Rats and Gargoyles (12 page)

"Foretelling interests me." Casaubon dug into the capacious pockets
of his full-skirted coat and brought out a handful of roasted chicken-wings.
Picking what remained of the meat from the bones, he said: "I’ll give you a
shilling to help carry my gear, and we’ll talk about it."

Lucas stood up off the balustrade. Patience
exhausted, the afternoon sun fraying his temper, he said: "Oh, really! There are
limits to what a prince will do!"

The big man looked down at the cards, and at the
heap of small coins at Lucas’s elbow. Through a fine spray of chewed chicken and
spittle, he remarked: "Are there? What are they?"

Lucas stared, silenced.

"Sir?"

A thin brown-haired woman in a frock-coat walked
across the sand. Behind her, silver highlights slid across an airship’s bulging
hull. She snapped her fingers for a porter to follow: the man staggered under
the weight of a brass-bound trunk. Two other men followed, carrying a larger
trunk between the two of them, their boots digging deep into the sand. The woman
made a deep formal bow.

"Ah–
Parry!
Here." The stentorian bellow beside
him deafened Lucas.

"I’ve summoned a carriage, Lord-Architect. Now, are
you sure that—?"

Casaubon stood. He bulked large above Lucas, easily
six foot four or five inches tall. He waved a dismissive hand at the woman.

"Parry, don’t fuss. Go back, as arranged. And
try
to keep the Senate from bankrupting me while I’m gone, won’t you?"

The woman, sweating in woolen frock-coat and
breeches, gave a long-suffering sigh. "Yes, Lord-Architect."

One carriage rolled up, and the porters began to
load it from the luggage piled up around the airship’s steps. Case followed
case, trunk followed trunk, until the metal-rimmed wheels sank inches deep into
the sand. The precise woman snapped her fingers and beckoned another of the
nearby carriages.

Casaubon strode over to supervise the loading,
mopping at the rolls of fat at the back of his neck with a brownish kerchief.
Two of the men struggled to raise a square chest. He motioned them aside,
squatted, and straightened up with it in his grip. He heaved it up on to the
cart.

"Oof! We’ll need another cart. Parry, you’re about
to miss your ship."

The thin woman glanced over to where crews were
loosening the anchor-ropes of the nearest airship.

"I’ll manage," the big man forestalled her. "My
friend here will call another carriage."

The woman made a hurried bow, looked as though she
would say more, heard a hail from the airship, and turned and strode away.
Casaubon stared after her. Ponderously regretful, he shook his head, and then
turned back to Lucas.

"Won’t you?"

Lucas, a step away, hesitated. He scratched at his
thick springy hair, and tugged the linen shirt away from his neck. The heat of
the afternoon sun cleared promenade, sand-flats and streets; litters vanishing
into cool courtyards, and men and women into cafes and bars. No one now to be
inveigled into a game of Shilling-the-Trump, and risk sunstroke.

He put a hand into his breeches pocket, and brought
it out closed. "I can only think of one way to tell if this is a waste of time."

Lucas opened his hand. On his palm, heavy and
intricate, glittering with sharp sun-sparks, lay a golden bee.

Falke shuddered as he walked through humid heat,
arms tight about his body. One hand clenched, frustrated, lacking the sword that
a Rat-Lord would kill him for owning. He flinched as wet petals brushed his
face. Great single-petaled roses shone ebony in the gloom, each bramble and leaf
and bud outlined in mirror-silver.

Their touch glided through his skin: substanceless.

"Here!" the brown Rat called from ahead.

Falke pushed sopping hair out of his eyes, staring
into the sewer-tunnel. Every noise–brushwood shoved aside, a stone kicked, the
sharp sound of water dripping from the brick roof–thrilled through him. The
reflexes of his illegal weapons-training made him twitch and start.

Stinking sweetness filled his nostrils, throat and
lungs.

"Messire." The young Katayan woman appeared at his
side. Her pale skin glimmered in the tunnel’s gloom. His dilated vision saw her
face clearly.

She shrugged the heavy greatcoat back off her
shoulders and swung it up to shroud him. "You’re shivering. Take it. Down here’s
the first time I’ve been warm since I came to your damn city!"

