The Hyena, without any sign of hearing Plessiez, looked past him to the young Katayan woman. "You what are you?"
Zar-bettu-zekigal scratched her ear with the tip of her tail.
"A Kings' Memory?" she offered.
The woman stood, tossed her lobster-tail helmet underarm: Zari caught it in both hands, and the Hyena took firm hold of her shoulder and drew the Katayan aside.
"You've been with the priest; you tell me what you've heard."
Plessiez straightened his shoulders, sanguine in the haunting-light for all his ruffled fur. His brilliant eyes darted, missing nothing: the two women, dark-haired and dirty, almost twins, standing by poles decorated with the shifting-eyed skulls of cranes.
The older and taller bent her head, listening. The younger stood with eyes half-shut, in the concentration of Memory, the speech of Masons' Hall unrolling in smooth sequence. Plessiez narrowed his eyes, translucent ears swiveling; stood still, and listened.
"Vitruvius writes . . ."
Casaubon sprawled back in the sagging armchair, legs planted widely apart, a book held at a distance in his free hand. He bit into a gravy-soaked hunk of bread, chewed, and put the remainder of the bread down on the expanse of his spread thigh. Dark liquid blotted the silk.
"In The Ten Books of Architecture, writes of . . ." He squinted, licked a gravy-stained digit and thumbed ponderously through the pages. " 'Hegetor's Tortoise: A Siege-Engine. 'The Ballista.' Catapults, crossbows; 'The Automata of Warfare' . . . Military engineering. Hardly what I'm used to, but I can do it."
"Casaubon!"
The White Crow smacked the side of his head. Lucas seethed as she pulled out the tail of her shirt, grabbed first one and then the other of the Lord-Architect's plump hands, and wiped each relatively clean.
"Master Desaguliers has put a factory production-line at my disposal." He sucked a finger clean. "And the King offers me ample funds."
"The King's as interested in military engineering as Desaguliers?" The White Crow picked up her glass of red wine again. She left her shirt-tail hanging out.
"His Majesty are interesting people," Casaubon remarked.
"Why don't you go back to your rooms and your books," she inquired pointedly, "instead of making a mess of mine?"
Casaubon's head turned as he surveyed the book- strewn, map- and chart-walled room. One eyebrow quirked up.
"Mess?"
Lucas took a deep swallow of wine, slid down in his chair and continued to glare at the Lord-Architect. Blue- gray storm-light blurred the window. The heavy air and wine made his temples throb.
The remains of a meal were spread across the round table. White Crowor Valentinewalked restlessly about the room, glass in hand.
"In any case," Casaubon added, in tones of injured reasonableness, "the porters are still moving my belongings into my room."
His fat arm reached up to the table. He grabbed two tomatoes from a dish and bit into both at once. Through a handful of red pulp and seeds, he added: "Who does Master Desaguliers wish to attack, or defend?"
"Who cares?" Valentine paced back across the book- cluttered floor. She hitched a hip up to sit on the window-sill. "Lucas will know. Won't you, Lucas? Tell us about the politics, Prince."
He struggled to sit up, meeting her tawny eyes.
"Any news I had at my father's court will be eighteen months out of date. I'll have to speak with my uncle. He might be able to tell you something."
"You do that, Prince."
Her grin blurred; and she reached over to pick up the winebottle, nursing it on her lap before refilling her glass. Her eyes moved to the Lord-Architect, and Lucas could not read her expression.
"Why are you here-? Lazarus, no!"
Lucas shifted his legs as the timber wolf trotted in from the further room. Its ice-pale eyes fixed on the Lord- Architect, and it began to whine: a nail scratched down glass. Casaubon reached down and shoved his fingers through the animal's hackle-raised ruff, gripped the wolfs muzzle and shook it.
"There was blood on the moon," he reminded the White Crow.
The timber wolf made an explosive huff! sound and curled up beside the armchair.
Lucas scratched through his springy hair and stood up, striving for calm or authority or anything but confusion.
"I saw," he insisted. "I saw that when I hadn't been in the city an hour."
