by Mary Gentle
"Gods are not permitted, or hindered. If He can uncreate, then that is well. If He can uncreate us all, then that is well. All things done by the Divine are well."
"Naw!" The bird’s croak sawed the air: comic, ludicrous before the Decan of the Eleventh Hour. "No! You’re wrong!"
"The Divine are not wrong, child of flesh, for whatever we do is right, because it is We who act."
"You sent! Me! To heal!"
"For then it would have been I who was right, and not the Lord of Noon and Midnight. Child of flesh, heal if you will. If you can. Until now, the hour had not yet quite come–but it has come, now.
"Now."
"It is time and the Hour is striking!"
The white crow’s feathers flurried as she strutted across the gravel, the earth that smelt faintly of mold, of rot, of corruption. Black bird-eyes glimmered, piercing. Her heavy beak stabbed the ground before great brick claws that, closing around her, could have cracked her like a flea.
Human speech cracked out of her as a thrush cracks a snail: shattering, raw.
"Who! Dies! Now! Who?"
The Decan weeps.
Lids slide down over Her eyes that hold deserts, rise to show the diamond-dust of tears. A shadow begins to cover Her breasts. Her head is raised as if she listens to the striking of some inaudible hour.
"Cannot you tell, child of earth?
"It is he, the Decan of Noon and Midnight. How else may he hope to be One, who is one of Thirty-Six, unless he can uncreate and self-create himself? He must die, truly, to create himself again out of non-being, and if he cannot–why, then. Nothing. For Us all."
"How! Can! You! Allow!"
"We foresee it will be so. Create it will be so. Past his death we cannot see nor create. "
The corruption of plague shines in the desert eyes of the god-daemon.
Past speech, past debate, past miracle; the weight of aeons waits for the moment in which this may exist: true death.
"No! Hrrrakk-kk! No!"
Battered by a Divine suffering that no mortal flesh can behold, avian or human, the white crow flees, flying out into the Fane.
"You’re a fool! Hrrrrakk! I won’t! Let you! Do this!"
Wings beat, her frail heart pulsing urgency, sensing how in the air it trembles now: the striking of the noon of the Night Sun.
Chapter Eight
Becalmed.
Black water slopped. Fog coiled across its cold surface. The one lantern’s yellow light made no reflection in the water.
The forgetfulness of the Boat pulled at Zar-bettu-zekigal, at every cell in her body. Her eyes darkened with Memory.
"You always call me buzzard because I used to sound like one. When I was a baby. Mee-oo," Zar-bettu-zekigal called. "Mee-oo."
The harsh sound echoed back flatly from fog and darkness. She walked across the deck, the untied laces of her black ankle-boots ticking on the wood, arms wrapped about herself. "See you, El, you remember that."
The older Katayan woman sat cross-legged at the stern, by the lantern, one hand resting on the tiller of the Boat, lace ruffles falling over her wrist. A frown of intense concentration twisted her face.
"More." .
"Oh, what! See you, I’ll tell you about the first time I ever met Messire . . . It was in an austquarter crypt. He said, Students, Charnay, but of a particular talent. The young woman is a Kings’ Memory. And then: You’re young, all but trained, as I take it, and without a patron. My name is Plessiez. In the next few hours I–we–will badly need a trusted record of events. Trusted by both parties. If I put that proposition to you?"
She squatted down in front of Elish-hakku-zekigal.
"Trust me, El?"
Sweat plastered the woman’s black curls to her forehead; her pallid face seemed stained, under the eyes, with brown. Elish’s lips moved silently, concentrating on the voice, following Memory’s bright thread.
"I remember what you said to me when I left South Katay. Learn hard, little buzzard, it opens all the world to you, and you’re a wanderer. I’ll be here to hear your tales. I love you, Elish. I’ll always come back and see you."
Zar-bettu-zekigal knelt, hands on her knees, tail coiled up about her hips. She leaned forward to study the compass rose set into the deck before the shaman woman. The needle moved ceaselessly, swinging in five ninety- degree arcs around the circle, in turn to all five points of the compass. She sat back, willing Elish the power to steer through the amnesia of the Boat, stronger now with night and nightmares haunting its drifting.
