Rats and Gargoyles (40 page)

Shafts of golden light curved over clustered
pillars, soared down from perpendicular arches in dust-mote-filled curtains. And
in all the hull-shaped nave no windows: light shafting from unappreciable
sources. The White Crow tilted down the brim of her speckled hat, shading her
eyes, squinting. High fan-vaulting and hollow arches hung bare, empty of
roosting acolytes. Below, all the wide floor stretched out deserted.

"Leave . . . here . . ."

She shivered. Breath echoed back from the stone
behind her, forced into painful speech: an old man’s weary voice.

"Leave . . . here . . . Candia . . . I am . . .
bait . . . for . . . you . . . Go . . . Go!"

The White Crow got to her feet. She turned. The man
in buff and scarlet still knelt, facing the severed head. She winced, seeing how the features of Theodoret
moved
: wrinkled eyelids blinking, the wide mobile mouth shifting.

Heurodis’s hands clenched in the folds of her
cotton dress.

The White Crow sheathed her rapier and took off her
pack, tossing the speckled hat down beside it on the flagstones. She unbuckled
the straps, fumbling, hands shaking; breathed in to calm herself, and took out a
cotton handkerchief and a metal water-flask.

"Well, I’m here to see The Spagyrus. I assume." A
ghost of sardonic humor touched her voice. "This should bring him."

She stepped past Candia and knelt, unscrewing the
top of the flask, covering it with the kerchief and tipping it up. Water chilled
the cloth and her fingers. She reached up and, with the damp cloth, moistened
the cracked lips of the head.

She kept her eyes on that vulnerable mouth,
shivered inside; finally lifted her gaze. Swimming with light, his gray eyes met
hers, saw her plainly; and the old man’s lips moved into an attempt at a smile.

"Pitiable . . . and . . . grotesque . . ."

"No, messire."

The White Crow moistened the cloth again and
applied it, words coming as randomly as her thoughts.

"Mistress Heurodis got me in here. She saved all
our lives. Master Candia tells me you sent to the Invisible College. Tell me
what you wish, messire."

The Bishop of the Trees spoke slowly, painfully.
"Bless . . . you . . . child . . ."

All else put aside, the White Crow sat back on her
heels, staring up into his creased face. The edges of her vision glowed with the
light of forests.

"My name is Valentine. White Crow. I come from the
Invisible College. I was fifteen years a Master-Captain; I’m a Master-Physician
now. Tell me quickly. If anything at all is possible now, would you die, or
would you have me try something other?"

Abrupt and arctic, silence dropped on the square,
darkling under the black sun.

"Don’t fear! We
know
what that means."

The Hyena screeched. She flung her free hand up,
pointing at the sky that now shone a deep and pitiless blue as the Night Sun
took hold.

"The Night Sun! The sign! The hour has come. We are
free of our strange masters, free of the god-daemons, free of the Decans, free
of the Thirty-Six! You all hear it, you all see it, you all feel it!"

Her voice flattened against the still cold air.

She swung round, pushing between packed men and
women, shoving her way from the siege-engine towards the steps. No lips moved.
The crowd, silent, parted by unspoken consent to let her through.

"Feast and rejoice! Feast and rejoice and
build.
Hold our celebration while the Night Sun shines. And when it passes you’ll see
the day’s light shine on a Fane standing open and empty, the Thirty-Six
abandoning the heart of the world. And that heart of the world given over into
our keeping, here: the imperial Sun dynasty!"

A middle-aged woman raised her head. Her silk
carpenter’s shirt hung in strips. Her face, caked thick with yellow and white
paint, showed raw sores around her mouth and nostrils. She met the Hyena’s gaze
and showed her teeth.

"Clovis, damn you!" The Hyena strode up the steps,
armor clattering; the only noise but for the siege-engine’s throbbing motor.

Faces turned to follow. Silk and satin work-clothes
hung in strips and tatters. A burly man stumbled from her path, face covered by
a feather-mask. Many masks gleamed in the crowd: brilliant or dust-covered
feathers clinging to faces, masking eyes, leaving mouths and sores uncovered.
And still no sound: not a shout, not a whisper.

The blond man, Clovis, met her on the top step.

"Lady . . . what have we done?"

"Plague Carnival!"

