Rats And Gargoyles - Rats and Gargoyles Part 43
Library

Rats and Gargoyles Part 43

"You heard me! You owe me a month's back rent! Where is it?"

"Ithat isunavoidably absent-"

Casaubon picked up his blue satin frock-coat, drawing it on over his filthy shirt. He drew himself up to his full six foot five, looked down over his swelling chest and belly, and shrugged magnificently. He spoke over the thunder of approaching wings.

"Mistress Evelian, I was, and am, busy. Now, if you don't mind-"

"That brat Lucas landed you on me, but the university's never heard of you; they won't pay me! If I can't get coin from them, I intend bartering those crates you left behind for whatever I can get for them!"

Casaubon absently retrieved a half-eaten lamb chop from an inner pocket, and paused in the act of biting into it.

"Are you mad? Absolutely not."

"Calling yourself a Lord-Architect; I don't believe that for a minute."

"Aw, Mother!"

A straggle-haired fifteen-year-old ran around from the other side of the siege-engine. She glanced up once at the brown Rats loading Greek fire into the ballista. A torn yellow-and-white sash had been tied over her plasterer's silk overalls.

"Get down!" She pushed the older blonde woman towards the side of the engine, her face upturned to the Night Sun.

"Don't interrupt, Sharlevian."

The Lord-Architect Casaubon wiped grease off his chin with the back of his hand, smearing machine oil across his fair skin. He replaced the half-eaten chop in a deep outer pocket of his coat. "Get under cover somewhere, rot you! I don't have time for this pox-damned nonsense!"

"Wanna go home," the blonde girl said pugnaciously.

Evelian put her fists on her hips. "I'm going nowhere until I get this account settled!"

"Ah." A new, male voice cut in. "Messire, do you have any authority here? Can you tell me who does? I wish to register the strongest-possible complaint-"

A thunk! and hiss from the ballista drowned his words. The Lord-Architect nestled his chin into three several layers of fat, looking down at a middle-aged, rotund and sweating man. A verdigrised chain hung about the man's neck.

"Tannakin Spatchet. Mayor of Nineteenth District east quarter."

The Lord-Architect Casaubon rested his weight back on his right heel, planted his ham-fist on his hip, and raised his chin. He surveyed the woman, the girl and the middle-aged man; let his gaze travel past them to the battered facades of buildings surrounding the square, and the azure sky dark with acolytes and the Night Sun.

"A lesser man would be confused by this," he rumbled plaintively.

"My rent-"

"We can't stand out here in the open-!"

"Severe damage to life and p-property-"

The Lord-Architect, ignoring the man's stutter, reached down with plump delicate fingers. A dark glint shone among the links of the Mayor's chain. He lifted a carved stone hanging on a separate chain.

"You hired a Scholar-Soldier! Damn me if that isn't Valentine's work."

Tannakin Spatchet frowned, bemused.

"White Crow." Seeing him nod, Casaubon let the talisman fall back. Another glyptic pendant rested in the division of Evelian's breasts; and a third, the chain lapping round several times, hung from Sharlevian's left wrist.

A crackle of musket-fire echoed from the engine- platform above their heads. Casaubon winced. Clouds of dust skirred up.

The Lord-Architect rubbed his stinging eyes, swore; grabbed Evelian's elbow and pulled her into the shelter of his bolster-arm as a daemon tail, a bristling thick cable, whiplashed down and cracked across the marble paving.

Stone chippings spanged off the side of the siege-engine.

Evelian glared. "My-"

"Rent, yes, I know," the Lord-Architect muttered testily. "Rot you, get up on the machine. All of you. Safer. Move!"

He caught Sharlevian by the scruff of her overalls and pushed; looked round for Spatchet and saw him already halfway up the ladder to the platform. Following mother and daughter, the Lord-Architect swung himself ponderously up the metal rungs.

"And stop that!" He batted one hand irritably towards the ballista. A brown Rat in Guard uniform yelled for a temporary cease-fire.

Above, the wings of acolytes cracked the air. Bristle-tails lashed down. The portico of a nearby house fragmented: stone splinters shrapneled. A balcony collapsed and spilled six Rats and two men down into the rubble of the square.

The Lord-Architect Casaubon pushed through the Guards to the back of the platform and knelt down. He folded back the deep cuffs of his satin coat, and scratched thoughtfully in the hair over his ear, peering down at the back axle.

Wheel-tracks and spilled oil marked their arrival, the tracks diminishing back down the avenue by which they had entered the square.

