He lurched free of the Archdeacon, ignoring Heurodis. His hair flew as he turned his face to the sky, to the Fane that blackened the south-aust horizon.
"Put my head on a spike like his, why don't you! Ask me why we betrayed the House of Salomon!"
A pulse of shock chilled her.
"Drunken hallucination," Heurodis whispered.
"If one of the Salomon-men hears him . . ." The Archdeacon wiped vomit-stained hands down her dress. Bright, rising over roof-tops, morning sun dawned on the Day of the Feast of Misrule, warming the sandstone streets.
"Ask me. I know." Candia sank to his knees on the paving. Tears slid down his filthy skin. He rubbed helplessly at his ripped doublet and breeches, and wiped his nose on the back of his bandaged wrist.
The Archdeacon steeled herself to walk forward and grip his arm. Head down, he muttered at the broken paving. She only just understood what he said.
"Heurodis, Heurodis, I don't have the courageno, I don't have the talent to do what we should do now."
Dawn sunlight slid across the dial of Clock-mill as the loaded mules passed by its waterwheel. The balding man in the darned jerkin mopped his brow in the early heat and tugged the lead mule's rein.
Above, the blue-and-gold dial showed three hundred and sixty Degrees marked with the signs of the Thirty- Six Decans. The clock-hands stood at five-and-twenty to six.
Mayor Tannakin Spatchet turned the corner out of Carver Street in an odor of mule dung. Two apprentices in silk and satin stopped and jeered. He stiffened his spine. A third girl, the gold-cross sash tied about her waist, shouted, and they ran off down the cobbles, bawling insults, late for their site. He drove the four mules around another corner as far as a narrow door, where he knocked.
One of the mules clattered its hoof against the cobbles, loud in the quiet street. The Mayor gazed up past the black wooden frieze of skulls and gold-chests and ivy to a window that stood an inch open.
"Lady! White Crow!"
He hammered his plump fist against the street-door. Distantly, above, he heard footsteps.
"Unh?"
A thin girl of fifteen or so opened the narrow door. Her yellow hair straggled up into a bun, and her blue satin overalls appeared to have a coating of orange fur and damp spots down the front.
"Unh?" she repeated.
Tannakin Spatchet, displeased at seeing the widow's daughter, drew in a breath that expanded his chest, showing off the verdigris-green Mayor's chain. "Sharlevian, I wish to see the White Crow. Immediately. Fetch her."
"Ain't here."
"When will she-?"
"Ain't living here," the girl snapped.
A voice from the darkness up the stairwell called: "Sharlevian, who is it?"
"Aw, Mother . . . it isn't anybody. Only the Mayor."
"Come back up here and finish feeding these blasted animals!"
Tannakin Spatchet heard Evelian's irritated voice grow louder coming down the stairs, and glimpsed her blue-and-yellow satin dress. The buxom woman thrust a halfgrown fox-cub and a feeding-bottle into Sharlevian's hands, ignoring both their whines, and nodded briskly to him.
"Tannakin."
He raised a finger, pointing at the upstairs window. "Is she coming back?"
The buxom woman stepped down into the street, closing the door behind her. Her gaze took in the four mules and the roped tarpaulin loads that stood almost as high again as the animals' backs. One fair brow quirked up.
"I don't know that she isn't. What's all this lot? You've come for more talismans?"
"It's taken us thirty days to collect this to pay for the last ones, and now you say she's gone . . . Is there another philosopher in the quarter who can make protective talismans?"
"You're joking! Magus' Row is bare as a Tree priest's larder, and no wonder, after the last Sign."
Evelian prodded the packing, and spoke without turning: "Sharlevian's talking of nothing but this House of Salomon. All the apprentices are the same, and sheit's all these fool boys she hangs around with. A bitch on heat, if I say it who's her mother. I wish I didn't think that I'd be better off with friends among the Salomon-men, but I do."
Tannakin let her vent the heat-bitterness of high summer.
"I've lost three lodgers in the last thirty days. I'm told the little Katayan's alive, but I've seen nothing of her. As for the White Crow . . . this is all hers?"
Tannakin Spatchet sighed. With his own bitter resentment, he said: "It's little enough. Brass pans, some shelving, an old clock, some lenses, four cheeses"
"I can smell the cheeses."
"a dozen tallow candles, and a ream of paper. The other loads are much the same. Mistress Evelian, in no way do I support the Salomon movement, in no way at all, but there are times when I would give my Mayor's chain not to have to barter, to be able to carry money and do with it what the Rat-Lords do."
He saw her smile, but did not entirely understand why.
"We'll have to lug it all up these stairs and store it in her room. Sharlevian! If the White Crow doesn't come back," the yellow-haired woman said, "it can stand as my back rent."
"Always the businesswoman-"
Tannakin Spatchet broke off, staring down the sunlit street into morning haze. Dark specks buzzed about the aust-west horizon: acolytes swarming about the angled Fane.
Evelian shaded her eyes. "How often do you see that? Master Mayor, we're all going to need more than talismans to get through the next Calendar Sign."
