Rats and Gargoyles

by Mary Gentle

  "But not only I tell you this." The Hyena’s voice dropped from passion to a passionate honesty. "If it were only me, how could I ask you to act? I have hidden in darkness. I have hit and run, struck and fled again, damaging the Rat-Lords but never confronting them. I have not starved. I have not died, to refuse the Thirty-Six my labor. If it were only me, and these soldiers here, why would you listen?"

  Zar-bettu-zekigal put in Memory the shouts in the crowd: half-audible, encouraging.

  "So listen to one of your own," the Hyena called out loudly. "Listen to Master Builder Falke!"

  Her foot kicked Zari as she stepped aside, and the woman looked down and grinned an apology. As the white-haired man moved out from under the shade of the silk canopy, the Hyena squatted down on her haunches beside Zar-bettu-zekigal.

  "Hot." Zari put the flat of her hand against the plate armor; the metal stung her palm. The woman pulled up her dark-red kerchief, shading her neck. A soldier two paces away held her laminated steel helm. The ragged Sun-banner drooped on a staff strapped to his back.

  "Be hotter yet. This is early. It’s going better than the last rally. Have you heard enough yet?"

  "The Cardinal will want to know it all. He always does."

  A single line of Sun-banner soldiers kept the crowd back from the steps. The Hyena clanked down to sit beside Zari. The Katayan sat up and slid her hand along the hot steel to the woman’s shoulders and, a little behind her now, began pressing her fingers down between armor and neck, finding points to release muscle tension.

  "It had to work here." The Hyena’s voice rasped. "After the last thirty days . . . Tell your Plessiez I gave the final order today. We’re officially abandoning the areas under the city. Too much . . . corruption there."

  Zari dug her fingers in. "See you, weren’t there always hauntings?"

  "Not like this!" The woman’s plate gauntlet clacked against her breastplate. "I wonder . . . I do wonder, now, what it was Plessiez had us do when we ran his underground errands. We don’t get this sort of aid without our previous help being worth a lot. But after today it won’t matter. We take charge today."

  White hair glinted in the sun as Falke stepped forward. His booted foot just missed Zar-bettu-zekigal. She glanced up over her shoulder.

  Falke walked with gravitas, thumbs tucked under his new swordbelt. His white-silver hair, longer now, he wore scraped back into a pony-tail and confined by a heavy silver ring. The morning sun showed up the lines around his mouth.

  Black silk strips criss-crossed his eyes. He moved uncomfortably, sweating in the sun’s heat, with a sword hanging from his belt, and a mail shirt and surcoat over his padded gray leather arming doublet. Embroidered insignia caught the sun and blazed across the square, on his breast not a ragged Sun but the House of Salomon’s golden Rule.

  "My friends."

  His voice crackled out across the square, half- humorous, and self-mockingly indulgent.

  "My friends, I have not gone into voluntary exile. I have not trained men and women to be warriors. I have not sabotaged the Rat-Lords, lived starving and tireless, fought without hope until I saw this day. No, I have not done these things. For that, you must go to the Lady Hyena and her people. And, conscious of that, 1 speak humbly after her."

  The flesh under Zari’s fingers tensed. She began to rub her thumbs at the base of the Hyena’s skull. The woman rumbled: "And three weeks ago he was gibbering with terror in a sewer. Gods, but that man can make capital out of anything."

  "See you, you’re absolutely right."

  Lost in the contact of flesh and flesh, Zar-bettu-zekigal grinned dreamily to herself. She cocked an eye at Falke, looking through his legs at the crowded square.

  He raised the microphone to his mouth again.

  "You’ve heard good oratory from many of us this morning. I’ll disappoint you; I’m a plain speaker. I’m one head of one hall in the east quarter of Nineteenth District. That’s one quarter out of a hundred and eighty- one; one District out of thirty-six. That’s all. But I’ve learned things you have a right to know about."

  His head lowered for a calculated moment, then lifted to face sun, sky and the assembled thousands.

  "From today, we do no work on any site. We have no choice. You have heard, and I have found out it’s true, that his so-called Majesty the King will send in their troops to fire on you. And the priests of the Orders of Guiry, and Hildi, and Varagnac will come, and they will damn you with all ceremony. Let them! We can withstand it. We are stronger than that. We have no choice."

