Rats And Gargoyles - Rats and Gargoyles Part 38
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Rats and Gargoyles Part 38

"Certainly! I just have to work out-"

"where we are?" the black Rat completed, sotto voce, after a moment.

"It's going to be fine, messire," Zar-bettu-zekigal said as she came up with them.

Plessiez sighed. He carried a bull's-eye lantern in one hand, light glinting from the buckles of his harness, and his rings, and the slender drawn rapier in his other hand. The cardinal's sash glowed a brilliant green against his black fur.

"You had no right to drag me down here, away from . . ." He stared at Charnay still, adding in a lower tone: "I would be happier with myself if I could regret the leaving more sincerely."

"This way," Charnay announced.

The big Rat padded away, following a curve of the line. Zar-bettu-zekigal squatted down on a sleeper, pulling at the hard metal of the rails where another joined it; looked ahead to realize the line split. She hastily knotted a bootlace and rose to her feet, following.

"Suppose a train came?"

"Suppose nothing of the kind!" Elish-hakku-zekigal reached out and ruffled her hair.

Zar-bettu-zekigal jumped from sleeper to sleeper, twofooted, grinning at the echoes coming back off the damp tunnel walls. "How far down are we?"

"The lower levels," Plessiez replied without turning.

Elish-hakku-zekigal lengthened her stride to catch up with the Cardinal-General. "Two things you should perhaps be aware of, your Eminence. One is that we're being followed- No, Zar', be quiet!"

Zar-bettu-zekigal took her hands from her pockets and loped to walk between the black Rat and the Katayan woman.

"And the other is that your friend will have to take us off the track soon. You can't get there from here."

The black Rat thrust the bull's-eye lantern at Zar-bettu-zekigal without acknowledgment, and she caught the handle just as he let go of it. Heat from the glass and metal warmed her hands. Holding it at arm's length, she saw a splinter of light: Plessiez now carried in his onyx-ringed left hand a triangular-bladed dagger.

Speaking across her head to Elish, the black Rat said: "Who follows?"

"I can't tell who or what it is."

"And the restyou know about this 'Night Council,' I comprehend? And the ways to reach it? Oh, come you've been in the heart of the world how long?"

Zar-bettu-zekigal muttered a protest, winced as the older Katayan woman's tail slapped her leg.

"She's a shaman," she protested, ignoring Elish. "Messire, you remember, when we came out from below last time, what we saw."

Plessiez's upper lip wrinkled, showing white incisors. He quickened his pace.

A coil of mist brushed Zar-bettu-zekigal. She put her free hand up to her face, touching dampness. The metal surface of the lantern hissed gently, evaporating moisture.

"Look." She held up the lantern.

The light cast Charnay's shadow ahead on to a bank of mist. Niter-webbed brick walls vanished as mist thickened into fog. The brown Rat strode on, her lantern bobbing on its pole, becoming a globe of yellow light.

Plessiez's hand tightened on the hilt of his rapier. "Well, we can't lose her now, I suppose."

Zar-bettu-zekigal, conscious of her aching arm, held up the bull's-eye lantern, and took Elish's hand again. Her nostrils flared. Fog pearled on her dress, on the hairs on her arms; and she glanced up at the Katayan woman, seeing the sapphire at her throat dimmed by clinging moisture.

She stumbled, stared ahead. No tunnel walls. The clatter of her feet vanished into the fog, echoless. Three lanterns glowed, yellow in the mist.

"It smells strange."

The black Rat briefly looked over his shoulder and murmured: "Sewers."

"No."

"We're too far below ground-level for anything else, I assure you. Charnay, woman, slow down!"

Zar-bettu-zekigal shivered, chilled. She held the lamp and lifted her head to stare upwards, seeing nothing but fog, no tunnel roof. She pursed her lips to whistle for echoes; her mouth too dry. The lantern's muffled light could not even illuminate the cinders and sleepers underfoot.

"It smells . . . salt."

Elish-hakku-zekigal's grip tightened.

Faint at first, on the edge of hearing, she felt the pulse and thunder of surf. A wind stirred the fog. She tasted seaweed and salt on her lips, pressing on faster to keep up with Charnay's lantern; brushing the black Rat's shoulder as she stumbled beside him.

"The sea!"