Hot humid air brushed his skin, leaving him
clay-cold. He reached up, tugging the coat about his shoulders. The taste of
copper lingered in his mouth.

The young woman, walking with a kick-heeled stride,
plunged her hands into the pockets of her plain black dress. "I thought it would
get colder, the further down we went."

The black Rat, outlined briefly at the mouth of the
tunnel, stepped down to the left and vanished. Falke heard his voice, with
Charnay’s; and then Zar-bettu-zekigal slipped her arm under his, and steered him
down two steps and out on to a sewer-quay.

The first oil-lamp, searing blue-white, hung in a
niche in the tunnel wall. Above it, the ceiling soared thirty feet. Below, the
brick went down in steps to the quay. Glass splinters of light pierced his eyes
from the ripples. Other lamps shone, further off; gleaming on the
filth- choked black quay and the massive tunnel that curved off to either side
into the distance.

Oily water glistened and shifted. The Katayan woman
coughed. "The
stink
–it’s like dead fish. Like the sea." Falke’s heel
skidded on the wet paving. He gripped her arm.

"Too much light. I can’t see." His clothes clung
wetly to him, and he huddled down on the top step, the greatcoat wrapped round
him, hands over his dilated eyes.

"Interesting." Plessiez’s voice came clearly. "The
oil has some way to burn yet. I wonder if these lamps are replaced at regular
intervals?"

Zar-bettu-zekigal’s voice said: "If it’s tidal,
we’re near the sea. Nearly outside."

Falke raised his head, shading his eyes.

"No. Sea-water comes in a long way. There are
hundreds of miles of sewer-system back of docklands."

The black Rat paced back, lightly alert, drawn
rapier shining in the lamp-light. His scarlet jacket, unbuttoned, gave him the
raffish air of a duelist; little trace of the priest now. Only Falke saw how he
shied away from black and silver phantoms.

"Charnay, you go two hundred paces up the tunnel,
I’ll go two hundred paces the other way; then come back and report."

"Yes, messire."

The brown Rat leaped down on to the lower quay and
walked off. Falke heard her humming under her breath. He looked up to meet
Plessiez’s puzzled expression.

"Stay here, messire, with the little one.
No,
Zari, you’re not coming. Stay where you are."

The young woman brushed dirt from her dress with
the tuft of her tail. "Of course, messire."

The black Rat padded soundlessly away. Falke
watched the lithe figure merge into the wall’s shadows; loping easily towards
the bend in the tunnel. From the opposite direction, a loud curse was followed
by the splash of some obstacle kicked into the water.

"Stay
quiet!"
He pushed his fist against his
mouth, muffling his outburst.

Zar-bettu-zekigal flopped down on the step beside him. "If someone hears her, that’s a good thing. We
want to get out of here."

His laugh caught in his throat. He put both hands
over his face, drew in a shaky breath; then took his hands away and clenched
them, staring at his trembling fists.

Her voice came quietly. "The acolytes frightened
me, too."

"It’s . . . more than that. More than cowardice."
He chuckled, painfully, back in his throat. "I am a coward, of course, but . .
."

The young woman’s sepia eyes darkened now, with the
concentration of a Memory. She put black hair behind her ears with both hands,
and shifted her hip so that she sat close to him. Falke drew unadmitted comfort
from the proximity.

"Only, having once seen that, you never truly cease
to see it.
Inside the Fane. But why here?" she asked.

Now the black Rat was out of sight, around the
curve in the tunnel. Falke leaned forward to peer after Charnay, but she also
was gone.

"When I made escape-routes from my hall, I only
ever meant to get into the upper levels. Down here, do you know how old this is?
These sewers–if you go deep enough, they’re part of the catacombs under the
Fane."

Moisture trickled down from somewhere into the
sluggish channel and, with the ripples, new stenches arose from the disturbed
sewer-water. Saliva filled his mouth, prelude to nausea. He clenched his hand as
if that could put one of the House of Salomon’s illegal blades into it, and
turned his dilated eyes on the Katayan.

