Rats and Gargoyles

by Mary Gentle

  Warmth struck. Lucas glanced up to see heating-pipes running along the vaulted arches of the Long Gallery; stopped, his breathing suddenly shallow.

  Machines towered to either side. A narrow space ran down the center of the hall, diminishing into distance all of a quarter of a mile away. Bars of light-shadow fell from clerestory windows to a polished parquet floor. Lucas held up the five-branched candelabrum. The smell of hot wax dizzied him.

  "Analytical engines!"

  He strode forward, barefoot, the candles held high, sword and sword-belt clashing at his hip. His kerchief, knotted about his dirty neck, tangled with carved stone talismans hanging on chains.

  Ranked to either side, cogs and shafts gleaming with darkness where the Night Sun’s light shafted in, the great analytical engines rose twice his height and more. He walked staring at banks of dials, levers, ornamented iron handles; moved a step closer and held up the candles to peer at the interlocking network of large and small cogwheels, springs, iron shafts and notched gearwheels.

  A small iron plate shone, dye-stamped with a factory’s mark. White Mountains: Candover.

  Hot wax spattered his hand.

  He winced and set the candelabrum down, absently peeling the white discs of cooling wax from his skin. They left clean marks. He unknotted his red kerchief and wiped his hands and arms, conscious of dust, oil, bloody scratches; wiped his face. He smiled wryly, scratching through his hair, now grown long enough to catch in the chains of the talismans hung about his neck.

  "Gerima would call me a base mechanic. And Uncle Andaluz—!"

  He turned, decisive, and strode back across the floor to the Reverend tutors. Shamar waved his arms excitedly; Pharamond rubbed at his clipped beard, and gestured for quiet; Reverend Mistress Regis tucked her blond-red hair back behind her ears and glared severely at Lucas.

  "I suggest we send this young man back to the Arche- master with a message of some description. His class- record is not such that I think we’ll find him useful in an emergency. You know how irresponsible these outland princes are."

  Heat touched his ears and cheeks. Lucas pressed on doggedly. "The message said, cheat mathesis—"

  Pharamond put his hands behind his back.

  "There are certain numbers that control the Form of the world. The formulae of force, attraction, gravitation, celestial and terrestial mechanics. These the Decans number and keep in existence. As well as those formulae that create the shapes and souls of men and beasts; formulae written deep in our cells—"

  "Oh, if we could cheat, yes!" Shamar interrupted the easy fluency of the lecture hall. His dark eyes glowed as he looked at the ranked analytical machines.

  Lucas frowned. "I don’t understand—"

  "Why should you think you could understand?" Regis snapped. "You’re a first-year student, and a mostly absent one at that."

  Shamar chuckled. A lightening of the tension went through the group. Lucas, for that reason, bit back a protest.

  Regis added kindly: "You wouldn’t understand. And this is an emergency."

  Light caught in the corners of Lucas’s eyes, blurring his vision with silver and blue. The levers and gearwheels of the analytical engines stood out black against the windows.

  "I study to be wise, but I’m not ignorant to begin with!"

  He drew himself up; all the bearing of Candover’s princes coming back to him now: one hand resting on the hilt of his sword, his shoulders straight as he stared at the six or eight tutors of the University of Crime.

  "Do you know who I am? The Emperor of the East and the Emperor of the West meet at my father’s court! Do you think his wisest tutors failed to teach me how it is mathesis that holds the Great Wheel of the heavens in place? It’s our serfs in Candover that build these mathematical engines! Now I’ll tell you something."

  Regis’s freckles stood out darkly. She opened her mouth.

  "A magus told me," Lucas said. "A woman who isn’t sitting here safe in the university! Do you know where she is, now, this minute? She’s inside the Fane . . ."

  He shook his head. "Sorry. None of us is safe. But I’ll tell you this. Yes, you can get these machines producing the Form-numbers of all things–stars, stones, roses, bricks, butterflies. You can run the formulae. What good will it do us? The White Crow told me what a Decan told her. All these formulae are going to be uncreated, finally, and for good. Now."

  Breath caught in his throat.

  The scent of candlewax drenched the air. Muffled by glass, the shrieks of acolytes echoed across the university’s courtyards. The silence in the hall pressed on his ears. Anger drained out of him; the last of court training reasserting itself.

