Rats and Gargoyles (3 page)

"And you’re a student?"

At that she stopped, swung round, head cocked a
little to one side as she looked him up and down.

"No, you don’t. I’m not to be
collected
–not
a specimen. You take your superior amusement and shove it up your anus
sideways!"

"Watch who you’re speaking to!" Lucas snarled.

"Now, that’s a question: who
am
I speaking
to?"

Lucas shrugged. "You heard the Reverend Master read
the roll. Lucas is the name."

"Yes, and I heard him afterwards."

"That’s my business—"

"This is a short-cut," the student said. She dived
down a narrow passage, between high stone houses. Lucas put one boot in the
kennel’s filth as he followed. He called ahead. Her coat and tail were just
visible, whipping round the far comer of the alley.

The light voice came back: "Down here!"

As Lucas left the alley she stopped, halfway over a
low brick wall, to beckon him, and then slid down the far side. Lucas heard her
grunt. He leaned his arms on the wall. The young woman was sitting in the dust,
legs sprawled, coat spread around her, wiry tail twitching.

"Damn coat." She stood up, beating at the dust.
"It’s the only thing that makes this filthy climate bearable, but it gets in my
way
!"

"You’re cold?"

"Where I come from, this is midwinter." She offered
him her hand to shake, across the wall. "Zar-bettu- zekigal, of South Katay. No
one here seems to manage a civilized language. I’ll consent to Zaribet; not
Zari.
That’s vomitable."

Lucas grinned evilly. "Honored, Zari."

Zar-bettu-zekigal gave a huff of exasperation that sent her fine hair flying.
She crossed the small yard to a building and pushed open a studded iron door. It
was cold inside, and dank. Wide steps wound down, illuminated by brass lamps.
The gas-jets hissed in yellow glass casings, giving a warm light.

The side-walls were packed with bones.

Niches and galleries had been left in the masonry–
and cut into natural stone, Lucas saw as they descended. The gas-jet light shone
on walls spidered white with niter, and on black-brown bones packed in close
together: thigh and femur and rib-bones woven into a mass, and skulls set
solidly into the gaps. Shadows danced in the ragged circles of their eyes.

When the steps opened out into a vast low-vaulted
gallery, Lucas saw that all the walls were stacked with human bones; each
partition wall had its own brick-built niche. The gas-lights hissed in the
silence.

"Takes us under Nineteenth District’s Aust quarter.
Too far, going round." Zar-bettu-zekigal’s voice rang, no quieter than before.
The tuft of her black tail whisked at her bare ankles. She pushed the fine hair
out of her eyes. "I like it here."

Lucas reached out and brushed her black hair. It
felt surprisingly coarse under his fingers. His knuckles rubbed her cheek, close
to her long fine lashes. Her skin was warmly white. Practiced, he let his hand
slide along her jaw-line to cup the back of her neck and tilt her head up; his
other hand slid into her coat and cupped one of her small breasts.

She linked both hands over his wrist, so that she
was resting her chin on her hands and looking up at him. One side of her mouth
quirked up. "What I like,
you
haven’t got."

Lucas stood back, and ruffled the young woman’s
hair as if she had been a child. "Really?"

"Really." Her solemnity danced.

"This really
is
a short-cut?"

"Oh,
right.
" She stepped back, hands in
pockets again, swirling the coat round herself, breath misting the cold air.
"Oh, right. You’re a king’s son. Used to stable-girls and servants; poor tykes!"

Lucas opened his mouth to put her in her place,
remembered his chosen anonymity, and then jumped as the black-tipped tail curved
up to tap his bare arm.

"I recognize it," Zar-bettu-zekigal said ruefully.
"I’m a king’s daughter. The King of South Katay. Last time we were counted,
there were nine hundred and seventy- three of us. Mother is Autumn Wife
Eighty-One. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Father close to. They sent me here,"
she added, "to train as a Kings’ Memory."

Lucas took her chin between his thumb and finger,
tipping her face up to his, and his facetious remark was never spoken, seeing
those brown eyes turned sepia with an intensity of concentration. He took his
hand away quickly.

"Damn," Lucas said, ears burning, "damn, so you
are; you are a Memory. We brought one in, once, for the
Great Treaty. Damn. Honor and respect to you, lady."