Wind roiled the fog, moving but not shifting it. The thunder of waves came from all quarters, the pounding of waves and the hiss of shingle sucked back. Zar-bettu-zekigal raised her head, neck prickling to the cold wind, searching for a lightness that would mark sky or sun. Wet air choked her. She loosed Elish's hand and stepped away.

"No."

A black tail coiled around her wrist, pulled. She jerked to a halt.

"I want to see the sea!"

"No."

Ahead, the bobbing lantern slowed. She caught a glimpse of Charnay, sword in hand, raising her snout to quest after a scent. Plessiez and the older Katayan woman hastened their steps.

"Oh, wait, will you!" Pebbles dragged at her feet and ankles, slid down her boots. Zar-bettu-zekigal stopped, bent, and put the lantern down on the beach; lifting her foot and reaching for the heel of her boot.

She froze. "Elish! El!"

Brown pebbles crunched underfoot: friable, fragile. The lantern, standing tilted, shed illumination on the round shadow-pocked pebbles. All of a size: no larger than a walnut.

Tiny skulls.

Ragged eye-sockets caught shadow, lamp-light. Cranial sutures gleamed, black-thread thin; the articulate and precise joints of jaws shone. She stared, seeing some with lower jaws, some with only upper teeth; the ragged slits of noses. Thousand upon thousand, million upon million, stretching out under the fog in piled banks and valleys.

Underfoot, as far back as lamp-light shone, tiny crushed skulls marked their path. Zar-bettu-zekigal wavered, balanced on one leg, hand still gripping the back of her left boot.

"Elish!" She wailed. "It doesn't matter where I put my feet, I'm going to break more of them . . ."

"I see it, little one. Keep walking."

Zar-bettu-zekigal hooked off her boot, balancing onelegged, shook it and replaced it. She seized the lantern and lifted it. Fog swirled about her ankles, mellowing, concealing. The slope dragged at her feet as she ran after Elish-hakku-zekigal and the Rats.

"This place stinks," she said bitterly. "Ei, Charnay, aren't we there yet? How far now? Which way?"

She grabbed the brown Rat's sword-arm, fur slick and fog-dampened, shaking it. Charnay looked down at her.

"I forget," she confessed.

"Oh, what-"

Plessiez, a yard or two ahead, interrupted. "I think we've arrived."

Lights shone through the fog. Zar-bettu-zekigal plodded on over the fragile beach, refusing to look down.

The fog thinned.

Ochre and red cliffs reared up before her and to either side; summits lost in distance. The sea echoed softly from wall to wall. A great amphitheater of rock, in the flares of torches.

Warmth breathed from the stone, as if the sun had only just ceased to shine and it still gave back heat. Zar-bettu-zekigal stretched out her hands.

Hacked out of the bedrock brown granite, still part of the cliffs, great squared thrones formed a semicircle.

Zar-bettu-zekigal bent to place the bull's-eye lantern at her feet. Tiny skulls crunched under her boots. She reached back without looking, and Elish-hakku-zekigal gripped her hand. The older Katayan came to stand at her back, setting down her lantern, folding her arms about Zari's chest and resting her chin on the top of her head.

Charnay drove the pole of her lantern deep into the beach, brushing bone splinters from her fur. She straightened up.

Plessiez trod a few paces forward, past Zar-bettu- zekigal, until he stood at the focal point of those inward- facing thrones, lifting his head and resting his rapier back across the drying fur of his shoulder.

"Old . . ." Elish's chin jolted her skull as the woman whispered. Zar-bettu-zekigal gripped her sister's hand, pulling her arms tighter.

Silence breathed from the stone. Silence and a tension, the bedrock brown granite dense with aeons of geological compression.

The squared thrones jutted from living rock that continued above them into square pillars, soaring up. She tilted her head to follow; lost the sight in dim distance a quarter of a mile overhead. No sky. Nothing but foundation rock below the world.

Dizzy, she dropped her gaze to the empty thrones. Crude seats and arms and backs, smoothed not by artisans but by time.

"The carvings." Elish's voice in her ear.

Lines marked the back of each brown granite throne, cut with no metal tools, cut with bone and wood and stone itself. She stared up at the human figures cut in stylized profile, the planes of muscle, the nakedness of bodies. She faced the central throne. Raising her eyes, Zar-bettu-zekigal followed the line of the giant figure's chest and shoulders. Scales marked the neck; the head not human but the head of a cobra.

She looked to the next throne, and the next. A man with the head of a viper, a woman whose black lidless eyes shone in the head of a python, a young man with the blunt head of a boa, a woman whose shoulders supported the blue-and-crimson head of a coral snake . . .

