Rats And Gargoyles - Rats and Gargoyles Part 8
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Rats and Gargoyles Part 8

"I think not. All today's lectures were canceled," the Ambassador said. "Term starts tomorrow. It seems that one of the lecturers has gone missing. A Reverend Master Candia?"

Lucas stared, startled. "He was there yesterday with us. With the new intake."

Andaluz shrugged. "And now, apparently, drunk or dead or whatever the reason might be, completely vanished."

Voices sound in the dark. The tones echo, as if from an immense space: bouncing back from hard surfaces. Mixed with those echoes is the sound of dripping water.

No light; no slightest peripheral gleam.

"Will you wait for me!" A scuffle and thud. "You bastards can see in the dark and I can't!"

"Are you hurt, little one?"

An inaudible mumble.

Further off, another voice demands: "What's she doing here?"

"She blundered in, Charnay, rather as you have a habit of doing. Don't complain. You have her to thank for your life."

"Where the hell are we?"

"Not, I hope, in hell, although I confess to some doubt on the subject."

Another voice speaks: "Listen!"

The silence resumes. Far off, there is a noise that might be water, or wind, or some element of flux peculiar to darkness.

Chapter Three.

"The use," Reverend Mistress Heurodis announced, "of the knife. You. Lucas. Come here."

Light shone from perpendicular windows down into the university's training-hall. Lucas rubbed the sleep of his second night in the city from his eyes and walked out of the group of students.

"The knife can kill quickly, efficiently and, above all, silently."

Heurodis's smoky blue eyes moved to Lucas. He hunched his shoulders unconsciously: her head only came up to the level of his collar-bone.

"Here." She offered him the bone hilt of a knife, with a hand upon which the veins stood up, skin brown-spotted with age.

"Stab him," she directed.

Lucas closed his hand on the knife. The blued-steel blade flashed, ugly; and he looked up from it to meet the glazed stare of the bound man beside Heurodis.

A smell of grease and old sweat came off the man; his ribs were visible under his shirt, and his yellow-gray hair marked him as only a few years younger than Heurodis.

"What are you waiting for?" the old lady demanded. "A killing strokeyou would aim where?"

Lucas heard someone gasp behind him; refused to look back at the half-dozen other students. He nipped lower lip between tooth and incisor, frowning. The knife-blade chilled his thumb. A trickle of sweat ran down between his shoulder-blades.

"In cold blood?"

"This isn't a game, boy. If you think that it is, you have no business at the university!"

"I . . . ".

He moved forward, boots loud on the scrubbed wooden floor. The bound man didn't move: drugged, dazed; the pulse beating steadily at the base of his corded throat. Heurodis leaned on her cane.

"I would cut the carotid artery there"Lucas's free hand tapped the side of the man's throat"from the rear for preference, Reverend Mistress."

He flipped the steel knife, caught it by the tip, held it out to her.

"But first I would make sure not to get into the situation. Or, if I had, that there was another way out of it. Or, if not, that I could stun rather than kill."

Someone behind him muttered. A shadow flicked across the floor, from a bird passing the high windows; and far off a clock struck nine.

"Are you disobeying me, boy?" Her wrinkled face puckered into a smile. "Good! The time will come when you have to kill to stay alive. But life is precious; you should always have a better reason for taking it than someone else's order."

A tall girl stepped forward from the group. "But we're here to learn, aren't we?"

Heurodis reached to take the knife from Lucas's outstretched hand. "Certainly. And Reverend tutors musn't be disobeyed, which is why Master Lucas will be scrubbing out the latrines this morning, as a punishment."

Lucas wiped his wet palm on his shirt.

"As a point of reference," the elderly lady said, "we usually don't do any killingknives, poisons, traps until well into the second term."

She gave the drugged man's tether to one of the hall- assistants, and as she passed Lucas he smelt frangipani and the scent of lilac. The old woman smoothed down her cotton dress.

"Pair off now. I want to see your techniques for disarming someone who has a knife. Master Lucas, a word with you."

The other new students began unrolling practice-mats. Lucas walked a few paces aside with the white-haired woman.

"I hear that you used some family influence yesterday to avoid the punishment for not attending." She placed the top of her cane against Lucas's chest. "Don't do that again. You could spend the rest of this term cleaning latrines."

"I-" was led astray by a dead girl, Lucas finished the thought; and shut his mouth, and met Heurodis's smoky gaze. "Sorry, Reverend Mistress."

The cane rapped him familiarly under the fifth rib. She smiled, displaying long regular teeth. "Good man."

"When I've finished . . . cleaning" Lucas's nostrils flared slightly"do I rejoin the class?"

"Yes." Heurodis raised her voice inclusively. "This afternoon you all have a session with Reverend Master Pharamondand your first practice-session, out in the city itself."

In the darkness, water dripped. Echoes ran off into the unseen distance. Cold moist air blew steadily now; and the stench of ordure was interrupted by scents of unbearable sweetness.

Rubble skittered across a hard surface. A grunt and an oath were succeeded by a splash.

"Zari?"

"My foot! My bare foot!"

The Katayan sprawled face-down across brick paving, half in and half out of a pool of water. She raised her head, pushing a chopped-off fringe of black hair out of her eyes, and then held up her hands, spread-fingered.

"Ei! I can see. It's light. Where's it coming from?"

