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Rats and Gargoyles

Page 28

by Mary Gentle


  Midday sun gleamed from the blued-steel barrels of muskets, from unsheathed swords, and from the harness of Rat-Lords seemingly as small as children, crouched on the platform of a great armored engine of war.

  "There must be two hundred thousand people here!"

  Lucas leaned tight into the steel wall-shield of the siege-engine, the metal platform hard under his knee. Curving hot metal sheltered his body ahead and to the side. From where he crouched, he could see the other King’s Guard behind the shelters.

  Tens, dozens, hundreds of faces turned upwards. Looking at the siege-engine. Faces caked with white lead and yellow ochre, the colors of the House of Salomon.

  The engine’s noise drowned all but the tolling of the charnel bells, coming raggedly from the quarters beyond Fourteenth District’s square. His grip on the support-strut grew sweat-slippery. Blood pounded in his head, and his hand went automatically to the talisman at his neck.

  "Casaubon! Lord-Architect!"

  Lucas rapped on the hot metal of the engine-hatch. Heat throbbed from a bright sky.

  "Slow down! If we hurt anyone, the rest’ll tear us to pieces!"

  "Pox rot it, I’m doing what I can!"

  The thudding vibration of the machine diminished, the juggernaut wheels slowing. Heat shimmered across packed bodies.

  The Lord-Architect Casaubon heaved himself up through the hatch, swore as his bare arms touched metal, and lifted his immense buttocks up to rest on the rivet- studded platform.

  "And at that, we’re almost too late."

  His stained linen shirt and corset obviously discarded somewhere in the engine compartment, sun pinked the slabs of fat cushioning his back and shoulder-blades. Black smears of oil covered his faint freckles, glistened on the copper hairs on his chest. He picked his nose and wiped the result on the metal hatch-casing.

  "Let me get this thing on to its station and primed, and I’ll shake the truth out of that sleek ruffian who calls himself a Cardinal! Then we’ll see!"

  The Lord-Architect reached up. Lucas stretched out a hand, gripped his; steadying the immense bulk as the man rose to his feet.

  He let go, wiping his now-oily palm on the back of his breeches.

  Casaubon drew himself up to his full six foot five, lifted his foot, brought it down, and with his stockinged toe hooked his discarded blue satin frock-coat across the platform towards him.

  Sun hammered Lucas’s scalp. He blinked rapidly.

  "Nearly noon. The White Crow. She will be all right, won’t she?" His voice thickened. "Stupid question. She won’t be all right unless she’s very lucky. And that goes for all of us, doesn’t it?"

  The Lord-Architect reached into the voluminous pockets of his once white silk breeches and brought out a silver flask. Lucas reached across as the big man offered it, up-ended the flask down his throat, spluttered into a coughing fit, and at last managed to hiss: "What is this?"

  Casaubon scratched at his copper hair and examined his fingernails for oil and scurf. "Turpentine?"

  "What!"

  "I beg your pardon," the Lord-Architect said gravely, "metheglin is what I meant to say. She’s a Master- Captain, boy, and a Master-Physician. More than that, she’s Valentine."

  "What . . . ? I don’t . . ."

  As Lucas watched, bewildered, the fat man slid down to seat himself with his broad back against the ram-casing. The Lord-Architect screwed up his eyes almost to the smallness of raisins against the glare off the page, and began to write painstakingly in his notebook, resting it against his bolster-thigh.

  "There." He tore the pages out with a delicate concentration, folded them, retrieved a gold pin from the lapel of his rescued jacket and pinned the paper shut.

  Lucas hunkered down, resting his brown arms across his thighs. "Well?"

  "We arrive, but in time to do nothing." Casaubon lifted his head, losing at least one chin. "Get over to the University of Crime. Rouse the students. Give this to the Board of Governors–no, don’t argue with me, boy. Tell them it’s no use their thinking all this pox-blasted foolery is beneath them; they must act, and I’d be obliged if they’d do it now."

  "Explain to me just exactly how I. . ." Lucas stopped. "You’re serious, aren’t you? I don’t know why, messire, but the White Crow thinks you know what you’re doing. Tell me how I get away from here and I’ll give it a try."

  "Prince Lucas!"

