Rats and Gargoyles

by Mary Gentle

  The rapier blade scraped a rib as he withdrew it, bracing his clawed foot against her shoulder.

  Light tore. In the whiteness of the bones of the truly dead, a rip appeared.

  Tumblers click, numbers roll.

  In the university building Lucas scrambles from under the meshing gears of an analytical engine. There is no noise, no smoking oil, no ripping metal. Only an intolerable strain that holds the fabric of the air taut, taut.

  Away across the heart of the world, a makeshift lath- and-plaster model of a building glows, moon-bright. A fifteen-year-old girl on her knees beside it, ear-rings jangling, breaks into tears at something she cannot explain: perhaps simply the extravagant order and complexity of its proportions.

  Enamel-imaged dice, scattered and chipped, lie among the discarded Thirty Trionfi cards, in a hollow of whiteness where a man and an old woman fall, fall endlessly.

  Breaking strain. As if in the weak forces that glue the universe together, some sudden slippage could be felt. Strings pulling apart, order losing its probability.

  Plessiez staggered back, sitting down on the bottom step of the nearest flight of stairs.

  Blood pooled from the rapier’s point to the earth. He sat staring at it, how it glistened in the white light. His chest heaved. He brushed his wrist across his mouth, touched matted fur; touched it again and took his hand away.

  One cut ripped his lip, just over the left incisor. He tasted blood, not knowing until he felt the slick matted fur on his right haunch that she had wounded him twice. Numbness began to fill the cavern, hiding the pain. Feeling the weakness of her deep wound, he with shaking fingers unbuckled his sword-belt and rebelted it tightly around his haunch as a tourniquet.

  "Well, now . . ."

  His voice, even at a whisper, sounded loud as gunfire in a cathedral. He wiped the rapier, fumbling it; leaned the point on the graveled earth and pushed himself upright.

  With a sharp snap, the blade broke.

  The black Rat staggered. His naked bristling tail whipped out for balance. He stood, eyes half-shut, peering at the clouded air before his face. The white light leached color from the fallen bones, from the great catafalque and the ossuary cavern itself. He gazed up at the dark tunnel-entrance to which the stairs led.

  Plessiez looked back.

  The great Wheel falters, loosens and forgets the unheard cadences of the Dance of all things; particles of earth and stone and bone dissolve upon air.

  He let the broken sword fall.

  One hand clenched hard enough to drive rings into his flesh.

  Not a light, but a leaching-away of substance.

  The earth beneath his numb feet not lost in brilliance, but dissolving into air, and air itself dissolving into nothingness . . .

  Plessiez squatted down awkwardly, one arm resting across his unwounded knee, staring at the bones.

  Moments ticked past, marked by the slow spreading of blood from the murdered woman. A tension thrummed deep in the stone. On the edge of audibility, Plessiez sensed the loosing of bonds in the heart of the earth. The bones and their red ribbon imprisoned his gaze, nested in the warm whiteness of oblivion.

  He spoke softly.

  "Now we are the same, you and I . . . Myself stripped gradually and willingly of all I’ve earned: cardinal’s rank, priesthood, power, and friends and skills. And you stripping the heart of the world until nothing remains. True death. Your portent in the sky: the Night Sun–there by a god’s conjuring, and mine. Well, we are the same."

  He lifted his snout, looking up at one of the stairs and exits.

  "No matter how fast, I would be very close, still, when it happens. So where is the point of running?"

  One translucent ear twitched. He heard no sound of Charnay, lost in the ossuary labyrinth; and the rattle in the dead woman’s throat would not be repeated.

  "Believe that I did not know you would be like this– but, then, one is seldom sure of outcomes, dealing in matters pertaining to the Divine. Does The Spagyrus regret you, I wonder?"

  Above his head, the stone roof of the cavern creaked.

  "And I am like you in this: I admit of no possibility of victory. Even though I think I perceive–I think–a method towards it. But you could not expect it of me."

  Talking to the bones as if they were his mirror image, the black Rat slid down to sit on the gravel: the nearer stones leached of color and substance.

