Rats and Gargoyles

by Mary Gentle

  Beetles and centipedes scuttled across the marble paving, fried by the approaching-noon sun. Something rustled on her arm, and the White Crow’s fingertips brushed chitin: a locust skittering away. She wiped her upper lip free of sweat. She could hardly look up at the sky. The shadow of the siege-engine fell on her as welcome shade.

  "This really is the most amazing machine to drive." The Lord-Architect Casaubon beamed under oil-smears. His head lifted, chins unfolding, as a clock chimed the half-hour somewhere down towards the docks. The White Crow bit her lip to keep a grin off her face.

  "How long have you been now? Here?"

  He gazed down from the engine-casing, rocked a podgy hand back and forth. "Since dawn, this day?"

  "Yeah, that’s about when I found myself."

  Catching the Rats’ attention on her, she switched to a language of more distant origin.

  "I’m trying for the Fane-in-the-Twelfth-District, to enter at noon. If not, it’ll have to be at midnight. But I don’t think we have that much time. And then there’s . . ."

  She flicked a brief gaze to the hot flagstones. Casaubon ponderously nodded.

  "What lies below? Oh, yes. And almost ripe, by the feel of it." His bulk shifted. "Valentine . . . Pox rot the Decan; She robbed us of a month! We could have discovered the nature of this magia, and how to prevent it."

  "I can hazard a better guess than the great Lord-Architect Casaubon?" The White Crow wiped her wet forehead. "Amazing. But talk to Lucas about the crypt under Aust-quarter. This is a plague-magia, responsible among other things for this High Summer pestilence. I believe I know who made it, but I don’t know why. What advantage is it to the Rat-Lords to have humans sick now?"

  She shifted one bare foot scalded by the hot paving, and raised it to slip on her shoe. "And, if I go after it now, I’ll miss entry to the Fane."

  The Lord-Architect rested bare arms on the engine- casing, wincing at the heat of sun on the metal, obviously feeling for a foothold in the bowels of the machine. Slowly he heaved his immense torso upwards. His shirt snagged on a rivet, tore free.

  "Pox rot it, She gave me my own task to do; and I must do it. I must see the builders. If you haven’t returned after noon, I’ll come for you."

  He sat up and swung his massive legs over, slid down to the main part of the platform, and knelt to offer the White Crow a hand to climb up.

  "If I can meet you, yes, we’ll debate what we do next. If noon’s the crucial time, then act as and how you can. I don’t like the feel of the day."

  Metal rungs hot under her tender palms, she climbed the ladder; grasped his hand and swung to stand on the steel-plated platform. The Lord-Architect rose to stand beside her. Somewhere he had shed one stocking, and his shoes were caked with white mud.

  "I wish," the White Crow said, "that She had been a little more forthcoming in what She wants us to do."

  From the height of the platform she could see how, ahead, the street opened up. She stared down the hill to the lagoon, the airfield and the rising slope of marble temples beyond, and–highest, farthest–the black aust- northerly horizon of the Fane-in-the-Twelfth-District.

  "I do what I can, Master-Physician. I am only"–Casaubon put one massive hand on the stained shirt over his heart–"a poor Archemaster and Master-Captain."

  "This is serious. Lucas . . . Lucas?"

  Glancing down, she missed the Prince of Candover. His voice came from the rear of the engine-platform, as he scrambled up the metal ladder near the ballista and hailed a black Rat.

  "Messire Cardinal!"

  The Rats in Guard uniform fell back from the edge as the black Rat signaled. Sleek, a few inches taller than Lucas; he rested his ringed hand on the hilt of his rapier. The Rat stood lightly, tail cocked, black feather-plume at a jaunty angle, with a silver ankh at his collar, and only the rich green silk sash to mark him more than a priest.

  "Where’s Desaguliers?" The White Crow touched Casaubon’s sweat-warm shirt-front. "Those are Guiry colors. That’s the Cardinal-General of Guiry? That’s Plessiez?"

  The Lord-Architect opened his mouth, shut it again, shook his head and made later gestures with his plump fingers.

  The Prince of Candover walked down the platform, apparently unaffected by the sun-heated metal under his thin sandals. "Messire Cardinal-General Plessiez. We’ve met, you may recall it. At the Embassy, with my Uncle Andaluz."

  The black Rat’s snout wrinkled in a smile. "And also, Prince, I think we met in the crypt below Nineteenth District’s Aust quarter. But that I have not yet discussed with your uncle the Ambassador."

