Rats And Gargoyles - Rats and Gargoyles Part 4
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Rats and Gargoyles Part 4

"Damn your hall! Just because you won't admit us . . ."

Plessiez pushed Charnay in the direction of the hall door, and turned to Falke. "Pardon me, messire, but it might not be amiss if other trades were represented here."

A fair-haired woman leaned forward, looking down the table to the black Rat. "Then we can't speak freely. Craft mysteries aren't to be disclosed to outsiders. You know that."

Plessiez shrugged. "Then, I must go. I don't belong to any Craft hall."

"We can't have this scum here!" The Fellowcraft, Shanna, pointed at the Mayor, who bridled. "You'll have us inviting councilors next."

Falke's cupped palms slammed down on the table. The crack! echoed. In sudden silence, his bandaged head cocked to one side, he spoke.

"Our quarrels are meat and drink to our masters. Aren't they, messire priest?"

"I don't understand you, Master Falke."

"You do. You think no more of using us than of saddling a horse to ride. You'd no more think of a man's name than a dog's name in the street if you kick it!"

His hand went up behind his head, pulling the knotted cloth bandage down. Prematurely white hair slid free. His fingers immediately clamped across his eyes, features blasted by the sudden light. Zari glimpsed wide eyes: no injury, no scar; only immensely dilated black pupils.

He said: "Because my name is on file, you can find and use me."

As if prompted, the Fellowcraft Shanna spread her hands, turning to the other men and women around the table. "The Rat-Lord's obliged to tell us nothing more than pleases him. We must tell him all. For all his alliance with us, he can sell us out any time that it should please him, and walk away unharmed. Remember that, when we come to trust him!"

Zar-bettu-zekigal's gaze darted from Falke to Plessiez. Her tail coiled up, lying across her arm, tense and twitching. Hearing and all senses acuteher smile widened suddenly.

Charnay marched back from the hall door, whisking her cloak past the seated Fellows, and leaned over to speak in the black Rat's ear. The Katayan heard: "Desaguliers is coming!"

Falke froze.

The black Rat's whiskers quivered. His bright eyes fixed on Charnay, and the brown Rat stumbled back a pace.

"This was your idea of secrecy, was it, Charnay!"

Before she could do more than mumble, voices were raised, and the group of men at the door were pushed aside. Five sleek black Rats, with black-plumed headbands and drawn rapiers, shoved them aside; and a taller black Rat stepped in from the sunny yard to the white hall.

"Was it necessary," Plessiez murmured silkily, "to bring the cadets in such strength, Messire Desaguliers?"

The watermills turned slowly, dripping water catching the sun. Lucas gazed at the water running past the building's stone wall (some part of a concealed stream uncovered?), and then up at the watermills' tower.

A twelve-foot gold-and-blue dial gleamed in the sun. The clock's hands twitched once, to a metallic click inside the tower, and a bell chimed the quarter. Lucas stood watching as a silver knight, some two feet tall, slid out on rails from one side of the tower, to meet an approaching bronze knight on a similar curve. Their swords lifted jerkily; they struck a clang! that echoed the length of the cobbled street. A pause, and both began to retreat.

Lucas rubbed his sweating neck, took his hand away filthy, and glanced speculatively at the running water. He still carried shirt and stockings. His bare feet were chafing in his boots, and his filthy chest and arms were beginning to sting from the sun.

A first-floor window opened further down the street, and a woman shook out a quilt and laid it on the sill.

"Lady," Lucas called, "is this Clock-mill?"

She leaned one bare forearm on the sill, her other hand supporting her as she leaned out, so that her elbow jutted up and her thick yellow hair fell about her shoulders. She wore a blue-and-yellow satin dress slashed with white, with puffed sleeves and a low full bodice. Lucas moved a few steps down the street towards her.

"Clock-mill and Carver Street," she called.

Lucas gazed up at the window. The quilt hung down, half-covering a frieze carved in the black wood: hourglasses, scythes, spades and skulls. Seen closer, the woman's face was lined. Lucas judged her forty at least. Some twinge of memory caught him.

"Is there . . . are you Mistress Evelian?"

"You're not one of my lodgers?" The woman's china- blue eyes narrowed, studying the filthy ragged young man. "Good God. What does Candia think he's sending me these days? Come in: don't stand there. Third door down will take you through info the courtyard. I'll let you in."

Lucas had only taken a few steps before she stuck her head out of the window again.

"Have you met the other students yet? Have you seen anything of that Katayan child, Zaribeth?"

Zar-bettu-zekigal sat with her grubby hands in front of her on the table. Her dappled tail flicked sawdust on the hall floor. A smell of cut wood, pitch, and long-boiled tea filled the heavy afternoon air.