"Listen, there’s more—"
Outside her circle of Memory’s voice, fleering mirror faces begin to gather.
The torch pitched forward, flaring soot across the floor.
His vision cleared.
Plessiez climbed to his feet, rubbing his haunch. Mist hung above him, choking the brick shaft they descended. He made to pick up the torch, and stopped.
The guttering torches on the stairwell shone down on a distorted curving brick floor that crested up, curved down in hollows, rippled out in frozen curves. The last of these steps had not been the last, once. It lay embedded in a tide of brick paving that had flowed, like water. His torch rocked in a deep hollow.
Brushwood rustled. Sound hissed back from the walls, with the drip of water. Niter spidered white patterns. Plessiez stepped down into the hollow, bending to pick up his torch. Flames glimmered blackly along the pitch. The fingers of his other hand cramped on his rapier’s hilt; the point circling, alert.
On the steps above a voice Charnay’s and not Char- nay’s hissed: "Go back little animal go back go die go away!"
He spun, sword raised. "What?"
Her blunt snout lowered, regarding him. She frowned. "I said, this is strangely altered since the last time we ventured down here."
"You–heard nothing?"
"Heard?" Charnay stared past him. A constricted passage some six feet high remained between roof and floor. This tunnel, lightless now, hissed unidentifiable echoes back.
"Bring another torch."
The brown Rat trod heavily. Her scaly tail lashed debris on the steps: brick rubble, desiccated wood, the brown knobs of animal vertebrae. She tugged her stained blue sash across her chest, scratching at her furred dugs.
Brick gave way underfoot to earth and gravel.
He held up his torch, blinking. The yellow light and black smoke of burning pitch faded into a wider open space.
Twin gibbets now stood by the entrance to the catacombs. Outlined in a pale silver glow, their nests of chains hung down, wound about bones, ragged flesh, cerements.
"Those weren’t here before."
Gravel crunched under the brown Rat’s clawed feet. Charnay rested a hand against one of the white marble obelisks that flanked the opening, staring up at the inscription. She snorted.
" ‘Halt! Here begins the Empire of the Dead . . .’ You always did have odd humors, messire."
"Magia indicated this one of the septagon sites, not I."
All perspective vanished in darkness. No torches burned inside the catacombs. Cold struck up from the graveled earth beneath his clawed feet. A smell of niter and dank mud sank into his fur.
"Charnay . . ."
Sound whispered back from the galleries.
". . . you would do me a greater favor, I think, to go back up the shaft and guard the way against our over-enthusiastic follower."
A hand clamped on his shoulder. The brown Rat stared him in the face, lowering her head to do it.
"I’m not in the business of doing you favors, Plessiez, man. I don’t trust you. You see your own advantage in matters very clearly. I don’t trust you not to work out some even more clever plot, and make things even worse." She cut him off before he could interrupt. "I don’t like all of this. I want things back to normal. You’re going in to put an end to this, and I’m going to be at your back every step of the way!"
She drew a deep breath. Plessiez, shaken, turned his gaze pointedly to where she gripped his
shoulder. After a long minute her fingers loosened.
"You were compliant enough when it was a matter of a little sickness among the human servants, and the Decans our masters being persuaded to remove further off—"
"Ahh!" The Lieutenant spat. She held up the torch, shadows leaping violently in the gibbets’ chains. "You and his Majesty are a pair of fools, all of you. Now this dangerous nonsense with black suns and acolytes out of control–and you call me stupid, messire priest!"
A knob of bone rattled across the earth, rolling to rest at Plessiez’s feet. "I think . . . I think we should go back."
Muted light dazzled his eyes as she lowered the torch, peering at him.
"Obviously we can do no good here; it was idiocy to suggest so." Plessiez faced about, putting his back to the catacomb-entrance. One-handed and with some difficulty he sheathed his rapier. "I don’t have the knowledge, I don’t have the equipment for magia; we should retreat and reconsider this. Perhaps return later, better equipped. You as a soldier will recognize the sense in this."
His tail twitched an inch one way, an inch back; he fell to grooming the fur of his shoulder for a moment.
