Rats and Gargoyles (42 page)

Zari lifted her head to their flight: moths and
butterflies fluttering like leaves, dotting the air . . . and rising. Slowly but
with purpose, spiraling up towards the Night Sun.

"They won’t. Oh, Elish."

She heard the older Katayan woman’s boots hit the
flagstones, and her light tread as she stepped between the tumbled bodies. A
warm hand took her arm. She pitched round, throwing her arms about her sister,
burying her face in the sweet-scented lace ruffles of her shirt. "Elish!"

"Little one." Work-hardened hands held her back and
head, crushing her dress, pressing sun-cooled hair against her scalp. "Hush."

"Hard times deserve hard measures."

Luka’s tone, sharp now, roused her.
Zar-bettu-zekigal raised her head. The small woman stood with her arms
outstretched, bamboo cane held up in one hand, head raised to the sky. Her
feather-braided hair hung down over her breast, silver against the garish robes.
The parakeet screeched, clinging to her shoulder.

Birds settled down.

Out of a clear sky, thrushes and starlings and
hawks flew down, landing on the lady’s outstretched arms. Sparrows, doves,
pigeons, humming-birds–until her old arms bowed, and she flung them upwards,
skywards. Zar-bettu-zekigal followed the gesture.

Dark under the Night Sun, birds circled. Great
scarlet macaws, eagles, buzzards; peregrine falcons and merlins, mouse-owls and
herring gulls, crows, ravens and vultures. Amazed, she hugged Elish tighter,
deafened by the rush of great wings, wincing from the spatter of droppings that
hit the flagstones; dizzied by the skirl of flight, hundreds upon thousands of
birds flocking overhead.

"Follow! Follow-follow-follow!"

High as a jay’s shriek, the old woman’s voice
pierced the air. She swept the bamboo cane high above her head.

A mottled black-and-white moth skittered across
Zari’s vision. A rush of cold wings sounded, whirring; and the scarlet parakeet
seemed to halt in mid-air, beak snapping. The moth’s body crunched. The bird
flicked away on an updraught, beak pecking down the fragile wings.

"Elish . . ." Zari unknotted her fists from her
sister’s coat, knuckles white. A cold wind began to blow. "Elish! What’re they
doing?"

Her heart thudded in her breast; Zar-bettu-zekigal
felt it through her sister’s flesh. The older Katayan said nothing, only stared
upwards.

Swift, acute, cutting the sky: the great flock of
birds circled and spread out, rising on dark wings, pursuing and catching and
devouring the hundred thousand butterflies that spiraled up into the bright air.

Brick walls rose up about him. Lucas trotted to the
end of another alley, pacing himself, holding in tight frustration. The alley
opened into a crossroads.

Five identical ways led off: indistinguishable from
all the other alleys. He cocked his head, listened. At least no footsteps now,
no pursuers.

"Gods damn it!" He slammed his fist against the
wall. Brickdust and plaster sifted down. "I don’t believe it!"

Lucas stared up at the narrow strip of sky visible
between roofs. The black glare of the sun blinded him, dead overhead, no use for
directions.

He picked an alley that might lead away from the
square and began to run down it, loping, muscles aching. Within minutes he hit a
division of the ways, paused. Lost.

Lost.

"I can’t believe I did this." His voice bounced
thinly back from the walls and shutters. He banged on peeling shutters. No
sound, no answer.

Claws scratched on cobblestones, loud in the
silence. A hard hairy body pushed under his right hand.
Lucas froze as it brushed his leg, looked down. A white dog.

"Lazarus?"

Not a dog, a timber wolf; turning its thin muzzle
up to gaze at him with ice-blue eyes. Dust clogged the pads of the animal’s
feet. It let its jaw gape for a moment, panting; then gave a quick high-pitched
growl and trotted off down one of the two alleys.

"Hey!" Lucas hesitated. "Where is she? Were you
with her? What the fuck–you’re an animal. What do you know?"

The wolf stopped, gazing back with feral eyes.

Lucas stepped forward. Heat rebounded back from the
walls of the buildings, built up a thin film of sweat on his skin that the
sunlight cooled. He began to walk. The wolf, as if satisfied at seeing him
follow, turned and trotted on, loping easily down the dry central gutter.

