Rats and Gargoyles

by Mary Gentle

  "Damn the whole lot of you. Your city, the Scholar- Soldiers, Decans, and me above all."

  His arm fell to his side. The black light glinted on oil and grease-stains on his satin frock-coat and breeches. His cravat hung unfolded over his open shirt. With no preparation, he sat down heavily on the top step; the marble vibrating under his bulk. He rested one cushioned elbow on his thigh, and the heel of that hand ground into his eye-socket.

  "You all can rot, for all I care. I sent her into that place, promised her help I can’t perform. I . . ."

  He lumbered back up on to his feet.

  "Of all the pox-rotten fools. She’s good with magia and better with a sword, and I, I had to make her into a Master-Physician! Of all the stupid, stupid—"

  Something brushed his cheek.

  Startled, he raised a hand, lowered it.

  A bee crept across his dirty knuckles, faceted eyes gleaming. Mica-bright wings quivered; its legs feather- touched his skin. Casaubon held his breath. The banded furry body pulsed, lifted into flight.

  For one second he heard the hum of summer, of clear days, and the smell (too sweet, too rich) of rose gardens.

  Metal clinked.

  He knelt down ponderously, sweeping aside one of the skirts of his frock-coat, and felt on the paving until his fingers contacted metal. He straightened, opened his palm. Heavy, glinting with the black light, a golden bee lay in his hand.

  "Lord Casaubon?"

  The Mayor’s voice.

  Black light moved with the viscosity of honey. It thickened, rolled across the construction site, sliding down from the sky and the Night Sun. A hard metallic taste invaded his mouth. He spat, wiped his mouth on his satin sleeve.

  "She needs me . . ."

  The fading warmth from the stone of Seshat illuminated their faces. Shadowed eye-sockets, noses; glinting hair and bright eyes. The straggle-haired girl knelt by her mother, one hand gripping the woman’s, intent on the model. Evelian leaned forward, yellow hair spilling across her breasts.

  "I forget her for whole minutes at a time." He smeared one plaster-wet hand down his shirt to clean it; weight resting back on one massive heel; brushing blindly at the grease-stains on the coat’s embroidered lapels.

  "So many years to find her, and then by accident. . ."

  Water brimmed in his eyes and overran. Tears spilled down his cheeks, acid-hot and then cold in the cold air; running down cheeks and chins, runneling wet marks down his stained linen shirt.

  "I never heard her speak of you." Evelian’s voice held wonder. "I knew there had to be somebody the cause of it."

  He covered his face with his hand. As loud as a child, he snuffled, and wiped his leaking eyes and nose on his sleeve. He sucked in a breath and looked down at her with the total bewilderment of pain.

  "What’s happening to her? I thought"–his voice wavered, thinned, began to ululate–"that I’d help her, gods rot her. Now. That I’d be able to . . . to get there, and . . ."

  He rubbed his face with soaking hands. Tears and snot soaked the cuffs of his coat. He hiccuped, gasping in air; muffling a sob in the palm of one hand.

  "I brought her into this!"

  The chill on his wet hands burned in the Night Sun’s enveloping cold. Arctic, a wind blew grit across the construction site. Sand tacked against his cheek.

  His left hand tightened on the metal bee, and he opened it and looked down, watching beads of blood ooze out onto the plaster-stained lines of his palm. Cold numbed the pain. He folded his hand over the sharp wings and antennae, clenching hard.

  "Valentine. White Crow!"

  Cold blossomed.

  As swiftly as if it were the light of some dawn, cold air fractured the world. Thick spikes of ice jolted down from the scaffolding. Marble paving crackled underfoot. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled, falling awkwardly, sprawling on his back with a heel caught in the skirts of his coat. The metal bee fell from his hand.

  The Word of Seshat faded from the foundation-stone, remaining for a long moment imprinted on his vision.

  In the dark he called out: "White Crow!"

  Broken marble littered the stone.

  As far as her human eyes could see, ruined stone lay. From fragments small as a finger-bone to blocks the size of houses: all tumbled, splintered into a landscape of rubble. Occasional crags jutted up, white slopes yet covered with burning candles. A mist of light curled across the stone.

  The White Crow stood with the Bishop of the Trees in a clear circle some thirty yards across.

