by Mary Gentle
Her outstretched fingers touched fur.
She twisted around, flattening her body against the pipework of the back wall. Her bare ankle brushed over the dead wasp. The door swung closed an inch, a foot, weighed by the heaviness of its burden.
Bulbous shapes–no, a shape–clung to the inside of the peeling cubicle door. Fragile insectile legs shifted for purchase. The throbbing soft segments of the torso glowed black and yellow, the glassy wings shattered a rainbow spectrum. The Archdeacon pressed herself back against the wall, heel kicking at the pipework.
The wasp’s body, as tall and solid as she, clung quivering to the door, arching slightly at the division of its bulbous body, sting pulsing under the lower torso.Regnault’s skin crawled. She looked up wildly to see if the cubicle walls could be climbed. Beyond the partition a deep buzzing note began, joined by another, then another. Sun through the clerestory windows glinted on rising wings.
The wasp that clung to the back of the door thrummed a raw increasing shriek.
"–heart of the Wood protect, the Lady of the Trees defend—"
A sharp click sounded outside the cubicle, at the end of the long room. She recognized the sound of a sandal stepping down on to a tiled floor from a small height: the height of, say, a wall-mirror.
She reached up, hands shaking, and carefully pressed each finger in turn to the hawthorn spray. With bloody hands she unpinned it from her dress, marking the cloth, tearing it into two handfuls of twig and leaf. Her skin cringed away from the insectile form clinging to the door, its translucent guts throbbing with half-digested food.
Poised, dizzy, she took a breath of oxygenless air.
Outside the cubicle, pacing footsteps traced a staccato inhuman rhythm. She glimpsed a brown ankle under the cubicle door, and a foot with claws.
Wetness touched her bare leg.
The fist-sized body of the dead wasp no longer blocked the drain. From its open throat a tendril of wet dark nuzzled. It touched her ankle, numbed the skin, left white puckered marks.
"Heart of the Wood!"
Both hands clenched on crushed hawthorn, she pivoted on one heel and struck the cubicle door solidly with her other foot, a hand-span from the thrumming wings. The door banged shut, rebounded concussively inwards. She pitched into a forward roll through the door, hands tucked into her sides, bruising her shoulders.
The wasp ripped up into the air, its chainsaw buzz shattering the glass in the row of clerestory windows.
Regnault came up on to her feet, crouching on the tiles; threw her left hand’s bunch of hawthorn full in the sharp-toothed liquid-fleshed mirror-face that fleered above her.
Bloody leaves, stained blossom: for a second outlined in green-and-gold brilliance. Light blinded. She dropped to one knee, edging back towards the urinals. Something black fell from the high ceiling. Shrieking above the saw- buzz of wasp wings, she flung her right hand’s hawthorn, slipped, fell full-length on the floor.
The last whole windows imploded.
Black clotted liquid spattered her dress and skin, scalding hot. A rain of ordure pattered down for thirty seconds. She raised her head. Fragments of wing and black fur floated in the air: the wasps were no longer there.
Archdeacon Regnault put her wrist to her nose and wiped away blood. She smiled with the satisfaction of the craftsman. Silence pressed in on her eyes, deep and echoing. Slowly, painfully, she got to her feet; fingers throbbing and still bleeding, clots of feces sliding to hit the tiles.
The wall-mirror hung shattered in the pattern of a hieroglyph. She read it; frowned suddenly.
" ‘Oldest of all, deepest of all, rooted in the soul of earth; who dies not but is disguised, who sleeps only—’ "
The tiles under her feet rippled, ceramic shifting like water, and she fell to one knee.
A black stain oozed out from under the furthest cubicle door. Black liquid ran down from the urinals. A stink of blood and urine constricted her throat. She clenched her fists, forcing concentration out of pain, muscles tensing to push her towards the exit.
Her legs could not move.
The ceramic tiles under her foot and knee shattered, thin as cat-ice on a puddle. Tears ripped from her eyes as she fell into corrosive vapor. She clawed at the edge of the floor as she fell past it, caught a joist with one bleeding hand for the briefest second.
She stared down into vaulting flooded with liquid darkness, heard the voices calling her, saw in the glistening surface far below the reflection of her face: feral, sharptoothed, grinning—
The joist grew wormy, holed and friable in the space of a breath. It crumbled under her clenching fingers.