Dust thickened thirst on his tongue. Now the wolf
began running, the rocking pace that eats up miles outside city streets; and
Lucas, one hand pressed over his breeches pocket and the letter, sprinted after,
panting.

"Hey!"

A corner, a narrow alley, a flight of steps;
another long alley, cut right, cut left; a short alley—

He caught a gutter-pipe to pull him round the next
corner. The street shone dusty, dark, empty before him. Disbelieving, he slowed,
panting; walking slowly along past a high wall.

"As if I
believed
—" Incredulity sharpened
his voice; he hit his fist against his thigh.

A murmur of voices came from a high window.

Lucas stopped. He narrowed his eyes against the
light shadows cast by the wall, staring up at the building’s clustered chimneys
and high peaked roofs. Still staring up, he walked along the wall to the massive
iron-railing gates that stood open.

Chimneys cast light shadows across the paving. Cool
reflected back from the walls on three sides, light glinting blackly from the
windows. Great stone stairways went up at cater-corners of the courtyard, the
wooden doors at the top of the left-hand flight standing open.

The murmur of voices from Big Hall echoed down
through open windows into the courtyard of the University of Crime.

From gable and ridge and roof, from finial and
spire, from pinnacle and gutter they rise up.

Great ribbed wings scour the sky.

Their shadows fall across the heart of the world,
falling not light as all other shadows do, but still black: black as pits on the
streets and houses and parks below.

The Night Sun bubbles their skins like tar. They
shriek, rising up into the air, soaring.

The heart of the world stretches far out to the
horizon, its thirty-six Districts and one hundred and eighty-one quarters; each
District cut on its austerly sides by the darkness of the Fane, tentacles of
stone building piecemeal across the earth. Houses, palaces, inns, temples;
courtyards and avenues, all empty now, no Rat-Lords, no humans, all lost or
fleeing for refuge—

The acolytes of the Fane swarm, a hundred thousand.

Here they swoop low, bristle-tails beating the air,
their thumbhooked wings beating at the windowless Fane-in-the-Eighth-District.
There they shriek, circling the buttresses of the
Fane-in-the-Thirty-First-District.

They can no longer enter.

The Night Sun scorches their uncommon flesh,
burning, burning.

Goaded they rise, blind with blood and fear. The
Fane is closed to them. Over the city they swarm up, screaming.

Their Thirty-Six masters do not answer.

Clawed feet scrape the air: unflesh that can wither
stone if it will. Wings beat: their breath can rip roofs from houses. Ears
listen, hearing the beats of frightened hearts: the living who hide in their
homes below and pray to the Fane’s deafness.

Shrieking, they soar up into the burning black
light. Gaining height to strike.

Plessiez clasped his onyx-ringed hands behind his
back, gazing out over the building site of the House of Wisdom, Temple of the
Two Pillars of Strength and Beauty, the Daughter of Salomon.

Abandoned barrows and diggers littered the earth,
tarpaulins flapped loose over crates; drills, buckets, chisels and barrels lay
on the ground and on the scaffolding platforms where they had been dropped. He
stepped half a pace to one side as two black Rats, both in the lace and linen of
minor gentry, carried the last of the dead men past by the hands and feet.

"The tents?" one queried. Plessiez inclined his
head, glancing down at the body’s heat-black and tattered skin.

"We need fear no infection . . . I believe."

Dust still hung over the massive granite block by
which he stood. From a blazing sky, dark light settled into the incised Word of
Seshat, filling every carved channel. He rested his hand against the chill
surface.

"As our great poet says, architecture is frozen
music. A thaw would improve this greatly, I think. We’ll have it demolished
later." He turned away from the site, now cleared of bodies, and walked down the
broken steps. Without looking up, he added: "How goes it?"

The Lord-Architect glanced up and winced. He wiped
his face, smearing a white dropping across one dark copper eyebrow.

"Fewer butterflies," he replied gravely. "More
birds."

Plessiez nodded acknowledgment to a group of black Rats, merchants from
one of the rich houses around the square; paused to exchange a word. To all
sides now the square stretched away empty, but for the last of the impromptu
squads carrying bodies to the abandoned Imperial tents. Careless, hard,
cheerful: voices rang out. One ragged banner still flew, in the increasingly
chill air.