  "I apologize, masters. I am hindering you; I crave your pardon. Excuse me."

  He bowed shortly. "What shall I tell Lord Casaubon when he asks why you don’t act?"

  Pharamond glanced away from the group of tutors: the elderly Reverend Mistress buttonholing Shamar, haranguing him; Regis stabbing a finger at both as she interrupted; four or five others clustered down the gallery by the ranked handles of the analytical engines.

  The bearded man touched the handle nearest to him, cranking it thoughtfully. Cogs shifted; numbers rolled in the dial. "Tell him we don’t, imprimis, have the manpower—"

  Lucas grinned. Air bubbled in his chest; he suddenly seized the smaller man by the shoulders.

  "You do," he said. "You do! Just wait!"

  "Prince—"

  "Believe me, you do!"

  He hit the door-jamb with his shoulder, racing out into the hall; feet hitting every third step down the great polished flight of stairs. Black light shone in from perpendicular windows; a scent of burning crept in through the creaking joins of the leaded glass. Lucas skidded across polished marble tiles and hit double-doors with both hands extended.

  A burst of voices quietened; he gazed out at alarmed faces in Big Hall.

  "Rafi!"

  "What in hell is happening?" Rafi of Adocentyn demanded. He rapidly strode towards Lucas, who shut the door behind him and seized his arm.

  "Get up to Long Gallery."

  "Oh, what? What are you on about, Candover?"

  Lucas grabbed a chair from the nearest desk, climbed on it, yelled across the heads of the assembled students. The noise-level fell a little: fifty or sixty heads turning.

  "Listen! Get yourselves up to the Long Gallery. Do it now. You’re going to be running the analytical engines. If we do it right, we’ve got a chance of clearing up this mess!"

  A flurry in one corner of Big Hall: the Proctor shoved into a corner and shouted down. Almost all faces turned towards Lucas. Students he recognized shouted questions, others yelled. As if by unspoken consent they began moving closer.

  "I haven’t got time to explain; it doesn’t matter if you don’t know what you’re doing—"

  "Nor you, Prince?" one voice yelled. Lucas laughed.

  "Nor me, neither. Listen. There’s a dozen Reverend tutors up in Long Gallery and they’re wetting themselves because they can’t run the machines on their own. Now, I’m going back up there. Come with me if you want. If you don’t, then sod you!"

  He kicked the chair aside as he leaped down; it skittered across the doorway. He ran out ahead of the crowd, Rafi of Adocentyn the only one close enough to catch up as he sprinted back up the stairs.

  "Candover, what the fuck are you doing?"

  Lucas’s steps slowed. He heard feet pounding the stairs behind, and glanced back to see the Night Sun glint from fair and dark hair, students running, yelling, laughing with the relief of action. Caught up in action, only a few spared a glance for the world outside the windows.

  "I don’t know." Lucas, dizzy with shouting, grinned at Rafi’s narrow puzzled face. "I don’t know. I’m trusting these idiots who teach us to know what they’re doing. I’m trusting White Crow when she says Lord Casaubon knows what he’s doing."

  The dark young man frowned. "Those two that were at Carver Street? Gods, Lucas! You’re crazy."r />
  Lucas grabbed the back of Rafi’s neck, turning the young man to look across the top of the stairwell and out of a window that overlooked the heart of the world. "Go outside and then tell me I’m crazy!"

  He swung the doors of the Long Gallery open, holding back the heavy oak. Rafi frowned, strode through. A girl followed, two more; a fair-haired Katayan; then a rabble of a dozen, then more. He stared at their excited shouting faces, searching for something, some conception of what had occurred outside the university in this hour of the Night Sun.

  "I suppose," Pharamond’s voice came from behind Lucas, "that they don’t have to know what they’re doing here to do it. You, Hilaire, walk! Shamar, get them sorted out, will you?"

  Shamar raised his hand. The warm light gallery flooded with voices, with students who ran, shouting to each other; the Reverend tutor directing each to set a dial or crank a handle.

