Heat shimmered over desolation.
A spiderwork of girders and scaffolding stretched away, covering sixty or more acres, the site rawly hacked out of the classical buildings surrounding it. Lucas stared at men and women swarming over heaps of brick and masonry. A great granite block towered in the foreground.
Lucas felt his skin shudder as a beast shivers. Realization hit hard and sudden: a jolt of cold injected into the blazing heat.
"They've started building."
He shot a glance over his shoulder, knowledge of foundation rites brimming on his tongue; silenced himself in the face of the Rat-Lords, and turned back to stare at worked stone, sunk in the earth, cut in proportion and inscribed.
"There is your revolution," Plessiez remarked acidly at his side.
'Mistress of the House of Books, Lady of the Builder's Measure.' From Rituale Aegypticae Nova, Vitruvius, ed. Johann Valentin Andreae, Antwerp, 1610 (now lostsupposed burned at Alexandria) The Lord-Architect's head swiveled ponderously, surveying. His chins creased as he beamed, looking down at the Cardinal-General, nothing but innocence in his blue gaze.
"Wonderful! Obvious why they've started building now, of course. Someone's given them the Word of Seshat."
Plessiez's fur, where it brushed Lucas's arm, prickled with a sudden tension.
Lucas looked up, met his black gaze. "Yes, my uncle told me you have an interest in architecture, your Eminence. Human architecture. Speculative and operative."
Plessiez stood four-square on the iron platform, balancing on bare clawed hind feet. A smile touched his mouth, the merest gleam of incisors. His head came up, the line of snout and jaw and sweeping feather-plume one clean curve in the midday heat. He turned his black eyes on Casaubon.
"Being a Lord-Architect, I suppose that would become immediately apparent to you. Yes. It's true that I put Messire Falke in the way of finding the lost knowledge he sought. I did not, until now, know the name of it. So the lost Word to build the Temple of Salomon is the Word of Seshat?"
"Mistress of the House of Books," Casaubon said reverently, "Lady of the Builder's Measure."
The siege-engine inched forward, slowing now to a crowd-pressed halt. The Lord-Architect swung his arm around until it rested lightly across Plessiez's shoulders. He looked down over the swell of his belly at the black Rat.
"Why, Master Cardinal?"
A kind of relaxation or recklessness went through the black Rat. Lucas saw him look up at Casaubon, fur sleek and shining in the sun, one ringed hand touching his pectoral ankh while his scaly tail curved in a low arc about his feet.
"I thought it not amiss, in this time when all changes, if your people had a Temple of their own. You have built for our strange masters, and for his Majesty, and never for yourselves. I thought," Plessiez said, a self-mocking irony apparent in his tone, "that it might stave off at least one armed rebellion. We shall see if I am right."
Obscurely angry, Lucas demanded: "What did he pay you? This man Falke, you didn't give him what he wanted as a gift."
Plessiez invested two words with a wealth of irony. "He paid."
"Youhalt!"
The immense sweating crowd pulled back. Lucas stared down from ten or twelve feet high on to the square's paving stones. Across them clattered a woman.
The sun blazed back from her. He twisted his head aside, afterimages swimming across his vision. Her mirror-polished armor blazed, sending highlights dancing across the metal carapace of the siege-engine and the Guards' uniforms.
Plessiez put up a narrow-fingered hand to shield his face. "Lady Hyena."
The woman looked up, a slanting-browed face framed in the open sallet helm. Her sheathed broadsword clanked against her armored hip.
"Here in person, Eminence?" she grinned toothily. "A miscalculation, maybe."
The black Rat beside Lucas shot one glance upwards, at the sun. "I have no quarrel with you, Lady."
"Nor with-?" She turned bodily, the sallet restricting her neck-movements, and pointed back to a man on the distant steps at the edge of the building site. "Nor with the head of the House of Salomon? Don't make me laugh. Well, will you fire on the crowd or not? What say you? Do you take the chance?"
Lucas stared at the stranger. An excitement familiar from exercises at arms in Candover tingled through his body. Readiness, anticipationand no arms, no defenses; and the black muzzles of armed Sun-banner men pointing full at the siege-engine. Lucas shuddered. The excitement still would not be killed. He knelt up, leaning one arm on the steel shield-wall, grinning fiercely at the human troops.
"Madam, have I offered you violence?" Plessiez said mildly.
The woman deliberately surveyed the towering engine, now coughing clouds of blue exhaust; the baroquely-cast beaked rams and the catapult. Sardonic, she observed: "That's a fair offer of it!"
Now his thoughts slipped back into the taught mode, Lucas easily picked out snipers behind the tents, musketeers in the cover at the edge of the building site, armed men and women massing behind the first unarmed rows of the great crowd.
"I require nothing but to station this here as protection," Plessiez said.