"You have"–the Lord-Architect Casaubon drew on his
voluminous blue satin frock-coat, and felt in his pockets–"a monstrously tidy
mind, Master Plessiez."

Plessiez rubbed his hands together, restoring
circulation. Giving a tug to his cardinal’s green sash, he moved down from the
last broken step to the paving, and into the bright shadow of the siege-engine.
His scabbard jingled, harsh in the cold air.

"I see no reason these should not labor. Albeit
minor gentry and merchants assume themselves too good for it." A nod of his head
to the velvet- and lace-clad Rats now milling in the square. "I’ll give orders
later for some communal burial, some monument."

"Later?"

Plessiez surveyed the crowds of his own kind, and
smiled slightly. "Oh, yes. After the present trouble."

The Lord-Architect walked
out a distance into the square and squatted down, studying the ground, blue silk
breeches straining over his expanses of thigh and buttock. Rubbish still
littered the paving about his feet: feathers, masks, colored ribbons, abandoned
food and drink.

"Then let me tell you . . ."

A glass with an inch of stewed beer still in it
stood by the Lord-Architect’s foot. He absently picked it up, drank the dregs,
and rose to his feet again.

". . . just by way of a warning, since you’re too
gods- damned ignorant to perceive it for yourself . . ."

Casaubon felt in his deep pockets. He brought out,
first, a stale chunk of bread smeared with something brown, which he bit into
and then returned; and then a small sextant. Holding this up to the Night Sun
with greasy fingers, he spoke through a spray of bread pellets.

". . . that there’s plague, and the black sun, but
your troubles aren’t half-over yet . . ."

Plessiez crossed the space between them in three
strides, seizing the fat man’s arm. "What do you know? Is this your Art?"

". . . therefore," the Lord-Architect concluded as
if he had not been interrupted, "kindly stand aside, master priest, and let me
get on with my work!"

"What work?" He loosed the satin sleeve.

"Plessiez!"

"Wait here," Plessiez ordered, turning to face the
voice. The noise of hoofs echoed across the square, the rider driving hard
between the clear-up squads; reining in to a reckless halt by the siege-engine.
She swung down from the mare’s saddle, a plump black Rat in the scarlet jacket
and
ankh
of the Order of Guiry.

"Fleury?"

"Man, are
you
in trouble!" She caught his
arm, drew him aside, her naked tail lashing nervously. "I rode from the palace.
Fenelon told me you’d gone this way. Let me tell you—"

"Wait."

Plessiez signaled to the King’s Guard, sending them
to stations a little distance from the siege-engine; glanced at the
Lord-Architect (the fat man’s attention fixed on the Night Sun and his sextant);
and drew the plump Rat into the shelter of the engine-platform.

"Now. And briefly."

The black Rat priest blinked, her dark eyes wide.
Specks of plaster clung to her fur; she smelt of horse- sweat and fear and
cordite. Plessiez abruptly put his hands behind his back again, holding the one
with the other, this time to prevent them shaking.

"Desaguliers holds the palace and the King." She
drew in a breath, began to relate in a machine-gun rattle.

Half-listening, half-absent, Plessiez narrowed his
eyes against the cold wind skirling across the square. The shadows of birds,
bright gold and fringed with light, fell thick across him, pelting like summer
rain. Their cries diminished as they flocked higher, higher; drawn up after the
swarm of brightly colored insects seeking the sun.

"Your orders, messire?"

He reached out and ruffled Fleury’s fur
affectionately. "My orders are to wait. We’ll settle our discontented
Captain-General,
and
St. Cyr, when this is finished. Republic! What fools
do they think we are?"

"Prodigious great ones?" The Lord-Architect
Casaubon, padding back to the siege-engine, sat down by the heap of his
belongings at the foot of the metal ladder. He beamed up at Plessiez, hooking on
his heeled court- shoes, and pulling up one stocking that immediately slid back
down around his ankle.

"I believe I can dispense with your services,"
Plessiez murmured. "The engine will do very well on-station here. Now, Fleury—"

"Gods rot your soul, I’ve half a mind to leave you
to it!"

Bending, hitting his head on the under-carapace,
the Lord-Architect moved under the siege-engine, twisting his head to peer up at
the axle and gears. He reached up with delicate plump fingers, feeling among
hard metal and grease. A sharp
clck!
sounded.