by Mary Gentle
Charnay opened shining dark eyes. She lounged back against the brick wall with something of a disappointed air, furry body half-supported against sacks and barrels, her long-fingered hands clasped comfortably across her belly. "Didn’t expect to see you again. Who gave you the new kit?"
"The Lady Hyena."
Falke reached up to tie his silver-gray hair back into a pony-tail with a length of leather thong. Fingers busy, facing into the great cavern, arms up and so unprotected. "There’s always a way, and I found it!"
The Rat rolled over on to one massive brown-furred flank. "I wouldn’t trust one of you peasants to find your backside with both hands and a map."
A pottery dish clunked on the edge of the brickwork. Clovis walked away without a word. Falke watched him stumble over rocks plainly visible in the somber torchlight that mimicked night.
He chuckled quietly, back in his throat.
Squatting, he scooped up the stew-bowl and prodded the mess of cooked weeds with his forefinger. Warm, greasy; the smell made his stomach contract. He shoved a messy fistful into his mouth, spilling fronds down the front of the leather doublet, and spoke between chewing.
"She knows, now, that I’ve been inside the Fane. Something your messire Plessiez can’t claim."
"What use is that to her? You fill your breeches at the mention of daemons."
Falke stopped chewing. "True, but that’s not to the point now. A magia plague, a plague to send into the Fane. Very good. I like that. House of Salomon will approve. I understand the Fane. Listen, and try to understand me, Lieutenant. Messire Plessiez would want you to support me in making an alliance with this woman. She has a number of people down here; she can be useful."
Shining black eyes shifted. The Rat lumbered to her hind feet and stood over him, looking down. "Too late. He has his bargain with her already, boy. He doesn’t need you now."
Warm shivers walked across his skin, raising the small hairs. Cramps twisted his gut. Falke turned his back on her momentarily. Shadows shifted. Hauntings whispered at the edges of light. A jealousy shifted in his breast. Across the vast brick chamber, under a ragged sun-banner, two men circled each other, sparring: light sliding down the blades of broadswords.
"You think so? It isn’t the first time Rat-Lords have used me. I may surprise them yet."
The anvil-clang of weapons-practice echoed in the sewer chamber. Stenches drifted up from the distant canal. Falke, hands tucked up under his armpits, stared across the expanse of camp-fires, brushwood heaps, gallows, and men and women. Each speck of light pricked at his unbandaged eyes.
"I shall live to thank Messire Plessiez for abandoning me here."
He missed what she rumbled in reply, still staring out at the armed camp.
At human men and women carrying swords, pikes, flails, daggers. Carrying weapons and practiced in their use.
The fox-cub nipped at the White Crow’s wrist. She swore, put the feeding-bottle down on the mirror-table, and the cub back in its box. She reached up to the herb shelf for witch-hazel to put on the blood-bruise.
"Where did I . . . ?"
The silver wolf padded across the room, pushing over two precarious piles of books. They slid to rest in the sunlight slanting whitely in at the street-side and courtyard windows, and at the roof-trap. Light fell on opened books, star-charts propped up with ivory rods, wax discs scattered in three heaps, and discarded hieroglyphed scrolls.
"Here."
She tapped the wolfs muzzle. Pale eyes met hers. It gaped, letting her finger the socket where a rotten tooth had been removed. Its head twitched irritably.
"Lazarus, you only come to me to get your teeth fixed," she accused. "I’d wait a day or two yet—"
She heard footsteps, and raised her voice without looking up: "We’re shut! Go away!"
The door swung open. She raised her head to see the dark young man open it with a mocking flourish, and bow most formally. The Lord-Architect Casaubon strode in past Lucas without a blink of acknowledgment.
"Valentine!"
The White Crow looked down at the timber wolf. "No. I don’t know how he does it."
"I must say," Casaubon remarked, "that you could keep this place a good deal tidier."
She put her fists on her hips.
"I’ve been up since dawn working on the last batch of Mayor Spatchet’s talismans, which aren’t finished, which won’t be finished today unless we’re all very lucky, and so I advise you not to make critical comments of any sort, because my temper is not of the best, is that clear?"