The Night Sun's black light gleamed on the marble frontages of temples, palaces, banks and offices on the surrounding hills; glinting from the horizons of the city- scape, from the very top of the Fane-in-the-Twelfth-District.

His china-blue eyes vague for a moment, he touched a filthy hand to his mouth, frowning. His lips moved, framed a word that might have been a woman's name. Inaudible in the roar of falling masonry, the shrieking and beat of wings.

"What are you doing?" Sharlevian demanded.

She collapsed into a sitting position beside him, silver- chain ear-rings dangling, narrow face pale. Remnants of yellow and white paint clung to her jaw and ears and hair-line. She clutched his arm, the bitten fingernails on her hand pulling threads from the satin.

"Hey!"

Casaubon's free hand went to one of his pockets. He dug in it, brought out a roast chicken-wing, absently offering it to Sharlevian. She sat back, disgust on her face. The Lord-Architect shoved the chicken-wing back; dug again, and his hand emerged clutching the small sextant. Still kneeling, he sighted up at the Night Sun.

He beamed.

"At last," he said.

He prised his fat fingers under one of the iron plates on the platform, opening it up. The ends of two thickly plaited cables of bare copper wire shone in the Night Sun's light. Wrapping each of his hands in the tails of his frock-coat, he carefully twisted the cables together and slammed the hatch shut.

Sparks leaped.

He sat back, grabbing Sharlevian's shoulder. The girl fell against him. Heads turned at the searing actinic light.

For a split second it clung to the siege-engine: St. Elmo's fire. Rat Guards cursed, swore, beating sparks from their uniforms. Mistress Evelian's gaze abruptly focused: she seized the Mayor's arm.

Searing blue-white light ran to the ground, to the spilled trail of oil staining the flagstones. Tiny blue flames licked up; then a thin rippling aurora-curtain of light. It sprang up from the spilled-oil trail, running powder-train swift back down the engine's tracks, down the avenue away from the square.

Wildfire-fast, spreading, running, the aurora-curtain of blue light sped up towards the distant hills, cornered, curved, divided and divided again: a brilliant track across the streets the siege-engine had followed.

The Lord-Architect Casaubon grasped one of the ballista struts. It creaked as he pulled himself up, foot scrabbling for a hold, until he saw the hills surrounding the docks and the airfield, the great city stretching away to every compass-point to the horizon.

Far in the distance other light-curtains began to spring up, thin as the spilled trail of oils from other siege-engines.

The electric-blue aurora tracery wavered, rising into the air, hovered at roof-level here, grew taller further off, shorter in other Districts. The Lord-Architect raised one great fist, punched the air; seams straining and at last popping under the arm of his frock-coat.

"Aw, I don't . . ." Sharlevian's puzzlement trailed off.

The light-threads of the labyrinth threaded the city streets, spreading far, far out of sight, following the oil- trails from specially constructed cisterns in each engine. Out through avenues and streets and alleys to all thirty- six Districts and all hundred and eighty-one quarters; netting the city that is called the heart of the world in a bright maze.

Sharlevian, at his elbow, wiped her nose on the back of her hand and sniffed. "So you are an architect. They taught us the Chymicall Labyrinth in Masons' Hall. We build that pattern into our homes sometimes. But what good is it?"

One fat finger raised, the Lord-Architect Casaubon paused. His head cocked sideways as if he listened for faint music. The black shadows of the Fane's acolytes fell across him, across the square, thousand upon thousand.

Wheeling. Turning.

Thousands, tens of thousands wheeling and turning as one.

Unwilling, constrained, they wheeled in their flights: gliding on burning wings to fly the pattern of the labyrinth. And only the pattern of the labyrinth.

Casaubon lowered his hand. Breath touched his oil- stained cheek, a remembrance of the heat in the Garden of the Eleventh Hour: the roses, and the black extinct bees that fly the knot garden's subtle geometries.

"Don't they teach you apprentices anything in your pox-rotted Masons' Halls?" he rumbled. "Patterns compel, structures compel. Will you look at that? Rot her, why can't Valentine be with me to see this?"

The acolytes of the Fane flocked, falling to fly the pattern of the burning labyrinth. Great ribbed wings spread under the Night Sun, blistering with its heat; bristle-tails flicked the air. Beaks and jaws opened to cry, cry agony.

Sparing no glance from blind black eyes for human or for Rat-Lord; tearing no stone from stone; uprooting no roofs now. Only gliding upon hot thermals, rising and falling; flurried wings lashing and falling again to a glide, compelled by the maze-pattern drawn in city streets that now they gaze on. Sightless gaze and are trapped, under the black scorching sun.