"Hear me!" The Hyena's voice crackled through the loudspeakers. The din of the crowd momentarily drowned out her words.
Zar-bettu-zekigal sat down on the step and unbuttoned her new greatcoat, cautiously letting the sun's early radiance warm her. She rested her chin on her fists.
The greatcoat, as matt black as her hacked-short hair, spread out on the marble step and the thrown-down yellow carpet. She curled her tail tightly to her body. The wash-faded black cloth of her dress began to grow hot in the morning sun, and she smiled and shrugged a stretch without moving from her sitting position. She kept one bare foot firmly on the stock of her musket that lay on the step below.
"We will build the Temple again, our temple, the House of Salomon: with just rule and line, for the Imperial dynasty to rule justly over our own people! We will build for ourselves, and never again for the Thirty-Six!"
Zar-bettu-zekigal yawned into her fists. Memory tracking automatically, she shifted an inch closer to the Hyena's plate-clad legs to watch every word. She gazed up, murmuring under her breath: "Oh, you're beautiful! But see you, you're a child; just a baby!"
The Hyena stood on woven carpets, under gold silk canopies held by ragged silk-clad soldiers.
"We have been the servants of servants, the slaves of slaves, forbidden the least right, hidden in darkness, condemned to toil only for others! Now our buried birthright is uncovered, is come into the light; our day dawns, this day!"
She walked forward to the edge of the steps. Against the milk-blue sky, the armored shoulders of the woman glittered silver; her scrubbed young face shone in the morning light. Zari watched the movement of her mobile mouth, the passion of her face; chopped-short brown hair flying, slanting red-brown eyes narrowed against the light.
"For them, now, nothing! We cut no more stone. We lay no more bricks. We dig no foundations. We draw no plans! Oh, they can force us to workwho denies it? But, if we're strong, who can force us to sleep or to eat?"
Behind the Hyena, gold-cross banners of the Sun shone: ranks of ragged soldiers crowding onto the steps of the Thirty-Second District square. The stink of gunpowder still hung in the air from a few enthusiastic musket-shots. Sword and sword-harness chinked.
"And when we die and are carried again on the Boat through the Nightwho will they have then to build their power? Oh, who? None. For when we come again we will act as we do now: we will not spend all our lives digging our graves and building our tombs!"
'We cut no more stone. We lay no more bricks. We dig no foundations.' Frontispiece to Sphinx Mystagoga, Athanasius Kircher, Amsterdam, 1676 The crowd's roar bounced back from the marble walls of the Trade Guild Meeting-halls, empty of their Rat-Lords now; together with the echoes of the Hyena's loudspeaker. Zari swiveled back on the step and faced forward, looking out across the heads of ten or fifteen thousand civilian men and women. In silk, in satin; their callused hands still carrying rule, trowel, wrench, or hod.
"But not only I tell you this." The Hyena's voice dropped from passion to a passionate honesty. "If it were only me, how could I ask you to act? I have hidden in darkness. I have hit and run, struck and fled again, damaging the Rat-Lords but never confronting them. I have not starved. I have not died, to refuse the Thirty-Six my labor. If it were only me, and these soldiers here, why would you listen?"
Zar-bettu-zekigal put in Memory the shouts in the crowd: half-audible, encouraging.
"So listen to one of your own," the Hyena called out loudly. "Listen to Master Builder Falke!"
Her foot kicked Zari as she stepped aside, and the woman looked down and grinned an apology. As the white-haired man moved out from under the shade of the silk canopy, the Hyena squatted down on her haunches beside Zar-bettu-zekigal.
"Hot." Zari put the flat of her hand against the plate armor; the metal stung her palm. The woman pulled up her dark-red kerchief, shading her neck. A soldier two paces away held her laminated steel helm. The ragged Sun-banner drooped on a staff strapped to his back.
"Be hotter yet. This is early. It's going better than the last rally. Have you heard enough yet?"
"The Cardinal will want to know it all. He always does."
A single line of Sun-banner soldiers kept the crowd back from the steps. The Hyena clanked down to sit beside Zari. The Katayan sat up and slid her hand along the hot steel to the woman's shoulders and, a little behind her now, began pressing her fingers down between armor and neck, finding points to release muscle tension.
"It had to work here." The Hyena's voice rasped. "After the last thirty days . . . Tell your Plessiez I gave the final order today. We're officially abandoning the areas under the city. Too much . . . corruption there."
Zari dug her fingers in. "See you, weren't there always hauntings?"
"Not like this!" The woman's plate gauntlet clacked against her breastplate. "I wonder . . . I do wonder, now, what it was Plessiez had us do when we ran his underground errands. We don't get this sort of aid without our previous help being worth a lot. But after today it won't matter. We take charge today."
White hair glinted in the sun as Falke stepped forward. His booted foot just missed Zar-bettu-zekigal. She glanced up over her shoulder.
Falke walked with gravitas, thumbs tucked under his new swordbelt. His white-silver hair, longer now, he wore scraped back into a pony-tail and confined by a heavy silver ring. The morning sun showed up the lines around his mouth.
