by Mary Gentle
"We’re gods’ thieves," she said. "And we’ve stolen from the gods themselves, missy. Under divine sufferance, no doubt, but we have done."
"Crime’s a high Art." Candia gripped the lintel of the arch, leaning to peer into the chamber beyond. One hand went to his belt, clenched into a fist. "Heurodis is a great practitioner."
"Here."
Drawing her small knife from the back of her belt, the White Crow passed it to the blond man. His hand, which had seemed to search quite independently of his will, closed about the hilt; he stooped slightly as he looked down at her, nodding with a wide-eyed surprise.
"You trust me, Master-Captain?"
"I don’t think this is a place for anyone to go unarmed."
She hefted the rapier in her right hand, with her left reaching up to push a coil of red hair back under her hat. A wetness brushed her cheek. She rubbed her stinging fingers across her skin and looked down at a bloody hand.
"Lady, you’re hurt." He took her hand by the wrist, turning her palm upwards. A bead of blood oozed from the life-line.
"No. Or not just now anyway." The White Crow winced, raising her left hand to her mouth, sucking at the pin-pricks made by black roses in the Garden of the Eleventh Hour. "The stigmata of magia. Messire Candia, do you recognize any of this?"
"None of it, lady."
Stone dust gritted under her sandals. The White Crow reached down and flipped them off, feeling the tension of stone under her bare feet. She padded forward into pale light.
Squat pillars spread out, forest-like, into the distance. From them great low vaults curved up, in arcs so shallow it seemed impossible the masonry of the ceiling should stay supported. The sourceless white light arced the ribs of the vaults with multiple shadows.
Her nostrils flared, catching a scent of roses.
"Why did you and . . . ?"
The blond man complied. "Theo. Bishop Theodoret, of the Church of the Trees."
"A Reverend tutor. And a Tree-priest. Of course."
The White Crow knelt and strained her vision. A breath of warm air feathered her cheek. Distance blurred pillars, low vaults, more pillars. No windows: the light not the light of sun or moon.
"Why did you need Scholar-Soldiers?"
Heurodis, catching the question, snapped: "Why indeed? What young Candia here thought he was doing asking help of the Invisible College, I’m sure I’ll never know. Ignorant children, all of them. You, too, missy."
Heurodis wiped a bony finger along the surface of the nearest pillar, sniffed at the dust, and wiped it down her blue cotton dress. In tones of waspish outrage she added: "How the University of Crime could begin to trust an organization that doesn’t even work for gain—"
Reduced to complete speechlessness, the White Crow leaned her rapier against her leg, reached to pin her tumbling hair up out of the way under her wide-brimmed hat, and at last managed to say: "You’ll have to take that point up with one of the others. Come to think of it, I’d like you to talk to the Lord-Architect Casaubon. Rather, I’d like him to have the experience of talking to you . . ."
She walked forward as she talked, letting the words come almost absently, centering herself to the familiar heft of the sword in her hand, the weight of the backpack. Light slid about her like milk. The air grew warmer, out under the low-vaulted ceiling; and a glimmer of blue clung to the edges of ribs and pillars.
"If I had to guess, I’d say that noon brought us the Night Sun." A quirk of humor showed as she glanced back at Heurodis. "After today, I’m cautious about expressing an opinion."
"Listen."
She glanced up, seeing lines deepen in Candia’s face; the blond man’s air of permanent injured surprise giving way to an unselfconcerned anxiety. He stumbled as he walked past her, away from the wall.
"What—? No, I hear it. Wait. . ." The White Crow moved forward and caught the buff-and-scarlet sleeve of his jerkin, halting him.
A deep wash of sound re-echoed from the pillars, hissing through the milky-blue air, losing direction against the white pillars and white vaults and white light. It died. The White Crow strained to hear. She walked forward, head cocked sideways, tracking it for some faint hint of direction.
"There . . ."
A faint green luminescence shone down one side of a low pillar, far off, where distance made the pillars small as a finger at arm’s length. Again the sound hissed, growing from inaudibility to a harsh breath of pain. It sawed the warm air. Her chest tightened, attempting to match that arhythmic breathing. The White Crow frowned, mouth open.