  A marble cricket, large as her hand and carved intricately, squatted on a ledge of the broken jaw. Its hind legs rasped together. The small voice sounded clear and perfect after the thunder of stone: "Little animal, you are laughing at me, I think."

  The stone under her bare feet crumbled, becoming friable and then dust. She sifted it between her toes. The White Crow smiled, not able to stop; sensuous in the new awareness of her self. She stood naked with no embarrassment.

  Theodoret laughed.

  "Why, what do you think I was doing, my lord Decan, while I lived in death here? I learned. There’s much to be learned in the Fane, when only a miracle stands between you and death, and," the old man said tartly, "you wish that it didn’t."

  "You have learned to wish to die."

  "No, my lord. You learned that of us. My young friend Candia always swore you pried too closely into mortal concerns and mortality."

  The White Crow squatted, running her hands through the dust of the Lord of Noon and Midnight. It sparkled on her fingers. Only the tiny voice remained now, guttering as a candle . . .

  She sat back, bumping her bruised buttocks, grinning. The alabaster dust sparkled white and silver on her shins, in the red-gold curls of her pubic hair. She rubbed her hands against her nose, smelling sweat and frost and fire.

  "The Eleventh Decan told me, Divine One. The Lady of the Ten Degrees of High Summer. You can forget, you can change your nature; it’s only Rats and humans that have to live with limitation." She stretched out a leg, examining bruises already yellow and purple. Fierce unreasonable joy fired her. "Forget, change, become a miracle."

  "I have made true death. "

  "Black miracles. Black miracles."

  "And I will become One."

  The White Crow gripped fistfuls of stone dust, sifting them out into the cold air. Abruptly she folded her legs under her buttocks, dug her feet in, pushed; and stood up without using her hands: every muscle electric with energy. She turned, arms outstretched, letting the last of the dust fall.

  Theodoret, his hands folded primly on his knees, said: "I learned that I am a fool, for thinking to instruct one of the Thirty-Six. I learned that when the Decan of Noon and Midnight pretends ignorance of human conspiracy it may be because he is using that conspiracy; letting us place your true-death necromancy under the heart of the world; bringing the plague and the Night Sun and your sickness—"

  All the joy of the Scholar-Soldier in her, the White Crow put in: "Or else, being clouded by base Matter, only taking advantage of what conspiracies mortals had already put into action—"

  "–and I learned, my lord Decan, that foolishness is not a province of humanity. But that," Theodoret said, "I always knew."

  The cricket’s fretted hind legs ceased moving. White stone gleamed. No voice formed.

  The White Crow gazed up at the old man. She touched his warm shoulder with a faintly proprietorial air and smiled. The air about them crackled, temperature falling towards sub-zero.

  "I should despair." She shook her head, grinning ruefully. "It’s this, I think. When you were healed, did you feel . . . ?"

  "Master-Physician, yes."

  "As if it were impossible to be hurt, ever again?"

  He put both hands on her bare shoulders, the touch of his fingers warm. Light gleamed in his gray eyes like water; silver and silky as his flowing hair. Briefly he kissed her, on the dark-red hair above her temples. The White Crow startled. His breath, warm and damp, s
melt of cut grass.

  "Now," he said.

  He turned, kneeling, burying his hands in the dust.

  The last outcrops of rounded marble slumped into dust, white light blazing hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. She raised her head. Her heart beat in her ears and groin.

  "I have learned," Theodoret said.

  A dank smell of leaf-mold penetrated her nostrils. The sole of her foot moved in some slick substance, and the White Crow looked down. Ankle-deep in stone dust, her skin sensed a moment’s texture of river mud.

  A faint light the color of sun through beech leaves burns around the Bishop’s hands–fades, fails and dies.

  The Thirty-Six feel the great wheel of the world hesitate in its turning: pause, poise. Wait.

  Some fractional movement above, where iron flood- doors hung suspended in grooves in the tunnel roof, warned Plessiez. He leaped forward as the chains and shutter crashed down.

  "Plessiez'"

  "Charnay, is all well?"

  Her voice came, muffled, from behind the iron door. He picked himself up off his knees, realized that he stood in a brighter light than the fallen torch could account for.

  The brown Rat’s voice faded. His ears rang with the noise of the shutter’s falling. After a moment she appeared at one of the close-barred window-openings where the tunnel doubled back on itself. "I’ll get round to you another way. Press on, messire. Courage!"