  "In a crypt!" the Lord-Architect snorted sotto voce.

  Lucas’s gaze moved across the White Crow’s face, his own blank as any diplomat’s; and she watched with a professional appreciation that momentarily, pleasantly, masked her urgent fears.

  "The very question I wanted to raise, Messire Plessiez," Lucas said. "You’ll recall I was with a Katayan girl then. Mistress Zar-bettu-zekigal–Zari. Her friends have been afraid she was dead. I’d very much like to speak with her again."

  The black Rat raised one furry brow.

  About to speak, the White Crow hesitated as she felt Casaubon’s voice rumble through his massive torso: "I, also, think it would be rewarding to speak with the Kings’ Memory. Valentine, you’ll be unaware of it. but I met her this morning, in company with the Cardinal here. A most delightful young lady."

  She blandly ignored his last comment. The Lord- Architect’s apparent smugness gave way to apparent pique. She smiled.

  "You may be overstepping an archemaster’s privileges, Messire Casaubon." The black Rat’s expression flickered, the glint of anger in bead-black eyes.

  "But," Plessiez continued smoothly, "in point of fact, I was about to suggest the same thing. I sent Mistress Zaribet to the great square in Fourteenth District with a message, and she may still be there. Perhaps, Prince Lucas, I could beg you to accompany us?"

  Still in a distant language, the White Crow murmured: "That one won’t get as much out of the Prince as he hopes, though I see he’ll try."

  "And your delightful foreign friend," Cardinal-General Plessiez continued, "who I take to be a practitioner of the noble Art? Madam, if you seek employment, I could find a use for a prognosticator of fortunes."

  "As well as for a Lord-Architect?" the White Crow challenged. "Who you seem to have riding in this monstrosity as well as building it–"

  "Driving, not riding," Casaubon corrected with mild hurt. "Master Plessiez here has promised me an introduction to the leader of the House of Salomon, one Master Builder Falke, in the great square. Therefore I accompany him."

  "Falke?" The White Crow put her palms back against the hot metal casing of the upper engine, supporting herself. Between tension and delight, she grinned at Plessiez. "So this Master Falke came out of the Eastquarter hall alive? I was told he died. But, then, I was told you died there, your Eminence. One can’t trust rumor!"

  Brown Rats in King’s Guard uniform leaned at their stations on the engine’s carapace, shading eyes against the brilliance, or checking the loading of muskets and calivers.

  "You know Falke, madam?"

  "I know of him. I know of you."

  The click of a rifle-bolt echoed back from the house-fronts. A sweet stink of oil choked the air, throbbing up as the siege-engine ticked over. Plessiez glanced over his shoulder at the Prince of Candover.

  "I see . . ."

  The Lord-Architect Casaubon interrupted: "We can drive to our destination by way of the Twelfth District, Valentine. Certainly! You’d be late if we left you to walk."

  Plessiez opened his mouth to protest.

  "Oh, certainly," the White Crow deadpanned. "I’ll never get Lucas to steal me horse and tack again in the time left. Of course, if it weren’t for this thing, we’d still have the mare and the gelding . . ."

  Hot sun beat down. Marble roofs and frontages, gold and white against the blue, breathed back the silence that comes from hot stone.
The tickover of the siege-engine came back from street and alley walls like the beating of surf, mingling with the offhand talk of the Guards as they patrolled the platform or squatted down against the shaded side.

  The Cardinal-General frowned with an expression condemning bad taste.

  "Madam, this is not a day upon which to make jokes."

  "I know, your Eminence. I know that better than you appreciate," The White Crow tilted her hat-brim down to shade her eyes. "Let’s speak of necromancy, shall we?"

  Desaguliers walked past the turning treadmill, not pausing even to brush the sparks from his fur as they fell from the crackling chandeliers. One sweating human face turned towards him. He slapped the end of his tail against the bars. "Get working."

  "Scum!"

  Unbelieving, he swung back to throttle the whisper out of the naked straining worker. Before he could reach her, a Lord Magus in a golden robe appeared at his elbow.

  "All’s arranged."

  He felt a small hard object pressed into his palm.

  "Watch me, then. Don’t miss the signal." Desaguliers, sweating in the heat of midday, the audience hall’s closed curtains and artificial light, let a cynical smile appear on his lean features. "I’ve known too many of these affairs be messy failures. This one has to succeed. If I go down, I’ll take all of you with me."

