Rats And Gargoyles - Rats and Gargoyles Part 25
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Rats and Gargoyles Part 25

The Lord-Architect Casaubon took the young woman's hand between the tips of filthy gloved fingers and thumb, inspected it for a moment, and bowed to kiss it. "Baltazar Casaubon, Lord-Architect, Scholar-Soldier of-"

Plessiez cut the man off in mid-flow: "If you listen, Zaribet, you do it as a private person."

The Katayan nodded vigorously, hair flopping over her black-hook eyebrows.

Plessiez let his weight rest on one haunch, thumb tucked into sword-belt, eyes narrowed against the sun; something of his poise returning.

"There are thirty-six of these engines. I've directed the production-line workers for the past week, getting sixteen engines on-station in the further Districts. These that remain must be functioning and able to move by noon, to be in positionat the entrances to the airfield, the docks, the underground rail and sewer termini, the main avenue to the royal palace, and at as many points overlooking the Fane as possible."

He saw Zar-bettu-zekigal's head come up, her pale eyes raking armor-plating, gunports, stacked muskets on the platform, beaked battering-rams.

"You're going to attack the Hyena's people!" she accused.

"We face no serious threat from a few of the servant class who've latterly learned to hold a sword by the correct end."

"No."

Plessiez, startled, looked up from his footing on the rubble to meet the china-blue eyes of the Lord-Architect. The fat man absently wrung mud out of his coat-tails and shook his head again.

"As I understand it, these are spiritual machines." Plessiez shrugged. "Designed to protect my people against attackby the servants of the Thirty-Six: the acolytes of the Fane."

A shudder walked down Plessiez's spine. He momentarily shut his eyes upon a memory of Masons' Hall, butcher-red, a shambles. The early sun fell hot on his fur. He opened his eyes to the distant sparks of light from palace windows. The silence of work suspended hung above the artillery garden, as it had been poised above all the city since dawn.

Zar-bettu-zekigal's eyes narrowed against the brightness of the empty sky. She smoothed her dress over her narrow hips with both hands. Her dappled tail hung limp.

"Tripe!" boomed a bass voice: Casaubon shattering the quiet.

Plessiez, tight-mouthed, shifted his ringed hand to his belt-dagger. A momentary breeze unrolled like a gonfalon the hooded silk cloak of a Cardinal-General. "Messire, if you would confine yourself to architecture and engineering-"

A large hand hit Plessiez squarely between the shoulders. The black Rat twisted his head, feather-plume blocking his view, to see a muddy glove-print on the back of his robe.

"Complete rubbish," the Lord-Architect Casaubon beamed. "That being the case, you'd only cover the Rat and Mixed districts. Wouldn't bother with a siege-engine for every district, including the Human."

Plessiez opened his mouth to prevaricate, saw Zari hop from one bare foot to the other, grinning wildly, and Casaubon twinkle at her: "I don't doubt he plans protection from the Fane. I'm no fool, Messire Cardinal. I can see thaumaturgy plain in a set of blueprints. As for these"a jerk of the head at the towering siege-engines that set his multiple chins quivering"I'm an architect. I followed your exact design. Put these in strategic locations and you protect everybodyas far as that's possible. Yes?"

Cardinal-General Plessiez shut his open mouth. He lifted his snout, raking the large man from copper hair to mud-dripping high-heeled shoes, and bringing his gaze to rest on the amiably smiling face. A brown smear of oil covered freckles, continued up into the cropped hair. The black Rat met the man's eyes.

"I assume that you need to know that," Plessiez said, "because I don't indulge idle curiosity, not with a matter that has taken years to conceive and execute, and which, besides, involves his Majesty the King. Even the curiosity of an excellent architect, messire."

The Lord-Architect Casaubon inclined his head gravely, waiting.

"Yes," Plessiez said. "The intention is to protect as many people as we can, regardless of who and what they are. Rat or human. Or, if it comes to it, acolyte. You are liable to see apocalyptic matters today, messire, and if any of us survive it will be thanks to these machines which his Majesty has desired and I have designed."