  "Well, and if it were fire I might manage that, and if it were flesh and blood there’s her " One slender dark finger pointed to the corpse of the Hyena. "But hardly of use, I fear, with the life departed from it. Death’s no cure for entropy."

  A large chunk of stone dislodged itself from the roof and fell, cracking the corner from the catafalque of the Rat-Kings. Part of a carved rose rattled down the steps. The smell of blood and ordure began to lessen, and even the chill in the air became mild.

  "But—" The black Rat argued obsessively, leaning forward. "You could not expect it of me. Even if I willed it, even if I saw nothing else to be done, even if–and it is possible, oh, I grant you it is possible–I desired it, well, still the flesh would not let me. That has its own desire for survival."

  He lay down now, on his side, tail coiled up to his flank, and one arm cradling his head. His black eyes glowed. With his free hand he reached out, testing the limits of absolute numbness near the bones: the milk- white bones glowing in brilliance.

  Expecting a pulse of tension, it brought fear hot into his throat to feel, through fingertips, the sensation of fracturing thin ice, of falling suddenly from the step that is not there—

  The knowledge of how short a time before the world split and rolled up like cloth burned in him. His eyes half-closed. White light split into rainbows.

  "Well," he said.

  Plessiez, ankh and priesthood discarded both, all conspiracies broken and bloody, lying on one elbow now, as if to read, or by the side of some lover, reached out and with a gentle touch took hold of the infinite whiteness of bone.

  The ceiling of the cavern cracked and fell.

  High above darkness, high above where the labyrinth in city streets gutters and dies; high above the straining wings of eagles, and soaring into the face of darkness, flies a moth with death’s-head markings on its wings.

  Airbreathed wings of dark fire reach out.

  The Night Sun’s blackness burns, a beacon. In the thin air, thinning with height of atmosphere, and with the loosening charges of electrons, the moth beats black- dusted wings furiously, rising, reaching up—

  A sparrow stalls in the air, snaps, crunches the moth’s soft body. Its gullet jerks twice, swallowing.

  The wind thins.

  Caught in dissolution, in air dissolving; the strangeness of matter that is its body fading, the bird begins to fall.

  And suddenly the sky is gold.

  "Messire!"

  Through rock that tumbled down, immense and slow, great boulders bounding and crushing heaps of bones, Lieutenant Charnay dodged and lumbered down the longest flight of steps, sword-rapier in hand.

  She ran across the floor of the ossuary cavern, moving fast, sparing one glance for the dead woman; heading for the slumped black figure before the catafalque. Shouting, voice lost in the roar of splintering rock.

  She flung herself to her knees beside Plessiez and turned him over.

  And stared into a face so changed she might never have recognized it if she had not, once, met his grandfather.

  His black fur was now faded gray; white about the jaw. His shrunken body moaned as she held it, light as sacking. Under his loose pelt, his ribs and collar-bone jutted in stark angles; slim fingers reduced to thin bony sticks.

  His head fell back. The flesh of his ears had turned translucently gray; and, as he blinked slowly, she took one look at his eyes–milky with cataracts–and turned her head aside to vomit.

  One of Plessiez’s age-withered hands grasped a skull’s lower jaw: brown and old and fragile. A coil of red ribbon rin
ged his wrist. All the nails of his hand were cracked, yellow, waxen.

  His other hand moved feebly. She dropped her sword and clasped it.

  "Plessiez, man."

  The black Rat, whiskers quivering, raised a hand that trembled. His head bobbed on his thin corded neck. He peered at her.

  "And I had always wagered"–his thin voice shook– "that I would not live to die old."

  A roar from above warned her. She had one second to look up at the falling rock, to see how many layers of the catacombs now fell in towards their foundations. Plessiez groaned. The brown Rat tightened her grip on his hand. She threw her body protectively across his, at the last reaching out for her sword.

  Stone soughs into dust.

  A weakness as of internal bleeding hamstrings her. The White Crow presses both fists into her stomach under the arch of her ribs. Body shaking with sudden cold, teeth grinding, she sits down hard in the alabaster whiteness.

