Rats and Gargoyles (65 page)

St. Cyr raised furry brows; thought better of it.

"Zu-Harruk!" The old woman snapped a yellow flower
sprouting from the head of her cane and tucked the blossom behind her ear. Her
smoky-blue gaze rested unimpressed on miracle. "Come here!"

A tall yellow-haired Katayan student staggering
under a box of altar regalia stopped, grunting, while she clucked and, with a
jeweler’s eye, abstracted a number of the smaller and more perfect diamonds.

"Don’t dawdle!" she advised. "When you’ve
transferred this to the university, I trust I’ve trained you well enough to go
on to the other Abbeys and the royal palace?"

"Yes, ma’am!"

The old lady ignored St. Cyr, and rapped her cane
against the White Crow’s elbow. "We have a reputation to keep up."

"Er. Mmm. Doubtless. Yes."

"Now that’s
his
trouble."

She pointed between sun-soaked trees to where
Reverend Master Candia sprawled, asleep.

"No sense of duty. With all due respect to you and
Theodoret and the Rat here, the man hangs out with Tree-priests and
Scholar-Soldiers; he just isn’t
respectable
enough for the University of
Crime."

St. Cyr sees the White Crow laugh; glance anxiously
back over her shoulder.

Heat beats back from the courtyard’s brick paving.

In shadowed colonnades, they shelter; eating and
drinking, weeping, searching for known faces. Rat-Lords in their lace and velvet
elbow women in factory overalls. Quarrels break out in corners.

A silence.

Shrouded in dark wings, stooped, casting a shadow
purple as plum-bloom, a gargoyle-daemon paces across the New Temple’s courtyard
and stoops to pet a child.

Inside the rotunda of the New Temple, the Mayor of
the eastern quarter of Nineteenth District, a little dizzy from the afternoon
heat, accepts another drink from a man in Master Builder’s overalls.

The man fingered the chained talismans about
Tannakin Spatchet’s neck.

"Our consortium is naturally interested in
the–shall we say?–the mass production of these talismans that warn of daemons’
presences."

Tannakin Spatchet glanced past the man. Under the
great arch, between two of the great sandstone pillars that opened to the
courtyards, old blankets and cushions had been thrown in a heap. Eight or nine
draggled Rats clustered there, talking, preening, snarling for pages to groom
them. No courtiers flocked to them.

Their co-joined tails were lost in the cushions. He
saw the eyes of a silver-furred Rats-King fix on him.

Beyond, in the courtyard, a gargoyle-daemon leaves
a human child, and fixes its amber gaze on the Rats.

"Sir." He bowed stiffly to the man, noting the
House of Salomon’s ribbons on his overalls. "You may find such talismans don’t
function now. All things change."

The man protested. "But you know her! The Master-
Physician, White Crow. You
know
her."

"I flatter myself that I have some influence in
that quarter, it’s true. Yes. Excuse me." The Mayor put the Master Builder aside
gently, weaving through the crowds towards the Rat-King. "In case things don’t
all
change, I have to discuss the repeal of a few local by-laws."

Lucas walked by the food-booths in the Temple
grounds, letting his feet carry him without direction except that necessary to
walk through the crowds. He knocked the elbow of a brown Rat, who turned with a
curse and then shrugged her shoulders.

The White Crow walked with strangers and friends.
He dogged her, at a distance. On one terrace he stopped, between great lead
figures of sea-monsters spouting a fine spray of jets.

"Young Lucas." A voice rumbled at his elbow.

"Piss off." He looked sourly up at Casaubon.

"Is that any way for my page to speak to me?"

The fat man seated himself with his legs apart on a
stone bench, mopping at his brow with a lace handkerchief. Sun glinted on his
copper hair. One garter had come unraveled, and his silk stocking sagged down
his immense calf.

"If I
were
your page . . ." The Prince of Candover sighed, crossing to the bench and kneeling down. He tugged the fat
man’s stocking up and tied the garter in a flamboyant bow below the knee. "I’d
quit. You’re impossible!"

Casaubon rested his elbows on his knees, and his
chins on his hands; face peering out from among the froth of white lace cuffs.
"Is
that
any way to speak to your prospective cousin-in-law?"

"What?"

