Rats And Gargoyles - Rats and Gargoyles Part 56
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Rats and Gargoyles Part 56

She rolled over on to her stomach on the marble. "I want to talk to the Bishop of the Trees and Master Candia. About inside the Fane. And Lady Luka, how she got here. Have the whole story."

Startled, the Lord-Architect met Zari's eye.

"I'm . . . ah . . . not certain where Mother is."

"I told her you were up in the rotunda." The Katayan stretched, water-spotted dress already drying in the heat, and grinned at his evident relief.

The music ceased abruptly, with a mechanical squeak. The jets died. Shadows, precise-edged, blackened the steps and the flagstones and lawn around the fountains. Her own elbow-and-knee-joint shadow, tail up, coiled into a florid curve worthy of the fountain's statues.

"Hei! Master Casaubon!"

A blonde girl in pink satin overalls swaggered up, silver chains jingling about her neck and wrists. She threw herself down on the marble rim between Zari and Casaubon, sparing no glance for anyone but the Lord-Architect.

"Mistress Sharlevian." He kissed her bitten-nailed fingers and waved a casual hand. "You two aren't acquainted, I believe. Entered Apprentice; Kings' Memory . . . Mistress Zari, I was about to askhave you seen young Lucas of late?"

Zar-bettu-zekigal shifted from her elbows to lie on her side, opening her mouth to answer. A sharp voice cut in: "Oh, Lucas. I've seen him. He went off looking for that red-headed cow who's one of my mother's lodgers." The girl pushed tangled yellow hair back out of her eyes. Her silver-chain ear-rings glinted. "Always mooning after her, dozy old bag. Well, she's welcome to what she gets, that's all I can say!"

The Lord-Architect raised both copper eyebrows.

"Kids!" The girl sniffed, wiping the back of her wrist across her nose. She leaned her arms back on the marble, weight on hip and heel. Under the remnants of paint, her complexion had a child's clearness. "I don't know why I go around with kids. I mean, that boypoke-poke- bang and it's all over, y'know? I wanna go with men who are worth the time."

Zar-bettu-zekigal smothered an exhalation of breath, for once without useful comment. The Lord-Architect opened his mouth to speak, rubbed his chins bewilderedly and shook his head. Sharlevian leaned to one side, her breast pressed against his shoulder, her breath warm and moist against his ear.

"What I say is, why go out with a kid when you can go out with someone . . . mature?"

Zar-bettu-zekigal coiled her dapple-furred tail sensuously across the girl's thigh and, when she had her attention, grinned. "Maybe Lucas feels the same way."

"Of all the-!"

Sharlevian stared from Zar-bettu-zekigal to the Lord-Architect and, as it became apparent that he would make no response, reddened, stood, and stalked off.

"It's true, he's looking for White Crow." Zar-bettu- zekigal stared up at the rotunda's terrace, seeing the Prince of Candover and a dozen House of Salomon officers, and no Bishop Theodoret. No White Crow.

"Anyone would think," the Lord-Architect rumbled, "that that woman is avoiding me."

Zar-bettu-zekigal crossed her ankles, rested her chin on the backs of her hands, and directed her gaze to Casaubon. "No! Go on!"

Horn and harpsichord ring out, lazing down the late afternoon. Humans and Rats take refuge under trees' shade. Water-automata play. Hot scents of wine, dust and roses fill the air, spreading out across the miles of the New Temple's gardens.

Lazy under that same heat, the air and the cells of flesh vibrate with the voices of Decans: more speech between the Thirty-Six in this one day than in the past century.

The black Rat St. Cyr stood with the Bishop of the Trees, watching a play.

A few planks rocked on top of barrels, with the canal and the nearest wall of the Temple for a backdrop. On the impromptu stage, a ragged gray-furred Rat brandished a banner: "Not sun of pitch, nor brightest burning shadow Daunted our noble Kingthey lay A-quiver, pissing in their satin bed, Whether the threat came from a friend or foe.

Twice-turned, a traitor saved them. (Saved myself A life of luxury in the world to come!) Witness, you renegades, what is gained by such Devotion as I showed my lord the king!"

Both humans and Rats in the crowd cheered.

"I perceive," the Bishop of the Trees observed, "that that is intended for Messire Desaguliers."

"You're right." St. Cyr chuckled. He paced elegantly forward through the mixed crowd. "Well acted, messires!"

A woman appeared at the old man's elbow. The paleness of the Fane marked her. Sun brightened her dark-red silver-streaked hair, caught up at the sides and shining with roses that tumbled down on to her shoulders. Minuscule down-feathers grew at her temples. St. Cyr, a little awed, bowed.