Candia grunted as if he had been punched. "Theo."
The White Crow looked to Heurodis. The old woman shook her head, moving forward to take the blond man’s elbow. His face held some abstract expression of pain and memory that defied analysis. The White Crow began to walk, hearing their slow footsteps behind her.
Pillars shifted, perspective moving them in her peripheral vision. Dry warm air rasped in her lungs. Deliberately barefoot, she walked lightly on the balls of her feet, letting the sensations of the flagstones guide her.
Between pillars, away in the milky light, she glimpsed a far wall. She walked faster.
"Master-Captain!"
The hissed whisper broke her concentration. She gestured shortly with her blood-wet left hand, ignoring Heurodis. More shifted in the light than perspective could account for. Small hairs hackled down the back of her neck. She slid from one squat round pillar to the concealment of the next.
Greenness drifted into the granular milky light, coiling as if it were steam or smoke and not luminescence: a light the color of sun through a canopy of new leaves. It touched the skin of her arms, goose-pimpling them with cool. A stink of old blood caught in her throat.
"Stay back." The White Crow touched one bloody finger to her backpack, stepping across the flagstoned space towards a door that opened into a tiny stone cell. She looked inside.
Candia, behind her, whispered: "Theo . . ."
Shock hit: her sweaty skin going cold between her shoulder-blades and down her arms. The White Crow bent forward and retched. One hand to the door-frame, the other leaning for support on her rapier, eyes blind with the tears of nausea, she vomited up the bile of a day’s fasting.
"Oh shit . . . Don’t come in. Somebody keep watch outside."
She spat, wiped her nose with the heel of her hand, took in a breath, and stepped into the white stone cell. Its low step caught her foot. She stumbled, staring ahead.
Stark against her sight, an iron spike curved up out of the masonry wall. Blood and pale fluids had dried in streaks below it. The White Crow stared at the head of a man impaled on the iron spike. Undecayed, spots of blood still dripped from the neck-stump to the stained floor. White hair flowed down to where, red-dappled, it stuck to drying knots of vertebrae, slashed cords and tendons.
Only the head: the cell held no truncated body.
Dappled light shifted, green and gold. For a second the White Crow sensed the rush of branches, birds, steps through leaf-mold. A shriek of ripped wood echoed, the light shifting. She knelt, staring levelly at the creased labile face.
At his open conscious eyes.
Heurodis’s sharp indrawn breath sounded above her head. The fair-haired man fell to his knees beside her. One dirty hand reached out as if he would touch the severed head. The White Crow caught his wrist.
"No, messire, I’m sorry. Not with the power here."
Tears brimmed over the lower lids of Candia’s eyes. Absently moving his knife, he picked with the tip of it under one thumbnail. Green light gleamed from the blade. "My lord Bishop . . . Theo, tell me how. I’ll do it."
The White Crow got to her feet, eyes never leaving the severed head. Heurodis whispered, "Take more than a knife, girl, when it’s a god keeping that thing alive," and the White Crow nodded, and risked a glance over her shoulder.
"Rot it! I thought as much."
Outside the cell, the pillars of the crypt had vanished. The cell now opened onto a gallery, fort
y feet above the floor of a high-vaulted chamber large as the nave of a cathedral, white and gold stone gleaming in sourceless brilliance. The White Crow touched a knee briefly to the floor, kneeling to look up and out past the low arch of the cell’s doorway.
Shafts of golden light curved over clustered pillars, soared down from perpendicular arches in dust-mote-filled curtains. And in all the hull-shaped nave no windows: light shafting from unappreciable sources. The White Crow tilted down the brim of her speckled hat, shading her eyes, squinting. High fan-vaulting and hollow arches hung bare, empty of roosting acolytes. Below, all the wide floor stretched out deserted.
"Leave . . . here . . ."
She shivered. Breath echoed back from the stone behind her, forced into painful speech: an old man’s weary voice.
"Leave . . . here . . . Candia . . . I am . . . bait . . . for . . . you . . . Go . . . Go!"
The White Crow got to her feet. She turned. The man in buff and scarlet still knelt, facing the severed head. She winced, seeing how the features of Theodoret moved: wrinkled eyelids blinking, the wide mobile mouth shifting.
