Rats And Gargoyles - Rats and Gargoyles Part 55
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Rats and Gargoyles Part 55

"I-" Andaluz abruptly turned to Luka. The woman rubbed at her wet eyes with plump fingers, smiling up at him. His own eyes ran water. He folded his arm in hers, patting her hand, and lifted it to his lips and kissed it.

She smiled with a brilliance that outshone the sky.

Elish-hakku-zekigal touched his arm and pointed. Her chant croaked on, breathless, unfaltering. Freckles stood out on Zar-bettu-zekigal's pale skin. The Candovard Ambassador stared upwards, following her gaze.

Six yards above, at the black rail, a shadowless woman leaned her chin on her arms and frowned as if memory troubled her. Slanting black brows dipped over reddish- brown eyes webbed around with faint lines. Broken butterfly-wings tangled in her short greasy hair.

"Lady!" Zar-bettu-zekigal's hand jerked up, stopped, fell to her side. "Lady Hyena!"

Warm wind brushed the woman's face, smoothing away the frown. A ragged Sun-banner sashed her red shirt; and she fisted the cloth in one hand and rubbed it against her cheek, her glance sliding away from the Katayan girl.

Andaluz rested his arm across her shoulders. "She'll come back, Mistress Zari. If not to you, then to others."

Zar-bettu-zekigal broke from his embrace. "Oh, what! I know that-"

Her greatcoat swirled about her pale calves. Loping strides took her ahead, paralleling the woman at the rail. Her hands fisted at her sides, black against dazzling light and water, as she came to the carved steps where the canal opened out into the lagoon.

A frown dented the woman's slanting brows.

Suddenly the woman grabbed at her hip, as if she expected to find a sword there. She thrust her way down the rail, limping, pushing her way between men and Rats; walking level with Zar-bettu-zekigal.

No shadow marked the deck.

A sweet smile broke over her face, relaxed and content. She stopped, standing still; andas no other on the Boatlifted her hand in farewell. Andaluz glanced down. Zar-bettu-zekigal's eyes glowed.

"Did you see that! She said goodbye. To me!"

The Boat moved out into the lagoon, prow turning towards the open sea. A humid wind shifted the masses of roses, and the rose-leaves sprouting from rail and bow and spar. Limpid water rushed against the curving tarred planks of the hull.

Andaluz shaded his eyes with his hand. Sweat slicked the grizzled hairs on his skin. The Lady Luka gripped Elish's arm for support and lowered herself to sit on a step, easing her sweat-pink feet into the cool water. He stepped down beside her, resting one hand on her rumpled robes.

"Andaluz, look!"

The harbor water flows, a net of diamonds; and in lucid depths adamant limbs now stir: Chnoumen, Chachnoumen, Opener of Hundreds and Thousands of Years, implicit in the lines of sun on water.

"Things can't be the same after this . . ."

A tread behind warns him, that and the sudden silence of the crowd.

Towering over the marble-and-gold palaces, Her ancient terracotta smile secret and triumphant, the Decan of the Eleventh Hour walks amongst Rats and humans that scurry like ants about Her feet. Bees hum among the roses that chain her, sweet and white in the afternoon sun.

Andaluz tastes salt and sand in his mouth.

"I wish I knew my son were here and safe." Luka raised her head, surveying all; bird-bright glance softening with dreamy reminiscence. "He was always so delicate as a child, my Baltazar. His chest, you know. He never did take care of himself."

Andaluz bit the inside of his cheek firmly. "Ah . . . yes. Mistress Zari's described Lord Casaubon to me so well that I feel I already know him."

The younger Katayan woman gurgled. She caught a light-standard and pulled herself up on to its marble base, gazing over the heads of the crowd, searching.

Luka patted her silver braid, twisting a feather more tightly in it. "I know he's never been too proud to ask his mother for help; that's why I came at once. I'd never say that to Baltazar, of course. He'd be dreadfully embarrassed. Did he look well when you last saw him?"

" 'Well'?" Zar-bettu-zekigal grinned and pointed. "See for yourself, Lady. Ei! Lord-Architect!"

"Baltazar!"

Luka elbowed her way between people, Andaluz at her heels. Andaluz glimpsed copper hair as a head turned.

An immensely tall and fat man walked beside the Decan of the Eleventh Hour, stately and beaming. His shirt hung out of his breeches, unbuttoned, stained black with machine-oil. The two top buttons of his breeches had gone missing, and both stockings were unrolled to his ankles. He moved massively, the crowd parting in front of him.

Luka hallooed: "My little baby boy!"