  Falke’s voice rose.

  "You will bear with me. None of you is a fool. We know the Rat-Lords exploit us and make us slaves, and we are old enough in the ways of the world not to expect better. But now we have–yes, I tell you today, now, this moment!–now we have the wisdom for which we searched. All of you know the Mysteries. You know the Interior Temple and the Exterior Temple are mirrors of each other, and of the greater Order."

  He rested one hand on his breast.

  "If we had the knowledge, we said, we would build thus. Build in the shape of our souls, and compel the Divine to acknowledge us. We have been kept dumb and blind by the Rat-Lords, forbidden to build for ourselves, forbidden the knowledge of it; but no longer. Now, today, we have at last recovered the knowledge we lost– the knowledge they hid from us so long ago. Now, today, we have the Word of Seshat!"

  A susurrus of words filled the air. Ripples of sound: lapping through the hot morning and the square, out to the pillared porticoes and marble frontages of the Trade Guild Meeting-halls.

  "Look at them! There isn’t a building site in the city that’ll be working today." The Hyena grinned. Her armored heel hacked down on the marble. She turned a heat-reddened face to Zar-bettu-zekigal, impervious to the Katayan’s skilled fingers.

  "One minute everything’s the same as it’s always been, and then—" Her fist smacked into her palm. "By the end of today we’ll have a general strike. No building, no trains, no servants. Tell Plessiez that. And tell him Falke and I must know when his necromancy will take full effect."

  "I’ll tell him."

  "Tell him I must know what happens at the Fane." Her slanting red-brown eyes moved, some hidden fear stirring and suppressed in a blink. "I must."

  "Shall I go to him now?"

  The Hyena glanced up to where Falke still spoke, pale hands gesturing. The Sun-banner soldiers still stood, but much of the crowd sat on the paving-stones: clusters of people growing closer together with the steady increase in their numbers.

  "Yes, and hurry back. Falke and I–we can start this, but we can’t stop it once it’s begun. It’ll cross the city like fire: every slightest whisper will carry it! It’s out of our hands."

  Zar-bettu-zekigal stood, picked up the musket and laid it back across one shoulder, and sketched a mock salute. "Anything for you, Lady. Anything at all."

  "Leave that gun here!"

  The woman put her fingers to her shoulder, only now sensing a tactile memory. The laminated steel plate blazed back sunlight. Zari blinked. The woman looked up at her.

  "Take it, then, Kings’ Memory. And take care."

  The airship and the warm bosom of the aircrew-woman long left behind, Casaubon’s sparrow flies through skies where vultures rise on mesa-winds. Heat is a hard arrow under the bird’s heart, piercing, piercing.

  To either side rise up the cliffs, sand-banded mesas: ocher, scarlet, orange, white.

  Reflected in the bird’s obsidian eye is desert, blue sky, great horizons; the jagged battlements of a castle built into the mesa-side; the drowsy noon emptiness of a courtyard; the tower-window overlooking it.

  The sparrow falls arrow-straight, kicks up a spurt of dust on the stone window-sill, hops on to the ring finger of the hand outstretched to receive her.

  Hot morning sun and warm air poured in through the open windows of the palace corridor. Zar-bettu-zekigal, musket confiscated at the gates, swung her greatcoat off her shoulders and slung it across
her arm as she walked. Her dappled tail curved up, poking through the slit at the back of her knee-length black dress.

  "Messire!"

  Plessiez raised a ringed hand in acknowledgment as he walked towards her. He gestured with finality to the four or five priests with him, giving orders, sending the last hurrying off as he came up with the Katayan.

  ". . . and tell Messire Fenelon to attend me in the Abbey of Guiry in an hour. Honor to you, Zaribet."

  "I just came from the Abbey of Guiry, messire. Fleury told me you were here in attendance on the King."

  Outside the open windows, sun put a haze on the blue- tiled turrets and spires and belvederes of the royal palace roofs. The roofscape spread out, acre upon acre. Mist rose up from drying pools of water: the previous sundown’s thunderstorm. Cardinal-General Plessiez drew in a breath, bead-black eyes bright, muzzle and whiskers quivering. He folded his arms and leaned up against the white stone corridor-wall.

  "I have just had an audience with his Majesty, yes."