  Maggots boil up like milk.

  Their soft bodies slide against her skin. Revolted, too weak to stand, she reaches out a hand to sketch a hieroglyph on the air. Her hand drops to her side, the powerless shape left unfinished.

  "He’s dying—"

  Waves of maggots belly up, silky and cool about her shins and ankles. The solidity of what stone remains under her begins to soften.

  Quietly, the White Crow laughs.

  "Theo, my lord, you did say ‘corrupted.’ The divine and demonic souls of the universe don’t decay into maggots when they die! Oh, he learned this of us."

  The absence that weakens her grows now, as if her heartblood leaks away through weakened aorta and ventricle at every pulse. At some deep level of cells, still resounding from the miracle of shape-changing, the White Crow shivers into dissolution.

  She shouts: "You didn’t have to do this! You’re a god; even these rules don’t bind you!"

  "He chooses that they do."

  Theodoret stands, Candia’s doublet still kilting his waist. Age-spotted skin gleams sallow in the growing intensity of light breaking down. His red lips part, he frowns; his head high, gray hair flowing.

  "Young woman, the Thirty-Six were fool enough to choose to exile the Church of the Trees and degrade their worshipers. I’ve suffered from that all my life. Don’t tell me about Divine capriciousness and stupidity!"

  She twists around on her knees, smearing the crawling maggots to a paste. Effort burns her lungs. As if the cells behind her eyes dissolve also, her vision whitens.

  "Ahhh—"

  Not her vision, it is the world that whitens. She perceives with preternatural clarity this last moment; her voice hissing in her ears like static: "He’s dead!"

  Weakness grows, pressing against her skin from inside. A void too large to contain. Her numb fingers no longer feel each other, nor her arms pressed to her sides; thighs drawn up tight to her belly and breasts.

  Her fingers, touching her flesh, feel the decaying voices of the Thirty-Six. Scholar-Soldier, student of magia, Master-Physician: she has the skill to hear their last cry, fading in the wake of dissolution—

  And something else.

  "Listen! Feel! Something’s happening."

  The old man looks sharply down at her. "What is it?"

  Far across the city that is called the heart of the world, echoes of destroyed magia vibrate. She, in the wasteland of ruined marble and maggots, points up at his hands. A faint luminescence clings to them, the color of green shadows and sunlight.

  * * *

  Above the city, the sky is suddenly gold.

  Dusty wings beating, the sparrow falls. In the bird’s bead-black eyes, reflected clearly, the Night Sun is overspotted with a leprous golden light.

  Flat as an illustrated manuscript, the sky over the heart of the world sears yellow as fever.

  Voices thundered in her head. Visions blurred her eyes. The smell of corruption choked her, sickly sweet. The White Crow retched, dry heaves that twisted her gut.

  "Don’t hesitate!" The White Crow lifted her head and shouted. "Now, my lord Bishop, now!"

  Wood-sunlight limned his bony fingers. The old man’s eyes narrowed, wincing. "He hurt me, hurt me unbelievably. I can’t find in me the charity to forgive him."

  Acerbic fear tugged her smile crooked. "You don’t forgive gods, Theo, my lord, the day for that isn’t in the calendar. And what can you expect from a Decan who’s had entirely too much contact with humans?"

  " ‘Too much’?"

  His beaked nose jutted as the corners of his mouth came up, deepening the folds of his skin. His brows contracted, and the skin around his eyes wrinkled. Sudden laughter spluttered in his voice.

  "What can I expect—?"

  She fell forward on both hands.

  The sweet smell changed.

  Her hands slid in the cool flesh of maggots, and it changed. On hands and knees she stared down. White rose-petals covered her hands, buried them to the wrists; she knelt on them. The thick heavy sweetness of roses breathed up from crushed flowers.

  She knelt up, head lowered, staring at the wave-front of whiteness traveling away from her among crumbled marble: the heaving bodies of grubs transmuting to flowers. She bent and pushed her hands forward into the mass.

  Thoms snagged her skin.

