Rats and Gargoyles (10 page)

"The Master of the Hall, Falke; and his sister,
Awdrey, who was Mistress Royal to the Children of the Widow. Two Apprentices
from out of the quarter. A man and two women I didn’t recognize. The Captain-
General of the King’s Guard, Desaguliers."

Tannakin Spatchet paused. The White Crow scratched
at rough parchment with a quill pen, noting names.

" ‘. . . Captain-General.’ I’ll have to ask
questions carefully in
that
quarter. Who else?"

He watched her handwriting: stark and sloping
across the page.

"A brown Rat. I believe she was a soldier. A
priest: a black Rat that the Captain-General called by the name of Plessiez. And
the girl who gave the warning, the Kings’ Memory. Lady, she was very young. I
don’t know her name. She is the one who died–a Katayan."

On the highest pinnacle yet built, among
scaffolding lashed with hemp rope and net-cradled blocks of masonry, men are
talking in whispers. Any sun is absorbed by the black stone. Acres of stone fall
away below them, in crevasses and coigns.

Distance hides the ground below.

"They know!"
.

The hooks dangle from the derricks, empty, ropes
creaking. All the cranes are abandoned.

"I tell you, they know what we’re doing!"

They are in working clothes, silk and satin, each
with the mark of his own particular Craft.

"We must act as if we were innocent. They need us
to build for them. "

This ziggurat will rise between two pyramidical
obelisks that are equal in thickness to the building itself. A mile away an
identical pair of obelisks rises, completed two generations ago. Great
hieroglyphs are burned into their stone sides. This burning of stone happened
during an eclipse of the sun that lasted four days.

"No. We don’t wait. " This speaker is the most
assured. "You’re right: they need us to build, because they can’t. So
—"

"If we stop work, they’ll kill enough of us that
the rest will go back to work. We’ve tried that before."

To north and east and aust of the ziggurat, more of
the Fane’s perpendicular frontages cut the sky. Here, the sky itself is the
color of ashes.

"They can force us to work," the first speaker
says, "but who can force a man to eat or to sleep?"

The ceiling-fan’s eight-foot blades circled a slow
wck
. . .
wck
. . .
wck . .
. The only other noise came
from the clerk’s quill pen. Afternoon heat slanted in through pale- green
shutters, drawn closed on the large room’s south-austern side.

A breath of air came in from the opposite
full-length shutters, open to the terrace, and touched the forehead of the man
sleeping in the chair behind the desk. His eyelashes flickered. The Candovard
Ambassador saw through sleep-watered vision the whitewashed walls, the
pale-green fretworked wood that decorated doors and shutters and terrace
balustrade.

A fist rapped the shutters. The thin young clerk
stood up.

"Mhrumhh?" Andaluz raised his head alertly.

A young man held one shutter open, slatted shadow
barring his body: bare feet and knee-breeches, and a doublet carried slung over
one shoulder. Chest and shoulders and arms were rounded with muscle. He looked
at Andaluz from under meeting brows.

"My dear Lucas!" Andaluz sprang up, waved the clerk
back and came round the desk. "My dear boy! I’ve been waiting for you to call."

The younger man dropped his doublet over a chair,
and the smaller man embraced him, kissing him on both cheeks. He put Lucas back
to arm’s length, studying him.

"I hear that you came in on the
Viper
yesterday morning. You should have called. Do I take it from this dress that
you’re still determined on disguise? Your mother wrote to me some months ago
about that. Most censoriously, I might add."

The young man laughed, holding up both hands. "I’ll
tell you, Uncle, if you’ll let me speak."

"Tea." Andaluz snapped his fingers. The clerk left
silently. Andaluz tugged at the hem of his sleep-creased white jacket, not
bothering to do up the neck buttons. He scratched at his curled, grizzled hair.

"And how is my dear Pereluz?"

"Mother’s fine."

The youth looked up at a portrait hanging above the
mahogany filing-cabinets. A patch of light picked out the woman who sat beside a
sun-haired man. She wore a coronet, as her husband did, on hair as dark as
Lucas’s; and her fine brows came within a hair of meeting.

Andaluz saw, reflected in the glass covering, his
and the young man’s same features: forty years between them. Andaluz’s hair was
grizzled sharply black and white, with little gray in it.

"She told me to tell you she misses her favorite
brother at court."

"Ah, Pereluz." The Ambassador patted Lucas’s
shoulder as he bustled back behind his desk. He picked up gold-rimmed spectacles
and put them on. "What can I arrange for you, Prince?"

He saw the dark gaze glint out from under heavy
brows. Lucas moved in the heat-shadowed room like a breath of the outside world:
sweet-tempered, smelling of sweat and sunshine.