The voice echoed down from the nearest building,
where on balconies black and brown Rats gazed down with arrogant equanimity.

"Why not sing?" one called down. "Why don’t you
dance now, peasants?"

Another pointed into the vast mass of people. "A
silent carnival! A plague carnival!"

"You don’t amuse us!"

"Dancing’s a sovereign cure for the plague, they
tell me!"

"Quiet!"
The sky shimmered from yellow to blue
in the corners of the Hyena’s vision. A smell of sickness breathed up from the
flagstones. She rubbed her nose, eyes watering at the stench.

"Lay down fire across the building if they speak
again. Over the heads of the crowd."

A young boy stepped from the silent crowd and threw
a handful of broken petals towards the balcony. He whisked a mask of owl’s
feathers from his face, sun gleaming on red hair and on his sores weeping white
pus. Other masked revelers stood in silence, jammed shoulder to shoulder,
crowding the dry basins of fountains. The Hyena followed the direction of every
gaze.

In the pitiless blue sky, coronas of black fire
licked out across the empyrean. Midnight at noon, night-fire: the black sun
blazes.

"Clovis. Set up sound-broadcast. I'm going to tell
them this is what we’ve been waiting for." She spared one glance for the
Rat-Lords on the siege-engine platform. Picking out an emerald sash, some humor
curved her lips. "We can all use . . . coincidences. Where’s Falke?"

"Here."

The man stepped silently to her side. He slid the
black silk bandage from his eyes, raising his face to the sky. She saw
momentarily in his unnaturally dilated pupils the twin reflections of darkness.

"We must hold the ceremony of the shadow. The
building
must
continue."

Her slanting red brows lifted. Directing troops to
their places by hand-signals, she spoke now without looking at him, in a
measured tone only a fraction from hysterical laughter.

"Whose shadow? Yours?
Have you seen what’s in
front of you?
"

The man gazed blindly across the building site.

"I’ve done without all else. I can do without my
shadow to keep the Temple of Salomon standing."

She pointed at their feet, then fumbled her hands
back into plate gauntlets.

"Oh, damn your Craft mysteries . . ."

All their shadows fell bright, brilliant; fell
through the dark air to shine on the broken stone.

"It’s impossible.
Look.
You’ve to nail a
shadow to the first-raised wall to keep the Temple standing.
All the shadows
are lights!
"

Falke frowned, brushing a hand across his lips and
the several tiny weeping sores at the corners of his mouth. The cagework-shadows
of scaffolding fell bright across his surcoat, and the Hyena held out both
gauntleted hands, glinting darkly.

"See! You have to depend on my troops now!"

She met his eyes, and his gaze blurred.

Falke stumbled against her, and she caught him with
one steel-clad arm; spun to grip his shoulders and lower his dead weight to the
broken paving. His eyes rolled up and showed only thin white lines below the
lids.

"Damn pestilence, it’s thinning us out faster than
we can fight or build. Let’s have some help here! Ho!"

The Hyena pushed greasy hair out of her face,
pulled off her plate gauntlet to feel for his pulse. She glanced up for her
lieutenants. Two of the people in her immediate sight–a dark-bearded man, a
young boy–slid down on their knees and fell hard across the stones. She gaped.

Above on the scaffolding a scream sounded, and the
thud of a heavy body falling.

"Falke?"

She grabbed his dark-streaked hair, pulling his
head up, and stopped as he sprawled limply back against her; head falling back,
mouth falling open. Tatters of black flesh ran across the skin of his face from
mouth to temple, spread down his neck to vanish under his collar. Crisped, sere:
as if plague-fever could burn up flesh in heartbeats.

She touched her bare fingers to his throat. No
pulse.

Dark flames licked down into her vision. The Hyena
stared across the open square. To left and to right, men and women sprawled
across the paving; others leaped up or shouted for aid. A coldness chilled her
bare hands.

With a child-like puzzlement, she looked down and
touched the face of the man dead in her arms.

Brightness moved in his mouth.

The Hyena snatched her hand away. Antennae moved in
the dead man’s open mouth, quivering, wavering. Insect feet scraped for purchase
on his lips. It crawled between his teeth, first a velvet body, and then the
spreading black-and-white-mottled wings of a death’s-head moth.