"Once, six or seven years back, I was an architect
on the Fane. Only a small addition to one wing, but I was proud of it–the
tallest perpendicular arches yet, a hundred and eighty feet high, and flying
buttresses as thin as lace . . ."

The Katayan bent forward and skimmed a stone across
the quay. It struck a scorpion, which plopped into the water, threshing, and
sank.

"I couldn’t bear never to see it again after it was
finished." He pushed his fine white hair out of his face. "How stupid . . . I
was too old to be that stupid. I thought that I would conceal myself in it, as they
came to take occupation, and see, and then I would know."

Words tumbled out of him now, falling into the
sepia gaze of her Memory.

"All the grimoires along Magus’ Row couldn’t hide a
human soul from them. They dragged me out into the open. And took me in, into
the heart of the Fane. Where nothing human had been since it was built,
millennia past."

He drew in a rough breath.

"Decans like The Spagyrus, that deal with humankind
from time to time, become corrupt, become a little like us."

Hot moist air pressed close. Muffled echoes came
from some unidentifiable direction. Bones rattled and scuffled in the
storm-flood piles of brushwood. Zar-bettu-zeki-gal’s head rose with a jerk as
the bright oil-lamp flickered.

"What else?"

"The noise. The
noise.
Agony. Torn flesh.
Tom souls. Yes, the soul can be hurt." He laughed: painful, embarrassed. "Don’t
listen to me. I was afraid of nothing before that, and now I’m afraid of almost
everything. The powers that are in there aren’t corrupt with humanity. They’re
the Thirty-Six Decans, the Celestial Powers of hell, and they live on this
earth, and we
build
for them!"

Zari turned towards him, cocked her head
to one side, and stared into his eyes.

Falke said: "Eyes that have seen the heart of the
Fane are afterwards changed."

Something in her body’s stiffness cautioned him. He
braced himself for her next words.

"See you, if it was me, I wouldn’t make up stories
about having been in the Fane to account for it."

His heart beat once, with a white pain. Very still,
he said: "Stories?"

"Aw, Messire Falke! Go into the
heart
of the
Fane? No one ever has. You’d be squished like a bug." Her dark eyes momentarily
reflected storm-light. "Or else you’d be lunch."

Zar-bettu-zekigal stood up. The hem of her dress
brushed his face, and Falke caught a scent of dry grass and sweat; and he reached up and knotted a comer of
the cloth in his fist.

"I don’t like to be called a liar, girl!"

"Or a coward?" One freckle-backed hand ruffled his
hair. He raised his head. Her white face and black hair stood out against black
and silver roses. The brambles that trailed down across the air passed
harmlessly through her arm and shoulder; and she stretched up, as if she would
grasp them, arcing her back and tail.

"If I’ve worked it out, then messire will have,
too. He probably even knows why you tell stories. If it isn’t just vanity."

She dropped down to squat on her haunches before
him.

"Ei! I bet it impresses people, though. If they’re
gullible enough. Hello, messire, find anything?"

Plessiez stepped silently out of the gloom.

"More of the same. The lamps in that direction have
less oil. Where’s Charnay?"

"Fallen into the canal?" the Katayan suggested.

"Oh, I hardly think so. Strategy and tactics may be
beyond her, but at feats of strength she’s . . ." Plessiez’s voice trailed away.

Falke stood. A pounding fear filled his head,
discovery and shock mingling; and his fingers fumbled as he began to fit his
arms into the sleeves of the young woman’s greatcoat, cold despite the moist
heat. Grunts and snarls came from the far darkness of the quay.

Zar-bettu-zekigal hopped from one bare foot to the
other.

"Oh, see you,
look
at that!"

Falke’s dilated eyes searched the darkness beyond
the lamps, first to find the approaching figure of Charnay.

For the first time, he smiled.

The brown Rat leaned forward as she walked,
gripping a rope that ran taut over her shoulder, muscles straining under her
brown fur. Ripples spread out from the water at the edge of the quay, following
her, slopping thickly onto the brickwork. The Rat granted. She planted both her
feet squarely on the slippery quay, and heaved at the rope and the heavy object
to which it was attached.

"Hell damn it!" Falke said. "It’s a boat."