Rats and Gargoyles (15 page)

Lucas saw her fist tighten: gold-wire frames
twisted. She stamped past him, flinched, reached out a hand to grip his shoulder
and brush a stone from her bare sole.

"Damn you! Do
you
know what’s gone wrong in
this city?"

Lucas’s dry mouth silenced him. He felt her warm
hand; gazed at her profile, fine-textured skin, and darker freckles on her ears.
Her long-lashed eyes fixed on Casaubon’s departing back.

"And what
about
the College?"

Almost gone now, his scuffed shoe entering the
shadow of the passageway that ran under Evelian’s rooms.

"I used blood on the moon—"

She stepped past Lucas, ignoring his exclamation.

"–Are you the answer to my message?"

The shadow-line of the building slid down
Casaubon’s back, pink satin turning strawberry in the archway’s dimness.

"Casaubon!"

The big man stopped and looked over his shoulder, a
profile of forehead, nose, delicate lips; chins; belly swelling like a ship’s
sail.

"You want me to stay, then?"

"Shit!"

The White Crow stomped back past Lucas, stooped to
pick up the grimoire from the grass, shut it with a clap that echoed flatly back
from the courtyard walls, and stalked across the yard and up the wooden steps.

The outer door slammed violently behind her: a
second later the inner room’s door crashed to.

Lucas started as Casaubon’s arm fell across his
shoulders, greasy, massive, delicately light. He looked up. Orange-gold hair
glinted, falling over a forehead where freckles were hardly visible under dirt.

The fat man glanced down at Lucas, beaming
beatifically.

"She wants me to stay."

Spiritual corruption crackled in the air. It tanged
dry as fear in Plessiez’s mouth. The black Rat priest’s hand moved to the looped
cross at his breast.

"I’ll take that."

The Hyena snatched the silver
ankh
from
Plessiez’s neck. He spun round, slender dark fingers reaching for the rapier
that was no longer at his side; wincing as the chain cut fur and flesh.

The woman threw the jeweled chain carelessly away.
"A rich priest! How unusual . . ."

Plessiez shuddered, hardly aware of her sarcasm.
Chains clanked above his head. All around the vast walls of the cavern, broken
metal beams jutted out. From each beam hung chains, and in the chains hung
corpses. Some showed bone and dried sinew only. The one above him was fresher.

"Messire," Charnay leaned down to mutter. "You’re
not afraid?"

Plessiez suppressed a shiver, fur hackling with
horror and satisfaction.

Here, raw brick edges showed how a dozen sewer-
chambers had been knocked into one, many-ledged and on multiple levels. Ragged
sun-banners hung everywhere. Flames licked the soot-stained walls. They burned
in apparently empty ram’s-horns and wide dishes. Niches and ledges higher up
gleamed with the spectral light of roses.

"The sheer power . . ." Plessiez breathed, for once
unguarded. "Digging bones from crypts is well enough, but
this
. . . The
Order should–I should have discovered this before now!"

Ragged men and women crouched around individual
fires, between heaps of rubbish. Sullen, they watched. Ordure stank underfoot;
the smells of decay and cooked meat choked the air.

Plessiez, unarmed, black eyes bright, took busy
steps back and forth, peering at how woodlice and centipedes swarmed over the
heaps of rubbish, active in the humidity. The delicate skulls of herons, mounted
on poles, rustled with a ghost of feathers and air.

"Now, messire," Charnay warned, "your Order’s plans
are very pleasant in a tavern of a summer evening, but this is serious. Let me
break some heads. We don’t need swords to get out of here; they’re a poor lot!"

"No!" Plessiez shook his head violently. "Do
nothing before I tell you. Think, for once in your life! What better place to
raise plague-
magia
than
here?
Let the Cardinal-General weep; I’ll
be head of the Order before I’m much older."

The walls sweated a dark niter that stank of blood.

The brown Rat put her hand on his arm. "Plessiez,
we’re old friends. Sometimes you’re an ambitious
fool.
"

Furious, he swung round, and then lost his balance
on the filth-choked earth as the young Katayan woman pushed him to one side. The
thick light that swam in metal bowls shone on her dirty face and on her fever-
bright eyes.

"Feed us!" She gazed up at the Hyena, hands still
in great-coat pockets, with a grin that might have been confidence or agony.
"Two days we’ve been lost. You brought us here.
Feed
us!"