Heurodis’s hands clenched in the folds of her cotton dress.
The White Crow sheathed her rapier and took off her pack, tossing the speckled hat down beside it on the flagstones. She unbuckled the straps, fumbling, hands shaking; breathed in to calm herself, and took out a cotton handkerchief and a metal water-flask.
"Well, I’m here to see The Spagyrus. I assume." A ghost of sardonic humor touched her voice. "This should bring him."
She stepped past Candia and knelt, unscrewing the top of the flask, covering it with the kerchief and tipping it up. Water chilled the cloth and her fingers. She reached up and, with the damp cloth, moistened the cracked lips of the head.
She kept her eyes on that vulnerable mouth, shivered inside; finally lifted her gaze. Swimming with light, his gray eyes met hers, saw her plainly; and the old man’s lips moved into an attempt at a smile.
"Pitiable . . . and . . . grotesque . . ."
"No, messire."
The White Crow moistened the cloth again and applied it, words coming as randomly as her thoughts.
"Mistress Heurodis got me in here. She saved all our lives. Master Candia tells me you sent to the Invisible College. Tell me what you wish, messire."
The Bishop of the Trees spoke slowly, painfully. "Bless . . . you . . . child . . ."
All else put aside, the White Crow sat back on her heels, staring up into his creased face. The edges of her vision glowed with the light of forests.
"My name is Valentine. White Crow. I come from the Invisible College. I was fifteen years a Master-Captain; I’m a Master-Physician now. Tell me quickly. If anything at all is possible now, would you die, or would you have me try something other?"
Abrupt and arctic, silence dropped on the square, darkling under the black sun.
"Don’t fear! We know what that means."
The Hyena screeched. She flung her free hand up, pointing at the sky that now shone a deep and pitiless blue as the Night Sun took hold.
"The Night Sun! The sign! The hour has come. We are free of our strange masters, free of the god-daemons, free of the Decans, free of the Thirty-Six! You all hear it, you all see it, you all feel it!"
Her voice flattened against the still cold air.
She swung round, pushing between packed men and women, shoving her way from the siege-engine towards the steps. No lips moved. The crowd, silent, parted by unspoken consent to let her through.
"Feast and rejoice! Feast and rejoice and build. Hold our celebration while the Night Sun shines. And when it passes you’ll see the day’s light shine on a Fane standing open and empty, the Thirty-Six abandoning the heart of the world. And that heart of the world given over into our keeping, here: the imperial Sun dynasty!"
A middle-aged woman raised her head. Her silk carpenter’s shirt hung in strips. Her face, caked thick with yellow and white paint, showed raw sores around her mouth and nostrils. She met the Hyena’s gaze and showed her teeth.
"Clovis, damn you!" The Hyena strode up the steps, armor clattering; the only noise but for the siege-engine’s throbbing motor.
Faces turned to follow. Silk and satin work-clothes hung in strips and tatters. A burly man stumbled from her path, face covered by a feather-mask. Many masks gleamed in the crowd: brilliant or dust-covered feathers clinging to faces, masking eyes, leaving mouths and sores uncovered. And still no sound: not a shout, not a whisper.
The blond man, Clovis, met her on the top step.
"Lady . . . what have we done?"
"Plague Carnival!"
The voice echoed down from the nearest building, where on balconies black and brown Rats gazed down with arrogant equanimity.
"Why not sing?" one called down. "Why don’t you dance now, peasants?"
Another pointed into the vast mass of people. "A silent carnival! A plague carnival!"
"You don’t amuse us!"
"Dancing’s a sovereign cure for the plague, they tell me!"
"Quiet!" The sky shimmered from yellow to blue in the corners of the Hyena’s vision. A smell of sickness breathed up from the flagstones. She rubbed her nose, eyes watering at the stench.
"Lay down fire across the building if they speak again. Over the heads of the crowd."
A young boy stepped from the silent crowd and threw a handful of broken petals towards the balcony. He whisked a mask of owl’s feathers from his face, sun gleaming on red hair and on his sores weeping white pus. Other masked revelers stood in silence, jammed shoulder to shoulder, crowding the dry basins of fountains. The Hyena followed the direction of every gaze.