  Under his breath, the black Rat murmured: "And if what I find now is some way of slipping past you, regaining the surface?"

  Sound scuttered at the edge of hearing. He snatched up the fallen rapier, the leather-wound hilt warm and worn under his palm. Here brown bones stacked the walls, racked up in barriers eight or nine feet tall; the close-packed knobs of bone broken only by jutting inset skulls. Plessiez moved cautiously down the wet slope. Ahead, the floor of the tunnel ran steeply down and the ceiling rose, until both widened out into the central cavern of the ossuary.

  "A little short of omens and nightmares," he whispered, sardonic, shaking.

  The sound ran down ahead of him, hissing into echoes, not fading but growing; increasing in volume until it yawped up the scale into laughter.

  "Charnay?"

  Steep flights of steps angled down into the great cavern from other, higher entrances. Marble altars stood to each side, among the bones and obelisks. Light glowed on the smooth walls, rounded almost into bosses, brown strata hooping up with the curve of aeons. Black candles towered in ornate stands, each one lit. His shadow on the passage wall and the cave roof leaped, agile, frantic, despite his even pacing.

  "Fool," said the Hyena.

  She swung lithely down from an entrance whose tunnel must cross above his. A basket-hilted rapier balanced in her right hand. Greasy hair fell down over her slanting brows, over the shoulders of her red shirt that hung torn to her waist. Her filthy red breeches were cut off at the knee; her bruised and cut feet moved without hesitation across the gravel as she ran towards him.

  "Lady, you follow me fast enough to outdistance me."

  She yawped a laugh that made his pelt shiver.

  Quickly he knelt and took the bundle of bones from his belt, tucking them under the nearest protruding wall. Skulls brushed his hand, friable and warm. He tightened his grip on his rapier. Without further speech he ran forward, seeking the flat cavern floor.

  "Gods—"

  Her blade leaped fire and light in the corner of his vision. He parried; scrabbling back to look wildly at what lay in the center of the ossuary cavern.

  On the far side, the catafalque of the Rat-Kings stood on a raised dais, on a dozen marble steps: a fragile lacy thing of white stone, engraved with the symbols of each of the Thirty-Six, with the insignia of the Churches– including Plessiez’s own Guiry–of which the Rat-Kings would be titular head. Friezes of ancient nobles in procession circled the body of the catafalque, upon which, in equally execrable taste, a circle of seven robed Rats lay in a King. Under their bier, carved in precise mirror- detail, seven Rat corpses, their bony vertebrae intertwined, lay in various stages of stony decomposition: this one a skeleton, snout crumbling, incisors gone; the next a shrunken fleshly body, with tiny carved marble worms emerging from it; the next a petrified mummy . . .

  Plessiez ignored the floridly baroque bad taste, staring past the dark-haired woman, past the blade that shot highlights from the candles.

  "That—" Some bright sanity burned in the woman’s eyes. For a moment she straightened from her sloping crouch, the animal gaze gone. "Is that what they all were? What we took from you, what we placed under the heart of the world?"

  They lay on the graveled earth before the catafalque– the femur and tail-vertebrae and skull of a Rat, scarcely large enough to be adult. A scarlet ribbon tied them in curious knots. One long knobbed femur, a rib, a rib with vertebrae attached: the long decreasing series of tail- bones. They made a kind of irregular septagon shape, the skull and lower jaw-bone crowning it. Now Plessiez realized where the light came from. These, that had been new and scrubbed bones–boiled down for cleanliness– now glowed as white as roses in morning sunlight.

  Fear shocked it out of him.

  "Lady . . . four times the Divine upon this earth and by some black miracle caused a soul to die. We made our necromancy from their mortal remains."

  The Hyena’s whisper hardly broke his trance: "There’s nothing there. Nothing."

  Red ribbon tied the bones in angled geometries. Red ribbon threaded the eye-sockets, attaching the skull to the bone framework upon which it rested. Ribbon, and the gravel on which it rested: all solid, all bodied into form and existence . . .

  The whiteness of the bones, now, the whiteness of absolute negation.

  "I saw them with butterflies all in their mouths," she sang, "seeking the Boat, and born again. But this . . ." The woman’s tone dropped to growling speech. "This isn’t death, but nothing."

