by Mary Gentle
"Rent, yes, I know," the Lord-Architect muttered testily. "Rot you, get up on the machine. All of you. Safer. Move!"
He caught Sharlevian by the scruff of her overalls and pushed; looked round for Spatchet and saw him already halfway up the ladder to the platform. Following mother and daughter, the Lord-Architect swung himself ponderously up the metal rungs.
"And stop that!" He batted one hand irritably towards the ballista. A brown Rat in Guard uniform yelled for a temporary cease-fire.
Above, the wings of acolytes cracked the air. Bristle-tails lashed down. The portico of a nearby house fragmented: stone splinters shrapneled. A balcony collapsed and spilled six Rats and two men down into the rubble of the square.
The Lord-Architect Casaubon pushed through the Guards to the back of the platform and knelt down. He folded back the deep cuffs of his satin coat, and scratched thoughtfully in the hair over his ear, peering down at the back axle.
Wheel-tracks and spilled oil marked their arrival, the tracks diminishing back down the avenue by which they had entered the square.
The Night Sun’s black light gleamed on the marble frontages of temples, palaces, banks and offices on the surrounding hills; glinting from the horizons of the city- scape, from the very top of the Fane-in-the-Twelfth-District.
His china-blue eyes vague for a moment, he touched a filthy hand to his mouth, frowning. His lips moved, framed a word that might have been a woman’s name. Inaudible in the roar of falling masonry, the shrieking and beat of wings.
"What are you doing?" Sharlevian demanded.
She collapsed into a sitting position beside him, silver- chain ear-rings dangling, narrow face pale. Remnants of yellow and white paint clung to her jaw and ears and hair-line. She clutched his arm, the bitten fingernails on her hand pulling threads from the satin.
"Hey!"
Casaubon’s free hand went to one of his pockets. He dug in it, brought out a roast chicken-wing, absently offering it to Sharlevian. She sat back, disgust on her face. The Lord-Architect shoved the chicken-wing back; dug again, and his hand emerged clutching the small sextant. Still kneeling, he sighted up at the Night Sun.
He beamed.
"At last," he said.
He prised his fat fingers under one of the iron plates on the platform, opening it up. The ends of two thickly plaited cables of bare copper wire shone in the Night Sun’s light. Wrapping each of his hands in the tails of his frock-coat, he carefully twisted the cables together and slammed the hatch shut.
Sparks leaped.
He sat back, grabbing Sharlevian’s shoulder. The girl fell against him. Heads turned at the searing actinic light.
For a split second it clung to the siege-engine: St. Elmo’s fire. Rat Guards cursed, swore, beating sparks from their uniforms. Mistress Evelian’s gaze abruptly focused: she seized the Mayor’s arm.
Searing blue-white light ran to the ground, to the spilled trail of oil staining the flagstones. Tiny blue flames licked up; then a thin rippling aurora-curtain of light. It sprang up from the spilled-oil trail, running powder-train swift back down the engine’s tracks, down the avenue away from the square.
Wildfire-fast, spreading, running, the aurora-curtain of blue light sped up towards the distant hills, cornered, curved, divided and divided again: a brilliant track across the streets the siege-engine had followed.
The Lord-Architect Casaubon grasped one of the ballista struts. It creaked as he pulled himself up, foot scrabbling for a hold, until he saw the hills surrounding the docks and the airfield, the great city stretching away to every compass-point to the horizon.
Far in the distance other light-curtains began to spring up, thin as the spilled trail of oils from other siege-engines.
The electric-blue aurora tracery wavered, rising into the air, hovered at roof-level here, grew taller further off, shorter in other Districts. The Lord-Architect raised one great fist, punched the air; seams straining and at last popping under the arm of his frock-coat.
"Aw, I don’t . . ." Sharlevian’s puzzlement trailed off.
The light-threads of the labyrinth threaded the city streets, spreading far, far out of sight, following the oil- trails from specially constructed cisterns in each engine. Out through avenues and streets and alleys to all thirty- six Districts and all hundred and eighty-one quarters; netting the city that is called the heart of the world in a bright maze.