  The Lord-Architect lifted one copper brow at the new voice. "Monstrous inconvenient."

  Cardinal-General Plessiez stepped out from the group of Guards on the platform and approached Lucas, pitching his voice over the crowd-noise. Sun shimmered from his black fur, from his ankh and green sash.

  "An interesting woman, your magus, Prince Lucas. What can she hope to say to the Twelfth Decan?"

  Buildings blocked the view behind them now; no sign of the marble terraces and the hill they had descended. Sun blurred Lucas’s vision; he rubbed his eyes. Nothing to see from here. Not even that last glint of sun from her sword, herself a tiny blob of color walking into heat-shimmer.

  Sudden, clear, he feels the shade and cool interior of the house on Carver Street; a holistic flash of white walls, piled books, cracked mirror-table, and the woman’s heat-roughened voice.

  "According to you, there’s no way into the Fane." He attempted to eradicate hostility from his voice, achieved only sullenness. "What’s it to you, priest?"

  "Still intransigent. I should have known when I met you. A King’s son."

  Lucas frowned. On the north-aust horizon, around the Fane’s black geometries, the summer air swarms thick with acolytes; gargoyle-wings beating as they hover, sink, aimlessly circle.

  The smooth voice insinuated. "And yet you’re not with her now, messire. Did she just need a university student to steal her a horse when there are none to be had?"

  The siege-engine creaked past the facades of ornate buildings lining the square. Pale plaster shot back sunlight and heat. Lucas stared grimly up at ornaments, strapwork, hanging flower-baskets. Rat-Lord spectators crowded balconies and windows. A brown Rat flourished a plumed hat; two drunken black Rats began tossing broken flowers down from pots on to the heads below.

  "I can thieve," he said. "I don’t have magia. She’d have been wasting her power protecting me. That’s why I’m here and not with her."

  "But a magus—"

  Something slithered across Lucas’s bare ankle. A coiled paper streamer drifted across the platform, snagged, then pulled away.

  Casaubon slammed his hand against the side of the machine. Iron echoed. "What’s happening, Plessiez? Where’s your damned Master Builder? And young Zaribeth?"

  A brown Rat called: "Your Eminence!"

  "You see we face some delay. The crowds," Plessiez said silkily; and before he could be answered strode back to take a report from the Guard.

  Lucas glanced back with a casual intensity, seeing the blue-liveried Guards positioned at each of the metal ladders. At the foot of the engine the crowd massed concealingly thick. The Lord-Architect beamed and prodded Lucas’s chest with a fat finger, nearly overbalancing him.

  "It’ll work. You’ll see."

  The black Rat, Plessiez, standing with the Guard, cast speculative glances up at the gleaming beaked rams and the high cup of the ballista. He murmured: "We must stay on-station here at the south-aust side, at least until the stroke of midday."

  "Yes." The Lord-Architect sounded grim. "We must."

  Canopies of silk rose on this side of Fourteenth District’s great square, great tents shining white and painted with the gold cross of the House of Salomon and the Sun of the Imperial Dynasty. Light glinted off laminated armor. Beyond the soldiers, scaffolding rose, great spider-structures of poles and platforms and cranes.

  Lucas stood and shaded his eyes. "Will you look at that!"

  "It may have been wise to bring more men." Plessiez walked to the front of the platform just as the Lord- Architect rose to his feet.

  Heat shimmered over desolation
.

  A spiderwork of girders and scaffolding stretched away, covering sixty or more acres, the site rawly hacked out of the classical buildings surrounding it. Lucas stared at men and women swarming over heaps of brick and masonry. A great granite block towered in the foreground.

  Lucas felt his skin shudder as a beast shivers. Realization hit hard and sudden: a jolt of cold injected into the blazing heat.

  "They’ve started building."

  He shot a glance over his shoulder, knowledge of foundation rites brimming on his tongue; silenced himself in the face of the Rat-Lords, and turned back to stare at worked stone, sunk in the earth, cut in proportion and inscribed.

  "There is your revolution," Plessiez remarked acidly at his side.

  ‘Mistress of the House of Books, Lady of the Builder’s Measure.’ From Rituale Aegypticae Nova, Vitruvius, ed. Johann Valentin Andreae, Antwerp, 1610 (now lost–supposed burned at Alexandria)

  The Lord-Architect’s head swiveled ponderously, surveying. His chins creased as he beamed, looking down at the Cardinal-General, nothing but innocence in his blue gaze.