The Archdeacon's sandals scuffed on the concrete of the yard. Tawny grass sprouted up through the cracked surface. She raised her eyes to the tops of the surrounding factory walls. Grass rooted there, against a blue morning sky. A stink of oil and furnaces made her broad nostrils flare.

"A daylight possession? And not susceptible to talismans?"

"We've tried everything. It keeps growing." The burly woman wiped sweat from her eyes. "There have been small corruptions breaking through for ten days or more, but now the Rat priests and the Fane won't answer our messages."

Inside the nearest factory-hangar door men and women leaned exhaustedly up against walls or lay on benches. The Archdeacon glanced back over her shoulder, seeing the alley; the Reverend Mistress and the blond Candia safely penned in by a locked gate and factory workers regarding them with suspicion.

"This way." The burly woman in carpenter's silks led her past molding and milling engines, standing silent and reeking of oil, towards the back of the building. In the unaccustomed silence, the bells of the nearby charnel- houses rang clearly.

"Your sick people here"the Archdeacon pointed "is it the pestilence?"

The carpenter glanced back at her co-workers where they sprawled or staggered. The Archdeacon saw a whiteness of skin under the woman's eyes, a certain luminosity and sharpness about the broad features. Vagueness crossed her eyes from moment to moment.

"I'm Yolanda." The woman stopped at the back wall. "Foreman over in the next workshop. Well, priest-"

The Archdeacon pointed to a canvas-shrouded bundle in the corner, among broken glass and waste metal and sacking. The length and shape of the human body: on it, blotted red dried to blotched brown. "Is that a victim of the possession here?"

A proud note came into Yolanda's deep voice. "Garrard? He fainted and fell under the ore-carts out in the sidings. Hadn't eaten for five days, to my certain knowledge. We had a Sergeant of Arms down here, running back to the Rat-Lords, closing us down. We tried to get a real priest."

She stopped, shrugged, eyes still on the shroud. "Already on the Boat by now, and traveling through the Night. He always did like sailing . . . The possession is here. Archdeacon."

The Archdeacon remained standing staring into the corner of the factory hangar. "This man died because he tried to work without food or sleep?"

Yolanda folded her arms. "He died because the Decans fated him to die today. More fool them. No foundries means no tools, no scaffolding, pretty soon no more building on the sitesno more Fane. They'll soon know how it goes. We're willing to work. Just not able."

The Archdeacon cracked her dark knuckles, loosening the muscles in her hands. "If the plague carries on, you won't need to starve or fatigue yourself, Fellowcraft Yolanda."

"Here." Yolanda pushed the small back door open.

Light from a clerestory window picked out the darker green threads woven into the Archdeacon's cotton dress: the pattern of roots, trunk, branches, leaves. She pulled her wide cloth belt taut. Her fingers touched the energy centers at her dark temples, at her breasts and groin and each opposite wrist.

"For all you despise my Church, I can't refuse to do my duty here. My name is Regnault." The Archdeacon's voice sounded clear, cold. "If I should be injured and can't do this, you must see to it: take Master Candia to the Cathedral of the Trees. Tell them Candia is to be questioned about Theodoret."

"Candia is to be questioned about Theodoret-"Yolanda flinched back a sleep-dazed step as the door in the back wall began to drift open. She turned and walked rapidly towards the front of the factory, gesturing to other workers to stay back.

Regnault touched fingers to the peeling white paint of the door. She wrinkled her nose. A smell of rotten vegetation came through the open door: not honest decay, but touched with a corruption of flesh.

She entered, took one slow step into the long white- tiled room, and halted, the door swinging closed behind her, her eye caught by movement. A young black woman in a faded dress faced her from the far end of the room. Round-breasted, round-hipped; bushy hair throwing back a myriad points of gold light from the clerestory windows. Archdeacon Regnault gazed at her reflection in the spotted mirror, at the long row of porcelain urinals on the wall to her left, and the row of closed or open cubicle-doors to her right. Darkness prickled at the edge of her vision. Cold struck up through the tiling and her sandals to impale the soles of her feet.

"Root in Earth protect me." Her whisper fell on dank air. She put her fingers to her breast, to the spray of hawthorn pinned there. She pressed the pad of her index finger against the thorn, piercing the skin. A bead of blood swelled.