Sharlevian, at his elbow, wiped her nose on the back of her hand and sniffed. "So you are an architect. They taught us the Chymicall Labyrinth in Masons’ Hall. We build that pattern into our homes sometimes. But what good is it?"
One fat finger raised, the Lord-Architect Casaubon paused. His head cocked sideways as if he listened for faint music. The black shadows of the Fane’s acolytes fell across him, across the square, thousand upon thousand.
Wheeling. Turning.
Thousands, tens of thousands wheeling and turning as one.
Unwilling, constrained, they wheeled in their flights: gliding on burning wings to fly the pattern of the labyrinth. And only the pattern of the labyrinth.
Casaubon lowered his hand. Breath touched his oil- stained cheek, a remembrance of the heat in the Garden of the Eleventh Hour: the roses, and the black extinct bees that fly the knot garden’s subtle geometries.
"Don’t they teach you apprentices anything in your pox-rotted Masons’ Halls?" he rumbled. "Patterns compel, structures compel. Will you look at that? Rot her, why can’t Valentine be with me to see this?"
The acolytes of the Fane flocked, falling to fly the pattern of the burning labyrinth. Great ribbed wings spread under the Night Sun, blistering with its heat; bristle-tails flicked the air. Beaks and jaws opened to cry, cry agony.
Sparing no glance from blind black eyes for human or for Rat-Lord; tearing no stone from stone; uprooting no roofs now. Only gliding upon hot thermals, rising and falling; flurried wings lashing and falling again to a glide, compelled by the maze-pattern drawn in city streets that now they gaze on. Sightless gaze and are trapped, under the black scorching sun.
Across the city that is called the heart of the world, the labyrinth burns.
Pain hollowed each air-filled bone.
Cold air pressed every planing pinion as the white crow wheeled again, rising to glide down vaulted hills. A bird’s side-set eyes reflected perpendicular arches, stone tracery, fan vaulting: a white desert of shaped stone.
"Crraaa-aak!"
Frosted air sleeked the feathers of her breast. She tilted aching wings, pain catching her in joints whose muscles still, at cell-level, remember being human. The scents of rotting hay, of weed left behind at equinoctial tides impinged sharply on her bird-senses.
"Craaa-akk-k!"
The white crow wheeled again and skimmed a long gallery. Age-polished stone flashed back her fragmented image, an albino hooded bird. She flew wearily from the gallery, wings beating deep strokes.
What use is it to search for the dying . . . ?
She lifted a wing-tip and soared. Pain flashed down nerve and sinew. She welcomed it. When her body no longer remembers that it was other and ceases to pain, she will have become what she is shaped to.
No one tell me that the Decan of Noon and Midnight has no sense of humor . . .
The internal voice seemed hers, forcing its way through avian synapses. Double images curved across the surface of her bright bird’s eyes: the great pillars of the Fane seeming spears, soon to tumble into confusion as after a battle. The air resisted her wings so that they beat slowly, slowly; Time itself slowing.
The great depths of the Fane opened around her. Masonry crumbling with age; floors worn down into hollows by aeons of divine tread. Lost ages built in stone: the Fanes that are one Fane, the inhabitation of god on earth. Built out as a tree grows, ring upon ring, hall and gallery and tower, nave and crypt and chapel. Growing, encrusting as a coral reef.
And as for what Rat-Lord and human empires rose and fell while this gallery was building, or what lo
vers and children died while these columns were cutting . . .
She stretched wide wings and lay herself on the air, letting it bear her; the voice in her head that is still Valentine and White Crow less frenetic now, slowing with the depths of millennia opening out.
They’re not idols, magia or oracles. They’re the Thirty- Six, the principles that structure the world. Why did we think we could go up against them? Why did we think that anything we did would not be what they ordained, even to the Uncreation?
"Craaaa-akk!"
She flew into the Fane of the Third Decan.
Into a hall in which cathedrals might have been lost, colors blotting her sight. Bright images burned in what should be perpendicular windows, but no light is needed to illuminate these shafts of color. To either side they shine, fiery as the hearts of suns, scarlets and blues and golds: depicting dunes, lizards, beasts of the desert; ragged stars, comets and constellations long pushed apart by Time.
