaw-cracking yawn, stifled it, and combed his sleep-tangled curls with his fingers.
"This is what you woke me up for? Of all the insolence—"
He stopped, and stared at Casaubon’s back. The fat man’s vest rode up over slabs of thigh and buttock as he fitted the canvas garment over his head, tugging it down over the full-moon swell of his belly.
"Poxrotted-damned-cretinous—" One elbow jammed in the air, the other caught in the laced-up garment. "Lend a hand, can’t you, boy!"
The court of Candover requires tact and diplomacy from a prince. Lucas sniffed hard. "Is that a corset?"
"Damned-poxrotted full-dress audience—"
Lucas looked at canvas, bone-ribs and thick cord lacings, almost as bewildered as the older man. He bristled, caught between the insult to his dignity and the sneaking suspicion that his lack of knowledge was about to make a fool of him.
"The Princes of Candover don’t dress themselves!" He reached out and tugged tentatively at the bottom hem. Casaubon’s elbow slid free. The fat man pulled the garment lower, huffing, until it girdled his stomach.
"Can’t hire a damned servant, can’t get a decent meal." He turned, glaring down at Lucas. "Does your poxrotted landlady ever serve anything without boiled cabbage in the meal?"
"I don’t know," Lucas shot back with satisfaction. "I’ve only been here a week!"
The Lord-Architect chuckled resonantly. His companionable beam took in Lucas, the summer morning, the bell-notes of birds in the courtyard.
"Pull," he ordered, presenting the Prince of Candover with his back and the lacings of the corset.
Lucas stepped closer, staring up at the fat-sheathed muscles of the Lord-Architect’s shoulders and arms. He tugged the two flaps of the corset towards each other across the broad back.
"Right," he said. "Right."
He grabbed the two cords and pulled, sharply. The Lord-Architect grunted and braced his massive legs apart.
"She doesn’t want you here." Lucas emphasized his speech with a hard pull on the lacings. "She’s only talking to you because you won’t answer her questions!"
The top of the corset, under the fat man’s arms, began to pull together. Lucas, sweating, poked at the lacings further down; hooked his fingers under a point where they crossed over, and heaved.
"What’s more, you’re bothering her, and I don’t like it."
Casaubon grunted. He scratched at his newly washed hair, spiking it in tufts. Craning to look back over his cushioned shoulder, the Lord-Architect said mildly: "Now, if I’d answered her questions when I arrived, what would she have done?"
"Told you to—" Lucas trapped his finger between tight lacings. He swore under his breath. "To go away."
"Precisely." The Lord-Architect sucked in his breath and belly. The two edges of the corset creaked closer together. "Now, how else could I get a bad-tempered impatient woman like Valentine to stand still and hear my message?"
Lucas glowered at the Lord-Architect’s back. He wrapped the cords around his fist, put a knee at the cleft of the fat man’s buttocks and pulled.
"What message?"
"Valentine will be asking herself that."
Lucas whipped the cords into a secure knot, and sat down heavily on the Lord-Architect’s bed, panting. Casaubon picked up a ruffled shirt and slid his arms into it, the bone-ribs of the corset gently creaking.
"I said . . . you’re bothering her . . . and I don’t like it." Lucas rested his arms back, propping himself up, chin on his chest. Outside, the heat whitened city roofs, turned the air dusty. He sweated. The sour smell of bathwater and wet cloth filled his nostrils.
"You’re right," Casaubon said contritely. "It was too sudden."
He fastened the toggles on his shirt. The tails hung down almost to his massive calves. Lucas shook his head, and handed up the bright-blue silk breeches laid out on the bottom of the bed.
"Much too sudden!" The Lord-Architect stopped, one foot in his breeches, the other wavering in mid-air. He beamed widely at Lucas.
"I shall woo her," he announced.
His foot hit the floorboards with an audible thump. As he fastened his silk breeches, he added: "Do you think she likes poetry? I’ll write her a sonnet. Two sonnets. How many lines would that be, exactly?"
Lucas fell back across the bed, wheezing, water leaking out of the comers of his eyes.
"Have that hay-fever treated," the Lord-Architect advised. He cumbrously hooked his braces to his breeches, and over them eased an embroidered waistcoat on to his massive torso.
