Rats And Gargoyles - Rats and Gargoyles Part 5
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Rats and Gargoyles Part 5

Plessiez reached down and ran a thumb along the ankh's heavy emeralds. Whimsical, he said: "It is a little oppressive for any church, you must admit, to have God incarnate on earth; and not only on earth, but also, as it were, down the next street, and the next . . ."

Scandalized, the plump Mayor protested. "Messire!"

"That They are god is true, that They are with us on this earth is true; and some say, also," Plessiez added, "that we would be better off were They to abandon Their incarnations here and resume their Celestial habitations."

Desaguliers' tone of incredulity cut the hot white hall like acid: "And you hope to affect the Thirty-Six?"

The black Rat smoothed down his scarlet jacket, a slightly dazed expression on his face. "Ah, perhaps my ambitions are not so high. Perhaps I only seek to move Them by affecting Their creations. I will say no more on this, messire; it is not part of our bargain."

Desaguliers swore, and Zari motioned him to silence. She swung round in her chair, drawing one leg up under her, staring at Plessiez.

"Then, I'll speak for you." Falke stood, both empty hands resting palm-down on the table. "Knowledge was the price of my consent to the bargain. If our plans are betrayed to the King, then so will yours be!"

He faced Desaguliers. "As to magiayes. What Messire Plessiez will do might be called necromancy, being that sort of poor magia that can be done using the castoff shells of souls, that is, mortal bodies.

"I know that Messire Plessiez plans the invoking of a plague-magia. A great plague indeed, but not a contamination that will kill my kind, or yours, Messire Desaguliers; instead a plague of such dimensions that it will touch the Decans Themselves."

Desaguliers stroked the grizzled fur at his jaw-line. His slender fingers moved unsteadily. "Plessiez, man, you are mad. The Fane knows all the pox-rotted arts of magia. This is lunacy."

Plessiez rose from his chair. "I will see his Majesty made a true King, Desaguliers, and that can't be done while there are masters ruling over us!"

Desaguliers snapped his fingers. Metal scraped as three more of the lithe black Rat cadets drew their swords.

"Lunacyand treason. I'm having you arrested-"

Zari felt the wood of the table shake under her spread palms.

The fat Mayor sprang back, swatting an armed cadet aside like a child; seized the arm of one of his companions and pulled her towards the door. "What did I tell you? I told them so!"

A copper taste invaded her tongue, familiar from that morning in the university courtyard.

"Run!"

She got one foot on the chair, launched herself off it as dust and splintered wood thundered down across the table, blinded by sudden hot brilliance; missed her footing and sprawled into the warm brown fur of Charnay. She sat up, head ringing.

Falke stared up and flung an arm across his lined worn face.

The Katayan grabbed, missed, then got her hands to Plessiez's ankle where he gazed up, transfixed, and brought him crashing down on top of her; coiled her tail around Falke's leg and pulled. The man fell to his knees.

A searing chill passed overhead.

Zari gazed up at the open sky: brown now, and blackening, like paper in a fire.

Dust skirled up from the hall's collapsed roof. The far wall teetered, groaned, and with a wrench and scream of tearing wood fell into the yard.

Feet trampled her, human and Rat, running in all directions. She saw some men, fleeing, almost at the yard- gate, duck as they ran; and something chill and shadowed passed above her.

"Look-"

She caught Falke's arm, but the man was too busy scrabbling at the planks they sprawled on for his eye- bandage. Charnay grabbed her discarded rapier and pushed Plessiez down, half-crouching over him, snarling up at the sky.

A woman in red satin overalls threw up her arms and screamed. Coils of black bristle-tail lapped her body, biting deep into her stomach, blood dulling the satin. Ribbed wings beat, closing about her as tooth and beak dipped for her face.

Fire burst from the wooden hall walls in hollow concussive plops, burning blue and green in the noon-twilight. Rapidly spreading, consuming even the earth and the yard's timber outside, it formed a circling wall of flames. One of Desaguliers' cadets thrust at it with his sword. A thin scream pierced the air: the Rat fell back on to the hall floor, fur blazing.

The sun burned with a searing storm-light.

Out of that sky, stinking of wildfire and blood, wings beating the stench of carrion earthwards, by dozens and hundreds, the Fane's acolytes fell down to feed.

Chapter Two.

Evelian bent over the wash- tub in the courtyard. The young man locked his apartment door and began walking towards the exit-passage. She looked up, red-faced, wiped her forehead with a soapy wrist, and called to him.

"Lucas, wait. Is Zaribeth there?"

The dark-haired young man shook his head. Despite the misty heat he was buttoned to the throat, in a black doublet with a small neck-ruff, and his breeches and stockings were spotless.

