Rats and Gargoyles (2 page)

With the tip of a white bird’s feather, dipped into
the blood, she draws with rapid calligraphic strokes. She draws on the mirror
glass: on the reflected image of the moon’s sea-spotted face.

She draws, urgently, a message that will be
understood by those others who watch the moon with knowledge.

White sun fell into the great court, on to
sandstone walls as brown as old wax. Sweeping staircases went up at
cater-corners of the yard to the university’s interior, and Lucas thought of
eyes behind the glazed, sharply pointed windows, and straightened. He stood with
two dozen other cadets under the sun that would, by noon, be killing, and now
was a test of endurance.

"
My
name," said the bearded man pacing slowly along
the lines of young men and women, "is
Candia.
"

He spoke normally, but his voice carried to bounce
off the sandstone masonry walls. His hair was ragged blond, tied back with a
strip of scarlet cloth; he wore boots and loose buff-colored breeches, and a
jerkin slashed with scarlet. Lucas put him at thirty; upped the estimate when
the man passed him.

"Candia," the man repeated. Under the lank hair,
his face was pale and his eyes dark; he had an air of permanent injured
surprise. "I’m one of your tutors. You’ve each been invited to attend the
University of Crime; I don’t expect you to be stupid. Since you’ve been in the
university buildings for an hour, I don’t expect any one of you to have purses
left."

Candia paused, then pointed at three cadets in
rapid succession. "You, you and
you
–fall out. You’ve just told a
pickpocket where you keep your purse."

Lucas blinked.

"Right." The man put his fists on his hips. "How
many of you now don’t know whether you have your purses or not? Tell the truth .
. . Right. You four go and stand
with them.
You—
"

He pointed back without looking; Lucas found
himself targeted.

"–Lucas." Candia turned. "You’ve got your purse? And you know that without feeling for it, and
giving it away, like these sad cases? Tell me how."

Surprised at how naturally he could answer the
impertinent question, Lucas said: "Muscle-tension. It’s on a calf-strap."

"Good. Good." The blond man paused a calculated
moment, and added: "As long as, now, you change it." He barely waited for the
ripple of laughter; flicked his head so that hair and rag-band flopped back, and
spoke to them all.

"You’ll learn how to take a purse from a calf-strap
so that the owner
doesn’t
know it’s gone missing. You’ll learn about
marked cards, barred cater-trey dice, the mirror-trick, and the several ways of
stopping someone without quite killing them."

Candia’s gaze traveled along the rows of faces.
"You’ll learn to conjure with coins–get them, breed them, lend them out and
steal them back. There are no rules in the university. If you have anything
still your own at the end of the first term, then well done.
I
didn’t."

He allowed himself a brief, tailored grin; most of
the cadets grinned back.

"You’ll learn about scaling walls and breaking
windows, about tunnels and fire-powder, and when to bribe a magistrate and when
to stage a last-minute gallows-step confession.
If you live to learn, you’ll
learn it.
Now . . ."

Heat shimmered the air over the flagstones. Lucas
felt it beat up on his cheeks, dazzle his water-rimmed eyes. His new cotton
shirt was rubbing his neck raw, and when the shadow crossed him he was conscious
only of relief. He glanced up casually.

The blond man raised his head. Then he took his
hands from his hips, and went down on one knee on the hot stone, his head still
raised.

Lucas gazed upwards into the dazzling sky.

He glimpsed the lichen-covered brick chimneys,
wondered why a bole of black ivy was allowed to twine around one stack, followed
it up as it thickened–no, it should grow thicker
downwards,
towards the
root–and then saw the clawed feet gripping the chimney’s cope, where that tail
joined a body.

The sky ran like water, curdling a yellowish brown. Lucas felt flagstones crack against his knees as he
fell forward, and a coldness that was somehow thick began to force its way down
his throat. He gagged. The air rustled with dryness, potent and electric as the
swarming of locusts.

Wings cracked like ship’s sails, leathery brown
against the shadowed noon.