She grinned at Theodoret. "Let's get out of here before they get on to the Fane again. Mind you, I think they do you very well . . ."

Theodoret's beak-nose jutted. He swept the green robe up from his bare feet, snorting back laughter. "Say you so?"

Behind them, from the stage, the harsh caw! of a crow rang out.

"Much better than they do me. I don't know what that Vanringham's been telling people, but I regret his source of news caught me when I was in shock enough to be honest!"

"Zar-bettu-zekigal is an engaging child."

"She's a plain nuisance. I remember thinking that when she arrived at Carver Street."

St. Cyr followed the direction of her gaze, seeing the woman spot the young Prince of Candover and frown. About to comment, he found his arm seized; she walked between himself and the Bishop of the Trees, away down towards the gardens.

"Hey!" The White Crow gave a loud hail as they came under the shadow of beeches. "Reverend Mistress! Heurodis!"

Sun and shadow dappled the old lady and her companions. St. Cyr made his bow to the representatives of the University of Crime.

"Feasting and rejoicing is all very well." Reverend Mistress Heurodis's face wrinkled into a smile that showed her long white teeth. "However, we ought not to miss our opportunities."

'Well acted, messires!' From Rituale Aegypticae Nova, Vitruvius, ed. Johann Valentin Andreae, Antwerp. 1610 (now lostsupposed burned at Alexandria) She leaned on her cane, regarding with satisfaction the procession of students, largely first-year Kings' Thieves and Kings' Assassins, passing with jewel-boxes, candle-sticks, portraits, gemmed books, rings and ankhs from the earthquake-tumbled ruins of the Abbey of Guiry.

St. Cyr raised furry brows; thought better of it.

"Zu-Harruk!" The old woman snapped a yellow flower sprouting from the head of her cane and tucked the blossom behind her ear. Her smoky-blue gaze rested unimpressed on miracle. "Come here!"

A tall yellow-haired Katayan student staggering under a box of altar regalia stopped, grunting, while she clucked and, with a jeweler's eye, abstracted a number of the smaller and more perfect diamonds.

"Don't dawdle!" she advised. "When you've transferred this to the university, I trust I've trained you well enough to go on to the other Abbeys and the royal palace?"

"Yes, ma'am!"

The old lady ignored St. Cyr, and rapped her cane against the White Crow's elbow. "We have a reputation to keep up."

"Er. Mmm. Doubtless. Yes."

"Now that's his trouble."

She pointed between sun-soaked trees to where Reverend Master Candia sprawled, asleep.

"No sense of duty. With all due respect to you and Theodoret and the Rat here, the man hangs out with Tree-priests and Scholar-Soldiers; he just isn't respectable enough for the University of Crime."

St. Cyr sees the White Crow laugh; glance anxiously back over her shoulder.

Heat beats back from the courtyard's brick paving.

In shadowed colonnades, they shelter; eating and drinking, weeping, searching for known faces. Rat-Lords in their lace and velvet elbow women in factory overalls. Quarrels break out in corners.

A silence.

Shrouded in dark wings, stooped, casting a shadow purple as plum-bloom, a gargoyle-daemon paces across the New Temple's courtyard and stoops to pet a child.

Inside the rotunda of the New Temple, the Mayor of the eastern quarter of Nineteenth District, a little dizzy from the afternoon heat, accepts another drink from a man in Master Builder's overalls.

The man fingered the chained talismans about Tannakin Spatchet's neck.

"Our consortium is naturally interested in theshall we say?the mass production of these talismans that warn of daemons' presences."

Tannakin Spatchet glanced past the man. Under the great arch, between two of the great sandstone pillars that opened to the courtyards, old blankets and cushions had been thrown in a heap. Eight or nine draggled Rats clustered there, talking, preening, snarling for pages to groom them. No courtiers flocked to them.

Their co-joined tails were lost in the cushions. He saw the eyes of a silver-furred Rats-King fix on him.

Beyond, in the courtyard, a gargoyle-daemon leaves a human child, and fixes its amber gaze on the Rats.

"Sir." He bowed stiffly to the man, noting the House of Salomon's ribbons on his overalls. "You may find such talismans don't function now. All things change."

The man protested. "But you know her! The Master- Physician, White Crow. You know her."

"I flatter myself that I have some influence in that quarter, it's true. Yes. Excuse me." The Mayor put the Master Builder aside gently, weaving through the crowds towards the Rat-King. "In case things don't all change, I have to discuss the repeal of a few local by-laws."

