Rats and Gargoyles (50 page)

"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,
Mo
ther!"

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 her 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—"

"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 lovers 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.