by Mary Gentle
She grabbed the brown Rat’s sword-arm, fur slick and fog-dampened, shaking it. Charnay looked down at her.
"I forget," she confessed.
"Oh, what—"
Plessiez, a yard or two ahead, interrupted. "I think we’ve arrived."
Lights shone through the fog. Zar-bettu-zekigal plodded on over the fragile beach, refusing to look down.
The fog thinned.
Ochre and red cliffs reared up before her and to either side; summits lost in distance. The sea echoed softly from wall to wall. A great amphitheater of rock, in the flares of torches.
Warmth breathed from the stone, as if the sun had only just ceased to shine and it still gave back heat. Zar-bettu-zekigal stretched out her hands.
Hacked out of the bedrock brown granite, still part of the cliffs, great squared thrones formed a semicircle.
Zar-bettu-zekigal bent to place the bull’s-eye lantern at her feet. Tiny skulls crunched under her boots. She reached back without looking, and Elish-hakku-zekigal gripped her hand. The older Katayan came to stand at her back, setting down her lantern, folding her arms about Zari’s chest and resting her chin on the top of her head.
Charnay drove the pole of her lantern deep into the beach, brushing bone splinters from her fur. She straightened up.
Plessiez trod a few paces forward, past Zar-bettu- zekigal, until he stood at the focal point of those inward- facing thrones, lifting his head and resting his rapier back across the drying fur of his shoulder.
"Old . . ." Elish’s chin jolted her skull as the woman whispered. Zar-bettu-zekigal gripped her sister’s hand, pulling her arms tighter.
Silence breathed from the stone. Silence and a tension, the bedrock brown granite dense with aeons of geological compression.
The squared thrones jutted from living rock that continued above them into square pillars, soaring up. She tilted her head to follow; lost the sight in dim distance a quarter of a mile overhead. No sky. Nothing but foundation rock below the world.
Dizzy, she dropped her gaze to the empty thrones. Crude seats and arms and backs, smoothed not by artisans but by time.
"The carvings." Elish’s voice in her ear.
Lines marked the back of each brown granite throne, cut with no metal tools, cut with bone and wood and stone itself. She stared up at the human figures cut in stylized profile, the planes of muscle, the nakedness of bodies. She faced the central throne. Raising her eyes, Zar-bettu-zekigal followed the line of the giant figure’s chest and shoulders. Scales marked the neck; the head not human but the head of a cobra.
She looked to the next throne, and the next. A man with the head of a viper, a woman whose black lidless eyes shone in the head of a python, a young man with the blunt head of a boa, a woman whose shoulders supported the blue-and-crimson head of a coral snake . . .
Movement caught her peripheral vision; Elish’s arms tightened; she heard Plessiez swear an oath, and Charnay grunt with satisfaction. Color and movement. Each figure changing as her eye left it, changing from bas-relief to solidity . . .
They sat each one high upon their thrones, the light of torches sliding on their bronze human flesh. Giant figures, twice the height of a man. The torches flared and glinted from scales, from lidless black eyes, from pulses beating in the white soft scales under serpentine jaws.
Elish’s arms loosened. She breathed: "The Serpentheaded . . ."
Now each of the Thirteen arose, standing before their thrones, scales shimmering, forked tongues licking between blunt lips; old with the age of granite, of bone, of earth.
Plessiez sheathed his rapier with a tiny click that echoed back from the towering walls. The black Rat raised his head, gazing at the giant figures.
"You are the Night Council?"
A scent of musk and sand-hot deserts breathed from the beach, from the miniature human skulls tumbled to the foot of the thrones. From the center throne the figure arose, standing with brown hands resting on the granite.
Light shone on his human body, brown, smoothskinned and naked; and Zar-bettu-zekigal let her gaze rise to where skin transmuted into scale and his spine curved inhumanly. Rearing up, haloed by hooded skin, the eyes of a cobra surveyed them with bright anger.
He spoke.
"Yeth."
She turned from the cell doorway, staring out into the Fane.
"You could not have healed him, if I had desired him truly to die."
