Rats And Gargoyles - Rats and Gargoyles Part 34
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Rats and Gargoyles Part 34

Candia, behind her, whispered: "Theo . . ."

Shock hit: her sweaty skin going cold between her shoulder-blades and down her arms. The White Crow bent forward and retched. One hand to the door-frame, the other leaning for support on her rapier, eyes blind with the tears of nausea, she vomited up the bile of a day's fasting.

"Oh shit . . . Don't come in. Somebody keep watch outside."

She spat, wiped her nose with the heel of her hand, took in a breath, and stepped into the white stone cell. Its low step caught her foot. She stumbled, staring ahead.

Stark against her sight, an iron spike curved up out of the masonry wall. Blood and pale fluids had dried in streaks below it. The White Crow stared at the head of a man impaled on the iron spike. Undecayed, spots of blood still dripped from the neck-stump to the stained floor. White hair flowed down to where, red-dappled, it stuck to drying knots of vertebrae, slashed cords and tendons.

Only the head: the cell held no truncated body.

Dappled light shifted, green and gold. For a second the White Crow sensed the rush of branches, birds, steps through leaf-mold. A shriek of ripped wood echoed, the light shifting. She knelt, staring levelly at the creased labile face.

At his open conscious eyes.

Heurodis's sharp indrawn breath sounded above her head. The fair-haired man fell to his knees beside her. One dirty hand reached out as if he would touch the severed head. The White Crow caught his wrist.

"No, messire, I'm sorry. Not with the power here."

Tears brimmed over the lower lids of Candia's eyes. Absently moving his knife, he picked with the tip of it under one thumbnail. Green light gleamed from the blade. "My lord Bishop . . . Theo, tell me how. I'll do it."

The White Crow got to her feet, eyes never leaving the severed head. Heurodis whispered, "Take more than a knife, girl, when it's a god keeping that thing alive," and the White Crow nodded, and risked a glance over her shoulder.

"Rot it! I thought as much."

Outside the cell, the pillars of the crypt had vanished. The cell now opened onto a gallery, forty feet above the floor of a high-vaulted chamber large as the nave of a cathedral, white and gold stone gleaming in sourceless brilliance. The White Crow touched a knee briefly to the floor, kneeling to look up and out past the low arch of the cell's doorway.

Shafts of golden light curved over clustered pillars, soared down from perpendicular arches in dust-mote-filled curtains. And in all the hull-shaped nave no windows: light shafting from unappreciable sources. The White Crow tilted down the brim of her speckled hat, shading her eyes, squinting. High fan-vaulting and hollow arches hung bare, empty of roosting acolytes. Below, all the wide floor stretched out deserted.

"Leave . . . here . . ."

She shivered. Breath echoed back from the stone behind her, forced into painful speech: an old man's weary voice.

"Leave . . . here . . . Candia . . . I am . . . bait . . . for . . . you . . . Go . . . Go!"

The White Crow got to her feet. She turned. The man in buff and scarlet still knelt, facing the severed head. She winced, seeing how the features of Theodoret moved: wrinkled eyelids blinking, the wide mobile mouth shifting.

Heurodis's hands clenched in the folds of her cotton dress.

The White Crow sheathed her rapier and took off her pack, tossing the speckled hat down beside it on the flagstones. She unbuckled the straps, fumbling, hands shaking; breathed in to calm herself, and took out a cotton handkerchief and a metal water-flask.

"Well, I'm here to see The Spagyrus. I assume." A ghost of sardonic humor touched her voice. "This should bring him."

She stepped past Candia and knelt, unscrewing the top of the flask, covering it with the kerchief and tipping it up. Water chilled the cloth and her fingers. She reached up and, with the damp cloth, moistened the cracked lips of the head.

She kept her eyes on that vulnerable mouth, shivered inside; finally lifted her gaze. Swimming with light, his gray eyes met hers, saw her plainly; and the old man's lips moved into an attempt at a smile.

"Pitiable . . . and . . . grotesque . . ."

"No, messire."

The White Crow moistened the cloth again and applied it, words coming as randomly as her thoughts.

"Mistress Heurodis got me in here. She saved all our lives. Master Candia tells me you sent to the Invisible College. Tell me what you wish, messire."

The Bishop of the Trees spoke slowly, painfully. "Bless . . . you . . . child . . ."