The White Crow nodded her head several times. She lifted one shoulder; the cotton slid across the curve of it and her breast. "You're talented, Prince-"
Footsteps sounded on the outer stairs. Evelian put her head around the door. She knocked on the open door lintel. "Messire Casaubon?"
"He's here," the White Crow finished.
"The porters can't get everything up to your room." Evelian wiped a thick coil of yellow hair back with her wrist. Her smile showed pale; flesh bagged under her eyes. "If you're not over in two minutes to sort it out, I'm telling them to leave the rest in the street!"
Her blue-and-yellow satin skirt flashed as she turned, and her footsteps clattered down the steps.
Casaubon tossed a handful of tomato-skins to the timber wolf. It snapped them out of mid-air, chewedand immediately hacked the fruit back up, onto the carpet. The Lord-Architect stood, agile. He drew the skirts of his coat about him, bent to peer out of the casement, and held a fat palm out to test the air.
Heat-lightning whitened the rooftops, erratic as artillery. Spots of rain darkened the blistered paint on the window-sill.
"Brandy is good for aposthumes and influenzas," he remarked hopefully. "I'll return shortly, Lady Valentine. Ah. Excuse me."
He bent ponderously and picked up an object from a corner of the room.
Lucas slammed his glass down, slopping wine; staggered across the room, and made it to the window at the same time as the cinnamon-haired woman grabbed the frame and leaned dangerously far out. He leaned out beside her, rain cool on his face.
Casaubon strode across the yard, coat flying, one massive hand gripping the stem of a lace parasol.
His head was high. He did not look up. As he disappeared into the passage Lucas heard his voice rumble, baritone, and the noise of a dropped crate.
"Oh!" The White Crow's arms clamped tight across her ribs. Mouth a rictus, she leaned against the casement and wheezed for air. Lucas opened his mouth to speak and caught the infectious laughter.
"Shit!" he said. "Oh, shit, what a sight!"
The woman rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand. Storm-light gave a warmth to her fine skin, her dark-red curls; and from the open neck of her shirt Lucas breathed a scent of sun and grass and flesh.
He sat down on the opposite side of the sill. Laughter slowly stopped shaking her.
Finding words from nowhere, he explained: "I thought that you were on your own in the city."
"So did I."
Relaxed, her mouth curved; and the terrible warmth of her eyes hit him in the pit of his stomach.
"I am," she contradicted herself softly. "Sometimes I look ahead, and I can see the days, each one a little cell. He knows me, you see. The clown. He thinks that if he entertains me I'll . . ."
Lucas picked up her hand and rubbed it against his face, feeling the warmth; the calluses on her middle finger.
"No." The woman shook her head. "The easiest thing in the world to say to you: stay. Don't listen to la belle dame sans merci. I won't listen to her, either."
Lucas marveled.
"I didn't think you knew I was here at all."
She took her hand back, slid one cotton sleeve of her shirt to show the, curve of her shoulder, and winked at him. Her breath was soft with wine.
"Ah, but now it wouldn't be because of you."
"Valentine-"
"No. Not 'Valentine'," she said. "Not ever again."
Not ever again beat in his pulse with the wine. Thinking how a Lord-Architect would not be here for ever, and how a student might be three years in the city, Lucas grinned crookedly.
Wood creaked with the returning tread of the fat man. The banisters protested his grip. The Lord-Architect and Knight of the Rose Castle stooped, still cracking his head lightly on the door-lintel.
"There was too little space," he confided sunnily. "I told the porters to store certain items in another room. The Lady Evelian suggested yours, young Lucas. I thought that particularly apt, since you're my page."
The light is green, the color of sunlight through hazel leaves in April. It shines on the frost-cracked masonry of a tiny cell. It shines on a thick rusty iron spike.
The air curls with vapors.
His hair is the same, gentle silver-white waves, and it is an untidy thatch above the same creased labile features. Vulnerably swimming eyes blink, would turn away if they could. Instead the mouth stumbles to form words, responds to insistent questioning.
The iron spike is slippery, clotted with blood, plasma, mucus; stringy with sinews. Knobbed bone shows a gleaming red and white.
