Red ribbon tied the bones in angled geometries. Red ribbon threaded the eye-sockets, attaching the skull to the bone framework upon which it rested. Ribbon, and the gravel on which it rested: all solid, all bodied into form and existence . . .
The whiteness of the bones, now, the whiteness of absolute negation.
"I saw them with butterflies all in their mouths," she sang, "seeking the Boat, and born again. But this . . ." The woman's tone dropped to growling speech. "This isn't death, but nothing."
Plessiez raised his eyes. The woman, unarmored, stood as if she still wore the Sun's ragged banners; brows come down over her slanting dark eyes. Yellow shadows moved at her feet, mottled and smelling of heat and dust. She met his gaze. Her eyes dulled: flat, cunning, bestial.
White light shone from behind her. The arctic negation of that light chilled him: so small, so bright.
"They are the bones of the truly dead." He stared around. At the whiteness sifting down upon the catafalque, upon the stacked bones of the royal dead: each with the seed-bone removed, each long since boarded the Boat and traveled the Night and returned again.
The chill of the earth faded under his clawed feet. Numbness replaced it, radiating out from the tiny pile of bones in the center of the cavern.
"You may not blame me, lady! Blame the Decan of Noon and Midnight, who thought fit that Guiry should share his alchemical work-"
Bare feet scuffed gravel. Her sword swung up. He knocked it aside, metal clashing harshly, echoing up into the cavern's dry heights.
"It didn't shock you." Her breath sawed. She flung her free hand out, pointing at him. "I saw. Falke died. I saw your face. They all started to die. It didn'teven surprise you. You knew the plague would hit us-"
On the walls of the ossuary cavern the shadows of the woman and the black Rat danced: sword-blades engaging, darting, each movement exaggerated, each swirl of the Rat's plume, each stoop-shouldered dash of the woman. Laughter yammered, drowning the hiss of bare feet on the earth.
"ours and the Decan's, the same pestilence-"
"Wait!"
His long wrist pivoted. He beat her blade back, wrenching his shoulder. Gravel bit his heels. His panting breath echoed back off the walls with the clang of metal. Habit took him to guard position; found him the snap in her concentration and lungedparried, beat her blade down and jumped back.
"you the same cause-"
The woman crabbed sideways three steps and scooped up a brown thigh-bone from the ossuary heap nearest, weighing it in her left hand. The bone-wall groaned, teetered.
"You're by far a better demagogue than fighter." Plessiez trod forward, his eyes meeting her dulled flat gaze. Anger burned him breathless. And fear. "You're a fool, get out."
"Yes, a fool. Yes, a fool to listen, ever, to you. I am the last now: the last of Sun and Roses. If I am a hyena, 1 can make you carrion!"
Highlights glinted in the woman's eyes, the eyes of a woman no more than adequate, he would guess, with a blade; but now flat and hard and cunning, echoing the yellow shadows that moved with her, mimicked her movements, padded in shadows, laughed inhuman laughter.
White light burned.
Now multiple shadows danced on the cavern walls. Brightness scarred his vision. He risked a lunge, continued it on into a run: dashing for the flight of stone steps leading up to another exit. In one loping jump the woman made the lower step: rapier darting up at his breast, he parried, skidded to one knee, staggered up, breath hot in his mouth.
He grabbed at his belt, finding the main-gauche lost somewhere; lunged again, one foot on the bottom step, drove her up three steps;, brought a heel down half off the edge of the sheer flight; leaped backwards and landed on the earth, left hand and tail out for balance. She halfloped and half-fell down the steps towards him.
The point took his gaze away. He only sensed her hand move.
Reflex brought his left hand up. The thrown femur jarred his wrist, clattered away on the floor. She lunged, leaping from the steps; and he bound her blade and kicked, crouched, whipped his scaled tail hard across her ankles. She fell.
She pitched past him, into the ossuary wall that she had loosened the bone from: in a rush and shatter of femurs and skulls and ribs and pelvises the mass of dry brown bones avalanched down on her. She sprawled face-down, greasy hair flying, one bare foot scrabbling for purchase. In the same second he fell forward into the furthest extent of his lunge and felt the penetration of flesh clear up the blade.
Through his grip on the hilt he felt his own pulse or the last fibrillation of her heart.
A Rat skull bounced across the floor. Vertebrae scattered like dice. The bone-pile slid to an unsteady halt, balanced up like kindling. The woman sprawled, partly covered in splintered brown bone, the half-inch-wide blade jammed up through her stomach and under the lowest rib. Blood rivuleted, staining her shirt; a dark stain marked her breeches as bowel and bladder relaxed. Her bubbling, blood-filled breath echoed into silence.