"What will you do nowsit quiet and watch Falke's builders?" She chuckled. "Do that, then. I have a proclamation of my own to make, now that it's midday."
At Lucas's elbow, the Lord-Architect Casaubon dug in his pocket and fumbled out a watch, flicked open the casing, and rumbled: "Not yet. A few minutes."
"White Crow said-" Lucas cut himself off. Imaging the woman, dark red hair tumbling, at the doors of the Fane: under the skreeing circles of daemons in flight. Noon. The Lord of Noon and Midnight. And which is it?
"Clovis, where's Cornelius Vanringham? Bring him. I want him to hear this." The armored woman, moving surprisingly lightly, strode to the front of the siege- engine. Lucas gazed down at her heat-scarlet face, dripping with sweat. She stared past him. "Well, priest, you may as well hear it, too. You'd hear it before the end of today, be certain of that."
Conciliatory, the black Rat bowed. "As you wish, Lady. I shall be most interested to hear what you have to proclaim."
"Only our independence." Sardonic, her voice went harsh and honest. "Only our freedom."
Lucas shivered: a deep motion of the flesh that never reached his skin, that seemed to reverberate in his chest and gut. He looked to Casaubon.
"Go now," the big man said quietly. His plumpfingered hand closed over Plessiez's shoulder, as the black Rat opened his mouth to call, tightening warningly.
Not pausing to consider trust, Lucas ducked back and slid on his buttocks past the Lord-Architect, hidden by the man's bulk. He stood, walked to the rear of the siege-engine; sat and slid and let himself fall from the edge of the platform in one movement. He staggered into the crowd with stinging ankles, thrusting between people with his elbows, tense for a shout, the crack of a musket behind him.
Bells chimed from the five corners of the square.
Noon.
Chill fell across him, cooling his chest, arms and back, welcome as cold water in the press of sweaty bodies. He felt muscles relax that had been tensed against the hammering heat of midday. Shadow swept across the square. And again, deep in his gut, his flesh shuddered.
A great intake of breath sounded around him, a simultaneous sound from the thousands gathered. Like wind across a cornfield, faces tipped up to the sky, ignoring the building site and the foundation-stone. Lucas raised his head, the comers of his vision filling with yellow dazzles.
Brilliant blackness stabbed his vision. Ringed with a corona of black flames, a black sun hung at the apex of the sky.
All the sky from arch to horizon glows yellow as ancient parchment. The twelfth chime of noon dies. Transmuted, transformed, in a fire of darkness: the Night Sun shines.
Chapter Seven.
"How the hell did you do that?" the White Crow demanded over her shoulder, padding down the steep flight of steps. "You can't have done that; it isn't possible!"
The blond man touched one hand to the pale stone wall for support, leaning forward, frowning.
"It's . . . light . . . in here. I don't recognize any of this."
He recollected himself and offered his hand to the old woman. Heurodis put one foot down, lowered her other foot to join it, then lowered herself cautiously down the next steep step. Her smoky eyes met the White Crow's.
"We don't do it often. Wethat's the university, girliewe can do it whenever we want to. That's something you indigent scholar-bullies will never master."
"But you can't-"
The White Crow half-missed her footing. She turned her head, seeing white stone steps descending to an archway and a stone-flagged door just visible beyond. Above, the high ceiling of the passage glowed pale and deserted.
"It is light," she said. "And it wasn't for the first few minutes after we got in. I think I know what's happening outside . . . Reverend Mistress, you don't understand! It isn't a lock that keeps that threshold closed. It isn't magia, either; it's the power of god, the power that structures the universe. The interior of the Fane of Noon and Midnight doesn't exist outside those times; you can't just pick the lock and get in!"
"We can." Heurodis grinned, showing all her long teeth.
Reverend Master Candia took Heurodis's hand and rested it on the White Crow's left shoulder. The age- spotted hand gripped with some strength. Candia loped down to the bottom of the flight of steps. His slashed jerkin shed fragments of lace, leaving a smell of stale alcohol on the air.
"And I thought seeing the impossible done couldn't surprise me any more!" The White Crow laughed aloud. Echoes hissed up the passage. "I've always wondered why the university doesn't depend on Rat-Lords or human patrons. If you can do that, you don't have to. How do you do it?"
Heurodis stepped down off the last step and took her hand from the White Crow's shoulder.
"We're gods' thieves," she said. "And we've stolen from the gods themselves, missy. Under divine sufferance, no doubt, but we have done."
"Crime's a high Art." Candia gripped the lintel of the arch, leaning to peer into the chamber beyond. One hand went to his belt, clenched into a fist. "Heurodis is a great practitioner."
"Here."
Drawing her small knife from the back of her belt, the White Crow passed it to the blond man. His hand, which had seemed to search quite independently of his will, closed about the hilt; he stooped slightly as he looked down at her, nodding with a wide-eyed surprise.