His head ends raggedly at the stump of a neck . . . torn muscle, wrenched vertebrae, split skin upon which age- freckles are still brown. His head is impaled on the iron spike.
Time has ceased in the stone labyrinths of the Fane. He is lost in a moment of butchery, endlessly prolonged; still balancing his endurance against the endless, endless demands for his knowledge.
The gray eyes brim with tears: not because of the moment's pain, but because the Bishop of the Trees has discovered that the tortures of the gods are infinitely diverse, and eternally prolonged.
"I am not your page!"
The White Crow rolled wine in her mouth, the numbness of alcohol pricking her tongue. The muscular young man stiffened, spine straightening; his black brows scowled: turning in a second from relaxed adult to tightly buttoned boy.
"He's a prince." She sighed, the last vestiges of humorous teasing falling away from her. "Princes can't be servants, you see."
Casaubon placed one hand on his massive chest, and inclined his head in a bow to Lucas of Candover. His heel struck the door, and knocked it to.
"Page of Scepters," he said.
She walked to the reversed-mirror table, concentrating on the lifting and pouring of a bottle. Cool damp storm-air rustled the star-charts pinned to the walls.
"I know. Yes. Lucas is concerned in this somehow," the White Crow admitted, clunking the bottle of straw- colored wine down on the wood.
The Prince sank into the cleared chair at the table, his dark eyes not leaving her face.
"So."
Casaubon grabbed a cold chicken-wing from the table as he passed, eased himself down into the creaking armchair, bit into the oily flesh and, in an indistinct but inviting tone, echoed: "So?"
The White Crow walked to the street-side window. She leaned up against the jamb, banging her shoulder, and pushed the casement open. Rain spattered her face.
A yellow storm-light colored the streets, and the roofs of the houses beyond. Past them, on the swell of the hill and horizon, running in a south-austerly direction to mark the quarter's boundary, a toothed line of obelisks and pyramids made a stark skyline.
Chitinous wings whir, too distant for human hearing. Like distant fly-swarms, acolytes darken the air over the distant stone.
She tasted rain on her lips.
"I know exactly what this is about."
She heard the armchair creak, knew Casaubon's vast bulk must have shifted. The thinning rain glistened on the tiled roofs opposite; and an odor of straw and oil drifted up to her. She fisted one hand and stretched that arm, feeling the wine unlock the muscles.
"Here at the heart of the world . . . it's lazy, don't you feel it?"
Cloud-cover tore in the high wind. She tasted in her mouth how the skyline runs true on Evelian's side of the building: another black chain of courts and wings and outyards, the Fane cutting across aust-easterly to divide the Nineteenth District from the Thirtieth and Dockland.
From behind her Lucas's voice volunteered, "We're souls fixed on the Great Wheel."
The White Crow spluttered, wiped her hand across her nose and mouth, and turned around and sat down on the damp window-sill in one unwise movement.
"Now gods defend us from the orthodox!" She shook her head. The room shifted. She set her empty glass down clumsily. "Next you'll think you have to tell me that everything that is is alive, and held in the constant creation of the Thirty-Six. From stones, bees and roses, to worlds that in their orbits move, singing with their own life that moves them . . ."
"Unquote." The Lord-Architect belched. He settled back down into the armchair. "Valentine, you've grown regrettably long-winded since we last met."
The White Crow stood. Anger moved her precisely across the room, avoiding piles of books and the table.
"Four times." Her index finger stabbed at him. "The first time it happened was the first year I came here. It's why I stayed. Then another, three years later. And then two in this year alone: one in winter and one a month ago. Now, don't tell me the College can't read the stars as clearly as I can. Don't tell me that's not why you're here!"
Casaubon watched her with guileless china-blue eyes.
"What happened four times?" Prince Lucas asked.
She swayed, and reached out to steady herself on empty air. The stale smell of an eaten meal roiled her stomach.
"I'll show you."
The White Crow walked unsteadily to where a chest stood against the wall. Leather-bound volumes weighed down the lid. A chair scraped: Lucas was beside her, suddenly, lifting the books and setting them down on the carpet. The smell of leather and dust made her nostrils flare.