  A silver band looped above one of his translucentskinned ears, below the other; a black ostrich-plume being clipped into it at a jaunty angle. A basket-hilted rapier hung at his side: leather harness black, buckles silver. Zar-bettu-zekigal grinned, seeing how he tied the cardinal’s green sash rakishly from left shoulder to knot above right haunch; tail carried with a high swagger, silver ankh almost lost in his sleek neck-fur.

  "I’ve much to do this morning. Now, the overseeing of the artillery garden . . . Zaribet, come with me; I shall need you as Memory then—"

  "But not right this minute." Zar-bettu-zekigal’s eyes gleamed. "Shouldn’t Messire St. Cyr be dealing with the artillery garden?"

  Plessiez snapped his fingers as he turned, not looking to see if the young Katayan woman scurried down the corridor at his heels. Zar-bettu-zekigal tossed her greatcoat into the window embrasure and left it. She caught him up after a few skips, reveling in the sun-hot corridor-tiles under her feet.

  "What did the King say, messire?"

  Cardinal-General Plessiez slowed rapid steps. He clasped ringed fingers behind his back as he paced, and began evasively: "Messire Desaguliers once removed, it would obviously be his second-in-command, St. Cyr, who gained control of the Cadets . . . St. Cyr is not Desaguliers’ man; he is mine. I put him in as lieutenant some years ago; hence he leaves to me what I desire to oversee; hence . . . I have said I will deal with the artillery garden."

  "And the King?"

  Zar-bettu-zekigal smoothed back her matt black hair from its center parting with both hands. She grinned up at the Cardinal-General: watching his severity and wry humor and affected military air with the delight of a connoisseur or an admirer.

  Two approaching priests robbed her of what answer he might have given. Plessiez stopped to issue orders. Zar-bettu-zekigal leaned back against the double doors at the end of the corridor, palms flat against the black oak, her dappled tail coiling down to her bare ankles.

  "Be Kings’ Memory now," Plessiez cut her off as he rejoined her. She pushed the doors open for him to pass through. Leisurely, she repeated the standard pronouncement: "Messire, you have an auditor . . ."

  Plessiez walked through the next hall to where, white in sunlight through leaded casements, the double-spiral stone staircase rose up through this wing of the palace. He paused under its entrance-arch for the young woman to catch up.

  "You hold all our secrets."

  She glanced up from her footing on the warm stone steps, descending in front of him. "No secrets, messire. What I’m asked, I tell to whoever asks me. When I’ve heard it as Memory."

  "And not otherwise?"

  "Oh, see you, messire! I wouldn’t take a question like that from anyone except you."

  Here in the stone shaft, air blew morning-cool. The Katayan rubbed her bare arms. Plessiez watched her with what, eventually, he had identified as a certain awe; as if she were some hawk come tamely willing to his hand without capture.

  "That may be why we all use you as a confessional." He caught the flash of her eyes, knowing and innocent; and his snout twitched with an unwilling smile. "Or does the Lady Hyena, as yet, share more than the ear of the Kings’ Memory?"

  The Katayan woman fisted hands to thrust in greatcoat pockets no longer there. Instead she put them behind her back, tail coiling up to loop her wrists.

  "I’m working on that . . . She wants to know when anything’s going to happen at the Fane. And, see you, Master Falke is lying his head off."

  "Falke tells no lies that I don’t know about."

  The jerk of her head, chopped-off hair flying, took in all the thirty-six Districts of the city invisible beyond palace walls. "Her ‘Imperial dynasty’ and the Salomon-men–they’ve started something they can’t stop down there in the city."

  "I know," Plessiez said. "It will be soon. It has already begun."

  Leaving the stairwell two floors below, walking through a cluttered salon, he nodded a greeting to passing black Rats, to one of St. Cyr’s uniformed Cadets, and to an aide of one of the Lords Magi. The Katayan beside him skipped to keep up with his strides. Plessiez eased the green sash where it crossed the fur of his shoulder, onyx and silver rings clinking against the ankh.

  In the next salon all the full-length windows had been flung open, and heat slid in on tentative breezes, bringing the noise of hammers and forges and Rats shouting. Outside the windows, a ruined marble terrace gave way to the artillery garden. Blue haze coiled up from stretches of mud not yet dried by the sun.

