Rats and Gargoyles (26 page)

The man muttered something inaudible.

Heurodis folded her hands neatly in front of her.
"It takes more than days to get into this state."

The Archdeacon straightened, looking around.
Morning light showed unkind on upturned tables and the deserted bar. Dark wood
scarred with knife-cuts and slogans reflected in shards of mirrors. She reached
out and took a pail from one of the cleaners as he passed, and up-ended dirty
water over the slumped man.

"Where’s Theodoret? Where’s my Bishop?"

The blond man reared up from the chair. Swearing,
he threw out dripping arms for balance, opened his eyes and turned an
uncomprehending gaze on the cafe and Heurodis and the Archdeacon. He stooped.
One filthy hand went out to the nearest wall for support. An expression of
amazement and embarrassment crossed his pale features.

Candia bent forward and vomited on the floor.

Broken mirrors at the back of the bar reflected the
owner in conversation with two men. Both newcomers wore gold-and-white sashes;
both wore clumsily adjusted rapiers and sword-belts.

Over the noise of retching, Heurodis said: "Those
are Salomon-men . . . We should move him from here, before they begin to
question us."

Gritting her teeth against the stink of vomit,
alcohol and urine, the Archdeacon pulled one of the blond man’s arms across her
shoulder and guided (not being tall enough to support) him out into the avenue.
A few yards on he fell against her, and she let him slide down to sit with his
back against one of the eucalyptus trees.

Candia frowned, lifting a drooping head. He opened
his mouth to speak and vomited into his lap, covering his doublet and breeches.

"It would be better, for his sake, not to take him
back to the university." Heurodis blinked in the sunlight.

The Archdeacon stepped back to join her. The blond
man lay against the tree-trunk, head back, legs widely apart; moaning.

"Where did you go with the Bishop?"

She squatted down a yard from Candia.

"The novices saw you leave together.
Where did
you take him?"

A ragged band of crimson cloth had been tied about
one of his wrists; days ago, judging by the dirt. A halfhealed scar showed under
the edge of it.

"He’s been missing for nearly thirty days," the
Archdeacon persisted.
"Where did you leave him?"

A light tap on her shoulder got her attention. She
stood and faced Heurodis. Carts clattered past on the rough avenue. A few early
passers-by turned to look at Candia.

"It’s been nearly thirty days since the Reverend
Master attended at the university," Heurodis confirmed. "I have not the least
idea what he would be doing in the cathedral with low-life, but it seems a
strong possibility that he
was."

The small old woman showed no disgust when she
looked at the blond man sprawled on the pavement.

"He will need treatment, I’m afraid, before he can
walk; and we can hardly carry him." Heurodis’s smoky gaze found its way to the
Archdeacon’s face. "I have a basic grounding in medicine. And I, too, can
remember drinking to drive away pain."

"I can help him temporarily."

Heurodis sniffed. Without a crack in her facade of
disapproval, she nodded. "Very well, then, but be quick. To be seen with one of
you is bad enough, but to be present in public while you actually . . . Get on
with it, girlie."

The Archdeacon knelt down in front of Candia, one
hand on his shoulder, one on the trunk of the eucalyptus.

Dawn mist cleared now, over roofs and alleys, and
carts passed every few minutes, jolting over the broken paving-stones. All the
drivers were human; no Rats visible. Heat began to soak up from the pavement,
ripen the smells of the gutter.

Leaves rustled, rattled together.

A faint green color rippled across the Archdeacon’s
black fingers. She brushed Candia’s dirt-ringed neck. He stirred, straightening;
his eyes opened and blinked against the sunlight. A smell of green leaves and
leaf-mold momentarily overpowered city odors.

Water brimmed in his eyes. A tear runneled the dirt
on his face. She saw him focus into himself; the loose- limbed sprawl tensing.
She let a little more of the power of green growing things clear his sodden head
and veins.

"Can you understand me?"

His thin dirty hand came up and touched hers. As if
the faint green color of spring leaves pained him, another rush of water brimmed
over his eyes.

"He . . . did that, and it didn’t save him . . ."

The Archdeacon glanced up at Heurodis. Healing
momentarily forgotten, she tightened her grip on Candia’s shoulder and shook
him.

