Rats and Gargoyles (59 page)

"
Forget
,
change, become a miracle."

The voice sounded like the rustle of leaves, like
the echo of sound in great spaces of stone.

"I had forgotten what it is to change! Each spring
is the world’s first; each winter the ending of an aeon; each summer the high
and changeless meridian of pleasure. Now is the millennium. Now I see!"

The great long-muzzled head lifted. Wide nostrils
and mouth encompassed a speckled darkness, the yellow darkness of sun in
shadowed cavities of wood. The god- daemon shifted, haunches sinking, wings
curving up to frame the high shoulders. It sat immovably in the cathedral of
trees.

She shook.

The tension of green hung in the air; paused,
poised, hesitated; hung in balance.

The Decan, The Spagyrus, Lord of Noon and Midnight,
reached out one clawed limb and touched the bark of the great beech tree. White
flesh and bone tumbled into shape: the old man sprawled in the grass. The White
Crow held out her right hand, and the Bishop of the Trees seized it and pulled
himself to his feet.

"We . . . did it." He laughed, dazed, face
creasing.

The White Crow gazed up through shifting beech
leaves, the brightness of the green tingling in her blood and vision.

"Yeah. We did it and here’s the end of it . . ."

The voice of the Twelfth Decan rang through the
aisles of the trees, deep and new. His sandstone-and-gold pelt rippled.

"End? No. I perceive . . . We perceive . . . that
We have erred. No, this is not the end. You have scarcely been admitted across
the threshold of miracle. It is the beginning, now."

The ancient voice burned with energy and new fire.
In the Scholar-Soldier’s head it echoed with the voices of the Thirty-Six who
make up the circle of the sky.

"Now We see that We should not for so many aeons
have concealed Ourselves in stone. Now We throw down the Fane. And now . . . We
will walk amongst you.
"

The White Crow craned her neck, staring upwards.

All the flat gold of the sky softened, turning to
great towering masses of brilliance that paled: here to rose, there to pink and
gold . . .

The sky shredded; stretching and pulling apart. The
depths beyond glowed blue.

Clouds parted, the sun’s beams turning them gold
and pink. Parted, pulled aside, no trace of the flat gold sky now; only a heat
and a brightness that dazzled her.

A white-yellow disc brought water to her eyes.

She stared up into the infinity of a blue summer
sky.

"Captain-General, something’s happening!"

Desaguliers straightened, leaning his musket and
rest back against his haunch. He stared up at the top of the barricade where the
Cadet crouched. "Did no one ever train you to make an exact report?
What
is ‘happening’?"

The young Cadet–a slim black Rat, hardly more than
a Ratling–clung with tail and one gloved hand to the shattered joists of the
palace wall. Powder-burns scarred his livery and smooth-furred snout.

"I don’t know!"

Desaguliers, hearing battle-fatigue in the young
Rat’s voice, leaned his musket against the barricade’s bricks, joists and
jewel-studded furniture; drew his pistol, and loped along to scramble up the
slope.

A stray shot spanged off a corner of the demolished
wall. Desaguliers ducked, glancing back. Nothing new– the main palace hall
broken open to the sky, slashed with the light-shadows of the Night Sun, and
barricaded from the courtyard where human refugees hid behind rubble and risked
shots with captured weapons.

Darkness clung to masonry, illuminated only by
powder-flashes. The blue light that mazed the streets sank into dimness.
Desaguliers rubbed his sore eyes. The wings of acolytes overlapped the sky,
flying down to cling to broken walls, precariously leaning roofs.

"They’re . . . not attacking."

Desaguliers, hand poised to give the signal to
fire, hesitated. "Not yet, I think."

Ribbed wings folded, obsidian claws clutching coign
and balcony and gutter, bristle-tails coiling: by tens and dozens the acolytes
settled on the besieged palace.

He turned his lean snout, staring down from the
barricade into the body of the hall. Shattered glass and treadmills, torn
drapes, the inlaid floor splintered with soldiers’ running feet; here and there
the black smears of extinguished fires. Blue-jacketed Cadets lined the
barricades, steadying muskets on rests or cleaning swords black with daemon
blood.