She knelt up, wringing out the hem of her greatcoat. Her dappled tail cracked like a whip, and a fine spray of water flew into the darkness.

"Where are we? Can we get out of here?"

"I think it unlikely."

Dim illumination shone on Plessiez, where the black Rat, drawn rapier in his hand, stood staring up a brick shaft that opened above his head. A cone of silvery light fell from it, on to a floor cluttered with broken bricks, stones, heaps of dried ordure, ossified branches and yellowing bones.

"Charnay, see if it's possible to climb here."

The brown Rat emerged from the gloom. She put her fists on her furry haunches, craning her neck. The arched brick roof passed five or six feet above her head, and the shaft in it (easily thirty feet in diameter) opened without lip or ledge.

"It's smooth," Charnay reported.

"I see that. Try if you can get a grip. Climb."

Zar-bettu-zekigal stood up, shaking her dripping foot, and padded towards the light. The skeleton of a snake curved across the brick paving in front of her, entire, the delicate-branched vertebrae all intact; and she stooped to peer at the wedge-shaped skull.

It rose an inch, empty eye-sockets turning towards her; and glided smoothly under an abandoned heap of brushwood.

Zari took one step after the loose-rattling tail, hesitated, and limped over to the two Rats.

"Where's . . . ? We've lost Falke again," she said.

Charnay's leap for the edge of the shaft connected briefly, and Plessiez stepped back as the brown Rat's wildly scrabbling hind foot swung past his head. Her tail whipped in wild circles.

"Damn the man."

The brown Rat lost her tenuous grip, tangled a foot in her scabbard and tail on landing and fell heavily on her rump. Plessiez side-stepped.

"I'm not his nurse!"

"Where is he?"

The shaft's dim light showed little around them but the walls. The scent of sweetness was stronger here. The Katayan narrowed her eyes, discerning a phosphorescence patterning the brick vaulting. A paleness of brambles, toothed leaves, petals . . .

Zari stepped forward and stared up the shaft, hands shoved deep into her pockets. Dizzied by the receding circle of brickwork and the sweet stench, she stumbled back against Plessiez, grabbing the black Rat's arm.

"It goes way up, messire. I think it's elbow-jointed. What are the flowers?"

The priest fingered his pectoral ankh. "A haunting of roses. One rarely sees such things above ground. I'd advise you to leave them alone."

Her shivering communicated itself through his arm. Plessiez chose a dry area of paving, in the shaft's light, and pushed the Katayan woman to sit down.

"We're taking a rest now. Charnay, find Falke."

The black Rat sheathed his rapier and reached up to untie his scarlet cloak. He swung it free, knelt down, and took the Katayan woman's freckled foot in his hands; drying it with the cloth, and examining it.

"Bruised. Can you walk?"

She withered him with a glare. "Messire, of course I can walk."

The black Rat dug thumbs into the ball of her foot, with hands upon which the rings were chill. His obsidian eyes glinted in the twilight.

"Honest assessment of your capabilities would be more useful than bravado, I think."

Her calves ached with an infinitude of steps, passages, iron-rung ladders, and tunnels. "I can walk."

Plessiez swathed her feet temporarily in the warm lined cloak and sat down at her side. His lean wolfish face was thoughtful. In the twilight she could see how his scarlet jacket was mud-stained, and the plumed headband bedraggled. Only a twitching of his scaly tail showed his reined-in temper.

"Damn the man! This is his escape-route; he should know where it leads."

Zari turned her greatcoat collar up, and sat hugging her knees. "Messire, be honest. Did you stop to ask where this went, when it went away from those . . . things?"

"I did not."

Plessiez removed his headband, scratching at the fur between his ears; and smoothed the broken black feathers. Two of the yellow nails on his right hand were broken. Scuffs and disheveled patches showed in his sleek fur. He looked sideways at the young woman.

"I don't forget that your prompt action saved us."

The Katayan shoved pale fingers through her hair, head bowed; and shook the black hair back from her face as she looked up. "Falke did that, with his traps and false cellars."

She knelt up, feet still swathed in Plessiez's cloak. She reached across, put her hands on the black Rat's shoulders, and absently began to knead the muscles that were tense under the sleek fur. Some of his rigidity dissolved. "If this is a sewer system, then it's been here for ever-"

A sound thrilled through the dark.

Plessiez grabbed his rapier, scrambling upright. Zar-bettu-zekigal half got to her feet, tangled herself in the cloak and sat down. Charnay's voice, nearby, said: "So it's salt. Then you ought to be glad that I pulled you out, instead of bitching about it, messire!"

The brown Rat staggered into the circle of twilight, a man's body over her shoulder. With a grunt of effort, she knelt and eased him down on to the terracotta paving. Black overalls streamed water on to the brick.

"We've got to get out of here! If we don't, we'll starve!" Falke caught the harness of Charnay's rapier in a white fist. His translucent hair dripped, sleeked dark with oil and water, and his eyes, uncovered, stared wildly: velvet pits.

Plessiez sheathed his rapier, watching the pale fire of spectral roses.

"The last of our worries is starvation, messire."

The brown Rat clapped Falke roughly on the back. "No need for hysterics."

Zari kicked her bare feet free of the cloak and scrambled upright. She seized Charnay's arm, as the brown Rat began to scrub water from her fur with a silk kerchief.