  Her skin, tanned, gold by contrast with these white petals and green spiked stems; her skin that smelt of sweat and dirt, now stitched across each arm with the dotted scars of rosethorns. A bead of blood swelled. She lifted her arm to her mouth and licked.

  "Oh, but what—?"

  She began to laugh.

  "Above, beneath: branch and root . . ."

  His voice from behind her resonated with a calm casual expectancy. She, magus, Master-Physician, echoed him joyously; feeding the power of the words into the world: "Above, beneath: branch and root—"

  "Pillar of the world . . ."

  A bramble coiled her ankle, the spikes too young and soft to do more than tickle. Roses fingered their way across her thighs where she sat; coiled up an arm; spread into the masses of her dark-red hair. She shook her head, white petals fluttering down, the corners of her eyes wet with laughter.

  "Oh, hey—"

  Ten yards away, he stood with his back to her. The old man, the Bishop; his hands folded calmly behind him, his chin a little raised. The wave-front of generation pulsed out from where he stood. "Leaf in bud: shelter and protection."

  "Light of the forest . . ."

  She stood up, naked, the white roses hanging heavy in her hair. A scent of them breathed on the suddenly blowing breeze. Heat fell down across her shoulders, unknot- ting the muscles there, relaxing her spine; so that she stood with her weight back on one heel and reached up with both arms, stretching up to light that glowed gold and green.

  Spikes pushed up through the drifts of white roses.

  She took one step forward and then another, unsteady on her feet; and twigs poked up, growing, sprouting into the air, knitting the air together about them–great clumps of blackthorn and may, elder and wild roses: sparkling with green shoots, pale in the light.

  "Protection of the branches that support the sky . . ." Saplings jutted from the earth around his feet. Brown twigs, one looped leaf spiking up from each.

  "Heart of the wood . . ."

  "Oldest of all, deepest of all—"

  Blackthorn grew, tough wood spearing higher than her head now. She felt how it knitted earth together within its roots, beneath the roses; how it knitted together, too, at microcosmic levels, binding energy, possibility, structure.

  "Rooted in the soul of earth—"

  "Who dies, not, but is disguised; who sleeps only."

  "Heart of the wood!"

  On the nearest branch a tiny leaf uncoiled, bright green beside the thom-spikes and white flower. So close that she crossed her eyes to focus on it, giggled and stepped back. Leaf and flower together, spidered now with flowering creeper, the horns of morning glory, columbine, old man’s beard, and ivy: green and white and
dappling the light with new shade.

  The White Crow spread her arms wide.

  She traced through her fingertips the divine and demonic in the structure.

  "Theodoret! Theo!"

  Heady: oxygen and excitement filled her lungs. The light of her inner vision blazed green and gold, filling her veins. Beech saplings sprouted from the earth all around her.

  She walked barefoot, wincing as a sharpness dug into the sole of her foot; stopping to balance and pull out a thorn, and on impulse kiss her finger and press it to the infinitesimal wound and smile, smile as if her face would never lose that expression.

  Warmth shone down.

  Warmth bloomed up from the earth beneath Theo- doret’s feet. Runners of ivy criss-crossed the ground, the leaves of other plants poking up between. And between one step and another the coiled heads of a myriad shoots unfurled, unwinding into flowers, and she walked knee- deep in bluebells with the old man.

  A dappled light shone on him, silvering and graying his hair by turns: a light of trees only yet potential.

  "You’re doing it!" Joy filled her; she shouted to the growing trees.

  "I can reach him, child–just."

  Wind creaked through the branches of trees grown tall, skittered over a ground clear of undergrowth in this newly mature wood.

  As far as she could see, the perspectives of the wood stretched. New leaves shimmered on trees, bluebells misted the distance. Far off, far away, in the heart of the wood . . .

  The White Crow let her arms fall to her sides. Aching, she stared; keeping the long sight down into the center as a part of her; hidden, dangerous, glorious.

  She turned.

  This way the trees were not so thick, and she glimpsed past them a light of rose and gold: swirling, granular, hot.