Clustered in the center, under the last remaining
arch of that clover-leaf roof, away from attack and falling walls, eight Rats
clung together. One brown Rat nursed a bloody arm, resting back in the arms of
two black Rats. A silver Rat trod down a scarlet robe under one hind claw,
clutching at a bony black Rat. They clung. The fattest black Rat lay on broken
marquetry flooring, curled around the clump of intergrown tails that he clutched
to his furred stomach.

"They’re
not
attacking, messire."

Desaguliers narrowed his eyes, stroking his scarred
cheek. "They’re going to come right over us next time they try, that’s obvious.
Messire Jannac, is your blade dull yet?"

"Er, no, messire."

"We’re going to move down into the nearest train-
tunnels while this lull lasts."

"But his Majesty?"

"We’re going to cut his Majesty free; it’s the only
way we’ll move them."

"Messire!"

He turned his head, swearing at the Rat daring to
protest; stopped dead, staring at the Cadet. A pale light glinted on his black
fur, shone from the young Rat’s broken nails and sword-hilt. Desaguliers raised
his head.

The light-shadows blurred and vanished. Above, the
world lightened to yellow, to gold, to brilliance.

He raised his eyes, staring up to where the Night
Sun had blotted the sky, and looked directly into the white- hot disc of the
noon sun.

Desaguliers scrambled up on to the highest point of
the barricade, careless of fire; eyes running tears in the brilliance of
daylight, the summer sun’s heat like fire on his pelt.

He grabbed a metal rod projecting from the rubble,
blotted his eyes with the fur of his arm, and stared out across the city. Across
the courtyard, where men and women walked out wondering into sunlight; across
the city roofs black with clustering acolytes, to the great darkness in the
north-aust.

Walls and buttresses tumbled, falling slow into
clear air.

Desaguliers beckoned wildly, aware of Jannac
climbing to his side. "Do you see, messire? Do you
see
that?"

"The Fane!"

Black walls splintered, shifting, falling. Arched
roofs crashed down into naves. Desaguliers felt through clawed feet the rumble
of the impact; sound twitched at his ragged ears. Dust billowed up from the
Fane-in-the- Seventh-District, spires crumpling, falling like rows of dominoes.
The breath of a smell came to him in the summer air: dank stone, opened crypts,
and something that choked his throat with unshed tears.

"The Fane . . ."

He sheathed his sword, loping up to cling to the
edge of the broken wall and lean outwards. Shadow skirred across him. He jerked
his snout up. The daemon-acolytes beat their wings, spiked tails clutching the
palace masonry, beaked jaws open and screeching.

Dust and haze thundered up in the north-aust sky.

Captain-General Desaguliers shaded his eyes with a
call used shaking hand. Gripping brick with his other hand, he leaned out and
squinted to the aust-west. Far distant, down in Eleventh District, the midnight
silhouettes of black masonry collapsed . . .

"It is . . . it
is
destroyed."

About to call down in triumph to the Cadets,
Desaguliers choked on wonder.

He had swiveled round to climb down, and now faced
the Fane again. Color danced: scarlet, green, blue, white and purple.

From out of the Fane’s black rubble and ruin, from
tilted pillars and crumbling buttresses, from ogive windows and broken spires,
plants began to flower. Roses, hawthorn, forget-me-nots, apple blossom; orchids
and cowslips, blackberries and alyssum; out of season and out of time, growing,
spilling out of the ruins like a lava-tide . . .

Below him, the Cadets rested muskets and sheathed
swords, climbing the barricades to walk among bewildered men and women in
temporary truce. The Rat-King milled in confusion. Desaguliers stepped, slipped,
slid a yard down a tilted limestone slab, grazing his haunch; grabbed the torn
stone edge and stared, wordless, at the Fane.

Among the ruins of millennially old stone,
miraculous flowers opened petals to the summer sky, spilling down into the city
streets.

The wings of acolytes rustled agitatedly on the
roof above. Desaguliers looked up to see each beaked muzzle pointing at the
Fane’s ruins in dumb expectancy.

Gray heat burned her bare shoulders.

She threw her head back, muscles unknotting from
tension; feeling her rose-tangled hair hot under the sun. A granular gray
summer’s heat burned in her, fogging her vision; pricking her skin with
ultraviolet, loosing all strains.

She stared up into a blue sky.

Open, blue: the sun an unbearable white hole into
heat and light. One glance upwards blinded her, tears pouring down her cheeks;
she saw, smeared, to each horizon: north, south, aust, west and east, the city
that is called the heart of the world.