  "Lucas, listen." Pharamond sighed, resting his arm up against the door-jamb. "Go and tell your Archemaster we’ll do what we can, but probably it’s not much. Yes, now we can run the numbers. But we can’t cheat to prevent the discreation."

  Lucas froze. Half-suspecting, half-speculating, he looked across at the tutor. "What would you have to do, for that?"

  "Pattern compels," Reverend Master Pharamond said. "As above, so below. But the influence runs both ways. Our ciphering of the numbers of the cosmos is compelled by the divine numbering of the Decans, yes. But if we could cheat, and make Their numbering dependent on our results, here?"

  Lucas stared.

  "We don’t do it often, boy, but when we need to we can–usually. We cheat with our results, and that cheats the world to comply with us."

  The dark Reverend Master, Shamar, approached the door and paused as he came up with them. "Pharamond, we’ve always said we could do it, but could we? Really?"

  "Not without the mechanical skills!" Pharamond nodded his head sharply at the ranked lines of levers.

  "Mechanical skills." Lucas paused, breath tight in his throat.

  "We’d have to gear the machines for the results we want, not the results it’ll give us now, considering what’s going on out there in the city. But . . ." Pharamond shrugged. "The faculty’s mechanics aren’t resident in the university."

  "Where will we find them?"

  Regis’s deep laughter echoed back from the Long Gallery. "Find them? Find them? In that chaos out there?"

  "She’s right," the bearded man said. "She’s right."

  Lucas reached out and rested his dirty hand against the stamped plate of Candover on the nearest engine. A quietness had fallen in the Long Gallery, most of the young men and women over the immediate excitement of their arrival. He heard their voices, saw how they watched him speaking with the Reverend tutors.

  "I–it wouldn’t be any use–well, it might—"

  Regis snorted. Pharamond held up a hand, arresting what she might have said; moved it to tap Shamar’s shoulder for the dark man’s attention.

  Heat colored his face; Lucas shifted his feet, stared at the floor.

  "I don’t want my father ever to know this! That I’ve been mixing with serfs, or with the trade of thaumatur-gike, or—The truth of it is, I know how these machines are put together. I think the Lord Casaubon must know that: we’ve talked. I used to . . . to sneak away and spend a lot of time in the workshops."

  The silence bit into him like acid. Somewhere down the hall, a richly amused voice that sounded like the Prince of Adocentyn said: " ‘Trade’!"

  Raising his head, and with an odd dignity that belonged neither to the past nor to Candover, Lucas said: "Master Pharamond, I can probably get these machines to do whatever you want them to. I was in the workshops when the Mark Four was being designed. But if you don’t have any other mechanics here, and there’s only me—"

  Voices shattered the quiet hall: Regis protesting, Shamar protesting, and the bearded Reverend Master’s voice drowning them both out: "Yes! We’ll do it! We can argue afterwards if it was worthwhile, if there is an afterwards. Masters, we stand in such a place that any help we give is worthwhile. Regis love, go and get the students organized–Shamar, you, too. Good!"

  He swung round, speaking over the clatter as they ran down the Gallery: "Candover. Tools down there; if you need anything, ask for it. Take a look, then I’ll tell you what you’ve got to do."

  "Yes . . ."

  Lucas, Prince of Candover, unbuckled his sword and hung it by the belt on the back of the door. He walked across to squat, sit and finally slide himself down into the concrete sump under the first engine.

  He picked up and adjusted a wrench, fingers black with oil; paused, looking up through the interlocking rods and gears.

  "If this happens to help you, it’s more than I have a right to ask." Prayer not seeming relevant now, he contented himself with breathing her names: "White Crow. Valentine."

  Loud footsteps clattered down the hall, each student going to set a dial or heave on a lever; shouting, voices edged half with fear and half with a wild excitement. Returning, Pharamond’s voice vibrated with the same emotion: "Do exactly what I tell you."

  Lucas, listening, reached up with the wrench to adjust the first gear.

  Footsteps pounded past. Out among the debris and rubble of Fourteenth District’s square, the last unwary Rats ran towards barricaded doors and tunnel-entrances. The undercarriage of the siege-engine shook deafeningly: liquid fire hissed up into the air.

  "Ei, you!"

  A torn edge of blue and yellow satin whisked past the Lord Architect Casaubon’s vision. A sharp and very solid finger poked him in the rump.