It clung to the brickwork, bristle-tail wrapped
firmly round the chimney-stack, wings half-unfolded and flicked out for balance.
The great haunches rose up to its shoulders as it crouched, and it brought the
peaks of great ribbed wings together at its flaking breast, and Lucas saw that
the bat-wings had fingers and thumb at their central joint.

All this was in a split second, reconstructed in
later memory. Lucas clung to the other cadets, they to him, no shame amongst
them: each of them having looked up once into the great scaled and toothed face
of the daemon poised above them.

A fair-haired girl of no more than fifteen stood up
from the group. She began to walk towards the iron gates. Candia’s gaze flicked
from her to the roof-tops; when he saw no movement there, he relaxed. The girl
paused, turned her thin face up to the sky and, as if she saw something in the
gargoyle-face, slipped out of the side-gate and ran off into the city streets.
Her footsteps echoed in the quiet.

The sky curdled.

That same gagging chill silenced Lucas’s voice. He
coughed, spat; and then the heat of the sun took him like a slap. He winced with
the feeling that something too vast had just passed above him.

The blond man rose to his feet, dusting the knees
of his buff breeches.

"Why did you let her go?" Lucas demanded.

Candia’s chin went up. He looked down his nose at
Lucas. "She was commanded. The city proverb is:
We have strange masters."

His gaze lingered on the gate. Then, with a final
flick at buff-colored cloth, Candia said: "You’ll all attend lectures, you’ll
attend seminars; most of all you’ll attend the practical classes. Punishments
for absence vary from stocks to whipping. We’re not here to waste your time.
Don’t waste mine."

Lucas rubbed his bare arms, shuddering despite the
morning heat.

"First class is at matins. That’s now, so
move .
. .
You four," the blond man said, as an afterthought. "Garin, Sophonisba,
Rafi and Lucas. Accommodation can’t fit you in. Here’s addresses for lodgings."

Lucas paused over his slip of paper. The other
three cadets wandered away slowly, comparing notes.

As Candia was about to go, Lucas said amiably: "I
don’t care to live out of the university. Fetch the Proctor."

Candia shot a glance over Lucas’s shoulder, Lucas
turned his head, and the man cuffed him hard enough across the face to send him
cannoning into the sandstone wall.

"You address tutors as ‘Reverend Master,’ " the man
said loudly, bent to grab his arm and pull him up; winked at Lucas, and added:
"Do you want everyone to know who you are?"

Lucas watched him walk away, the cat-spring step of
the man; opened his mouth to call–and thought better of it. He read the printed
slip of paper:

Mstrss. Evelian by the signe of the Clock upon
Carver streete neare Clocke-mill. Students warned, never to leave the Nineteenth
District between the University and the Cathedral.
And then, after the
print, in a scrawling hand:
Unless commanded by those greater than they.

Candia pushed the cathedral door open and moved
rapidly inside, shutting the heavy wood smoothly behind him. He stopped to
quieten his breathing, and to adjust to the dimness. Light the color of honey
and new leaves fell on to the smooth flagstones, from the green-and-gold
stained-glass windows.

The blond man’s nostrils flared at the
incense-smell: musky as leaf-mold and fungus. He padded slowly down between the
pillars towards the altar, and his boots, practiced, made no sound. He saw no
one in all that towering interior space. The pillars that were carved of a
silver- gray stone to resemble tall beeches concealed no novices.

Once he froze, reached out to a pillar to catch his
balance and remained utterly still. The stone was carved into a semblance of
roots, with here and there a carved beetle or caterpillar, as above where the
carved branches met together there were stone birds. The sound (if there had
been a sound) was not repeated.

Coming to the altar, Candia settled one hip up on
it, resting against the great polished and swirl-veined block of oak. He
listened. Then he drew out his dagger, and began to clean casually and
delicately under his fingernails.

He swore; stuck his finger in his mouth and
sucked it.

"Master Candia?"

A man stood up in the shadow of a pillar. White
hair caught a dapple of green-gold light. He dropped a scrubbing-brush back into
a galvanized-iron bucket; the noise echoed through all the cathedral’s arches.

Candia straightened up off the altar. "My lord
Bishop," he acknowledged.