  Plessiez raised his eyes. The woman, unarmored, stood as if she still wore the Sun’s ragged banners; brows come down over her slanting dark eyes. Yellow shadows moved at her feet, mottled and smelling of heat and dust. She met his gaze. Her eyes dulled: flat, cunning, bestial.

  White light shone from behind her. The arctic negation of that light chilled him: so small, so bright.

  "They are the bones of the truly dead." He stared around. At the whiteness sifting down upon the catafalque, upon the stacked bones of the royal dead: each with the seed-bone removed, each long since boarded the Boat and traveled the Night and returned again.

  The chill of the earth faded under his clawed feet. Numbness replaced it, radiating out from the tiny pile of bones in the center of the cavern.

  "You may not blame me, lady! Blame the Decan of Noon and Midnight, who thought fit that Guiry should share his alchemical work—"

  Bare feet scuffed gravel. Her sword swung up. He knocked it aside, metal clashing harshly, echoing up into the cavern’s dry heights.

  "It didn’t shock you." Her breath sawed. She flung her free hand out, pointing at him. "I saw. Falke died. I saw your face. They all started to die. It didn’t–even– surprise you. You knew the plague would hit us—"

  On the walls of the ossuary cavern the shadows of the woman and the black Rat danced: sword-blades engaging, darting, each movement exaggerated, each swirl of the Rat’s plume, each stoop-shouldered dash of the woman. Laughter yammered, drowning the hiss of bare feet on the earth.

  "–ours and the Decan’s, the same pestilence—"

  "Wait!"

  His long wrist pivoted. He beat her blade back, wrenching his shoulder. Gravel bit his heels. His panting breath echoed back off the walls with the clang of metal. Habit took him to guard position; found him the snap in her concentration and lunged–parried, beat her blade down and jumped back.

  "–you the same cause—"

  The woman crabbed sideways three steps and scooped up a brown thigh-bone from the ossuary heap nearest, weighing it in her left hand. The bone-wall gro
aned, teetered.

  "You’re by far a better demagogue than fighter." Plessiez trod forward, his eyes meeting her dulled flat gaze. Anger burned him breathless. And fear. "You’re a fool, get out."

  "Yes, a fool. Yes, a fool to listen, ever, to you. I am the last now: the last of Sun and Roses. If I am a hyena, 1 can make you carrion!"

  Highlights glinted in the woman’s eyes, the eyes of a woman no more than adequate, he would guess, with a blade; but now flat and hard and cunning, echoing the yellow shadows that moved with her, mimicked her movements, padded in shadows, laughed inhuman laughter.

  White light burned.

  Now multiple shadows danced on the cavern walls. Brightness scarred his vision. He risked a lunge, continued it on into a run: dashing for the flight of stone steps leading up to another exit. In one loping jump the woman made the lower step: rapier darting up at his breast, he parried, skidded to one knee, staggered up, breath hot in his mouth.

  He grabbed at his belt, finding the main-gauche lost somewhere; lunged again, one foot on the bottom step, drove her up three steps;, brought a heel down half off the edge of the sheer flight; leaped backwards and landed on the earth, left hand and tail out for balance. She halfloped and half-fell down the steps towards him.

  The point took his gaze away. He only sensed her hand move.

  Reflex brought his left hand up. The thrown femur jarred his wrist, clattered away on the floor. She lunged, leaping from the steps; and he bound her blade and kicked, crouched, whipped his scaled tail hard across her ankles. She fell.

  She pitched past him, into the ossuary wall that she had loosened the bone from: in a rush and shatter of femurs and skulls and ribs and pelvises the mass of dry brown bones avalanched down on her. She sprawled face-down, greasy hair flying, one bare foot scrabbling for purchase. In the same second he fell forward into the furthest extent of his lunge and felt the penetration of flesh clear up the blade.

  Through his grip on the hilt he felt his own pulse or the last fibrillation of her heart.

  A Rat skull bounced across the floor. Vertebrae scattered like dice. The bone-pile slid to an unsteady halt, balanced up like kindling. The woman sprawled, partly covered in splintered brown bone, the half-inch-wide blade jammed up through her stomach and under the lowest rib. Blood rivuleted, staining her shirt; a dark stain marked her breeches as bowel and bladder relaxed. Her bubbling, blood-filled breath echoed into silence.