"Who did? I talked to builders, some of the
builders on the Fane–they say they saw my Bishop there. Was that you? Were you
with him? What happened to him?"

He groaned. Sweat broke out on his forehead,
plastering blond hair down. His other hand came up and gripped her wrist.

"Ask–why did they let me go . . . and not Theo . .
."

"He’s at the Fane? Is he alive and well?"

"Yes . . . no . . ."

His breath stank. The effort it took him to speak
made the Archdeacon shake her head in self-disgust.

She reverently touched the eucalyptus-trunk,
centering patterns of veins in leaf and flesh, letting energy rise. After a
moment she let the color fade from her hands, and pulled Candia’s arm across her
shoulder again, and lifted. He came up on to his feet with difficulty, weight
heavy on her.

Heurodis’s chin rose, looking up at him, flesh
losing creases momentarily. "Take him to my house."

Trying not to breathe in his stink, the Archdeacon
put her arm around Candia’s body to support him. Under his shirt her fingers
felt each rib prominent. His pelvic bone jabbed into her side. Heurodis,
irritable at the increasing number of people on the avenue, moved to hook the
Reverend Master’s other arm in hers and push him into uncertain steps. He swayed
as they walked, slow yard by yard.

"If I do anything, it’s what the Thirty-Six want me
to do . . . what they let me go loose for . . ." His voice slurred. "People
talk
when they think you’re drunk . . . I’m not drunk. I’ve heard things.
Not as drunk as I’d have to be . . ."

His arms flopped loosely over the two women’s
supporting shoulders. His head dipped. His eyes shifted to the sky, watching
under wary brows, afraid. The Archdeacon shifted her grip. His head turned, and
he focused on the hawthorn pinned to her full bodice.

"Fuck your church! Fuck your arrogant beggarly
church—"

He lurched free of the Archdeacon, ignoring
Heurodis. His hair flew as he turned his face to the sky, to the Fane that
blackened the south-aust horizon.

"Put
my
head on a spike like his, why don’t
you! Ask
me
why we betrayed the House of Salomon!"

A pulse of shock chilled her.

"Drunken hallucination," Heurodis whispered.

"If one of the Salomon-men hears him . . ." The
Archdeacon wiped vomit-stained hands down her dress. Bright, rising over
roof-tops, morning sun dawned on the Day of the Feast of Misrule, warming the
sandstone streets.

"Ask
me.
I know." Candia sank to his knees
on the paving. Tears slid down his filthy skin. He rubbed helplessly at his
ripped doublet and breeches, and wiped his nose on the back of his bandaged
wrist.

The Archdeacon steeled herself to walk forward and
grip his arm. Head down, he muttered at the broken paving. She only just
understood what he said.

"Heurodis, Heurodis, I don’t have the courage–no, I
don’t have the
talent
to do what we should do now."

Dawn sunlight slid across the dial of Clock-mill as
the loaded mules passed by its waterwheel. The balding man in the darned jerkin
mopped his brow in the early heat and tugged the lead mule’s rein.

Above, the blue-and-gold dial showed three hundred
and sixty Degrees marked with the signs of the Thirty- Six Decans. The
clock-hands stood at five-and-twenty to six.

Mayor Tannakin Spatchet turned the corner out of
Carver Street in an odor of mule dung. Two apprentices in silk and satin stopped
and jeered. He stiffened his spine. A third girl, the gold-cross sash tied about
her waist, shouted, and they ran off down the cobbles, bawling insults, late for
their site. He drove the four mules around another corner as far as a narrow
door, where he knocked.

One of the mules clattered its hoof against the
cobbles, loud in the quiet street. The Mayor gazed up past the black wooden
frieze of skulls and gold-chests and ivy to a window that stood an inch open.

"Lady! White Crow!"

He hammered his plump fist against the street-door.
Distantly, above, he heard footsteps.

"Unh?"

A thin girl of fifteen or so opened the narrow
door. Her yellow hair straggled up into a bun, and her blue satin overalls
appeared to have a coating of orange fur and damp spots down the front.

"Unh?" she repeated.

Tannakin Spatchet, displeased at seeing the widow’s
daughter, drew in a breath that expanded his chest, showing off the
verdigris-green Mayor’s chain. "Sharlevian, I wish to see the White Crow.
Immediately. Fetch her."