  "We never doubted that, messire."

  Desaguliers left him, walking under the clover-leaf vaults of the great chamber, now bright with the flare of generated lights. He pushed between two Rats, one in blue satin, one in linen and leather; both feeding by hand and from the same dish their leashed human slaves.

  A flurry in the thick crowd caught his attention. A tall Rat in the gold of the Lords Magi, awkwardly riding the shoulders of a female brown Rat-Guard, yelled a drunken toast to the four or five hundred packed into the hall: "The King!"

  Different voices chorused: "The King and victory!"

  "To our future without masters!" the Magus echoed, slipped, and slid to vanish from Desaguliers’ sight into the crowd and a roar of laughter.

  Pushing onwards, elbowing, the former Captain-General worked his way towards the circular dais-throne. The crowd grew thicker. He thrust a way between four female Rats in Guard uniform, a priest, a cluster of gallants quarreling; stepped down hard on the long-toed foot of a dazed-drunk brown Rat and opened a gap in the front row.

  The Rat-King sat among wine-stained cushions, under the incandescent glare of the lights. Receiving toasts, congratulations; waving away a messenger, talking to a priest in the robes of the Abbey of Guiry, bright-eyed with victory celebrations . . .

  "Messire Desaguliers!" The younger of the silver- furred Rats-King raised a wine-goblet in ironic salutation. "Have you come seeking your co-conspirators?"

  Silence began to seep into their immediate circle.

  "Conspiracy?" Desaguliers asked mildly.

  "Janin, Reuss, Chalons," the silver-furred Rat-King enumerated. "And, of the Guard, Rostagny and Hervet—"

  "–Volcyr, Perigord, de Barthes," the bony black Rats-King picked up, turning away from the young female Guiry priest. "If you have come inquiring for them, I recommend you seek them out in the palace oubliettes. But, then, you’ll—"

  "–be there in their company soon enough." A brown Rats-King flopped down on his belly, tail cocked high, and wrinkled his nose dazedly. "Drink, man! We’ll settle your execution tomorrow. Things will be different tomorrow."

  "They certainly will." Desaguliers spoke over the nearest of the crowd’s ragged cheers. He made a low formal bow and, as he straightened up, added: "You were well informed about the conspiracy, your Majesty. If not quite well enough."

  "Shilly." The brown Rats-King closed his eyes suddenly.

  "Are you still a danger, then?" the bony black Rats- King said. He sprang to his feet, dragging the knot of co-joined tails painfully towards him. Standing knee-deep in the silk cushions, he flung out a hand.

  "Enough leniency. More than enough. Shoot him!"

  The Rats nearest Desaguliers started, whiskers quivering; backed up hard against the packed crowd. The Guards around the dais raised their loaded muskets, struck tinder for the fuses. Someone at Desaguliers’ elbow screamed. The Rat-King pointed again, shrieking: "Shoot!"

  Elbows rammed into his ribs; feet clawed him, pushing away. Desaguliers, swordless, grinned a ferocious grin and kept his feet; watching the smouldering musket-fuses, praying that the Lord Magus’ lent magic would–once, it only needs to be this once–work for him.

  He flung up his hand and crushed the tiny glass sphere that he carried in his hand. "Now!"

  The sputtering chandeliers died momentarily; then blazed up with a glare that lit the closed draperies like a gunpowder-flash. Hot splinters of glass rained down among screams. Desaguliers threw himself flat as a musket discharged, heard the shot whistle past his head and thunk into something with a noise like a butcher’s cleaver hitting bone. Wet blood spattered his fur.

  On his knees, jaw aching from some unrecognized blow, he heard what seemed at first to be a continuation of the bulbs breaking. The full-length windows shattered, draperies billowing inwards. Daylight blazed in, and dust.

  Through clouds of dust and stone-fragments, Desaguliers saw the metal-tipped beak of a battering-ram. Panicked Rats all but crushed him as, now, they struggled as hard away from the windows as they had from the dais. Desaguliers sprang across the intervening distance and landed on the Rat-King’s throne.

  "Nobody move!"

  The spur of the battering-ram, joined by a second, pushed collapsing wall and window-frames into the audience hall. Dust rained down on silks and satin and fur. Screams and cries echoed. A silver Rats-King sobbed. The vast bulk of a siege-engine rumbled through the destroyed wall and on to the inlaid-wood flooring, grinding up planks as it came. It blocked the shafts of sunlight spearing the dust . . .