"Above, beneath: branch and root-"

Breath-soft, she began the Litany of the Trees; letting her power push the pepper-scent of hawthorn out into the tiled room, expunging the smell of urine and feces, tasting still a faint corruption in her mouth.

"Pillars of the world-"

Light brightened: sun through high windows. A watery glop sounded, close at hand. The Archdeacon padded forward, and suddenly stopped.

Her reflection in the fly-spotted mirror had not moved.

"branch and leaf-"

The reflection raised a head subtly disfigured, and smiled with teeth too long and pointed.

"leaf in bud: shelter and protection-"

The Archdeacon splayed the fingers of her left hand in the Sign of the Branches. Her right index finger throbbed. Blood fell to the floor-tiling in small perfect discs and ovals.

Something buzzed, close at her right hand.

Regnault halted between one step and the next, glancing sideways. The cubicle-door beside her stood halfopen, opening inwards, disclosing muddy porcelain footstands in the floor-basin and the china throat of the open drain.

A furred body as large as her two fists hung above the toilet-hole, angrily buzzing. Yellow and black stripes, light glinting from whirring wings, multi-faceted eyes.

The Archdeacon turned from the mirror, stepping towards the cubicle. Water blinked in the open floor- drain: a dark eye in the stained white porcelain. The giant wasp shifted in the air, shifted again, faster than she could react. She stabbed her finger against the hawthorn again and sketched a sign in blood on the air.

"the protection of the Branches that support the sky-"

The wasp lifted, buzzing, the vibration reverberate from the walls; rising level with the Archdeacon's head. Regnault flung both hands out at a level with her shoulders, spread her fingers and slowly closed them.

Dints appeared in the furred body-segments. Diaphanous wings glimmered emerald, the color of spring leaves, and crumpled. The soft heavy body fell, still crumpling, to smack against the glazed china surface; slid down the shallow slope and blocked the open drain, feebly burring.

Sweat trickled down between Regnault's shoulder- blades. The step forward had brought her into the cubicle. Eyes still fixed on the dying wasp, she reached out a hand behind her to pull open the swung-to door.

Her outstretched fingers touched fur.

She twisted around, flattening her body against the pipework of the back wall. Her bare ankle brushed over the dead wasp. The door swung closed an inch, a foot, weighed by the heaviness of its burden.

Bulbous shapesno, a shapeclung to the inside of the peeling cubicle door. Fragile insectile legs shifted for purchase. The throbbing soft segments of the torso glowed black and yellow, the glassy wings shattered a rainbow spectrum. The Archdeacon pressed herself back against the wall, heel kicking at the pipework.

The wasp's body, as tall and solid as she, clung quivering to the door, arching slightly at the division of its bulbous body, sting pulsing under the lower torso.Regnault's skin crawled. She looked up wildly to see if the cubicle walls could be climbed. Beyond the partition a deep buzzing note began, joined by another, then another. Sun through the clerestory windows glinted on rising wings.

The wasp that clung to the back of the door thrummed a raw increasing shriek.

"heart of the Wood protect, the Lady of the Trees defend-"

A sharp click sounded outside the cubicle, at the end of the long room. She recognized the sound of a sandal stepping down on to a tiled floor from a small height: the height of, say, a wall-mirror.

She reached up, hands shaking, and carefully pressed each finger in turn to the hawthorn spray. With bloody hands she unpinned it from her dress, marking the cloth, tearing it into two handfuls of twig and leaf. Her skin cringed away from the insectile form clinging to the door, its translucent guts throbbing with half-digested food.

Poised, dizzy, she took a breath of oxygenless air.

Outside the cubicle, pacing footsteps traced a staccato inhuman rhythm. She glimpsed a brown ankle under the cubicle door, and a foot with claws.

Wetness touched her bare leg.

The fist-sized body of the dead wasp no longer blocked the drain. From its open throat a tendril of wet dark nuzzled. It touched her ankle, numbed the skin, left white puckered marks.

"Heart of the Wood!"

