Rats and Gargoyles (27 page)

She walked forward to the edge of the steps.
Against the milk-blue sky, the armored shoulders of the woman glittered silver;
her scrubbed young face shone in the morning light. Zari watched the movement of
her mobile mouth, the passion of her face; chopped-short brown hair flying,
slanting red-brown eyes narrowed against the light.

"For them, now, nothing! We cut no more stone. We
lay no more bricks. We dig no foundations. We draw no plans! Oh, they can force
us to work–who denies it? But, if we’re strong, who can force us to sleep or to
eat?"

Behind the Hyena, gold-cross banners of the Sun
shone: ranks of ragged soldiers crowding onto the steps of the Thirty-Second
District square. The stink of gunpowder still hung in the air from a few
enthusiastic musket-shots. Sword and sword-harness chinked.

"And when we die and are carried again on the Boat
through the Night–who will they have then to build their power? Oh, who? None.
For when we come again we will act as we do now:
we will not spend all our
lives digging our graves and building our tombs!"

‘We cut no more stone. We lay no more bricks. We
dig no foundations.’
Frontispiece to
Sphinx Mystagoga
, Athanasius
Kircher, Amsterdam, 1676

The crowd’s roar bounced back from the marble walls
of the Trade Guild Meeting-halls, empty of their Rat-Lords now; together with
the echoes of the Hyena’s loudspeaker. Zari swiveled back on the step and faced
forward, looking out across the heads of ten or fifteen thousand civilian men
and women. In silk, in satin; their callused hands still carrying rule, trowel,
wrench, or hod.

"But not only
I
tell you this." The Hyena’s
voice dropped from passion to a passionate honesty. "If it were only me, how
could I ask you to act? I have hidden in darkness. I have hit and run, struck
and fled again, damaging the Rat-Lords but never confronting them. I have not
starved. I have not died, to refuse the Thirty-Six my labor. If it were only me,
and these soldiers here, why would you listen?"

Zar-bettu-zekigal put in Memory the shouts in the
crowd: half-audible, encouraging.

"So listen to one of your own," the Hyena called
out loudly. "Listen to Master Builder Falke!"

Her foot kicked Zari as she stepped aside, and the
woman looked down and grinned an apology. As the white-haired man moved out from
under the shade of the silk canopy, the Hyena squatted down on her haunches
beside Zar-bettu-zekigal.

"Hot." Zari put the flat of her hand against the
plate armor; the metal stung her palm. The woman pulled up her dark-red
kerchief, shading her neck. A soldier two paces away held her laminated steel
helm. The ragged Sun-banner drooped on a staff strapped to his back.

"Be hotter yet. This is early. It’s going better
than the last rally. Have you heard enough yet?"

"The Cardinal will want to know it all. He always
does."

A single line of Sun-banner soldiers kept the crowd
back from the steps. The Hyena clanked down to sit beside Zari. The Katayan sat
up and slid her hand along the hot steel to the woman’s shoulders and, a little
behind her now, began pressing her fingers down between armor and neck, finding
points to release muscle tension.

"It had to work here." The Hyena’s voice rasped.
"After the last thirty days . . . Tell your Plessiez I gave the final order today. We’re officially abandoning the
areas under the city. Too much . . .
corruption
there."

Zari dug her
fingers in. "See you, weren’t there always hauntings?"

"Not like this!" The woman’s plate gauntlet clacked
against her breastplate. "I wonder . . . I do wonder, now, what it was Plessiez
had us do when we ran his underground errands. We don’t get this sort of aid
without our previous help being worth a lot. But after today it won’t matter. We
take charge today."

White hair glinted in the sun as Falke stepped
forward. His booted foot just missed Zar-bettu-zekigal. She glanced up over her
shoulder.

Falke walked with gravitas, thumbs tucked under his
new swordbelt. His white-silver hair, longer now, he wore scraped back into a
pony-tail and confined by a heavy silver ring. The morning sun showed up the
lines around his mouth.