  "Here!" Desaguliers held up his hand, signaling to the Rats in Guard uniform crouching on the main platform, who now, swords in hand, leaped down and began shoving the crowd together in smaller, terrorized groups. One group remained on the engine-platform, firing a musket-volley into the King’s Guards.

  The leader, St. Cyr, picked a way from the siege-engine between the wounded through to the throne, fastidiously wiping blood and dust from his black fur.

  "Saw your signal," he said. "The rest are in position at the back of the building."

  Desaguliers looked down at the bony black Rats-King, crouching at his feet in the silken cushions.

  "Your intelligence was good," he advised, "but not good enough. Think about how many more of these engines we may have stolen out of Messire Plessiez’s control. And then you can be thinking about how the Rat-King, tomorrow, will still have a master. The senate of our new republic."

  The gangplank grated as it hit the quayside.

  Six or eight very young children leaned over the Boat’s rail, screeched, slid back; and the Candovard Ambassador heard their shrill voices calling, bare feet thumping on the deck, high above and invisible.

  "Sir?"

  Andaluz looked at the red-headed clerk at his elbow.

  "My dear girl, you don’t suppose that— No. He would be on the Boat when it docks under the White Mountain, not here. I mean my son." A sea-breeze gusted in his face. He rubbed absently at his hair, feeling it stiff with salt. "My late son. You’d recognize him easily, Claris. He bore a remarkable resemblance to my nephew."

  Noon shadows pooled on the white marble quay; from the brown Rat, the Katayan, and the two Candovards. Ropes strained from the bollard beside the four of them to the moored ship. Black tarred planks rose up above the Ambassador’s head, plain and solid in the sun. He craned his neck and read the name of the Boat cut deeply into the hull. Ludr.

  "An old word: it means ‘ship,’ " he said, "and ‘cradle,’ and ‘grave’ . . . The other ships are gone?"

  The tall young clerk squinted into the light off the harbor. "Yes, sir."

  Zar-
bettu-zekigal pointed. "It’s still flying a Katayan flag!"

  "Among many others." Andaluz rested his hand on her shoulder, restraining her impatience.

  "I don’t understand." The brown Rat, Charnay, padded back down the marble quay steps and halted beside Zar-bettu-zekigal. "When those five galleons were coming in, we couldn’t see this one; and now we can see this one the others have vanished."

  "Oh, what! Haven’t you ever seen the Boat before?" Zar-bettu-zekigal leaned back on her bare heels, tail coiling up to scratch at her shaggy-growing hair. "See you, must be hundreds of ’em on board. Boat hasn’t been in all this summer."

  Above, furled sails gleamed an ochre, sand-colored white in the midday sun. From the decks came the clamor of children’s voices.

  "I can’t stay here for this," Charnay protested. "I must find Messire Plessiez. The Night Council want him!"

  Andaluz let their voices fade into the background. The sun beat down on his uncovered head; he blinked away heat-dazzles in his vision, sweating. Sounds came clearly: the shift of the horses, restless in the shafts of the coach up on the promenade, and, far off across the airfield and the square, the roar of voices . . .

  The gangplank creaked.

  Andaluz straightened, unconsciously assuming the position of formal greeting. Then his ramrod spine relaxed. He smiled wistfully.

  A child some two or three years old staggered down the plank. Another followed it, dark as the first was fair; squatting to prod at the sun-softened tar on the plank. When she stepped onto the quay she took the other child’s hand. Both walked away.

  "They . . ."

  Andaluz held up a hand to arrest Claris’s words. He peered up at the light-silhouetted deck, seeing another child, two more; a group of a dozen Ratlings, burnished pelts bobbing in the sun. They clattered barefoot down the gangplank, swarmed for a moment about him, so that Andaluz looked down on the heads of small children, surrounded.

  All silent now, all solemn; looking up at the Katayan woman, the Rat and the Candovards.

  He knelt, reaching out, almost touching the arm of a small boy no more than two. The child looked with blue eyes, dark blue eyes so nakedly curious and real that Andaluz shuddered. He sat back, slipped, reached up to grip his clerk’s arm. By the time he rose to his feet, the crowd of human and Rat children were beginning to back up on the gangplank. He stepped to one side.