Her eyes moved from the white-haired Falke, poised at rest in his chair, to Tannakin Spatchet (stiffly upright), and the well-dressed builders and ill-dressed councilors; to Plessiez and Charnay, and to the black Rat Desaguliers, standing and glaring at each other across the table.

"I think the King might be interested in this meeting," Desaguliers challenged. He was a lean black Rat, tall, with the plain leather harness and silver cuirass of a soldier; the hairs on his thin snout grizzled.

"The Captain-General is aware, of course, that the King has full knowledge of-"

Desaguliers bluntly interrupted Plessiez: "Horse-dung! I'm aware of nothing of the sort."

"How very remiss of you."

"Gentle lords. Please." Falke spoke with a sardonic gravity. He sat with his hand shading his uncovered eyes against the hall's whitewashed brilliance. Tears ran down his cheeks; he rapidly blinked. "You know how your honor suffers, to be seen quarreling by we underlings."

"Master Falke!" Plessiez snapped.

"I apologize. Most humbly. I hazard my guess, also, that this terminates our discussion. And that we shall be the ones to suffer for your plotting." He smoothed the cloth bandage between his fingers, and bent his head to tie it back over his eyes.

Zari's gaze darted back to Plessiez and the black Rat Desaguliers.

"No." Plessiez, sleek in scarlet. "I put this hall under Guiry's protection. Let Messire Desaguliers hear our talk. Since I perceive his spies will have it sooner or later, let it be now. I have nothing to hide."

Desaguliers snorted. "A miracle, that!"

Welcome heat touched her with the room's shifting patches of sun. Zari coughed, and stuck her tail up above head-height, twitching it. "If you talk through me, messires, it'll be easier for the record."

Desaguliers peered down the table. "What is that?"

Plessiez, seating himself, and draping his scarlet cloak over the back of the chair, murmured: "Zari, of South Katay. A Kings' Memory."

"A Kings' Memory." The taller Rat shook his head in reluctant admiration, and slumped back into a chair on his side of the table. The sun glinted off his cuirass. He kicked his rapier-scabbard back with a bare heel. "Plessiez, you miss few tricks. Let's hear what you have to say, then."

Plessiez rested one slender clawed finger across his mouth for a few seconds, leaning back, thin whiskers still. His eyes narrowed to obsidian slits. The hand fell to caress his pectoral ankh.

"I don't think I need to do more than say what I said when we last met. Master Falke, we, your masters, confine humans to certain ghetto areas within the city-"

"As you are yourselves confined, by those Divine ones who are masters of us all." The white-haired man sat back with his arms along the arms of the chair, cloth- blinded eyes accurately finding Plessiez's face. "It may gall you, Messire Plessiez, but there are Human Districts forbidden even to you. The Decans decree it."

"If I spoke sharply, Master Mason, you must pardon me. There is much at stake here."

"You apologize to this scum?" Desaguliers guffawed loudly; broke off as Zari glared at him. He glanced around at black Rat cadets positioned on guard about the hall. She resumed the concentration of listening, head cocked bird-like to one side.

"We need your help, Falke," the black Rat Plessiez said, in a tone of plain-dealing, "and you, you say, need ours. Both of us for the same reason: that one can go where the other cannot."

Falke inclined his head.

"If, therefore, we agree an exchange of mutual help-"

Tannakin Spatchet rose to his feet. He mopped his face, reddened by the airless heat. "We don't enter into blank contracts. As local Mayor, I must know what you intend, messire priest."

"You 'must' nothing." Plessiez's rapier-hilt knocked against the chair as he shifted position. "However, I am prepared to discuss a little of the situation."

The black Rat glanced towards Zari. She grinned and tapped her freckled ear-lobe with one finger.

Plessiez said: "There are a number of locations within the city, at which, for purposes of our own, we intend to place certain . . . 'articles.' Packages. Three of them are within quarters humans may enter and we may not. Therefore-"

Desaguliers snorted. "Purposes of your own, yes, messire, surely!"

"I see no need to discuss it with you."

"It may endanger the King."

"It will not. But if his Majesty is ever to be King in more than name only, then some of us must act; and you and your cadets will oblige me by keeping silent while we do!"

"Is this treason, messire!"

Zar-bettu-zekigal reached, sprawling halfway across the wooden table, and slapped her hand down over the hilt of Charnay's discarded sword as the Captain-General grabbed for it. Plessiez slowly relaxed his hands that gripped the arms of his chair.

Still sprawled across the sun-warmed wood, the Katayan said: "You wouldn't be here if you didn't want to know what was going on, Messire Desaguliers, so why don't you shut up and listen?"

Plessiez threw his head back and laughed.