"Yes, I do want you to do something for me. I want
it made clear to the university that I start there tomorrow, not today." The
young man paused, as the clerk returned with iced tea.

Andaluz scribbled a short note, handed it to the
clerk and sent her off with whispered instructions.

"Done, I think. What else?"

Lucas smiled. "Does it show so clearly?"

"My dear Lucas, if this were a social visit, you
would have called yesterday. Besides, I’m told that your stay here, short as it
is, hasn’t been uneventful." Andaluz broke off, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
"Tell me about it. I can cease to be official for a few minutes."

The young man shook his head decisively.

"I want you to investigate a death. A girl. She was a
student, a Katayan; I can give you her full name."

Andaluz’s bushy eyebrows
rose. "A friend?"

"No. No . . ." The young man looked away. "I didn’t
like her, and I haven’t changed my opinion because she died. I suppose I feel
guilty about—
De mortuis nil nisi bonum.
But I want the full story. There
are friends of hers who need to know. Her name was Zar-bettu-zekigal."

Andaluz copied down the carefully enunciated
syllables.

"Assume that I know something of this," he said.
"The Embassy keeps an eye on you. What else?"

The young man paced across the faded carpet. He
stopped for a time, looking out on to the wooden terrace, and across the stretch
of yellow earth that, if not for the heat, would be a garden.

"I had another message for you, Uncle, but the
person who sent it probably died when Zari did." Lucas turned. "A priest, a
black Rat by the name of Plessiez. He said he knows . . .
knew
you. He
sent his regards."

Andaluz took off his spectacles, laying them on the
papers on the desk. The ceiling-fan’s
wck-wck
sounded loudly.

"The little priest is dead?"

"It’s almost certain. Sorry."

"I always
told
Plessiez that he’d go too
far. Tell me all of it," Andaluz directed and, when he had heard the boy out,
shook his head slowly. "The Embassy Compound’s been quiet. I don’t think we’ve
had to deal with more than the Fane’s intermediaries in five years. Now three
secretaries and two ambassadors summoned by the Decans in half a day . . ."

Lucas said: "I also need to know if you have a file
on a woman. A natural philosopher: she calls herself the White Crow. Most of
what I’ve heard about the hall, I’ve heard through her. I want to know how
reliable she is." Andaluz picked up a bell on his desk and rang it. After a few
seconds, another clerk appeared; and the Candovard Ambassador handed him a slip
of paper with two names on it. He sipped at his iced tea while he waited,
studying the Prince’s face.

"You’re no longer incognito," he said. "Will you be
moving in here? I’ve plenty of room."

A chessboard occupied one corner of the large desk.
Lucas leaned on his forearms, studying the game in progress, and reached to move
a jet-carved pawn with dirty fingers. Andaluz all but saw images in the boy’s
mind: of the odd house off Carver Street to which the university had sent him.
He restrained himself from comment.

"I’ll stay where I am, Uncle, for the moment."

The second clerk returned, putting a thick file of
papers down in front of Andaluz. The Ambassador began to skim over the notes.
When he spoke, it was without looking up.

"Your ‘White Crow’ is easily identifiable. There
aren’t too many foreign natural philosophers in the city. Even though this one
appears to change her name and move around–six months here, eight months there .
. ."

Andaluz sat back. "We have records for her going
back five years. No reason in particular, except that, as a philosopher, she’s
kept under observation. She practices a little natural magic in order to make a
living, it would seem."

The boy had leaned forward. Now he bent his head,
rubbing with both hands at the back of his neck. When he straightened, that
might have been the reason for his heat-reddened cheeks.

Andaluz said gently: "I hope you’ll come here
often, Lucas. I miss my countrymen, and family."

The young man nodded, shifting awkwardly. "Of
course."

"Sending you to the university was your father’s
idea. Of course, the Ortiz have always had a strain of eccentricity in the
blood—"

"And the Luz haven’t?"

"My
dear
Lucas."

A pair of blowflies buzzed around the tea-bowl, and
Andaluz carefully fitted the weighted net cover over the ceramic. The flies
settled on the cracked plaster ceiling, crawling there, beyond the fan-blades,
with several dozen other insects.

"I intended to say, only, that this is not the
summer I would choose to have the heir of Candover here."

Lucas shrugged. "I’m staying."

"So I perceive." Patience stayed Andaluz’s tongue,
long assumed and long practiced. He looked up as the first clerk returned,
handing him a written note in return for his message.

"Is there going to be trouble with the
university?"

Andaluz read, and then looked up.

"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.

"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 stroke–you 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.