All else put aside, the White Crow sat back on her heels, staring up into his creased face. The edges of her vision glowed with the light of forests.

"My name is Valentine. White Crow. I come from the Invisible College. I was fifteen years a Master-Captain; I'm a Master-Physician now. Tell me quickly. If anything at all is possible now, would you die, or would you have me try something other?"

Abrupt and arctic, silence dropped on the square, darkling under the black sun.

"Don't fear! We know what that means."

The Hyena screeched. She flung her free hand up, pointing at the sky that now shone a deep and pitiless blue as the Night Sun took hold.

"The Night Sun! The sign! The hour has come. We are free of our strange masters, free of the god-daemons, free of the Decans, free of the Thirty-Six! You all hear it, you all see it, you all feel it!"

Her voice flattened against the still cold air.

She swung round, pushing between packed men and women, shoving her way from the siege-engine towards the steps. No lips moved. The crowd, silent, parted by unspoken consent to let her through.

"Feast and rejoice! Feast and rejoice and build. Hold our celebration while the Night Sun shines. And when it passes you'll see the day's light shine on a Fane standing open and empty, the Thirty-Six abandoning the heart of the world. And that heart of the world given over into our keeping, here: the imperial Sun dynasty!"

A middle-aged woman raised her head. Her silk carpenter's shirt hung in strips. Her face, caked thick with yellow and white paint, showed raw sores around her mouth and nostrils. She met the Hyena's gaze and showed her teeth.

"Clovis, damn you!" The Hyena strode up the steps, armor clattering; the only noise but for the siege-engine's throbbing motor.

Faces turned to follow. Silk and satin work-clothes hung in strips and tatters. A burly man stumbled from her path, face covered by a feather-mask. Many masks gleamed in the crowd: brilliant or dust-covered feathers clinging to faces, masking eyes, leaving mouths and sores uncovered. And still no sound: not a shout, not a whisper.

The blond man, Clovis, met her on the top step.

"Lady . . . what have we done?"

"Plague Carnival!"

The voice echoed down from the nearest building, where on balconies black and brown Rats gazed down with arrogant equanimity.

"Why not sing?" one called down. "Why don't you dance now, peasants?"

Another pointed into the vast mass of people. "A silent carnival! A plague carnival!"

"You don't amuse us!"

"Dancing's a sovereign cure for the plague, they tell me!"

"Quiet!" The sky shimmered from yellow to blue in the corners of the Hyena's vision. A smell of sickness breathed up from the flagstones. She rubbed her nose, eyes watering at the stench.

"Lay down fire across the building if they speak again. Over the heads of the crowd."

A young boy stepped from the silent crowd and threw a handful of broken petals towards the balcony. He whisked a mask of owl's feathers from his face, sun gleaming on red hair and on his sores weeping white pus. Other masked revelers stood in silence, jammed shoulder to shoulder, crowding the dry basins of fountains. The Hyena followed the direction of every gaze.

In the pitiless blue sky, coronas of black fire licked out across the empyrean. Midnight at noon, night-fire: the black sun blazes.

"Clovis. Set up sound-broadcast. I'm going to tell them this is what we've been waiting for." She spared one glance for the Rat-Lords on the siege-engine platform. Picking out an emerald sash, some humor curved her lips. "We can all use . . . coincidences. Where's Falke?"

"Here."

The man stepped silently to her side. He slid the black silk bandage from his eyes, raising his face to the sky. She saw momentarily in his unnaturally dilated pupils the twin reflections of darkness.

"We must hold the ceremony of the shadow. The building must continue."

Her slanting red brows lifted. Directing troops to their places by hand-signals, she spoke now without looking at him, in a measured tone only a fraction from hysterical laughter.

"Whose shadow? Yours? Have you seen what's in front of you?"

The man gazed blindly across the building site.

"I've done without all else. I can do without my shadow to keep the Temple of Salomon standing."

She pointed at their feet, then fumbled her hands back into plate gauntlets.

"Oh, damn your Craft mysteries . . ."

All their shadows fell bright, brilliant; fell through the dark air to shine on the broken stone.

"It's impossible. Look. You've to nail a shadow to the first-raised wall to keep the Temple standing. All the shadows are lights!"

Falke frowned, brushing a hand across his lips and the several tiny weeping sores at the corners of his mouth. The cagework-shadows of scaffolding fell bright across his surcoat, and the Hyena held out both gauntleted hands, glinting darkly.