The rapier blade scraped a rib as he withdrew it, bracing his clawed foot against her shoulder.
Light tore. In the whiteness of the bones of the truly dead, a rip appeared.
Tumblers click, numbers roll.
In the university building Lucas scrambles from under the meshing gears of an analytical engine. There is no noise, no smoking oil, no ripping metal. Only an intolerable strain that holds the fabric of the air taut, taut.
Away across the heart of the world, a makeshift lath- and-plaster model of a building glows, moon-bright. A fifteen-year-old girl on her knees beside it, ear-rings jangling, breaks into tears at something she cannot explain: perhaps simply the extravagant order and complexity of its proportions.
Enamel-imaged dice, scattered and chipped, lie among the discarded Thirty Trionfi cards, in a hollow of whiteness where a man and an old woman fall, fall endlessly.
Breaking strain. As if in the weak forces that glue the universe together, some sudden slippage could be felt. Strings pulling apart, order losing its probability.
Plessiez staggered back, sitting down on the bottom step of the nearest flight of stairs.
Blood pooled from the rapier's point to the earth. He sat staring at it, how it glistened in the white light. His chest heaved. He brushed his wrist across his mouth, touched matted fur; touched it again and took his hand away.
One cut ripped his lip, just over the left incisor. He tasted blood, not knowing until he felt the slick matted fur on his right haunch that she had wounded him twice. Numbness began to fill the cavern, hiding the pain. Feeling the weakness of her deep wound, he with shaking fingers unbuckled his sword-belt and rebelted it tightly around his haunch as a tourniquet.
"Well, now . . ."
His voice, even at a whisper, sounded loud as gunfire in a cathedral. He wiped the rapier, fumbling it; leaned the point on the graveled earth and pushed himself upright.
With a sharp snap, the blade broke.
The black Rat staggered. His naked bristling tail whipped out for balance. He stood, eyes half-shut, peering at the clouded air before his face. The white light leached color from the fallen bones, from the great catafalque and the ossuary cavern itself. He gazed up at the dark tunnel-entrance to which the stairs led.
Plessiez looked back.
The great Wheel falters, loosens and forgets the unheard cadences of the Dance of all things; particles of earth and stone and bone dissolve upon air.
He let the broken sword fall.
One hand clenched hard enough to drive rings into his flesh.
Not a light, but a leaching-away of substance.
The earth beneath his numb feet not lost in brilliance, but dissolving into air, and air itself dissolving into nothingness . . .
Plessiez squatted down awkwardly, one arm resting across his unwounded knee, staring at the bones.
Moments ticked past, marked by the slow spreading of blood from the murdered woman. A tension thrummed deep in the stone. On the edge of audibility, Plessiez sensed the loosing of bonds in the heart of the earth. The bones and their red ribbon imprisoned his gaze, nested in the warm whiteness of oblivion.
He spoke softly.
"Now we are the same, you and I . . . Myself stripped gradually and willingly of all I've earned: cardinal's rank, priesthood, power, and friends and skills. And you stripping the heart of the world until nothing remains. True death. Your portent in the sky: the Night Sunthere by a god's conjuring, and mine. Well, we are the same."
He lifted his snout, looking up at one of the stairs and exits.
"No matter how fast, I would be very close, still, when it happens. So where is the point of running?"
One translucent ear twitched. He heard no sound of Charnay, lost in the ossuary labyrinth; and the rattle in the dead woman's throat would not be repeated.
"Believe that I did not know you would be like this but, then, one is seldom sure of outcomes, dealing in matters pertaining to the Divine. Does The Spagyrus regret you, I wonder?"
Above his head, the stone roof of the cavern creaked.
"And I am like you in this: I admit of no possibility of victory. Even though I think I perceiveI thinka method towards it. But you could not expect it of me."
Talking to the bones as if they were his mirror image, the black Rat slid down to sit on the gravel: the nearer stones leached of color and substance.
"Well, and if it were fire I might manage that, and if it were flesh and blood there's her " One slender dark finger pointed to the corpse of the Hyena. "But hardly of use, I fear, with the life departed from it. Death's no cure for entropy."
A large chunk of stone dislodged itself from the roof and fell, cracking the corner from the catafalque of the Rat-Kings. Part of a carved rose rattled down the steps. The smell of blood and ordure began to lessen, and even the chill in the air became mild.
"But-" The black Rat argued obsessively, leaning forward. "You could not expect it of me. Even if I willed it, even if I saw nothing else to be done, even ifand it is possible, oh, I grant you it is possibleI desired it, well, still the flesh would not let me. That has its own desire for survival."