Zar-bettu-zekigal slid back into her chair. "I don't have all day. If I miss this afternoon's lectures, I'm dead. So could we get on, please?"

The white-haired Mason, Falke, watched the armed Rat-Lords. "Our part of the bargain is this. There are ancient buildings of this city that we may not enter, because of where they are situated. There are records and inscriptions in those buildings that we need. If Messire Plessiez and his people can gain us that, we'll run his errands."

"No!" Tannakin Spatchet's fist hit the table. "Who knows what retribution we'd bring into our quarter if we did? As Mayor-"

"Tan, be quiet," Falke ordered.

Desaguliers leaned forward. "The peasant's right. I want to know what and why, messire priest. Some scheme to open up every district to us, is it? That would be foolhardy, but of use. But, if you say to me certain 'articles' needing to be put in certain places, that sounds like magia. Which one might expect from the damned Order of Guiry priests!"

Falke, head sunk to his chest, seemed by the turning of his chin to direct quick glances at both armed Rat- Lords. The corners of his mouth moved. "Will you tell him, Messire Plessiez?"

The black Rat's eyes darted to Desaguliers and back to Falke. "Would you speak of what it is you need, and why?"

Zar-bettu-zekigal held out her hand to Falke. Prompting.

"If I must. If it will make you speak, after." Falke reached up with grazed and cut fingers. A few strands of black still ran from his temples into his curling white hair. He pulled the cloth bandage free of his eyes again.

"You and I," he said, "are ruled by the Thirty-Six."

His long fine lashes blinked over eyes without irises. Midnight-black pupils, vastly expanded, unnaturally dilated, swallowed all the color that might have been.

He rubbed water from his left eye, blinking again, and shot a glance at Desaguliers.

"I don't want to make a display of this, but I will. I hide my eyes, because all light's too strong for me now, and because I don't want to think about them, being like this, what they are."

"How . . . ?" Zari clapped her hand over her mouth.

Falke wound the cloth around his knuckles; his hand lifted to shade his eyes.

"You come to me, a Master Mason. I, and my hall brethren, all of us are builders for our strange masters. We build still, as we have built for generations uncounted. What we buildthe Faneis a cold stone shell. Nothing human has been into the heart of the Fane since building finished there."

Sun and silence filled the hall.

"Except, once, myself. I saw . . .

"I was fool enough to find my way in. In to the center. There's a cold cancer eating away, spreading out, stone by stone, year by year. We build it for them, and then they make it theirs. We build for God and They transform it. We only see shadows of what They seem. Inside, in the heart of the Fane, you see what They really are." His strong fingers began to smooth out the bandage; shifted to knuckle the sepia lids of his eyes.

"Only, having once seen that, you never truly cease to see it."

The lean Rat, Desaguliers, grunted. "All of which is no doubt true, and was true in our fathers' fathers' time, so why should we concern ourselves with it?"

Falke, very quietly, said: "Because we are still building. We are compelled. Not even their servantstheir slaves."

"I can't see the importance of that. It's always been so. You . . ." The Captain-General's gesture took in the men and women who sat around the trestle table. Skepticism was plain on his wolfish face. "You think you'll do what, exactly, against the Decans our masters?"

The fair-haired woman next to Zari sighed. "Tell them, Falke."

Falke stared at his hands.

"This hall is searching for the lost Word. The Word that the Builder died to conceal when this city was invaded, and the Temple of Salomon abandoned. The Word of Seshatthat has been lost for millennia. And for that long our own Temple has remained unfinished, while we're forced to build in slavery for strange masters."

Tannakin Spatchet slowly sat down, pale blue eyes dazed.

"Yes, I'm speaking of Craft mysteries." Falke's wide- set eyes met Zari's gaze, dark lashes blinking rapidly over pupils clear as polished black glass. "We search for the lost Degree, and the lost Mark. And the lost Mystery: we know who built the South side of our Temple, and what their wages were; but until we know the secrets of the Aust side, and what the black-and-white pillars support, we remain as we areslaves. When we know, when our New Temple can be begun-"

"We'll build it and make the heart of the world the New Jerusalem," the fair-haired woman completed.

Falke lifted his shoulders in a weary shrug. "We must have our own power, you see. Build for ourselves again, and not for our masters."

The Captain-General stood, scaly tail lashing. "And this is what you've got yourself mixed up in? Plessiez, you fool! Will you listen to him talk against the Thirty- Six and not protest? They'll eat him alive, man!"

Plessiez smiled. "If I were afraid of the Decans our masters, I would not have begun this."

Tannakin Spatchet stared at the ankh on the black Rat's breast. "You're a priest, my lord! How can you talk against Them? They're the very breath and soul of your Church-"