Rats and Gargoyles (24 page)

Lights dimmed, cadets wrenched curtains open, and
sun and air poured in. Desaguliers pushed through the dazed assembly to be first
out. He caught one glimpse of Plessiez as he went. The little priest stood on
the dais steps, deep in conversation with the silver-furred Rats- King, smiling.

The carriage drew up outside one of the smaller and
older of the Thirty-Six temples of the Fane. A clock down in North quarter
struck quarter to the hour of eleven.

"Shit," said the White Crow.

A granular sea-mist grayed the stone cornices and
columns. The air below the mist made street-level humid, warm as bathwater. She
hooked one bent frame of her spectacles in the V of her buttoned shirt, and
pushed the brim of her hat up.

"I don’t think this is one of your better ideas,"
she remarked, dismounting from the carriage. Its springs creaked as the
Lord-Architect got out after her.

"What’s more—"

She turned her head to add another word of disquiet
and stopped.

The Lord-Architect Casaubon ponderously moved to
position himself beside the rear nearside wheel. The White Crow’s jaw slackened
as he unbuttoned the flap of his blue silk breeches, reached down, stared
absently back down the hill, and urinated fully and at some length over the
wooden wheel-spokes.

"Oh, really!" The White Crow’s exasperation gave
way to laughter. "There is a time and a place to exercise ancient privileges,
and this isn’t either one of them!"

Mist dissipated. Above the cityscape gliders
flicked brilliance from their wings, circling about a central column of air.

"Nervous," Casaubon explained, buttoning himself
up.

"You?"

"Wait for us," the Lord-Architect directed the
carriage-driver.

The White Crow took a pace. Shadow fell cool across
her back, where her linen shirt plastered sweaty skin. As if it were a talisman
she raised her hand to her nostrils and inhaled human odors of heat.

A hooped arch broke the Fane’s brown brick wall.
Stepping under it, she saw other arches in other walls opening off to left and
right. Across a small courtyard, an arch’s bricks burned tawny in sunlight.
Beyond, another lay in shade.

"Well, then."

She stretched all fingers on both hands, palms
taut, flexing sinews, in a gesture that she did not remember to be one church’s
Sign of the Branches. After that she tipped her speckled hat back slightly, and
glanced up at the Lord-Architect.

"Suppose we leave this until another day?" she
suggested.

"Suppose we don’t."

Brief shadow cooled her in the archway. In the
small courtyard, heat bounced back from the worn brickwork. Silence drummed on
her ears. Glancing back, the White Crow faced a blank wall: no sign of the arch
by which they’d entered. She smiled ruefully.

"That one," Casaubon said.

She walked towards the further archway. The Lord-
Architect’s blue satin frock-coat brushed her arm at every pace. Her left arm.
Her right hand swung free, and she reached up to touch the hilt of her sword,
and smiled to herself again.

"You never did miss a trick," she observed.

The sky overhead curdled hot and yellow.
Storm-lightning flickered above the windowless brick walls, almost invisible in
the bright day. White Crow matched Casaubon stride for stride, through three
enclosed courtyards: ears tensed for any noise, eyes searching for any movement.

Her saliva began to have the metallic taste of
fear. Sweat made her skin tacky at elbow and knee joints, above her lip, and on
each upper eyelid. She reached up and pulled her sword from its sheath.

"Valentine."

"No. I need to," she said. White sun flashed the
length of the blade. Its grip fitted into her palm; and the weight of its pull
on her shoulder felt comfortingly familiar. Anxiety tensed her back, prickled
down her vertebrae.

She grinned.

"Last-minute rescues." Her voice bounced back from
the bricks of a fourth enclosed courtyard. "Frantic escapes, reprieves on the
gallows-steps, victory or defeat at the final instant, on the eleventh minute of
the eleventh hour of the eleventh day . . ."

Casaubon’s copper hair gleamed as he nodded. "In
short: the Decan of the Eleventh Hour."

Urgency and excitement radiated back from the walls
with the heat and light. With long-practiced ease she reached up and slid the
blade back into her shoulder- scabbard.

She turned her head to do it, and to look at
Casaubon as she spoke, walking under yet another arch of the brick labyrinth.
Turning back, she stopped in her tracks; Casaubon’s cushioned arm bumped her
forward a step; and she stumbled, wincing at her bare feet on graveled earth.