Black silk strips criss-crossed his eyes. He moved uncomfortably, sweating in the sun's heat, with a sword hanging from his belt, and a mail shirt and surcoat over his padded gray leather arming doublet. Embroidered insignia caught the sun and blazed across the square, on his breast not a ragged Sun but the House of Salomon's golden Rule.
"My friends."
His voice crackled out across the square, half- humorous, and self-mockingly indulgent.
"My friends, I have not gone into voluntary exile. I have not trained men and women to be warriors. I have not sabotaged the Rat-Lords, lived starving and tireless, fought without hope until I saw this day. No, I have not done these things. For that, you must go to the Lady Hyena and her people. And, conscious of that, 1 speak humbly after her."
The flesh under Zari's fingers tensed. She began to rub her thumbs at the base of the Hyena's skull. The woman rumbled: "And three weeks ago he was gibbering with terror in a sewer. Gods, but that man can make capital out of anything."
"See you, you're absolutely right."
Lost in the contact of flesh and flesh, Zar-bettu-zekigal grinned dreamily to herself. She cocked an eye at Falke, looking through his legs at the crowded square.
He raised the microphone to his mouth again.
"You've heard good oratory from many of us this morning. I'll disappoint you; I'm a plain speaker. I'm one head of one hall in the east quarter of Nineteenth District. That's one quarter out of a hundred and eighty- one; one District out of thirty-six. That's all. But I've learned things you have a right to know about."
His head lowered for a calculated moment, then lifted to face sun, sky and the assembled thousands.
"From today, we do no work on any site. We have no choice. You have heard, and I have found out it's true, that his so-called Majesty the King will send in their troops to fire on you. And the priests of the Orders of Guiry, and Hildi, and Varagnac will come, and they will damn you with all ceremony. Let them! We can withstand it. We are stronger than that. We have no choice."
Falke's voice rose.
"You will bear with me. None of you is a fool. We know the Rat-Lords exploit us and make us slaves, and we are old enough in the ways of the world not to expect better. But now we haveyes, I tell you today, now, this moment!now we have the wisdom for which we searched. All of you know the Mysteries. You know the Interior Temple and the Exterior Temple are mirrors of each other, and of the greater Order."
He rested one hand on his breast.
"If we had the knowledge, we said, we would build thus. Build in the shape of our souls, and compel the Divine to acknowledge us. We have been kept dumb and blind by the Rat-Lords, forbidden to build for ourselves, forbidden the knowledge of it; but no longer. Now, today, we have at last recovered the knowledge we lost the knowledge they hid from us so long ago. Now, today, we have the Word of Seshat!"
A susurrus of words filled the air. Ripples of sound: lapping through the hot morning and the square, out to the pillared porticoes and marble frontages of the Trade Guild Meeting-halls.
"Look at them! There isn't a building site in the city that'll be working today." The Hyena grinned. Her armored heel hacked down on the marble. She turned a heat-reddened face to Zar-bettu-zekigal, impervious to the Katayan's skilled fingers.
"One minute everything's the same as it's always been, and then-" Her fist smacked into her palm. "By the end of today we'll have a general strike. No building, no trains, no servants. Tell Plessiez that. And tell him Falke and I must know when his necromancy will take full effect."
"I'll tell him."
"Tell him I must know what happens at the Fane." Her slanting red-brown eyes moved, some hidden fear stirring and suppressed in a blink. "I must."
"Shall I go to him now?"
The Hyena glanced up to where Falke still spoke, pale hands gesturing. The Sun-banner soldiers still stood, but much of the crowd sat on the paving-stones: clusters of people growing closer together with the steady increase in their numbers.
"Yes, and hurry back. Falke and Iwe can start this, but we can't stop it once it's begun. It'll cross the city like fire: every slightest whisper will carry it! It's out of our hands."
Zar-bettu-zekigal stood, picked up the musket and laid it back across one shoulder, and sketched a mock salute. "Anything for you, Lady. Anything at all."
"Leave that gun here!"
The woman put her fingers to her shoulder, only now sensing a tactile memory. The laminated steel plate blazed back sunlight. Zari blinked. The woman looked up at her.
"Take it, then, Kings' Memory. And take care."
The airship and the warm bosom of the aircrew-woman long left behind, Casaubon's sparrow flies through skies where vultures rise on mesa-winds. Heat is a hard arrow under the bird's heart, piercing, piercing.
To either side rise up the cliffs, sand-banded mesas: ocher, scarlet, orange, white.
Reflected in the bird's obsidian eye is desert, blue sky, great horizons; the jagged battlements of a castle built into the mesa-side; the drowsy noon emptiness of a courtyard; the tower-window overlooking it.
The sparrow falls arrow-straight, kicks up a spurt of dust on the stone window-sill, hops on to the ring finger of the hand outstretched to receive her.
Hot morning sun and warm air poured in through the open windows of the palace corridor. Zar-bettu-zekigal, musket confiscated at the gates, swung her greatcoat off her shoulders and slung it across her arm as she walked. Her dappled tail curved up, poking through the slit at the back of her knee-length black dress.
"Messire!"