She fell.
* * *
A sepia twilight, hot and brown, clings to discarded furnace-mouths, broken bains-marie and alembics. The Bishop of the Trees views them through the open door of his cell: unable to move, or turn away, crusted blood and sinew tightening below his impaled medulla oblongata.
"Why . . . will . . . you . . . not . . . let . . . me . . . die?"
He forces each word out with what breath he can gather into his withered cheeks.
Wings rustle in the heat. Basalt pinions settle to huge flanks as the Decan of Noon and Midnight who is also called The Spagyrus lays his tusked and tendriled head upon vast paws.
You’re bait—
"Wh . . . ?"
The ebony lids slide up from basalt eyes.
–My servants questioned you for their pleasure. I am a god and a daemon, a Decan of the Thirty-Six: I know all that you could ever know. Still, I allow the acolytes their play—
Scales rustle as the immense head settles still further, yellow-crusted nostrils twitching.
Theodoret, Bishop of the Trees, turns his sandpaper- gaze to where the Decan looks. Down in the wall of the Fane, above the deserted alchemical workshop, is set a glass bubble–no, a congeries of glass bubbles, each with their variant image of the heart of the world enclosed . . .
They cast a bluish-white light upon The Spagyrus, where the Decan sprawls under the Fane’s crepuscular vaults. Perhaps it is that light–or the sun’s not being in his Sign–or perhaps it is instinct: the most primitive instinct is smell, and Theodoret has that sense left to him still.
Each breath is rasping pain, each word formed through a tom throat and split lips; still, Bishop Theodoret forces words into the hot silence of the heart of the Fane.
"You . . . know . . . all . . . my . . . Lord—I . . . who . . . know . . . nothing . . . will ask you . . . a . . . riddle . . . What . . . can happen . . . to . . . make . . . a god . . . afraid?"
Chapter Six
Light advancing, midmorning of the Day of the Feast of Misrule.
Rafi of Adocentyn rolled over on the rug, kicking a foot against one of the Lord-Architect’s locked abandoned chests.
"If I’d known we had theory-tests on Festival days, I’d never have joined the university! What is all this junk anyway?"
Lucas chose deliberately to misunderstand. From where he sprawled on his bed, surrounded by open books, he muttered: "Geometry, one would hope."
"Witty, Candover, witty."
The languid king’s son from Adocentyn hoisted himself up on an elbow on the rug, and plotted a course across a page with a dirty finger.
"Lucas, just listen to this question: ‘The Five Points of the Compass lie upon a circle of 360 degrees, each one at a ninety-degree angle from the next. . . Draw a compass rose, and enter North, West, East, South and Aust at the appropriate positions.’ "
Lucas shifted into a patch of morning sun, knowing he would be grateful later for shade. He gestured for Rafi to continue. The other dark-haired student propped the book up on its spine.
" ‘Now draw the following quadrilateral triangle . . .’ "
Lucas leaned down, grabbed a sheet of paper and a lead pencil, and sketched for a few seconds. "Like so."
"You think so?" Rafi of Adocentyn sat up, scratching at the cleft of his buttocks. "We’re going to be sweating our arse
s off in Big Hall today."
"The way things are here, lucky if that’s the only problem we got."
"Yeah, the Feast of Misrule won’t be up to much."
Lucas got up and stood at the open window, thumbs hooked in the back pockets of his knee-breeches. The warm air soothed his sun-scalded chest and shoulders. He looked down into the street. A mist so milky blue as to be almost purple clung to the roofs.
"At least you haven’t been scrubbing latrines for three weeks."
Rafi bellowed, thin mobile features convulsed. "Shit, that Heurodis bitch has got it in for you!"
"And the rest."
"I think it’s funny," the other king’s son said, "but then, nothing that happens to me here is ever going to get back to Adocentyn if I can prevent it."
The wooden frame creaked under Lucas’s grip as he leaned out of the window, one knee up on the sill.
"What is it this time? Ei, Luke!"
He fell back into the room, struck the door-frame with his shoulder on the way through, ignored Rafi’s shout, and hit every third stair going down to the street-door.