The armored woman leaned weight on her scabbarded
long sword, all the metal glistering dully in the light. She spat. A globule of
spittle hit the earth-choked brick paving by Plessiez’s feet. It moved. It
scuttled, and he set his heel on it, grinding the aborted by-product of
magia
into the earth.

She said: "Won’t waste food on you. You wouldn’t
have time to shit it out again before we killed you.
Clovis
!"

The blond man ran to kneel before her. She spoke
rapidly to him.

Plessiez watched the men and women of the Imperial
dynasty sleeping, eating and arguing in the shadows of gallows; never glancing
up.

Wiry arms flung themselves around him. He swore,
bit the words back. Zar-bettu-zekigal hugged, pressing the sword-harness
painfully into his fur, resting the top of her head against his chest.

"Eeee!" The Katayan kicked a bare foot against the
ground, and looked up with glowing eyes. "She’s wonderful!"

"Damn you, Zaribet!" Plessiez’s pulse jolted. "Hell
damn you, you little idiot!"

The Katayan beamed uncomprehendingly. "I must be
mad. She isn’t a day over twenty-five; she’s a
baby.
Mistress Evelian’s
all woman. This one’s flat as a yard of tap-water . . ."

Exasperation sharpened his voice as Plessiez
gathered his shaken self-possession. "I grant you, if she were about to kill us,
she would have done it immediately.
However
–"

The Hyena’s voice cut across his.

"How long is it since we last caught someone down
here?"

She reached up with her free hand, skin filthy in
the yellow light, and jangled the gallows chains high above Plessiez’s head. The
stink of rot drenched the air. He coughed.

Something unidentifiable in the shadows fell from
the gallows, hitting the earth with a squashy thud.

"About a month," she judged.

Plessiez swallowed hard. Falke’s shoulder shoved
him back as the white-haired man pushed forward. He snarled at the armored
woman: "Scare
me,
‘Lady’ Hyena. Try. These eyes have seen the heart of
the Fane. Nothing
human
is going to make me afraid." He dropped the hand
that shaded his eyes, staring at the woman with pit-velvet pupils.

"Clovis!"

The armored woman snapped her fingers. Two men in
half-armor heaved a wooden block across and slammed it down at the Hyena’s feet.
The taller of the two drew a thin curved sword; light dripped along the edge of
the blade. The other grabbed Falke’s arms, twisting them up behind his back, and
dragged him sprawling half across the block.

Plessiez narrowed his eyes to furry slits. He met
the Hyena’s gaze, and said softly and clearly:

"Honor to you."

She stared, shook her head and made a bitter sound.
"To me? Messire priest, if I had any honor left, why would we be down here?"

Men and women mostly between the years of fifteen
and forty watched, faces sullen. Plessiez ignored them, ignored Falke.

"These are offal, and you know it," he said
clearly. "Since you’re not blind or deaf, you can hardly mistake them for
anything else. I’m not concerned with them."

She limped, armor clashing, until her face came
within an inch of his. He smelled blood; ghostly in the air about her. "What can
we humans
be
but your servants or your whores? You starve us and use us.
What can we do? Leave the city?
No.
Carry a sword, and defend ourselves
when you kick us in the streets?
No.
Carry
money,
even? No!"

She scowled, black brows dipping; and a strand of
lank hair lodged across her cheek, as her head moved with passionate anger.

"Work our guts out and then die while you sleep on
silk; and even when we die we’re not free of the city!"

Plessiez smoothed his fur with fingers that
trembled.

" ‘We’?" he said delicately.

The Hyena struck backhanded without looking, and
the nearer man let Falke pull free of his grip. The whitehaired man stared up
from under tear-dazzled lashes at the gallows.

"We," she said, wiping the hair away from her face.
Her hectoring tone gave way to puzzled suspicion. "Yes, and you, too–the Decans
are your masters."

Plessiez nodded.

"Honor to you," he repeated. "People who are going
to kill do it quite utilitarianly. A knife between two neck-vertebrae is
efficient. Charnay will not admit it, I think, but I believe that humans may
have a soldier’s honor."

Charnay straightened, tail lashing. "Imperial
horseshit! I don’t care if they have stolen swords from somewhere; they’re a
rabble."