"You trust me, Master-Captain?"
"I don't think this is a place for anyone to go unarmed."
She hefted the rapier in her right hand, with her left reaching up to push a coil of red hair back under her hat. A wetness brushed her cheek. She rubbed her stinging fingers across her skin and looked down at a bloody hand.
"Lady, you're hurt." He took her hand by the wrist, turning her palm upwards. A bead of blood oozed from the life-line.
"No. Or not just now anyway." The White Crow winced, raising her left hand to her mouth, sucking at the pin-pricks made by black roses in the Garden of the Eleventh Hour. "The stigmata of magia. Messire Candia, do you recognize any of this?"
"None of it, lady."
Stone dust gritted under her sandals. The White Crow reached down and flipped them off, feeling the tension of stone under her bare feet. She padded forward into pale light.
Squat pillars spread out, forest-like, into the distance. From them great low vaults curved up, in arcs so shallow it seemed impossible the masonry of the ceiling should stay supported. The sourceless white light arced the ribs of the vaults with multiple shadows.
Her nostrils flared, catching a scent of roses.
"Why did you and . . . ?"
The blond man complied. "Theo. Bishop Theodoret, of the Church of the Trees."
"A Reverend tutor. And a Tree-priest. Of course."
The White Crow knelt and strained her vision. A breath of warm air feathered her cheek. Distance blurred pillars, low vaults, more pillars. No windows: the light not the light of sun or moon.
"Why did you need Scholar-Soldiers?"
Heurodis, catching the question, snapped: "Why indeed? What young Candia here thought he was doing asking help of the Invisible College, I'm sure I'll never know. Ignorant children, all of them. You, too, missy."
Heurodis wiped a bony finger along the surface of the nearest pillar, sniffed at the dust, and wiped it down her blue cotton dress. In tones of waspish outrage she added: "How the University of Crime could begin to trust an organization that doesn't even work for gain-"
Reduced to complete speechlessness, the White Crow leaned her rapier against her leg, reached to pin her tumbling hair up out of the way under her wide-brimmed hat, and at last managed to say: "You'll have to take that point up with one of the others. Come to think of it, I'd like you to talk to the Lord-Architect Casaubon. Rather, I'd like him to have the experience of talking to you . . ."
She walked forward as she talked, letting the words come almost absently, centering herself to the familiar heft of the sword in her hand, the weight of the backpack. Light slid about her like milk. The air grew warmer, out under the low-vaulted ceiling; and a glimmer of blue clung to the edges of ribs and pillars.
"If I had to guess, I'd say that noon brought us the Night Sun." A quirk of humor showed as she glanced back at Heurodis. "After today, I'm cautious about expressing an opinion."
"Listen."
She glanced up, seeing lines deepen in Candia's face; the blond man's air of permanent injured surprise giving way to an unselfconcerned anxiety. He stumbled as he walked past her, away from the wall.
"What-? No, I hear it. Wait. . ." The White Crow moved forward and caught the buff-and-scarlet sleeve of his jerkin, halting him.
A deep wash of sound re-echoed from the pillars, hissing through the milky-blue air, losing direction against the white pillars and white vaults and white light. It died. The White Crow strained to hear. She walked forward, head cocked sideways, tracking it for some faint hint of direction.
"There . . ."
A faint green luminescence shone down one side of a low pillar, far off, where distance made the pillars small as a finger at arm's length. Again the sound hissed, growing from inaudibility to a harsh breath of pain. It sawed the warm air. Her chest tightened, attempting to match that arhythmic breathing. The White Crow frowned, mouth open.
Candia grunted as if he had been punched. "Theo."
The White Crow looked to Heurodis. The old woman shook her head, moving forward to take the blond man's elbow. His face held some abstract expression of pain and memory that defied analysis. The White Crow began to walk, hearing their slow footsteps behind her.
Pillars shifted, perspective moving them in her peripheral vision. Dry warm air rasped in her lungs. Deliberately barefoot, she walked lightly on the balls of her feet, letting the sensations of the flagstones guide her.
Between pillars, away in the milky light, she glimpsed a far wall. She walked faster.
"Master-Captain!"
The hissed whisper broke her concentration. She gestured shortly with her blood-wet left hand, ignoring Heurodis. More shifted in the light than perspective could account for. Small hairs hackled down the back of her neck. She slid from one squat round pillar to the concealment of the next.
Greenness drifted into the granular milky light, coiling as if it were steam or smoke and not luminescence: a light the color of sun through a canopy of new leaves. It touched the skin of her arms, goose-pimpling them with cool. A stink of old blood caught in her throat.
"Stay back." The White Crow touched one bloody finger to her backpack, stepping across the flagstoned space towards a door that opened into a tiny stone cell. She looked inside.