  "Wonderful! Obvious why they’ve started building now, of course. Someone’s given them the Word of Seshat."

  Plessiez’s fur, where it brushed Lucas’s arm, prickled with a sudden tension.

  Lucas looked up, met his black gaze. "Yes, my uncle told me you have an interest in architecture, your Eminence. Human architecture. Speculative and operative."

  Plessiez stood four-square on the iron platform, balancing on bare clawed hind feet. A smile touched his mouth, the merest gleam of incisors. His head came up, the line of snout and jaw and sweeping feather-plume one clean curve in the midday heat. He turned his black eyes on Casaubon.

  "Being a Lord-Architect, I suppose that would become immediately apparent to you. Yes. It’s true that I put Messire Falke in the way of finding the lost knowledge he sought. I did not, until now, know the name of it. So the lost Word to build the Temple of Salomon is the Word of Seshat?"

  "Mistress of the House of Books," Casaubon said reverently, "Lady of the Builder’s Measure."

  The siege-engine inched forward, slowing now to a crowd-pressed halt. The Lord-Architect swung his arm around until it rested lightly across Plessiez’s shoulders. He looked down over the swell of his belly at the black Rat.

  "Why, Master Cardinal?"

  A kind of relaxation or recklessness went through the black Rat. Lucas saw him look up at Casaubon, fur sleek and shining in the sun, one ringed hand touching his pectoral ankh while his scaly tail curved in a low arc about his feet.

  "I thought it not amiss, in this time when all changes, if your people had a Temple of their own. You have built for our strange masters, and for his Majesty, and never for yourselves. I thought," Plessiez said, a self-mocking irony apparent in his tone, "that it might stave off at least one armed rebellion. We shall see if I am right."

  Obscurely angry, Lucas demanded: "What did he pay you? This man Falke, you didn’t give him what he wanted as a gift."

  Plessiez invested two words with a wealth of irony. "He paid."

  "You–halt!"

  The immense sweating crowd pulled back. Lucas stared down from ten or twelve feet high on to the square’s paving stones. Across them clattered a woman.

  The sun blazed back from her. He twisted his head aside, afterimages swimming across his vision. Her mirror-polished armor blazed, sending highlights dancing across the metal carapace of the siege-engine and the Guards’ uniforms.

  Plessiez put up a narrow-fingered hand to shield his face. "Lady Hyena."

  The woman looked up, a slanting-browed face framed in the open sallet helm. Her sheathed broadsword clanked against her armored hip.

  "Here in person, Eminence?" she grinned toothily. "A miscalculation, maybe."

  The black Rat beside Lucas shot one glance upwards, at the sun. "I have no quarrel with you, Lady."

  "Nor with—?" She turned bodily, the sallet restricting her neck-movements, and pointed back to a man on the distant steps at the edge of the building site. "Nor with the head of the House of Salomon? Don’t make me laugh. Well, will you fire on the crowd or not? What say you? Do you take the chance?"

  Lucas stared at the stranger. An excitement familiar from exercises at arms in Candover tingled through his body. Readiness, anticipation–and no arms, no defenses; and the black muzzles of armed Sun-banner men pointing full at the siege-engine. Lucas shuddered. The excitement still would not be killed. He knelt up, leaning one arm on the steel shield-wall, grinning fiercely at the human troops.

  "Madam, have I offered you violence?" Plessiez said mildly.

  The woman deliberately surveyed the towering engine, now coughing clouds of blue exhaust; the baroquely-cast beaked rams and the catapult. Sardonic, she observed: "That’s a fair offer of it!"

  Now his thoughts slipped back into the taught mode, Lucas easily picked out snipers behind the tents, musketeers in the cover at the edge of the building site, armed men and women massing behind the first unarmed rows of the great crowd.

  "I require nothing but to station this here as protection," Plessiez said.

  "What will you do now–sit quiet and watch Falke’s builders?" She chuckled. "Do that, then. I have a proclamation of my own to make, now that it’s midday."

  At Lucas’s elbow, the Lord-Architect Casaubon dug in his pocket and fumbled out a watch, flicked open the casing, and rumbled: "Not yet. A few minutes."