"Her bed hasn't been slept in."

"Her bed!" Evelian snorted. Lucas paused.

A granular mist fogged the air, blurring the roofs of the two-story timber-framed apartments overlooking the yard. Intermittent watery sun shone down on washing, limp on the cherry trees, and the scent of drying linen filled the air.

Evelian slapped a shirt against the washboard. She wore her yellow hair pinned up in a tangle, and an apron over the blue-and-yellow satin dress. "Brass nerve, that child! Do you know, one night, I found her in my bed? Yesterday. No; night before last."

She put a hand in the small of her back and stretched. "I came up to my room and there she was, under the sheet in my bed, naked as an egg! Looked at me with those big brown eyes, and asked did I really want her to go, and didn't I need keeping warm of nights?"

Lucas colored. Outside the yard, Clock-mill struck the half-hour.

"I told her we're in the middle of a heatwave as it is," Evelian added, "and up she got, all pale and freckled, little tits and fanny, with that fool tail of hers whisking up the dust. I turned her round and smacked her one that'll have left a mark! Told her not to be an idiot; I don't sleep with my lodgers. Oh, now, see you; I've made you blush."

"Not at all." Lucas shifted awkwardly. "It's just a warm morning."

"I wish"a vicious slap at wet cloth"that I knew where she was."

Lucas felt the mist prickle warmly against his face. Looking at the cloud that clung to the roof-trees put the black timber frieze in his line of vision; bas-relief spades, crossed femurs, hour-glasses, money-sacks and skulls.

He snapped: "I don't know where she is. I don't care! If you knew what I had to go through yesterday, to get out of what that little bitch got me into . . ."

Evelian flipped shirts into the soapy water, and plunged her arms in, scrubbing hard. The shadowless light eased lines from her face. She could have been twenty rather than forty.

"I'm not getting mixed up in whatever's biting you, boy. I swore last time that I'd have nothing to do with organizing against the Rat-Lords. The only good thing I ever got out of that was my Sharlevian. But, there, I live in the city; there isn't any escape from it." Evelian stepped into the cherry tree, into cool green leaves and damp linen. "The little Katayan's hardly older than Sharlevian. I like the girl. I worry about her."

Another door opened across the yard, and a student scuttled towards the exit-passage, calling: "Luke, see you there. Don't be late!" Evelian saw him bristle at Luke.

On the point of going, he turned back.

"Yesterday afternoon. I tasted . . . could taste blood. Coppery." He went on quickly. "Others, here, they did, too. Like yesterday morning, when one of the . . . one of them came to the university. As if something watched . . ."

She wiped her hands on her apron, and her blue eyes went vague for a long minute.

"Mistress Evelian?"

"Get someone to read the cards or dice for you," she said.

"Yes! But is there anyone, here?"

Evelian nodded. A coil of fair hair escaped a clip and fell down across her full bodice.

"The White Crow. That's who you want. Do you dice, cards, palmsanything you can think of. The only practicing Hermetic philosopher in this quarter, as far as I can make out."

"I can't be late; it's my first day-" Lucas shut his mouth with a snap. "Yes, I can. To quote Reverend Master Candia, there are no rules at the University of Crime. Where is this White Crow?"

"Right across the yard here. Those top two apartments on the left-hand side." Evelian pointed to the rickety wooden steps leading to the first floor. "Just knock and go in. All my lodgers are . . . unique in some way."

He took a few steps, and her voice came back from behind him: "Ask about Zaribeth!"

The wooden hand-rail felt hot, damp in the swirling mist. Lucas glanced up at the windows and open skylight as he mounted the steps. The diamond-panes fractured thin sunlight into splinters. Children yelped in the street beyond the passage; somewhere there was a smell of boiled cabbage.

He rapped on the door, and it swung open, outwards. Calling loudly, "Hello in there!" Lucas walked in.

The first room was light, airy, and piled high with volumes of leather-bound books. Books stood on chairs, shelves, leaned on the window-sill, slid off a couch. Only the round table, with its patchwork cloth, was clear.

"Mistress White Crow?"

"Here." The far door opened. A woman in a white cotton shirt and cut-off brown knee-breeches came in. A white dog followed at her bare heels.

Her hair was a tumbling mass of dark red-brown, almost a cinnamon color; and, where she had pinned the sides back from her face, bright silver streaked her temples. She stood a few inches shorter than Lucas, wiry, with something languid in her movements. He thought her about thirty years old.

She nodded to him, and crossed to the window, leaning on the sill and sniffing at the heat of the morning. Her smile was melancholy. Lucas caught a flash of white; noticed that she wore a fingerless cotton glove on her left hand. The palm was dotted with red.