  A brown Rat passed across the terrace, and the Katayan woman checked. "I thought . . . it might have been Charnay."

  "No. Not yet." Plessiez’s finger tapped irritably against his flank. "I believe the Lady Hyena’s admission that she released her. That means Charnay is off on some fool plan of her own. And that’s when one knows there’ll be trouble."

  The ormolu clock at the far end of the salon struck seven times. As the tinny notes died, a Cadet pushed the doors open. He bowed deeply to Plessiez.

  "Lord Cardinal, the military architect is here to see you."

  "Finally! Show him in."

  "He . . . ah . . ."

  Plessiez glimpsed a shadow out on the terrace. The previous night’s rain stood in pools, flashing back white sun through the rising haze of steam. The mud, rubble, broken joists, and the machines of the artillery garden were blotted out by the bulk of a man. The big man glanced in at the window, nodding to Plessiez. His copper hair shone. He hooked his thumbs under the lapels of his blue satin frock-coat.

  "Messire priest, I am Baltazar Casaubon, Lord-Architect, Scholar-Soldier of the Invisible College, Surveyor of Extraordinary Gardens, Knight oftheRoseCastleand," the immensely fat man got in before Plessiez could interrupt him, "Horologer, Solar and Lunar Dial-maker, Duke of the Golden Compasses, and Brother of the Forgotten Hunt. Where is Messire Desaguliers?"

  Rubble and hard earth jarred the base of his spine. Candia’s eyes jolted open. Sunlight spiked into his head. He moaned, lying back and leaning his face against rough- pointed brickwork.

  ". . . it is a priest!"

  "Not a real one."

  "We ain’t got one, but we got her. Ei, priest, over here!"

  Voices resounded in the warm air above his head. Yellow grass beside him grew up through shattered paving- stones. Silk- and satin-clad legs milled in front of his face: scarlet and azure and cloth-of-silver dazzled.

  "–need any sort of a priest; we—"

  "–see how things are here—"

  "–necessary exorcism—"

  "–a priest, now!"

  Candia uncovered his face. A factory’s sheer brick soared up into a blue sky. Above and beyond, he saw smokeless chimney-stacks. His head fell forward. Six inches from his nose, in the folds of a faded, tree-embroidered, green cotton dress, a black hand clenched into a fist.

  A voice just above him said: "I’ll send you someone else from the Cathedral of the Trees."

  "No. We can’t wait!"
r />   "Not while they come all the way from Nineteenth District!"

  Candia raised his head with an effort. He focused on a burly woman, arms folded, the gold Rule embroidered on her overalls catching the sun painfully bright.

  "No," she repeated. "We want you, Archdeacon, before it’s too late."

  Candia pushed his shaking fingers through his lank hair. As he moved, the cloth of his doublet and breeches cracked with dried liquid, and he smelt the stench of old urine and vomit. He pressed his shaking hands into his eye-sockets.

  "Who? Where?" His weak voice cracked.

  A familiar tart voice at his other side said: "You’re a fool, Candia. The university officially suspended you ten days ago. What did you do that was worth getting yourself into this state?"

  He felt a slow heat spreading across his face. For a second his shame would not let him look up at Heurodis. Veins pulsed behind his shut eyelids, the color of light through new leaves. The invading presence of that healing could no longer be denied.

  "Heurodis . . ." He took his hands from his face, braced his shoulders against the wall, and pushed himself upright against the rough brick, ripping his buff doublet again. Morning sun dazzled. The young black woman beside him argued furiously with the burly carpenter. Workers crowded around in the alley, the movement confusing him.

  "Stay here." The black woman moved a step towards the factory, glancing at the locked gates at the end of the alley, and then at the elderly Heurodis and at Candia. "I’ll come back for you."

  "No . . ." Gesture and voice died; he leaned weakly against the wall, brushing fair hair from his eyes, ignoring filth.

  "Yes." Heurodis put her wrinkled hand protectively on Candia’s arm, and kept it there until the black woman turned away. She raised one faded eyebrow at the Reverend Master then.

  "Help me," Candia said shakily. "Now, while they’re arguing. I’ve seen, and I’ve heard . . . Heurodis, I have to get back inside the Fane."

  "Of course," Plessiez heard the Lord-Architect observe, "I left numerous and very detailed plans . . ."