In the pitiless blue sky, coronas of black fire licked out across the empyrean. Midnight at noon, night-fire: the black sun blazes.
"Clovis. Set up sound-broadcast. I'm going to tell them this is what we’ve been waiting for." She spared one glance for the Rat-Lords on the siege-engine platform. Picking out an emerald sash, some humor curved her lips. "We can all use . . . coincidences. Where’s Falke?"
"Here."
The man stepped silently to her side. He slid the black silk bandage from his eyes, raising his face to the sky. She saw momentarily in his unnaturally dilated pupils the twin reflections of darkness.
"We must hold the ceremony of the shadow. The building must continue."
Her slanting red brows lifted. Directing troops to their places by hand-signals, she spoke now without looking at him, in a measured tone only a fraction from hysterical laughter.
"Whose shadow? Yours? Have you seen what’s in front of you?"
The man gazed blindly across the building site.
"I’ve done without all else. I can do without my shadow to keep the Temple of Salomon standing."
She pointed at their feet, then fumbled her hands back into plate gauntlets.
"Oh, damn your Craft mysteries . . ."
All their shadows fell bright, brilliant; fell through the dark air to shine on the broken stone.
"It’s impossible. Look. You’ve to nail a shadow to the first-raised wall to keep the Temple standing. All the shadows are lights!"
Falke frowned, brushing a hand across his lips and the several tiny weeping sores at the corners of his mouth. The cagework-shadows of scaffolding fell bright across his surcoat, and the Hyena held out both gauntleted hands, glinting darkly.
"See! You have to depend on my troops now!"
She met his eyes, and his gaze blurred.
Falke stumbled against her, and she caught him with one steel-clad arm; spun to grip his shoulders and lower his dead weight to the broken paving. His eyes rolled up and showed only thin white lines below the lids.
"Damn pestilence, it’s thinning us out faster than we can fight or build. Let’s have some help here! Ho!"
The Hyena pushed greasy hair out of her face, pulled off her plate gauntlet to feel for his pulse. She glanced up for her lieutenants. Two of the people in her immediate sight–a dark-b
earded man, a young boy–slid down on their knees and fell hard across the stones. She gaped.
Above on the scaffolding a scream sounded, and the thud of a heavy body falling.
"Falke?"
She grabbed his dark-streaked hair, pulling his head up, and stopped as he sprawled limply back against her; head falling back, mouth falling open. Tatters of black flesh ran across the skin of his face from mouth to temple, spread down his neck to vanish under his collar. Crisped, sere: as if plague-fever could burn up flesh in heartbeats.
She touched her bare fingers to his throat. No pulse.
Dark flames licked down into her vision. The Hyena stared across the open square. To left and to right, men and women sprawled across the paving; others leaped up or shouted for aid. A coldness chilled her bare hands.
With a child-like puzzlement, she looked down and touched the face of the man dead in her arms.
Brightness moved in his mouth.
The Hyena snatched her hand away. Antennae moved in the dead man’s open mouth, quivering, wavering. Insect feet scraped for purchase on his lips. It crawled between his teeth, first a velvet body, and then the spreading black-and-white-mottled wings of a death’s-head moth.
Frozen, not even able to push his body away, she watched the moth shake out its wings and sun itself on his tattered cheek.
A scrap of color bobbed past her vision. A scarlet butterfly, wings dusted with gold, sharp against the blue sky . . . The Hyena looked at the boy collapsed on the next step down. From between his lips a pale blue butterfly crawled, took flight.
The death’s-head moth flew up past her face, skull- markings plain on its dried wings. She covered her mouth with her hand, sick and afraid.
Under the generative chill of the Night Sun, all the air above the square glimmered, red and blue and black and gold, alive with whirling columns of butterflies and moths rising up from the mouths of the plague-dead.
"It’s a bad joke!" Candia exclaimed. He rocked back on to his heels, standing up.
The White Crow grabbed at her arm as he caught it, pulling her up on to her feet. She twisted out of a grip that would leave bruises, glaring up at the blond man.