Depths swung sickeningly below her wings as she dived. Her instincts human, flight is precarious. She cawed, hard and harsh, the sound recognizable as a bird’s copy of human speech.
"Xerefu! Akeru! Lord of Yesterday and Tomorrow!"
An ornate marble tomb towered in the center of the nave, gleaming white and gold and onyx-black. Her wings held the air as she curved in flight around the pomegranate-ornamented pillars, the scarabs cut into the great base and pedestal.
A great scorpion shape crowned the tomb, thrice the height of a church spire.
White stone articulated the carapace of the scorpion: its highcurving tail and sting, great moon-arced claws. The segmented body gleamed hollow. Chill air drifted between the joints of the shell, caressing angular legs, clustered eyes. A scent of old dust haunts the air.
"Xerefu! Akeru!"
Time frosted the stone exoskeleton beneath her wings, shimmering as if ice runs over the fabric that, after aeons of divine incarnation, is no longer stone.
"We do not fear. "
Air whispers between the carapace-joints. The jointed tail quivers, a point of light sparkling at the tip of the hollow sting.
"We do not fear, as you do. We may choose now to incarnate Ourselves in the celestial world and not here on earth. Or We may raze this world and begin again. The game does not weary Us. "
The white crow wheeled across the cliff-face of the image, time stretching as she skimmed the distance between moon-curved claw and claw. Her heart pounded more rapidly than a watch, ticking away her slight bird’s lifespan.
"Sick! Sick! You have! Plague here!"
Her travesty of human voice cawed, echoing from hollow shells. One serrated claw shifts. A shining globe-eye dulled as she flew past, and crumbling stone dust drifted down on the air.
"Xerefu! Akeru!"
The whispering air lies silent.
The hollow stone that incarnates the Decan of Beginnings and Endings, the Lord of the Night of Time, two-aspected and of two separate speeches, begins to crumble into fragments.
"Craa-akk-kk!"
Wing-tips beat down against unyielding air. The white crow folded wings to body and dived, feathers out-thrust to brake and sending her whirling into the passage and stairs to a crypt. Her wings clipped the corner of the wall. Falling stone misses her by a heartbeat.
Out of the crypt: now great rounded pillars rose up to either side of her. She flew on a level with their carved tops: human faces tall as ship’s masts, with lilies growing from their mouths and eye-sockets. The corded stone columns sheered down into the depths of the Fane below. She flew too hard and too high to see what lies there.
The white crow flew under ribbed vaults, and into the Fane of the Twenty-Sixth Decan.
A ledge reared up.
One wing-tip flicked up in shock; she skidded to land, claws scrabbling, on an ancient surface. The white crow folded her wings. She raised her head, jerking her beak from side to side, rawly disgusted at ridiculousness no human eye can see.
Hard as mountains under aeons of permafrost, the ledge chilled her.
"Chnoumen! Destroyer of Hearts!"
The ledge ran around the inside of a domed round hall, the color of old blood. Gold veined the red walls. Arched, huge; too vast even for echoes. Her bird’s vision brought her sight of black line paintings on the dull red: thirty-six images coloring the walls around the three- hundred-and-sixty-degree circle. Too distant for their subjects to be deciphered.
"Chnachoumen! Opener of Hundreds and Thousands of Years!"
The floor of this round hall, blood red and blood dark, ripples: stone becoming liquid. She tilted her head, staring down. The stink of rotting weed dizzied her. Under the surface of the water, dark shapes moved.
"You have no business here."
Translucent suddenly: glowing transparently scarlet as arterial blood, the interior sea ripples with white and gold light. Carved in planes of diamond, the coils of a great kraken fill up the pool. Tentacles curve, sinuous. The Decan of Judgments and Passing incarnate in adamant.
"Divine One!"
The white crow paces the ledge jerkily; cocking her head to one side to clearly see ahead. Scales shine on the beaked head of the kraken. But a dim film covers the golden eyes. She steels her voice to discipline.
"Divine One, if you created us you owe us something. You at least owe us the acknowledgment that we have universes inside us!"
The arterial scarlet of the inland sea lightened, becoming rose. The living diamond of the Decan’s limbs coiled into rose-petal patterns. Liquid tones hissed from the domed ceiling and walls, amused.