Across the city that is called the heart of the world, the labyrinth burns.

Pain hollowed each air-filled bone.

Cold air pressed every planing pinion as the white crow wheeled again, rising to glide down vaulted hills. A bird's side-set eyes reflected perpendicular arches, stone tracery, fan vaulting: a white desert of shaped stone.

"Crraaa-aak!"

Frosted air sleeked the feathers of her breast. She tilted aching wings, pain catching her in joints whose muscles still, at cell-level, remember being human. The scents of rotting hay, of weed left behind at equinoctial tides impinged sharply on her bird-senses.

"Craaa-akk-k!"

The white crow wheeled again and skimmed a long gallery. Age-polished stone flashed back her fragmented image, an albino hooded bird. She flew wearily from the gallery, wings beating deep strokes.

What use is it to search for the dying . . . ?

She lifted a wing-tip and soared. Pain flashed down nerve and sinew. She welcomed it. When her body no longer remembers that it was other and ceases to pain, she will have become what she is shaped to.

No one tell me that the Decan of Noon and Midnight has no sense of humor . . .

The internal voice seemed hers, forcing its way through avian synapses. Double images curved across the surface of her bright bird's eyes: the great pillars of the Fane seeming spears, soon to tumble into confusion as after a battle. The air resisted her wings so that they beat slowly, slowly; Time itself slowing.

The great depths of the Fane opened around her. Masonry crumbling with age; floors worn down into hollows by aeons of divine tread. Lost ages built in stone: the Fanes that are one Fane, the inhabitation of god on earth. Built out as a tree grows, ring upon ring, hall and gallery and tower, nave and crypt and chapel. Growing, encrusting as a coral reef.

And as for what Rat-Lord and human empires rose and fell while this gallery was building, or what lovers and children died while these columns were cutting . . .

She stretched wide wings and lay herself on the air, letting it bear her; the voice in her head that is still Valentine and White Crow less frenetic now, slowing with the depths of millennia opening out.

They're not idols, magia or oracles. They're the Thirty- Six, the principles that structure the world. Why did we think we could go up against them? Why did we think that anything we did would not be what they ordained, even to the Uncreation?

"Craaaa-akk!"

She flew into the Fane of the Third Decan.

Into a hall in which cathedrals might have been lost, colors blotting her sight. Bright images burned in what should be perpendicular windows, but no light is needed to illuminate these shafts of color. To either side they shine, fiery as the hearts of suns, scarlets and blues and golds: depicting dunes, lizards, beasts of the desert; ragged stars, comets and constellations long pushed apart by Time.

Depths swung sickeningly below her wings as she dived. Her instincts human, flight is precarious. She cawed, hard and harsh, the sound recognizable as a bird's copy of human speech.

"Xerefu! Akeru! Lord of Yesterday and Tomorrow!"

An ornate marble tomb towered in the center of the nave, gleaming white and gold and onyx-black. Her wings held the air as she curved in flight around the pomegranate-ornamented pillars, the scarabs cut into the great base and pedestal.

A great scorpion shape crowned the tomb, thrice the height of a church spire.

White stone articulated the carapace of the scorpion: its highcurving tail and sting, great moon-arced claws. The segmented body gleamed hollow. Chill air drifted between the joints of the shell, caressing angular legs, clustered eyes. A scent of old dust haunts the air.

"Xerefu! Akeru!"

Time frosted the stone exoskeleton beneath her wings, shimmering as if ice runs over the fabric that, after aeons of divine incarnation, is no longer stone.

"We do not fear. "

Air whispers between the carapace-joints. The jointed tail quivers, a point of light sparkling at the tip of the hollow sting.

"We do not fear, as you do. We may choose now to incarnate Ourselves in the celestial world and not here on earth. Or We may raze this world and begin again. The game does not weary Us. "

The white crow wheeled across the cliff-face of the image, time stretching as she skimmed the distance between moon-curved claw and claw. Her heart pounded more rapidly than a watch, ticking away her slight bird's lifespan.

"Sick! Sick! You have! Plague here!"

Her travesty of human voice cawed, echoing from hollow shells. One serrated claw shifts. A shining globe-eye dulled as she flew past, and crumbling stone dust drifted down on the air.

"Xerefu! Akeru!"

The whispering air lies silent.

The hollow stone that incarnates the Decan of Beginnings and Endings, the Lord of the Night of Time, two-aspected and of two separate speeches, begins to crumble into fragments.

"Craa-akk-kk!"