He lay down now, on his side, tail coiled up to his flank, and one arm cradling his head. His black eyes glowed. With his free hand he reached out, testing the limits of absolute numbness near the bones: the milk- white bones glowing in brilliance.
Expecting a pulse of tension, it brought fear hot into his throat to feel, through fingertips, the sensation of fracturing thin ice, of falling suddenly from the step that is not there- The knowledge of how short a time before the world split and rolled up like cloth burned in him. His eyes half-closed. White light split into rainbows.
"Well," he said.
Plessiez, ankh and priesthood discarded both, all conspiracies broken and bloody, lying on one elbow now, as if to read, or by the side of some lover, reached out and with a gentle touch took hold of the infinite whiteness of bone.
The ceiling of the cavern cracked and fell.
High above darkness, high above where the labyrinth in city streets gutters and dies; high above the straining wings of eagles, and soaring into the face of darkness, flies a moth with death's-head markings on its wings.
Airbreathed wings of dark fire reach out.
The Night Sun's blackness burns, a beacon. In the thin air, thinning with height of atmosphere, and with the loosening charges of electrons, the moth beats black- dusted wings furiously, rising, reaching up- A sparrow stalls in the air, snaps, crunches the moth's soft body. Its gullet jerks twice, swallowing.
The wind thins.
Caught in dissolution, in air dissolving; the strangeness of matter that is its body fading, the bird begins to fall.
And suddenly the sky is gold.
"Messire!"
Through rock that tumbled down, immense and slow, great boulders bounding and crushing heaps of bones, Lieutenant Charnay dodged and lumbered down the longest flight of steps, sword-rapier in hand.
She ran across the floor of the ossuary cavern, moving fast, sparing one glance for the dead woman; heading for the slumped black figure before the catafalque. Shouting, voice lost in the roar of splintering rock.
She flung herself to her knees beside Plessiez and turned him over.
And stared into a face so changed she might never have recognized it if she had not, once, met his grandfather.
His black fur was now faded gray; white about the jaw. His shrunken body moaned as she held it, light as sacking. Under his loose pelt, his ribs and collar-bone jutted in stark angles; slim fingers reduced to thin bony sticks.
His head fell back. The flesh of his ears had turned translucently gray; and, as he blinked slowly, she took one look at his eyesmilky with cataractsand turned her head aside to vomit.
One of Plessiez's age-withered hands grasped a skull's lower jaw: brown and old and fragile. A coil of red ribbon ringed his wrist. All the nails of his hand were cracked, yellow, waxen.
His other hand moved feebly. She dropped her sword and clasped it.
"Plessiez, man."
The black Rat, whiskers quivering, raised a hand that trembled. His head bobbed on his thin corded neck. He peered at her.
"And I had always wagered"his thin voice shook "that I would not live to die old."
A roar from above warned her. She had one second to look up at the falling rock, to see how many layers of the catacombs now fell in towards their foundations. Plessiez groaned. The brown Rat tightened her grip on his hand. She threw her body protectively across his, at the last reaching out for her sword.
Stone soughs into dust.
A weakness as of internal bleeding hamstrings her. The White Crow presses both fists into her stomach under the arch of her ribs. Body shaking with sudden cold, teeth grinding, she sits down hard in the alabaster whiteness.
Maggots boil up like milk.
Their soft bodies slide against her skin. Revolted, too weak to stand, she reaches out a hand to sketch a hieroglyph on the air. Her hand drops to her side, the powerless shape left unfinished.
"He's dying-"
Waves of maggots belly up, silky and cool about her shins and ankles. The solidity of what stone remains under her begins to soften.
Quietly, the White Crow laughs.
"Theo, my lord, you did say 'corrupted.' The divine and demonic souls of the universe don't decay into maggots when they die! Oh, he learned this of us."
The absence that weakens her grows now, as if her heartblood leaks away through weakened aorta and ventricle at every pulse. At some deep level of cells, still resounding from the miracle of shape-changing, the White Crow shivers into dissolution.
She shouts: "You didn't have to do this! You're a god; even these rules don't bind you!"
"He chooses that they do."
Theodoret stands, Candia's doublet still kilting his waist. Age-spotted skin gleams sallow in the growing intensity of light breaking down. His red lips part, he frowns; his head high, gray hair flowing.
"Young woman, the Thirty-Six were fool enough to choose to exile the Church of the Trees and degrade their worshipers. I've suffered from that all my life. Don't tell me about Divine capriciousness and stupidity!"
She twists around on her knees, smearing the crawling maggots to a paste. Effort burns her lungs. As if the cells behind her eyes dissolve also, her vision whitens.
"Ahhh-"