Heat struck down from a cloudless sky. Apprentices clattered past at the Clock-mill end of the side-alley. His rapid breathing slowed as he went barefoot over the cobbles to the other end of the alley and turned the corner.
Voices rang across the street: Evelian’s snotty daughter, Evelian herself, and a woman just now halted with her back to Lucas.
Sun tumbled in cinnamon hair.
"I want my rent!" Evelian shouted. "And where’s your friend the Lord-Architect?"
"The gods know! No–they probably do. I don’t."
She stood, now, with one arm outstretched to the brick-and-plaster wall for support, her white shirt-sleeve half-unrolled. Sweat soaked the underarms; her uncovered skin glowed pink-red. Slung across her back, worn straps cinched tight, a sword-rapier caught the morning light.
"White Crow?"
His whisper cracked soprano, inaudible.
She brushed grit from the sole of her right foot with her free hand. Brick- or stone-dust powdered her smooth calves and the hems of her knee-breeches. A hat lay upturned at her feet, white felt speckled with black hieroglyphics; and she bent and turned and scooped it up, and her tawny eyes focused and met his.
"Lucas!"
She strode the few yards between them, flung her arms around his chest: breasts and belly and legs pressed the length of his stirring body. Her rib-cage moved rapidly as she panted, hyperventilating in the heat. He buried his face in her hot-odored white-streaked hair. Careful of blade and harness, as careful of her fine-lined skin and solid flesh as of porcelain, Lucas closed his arms across her back.
"You’re sunburned." The White Crow swatted his chest with the brim of her hat, stepping out of his embrace. "The mysteries of elapsed time . . . What the hell has happened to the trains and carriages? I’ve had to walk from the Thirty-Sixth District, and it’s taken me hours."
"You must be new here," Evelian snarled sarcastically. "Haven’t you heard about the strikes?"
The White Crow smiled. "I’ve been away, remember?"
Lucas watched her lips move in the sunlight. A fine line marked her lower lip: a thirst-split. More fine lines webbed the comers of her eyes and cheek-bones. Her cinnamon lashes blinked over pale eyes, in eye-sockets whitened by heat and sweat.
He bent his head, smelling the sweet odor of her skin, and kissed the gritted comer of first one and then her other eye.
"Grave-robber!" A possessive mutter from Sharlevian.
He straightened, ignoring the girl. The White Crow’s mouth moved in some reaction too complex for easy interpretation. Shock still reverberating through him,Lucas yelled: "What happened? What did the Fane do to you?"
Sharlevian gasped; he saw her mouth gape comically. Evelian scowled. The White Crow pitched her voice above Mistress Evelian’s renewed questions: "I was gone, I’m back; I’ll be gone again shortly, and after that I don’t know!"
"But—"
Noise interrupted Lucas: a dozen apprentices clattering down the alley, cutting through the street to a Dockland site. A gangling dark boy snapped a punch at Lucas in passing; an older man jeered: "Student!"
"What are the gold-and-white sashes?" the White Crow said at his shoulder. "And was that weapons they’re carrying? Openly?"
Lucas stared the gangling youth out until he turned, spitting, to follow the others. Of the dozen or so passing men and women, fully half had a striped sash and sword- belt around their shoulders or waists.
"The new Order of the—Shit!" A thrown pebble struck his knuckle. He jammed it into his mouth and sucked the cut. "Of the Poor Knights of the House of Salomon. We’ve had street-fights with them at the university."
"I did wonder. No one called me out on this." The White Crow reached up, touching the hilt of her sword. Sunlight shone on the blue metal, the sweat-dark leather binding; and on the curve of her uplifted arm. "It seems that the House of Salomon has changed greatly since the Mayor told me about them."
"Those aren’t Salomon men," Lucas added. "Just their followers. White and gold are their colors. They’re the sort who say you can wear the gold cross as protection against the plague."
"There is a plague?"
Disquiet touched her face. Lucas regretted the dramatization.
"Not really. Just the High Summer fevers are worse than usual. It’s all rumor."
"I need to know . . ." She shook her head, sun-silvered red hair falling about her shoulders. Lucas noted the falling cuff of her shirt: a stain of red wine not yet faded.
". . . What don’t I need to know!" she finished.