Movement caught her peripheral vision; Elish's arms tightened; she heard Plessiez swear an oath, and Charnay grunt with satisfaction. Color and movement. Each figure changing as her eye left it, changing from bas-relief to solidity . . .

They sat each one high upon their thrones, the light of torches sliding on their bronze human flesh. Giant figures, twice the height of a man. The torches flared and glinted from scales, from lidless black eyes, from pulses beating in the white soft scales under serpentine jaws.

Elish's arms loosened. She breathed: "The Serpentheaded . . ."

Now each of the Thirteen arose, standing before their thrones, scales shimmering, forked tongues licking between blunt lips; old with the age of granite, of bone, of earth.

Plessiez sheathed his rapier with a tiny click that echoed back from the towering walls. The black Rat raised his head, gazing at the giant figures.

"You are the Night Council?"

A scent of musk and sand-hot deserts breathed from the beach, from the miniature human skulls tumbled to the foot of the thrones. From the center throne the figure arose, standing with brown hands resting on the granite.

Light shone on his human body, brown, smoothskinned and naked; and Zar-bettu-zekigal let her gaze rise to where skin transmuted into scale and his spine curved inhumanly. Rearing up, haloed by hooded skin, the eyes of a cobra surveyed them with bright anger.

He spoke.

"Yeth."

She turned from the cell doorway, staring out into the Fane.

"You could not have healed him, if I had desired him truly to die."

White stone walls shone in sourceless light. The White Crow looked out across a floor littered with broken glass, alembics, bainsmarie and furnaces; eyes narrowing to witness the machinery of the alchemist. Flat glass bubbles, set in ranks into the wall, danced with moving pictures. She registered in peripheral vision outer views of the city. Past that . . .

This high vaulted hall opened into a nave, into a colonnade; into balconies, oratories, galleries . . .

So clear the air, no possible distance could make it blurred or diffuse. She saw into the heart of the Fane: all bright, all in focus. Colonnades of white arches hooped away, growing smaller in perspective; vaults shone and soared; galleries ran the walls, drawing zigzag lines into the distance. All around: tower-stairs and loggias, porches and steps and halls starkly clear; white and intricate and shining as if carved from ivory and milk.

Glass rolled aside as she moved, ticking across the stone. She glanced down.

A rose-briar lay across the flagstones, jet-black, bristling with thorns. One withered leaf clung to the stem. Something had eaten away the petals of the remaining black rose. She raised her head, following it.

Insects crawled.

Cockroaches, locusts, scarab beetles, flies: a towering mass of bodies filled all the near end of the hall. Cluttering, feelers waving, chitinous wings rasping; the insects crawled on a mountainous bulk that heaved although still.

The White Crow caught a glimpse of blackness under the mass, began to make out shapes. The circular rim of a great nostril, crusted with the bodies of locusts. Higher up the shapes of scales, cockroaches crawling under the rims. Tendrils of darkness sweeping back to where, through chitinous crawling bodies, an eye opens, disclosing a darkness greater than the Night Sun.

One-handed, she sheathed the rapier and beckoned the others to leave the cell.

He filled the whole space of the hall, so that she could hardly take in more than rising shoulders, basalt-feathered wings, tusked and toothed muzzle furred with insects. Cockroaches, locusts, black beetles; carrion-flies and scarabs; they clung, flew up a few inches, and fell to crawl again in worship over the body of The Spagyrus.

Dizzy with expense of power and sick with the receding tide of pain, the White Crow walked drunkenly across the flagstones until she stood before the Decan. A cockchafer burred past her face. Her head jerked back.

She held up her blood-stained and black-pitted left hand, and knelt to touch one knee to the stone floor.

"Divine One, Lord of the Elements, you healed him through me. I thank you for it."

The shining basalt eyes closed.

The great body sprawled the length of the hall, flank up against curtain-tracery walls, head rising twenty-five feet into the air. Roses covered the massive paws and shoulders, clustered on the joint of a wing.

White light shone on living black basalt.

Clear now, unshadowed, she traced every lineament. Crusted nostrils, thick with hair and flies, in an upper muzzle that overhung the lower jaw by ten feet. Jutting tusks above the nostrils. Teeth spiking up from the lower jaw, digging into scaled cheeks; flowing tendrils around the head and tiny naked ears.