Rats and Gargoyles

With
Rats and Gargoyles
, Mary Gentle turns her
amazing abilities to a mythic realm at "the heart of the world." It is a time
and a land ruled by the Hermetic
magia
of the Renaissance, by secret,
almost forgotten Masonic rites, and by the all-encompassing presence of the
thirty-six Decans, the god-daemons incarnate in living stone.

"IF YOU PLAN TO READ THIS ONE, BE PREPARED TO ENJOY!"

–New York Daily News

"SPLENDID, ELABORATE! Soldiers and scholars,
card-sharps, secret sects, Dickensian grotesques . . . and post-natural,
post-literate, post-everything creations."

–Washington Post

"DARK, VIVID, AND COMPLEX."

–Hackensack Sunday Record

MARY GENTLE

RATS AND GARGOYLES

ROC

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,

London W8 5TZ, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,

Victoria. Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

Toronto. Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd. Registered Offices:

Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Published by Roc, an imprint of New American Library,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. Previously published in America in a
Viking/Roc hardcover edition. Originally published in Great Britain by Bantam
Press.

First Mass Market Printing, October, 1992

10 987654321

Copyright © Mary Gentle, 1990

All rights reserved. For information address New
American Library.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK–MARCA REGISTRADA

Printed in the United States of America

Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or
introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means
(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the
prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of
this book.

If you purchased this book without a cover you
should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold
and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has
received any payment for this "stripped book".

This book is dedicated to

G. K. CHESTERTON

and

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

I owe a debt those investigators who have treated Renaissance Hermetic
magia
as a field for serious scholarly
research. The fact that I have treated it as one vast adventure-playground is
not intended to detract from this.

Those who helped include Goldsmiths’ College,
University of London; the albums
I’m Your Man
by Leonard Cohen and
Famous Blue Raincoat
by Jennifer Warnes;
Watkins Books
in Cecil
Court; Rouen; and Alexandre Dumas. I also owe a debt to Sarah Watson for reading
the manuscript, and for letting me read her (unpublished) "The Jaguar King."

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY

In the raucous cathedral square the crowd prepared to
hang a pig.

A young man slowed his pace, staring.

The yellow wood of the gallows wept sap; hastily
nailed together; the scent of pine reached him. Stronger: the stench of animal
dung. Lucas reached for a kerchief to wipe his sweating face. Finding none, he
distastefully used a corner of his sleeve. He thrust a way between the
spectators, head ringing with their noise.

A man and a woman stood up on the platform. Between
them, a great white sow snuffled, wrapped in a scarlet robe that her split feet
fouled, jaws frothing. She shook her snout and head, troubled by the loose hemp
rope around her neck. It went up white against the sky, to the knot on the
gallows-tree.

Sun burned the moisture from the flagstones,
leaving dust that took the imprint of the young man’s booted feet. The steps and
entrances and columns of the cathedral towered over the square: a filigree of
brown granite against a blazing early sky; carved leaves and round towers still
wet with the night’s dew.

"This beast has been duly tried in a court of law."
The priest’s voice carried from the platform to the small crowd. "This she-pig
belongs to Messire de Castries of Banning Lane, and has been found guilty of
infanticide, most filthily and bestially consuming the child of the said Messire
de Castries’ daughter. Sentence is passed. The animal must be hanged, according to the law and
justice. Do your duty!"

The priest lumbered down the rickety steps from the
gallows-platform, her leaf-embroidered robe tangling at her ankles. She elbowed
Lucas aside just as he realized he should move, and he bristled despite himself.

The man remaining on the platform knelt down beside
the sow. Lucas heard him say: "Forgive me that I am your executioner."

"Hang the monster!" one fat woman in a velvet dress
screeched beside his ear, and Lucas winced; a tall weatherbeaten man cupped his
hands and shouted through them: "Child-killer!"

The executioner stood up and kicked back the bolt
holding up the trap.

The trapdoor banged down, gunshot-loud. The sow
plunged, a
crack!
cut off the squealing, screeching–the groan of
stretched rope sang in the air. In the silence, Lucas heard bone splintering.
The sow’s legs kicked once, all four feet splayed. The scarlet robe ("I" for
infanticide
stitched roughly into the back) rode up as she struggled, baring
rows of flopping dugs.

"Baby-killer!"

"May your soul rot!"

Lucas wrenched his way free of their rejoicing. He
strode across the square, dizzy, sweating. The ammoniac stink of pig dung
followed him. He stopped where a public fountain and basin stood against the
cathedral wall, tugging at the buttons of his high collar, pulling his jacket
open at the neck. Sweat slicked his skin. He bent and scooped a double handful
of water to splash his face, uncertain at the novelty of it. Burning cold water
soaked his hair, his neck; he shook it away.

Then he leaned both hands on the brown granite,
head down. Sun burned the back of his neck. The water, feather-stirred by the
fountain’s trickle, mirrored a face up at him: half-man and half-boy, against a
blue sky. Springy black hair, expensively cropped; eyes deep-set under meeting
brows. For all that his skin was tanned, it was not the chapped skin of an
apprentice.

He shifted his padded black jacket that strained
across his muscled shoulders; moved to go–and stopped.

The moon gleamed in the early morning sky. He saw
it clearly reflected beside his face, bone-white; seas the same pale blue as the
sky.

Across the moon’s reflected face, a line of blood
appeared, thin as a cat’s' scratch. Another scraped across it, curved; dotted
and scored a third bloody weal across the almost-globe. A symbol, glistening
red.

He spun round and jerked his head up to look at the
western sky. The moon hung there, sinking over the city’s roofs. Pale as powder,
flour-dust white. No unknown symbols . . .

A pink flush suffused the gibbous moon, now almost
at its full; and the seas flooded a rich crimson.

He turned, grabbed the edges of the basin, staring
at the clear water. The reflected moon bore a different symbol now. As he
watched, that faded, and a third set of blood-lines curved across that pitted
surface.

Men and women passed him, dispersing now that the
pig’s execution was done. He searched their faces frantically for some sign they
saw his bloody moon; they–in spruce city livery, open to the heat–talked one
with another and didn’t glance above the rooftops.

When he looked back, and again to the sky, the moon
was clean.

" ’Prentice, where’s your workshop?"

The man had obviously asked twice. Lucas came to
himself and, seeing the man wearing the silk overalls of a carpenter, assumed
the extreme politeness of one unfamiliar with such people.

"I have no workshop, messire," he said. "I’m a
student, and new to your city. Can you tell me, please, where I might find the
University of Crime?"

Not far away, a gashed palm bleeds. The hand is
cupped. Blood collects, trickles away into life-line and heart-line and between
fingers, but enough pools to be used.

The moon’s face is reflected into a circular
mirror, twelve hand-spans in width. This mirror, set on a spindle and in a
half-hoop wooden frame, can be turned to face the room’s ceiling, or its east,
or (as now) its west window.

Through the open window comes the scent of dust,
heat, fur, and boiled cabbage. Through the open window comes in the last fading
image of the morning moon.