"Ain’t here."

"When will she—?"

"Ain’t
living
here," the girl snapped.

A voice from the darkness up the stairwell called:
"Sharlevian, who is it?"

"Aw,
Mo
ther . . . it isn’t anybody. Only the
Mayor."

"Come back up here and finish feeding these blasted animals!"

Tannakin Spatchet heard Evelian’s irritated voice
grow louder coming down the stairs, and glimpsed her blue-and-yellow satin
dress. The buxom woman thrust a halfgrown fox-cub and a feeding-bottle into
Sharlevian’s hands, ignoring both their whines, and nodded briskly to him.

"Tannakin."

He raised a finger, pointing at the upstairs
window. "Is she coming back?"

The buxom woman stepped down into the street,
closing the door behind her. Her gaze took in the four mules and the roped
tarpaulin loads that stood almost as high again as the animals’ backs. One fair
brow quirked up.

"I don’t know that she
isn’t.
What’s all
this lot? You’ve come for more talismans?"

"It’s taken us thirty days to collect this to pay
for the last ones, and now you say she’s gone . . . Is there another philosopher
in the quarter who can make protective talismans?"

"You’re joking! Magus’ Row is bare as a Tree
priest’s larder, and no wonder, after the last Sign."

Evelian prodded the packing, and spoke without
turning:

"Sharlevian’s talking of nothing but this House of
Salomon. All the apprentices are the same, and she–it’s all these fool boys she
hangs around with. A bitch on heat, if I say it who’s her mother. I wish I
didn’t think that I’d be better off with friends among the Salomon-men, but I
do."

Tannakin let her vent the heat-bitterness of high
summer.

"I’ve lost three lodgers in the last thirty days.
I’m told the little Katayan’s
alive,
but I’ve seen nothing of her. As for
the White Crow . . . this is all hers?"

Tannakin Spatchet sighed. With his own bitter
resentment, he said: "It’s little enough. Brass pans, some shelving, an old
clock, some lenses, four cheeses–"

"I can smell the cheeses."

"–a dozen tallow candles, and a ream of paper. The
other loads are much the same. Mistress Evelian, in no way do I support the
Salomon movement, in no way at all, but there are times when I would give my
Mayor’s chain not to have to barter, to be able to carry money and do with it
what the Rat-Lords do."

He saw her smile, but did not entirely understand
why.

"We’ll have to lug it all up these stairs and store it in her room.
Sharlevian!
If the White Crow doesn’t come back," the yellow-haired woman
said, "it can stand as my back rent."

"Always the businesswoman—"

Tannakin Spatchet broke off, staring down the
sunlit street into morning haze. Dark specks buzzed about the aust-west horizon:
acolytes swarming about the angled Fane.

Evelian shaded her eyes. "How often do you see
that? Master Mayor, we’re all going to need more than talismans to get through
the next Calendar Sign."

"Hear me!"
The Hyena’s voice crackled through
the loudspeakers. The din of the crowd momentarily drowned out her words.

Zar-bettu-zekigal sat down on the step and
unbuttoned her new greatcoat, cautiously letting the sun’s early radiance warm
her. She rested her chin on her fists.

The greatcoat, as matt black as her hacked-short
hair, spread out on the marble step and the thrown-down yellow carpet. She
curled her tail tightly to her body. The wash-faded black cloth of her dress
began to grow hot in the morning sun, and she smiled and shrugged a stretch
without moving from her sitting position. She kept one bare foot firmly on the
stock of her musket that lay on the step below.

"We
will
build the Temple again, our temple,
the House of Salomon: with just rule and line, for the Imperial dynasty to rule
justly over our own people! We will build for ourselves, and never again for the
Thirty-Six!"

Zar-bettu-zekigal yawned into her fists. Memory
tracking automatically, she shifted an inch closer to the Hyena’s plate-clad
legs to watch every word. She gazed up, murmuring under her breath: "Oh, you’re
beautiful! But see you, you’re a child; just a baby!"

The Hyena stood on woven carpets, under gold silk
canopies held by ragged silk-clad soldiers.

"We have been the servants of servants, the slaves
of slaves, forbidden the least right, hidden in darkness, condemned to toil only
for others! Now our buried birthright is uncovered, is come into the light; our
day dawns,
this
day!"