White stone walls shone in sourceless light. The White Crow looked out across a floor littered with broken glass, alembics, bainsmarie and furnaces; eyes narrowing to witness the machinery of the alchemist. Flat glass bubbles, set in ranks into the wall, danced with moving pictures. She registered in peripheral vision outer views of the city. Past that . . .
This high vaulted hall opened into a nave, into a colonnade; into balconies, oratories, galleries . . .
So clear the air, no possible distance could make it blurred or diffuse. She saw into the heart of the Fane: all bright, all in focus. Colonnades of white arches hooped away, growing smaller in perspective; vaults shone and soared; galleries ran the walls, drawing zigzag lines into the distance. All around: tower-stairs and loggias, porches and steps and halls starkly clear; white and intricate and shining as if carved from ivory and milk.
Glass rolled aside as she moved, ticking across the stone. She glanced down.
A rose-briar lay across the flagstones, jet-black, bristling with thorns. One withered leaf clung to the stem. Something had eaten away the petals of the remaining black rose. She raised her head, following it.
Insects crawled.
Cockroaches, locusts, scarab beetles, flies: a towering mass of bodies filled all the near end of the hall. Cluttering, feelers waving, chitinous wings rasping; the insects crawled on a mountainous bulk that heaved although still.
The White Crow caught a glimpse of blackness under the mass, began to make out shapes. The circular rim of a great nostril, crusted with the bodies of locusts. Higher up the shapes of scales, cockroaches crawling under the rims. Tendrils of darkness sweeping back to where, through chitinous crawling bodies, an eye opens, disclosing a darkness greater than the Night Sun.
One-handed, she sheathed the rapier and beckoned the others to leave the cell.
He filled the whole space of the hall, so that she could hardly take in more than rising shoulders, basalt-feathered wings, tusked and toothed muzzle furred with insects. Cockroaches, locusts, black beetles; carrion-flies and scarabs; they clung, flew up a few inches, and fell to crawl again in worship over the body of The Spagyrus.
Dizzy with expense of power and sick with the receding tide of pain, the White Crow walked drunkenly across the flagstones until she stood before the Decan. A cockchafer burred past her face. Her head jerked back.
She held up her blood-stained and black-pitted left hand, and knelt to touch one knee to the stone floor.
"Divine One, Lord of the Elements, you healed him through me. I thank you for it."
The shining basalt eyes closed.
The great body sprawled the length of the hall, flank up against curtain-tracery walls, head rising twenty-five feet into the air. Roses covered the massive paws and shoulders, clustered on the joint of a wing.
White light shone on living black basalt.
Clear now, unshadowed, she traced every lineament. Crusted nostrils, thick with hair and flies, in an upper muzzle that overhung the lower jaw by ten feet. Jutting tusks above the nostrils. Teeth spiking up from the lower jaw, digging into scaled cheeks; flowing tendrils around the head and tiny naked ears.
The White Crow got awkwardly to her feet. She heard someone kick glass as Candia, Heurodis and the Bishop came to stand beside her. The great eyes remained closed.
"Now . . ." She tapped her closed right fist against her mouth. "What do we do now?"
"What we do now is . . ." Candia stepped forward, shaking out the stained lace of his cuffs, tugging his loose shirt into order. "We play cards."
"Wh
at?"
The blond man held out a filthy hand to Heurodis. The white-haired woman felt in the pocket of her blue cotton dress and brought out a thick pack of cards. Candia grinned, boyish, and she tutted.
"Tarot cards." Elegant, faintly comic, he stripped off the binding ribbon and held the pack up one-handed, cards fanned into a circle. The White Crow gazed at images stained-glass brilliant against the white walls and the wreckage, against the million insects crawling, worshiping, on the living stone skin of The Spagyrus.
"You’re out of your mind, Messire Candia," the White Crow remarked quite cheerfully. "You know that, don’t you?"
He ignored her, scooping the cards into a pack again. Automatically his feet took him a few paces one way, a few paces the other; glancing up at the silent Decan as he spoke.
"Divine One, you’ll remember me. My name is Candia. Reverend tutor, University of Crime. Now, my talent is the use of the tarot pack. Four suits: Swords, Grails, Sceptres, Stones. Thirty trumps. Watch."