Both hands clenched on crushed hawthorn, she pivoted on one heel and struck the cubicle door solidly with her other foot, a hand-span from the thrumming wings. The door banged shut, rebounded concussively inwards. She pitched into a forward roll through the door, hands tucked into her sides, bruising her shoulders.

The wasp ripped up into the air, its chainsaw buzz shattering the glass in the row of clerestory windows.

Regnault came up on to her feet, crouching on the tiles; threw her left hand's bunch of hawthorn full in the sharp-toothed liquid-fleshed mirror-face that fleered above her.

Bloody leaves, stained blossom: for a second outlined in green-and-gold brilliance. Light blinded. She dropped to one knee, edging back towards the urinals. Something black fell from the high ceiling. Shrieking above the saw- buzz of wasp wings, she flung her right hand's hawthorn, slipped, fell full-length on the floor.

The last whole windows imploded.

Black clotted liquid spattered her dress and skin, scalding hot. A rain of ordure pattered down for thirty seconds. She raised her head. Fragments of wing and black fur floated in the air: the wasps were no longer there.

Archdeacon Regnault put her wrist to her nose and wiped away blood. She smiled with the satisfaction of the craftsman. Silence pressed in on her eyes, deep and echoing. Slowly, painfully, she got to her feet; fingers throbbing and still bleeding, clots of feces sliding to hit the tiles.

The wall-mirror hung shattered in the pattern of a hieroglyph. She read it; frowned suddenly.

" 'Oldest of all, deepest of all, rooted in the soul of earth; who dies not but is disguised, who sleeps only-' "

The tiles under her feet rippled, ceramic shifting like water, and she fell to one knee.

A black stain oozed out from under the furthest cubicle door. Black liquid ran down from the urinals. A stink of blood and urine constricted her throat. She clenched her fists, forcing concentration out of pain, muscles tensing to push her towards the exit.

Her legs could not move.

The ceramic tiles under her foot and knee shattered, thin as cat-ice on a puddle. Tears ripped from her eyes as she fell into corrosive vapor. She clawed at the edge of the floor as she fell past it, caught a joist with one bleeding hand for the briefest second.

She stared down into vaulting flooded with liquid darkness, heard the voices calling her, saw in the glistening surface far below the reflection of her face: feral, sharptoothed, grinning- The joist grew wormy, holed and friable in the space of a breath. It crumbled under her clenching fingers.

She fell.

A sepia twilight, hot and brown, clings to discarded furnace-mouths, broken bains-marie and alembics. The Bishop of the Trees views them through the open door of his cell: unable to move, or turn away, crusted blood and sinew tightening below his impaled medulla oblongata.

"Why . . . will . . . you . . . not . . . let . . . me . . . die?"

He forces each word out with what breath he can gather into his withered cheeks.

Wings rustle in the heat. Basalt pinions settle to huge flanks as the Decan of Noon and Midnight who is also called The Spagyrus lays his tusked and tendriled head upon vast paws.

You're bait- "Wh . . . ?"

The ebony lids slide up from basalt eyes.

My servants questioned you for their pleasure. I am a god and a daemon, a Decan of the Thirty-Six: I know all that you could ever know. Still, I allow the acolytes their play- Scales rustle as the immense head settles still further, yellow-crusted nostrils twitching.

Theodoret, Bishop of the Trees, turns his sandpaper- gaze to where the Decan looks. Down in the wall of the Fane, above the deserted alchemical workshop, is set a glass bubbleno, a congeries of glass bubbles, each with their variant image of the heart of the world enclosed . . .

They cast a bluish-white light upon The Spagyrus, where the Decan sprawls under the Fane's crepuscular vaults. Perhaps it is that lightor the sun's not being in his Signor perhaps it is instinct: the most primitive instinct is smell, and Theodoret has that sense left to him still.

Each breath is rasping pain, each word formed through a tom throat and split lips; still, Bishop Theodoret forces words into the hot silence of the heart of the Fane.

"You . . . know . . . all . . . my . . . Lord-I . . . who . . . know . . . nothing . . . will ask you . . . a . . . riddle . . . What . . . can happen . . . to . . . make . . . a god . . . afraid?"