"Ah, will you look at him! He’s pissing his
britches at the very thought. Do you wonder why I don’t shout about it—?"

Her ringing voice cut off; the silence startled
Lucas. Zar-bettu-zekigal’s eyes widened.

Lucas, turning, saw a cloaked figure at one of the
wall- niches, and a beast’s hand halted midway in reaching to pick up a femur.

Zar-bettu-zekigal’s last words echoed, breaking the
stranger’s concentration. A hood was pushed back from a sharp black-furred
muzzle. Gleaming black eyes summed up the young man and woman, and one of the
delicate ears twitched.

The Rat was lean-bodied and sleek, standing taller
than Lucas by several inches. He wore a plain sword- belt and rapier, and his
free hand (bony, clawed; longer- fingered than a human’s) rested on the hilt. In
the other hand he carried a small sack.

"What are you doing here?" he demanded.

Steam and bitter coal-dust fouled the air. The
slatted wooden floor of the carriage let in the chill as well as the stink, city
air cold at this depth; and the Bishop of the Trees gathered the taste on his
tongue and spat.

Spittle shot between his booted feet, hit the
tunnel- floor that dazzled under the carriage’s passing brilliance.

The wooden seat was hard, polished by years of use,
and he slipped from side to side as the carriage jolted, rocking uphill after
the engine, straining at the incline. The Bishop of the Trees stared out through
the window. Up ahead, light from another carriage danced in the vaulted tunnel.
Coal-sparks spat.

The window-glass shone black with the darkness of
the tunnel beyond it; and silver-paint graffiti curlicued across the surface.
Theodoret’s gaze was sardonic, unsacramental.

A handful of young men banged their feet on the
benches at the far end of the carriage. The Bishop of the Trees caught one
youth’s gaze. He heard another of them yell.

First two, then all of them clattered down the
length of the empty carriage.

"Ahhh . . ." A long exhale of disgust. A short-haired
boy in expensive linen overalls, the carpenters’ Rule embroidered in gold thread
on the front. He grinned. Over his shoulder, to a boy enough like him to be his
brother, he said: "It’s only a Tree-priest. Ei, priest, cleaned up the shit in
your place yet?"

"No, fuck, won’t do him no good," the other boy put
in. "The other guilds’ll come calling, do more of the same."

Theodoret loosened the buckle of his thick leather
belt, prepared to slide it free and whip the metal across the boy’s hands; but
neither youth drew their belt- knives–they just leaned heavily over the back of
his seat to either side of him.

"Ei, you learned yet?"

"Tear your fuckin’ place down round you!"

"Tear it down!"
Spittle flew from the lips of
the shorthaired boy, spotting his silk overalls. "You didn’t build it. Fuck,
when did any of you parasite Tree-priests
build
? You too good to work for
our masters!"

"You make our quarter look
sick,"
a
brown-skinned boy said. The last of the four, a gangling youth in overalls and
silk shirt, grinned aimlessly, and hacked his heel against the wooden slats. The
rocking car sent him flying against the dark boy; both sparred and collapsed in
raucous laughter.

"Fuck, don’t bother him. Ei! He’s
praying
!"

The Bishop of the Trees looked steadily past each
of the youths, focusing on a spot some indeterminate space away. Anger flicked
him. Theodoret stretched hand and fingers in an automatic sign of the Branches.

"If you knew," he said, "what I pray for—"

He tensed, having broken the cardinal rule, having
admitted his existence; but the gangling youth laughed, with a hollow hooting
that made the other three stagger.

"Aw, say you, he’s not worth bothering–fuck, we’re
here,
aren’t we?"

The four of them scrambled for the carriage-door,
shoving, deliberately blocking each other; the youngest and the gangling one
leaping between the slowing car and the platform. The door slammed closed in
Theo- doret’s face. He opened it and stepped down after them on to the cobbled
platform.

He grunted, head down, bullish. Briefly, he
centered the anger in himself: let it coalesce, and then flow out through the
branching channels of vital energy . . . His breathing slowed and came under
control. The colors of his inner vision returned to green and gold.

He walked through the great vaulted cavern. Sound
thundered from stationary engines, pistons driving. The hiss of steam shattered
the air. Vast walls went up to either side: millions of small bricks stained
black with soot, and overgrown here and there with white lichen.