Frozen, not even able to push his body away, she
watched the moth shake out its wings and sun itself on his tattered cheek.

A scrap of color bobbed past her vision. A scarlet
butterfly, wings dusted with gold, sharp against the blue sky . . . The Hyena
looked at the boy collapsed on the next step down. From between his lips a pale
blue butterfly crawled, took flight.

The death’s-head moth flew up past her face, skull-
markings plain on its dried wings. She covered her mouth with her hand, sick and
afraid.

Under the generative chill of the Night Sun, all
the air above the square glimmered, red and blue and black and gold, alive with
whirling columns of butterflies and moths rising up from the mouths of the
plague-dead.

"It’s a bad joke!" Candia exclaimed. He rocked back
on to his heels, standing up.

The White Crow grabbed at her arm as he caught it,
pulling her up on to her feet. She twisted out of a grip that would leave
bruises, glaring up at the blond man.

"No
—"

Candia reached down to knot his fists in her shirt,
leaning over her, breath stinking in her face.

"Break a Decan’s power? Theo–you can’t kill him,
you can’t heal him. How can you joke, and in front of him! I’ll have no more of
it. Hear me?"

"Messire—" The White Crow cut herself off. As
gently as temper would let her, she closed her hands over the Reverend Master’s
fists, conscious of the pain in her left hand, of the dry warmth of the stone
cell. "Candia. I mean what I say."

Flickers of green pushed at her vision, marbling
the pale masonry walls. The blond man released his grip, reaching up to push
hair out of his bruised-seeming eyes, gazing down bewildered. The White Crow
tugged creased cloth straight.

"Lady, he . . . Death would be an act of mercy."

"Trust me."

"Trust a Scholar-Soldier?" Reverend Mistress
Heurodis’s acid voice sounded from the low arched door, where she peered out
into the golden nave. "Well, girlie, it doesn’t matter; I think none of us will
leave here, but you may try to end his pain."

The White Crow turned and knelt. The stone, hard
and warm under her bare knee, beat with an imperceptible tension. She looked up
again at the severed head. The old man’s eyelids slid half-shut over swimming
gray eyes, and his mouth clenched.

"I . . . needed to . . . die . . . before . . . He
. . . called . . . me . . . bait."

Some choking pressure in her chest resolved itself
into pity and anger, and she put out a hand and touched his soft skin, echoes of
pain resounding on cellular levels. "Take time to decide. We’ve got a little
time."

She sat back, grabbing the leather backpack and
sorting through the books and papers inside.

Candia said thickly: "Bait? For who?"

Heurodis’s voice sounded above the White Crow’s
head. "For all of us?"

The White Crow stood and moved to the door. She
squatted, dabbed the gummed end of a paper strip at her tongue and pasted it
across the threshold. Her sallow fingers worked rapidly, fastening the
character-inked strips across the jamb and lintel. A certain growing tension in
the air held itself in abeyance.

She stood for a moment with her back to the three
of them, staring out into the golden shafts of light in the nave.

"My lord, I haven’t heard you answer."

"So . . . much . . . suffering . . ."

The White Crow turned and took two rapid paces
across the cell, catching up her sword as she knelt, resting her hands on the
hilt and her chin on her hands, words falling rapidly into the full silence.

"I don’t think I should help you die. I mean . . ."
She gave a helpless shrug. "I don’t know if I
can
give you anything
better than death. I’m a Scholar-Soldier; I can’t work miracles. But, see,
someone is going to die soon–truly die, my lord, the soul, too–and that’s when
the Circle is broken, and I can’t . . . if it’s you . . . if that happens, we .
. . I was told by the Decan of the Eleventh Hour to act. But not how."

Theodoret’s creased features moved. Long seconds
passed.

"My lord," the White Crow said very softly, "you’re
laughing at me, I think."

The severed head’s bright eyes moved, meeting hers;
and the Bishop of the Trees, as if there were no one there but the two of them,
no old friend Candia, no Reverend Mistress, said: "Do . . . your . . . damnedest
. . . woman . . . I would . . . live . . . like
this
. . . if. . . I . .
. thought . . . it would . . . hurt . . . The . . . Spagyrus . . ."

Reverend Mistress Heurodis’s bony finger tapped
peremptorily on her shoulder.