The Bishop of the Trees came forward, wringing
water from one sleeve of his robe. The robe was full-length, dark green,
embroidered with a golden tree whose roots circled the hem and whose branches
reached out along each arm. The embroidery showed threadbare; the cloth much
worn and darned.

"The most recent intake–is there
anyone
?" He
paused to touch the wooden altar with thin strong fingers, mutter a word.

"No. No one. Four from Nineteenth District, nine
from docklands and the factories; the rest from Third, Eighth and Thirty-First
Districts. Three princes from the eastern continent incognito–two of whom have
the nerve to assume I won’t know that."

"None disguised? Scholar-Soldiers travel disguised;
one might be waiting to test you."

Now Candia laughed. "One of the acolytes came and
took a girl. Just an acolyte terrified
all
of them. No, there’s no
Scholar-Soldier amongst them."

"And this was our last hope of it. We can’t wait
for the Invisible College’s help indefinitely."

White hair curled down over the Bishop’s collar.
Seven decades left his face not so much lined as creased, folds of skin running
from his beaked nose to the corners of his mouth. His eyes were clear as a
younger man’s, gray and mobile, catching the cathedral’s dim light.

"Are you willing to risk waiting now, young Candia,
with no assurance our messages have even reached them?"

Candia glanced at the washed flagstones (where the
traces of scrawled graffiti were visible despite the Bishop’s work) and then
back at the man. "So events force us."

"To go to The Spagyrus."

"Yes. I think we must." Candia put the knife back
into its sheath at his belt, fumbling it. He drew a breath, looked at his
shaking hands, half-smiled. "Go before me and I’ll join you–if the faculty see
me with a Tree-priest, that’s my lectureship lost."

He followed the Bishop back down the central aisle,
through green light and stone. Dust drifted. The man picked up a broad-brimmed
hat from a pew. Then he opened the great arched doors to the noon sun, which had
been triple-locked before Candia chose to pass through.

"You and your students," he said, "make a deal too free with us—"

"I send them here, Theo. It’s good practice."

"I was a fool ever to advise you to apprentice
yourself to that place!"

"So my family say to this day."

The Bishop snorted. He wiped a lock of white hair back
with the sleeve of his robe, and clapped the hat onto his head. "I had word from
the Night Council."

"And there was a waste of words and breath!"

"Oh, truly; but what would you?" The Bishop
shrugged.

Candia smelt the dank cellar-smell of the
cathedral’s incense, all the fine hairs on his neck hackling. He shook himself,
scratched, and moved to stand where he would not be visible when the door
opened.

"You take underground ways. I’ll follow above.
We’re late, if we’re to get there by noon."

* * *

Lucas put the address-slip in his pocket and strode
across the yard, the side of his cuffed face burning.

A last student waited, leaning up against the
flaking iron gate, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a brown greatcoat two
sizes too large, and too heavy for the heat.

Either a young man or a young woman: the student
had straight black hair falling to the coat’s upturned collar and flopping into
dark eyes. A Katayan, the student’s thin wiry tail curved under the flap of the
brown coat, tufted tip sketching circles in the dust.

"I can take you to Carver Street." The voice was
light and sharp.

"And take my purse on the way?" Lucas came up to
the gate.

The student shifted herself upright with a push of
one shoulder, and the coat fell open to show a bony young woman’s body in a
black dress. Patches of sweat darkened the underarms. Her thin fine-furred tail
was mostly black, but dappled with white. Her feet were bare.

"I lodge there, too. By Clock-mill. The woman in
charge–um." The young woman kissed the tip of a dirty finger and sketched on the
air. "Beautiful! Forty if she’s a day. Those little wrinkles at the corners of
her eyes?"

The smell of boiled cabbage and newly laundered
cloth permeated the narrow street; voices through open windows sounded from
midday meals. Lucas fell into step beside the young woman. She had an erratic
loping stride. He judged her seventeen or eighteen; a year or so younger than
his calendar age.

"That’s Mistress Evelian?"

"I’ve been there a week and I’m in
love."
She kept her hands in her pockets as she walked, and threw her head back as she
laughed, short fine hair flopping about her ears.