Lucas walked by the food-booths in the Temple grounds, letting his feet carry him without direction except that necessary to walk through the crowds. He knocked the elbow of a brown Rat, who turned with a curse and then shrugged her shoulders.

The White Crow walked with strangers and friends. He dogged her, at a distance. On one terrace he stopped, between great lead figures of sea-monsters spouting a fine spray of jets.

"Young Lucas." A voice rumbled at his elbow.

"Piss off." He looked sourly up at Casaubon.

"Is that any way for my page to speak to me?"

The fat man seated himself with his legs apart on a stone bench, mopping at his brow with a lace handkerchief. Sun glinted on his copper hair. One garter had come unraveled, and his silk stocking sagged down his immense calf.

"If I were your page . . ." The Prince of Candover sighed, crossing to the bench and kneeling down. He tugged the fat man's stocking up and tied the garter in a flamboyant bow below the knee. "I'd quit. You're impossible!"

Casaubon rested his elbows on his knees, and his chins on his hands; face peering out from among the froth of white lace cuffs. "Is that any way to speak to your prospective cousin-in-law?"

"What?"

Without lifting his head, the fat man nodded. Lucas stared down past the nereid fountains to the lawns.

A small man in Candovard formal doublet, his hair grizzled black and white, stood holding both a woman's hands in his. The woman, plump and swathed in orange robes, was recognizable from Vanringham's broadsheet photographs: the bird magus, Lady Luka. She said something, her face shining; and the Candovard Ambassador flung his arms around her, burying his face in her neck.

Lucas breathed: "Andaluz . . . ?"

"He may not have any magia; but, then, my lady mother has all the political sense of a sparrow. They suit extremely. So. Your uncle, my mother; I'm her son, that makes us cousins de facto-"

"Oh no!" Lucas groaned.

In tones of great hurt, the Lord-Architect remarked: "I think they make a very nice couple."

"I . . . you . . ." He turned back to the terrace. The White Crow moved among velvet-clad Rat-Lords, and masons in silk overalls. "It's just . . . it's just too much!"

The Lord-Architect patted Lucas carefully on the shoulder. For once he said nothing at all.

White sea-mist cools the flanks of the Thirty-Sixth Decan, wading in the heat-haze between city and garden.

Sun blasts Her ochre bricks pale, dazzles from roses that trail in Her wake; is dimmed only by the brilliance of Her eyes. Her cowled head lifts.

In the heat-soaked summer sky, Erou, Ninth Decan, Lord of Time and Gathering, shadows Her with white marble wings. His muscled body slides the air, angel-wings feathering horizon to horizon, and He smiles, meeting Her gaze.

Particles, electrons, strings, weak forces: Their pulse beats with the Dance.

In the middle air, a small and sharp crack! sounds.

Pale in the sun, a premature celebratory firework scatters green sparks across the sky.

Lucas craned his neck, watching through the garden's trees the thin trail of smoke over the rotunda. No further explosions sounded.

A tall man in dockside gear called: "You the Prince?"

He left Rafi of Adocentyn and the other students to impressing young Entered Apprentices, and loped across the grass.

"I'm Lucas."

"Met a woman. She lookin' for you."

A hard pulse hit him under the ribs. Lucas nodded.

"She say her ship just got into Fourteenth District harbor," the man observed. "Calls herself Princess Gerima of the White Mountains, Gerima of Candover?"

Outside the rotunda, the White Crow paces a colonnade between tiny mirror screens, set in vast ornate metal frameworks. Like the congeries of bubbles in the demolished Fane-in-the-Twelfth-District, the screens glowed pale blue.

She pauses to stare into them, seeing scenes of revelry in other Districts. Down by the factories, and in the docks. Across the estuary, up in the high hills, and far across the continent to all points of the compass . . .

The White Crow looks into an oval screen. Swirling iron petals cup it. The image shows humans and Rats together at a banquet on Seventeenth District's beach, so far to the east that the sun's light has faded, and they revel by torches and pastel light-spheres and the rising glow of the moon.

She fists her hands, stretching her arms up in the afternoon heat; bones and muscles creaking. The sun dazzles in her red-brown eyes.

Her mouth moves in a quiet smile, feeling a gaze resting on her back.

The black-browed woman caught up her formal gown, lifting the hem as she raced up the terrace steps to Lucas and hugged him.

"I didn't know what was happening when we arrived; three days out from land the portents started, and such sudden miracles seen at sea! But you're safe. You're safe." Gerima drew breath, pale face flushed under dark curls. "Tell me. Which is she?"