The heart of the maze of the Thirty-Sixth temple
opened before her.

The White Crow moved forward slowly into the large
courtyard. High walls enclosed her, of small bricks once dark brown and now
sun-bleached to ocher; the sky empty and sun-filled. Black dots floated across
her vision. One of them landed on her arm, crawling among the fine red hairs.

"The old English black bee . . ." She raised her
arm, blew softly, and the bee flew off.

"Made extinct in an epidemic." Casaubon’s hand
rested on her shoulder. "Master-Physician."

All the ground lay marked in ocher and yellow and
brown gravels, a labyrinth of patterns on the earth. She began to walk the
knotted pattern. She did not raise her eyes yet, to see what lay in the center
of the courtyard.

Black roses thrust briars into crevices of the
brickwork. The pattern brought her close to one wall, and she reached up to touch: black stem, black thorns,
black petals; cold as living onyx or jet. The tiny bees swarmed about her. Their
noise filled her head. She reached behind without looking, left-handed, and
Casaubon’s hand enclosed hers.

The soles of her bare feet burned with the hot
earth. She stepped from that to brick paving, reaching the center of the marked
patterns. The Lord-Architect came to stand beside her. The yellow sun drenched
the enclosed garden. A smell of hot earth and hot brick reached her nostrils.

A statue loomed in the center of the courtyard,
bees swarming over its crossed front paws. Brown unmortared bricks rose up into
leonine shoulders, flanks, haunches, and a tail curved over one slightly
stretched hind leg. Around the shoulders and head, drapework delineated in
curved brickwork surrounded an almond-eyed face. The swell of breasts showed
above the crossed front paws.

The White Crow shifted, eyes aching from staring up
into the sun. The sphinx towered some sixteen or eighteen feet above her; shaped
brickwork smoothly curving, sun-bleached, and crumbling here and there where
bees nested in crevices. She sat down, cross-legged, ignoring Casaubon’s
expostulation; energy sucked by the heat.

Drowned dizzy, she wiped her red face and reached
down to scratch her bare legs under the knee-breeches. The fingers of her left
hand pricked with pain. She glanced down to see angry red pin-pricks where she
had touched the bristles of the black roses.

Casaubon’s voice, half-drowned in the silence of
sun and bees, said: "Time."

She heard no clock. The hour sounded as invisibly
as ripples under water, pulsing through her.

The sphinx’s curved brickwork eyelids slid up.

Pupil-less ocher eyes gazed down, twelve feet above
the earth. She saw herself and the Lord-Architect reflected there, in shining
sand. Some frontier irrevocably crossed in her mind, the White Crow succumbed to
a casual bravado that might pass for, or might become, courage. She removed her
hat. She laughed.

Long lips curved up, and the great front paws
moved, dust haunting the hot air.

"You are too early."

The Lord-Architect knelt beside the White Crow. She
stared at the back of his neck, the yellow-stained linen and heat-flushed skin.

"What do you mean, ‘too early’!" Casaubon protested
indignantly. "I might have been too late!"

The White Crow gripped the crown of her speckled
black-and-white hat and fanned herself with the brim. Still sitting, she called
up: "Lady of the Eleventh Hour, who is Lord of the Ten Degrees of High Summer!"

The sphinx’s eyes shifted to the red-haired woman.

"I’m the Master-Physician White Crow," the White
Crow said, "and this is Baltazar Casaubon, Lord- Architect, Knight of the Golden
Rose, Scholar-Soldier of the Invisible College . . ."

"Yes."
The ancient eyes filled with amusement.
"I know. I summoned him."

A stillness touched the White Crow; only her eyes
shifting up to the man who knelt beside her. What she had forgotten of his wit
and strength (not merely a very fat man, but a very large man also fat) came
back to her with the rush of five years’ forgetting.

Brick paving jolted as Casaubon sat down heavily.
Peeling off the heavy satin frock-coat, and unbuttoning his embroidered
waistcoat, he wiped his already-wet shirt-sleeves across his face, and gazed up
at the Decan.

A heat-shimmer clung to the shaped bricks. The
folds of the head-dress fell across leonine shoulders, framing a face more than
human. Articulated, impossible, the great body shifted to one elbow, hind leg
stretching.