"Wait there, right there!"
"I’ll be up in my rooms. Evelian—"
Lucas raced back around the corner of the building, up the street-stairs, into his own rooms, physical effort for the moment masking his wild excitement.
"The test’s in an hour," the king’s son of Adocentyn grunted, arms full of texts, as Lucas shoved past him to rummage in a heap of revision-papers. "They’ll sling us out if we don’t pass. Luke!"
"Yeah, yeah. Got it."
He sprinted back, out into the morning air, seeing Evelian and her daughter still arguing in the street; leaping for the stairs and skidding up through the kitchen and into the White Crow’s main room.
"Here. This’ll tell you all you need to know about Salomon. It’s put out by the woman who claims to lead the imperial dynasty."
"The what?"
"You must know. Where have you been?" And then he froze, at the implications of that casual question.
The White Crow squatted, glancing into the fox-cubs’ box. The chill of disuse and her absence cut through High Summer heat in the newly opened room. Junk stacked the corners, piled on chairs.
The mirror-table shone, glass side up, feeding-bottles scarring rings across its cracked surface.
"Fuck!" The White Crow bent to check the broken magus-mirror.
"Evelian wouldn’t let me in here, or I’d have looked after it."
The White Crow straightened. Her head came up as she turned a full circle, taking in neglected books and charts and lenses. The slightly fat-blurred line of her chin made his throat constrict. She prodded a heap of hand- scrawled messages resting on the table, tilting her head sideways to read one.
"I must follow up some of these names. And talk to Evelian about people she knows. Now . . ." She reached for the pamphlet he still held out, and her fingers touched his hand. He grinned foolishly.
"Damned black letter printing . . . Let me see. Liber ad Milites Templi de Laude Novae Militae. ‘In Praise of the New Knighthood’?"
"The Salomon men are behind the organized hunger- strikes up at the Fane. They’ve almost stopped all building going on."
"Casaubon knows more about the Secret Orders than I do. Whenever he’s been put now . . ." Her mouth quirked up. " ‘One crucial hour’–and it turns out to be the Feast of Misrule. Lucas, don’t let anyone tell you the gods have
no sense of humor."
Lucas scratched under his open shirt at sweaty hair. Bewildered, he said: "There won’t be much of a festival, with the sickness and the strikes. What do you mean, whenever?"
She absently folded the black-letter pamphlet, creasing it sharply, and put it in her pocket. "I don’t know for certain that the Decan did do the same to him. Pox- rotten damned idiot that he is, why didn’t he tell me what he was up to! I wonder if it’s too late to contact any more of the College?"
She rested both fists against her mouth, tapping them softly against her teeth, in the gesture of thought that brought Lucas’s heart to his mouth. Then, still absently, she reached up to a shelf for a wooden box, opened it, and took out three small talismans on chains.
Cut into tear-translucent moonstone: a sickle moon. Into pearl: a nereid’s trident. And into black onyx: the cold Pole Star. Some of the sweat-blotched red and white left her face as she put them around her neck. She stretched, and all but fell into a sitting position on the courtyard-window’s sill.
"That’s better. I’d forgotten what High Summer’s like, here in the heart of the world . . ."
Lucas said softly: "Are you well?"
She shoved her spread fingers through her hair, pushing it back from her face. The white at her temples gleamed. Resting with her back against the jamb, one bare foot up on the sill, she smiled exhaustedly up at Lucas.
"Yes, kind sir, I thank you for asking. But no," she said, the smile vanishing, "I’ll have to be moving again. Damned transport would be out now, when I need to get across half the city. And I hate to break a strike."
Lucas looked round at the star-charts curling on the walls, the cracked mage-mirror table, the stacked volumes of Paracelsus, Michael Meier, Basil Valentine. He walked to stand beside her, looking across the top of her head and out into the courtyard. Yellow grass sprouted up between the flagstones. A dark patch on the earth showed where Evelian irrigated the cherry trees; morning light dappling their long oval leaves.
"Lady, you don’t need to be told how much I missed you, or how I feared you dead. I even ordered poor Andaluz to make inquiries at the Fane of the Thirty- Sixth Decan. My uncle is afraid of the Decans. He was not admitted, in any case. But you had been allowed in . . ."