Black silk strips criss-crossed his eyes. He moved
uncomfortably, sweating in the sun’s heat, with a sword hanging from his belt,
and a mail shirt and surcoat over his padded gray leather arming doublet.
Embroidered insignia caught the sun and blazed across the square, on his breast
not a ragged Sun but the House of Salomon’s golden Rule.

"My friends."

His voice crackled out across the square, half-
humorous, and self-mockingly indulgent.

"My friends,
I
have not gone into voluntary
exile.
I
have not trained men and women to be warriors.
I
have not
sabotaged the Rat-Lords, lived starving and tireless, fought without hope until
I saw this day. No, I have not done these things. For that, you must go to the
Lady Hyena and her people. And, conscious of that, 1 speak humbly after her."

The flesh under Zari’s fingers tensed. She began to
rub her thumbs at the base of the Hyena’s skull. The woman rumbled: "And three
weeks ago he was gibbering with terror in a sewer. Gods, but that man can make
capital out of anything."

"See you, you’re absolutely right."

Lost in the contact of flesh and flesh,
Zar-bettu-zekigal grinned dreamily to herself. She cocked an eye at Falke,
looking through his legs at the crowded square.

He raised the microphone to his mouth again.

"You’ve heard good oratory from many of us this morning. I’ll disappoint you;
I’m a plain speaker. I’m one head of one hall in the east quarter of Nineteenth
District. That’s one quarter out of a hundred and eighty- one; one District out
of thirty-six. That’s all. But I’ve learned things you have a right to know
about."

His head lowered for a calculated moment, then
lifted to face sun, sky and the assembled thousands.

"From today, we do no work on any site. We have no
choice. You have heard, and I have found out it’s true, that his so-called
Majesty the King will send in their troops to fire on you. And the priests of
the Orders of Guiry, and Hildi, and Varagnac will come, and they will damn you
with all ceremony. Let them! We can withstand it. We are stronger than that. We
have no choice."

Falke’s voice rose.

"You will bear with me. None of you is a fool. We
know the Rat-Lords exploit us and make us slaves, and we are old enough in the
ways of the world not to expect better. But now we have–yes, I tell you today,
now, this moment!
–now
we have the wisdom for which we searched. All of
you know the Mysteries. You know the Interior Temple and the Exterior Temple are
mirrors of each other, and of the greater Order."

He rested one hand on his breast.

"If we had the knowledge, we said, we would build
thus. Build in the shape of our souls, and compel the Divine to acknowledge us.
We have been kept dumb and blind by the Rat-Lords, forbidden to build for
ourselves, forbidden the knowledge of it; but no longer. Now, today, we have at
last recovered the knowledge we lost– the knowledge they hid from us so long
ago. Now, today,
we have the Word of Seshat!"

A susurrus of words filled the air. Ripples of
sound: lapping through the hot morning and the square, out to the pillared
porticoes and marble frontages of the Trade Guild Meeting-halls.

"Look at them! There isn’t a building site in the
city that’ll be working today." The Hyena grinned. Her armored heel hacked down
on the marble. She turned a heat-reddened face to Zar-bettu-zekigal, impervious
to the Katayan’s skilled fingers.

"One minute everything’s the same as it’s always
been, and then—" Her fist smacked into her palm. "By the end of today we’ll have a general strike. No
building, no trains, no servants. Tell Plessiez that. And tell him Falke and I
must
know when his necromancy will take full effect."

"I’ll tell him."

"Tell him I must know what happens at the Fane."
Her slanting red-brown eyes moved, some hidden fear stirring and suppressed in a
blink. "I must."

"Shall I go to him now?"

The Hyena glanced up to where Falke still spoke,
pale hands gesturing. The Sun-banner soldiers still stood, but much of the crowd
sat on the paving-stones: clusters of people growing closer together with the
steady increase in their numbers.

"Yes, and hurry back. Falke and I–we can start
this, but we can’t stop it once it’s begun. It’ll cross the city like fire:
every slightest whisper will carry it! It’s out of our hands."

Zar-bettu-zekigal stood, picked up the musket and
laid it back across one shoulder, and sketched a mock salute. "Anything for you,
Lady. Anything at all."