Water dripped from the walls, and the air was
sweatily warm.

Somewhere at the end of the platform, voices
yelped; and he quickened his steps, but saw nothing at the exit. He stomped up
the stairs to ground-level. A vaulted roof arched, scaled and glittering, that
might once have been steel and glass but now was too soot-darkened to let in
light. Torches burned smokily in wall-cressets.

"Lord Bishop?"

Candia leaned indolently up against the iron
stair-rail.

"I was delayed. The lower lines are closed off,"
Theodoret said.

"Already?"

"I’ve always said that would be the first signal.
Have you asked to see . . . ?"

Candia flashed him a knowingly insouciant grin. "As
we agreed. The Twelfth Decan–The Spagyrus. I’ve had dealings with him."

Theodoret grunted.

As the Bishop of the Trees followed Candia out of
the station hall, he passed the group of young men. Three crowded round the
fourth, the youngest, whose nose streamed blood. The gangling youth swore at the
blond man. Candia smiled serenely.

Outside the brick-and-glass cupola heat streamed
down. Theodoret sweated. Pilings stood up out of the tepid sluggish water all
along the canal-bank. The tide was far out, and the mud stank. Blue and gray,
all hardly touched by the sun’s rise to noon.

The Bishop knelt, resting his hand on the
canal-path. "It remembers the footprints of daemons."

He reached, caught Candia’s proffered hand, pulled
himself upright.

"They"
–Candia’s head jerked towards the city–
"they’re like children teasing a jaguar with a stick. When it claws their faces
off,
then
they remember to be afraid."

"Still, this will be a difficult
medicine for them to swallow. For them and for us."

The Bishop turned away from the canal, treading
carefully across a long plank that crossed a ditch. Half-dug foundations pitted
the earth, and the teams of diggers crouched in the meagre shadows in the
ditches, eating the midday meal.

Broken obelisks towered on the skyline.

Candia picked his way fastidiously across the mud.
His gaze went to the structures ahead. He thumbed hair back under his ragged
scarlet headband. "The Decans don’t care. What’s another millennium to them?"

Blocks of half-dressed masonry lay on the earth.
Jutting up among them were narrow pyramids of black brick. Theodoret and Candia
followed a well-trodden path. Half-built halls rose at either side, festooned
with wooden scaffolding. The place was loud with shouts of builders, carpenters,
bricklayers, carvers, site-foremen.

With every step the sunlight weakens, the
sky turns ashen.

Theodoret favored his weak leg as he strode, passing teams of
men and women who (ropes taut across chests and shoulders, straining; silk and
satin work-clothes filthy) heaved carts loaded with masonry towards the area of
new building. All were dwarfed by what rose around them.

Staining the air, blocking every city horizon to
east, west, north, south and aust; heart of the world: the temple-fortress
called the Fane.

Sacrilege tasted bitter in Theodoret’s mouth. The
granite buildings, the marble, porphyry and black onyx; it grew as a tree grows,
out in rings from the heart of divinity. Accumulating over centuries, this
receding mountain of roofs, towers, battlements, domes and pyramids. The nearest
and most massive outcrop drew his eyes skyward with perpendicular arches.

"Candia . . ."

Black as sepulchres, windowless as monuments. It
flung story upon story, spire upon tower, straining towards the heavens.
Walkways and balconies hung from slanting walls. Finials and carved pinnacles
jutted dark against the noon sky.

The nearer they drew, the quieter it became.
Silence sang in the dust that tanged on the Bishop’s tongue. The paving that he
trod on now was old. The flights of steps that went up to the entrances, wide
enough to ride a horse up, were hoary with age and lichen.

Theodoret smoothed down his worn green robe. He and
Candia stood out now, among the servants all in tightly buttoned black, lost in
the silent crowds at the arched entrances.

Candia snapped his fingers at the nearest man.

"Tell The Spagyrus I am here."

The Bishop glanced back once. The city sprawled out
like a multi-colored patchwork to the five quarters of the earth.

Noon is midnight: midnight noon.

The two pivots of the day meet and lock, and in
that moment men are enabled to pass over this threshold. There is a tension in
the filth-starred stone, receiving their footprints.