"What?" Charnay demanded.
"I’ve told you. We’re leaving. We’ll return here in due course."
The brown Rat said: "You’re going in there."
Plessiez leaned his hand up against the brown brick wall. Niter sweated under his long-fingered hands. He lowered his head for a second, then lifted it, staring up at the rusting gibbet-chains, and the white-painted inscription across the entrance.
"No," he said. "No."
"Plessiez, man—"
"I won’t do it!"
Echoes hissed off the low walls. Cold and damp struck deeper, chilling blood and bone. A soft chuckle rustled through the chains of the gibbets. The black Rat leaned dizzily against the brickwork.
"Now I envy you. Charnay, I would to gods I had your thick skull and your ability not to foresee."
The brown Rat lugged out her long sword, leaning the point on the earth. She cocked her head to one side, a frown on her blunt muzzle. "Messire, I don’t know what to do in there."
"Neither do I!"
The black Rat rubbed his hand across his face, smoothing fur that slicked up in tufts. His eyes glinted darkly, meeting Charnay’s.
"Now, listen to me, Lieutenant Charnay. I suspect that when we emerge on the surface it will be to find the servants, humans and all, in confusion. H’m? Their temple destroyed, their ranks thinned by pestilence."
Plessiez picked at his incisors with one broken claw.
"His Majesty, gods preserve them, I fear to be dead, if what young Fleury said is true. And the Lords of the Celestial Sphere, one might prophesy, returned to that plane and only overlooking our earth with their Divine providence. All which, if I am right, leaves clear room for one determined in his aims. He–he and his friends, Charnay–might do much, now, in the government of the heart of the world."
"You’re going in there."
The black Rat knelt, driving the shaft of the torch into the soft earth and gravel. He got to his feet slowly. Black eyes bright, he said: "No. Not for my life. No."
Silver glinted on the onyx rings on his fingers, on the head-band that looped over one translucent pink ear and under the other; shimmered on the black feather plume that moved with his breathing. Nothing of the priest about him now: more gone than ankh and insignia. Charnay took in his febrile tension.
"I’m not a fool." She shrugged. "I know enough to be afraid. Leave magia alone and working for weeks, and the gods alone know what it’s become now! But we don’t have any choice. I told the Night Council that if you destroyed one of the seven points it would stop the necromancy working. Get in there and do it. You promised the little Kings’ Memory."
The black Rat turned his head, staring into the depths of the catacombs. He scratched at the back of his head, sliding a dark palm round to rub his snout as he lowered his arm.
"So I did."
He shuddered: cold drifting out from the low arch of the catacombs. A visible pulse beat in the soft fur of his throat. His sword-harness clinked.
"What will you do now, my friend?"
The brown Rat, torch and long rapier in her hands, blocked the way back to the stairs. Her eyes narrowed. She thrust her torch at him so suddenly that he must grasp it or be singed; swung the sword up two-handed, and cut at the rusty chains.
Bones and cloth hit the earth; Plessiez skittered back. Charnay, backhanding, cut at the other gibbet. The rusty chains resisted; the rotten wood of the support cracked loud as musket-shot, teetered, and fell forward into darkness.
"Now you’re equipped, messire. Now move."
A hard knot of tension under his breastbone, Plessiez knelt, holding high the torch, swiftly and distastefully fumbling through the heaps of bones. What seemed most useful he wrapped in cerements; after a moment’s hesitation tucking the bundle securely under his sword-belt.
"Well, then," he said. "Well."
Damp cold prickled his spine, and he stepped forward with his tail carried fastidiously high. Smoke from the pitch made his eyes run with water. He raised the torch as he walked through the catacomb-entrance. Shadows of rib and pelvic bones danced on the cavern walls.
At his right hand rose the beginning of a wall of bones.
Forearm and thigh bones, laid crosswise like kindling and as brown, built up a retaining wall a head taller than himself. Into the space between the arm and leg bones and the cavern wall, ribs and vertebrae, carpals and metacarpals, pelvic bones and all else had been carelessly thrown. Along the top of the wall, jammed jowl to jowl, lay skulls. Rows of skulls jutting their eyeless long snouts into darkness, yellow incisors impossibly long.