The Lord-Architect Casaubon stopped, sat heavily and abruptly down on the top step of the quay, put his padded elbows on his vast knees, and sank his face into his hands.

". . . Mother."

Slowly the Boat moves into distance, hazed in the afternoon heat; gliding down the path of sun-dazzles on the water.

Still from the sky they pour down to follow it, the birds that fly from thin-aired heights; and, high above, white stone wings curve on air: Erou, the Ninth Decan, Lord of the Triumph of Time, soaring in the changing brilliance of the sky.

"We will never be the same again."

Into the silence of gathered tens of thousands, a clear voice sounds: the Decan of the Eleventh Hour, Lady of the Ten Degrees of High Summer, whose gaze now scatters miracles over the god-haunted heart of the world.

"Death is not final-"

From the Fifth Point of the Compass they come, walking out from the ruins of the Fane into the world. In the great Districts that stretch across a continent, bells ring in abbey towers, ships' masts burst into flower, women and children and Rats and men clasp hands and dance, in chains and pairs, through streets, and through the midnight-marble ruins.

Stone-bodied, immense, beast-headed: god-daemons stalk streets and parks and avenues, squares and palaces.

"only change is final; and now it changes again!"

After millennia of construction, thrown down now and laid waste, the Thirty-Six Decans walk out of the Fane's ruins and into the world.

Chapter Nine.

White heat-haze lies over the full-leafed summer trees, shadowing their green canopies blue.

Where she lies, in tall cow-parsley between field and formal gardens, damp grass and shadow imprint her body. Borrowed shirt and breeches shade her from sunburn.

Up on the hill-slope, past garden fountain-jets ten meters tall and impromptu open-air feasting, the rotunda of the New Temple curves across the sky. Warm brick, pennants and flags, tiny dots of faces where people walk in wonder along its outer balconies . . .

Time enough to go back to crowds and questions in a few minutes. The woman lies in the grass, hearing birds sing; now gazing down past where the Arch of Days lies invisible under the foot of the hill, past the new canal, to distant hills hollowed with blue shadow.

A large figure approaches, down in the valley, walking along the canal path. Frock-coated: copper hair glinting a clear quarter-mile.

The White Crow rolled over on her back, staring up through the dust of meadowsweet, reaching up with scarred hands to play with the swarming black-dot haze of bees. And abruptly shifted, sprang to her feet, and began to run back up the hill towards the Temple.

A distant clock chimes.

Blazing white light reflected from pale gravel and a pale sky. Zar-bettu-zekigal sprawled on the fountain's marble rim, knees and black dress spread apart, nostrils flaring to smell the day's heat.

"I know the answers to every question now."

"Every question?" Lucas pulled at the neck of his shirt. He lifted a wine-bottle to his mouth and drank. The young Katayan woman sat sideways on the fountain's rim, one foot up on the marble, her black dress falling down between her knees and over her tail.

"I'm a Kings' Memory: I know." She snorted. "Which is more than they do."

Sheaves of paper lay scattered on the gravel about her feet. Blackletter, with illustrative gray-and-black photographic images, and narrow columns of print. The fountain's odorous spray speckled them with water.

"Vanringham got this out fast enough! Listen." She hauled a sheet of paper out from under her other heel. The Moderate Intelligencer's still-damp ink marked her fingers.

" 'Visiting student Prince Lucas of our far-flung colony of Candover played a curious part in events. It is creditably reported that he authorized the students of the University of Crime to go on a spree of looting, they only being discouraged at the last by the disclosure of his background in the mechanic trade-' "

"What!" Lucas, choking on a swallow of wine, sat up and grabbed the paper. "I'll sue!"

She shuffled paper-clippings, dropping a small pair of silver scissors on the gravel. "Here's another one. 'Rumor speaks of the late Master of the Hall in Nineteenth Eastquarter, Falke, being instrumental in preventing the late outbreak of plague from worsening.' Ei! Won't I talk to Vanringham! I told him everything true, and he's just distorted it all!"

Lucas turned the page of Thirtieth District's Starry Messenger over, reading aloud.

" 'Accusations against Reverend tutor Candia of the University of Crime have been dropped. It was reported that Master Candia had dealt with persons unbecoming to the reputation of the University of Crime, and was to be dismissed from his place on the Faculty, but after representations from the Church of the Trees-' " Astonishment edged Lucas's tone. " 'from the Church of the Trees all charges have been dropped.' "

"Oh, say you, that's because of this."

Zar-bettu-zekigal proffered Eighth District's Mercurius Politicus.