The attic-room’s airless heat increased. Lucas rolled across the bed and pushed the casement window open.
Mud patched the courtyard, remnant of the storm. The White Crow stood up, two battered saucepans under her arm, and waved as she saw Lucas. He stared after her as she climbed her steps, picking up another can on the way. He realized he hadn’t waved back.
"What message? If you’re getting her involved in anything dangerous . . ."
The sun tangled in her hair that, he saw now, shone red without a gleam of gold or orange in it. Her white shirt hung out of the back of her brown knee-breeches.
The door swung to behind her.
Casaubon came to the window, shrugging into a royal- blue satin coat, deep-pocketed, with turned-back embroidered cuffs. It fitted across his corseted stomach like a second skin. The full skirts swirled. Lucas, momentarily petty, enjoyed a thought of how hot and uncomfortable the Lord-Architect was going to be at a formal audience.
"Valentine has faced danger for the College since she was fifteen," Casaubon said soberly. "The woman enjoys it. Foolish child."
Lucas stood. The Lord-Architect still topped him by six or eight inches.
"My uncle the Ambassador has a fairly efficient intelligence service. If I want to find out what’s going on here, I can. Suppose you tell me."
Casaubon lifted the corner of the bedsheet, peering under the bed. He padded to the other side of the room in stockinged feet.
"Can you see a shoe?"
Lucas scratched his chest. Muscles slid under sweaty skin. Almost despairing, he burst out: "If you care about her so much, why won’t you take help when it’s offered? I’m a prince. I can command my people who are here. I could help!"
"It was here somewhere . . ."
Lucas picked up an extremely large black shoe from behind a crate. Acting on nothing but impulse, he walked around the bottom of the bed, put his hand on Casaubon’s chest and pushed. The Lord-Architect sat down heavily. Wood screeched. Lucas squatted down on his haunches in front of the fat man.
"You won’t get rid of me." He grabbed one stockinged foot, shoving the shoe on to it. Casaubon grunted. Lucas snared the other high-heeled court shoe from under the bed and fitted it on. "So you might as–uh–might as well get used to me. There."
Casaubon rested his elbows on his massive thighs, and rested his chins in his hands. China-blue eyes met Lucas’s.
"I am about to go and give Valentine her message," he said gravely. "Would you care to come with me, before you leave for the university?"
Lucas stood. "Yes! Yes . . ."
"Good."
Hazarding a blind guess, Lucas said: "You’ll take her with you, to your audience with the King?"
"I have an audience," the Lord-Architect Casaubon agreed, "but not with the King. I h
ave an audience at eleven, at the Fane."
"No, true, my eyes are a natural condition. Permanently dilated pupils. My grandmother suffered them, too."
Falke pulled down the sleeves of a slightly overlarge gray leather doublet, shrugging his shoulders into the new garment.
"Do you blame me for impressing the gullible? You must know what it’s like to grub for every scrap of influence, the dynasty being powerless these many centuries . . . I tell them: every guttersnipe in the city walks into the Fane to talk to God; but I don’t mean antechambers or building-sites, I mean the infinite interior of what we build . . . I say: I’ve seen. It works."
Silver buckles clinked at his wrists, and he fastened them; thumbing back the dove-gray silk that protruded through the slashing on the leather sleeves. Pinpoints of brilliance reflected back from the metal into his vision. His eyes watered.
"And, gullible or not, I have a large number of people who listen to what the House of Salomon says. You need support. Your numbers are comparatively small–compared to our masters the Rat-Lords, that is."
A last movement, tucking gray breeches into new boots (the leather a little bloodstained still at the toes), and he straightened; dry and clothed, now; gambling; meeting her red-brown eyes where she sprawled across the carved chair, under the torches and banners and bones.
"I’ve listened to you." She snapped her fingers, not looking at the blond man who ran to her side. "Clovis, feed him. I’ll speak to him again later."
"What about the Lieutenant?" Clovis asked.
"Nothing. I must think. Go."
Falke followed the man through the makeshift camp in the vast chamber, walking easily across shadowed broken earth. A warm wind blew in his face, with a stench of carrion and sweetness on it; nevertheless he expanded his chest, drawing in the air.
"There."
Clovis jerked his head towards a wide brick ledge. Falke leaped up lightly as the man walked away towards cooking-pots on tripods.