The Lord-Architect tugged at the turned-up cuffs of his blue satin coat. "I had something of a disturbed night myself."
"Aw—" The White Crow sat down heavily at the table, sinking her chin in her hands. Bright eyes brimmed with laughter, fixing on Casaubon; she snuffled helplessly for several seconds.
Lucas’s dark brows met in a scowl.
"Good morning . . . Prince," the White Crow said.
Lucas picked up one of the discarded wax tablets. "Talismans?"
"Oh . . ." She took it out of his hand. "Easy enough making something to warn when Decans exercise their power. The difficulty is making one the god-daemons’ acolytes won’t immediately feel being used and flock to."
A light wind lifted papers as it brushed past her. She anchored one heap on the table with the handful of talismans. A number of crates stood open under the table, carved wood and incised wax talismans nesting in oakum. Her hand went to the small of her back, rubbing. She looked past the young man’s earnest face to Casaubon.
"Now I suppose you’ll tell me why you’re here?"
The Lord-Architect stood by the open street-side window, face intent. He whistled through chiseled lips. The White Crow stood and walked across to sit on the sill, drawing her feet up, bracketed by the frame.
"There have been three other Scholar-Soldiers come to the heart of the world," Casaubon said, "since you disappeared."
Feathers rustled by her head. She flinched at the fluttering.
Bright chaffinches flew to perch on the Lord- Architect’s extended plump fingers. A thrush’s claws scored his head, pricking sharp through his hair; and a humming-bird the same brilliant blue as his satin coat hung so close before his face that his eyes crossed watching it. He whistled again.
She met his gaze through vibrating wings.
"None of them survived a half-year," he concluded.
"I didn’t know. This place is scaring me shitless." The White Crow lifted her chin. "You’re not helping."
"I have a message from the Invisible College."
She reached forward, past her raised knees, touching the wooden window-frame. Sun-warmed, barely damp now. She breathed the acrid smell of street-dust. Heat already soaked the sky: people hurrying past kept to the buildings’ shadows. Clock-mill’s half-hour chime came from the far side of the building.
"I haven’t written on the moon in ten years. Believe that I wouldn’t have sent out any warning unless I had to. If I’d known it would bring you—"
His cushioned arms pushed between her back and the windowframe, and under the arch of her knees. She grabbed wildly, balance gone; blindly lurching back from the one-story drop. His arms tightened. The White Crow knotted fists in his shirt as the fat man lifted her, holding her across the swell of his stomach.
"I am not in the habit of being a messenger-boy! Sit down, sit still, shut up and listen!"
Her bare feet hit the floor stingingly hard.
"Get the hell out of here!"
Lucas’s voice came from the corner of the room: "How does an invisible college find itself, to send messages?"
"Oh, what!" Exasperated, the White Crow swung round. She met his dark gaze, seeing both amusement and calculation. She nodded once. As she tucked her white shirt into her breeches, she said: "Well done, Prince. But you won’t stop the two of us quarreling. As to your question, the College is wherever two or three Scholar-Soldiers happen to meet. Often you never do find out just who sugges
ted what."
A last sparrow flew out of the street-side window. The Lord-Architect rubbed absently at his sleeves, smearing guano across the blue satin. Wet patches of sweat already showed under his arms.
"You’re promoted," he announced, "from Master-Captain to Master-Physician Valentine."
She felt an amazed grin start, and touched clasped fists to her mouth to hide the joy. "You’re joking. No, really."
"I’m telling the truth," Casaubon said.
"I never thought they’d ever— But I’ve left the damned College!" She sat down at the table and looked at Lucas. "Yes, and your next question is How do you find the College to leave it?"
The Lord-Architect rested his hand on Lucas’s shoulder as he walked around to face her. "The Invisible College’s rules are strict. We travel incognito, Prince, and never more than two or three together."
"Oh, this is quite ridiculous." The White Crow pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes, lost in a sparkling darkness. Evelian’s voice sounded out in the courtyard, talking to her daughter Sharlevian. It came no nearer. A bee hummed in through one window, out through the other.