"See! You have to depend on my troops now!"

She met his eyes, and his gaze blurred.

Falke stumbled against her, and she caught him with one steel-clad arm; spun to grip his shoulders and lower his dead weight to the broken paving. His eyes rolled up and showed only thin white lines below the lids.

"Damn pestilence, it's thinning us out faster than we can fight or build. Let's have some help here! Ho!"

The Hyena pushed greasy hair out of her face, pulled off her plate gauntlet to feel for his pulse. She glanced up for her lieutenants. Two of the people in her immediate sighta dark-bearded man, a young boyslid down on their knees and fell hard across the stones. She gaped.

Above on the scaffolding a scream sounded, and the thud of a heavy body falling.

"Falke?"

She grabbed his dark-streaked hair, pulling his head up, and stopped as he sprawled limply back against her; head falling back, mouth falling open. Tatters of black flesh ran across the skin of his face from mouth to temple, spread down his neck to vanish under his collar. Crisped, sere: as if plague-fever could burn up flesh in heartbeats.

She touched her bare fingers to his throat. No pulse.

Dark flames licked down into her vision. The Hyena stared across the open square. To left and to right, men and women sprawled across the paving; others leaped up or shouted for aid. A coldness chilled her bare hands.

With a child-like puzzlement, she looked down and touched the face of the man dead in her arms.

Brightness moved in his mouth.

The Hyena snatched her hand away. Antennae moved in the dead man's open mouth, quivering, wavering. Insect feet scraped for purchase on his lips. It crawled between his teeth, first a velvet body, and then the spreading black-and-white-mottled wings of a death's-head moth.

Frozen, not even able to push his body away, she watched the moth shake out its wings and sun itself on his tattered cheek.

A scrap of color bobbed past her vision. A scarlet butterfly, wings dusted with gold, sharp against the blue sky . . . The Hyena looked at the boy collapsed on the next step down. From between his lips a pale blue butterfly crawled, took flight.

The death's-head moth flew up past her face, skull- markings plain on its dried wings. She covered her mouth with her hand, sick and afraid.

Under the generative chill of the Night Sun, all the air above the square glimmered, red and blue and black and gold, alive with whirling columns of butterflies and moths rising up from the mouths of the plague-dead.

"It's a bad joke!" Candia exclaimed. He rocked back on to his heels, standing up.

The White Crow grabbed at her arm as he caught it, pulling her up on to her feet. She twisted out of a grip that would leave bruises, glaring up at the blond man.

"No-"

Candia reached down to knot his fists in her shirt, leaning over her, breath stinking in her face.

"Break a Decan's power? Theoyou can't kill him, you can't heal him. How can you joke, and in front of him! I'll have no more of it. Hear me?"

"Messire-" The White Crow cut herself off. As gently as temper would let her, she closed her hands over the Reverend Master's fists, conscious of the pain in her left hand, of the dry warmth of the stone cell. "Candia. I mean what I say."

Flickers of green pushed at her vision, marbling the pale masonry walls. The blond man released his grip, reaching up to push hair out of his bruised-seeming eyes, gazing down bewildered. The White Crow tugged creased cloth straight.

"Lady, he . . . Death would be an act of mercy."

"Trust me."

"Trust a Scholar-Soldier?" Reverend Mistress Heurodis's acid voice sounded from the low arched door, where she peered out into the golden nave. "Well, girlie, it doesn't matter; I think none of us will leave here, but you may try to end his pain."

The White Crow turned and knelt. The stone, hard and warm under her bare knee, beat with an imperceptible tension. She looked up again at the severed head. The old man's eyelids slid half-shut over swimming gray eyes, and his mouth clenched.

"I . . . needed to . . . die . . . before . . . He . . . called . . . me . . . bait."

Some choking pressure in her chest resolved itself into pity and anger, and she put out a hand and touched his soft skin, echoes of pain resounding on cellular levels. "Take time to decide. We've got a little time."

She sat back, grabbing the leather backpack and sorting through the books and papers inside.

Candia said thickly: "Bait? For who?"

Heurodis's voice sounded above the White Crow's head. "For all of us?"

The White Crow stood and moved to the door. She squatted, dabbed the gummed end of a paper strip at her tongue and pasted it across the threshold. Her sallow fingers worked rapidly, fastening the character-inked strips across the jamb and lintel. A certain growing tension in the air held itself in abeyance.