" 'Bishop Theodoret instrumental in dismissing Black Sun; makes overtures to the Thirty-Six; intervention of this gaia-church successful; The Spagyrus ratifies new status for the Church of the Trees; see pictures page six.' "

"Pictures?" Lucas took the clipping, peering at silver- and-gray images of the Cathedral of the Trees and that square's gallows, a tiny figure in the foreground recognizable as Theodoret. The cameraman had, quite sensibly, made no attempt to include the Decan, but a vast shadow lay across the foreground of the square.

At Theodoret's side, small and bright, stood the White Crow.

Breath stopped in Lucas's throat, left a lump past which he could not swallow. Zari's voice faded from his consciousness for a minute. Lucas gazed across the gardens to the canal. Small boats bobbed on the water, where music and laughter sounded. He smiled, almost hugging himself.

His fingers remember the touch of skin.

"If we'd known how it would end . . ." He scanned her narrow face, searching for differences from the young Katayan in the university's courtyard, and in Austquarter's crypt and the palace throne-room. Memory nagged. With sudden discovery, he said: "Plessiez? I heard that . . . I haven't seen him. Is he . . . ?"

Zar-bettu-zekigal looked up, her lively features still.

"Elishmy sister Elish-hakku-zekigal, she's a shamanshe did a vision. She told me. She sees true. She saw Messire Plessiez at the end, underground, somewhere where there were bones . . ."

Her fingers slid to the sash about her waist, a length of green silk casually knotted around her black dress.

"You can say what you like about the university. And about your old White Crow. It was Messire who went in to break the magia. Elish sawand then her vision couldn't see through the dust: the whole cavern-roof caved in and came down on him. Him and Charnay, too."

Her eyes, sepia with Memory, shifted.

"I wish I could have seen him on the Boat."

Lucas took the Tractatus Democritus broadsheet between finger and thumb, staring at the print without reading it. He grunted cynically.

"Cardinal Plessiez? He had no more conscience than a fish has feathers! If you ask me, it's a good thing he didn't make it."

The paper tore, snatched out of his hands.

"Mistress Zari? I didn't mean . . ."

The Katayan hunched her shoulders, bent over the heap of broadsheets, and began with frightening care to scissor out clippings from the remaining papers.

Passing humans and Rats brushed by him; Lucas stood and stepped back with automatic courteous apology. He backed further away from the fountain. Bright silks shone on the far side of falling screens of water.

Up on the terrace, in front of the open pillared rotunda where many danced, a crowd blocked the path. Men and Rats pressed in on the White Crow, shouting questions. She laughed; her hand resting on the green-and-gold sleeve of the Bishop of the Trees.

"Damn. Why does he have to be there? Or any of them? Well . . . Well."

He shrugged and began to walk up towards the terrace.

Abandoning press cuttings, Zar-bettu-zekigal dipped the tuft of her black-and-white furred tail into the fountain, lifted it above her head, and shook a fine spray over herself. Cool water spotted the shoulders of her black dress. She crossed her ankles and leaned back, supported precariously by her arms on the marble fountain's wide rim. Her face up-turned, eyes ecstatically shut, she dipped her tail againstopped, sniffed, opened her eyes, and turned a disgusted glance on the green fountain-basin.

"Ei! What a stink."

"Low-quality lead piping," a voice rumbled, its owner invisible through the falling fountain-spray. "My dear child, ought you really to do that?"

The Lord-Architect Casaubon strode magisterially around the fountain-basin, mud-stained satin coat over one bolster-arm, his shirt unlaced and his sleeves rolled up. Black oil and grease smeared his blue silk breeches and braces. The rag with which he wiped his face looked as if it might have been an embroidered silk waistcoat.

"Very inferior work, all of this."

"You just can't trust miracles any more, messire architect!"

Zar-bettu-zekigal flicked her tail in greeting. Water- drops cartwheeled in the sun.

He beamed. "Trust miracles? From now on you can!"

The distant clock sounded again. On its last stroke, the sound of trumpets clashed out. Jets shot up fifteen or twenty feet from twelve surrounding fountains. Zar-bettu-zekigal put both hands up to push suddenly wet hair out of her eyes, nose wrinkling at the stronger low- tide-mud stink. A burst of complicated music blasted from sound horns in the statuary.

"Ei!" Zari cocked one black eyebrow.

The Lord-Architect looked down his nose, chins and the considerable expanse of his belly at the fountain. A pained expression crossed his features at the sight of carved nereids spurting water from their breasts, and ragged sea-monsters jetting water from nostrils and every other orifice.

"Florid."

He slung the blue satin frock-coat on the marble rim, careless of one sleeve trailing in the water, searched the pockets, and brought out a metal hip-flask.