  "Where’s my bloody rent, you oversized fraud?"

  Casaubon, straightening, clipped one ear-lobe painfully against the underside of the engine as his heel skidded in leaked oil. He grunted, backing out without turning until he could stand up.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  A woman of perhaps forty folded her arms under her ample bodice. Yellow coils of hair fell across her ripped satin dress. Oblivious of the now-deserted New Temple site, the other buildings’ neo-classical doors barricaded with torn-up marble paving-slabs, ignoring the Guards up on the siege-engine platform, and the broken windows from which musket-muzzles jutted, Evelian stared up at the Lord-Architect with glassy determination.

  "You heard me! You owe me a month’s back rent! Where is it?"

  "I–that is–unavoidably absent—"

  Casaubon picked up his blue satin frock-coat, drawing it on over his filthy shirt. He drew himself up to his full six foot five, looked down over his swelling chest and belly, and shrugged magnificently. He spoke over the thunder of approaching wings.

  "Mistress Evelian, I was, and am, busy. Now, if you don’t mind—"

  "That brat Lucas landed you on me, but the university’s never heard of you; they won’t pay me! If I can’t get coin from them, I intend bartering those crates you left behind for whatever I can get for them!"

  Casaubon absently retrieved a half-eaten lamb chop from an inner pocket, and paused in the act of biting into it.

  "Are you mad? Absolutely not."

  "Calling yourself a Lord-Architect; I don’t believe that for a minute."

  "Aw, Mother!"

  A straggle-haired fifteen-year-old ran around from the other side of the siege-engine. She glanced up once at the brown Rats loading Greek fire into the ballista. A torn yellow-and-white sash had been tied over her plasterer’s silk overalls.

  "Get down!" She pushed the older blonde woman towards the side of the engine, her face upturned to the Night Sun.

  "Don’t interrupt, Sharlevian."

  The Lord-Architect Casaubon wiped grease off his chin with the back of his hand, smearing machine oil across his fair skin. He replaced the half-eaten chop in a deep outer pocket of his coat. "Get under cover somewhere, rot you! I don’t have time for this pox-damned nonsense!"

  "Wanna go home," the blonde girl said pugnaciously.

  Evelian put her fists on he
r hips. "I’m going nowhere until I get this account settled!"

  "Ah." A new, male voice cut in. "Messire, do you have any authority here? Can you tell me who does? I wish to register the strongest-possible complaint—"

  A thunk! and hiss from the ballista drowned his words. The Lord-Architect nestled his chin into three several layers of fat, looking down at a middle-aged, rotund and sweating man. A verdigrised chain hung about the man’s neck.

  "Tannakin Spatchet. Mayor of Nineteenth District east quarter."

  The Lord-Architect Casaubon rested his weight back on his right heel, planted his ham-fist on his hip, and raised his chin. He surveyed the woman, the girl and the middle-aged man; let his gaze travel past them to the battered facades of buildings surrounding the square, and the azure sky dark with acolytes and the Night Sun.

  "A lesser man would be confused by this," he rumbled plaintively.

  "My rent—"

  "We can’t stand out here in the open—!"

  "Severe damage to life and p-property—"

  The Lord-Architect, ignoring the man’s stutter, reached down with plump delicate fingers. A dark glint shone among the links of the Mayor’s chain. He lifted a carved stone hanging on a separate chain.

  "You hired a Scholar-Soldier! Damn me if that isn’t Valentine’s work."

  Tannakin Spatchet frowned, bemused.

  "White Crow." Seeing him nod, Casaubon let the talisman fall back. Another glyptic pendant rested in the division of Evelian’s breasts; and a third, the chain lapping round several times, hung from Sharlevian’s left wrist.

  A crackle of musket-fire echoed from the engine- platform above their heads. Casaubon winced. Clouds of dust skirred up.

  The Lord-Architect rubbed his stinging eyes, swore; grabbed Evelian’s elbow and pulled her into the shelter of his bolster-arm as a daemon tail, a bristling thick cable, whiplashed down and cracked across the marble paving.

  Stone chippings spanged off the side of the siege-engine.

  Evelian glared. "My—"