"Why else should We take on flesh, but that for flesh has such universes within it?"
Her harsh crow’s laughter lost itself in the spaces of immensity.
"To hurt? To be cold, to be hot? To bleed, kiss, fuck, shit? To eat? To love?"
"Child of flesh, We have loved Our creation, but nothing lasts, not even love."
Her clawed feet slipped. A flake of red stone crumbled from the ledge.
She flicked into flight without thought, skimming down to follow it: this substance that should not be subject to time and decay. Her pinions spread, the wide-fingered wings of a crow. From the red water, rose light shone up through her feathers.
Heat scalded.
The stench of a butcher’s shambles choked her. She flung herself up into suddenly blazing air, wings thrashing, blindly flying: one glimpse of water turned thickly bloody and the threshing of diamond limbs left imprinted double behind her eyes.
"Craa-akk!"
Gravity pulled her: not down, but onwards. The white crow spread her wings to their widest. The changing stone spun past below her feathered body. The names of Decans beat in the confines of her brain and blood: Chnoumen, Chnachoumen, Knat, Biou, Erou, Erebiou, Rhamanoor, Rheianoor . . .
A faint echo came down one high hall, a whisper caught out of time:
" ‘I also know how difficult it is to get thirty-six of anybody to agree on anything and act as one. ’ "
She cawed a crow’s harsh bitter laughter.
A wall reared up before her. Her wing-tips brushed an arch of brick. Small smooth ochre bricks; the ghost of sun’s warmth in their depth. The touch against her feathers froze her through to her hollowed bones.
Her feathered shadow skipped across a courtyard.
Black roses lay worm-eaten, tangled, dead in the Garden of the Eleventh Hour. The gravels of the knot garden lay smeared, patternless.
The crow’s wings flapped slowly, curving into a descent.
A brown blight covered the brickwork eaten away by lichen. Grubs gnawed the leaves of black roses. Tiny curled dots showed on the earth, black bees lying dead.
The sky above shone brown, yellow, the color of paper about to burst into flame.
"Divine One! Lady! Of the Eleventh Hour!"
The white crow wheeled, feathers cutting the air, gliding to land among ivy and lichen at the base of the great brick paw. The sand-bright sphinx bulked above her, mortar crumbling fr
om between ochre bricks: the Decan of the Eleventh Hour, of Ten Degrees of High Summer, the Lady of Shining Force.
A crow is a large bird, some eighteen inches from beak to tail, and unwieldy: she landed heavily in a skirr of feathers. She raised her head, double vision shining with the ivy-bitten forepaws and breasts and head of the god-daemon.
"Divine One, you see all. Know all. Are all. The Decan of Noon and Midnight sends me. To tell you the Great Circle of the world breaks now."
A sand-blast of heat breathes from Her curving lips.
"It is so."
"To tell you. If it can be re-created from chaos. There won’t be Thirty-Six, but One. I begin to see–why he wishes it. What other change–can omnipotence desire? What else could be impossible?"
The brick-curved linen draperies of Her head drift dust into the air. The lids of Her slanting eyes slide up. A gaze as pitiless as deserts impaled the crow.
"I am omnipotent, child of flesh, and I do not desire non-being. If I tire of this world, I will make more. If I tire of the cosmos, I will make things other than universes. It has been long and long that I have guided the Great Wheel, long and long that I have created and changed it; it shall be longer still before I weary of all that is and all that can be."
Gravel chilled her bird-claws. Silence shimmered in the Garden. The white crow strutted on the earth, making a movement of wings and body oddly like a human shrug. She stabbed a hard carrion-tearer’s beak at the air.
"He’s weary. The Spagyrus."
"Flesh corrupts him. We do not weary unless we choose. It is not beyond us to forget, when we weary. Each springtime is the first of the world. Each winter the ending of an aeon. We need not weary of it. "
"You can’t let him!"
The Decan’s head tilts, facing down to the earth; to the bird strutting among dead rose briars and the curled bodies of black bees. Aeons of deserts under noon fire and arctic cold burn in Her eyes, burn with the pain of fissure, dissolution, decay.
The white crow’s wings open slightly, on the verge of panic flight.