The White Crow craned her neck to look up at the god-daemon’s face. Briars and black roses tangled in the scaled and tendriled head, coiled to ring a forearm; rustling with the living garment of worshiping insects. The basalt eyes remained closed.
The blond man gave Heurodis his hand as the small woman seated herself limberly cross-legged on the flagstones. Theodoret stood behind her. Candia very carefully lowered himself to sit opposite. His long-fingered and dirty hands shuffled the pack.
Bemused, the White Crow moved to look over his shoulder.
"A reading of all eighty-six cards," he announced. His fingers quickened, the pasteboard images flashing past. "To determine the immediate and near future. My own method. Now."
The man laid out three cards swiftly, slapping them face-down on the stone floor. Another three, then five grouped in a diamond with one in the center. He paused. More sets of three, five and six.
"Hey!" She grabbed at his wrist, missing it.
The strong thin fingers dealt two more cards off the bottom of the pack as she watched. Candia glanced up through flopping hair, eyes bright. He indicated the backs of eighty-six cards with a careless gesture.
"Broadest reading, three cards in the Sign of the Archer. What have we got?"
Heurodis leaned forward, grunting, and turned over the three cards. The White Crow saw a castle struck by lightning, The House of Destruction, the knot of a shroud, Plague, and a skull with blue periwinkle flowers set into the eyes, Death.
"I think . . ." Candia’s hand hovered over the cards. "Probably not."
He grinned at the White Crow, replacing the three cards face-down and then reaching out to them again. He paused, hand in mid-air, and gestured to her. "You."
She knelt cautiously and turned the three cards. The first, in bright colors, showed two children playing at noon in a garden, The Sun. The second, a man and a woman embracing, The Lovers. On the third, a hermaphrodite dancing among balanced alchemical symbols, The World.
"You can’t do that!" Wide-eyed, she stared; aware of the distraction but not of when it had occurred.
Heurodis gave a long-toothed smile.
"I don’t mean it won’t work if you do, I mean that you can’t do it!"
Candia fell to shuffling some of the lower cards, keeping The Sun, The Lovers and The World at the top of the reading. The White Crow stared intently, drew a deep breath and tried again.
"You can’t sharp these cards. It isn’t possible. They’re constrained by the future. All the tarot’s links are with what’s going to happen; you can’t cheat what’s Fated!"
Fair hair fell across his eyes as he looked up. Practiced, he shook back the lace cuffs from his wrists; a deliberate staginess in his gestures.
"Readings influence what will come, as well as being influenced by it."
The White Crow stood, rubbing her calf muscle with her right hand. The humming of insects made her dizzy. An incredulous laugh bubbled up. She stifled it.
"You’re telling me the University of Crime can sharp tarot cards?"
Heurodis said: "Not often, girlie. But when we need to we can."
Candia turned over a Ten of Grails, Three of Scepters and The House of Destruction in the position of the Sign of the Wilderness. He lifted his gaze to meet the White Crow’s, one brow raised; and when she glanced down it was to see the Ten of Grails, Ace of Scepters and Fidelity.
"Damn you, you just might exercise some influence. Here. You just might. Are you a good cheat, Messire Candia?"
"The best."
A breath reached her: saline, musky. Black basalt eyes opened, twenty-five feet above her head. The great lips moved apart, and she stared up at a cockroach picking its way across the living basalt of the Decan’s skin.
"Bait for a healer . . . which of my ten million souls here in the heart of the world, think you, is fated now truly to die? Can you tell, little magus? I tell you: they are already grievous sick. "
Insects buzzed. The White Crow gazed up at empty vaulting over the Decan’s head.
"I don’t think to outwit omnipotency, Divine One. That would be stupid."
"My sister of the Ten Degrees of High Summer gave you a certain hour. You have not used it well."
She grinned up at the Decan: a rictus of pain, fear and defiance. She held up her left hand. The wound in its palm gaped, raw but not bleeding. Her fingers, red and swollen, bore pin-prick marks from the briars of black roses.
"All the same, aren’t you? All Thirty-Six. The hour isn’t over yet."
"WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME . . . !"
Echoes shuddered. Quietly, beside her, the Bishop of the Trees said: "He’s sick. His Sign is occluded."
He reached down to his side, more firmly knotting the sleeves of the buff-and-scarlet doublet around his hips. He wore the makeshift covering with an old man’s slow dignity. A faint green light began to gather about his fingers.
"No. I agree. But even so . . ." The White Crow shook her head warningly. "This is the crucial hour. Plague outside, sickness in the Fane; and somewhere, somewhere . . ."
Great lips breathed carrion on the air.
"They are far from here, and sick, and soon to die. Both the death of the body, and the death of a soul. "
The White Crow cocked a jaundiced eye at the insect- ridden slopes of flank and shoulder rising, mountainous, before her.
"Yes? And will they die of the . . . same . . . sickness . . . ?"
She stopped. Her left hand burned, the pain connecting her to the substance of the Fane and the magia acted within it; and slowly, aloud, she followed the connection.
"You’re the heart and center of it," the White Crow said. "The truly dead, the plague, the death of souls, and the magia of necromancy. All of it begins here. Tell me, I know! I feel your power through the stone, I’ve spilled my blood here, I’ve healed a man with pain and your power channeled through me, and I know!"
She stopped to draw breath, grinning through tears that poured without volition down her face.
"One plague. Here and outside. One plague. Black alchemy . . . Oh, they will die of the same sickness, won’t they! It doesn’t have to be a human death, or the death of a Rat-Lord. Why didn’t I think of it! What death would really uncreate the world? One of the Thirty- Six!"
Crowned with roses, worshiped by carrion-flies, his Sign occluded by his power still immanent in the Fane about her, the Decan of Noon and Midnight smiles.
"The most ancient question," Theodoret murmured at her ear. "Can the omnipotent gods unmake themselves?"
She ignored him. Theodoret stepped back to where Candia and the white-haired woman bent over the spread of cards, their intensity of concentration aware but not admitting influence of even the Lord of Noon and Midnight.
"I will let them play, little magus, until my Sign is past its occlusion. I will even let your bait keep his life, for as long as is left to him."
Insect-clouds swarmed as the great body shifted, one hind claw rasping at his basalt ribs. The great
eyelids slid down, up; darkness glimmering in the depths of the eyes. The voice dropped to quietness.
"We are not all of us alike: the Thirty-Six. We should not all hold equal powers. 1 give you a secret, little magus. When the Great Circle flies in pieces, then one of us will re-create it. And there will be not Thirty-Six but One alone. "
Carrion-breath stung her eyes. The rose-light smoldering in the masonry flared: all the debris and pillars and stones white as skin with blood beating a swift pulse under it.
"I give you that secret, little Valentine. Tell whom you will. And what can you do, now that you know?"
The White Crow looked down at one whole and one injured hand.
"If you’re not afraid, Divine One, why stop me?"
"Child of flesh, you speak of fear?"
The White Crow laughed, water running from the corners of her eyes. She reached up with her right hand as if she would touch the Decan of Noon and Midnight.
"Give me my chance, then," she challenged. "What can it matter to you, you who know all, see all, are all? Give me the strength to search, and see if I find you out!"
Candia scratched at his overgrown blond beard and muttered: "Shit!"
"Oh, I know." The White Crow spoke to him without turning away from the Decan. "The most unwise thing, to challenge God—"
Pain stabbed her fingers.
She brought her hands up in front of her face, trying to clench them against the fire burning under the skin. Her white nails shone–shone and lengthened, splitting. Whiteness ran back over her hands and wrists and forearms.
"Wh- whaa—?"
Faint down feathered the backs of her hands. She raised them closer to her face, knocking them against some obstruction. Her head twisting, she seemed to knock her nose against her hands: a nose that lengthened, darkened, pulled up her teeth into its growth as her mouth shrank . . .
The Spagyrus’ laughter shook dust from the high vaulting of the Fane.
Stepping back, stumbling, she fell. As she fell, her body collapsed into itself, folding impossibly. Her feet still flat on the stone, she seemed to be crouching only a few inches above the floor.