Plessiez very carefully caught the armored woman’s
eye, letting a little humorous resignation show. After a long moment, the
Hyena’s mouth moved in a smile.

"A priest, a King’s Guard, a Master Builder and"–
her red-brown eyes moved to Zar-bettu-zekigal–"something from half the world
away . . . It would be a shame to lose a ransom. I’ll kill you after I’ve let you
prove to your masters that you’re alive. Then you won’t tell them where to find
us."

Plessiez smoothed down his fur again, shooting a
brief humorous glance at her; sure of himself now, and ebullient.

"I’ll pay you more than a ransom," he said. "I’ll pay
you a King’s ransom that his Majesty is far too mean to give. Your people go
under the city, don’t they? Under the whole city? Let’s talk. You can do
something for me, and I can do much for you."

"If you Rat-Lords kill each other, that’s good, but
it doesn’t help us."

"I belong to an Order within the Church," Plessiez
enunciated carefully, aware of knife-edge balance, "and I fear, madam, that we
have too short a time for me to retell thirty years of their history; but
suffice it that we’re not interested in factions at the court of his Majesty the King. Shall I say we’re concerned with the city’s
strange masters?"

"The
Decans
?"

The woman glanced round, gripped the litter’s pole
with a gauntleted hand and slumped down to sit. She looked up at Plessiez from
among ordure-stained drapes and cushions.

"A mad priest. We’ve found ourselves a mad priest.
You’d fight god, would you?
Stupid
–and more fool me for listening."

Plessiez let the chill humidity of the cavern sink
in; the devil-light and the little hauntings. He took the risk quite
deliberately.

"Fifty years ago the plague wiped out a third of
the population. It didn’t touch the Fane. Why should it? It only killed bodies.
Since then the organization within the Church to which I belong has been
studying
magia.
"

Falke hauled himself up by Charnay’s helping hand,
shading his eyes that were intent on Plessiez.

"Plagues may exist in flesh, in base matter, and
bring bodies to death. And, we discover, there are other pestilences that may be
achieved, plagues of the spirit and the soul." His long fingers searched the fur
of his breast for the missing
ankh.
"And there are plagues that can be
brought into existence only by acts of
magia.
They bring their own
analogue of death–to such as our masters, the Thirty-Six Lords of Heaven and
Hell: the Decans."

The woman took hold of the ragged sun-banner
hanging from the litter-pole. "
Death?
Theirs?"

"To the Divine? No. Naturally not. Lady, what we
can and must do is make Them sicken, so that They abandon Their incarnations in
flesh and remove to that Celestial sphere that is Their proper habitation,
leaving"–his tone sharpened–"the world to us."

The Hyena, without any sign of hearing Plessiez,
looked past him to the young Katayan woman. "You– what are you?"

Zar-bettu-zekigal scratched her ear with the tip of
her tail.

"A Kings’ Memory?" she offered.

The woman stood, tossed her lobster-tail helmet
underarm: Zari caught it in both hands, and the Hyena took firm hold of her
shoulder and drew the Katayan aside.

"You’ve been with the priest;
you
tell me
what you’ve heard."

Plessiez straightened his shoulders, sanguine in
the haunting-light for all his ruffled fur. His brilliant eyes darted, missing
nothing: the two women, dark-haired and dirty, almost twins, standing by poles
decorated with the shifting-eyed skulls of cranes.

The older and taller bent her head, listening. The
younger stood with eyes half-shut, in the concentration of Memory, the speech of
Masons’ Hall unrolling in smooth sequence. Plessiez narrowed his eyes,
translucent ears swiveling; stood still, and listened.

"Vitruvius writes . . ."

Casaubon sprawled back in the sagging armchair,
legs planted widely apart, a book held at a distance in his free hand. He bit
into a gravy-soaked hunk of bread, chewed, and put the remainder of the bread
down on the expanse of his spread thigh. Dark liquid blotted the silk.

"In
The Ten Books of Architecture,
writes of
. . ." He squinted, licked a gravy-stained digit and thumbed ponderously
through the pages. "
‘Hegetor’s Tortoise: A Siege-Engine.� ‘The Ballista.’
Catapults, crossbows;
‘The Automata of Warfare’
. . . Military
engineering. Hardly what I’m
used
to, but I can do it."