"Stupid." She took her sweat-damp hands away from her face. "I did leave. You knew it; so did Master-Captain Janou. You can’t make me a Master-Physician, because I won’t let you."
The young man squatted down, fiddling with one of the chests against the wall.
"You know what’s truly stupid?" She turned her head towards Casaubon. "What’s stupid is that it comforted me, sometimes, to think that I might be part of the College still–whoever we are, and however many there may be of us. I had to leave you, but I lost something when I left."
"And so did I."
The White Crow felt her cheeks heat. She rubbed her flat palms against her face.
"And so did you . . . And now I don’t want anything to do with this. I sent that warning because I want nothing to do with this; I wanted someone wiser to come here and do something about it!"
Casaubon tsk-ed ironically. "Poor Valentine."
Lucas’s hand passed over her shoulder, and she sat up as a long bundle clattered on to the mirror-table.
"I asked the Lord-Architect about Scholar-Soldiers," the young man said. "You should be carrying this."
She ignored Casaubon’s startled look. Her fingers undid the wrappings, sliding scabbard and sword onto the table. The sweat-darkened leather grip on the hilt fitted her fingers, ridged to their exact shape. The weight on her wrist when she lifted it, familiar and strange now, made her throat ache.
"Why does the College need a Master-Physician here?"
"I would like to know that," Casaubon said.
She rubbed her finger along the oiled flat of the blade. Cold metal, cold as mornings walking the road, or evenings coming to an inn. The smell of the oil mixed with the smell of the ink on the table, drying on the hiero-glyphed parchments.
"What could possibly need healing?"
In one flawless movement she clicked the rapier home in its scabbard. The straps and buckles of the sword-belt tumbled across the table.
"I’m frightened."
The Lord-Architect’s voice rumbled above her head. "That makes me afraid."
"Well, that’s sense enough." Hands still on the scabbard, she looked across at Lucas. "Oh, and if I wear this in the street I’ll be in the palace dungeons before you can say his Majesty."
"You need to wear it," he insisted. "You need to. Not for protection."
She looked down at hands tanned and with a fine grain to the skin, the blue veins showing faintly under the surface. She flexed her fingers.
"A wise child. My lord, you have a wise child with you." She took Casaubon’s cuff between thumb and forefinger. The sweat-damp satin smelt of an expensive scent. "Something formal, is it?"
"The Fane. An audience, at the eleventh hour."
"What? Who with? The Spagyrus?"
The Lord-Architect spread padded hands. "How can I tell you that? You’ve left the College."
The White Crow drew in a breath, saliva tasting metallic. Gaining time, she stood, her practiced fingers unbuckling the straps of the sword-hanger and belt. She muttered irritably, waving away Lucas’s offered help; and busied herself for almost two minutes in slinging straps over her shoulders and around her hips, buckling the scabbard so that it hung comfortably across her back, hilt jutting above her right shoulder.
"If I accept Master-Physician?" she queried.
Casaubon pushed the piles of paper from the table onto the floor, spun the table to its mirror side, and began to comb his copper hair into a neat Brutus style. Before she could get breath to swear he straightened, and pulled white cotton gloves from his capacious pockets.
"I am told"–Casaubon tugged glove-fingers snugly down–"that I shall be seeing the Thirty-Sixth Decan, whose sign is the Ten Degrees of High Summer."
The White Crow worked the belt around her waist, made an alteration of one notch to a buckle. Then she reached across and brushed the Lord-Architect’s fingers away, and buttoned his gloves at the wrist.
"Lucas . . ."
She crossed the room and hugged the young man, having to stand up on the balls of her feet and stretch her arms around his muscled back. His eyes shone. She stepped back, reaching up to touch the hilt of her sword, where it hung ready for a down-draw over the shoulder.
"Thank you," she said, and to Casaubon: "I’ll come to the Fane with you. Lucas, can I ask you a favor? I need you to go and see your uncle, the Ambassador."
Blinding and imperceptible, the sun rose higher.