"Leave that gun here!"

The woman put her fingers to her shoulder, only now
sensing a tactile memory. The laminated steel plate blazed back sunlight. Zari
blinked. The woman looked up at her.

"Take it, then, Kings’ Memory. And take care."

The airship and the warm bosom of the aircrew-woman
long left behind, Casaubon’s sparrow flies through skies where vultures rise on
mesa-winds. Heat is a hard arrow under the bird’s heart, piercing, piercing.

To either side rise up the cliffs, sand-banded
mesas: ocher, scarlet, orange, white.

Reflected in the bird’s obsidian eye is desert,
blue sky, great horizons; the jagged battlements of a castle built into the mesa-side; the drowsy noon emptiness of a
courtyard; the tower-window overlooking it.

The sparrow falls arrow-straight, kicks up a spurt
of dust on the stone window-sill, hops on to the ring finger of the hand
outstretched to receive her.

Hot morning sun and warm air poured in through the
open windows of the palace corridor. Zar-bettu-zekigal, musket confiscated at
the gates, swung her greatcoat off her shoulders and slung it across her arm as
she walked. Her dappled tail curved up, poking through the slit at the back of
her knee-length black dress.

"Messire!"

Plessiez raised a ringed hand in acknowledgment as
he walked towards her. He gestured with finality to the four or five priests
with him, giving orders, sending the last hurrying off as he came up with the
Katayan.

". . . and tell Messire Fenelon to attend me in the
Abbey of Guiry in an hour. Honor to you, Zaribet."

"I just came from the Abbey of Guiry, messire.
Fleury told me you were here in attendance on the King."

Outside the open
windows, sun put a haze on the blue- tiled turrets and spires and belvederes of
the royal palace roofs. The roofscape spread out, acre upon acre. Mist rose up
from drying pools of water: the previous sundown’s thunderstorm.
Cardinal-General Plessiez drew in a breath, bead-black eyes bright, muzzle and
whiskers quivering. He folded his arms and leaned up against the white stone
corridor-wall.

"I have just had an audience with his Majesty,
yes."

A silver band looped above one of his translucentskinned ears, below the
other; a black ostrich-plume being clipped into it at a jaunty angle. A
basket-hilted rapier hung at his side: leather harness black, buckles silver.
Zar-bettu-zekigal grinned, seeing how he tied the cardinal’s green sash rakishly
from left shoulder to knot above right haunch; tail carried with a high swagger,
silver
ankh
almost lost in his sleek neck-fur.

"I’ve much to do this morning. Now, the overseeing
of the artillery garden . . . Zaribet, come with me; I shall need you as Memory then—"

"But not right this minute." Zar-bettu-zekigal’s
eyes gleamed. "Shouldn’t Messire St. Cyr be dealing with the artillery garden?"

Plessiez snapped his fingers as he turned, not
looking to see if the young Katayan woman scurried down the corridor at his
heels. Zar-bettu-zekigal tossed her greatcoat into the window embrasure and left
it. She caught him up after a few skips, reveling in the sun-hot corridor-tiles
under her feet.

"What did the King say, messire?"

Cardinal-General Plessiez slowed rapid steps. He
clasped ringed fingers behind his back as he paced, and began evasively:
"Messire Desaguliers once removed, it would obviously be his second-in-command,
St. Cyr, who gained control of the Cadets . . . St. Cyr is not Desaguliers’ man;
he is mine. I put him in as lieutenant some years ago; hence he leaves to me
what I desire to oversee; hence . . . I have said I will deal with the artillery
garden."

"And the King?"

Zar-bettu-zekigal smoothed back her matt black hair
from its center parting with both hands. She grinned up at the Cardinal-General:
watching his severity and wry humor and affected military air with the delight
of a connoisseur or an admirer.

Two approaching priests robbed her of what answer
he might have given. Plessiez stopped to issue orders. Zar-bettu-zekigal leaned
back against the double doors at the end of the corridor, palms flat against the
black oak, her dappled tail coiling down to her bare ankles.