"Don't touch Lazarus," she warned. "He isn't a pet."

Lucas turned his head. The dog was no dog. Large, with a shaggy white coat that faded into a silver ruff; the muzzle sharp and thinly pointed. It turned its head, staring at him with blue eyes. Sweat prickled between his shoulder-blades as the silver-gray timber wolf padded past him and lay down across the doorway.

The door swung back open, on creaking hinges. The White Crow raised red-brown eyebrows, and smiled at Lucas. "Disconcerting, isn't it? Tell me about yourself."

"Aren't you meant to do that?"

"You want me to read dice or cards," the woman remarked, lifting several volumes of Paracelsus from an armchair, "and you act like a damned aristo. You're studying at the university, but all of that I could have heard where I heard your name, Lucas. From gossip. I don't do party tricks. Sit down."

Lucas stiffened. The cinnamon-haired woman dusted her hands together, and winced.

She pulled the patchwork cloth from the round table. Mirror-glass glimmered. Businesslike, she bent down, undid a catch, and spun the mirror on its spindle until the wooden backing was uppermost. A click of the catch and the table was firm.

Reaching up to a cupboard, the White Crow remarked, "Dice, I think," and pulled a brown silk scarf out and floated it down across the table.

Lucas picked the empty chair up and put it by the table. Something brushed his hair, buzzed sharply; he shook his head, and a honey-bee wavered off across the room. The woman put up a finger. The bee clung there for a moment while she brought it up close to eyes that, Lucas saw, glowed tawny amber; her lips pursed, and she blew gently. The bee hummed, flying drunkenly through the open window.

"Why 'White Crow'?" Lucas sat, lounging back in the chair and crossing his legs.

She smiled. Under the white cotton shirt, her breasts were small and firm. Crow's-feet starred the comers of her eyes, and the slightest fat was beginning to blur the line of her jaw.

"Because it's not in the slightest like my own name-Quiet, Lazarus."

The wolf snapped, snarled a quick high whine, as two more bees flew in at the door. The White Crow held out a hand absently. As the bees alighted there, she transferred them to her red-brown hair, where they crawled sluggishly, buzzing. Lucas's skin crawled.

"If you have a silver shilling," she said, "it would speed matters up considerably. Now where did I . . . ? Oh, yes."

She pushed books off the window-sill left-handed, regardless of where they fell. The sill opened. From the compartment, she took a handful of dice. She looked about for a moment for somewhere to sit, and then pulled a tall stool out from a corner.

Lucas sat up. The White Crow threw the dice loosely onto the brown silk covering the table. There were eight or nine of them: cubes of bone. And laid into each die- face, in brilliant enamel, was a picture or image.

"Just handle those for a minute, will you, and then cast them?"

Mist cleared and clouded, visible through the open skylight, and the room seemed to swell or darken as the sun shone or diminished. The woman reached up to a high shelf. Her shirt pulled taut across her breasts and pulled out of her breeches waistband, so that he saw tanned flesh in the gap. Lucas shuffled the dice in both hands, leaning forward to the table to conceal his arousal.

She took down a stole and slung it about her neck. The white satin shone, embroidered with dozens of tiny black characters.

"Now," she said, and Lucas cast the handful of dice on the table.

He drew in a sharp breath. Of the nine die-faces, four were showing a white enameled skull with blue periwinkle eyes, the other five a tiny knotted cordthe knot with which a shroud is tied.

The White Crow leaned over, squinting, and her dark red eyebrows went up.

"Damn things are on the blink again. Here, we'll try the cards. How old are you?"

"Nineteen." Lucas slid a hand down between himself and the table, and tugged surreptitiously at the seam of his breeches. His eyes followed the woman as she padded about the room, turning up books and piles of paper, obviously searching.

Something about her made him want to drop all pretense. "Actually," Lucas said, "I'm the heir to the throne of Candover. Prince Lucas. Eldest son of King Ordono."

She trod on the end of the satin stole, and swore.

"Incognito?"

"That was my idea." He pushed his fingers through his thick springy hair. "I thought it would be good. To not be a king's son. I suppose I thought people would treat me the same; that it would show through, naturally, somehowwhat I really am."

The White Crow said drily, "Perhaps it does," and straightened up with a much-thumbed pack of cards. She gave them to Lucas and slumped down on the stool, puffing.

"But there's no advantage to it, I can see that." Lucas shuffled the cards. "I'll give it up, I think."

"Oh, to be nineteen and romantic!" The woman smiled, sardonic. She took the cards back and began to lay them out on the brown silk cover. When she had put twelve in a diamond-pattern, she stopped.