Pools of rain in Evelian’s courtyard shrank fraction by fraction. The heat of the sun drew mosquito nymphs to the water’s surface. The wooden frieze of skulls and spades grew warm, and hosted colonies of insects swarmed out of cracks.
Wings skirred: one of the Lord-Architect’s sparrows fluttering to the eaves.
Beyond Clock-mill, lizards sunned themselves in corners of streets left drowsy and deserted. White dust and white blossom snowed the streets of the city.
The sparrow flicked from eaves to tiles to roof-ridge, crossing the quarter. Where the Fane’s obelisks cut the sky, the bird scurried for height, lost in the milk-blue heavens; flying swiftly south-aust.
Down between marble wharfs, heat-swollen helium airships tugged at mooring-ropes. Crews rushed to the gas-vents. The bird’s bead-black eyes registered movement. A dusty-brown mop of feathers, it fell towards an airship’s underslung cabin.
Aust, north, south, east and west: the city stretches away below, reflected in the sparrow’s uncomprehending vision.
A day later, one woman crewing an airship will find the bird, half-frozen, and feed it drops of warm milk and millet. Thinking to keep it as a pet, when the airship’s long overseas voyage is done.
The Lord-Architect’s sparrow rests, cushioned under her shirt, between her breasts. The bead-black eyes hold a message that is simple enough for those with the power to read it.
* * *
"Carrying a sword?" the Candovard Ambassador exclaimed.
"It was wonderful. She was wonderful!" Lucas sobered. "At first . . . I don’t know what she’s seen to cause her so much fear. But she’s going to the Fane at eleven this morning."
"A sword," Andaluz repeated.
"Well, yes, technically she shouldn’t, but . . ."
Andaluz scratched his salt-and-pepper hair. One stubby finger pointed at his Prince.
"This is the heart of the world, not the White Mountain. Candover sees its Rat-Lord Governor only once or twice a year, and you’re let carry weapons there because who else could? Here, every Rat with pretensions to gentle blood carries a sword. Gods preserve men or women who trespass on their privileges!"
Dust drifted in from the compound. Flies haunted the ceiling, undeterred by the wck-wck-wck of the fan.
"I . . . didn’t realize." Lucas, who had carried his shirt in his hand, slung it about his neck like a towel, and tugged it back and forth to mop up sweat.
> "Your father could never bear it. I discourage him from traveling here." Andaluz pushed his chair back from the big desk. "Lucas, dear boy, here I’m the ambassador from savages–yes, savages–who are suffered to live with only minor supervision, because we’re far away and beneath the Rat-Lords’ notice."
"And I told her to carry a sword." Lucas’s eyes showed dark in a face gone greenish-white. "I’ll have to warn her!"
"If this White Crow woman has been five years in the heart of the world, I assure you that she knows."
"She needs it. To be what she should be." Lucas looked up from the dusty patterned carpet. "She asked if you would attend at court today. I told her that you would. I told her that you’ll use all of Candover’s influence with the King, Uncle, if she’s troubled or arrested."
"Yes, Prince." Andaluz made a face. "What there is of it. Ah . . . the university?"
"I’ll take care of that. Reverend Mistress Heurodis has her own way with students," the young man said. "I’m coining with you to court. A prince’s word may carry weight."
"Aww, this sun’s too bright. Hold on a minute." The cinnamon-haired woman clattered back up the stairs from the street-door.
The Lord-Architect Casaubon waited by the carriage, easing his shirt away from the rolls of flesh at his neck. Sweat trickled down his back.
She re-emerged holding a white felt hat, wide-brimmed and with a dented crown. It had a black band, and small black characters printed into the felt. She clapped it on to her head and tilted it, shading her eyes.
"And you say I have no dress sense."
She smiled. "No sense of any kind, as far as I could ever make out . . . You know what this hat needs?"
"Euthanasia?"
"A black feather. Tell me if you spot one."
She leaned automatically up against his arm, sparking backchat off his deadpan replies with the ease of habit and practice. Now he saw her frown. She moved away.
"Master-Physician." The Lord-Architect very formally offered a glove, handing her into the carriage.