The brown bone glowed, sprinkled with niter as with frost.
Skulls, set into the walls of knobbed bone joints, made patterns of chevrons and ankhs; and long intact skeins of tail-vertebrae snaked around them, jammed in tight.
"We can be followed in here." Charnay rescued the other torch, waving it to cast light down the curving passages and cross-passages of the royal catacombs. Another wall rose beside her; unencumbered with torch and rapier she could have stood in the center of the passage and touched a hand to both.
"And outdistanced . . ."
Plessiez paced forward, torch high. Black shadows darted in the hollow rings of eye-sockets, in the channels of snouts, and over incisors still clinging to bony jaws. The brown Rat held her torch close to the white marble plaque, one of a number set into the wall at intervals.
" ‘Behold these bones, the . . . the nest. . .’ "
Plessiez completed, rapidly and accurately enough to put down some of his terror, " ‘ . . . the nest of each fledgling soul. ’ Poor poetry, I fear, but his Majesty’s taste was always less than highbrow—"
He broke off as the hilt of the brown Rat’s sword nudged him. Without looking back, he walked into the catacombs and silence.
"And if it were only true, now, further in!"
The interior of the plague-tent shone, full of light-shadows.
Shock chilled her back to reality. Evelian stepped outside and let the canvas flap fall to behind her. She rubbed a work-roughened hand across her face.
"I’ve . . . found Falke for you."
Her skin sweated, despite the Night Sun’s chill. Slanting bars of light-shadow fell from the Imperial pavilions down into Fourteenth District’s square. Gold-and-white banners hung limp, the canvas cloth now thickened with ice. Frost glimmered on shattered masonry, on abandoned muskets and greaves and shoes thrown together in a pile by the Rat-Lords’ clear-up details.
"The master builder? Here?"
Through blazing black light, the Lord-Architect came towards her from the construction site, moving with a frighteningly rapid stride.
"He’s . . . Falke . . . When he was a boy, we used to talk about all this. About House of Salomon and how we should build . . . I swore I’d never get mixed up in it again af
ter it failed the first time, but what would you? Poor bastard."
She drew a noisy breath, huffed it out; dizzy with shock.
"All those poor bastards."
The fat man’s tread shook the paving-stones. She automatically stepped out of his way. She smelt machine oil and sweaty linen. The Lord-Architect Casaubon threw the tent-flap open, staring past her, to where the plague- dead lay stacked like winter wood.
"Rot him, I needed him!"
Casaubon pushed past her into the tent, the bulk of his body brushing aside her and the canvas with equal impatience. Evelian stared. Outrage flared in her, old temper reasserting itself.
"Damn you, man, what right do you have to say that? What right do you have not to care that he’s dead?"
"Oh, I care!"
She turned her eyes away from the laid-out rows of men and women. Some wrapped in blankets or cloaks; some in summer clothing, still with the traces of lead-and-ochre paint on their faces. Afraid of how many she might recognize under the black disfigurement of plague.
"You can’t—" Evelian stopped. The Lord-Architect Casaubon knelt down by Falke’s body, one fat hand knotting surcoat and mail-shirt both at the shoulder, pulling him up into a half-sitting position, while his other hand searched the recesses of the man’s clothes.
"Rot him, he knows things I need to know. Damn him for dying now of all times!"
White hair fell back from the plague-tattered flesh of the dead man; his mouth gaped slightly. A thin line of white showed under his eyelids. One hand flopped, too recently dead for rigidity. Casaubon handled the weight effortlessly, fat-sheathed muscles tensing. Evelian grunted.
"Not the joker you were in Carver Street now, are you, my lord?"
"Get out!"
Her heart pounded. She tasted blood, coppery and cold, on her breath; suddenly certain she had stayed too long away from her daughter. She stepped back.
Black air fogged vision, hiding the barricaded buildings around the square and the distant reaches of the construction site. Hiding the sky, beyond which distant wings moved; casting a veil of black across the streets, and the aurora-geometries of the labyrinth . . .