The White Crow ignored Casaubon’s attempts to speak
now that his immediate indignation had run dry. She gazed up at the god-daemon,
not able to keep her mouth from stretching in a smile of pure joy. She put her
hat back on the masses of tangled red hair, tilted it to shade her eyes. Her
fingers flexed. They tingled for the act of an art so long unpracticed.

The Decan’s full-lipped mouth smiled. Her robed
head bent, and her shining sand eyes fixed on the White Crow.

"Child of earth."

"Lady." The White Crow laughed. Sweat trickled down
between her sharp shoulder-blades. The Decan’s sun unknotted tensions in her
body, smoothed them into a trance of heat.

"You sent for an architect and a physician of the
Invisible College." Casaubon, doggedly rolling up his shirtsleeves, addressed
his remarks to the sphinx-paw resting on the earth beside him. The paw lay large
as a cart on the earth. Brick claws flexed.

"Divine One," he added, as an afterthought.

Heady, as if she were ten years younger and still
the woman who would speak her mind although god and daemon waited on it, she
poked her finger into Casaubon’s damp shoulder.

"Oh, now, you, hold it
–right
there. A
Decan
sent for the College’s assistance? And you didn’t tell me that?"

Sunned in the warmth of amusement radiant from the
brick courtyard, the Lord-Architect said: "Now, Valentine. You wouldn’t be here
if I had. I know you."

"Yes." The White Crow uncrossed her legs, rubbing at
cramp in one calf. "Yes . . ."

She rested her elbow along his shoulder. His shirt
showed sopping patches under the arms and down the middle of his vast back.
Sweat and metheglin reeked on the air.

"This is not the appointed hour."

The White Crow made a grab for the Lord-Architect
as he rose majestically to his feet.

"You’re lucky I’m here at all!" he rumbled,
ham-hands planted on hips. "I bring you the best pox-rotted physician there is
(who doesn’t want to come), and the best living expert in architectonics (and
I
didn’t want to come either, if your Divine Presence doesn’t know that),
and I get us both here, now, through
magia
run wild, and what thanks do I
get for it!"

He stopped, swept up his satin coat, rescued the
hipflask from one pocket, and stomped to the edge of the brickwork to stare out
over the knotted gravel patterns of the courtyard and coax a drop or two more of
metheglin from the flask.

The hot brick paving quivered. The other paw of the
sphinx fell lightly, so that, from where she sat between them now, the White
Crow could have reached out a hand to touch both.

"The best living–but I can raise the best of the
dead. You passed a world of dangers–but we could unseam the world from pole to
pole, in a heartbeat."

The White Crow laughed.

She was aware that Casaubon turned, that the
freckles on his heated face stood out in a sudden pallor. All else vanished in
the sandstorm and dust-devil gaze of the god- daemon, as the Decan lowered her
head and focused her close gaze on the White Crow.

Nails digging into her palms, the White Crow said:
"Lady, and begging your Divine Presence’s pardon, I know the Decans could unsoul
the sky, untie the bonds that fasten the earth, untune the dance of the heavens;
for all that is is held within the Degrees of the Thirty- Six."

The brick lids blinked.

"And I also know," the White Crow ended, "how
difficult it is to get thirty-six of anybody to agree to anything, and act as
one."

Furnace heat scoured the courtyard. Softer than the
hum of black bees and the rustle of the roses, the White Crow heard the rare
laughter of a Decan. She climbed to her feet. The muscles at the backs of her
legs trembled.

"She is a Master-Physician, to know the conflict
and contention among the Stars so well. You have performed adequately, child of
earth, in bringing her here. Welcome. "

" ‘Bringing’?" the White Crow queried.

" ‘Adequately’?" the Lord-Architect bridled.

She could feel him clinging to his refuge of obtuse
pride and alcohol, as she clung to wit or a studied carelessness: some scant
refuge against the presence of the god-daemon informing mortal matter.
Casaubon’s plump knuckles brushed her chin, moved up to lift the tumbled mass of
hair, silver-white at the temples. The power of ten degrees of the sky infused
the courtyard: permitting no evasions, nothing less than truth.

"I made you keep me here. I made you listen to me.
I made you come with me. Valentine."

"Oh, I knew how you were doing it," she said, "but
I let you, just the same . . . I did the hard bit when I hid here and researched
the heart of the world for five years, alone."