At every horizon, the Fane is tumbled into ruin:
obelisks jutting like broken teeth, buttresses fracturing into stone lace, roofs
falling, walls split, open to the summer air.

"We have chosen Our new way. We have hidden
Ourselves for too long. Now We choose to walk amongst you. "

All Fanes are one Fane.

Her feet are conscious of hardness, that she walks
now on brick paving, and she stares up–in a courtyard where pottery brick walls
collapse–at the stone-warm image of a sphinx.

Black bees swarmed frantically, the air full of
buzzing black dots. The White Crow walked forward, hands gently brushing bees
aside, their furred feet tickling as they crawled across her bare shoulders. She
lifts her head.

"The Wheel turns. The Dance begins again."

"You’ll . . . build again?"

Terracotta full lips smile, anciently and with
warmth. The Decan of High Summer, the Lady of the Eleventh Hour: a sphinx-shape
that towers high above the woman; heat radiating back from sun-warmed brick
flanks and head-dress and heavy-lidded eyes.

"We have confined Ourselves to the Fane too long,"
the Decan’s voice repeats, attendant with echoes, until it seems that all
the Thirty-Six are speaking in a confusion of voices.
"My Master-Physician,
all that the Divine does is right, because it is We who do it. Come."

The White Crow’s feet stung with the reverberation
of a brick paw falling to the ground. She swayed, staring up. Moss-crusted
flanks stretch, great shoulders arch; the vast body of the god-daemon rises from
the earth. Impossible, articulated, the incarnate stone flesh moves; shining in
the noon sun with the brilliance of deserts.

The footfall’s reverberation shook her flesh. The
White Crow stumbled, half-walking and half-running. The shadow of ancient stone
fell across her, and she, legs turned rubbery, staggered to walk beside the god-
daemon as the Decan slowly paced forward.

"Come. We will walk out into the world."

Parquet flooring, hot with impossible sun, burned
his palms.

Lucas slid out from the pit under the last
analytical engine in the Long Gallery and stood up. Other students crowded the
doors, the high windows, clamoring. Black grease smeared his hands and arms. He
reached to grab his discarded doublet with filthy fingers.

"It’s the sun!" Rafi slapped his bare shoulder,
running past. "It’s daylight out there!
We did it
!
"

Bodies jostled. Lucas floated in their movement,
hardly conscious of it; aching with weariness from wrench and gear and rod, eyes
stinging with tiredness. He let himself be carried down the grand stairway into
the university’s entrance-hall.

"Outside!" A blonde girl hammered the door-beam out
of its socket with the heel of her hand.

Above his head, the carved apple wood beams
shimmered. He raised his head. Summer heat and light flooded in through the
opening door. A sharp sweet smell drifted in.

One pale green spot appeared on the wood. It
swelled, bubbled up, unscrolled into the air–a leaf. A veined green leaf. Lucas
pushed his head-band further up his brow, shifting the hair from his eyes,
gaping.

All the beams supporting the roof burst into leaf.
A tide of green swept through the hall, leaves unfolding, rustling; springing
from the wood of beams and paneling and doors, darkening the sunlit hall to a
green shadow.

Lucas pushed into the throng of students and
Reverend tutors, finding himself carried towards the door. Pink blossom burst
out on the now-knotted beams.

"The sun—!"

A silence fell. Lucas stepped out into the
courtyard, the other students slowing as they pushed out into that wide paved
space. Briars wreathed the great sandstone staircases rising up at cater-corners
of the yard. Glass windows shimmered, river-bright. Acolytes clung to the
towering chimneys, bristle-tails writhing down among flowering wooden
window-frames.

Pharamond caught his gaze across the heads of other
students: the bearded man with his hair disheveled, his face dazed. "We did it.
We cheated the laws of nature!"

Lucas brushed his arms, the faint dew and wind
raising the small hairs down his forearms. Black machine-oil glistened. Over the
courtyard and the open gates, an early-summer sky clung to roofs and streets and
spires. A sky hot and soft and pale with heat.

A Katayan student clapped his hands rhythmically,
broke off, caught a dark-haired woman’s hands and pulled her into a dance-step.
Lucas, to his own astonishment, picked up the clapping rhythm. Two girls
snatched up soft-thorned briars, weaving them into garlands. Processional,
ragged, yelling, the students burst open the university’s iron gates.