  "White Crow said—" Lucas cut himself off. Imaging the woman, dark red hair tumbling, at the doors of the Fane: under the skreeing circles of daemons in flight. Noon. The Lord of Noon and Midnight. And which is it?

  "Clovis, where’s Cornelius Vanringham? Bring him. I want him to hear this." The armored woman, moving surprisingly lightly, strode to the front of the siege- engine. Lucas gazed down at her heat-scarlet face, dripping with sweat. She stared past him. "Well, priest, you may as well hear it, too. You’d hear it before the end of today, be certain of that."

  Conciliatory, the black Rat bowed. "As you wish, Lady. I shall be most interested to hear what you have to proclaim."

  "Only our independence." Sardonic, her voice went harsh and honest. "Only our freedom."

  Lucas shivered: a deep motion of the flesh that never reached his skin, that seemed to reverberate in his chest and gut. He looked to Casaubon.

  "Go now," the big man said quietly. His plumpfingered hand closed over Plessiez’s shoulder, as the black Rat opened his mouth to call, tightening warningly.

  Not pausing to consider trust, Lucas ducked back and slid on his buttocks past the Lord-Architect, hidden by the man’s bulk. He stood, walked to the rear of the siege-engine; sat and slid and let himself fall from the edge of the platform in one movement. He staggered into the crowd with stinging ankles, thrusting between people with his elbows, tense for a shout, the crack of a musket behind him.

  Bells chimed from the five corners of the square.

  Noon.

  Chill fell across him, cooling his chest, arms and back, welcome as cold water in the press of sweaty bodies. He felt muscles relax that had been tensed against the hammering heat of midday. Shadow swept across the square. And again, deep in his gut, his flesh shuddered.

  A great intake of breath sounded around him, a simultaneous sound from the thousands gathered. Like wind across a cornfield, faces tipped up to the sky, ignoring the building site and the foundation-stone. Lucas raised his head, the comers of his vision filling with yellow dazzles.

  Brilliant blackness stabbed his vision. Ringed with a corona of black flames, a black sun hung at the apex of the sky.

  All the sky from arch to horizon glows yellow as ancient parchment. The twelfth chime of noon dies. Transmuted, transformed, in a fire of darkness: the Night Sun shines.

  Chapter Seven

  "How the hell did you do that?" the White Crow demanded over her shoulder, padding down the steep flight of steps. "You can’t have done that; it isn’t possib
le!"

  The blond man touched one hand to the pale stone wall for support, leaning forward, frowning.

  "It’s . . . light . . . in here. I don’t recognize any of this."

  He recollected himself and offered his hand to the old woman. Heurodis put one foot down, lowered her other foot to join it, then lowered herself cautiously down the next steep step. Her smoky eyes met the White Crow’s.

  "We don’t do it often. We–that’s the university, girlie–we can do it whenever we want to. That’s something you indigent scholar-bullies will never master."

  "But you can’t—"

  The White Crow half-missed her footing. She turned her head, seeing white stone steps descending to an archway and a stone-flagged door just visible beyond. Above, the high ceiling of the passage glowed pale and deserted.

  "It is light," she said. "And it wasn’t for the first few minutes after we got in. I think I know what’s happening outside . . . Reverend Mistress, you don’t understand! It isn’t a lock that keeps that threshold closed. It isn’t magia, either; it’s the power of god, the power that structures the universe. The interior of the Fane of Noon and Midnight doesn’t exist outside those times; you can’t just pick the lock and get in!"

  "We can." Heurodis grinned, showing all her long teeth.

  Reverend Master Candia took Heurodis’s hand and rested it on the White Crow’s left shoulder. The age- spotted hand gripped with some strength. Candia loped down to the bottom of the flight of steps. His slashed jerkin shed fragments of lace, leaving a smell of stale alcohol on the air.

  "And I thought seeing the impossible done couldn’t surprise me any more!" The White Crow laughed aloud. Echoes hissed up the passage. "I’ve always wondered why the university doesn’t depend on Rat-Lords or human patrons. If you can do that, you don’t have to. How do you do it?"

  Heurodis stepped down off the last step and took her hand from the White Crow’s shoulder.

 

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