Without lifting his head, the fat man nodded. Lucas
stared down past the nereid fountains to the lawns.

A small man in Candovard formal doublet, his hair
grizzled black and white, stood holding both a woman’s hands in his. The woman,
plump and swathed in orange robes, was recognizable from Vanringham’s broadsheet
photographs: the bird magus, Lady Luka. She said something, her face shining;
and the Candovard Ambassador flung his arms around her, burying his face in her
neck.

Lucas breathed: "Andaluz . . . ?"

"He may not have any
magia;
but, then, my
lady mother has all the political sense of a sparrow. They suit extremely. So.
Your uncle, my mother; I’m her son, that makes us cousins
de facto
—"

"Oh no!" Lucas groaned.

In tones of great hurt, the Lord-Architect
remarked: "
I
think they make a very nice couple."

"I . . . you . . ." He turned back to the terrace.
The White Crow moved among velvet-clad Rat-Lords, and masons in silk overalls.
"It’s just . . . it’s just too much!"

The Lord-Architect patted Lucas carefully on the
shoulder. For once he said nothing at all.

White sea-mist cools the flanks of the Thirty-Sixth
Decan, wading in the heat-haze between city and garden.

Sun blasts Her ochre bricks pale, dazzles from
roses that trail in Her wake; is dimmed only by the brilliance of Her eyes. Her
cowled head lifts.

In the heat-soaked summer sky, Erou, Ninth Decan, Lord of Time and Gathering, shadows Her with white
marble wings. His muscled body slides the air, angel-wings feathering horizon to
horizon, and He smiles, meeting Her gaze.

Particles, electrons, strings, weak forces: Their
pulse beats with the Dance.

In the middle air, a small and sharp
crack
!
sounds.

Pale in the sun, a premature celebratory firework
scatters green sparks across the sky.

Lucas craned his neck, watching through the
garden’s trees the thin trail of smoke over the rotunda. No further explosions
sounded.

A tall man in dockside gear called: "You the
Prince?"

He left Rafi of Adocentyn and the other students to
impressing young Entered Apprentices, and loped across the grass.

"I’m Lucas."

"Met a woman. She lookin’ for you."

A hard pulse hit him under the ribs. Lucas nodded.

"She say her ship just got into Fourteenth District
harbor," the man observed. "Calls herself Princess Gerima of the White
Mountains, Gerima of Candover?"

Outside the rotunda, the White Crow paces a
colonnade between tiny mirror screens, set in vast ornate metal frameworks. Like
the congeries of bubbles in the demolished Fane-in-the-Twelfth-District, the
screens glowed pale blue.

She pauses to stare into them, seeing scenes of
revelry in other Districts. Down by the factories, and in the docks. Across the
estuary, up in the high hills, and far across the continent to all points of the
compass . . .

The White Crow looks into an oval screen. Swirling
iron petals cup it. The image shows humans and Rats together at a banquet on
Seventeenth District’s beach, so far to the east that the sun’s light has faded,
and they revel by torches and pastel light-spheres and the rising glow of the
moon.

She fists her hands, stretching her arms up in the
afternoon heat; bones and muscles creaking. The sun dazzles in her red-brown
eyes.

Her mouth moves in a quiet smile, feeling a gaze
resting on her back.

The black-browed woman caught up her formal gown,
lifting the hem as she raced up the terrace steps to Lucas and hugged him.

"I didn’t know what was happening when we arrived;
three days out from land the portents started, and such sudden miracles seen at
sea! But you’re safe. You’re safe." Gerima drew breath, pale face flushed under
dark curls. "Tell me. Which is she?"

"Over there. In white."

"Her? I thought she’d be . . . younger."

Lucas moved out of his sister’s embrace, rubbing
the back of his sweating neck. He looked from Gerima to the Scholar-Soldier
further down the terrace. "I don’t care if you don’t like her!"

Gerima smiled at the red-haired woman.

"Like her? But I met her while I was looking for
you; she’s the magus who was in the Fane! But that’s wonderful! When you (gods
forbid) inherit the throne from father, what better to have as a queen than a
woman with
magia?"

She put her short curls back from her face,
features sharpening with concentration.

"If you’re serious, we can have the wedding later
this year. Father will take you out of the university. You ought to give him at
least one grandchild before you leave White Mountains again. Don’t you think?
And she could teach at the University of the White Mountain while we train her
in statecraft . . . What’s the matter, Lu?"

The Prince of Candover pulled down his knotted
handkerchief and wiped his forehead, his head turning uneasily between his
sister and the White Crow. He opened and shut his mouth several times.

"Maybe," he said at last, "we should think about
this."

The Princess Gerima of Candover, passing by the
Master-Physician White Crow, concluded their earlier and longer conversation
with a short wink.

* * *

Mid-afternoon drowses; long, lingering, with
somewhere the scent of fresh-cut grass.

"It’s a climate of miracles now . . ." Theodoret
touched a blunt finger to the White Crow’s temple, and the chick-soft down
growing there. "All these people are thinking that tonight is for rejoicing and
tomorrow for putting the world back together. But it’ll be a different world
when they do."

"They know it."

The White Crow reached down and scratched in the
ruff of a silver timber wolf. The wolf scrabbled in the soft earth at the edge
of the flower-bed, nosing a bone to the surface, and trotted off with it in its
jaws.

"Scholar-Soldier, are you waiting for the moon?"
Bishop Theodoret asked. "To see what might be written on it?"

She opened her mouth to reply and stayed silent.

The Decan of Noon and Midnight, afternoon sunlight
soft on sandstone and gold flanks, paced between flowerbeds and fountains. The
tusked and fanged muzzle lowered, moving in the ancient smile. Where He passed,
people stopped their talk and knelt on the cool grass. The White Crow smelt
stone-dust, and the distant burning of candles.

Theodoret’s face creased into a smile. "The man
will catch up with you sooner or later. Heart of the Woods! Talk to him, lady,
and then I can stop avoiding him in your company. I have somewhat of a desire to
speak with your architect-magus."

A gargoyle-daemon whirled leathery wings, roosting
on a balustrade; cawing something softly to a man who stood beside her and did
not kneel to the Decan of Noon and Midnight. One Rat in red satin folded his
arms insouciantly and stared at the sky. A little distance away, young Entered
Apprentices continued their dancing.

The Spagyrus touched His lips to the fountain,
raised His head, passing on. The White Crow scooped her hand in and tasted, lips
numbed with heavy red wine.

"Who knows
what
may happen?" She grinned.
"My lord Bishop, I think we should have another drink, before they dispose of
the lot."

"Not much chance of that, I would have thought."

The White Crow gazed down into the gardens, at men
and women and Rats. "Don’t bet on it. Some of this lot could out-drink a
miracle, no problem."

In a further garden, Captain-General Desaguliers
swept his plush cloak back with ringed fingers. Medal-ribbons fluttered. The
white ostrich plumes in his silver headband curved up in a fan, one dipping to
brush his lean jaw, almost blinding him. The jeweled harness of his sword
clanked as he walked.

"Well, now . . ."

He gestured expansively. Four Cadets walked with
him, each similarly overdressed; the tallest–a sleek black Rat–stumbling over
the hem of her cloak from time to time. Desaguliers belched. He leaned heavily
on the shoulder of the gargoyle-daemon.

"I think we should serioushly talk . . ."

"I agree." The harsh caw, muted now, didn’t carry
further than this corner of the garden. The elderly acolyte-daemon waddled on
clawed feet across the grass, her shabby wings pulled cloak-like around her
shoulders. Her claw-tipped fingers clasped each other across her flaking breast
as if she prayed. "Messire Captain-General, I offer no apologies for what we
were before—"

"No, no. ’Course not. Victims of circumstances.
Superior orders," he said owlishly, bead-black eyes widening. "Had we been
otherwise then . . ."

Desaguliers pushed himself upright, halting the
gargoyle-daemon with a pressure of his furred arm. He laid his snout across her
shoulder, crumpling his ear against her beaked head, and pointed with his free
hand.

"See them? Tha’s his Majesty the
King.
Just
needs a little looking after, is all. Going to call a meeting, me and the Lords
Magi ’n’ others, form a Senate." He stopped, puzzled. "That isn’t what I was
going to tell you. What was I going to tell you?"

The gargoyle-daemon’s body shifted under his arm as
he felt her draw in a long breath.