Rats and Gargoyles (4 page)

There are guides. They do not speak. They climb
narrow flights of stairs that wind up and around. The stairways are not lit.
Their fingers against the slick stone guide them.

Theodoret and Candia climb, ensnared in that
mirrored moment of midnight and midday.

"What are you doing here?" the black Rat demanded.

"My lord." Zar-bettu-zekigal bowed, the dignity of
this impaired by her hands being tucked up into her armpits for warmth. "We’re
students, passing through to the other side of the Nineteenth’s Aust quarter."

Lucas noted the black Rat’s plain cloak and sword-
belt, without distinguishing marks. A plain metal circlet ringed above one ear
and under the other; from it depended a black feather plume. The black Rat,
despite being unattended, had an air that Lucas associated with rank, if not
necessarily military rank.

"You’re out of your lawful quarter."

The Rat swept the last fragments of bone from the
niche into the sack, and pulled the drawstrings tight. His muzzle went up: that
lean wolfish face regarding Lucas first, and then the young Katayan.

"A trainee Kings’ Memory?" he recalled her last
words. "How good are you, child?"

The young woman lifted her chin slightly, screwed
up her eyes, and paused with tail hooked onto empty air. "Me:
What I like,
you haven’t got;
Lucas:
Really?
Me:
Really;
Lucas:
This
really is a short-cut?
Me:
Oh, right. Oh, right. You’re a king’s son.
Used to stable-girls and servants
—"

The Rat cut her off with a wave of one be-ringed
hand. "Either you’re new and excellent, or near the end of your training."

"New this summer." Zar-bettu-zekigal shrugged. "Got
three months in the university now, learning practical self-protection."

"I’ll speak further with you. Come with me."

"Messire—"

The Rat cut off Lucas’s belated attempt at
servility. "Follow."

They walked on into vaulted cellars, where the
loudest noise was the hissing of the gas-lamps. Soft echoes ran back from
Lucas’s footsteps; Zar-bettu-zekigal and the Rat walked silently.

A distant thrumming grew to a rumble, which
vibrated in the stone walls and floor. Bone-dust sifted down. The Rat carried
his ringed tail higher, cleaning it with a fastidious flick. His hand fell to
the small sack at his belt.

"Zari." Lucas dropped back a step to whisper. "Do
they practice
necromancy
here?"

"I’m a stranger here myself—!" The young woman’s waspishness faded. "The only good use for bones is
fertilizer. Who cares about fringe heresies anyway?"

"But it’s blasphemy!"

The Rat’s almost-transparent ears moved. He stopped
abruptly, and swung round. "Necromancy?"

Lucas said: "Not a fit subject for the location,
messire, true. Does it disturb you?"

The black Rat’s snout lifted, sniffing the air.
Lucas saw it register the sweat of fear, and cursed himself.

"Even were it a fit subject for our discussion,
necromancy–using the basest materials, as it does–is the least and most feeble
of the disciplines of
magia,
and so no cause for concern at all." .

The Rat drew himself up, balanced on clawed hind
feet, and the tip of his naked tail twitched thoughtfully. Metal clashed:
sword-harness and rapier.

"Who sent you here to spy?"

"No one," Zar-bettu-zekigal said.

"And that is, one supposes, possible. However–"

"Plessiez?"

The black Rat’s mouth twitched. He lifted his head
and called: "Down here, Charnay."

Lucas and Zar-bettu-zekigal halted with the black
Rat, where steps came down from street-level. The bone- packed vaults stretched
away into the distance. In far corners there was shadow, where the gas-lighting
failed. Dry bone-dust caught in the back of Lucas’s throat; and there was a
scent, sweet and subtle, of decay.

Zar-bettu-zekigal huffed on her hands to warm them.
The Katayan student appeared sanguine, but her tail coiled limply about her
feet.

A heavily built Rat swept down the steps and ducked
under the stone archway. Lucas stared. She was a brown Rat, easily six and a
half feet tall; and the leather straps of her sword-harness stretched between
furred dugs across a broad chest. She carried a rapier and dagger at her belt,
both had jewelled hilts; her headband was gold, the feather-plume scarlet, and
her cloak was azure.

"Messire Plessiez." She sketched a bow to the black
Rat. "I became worried; you were so long.
Who are they?"

She half-drew the long rapier; the black Rat put
his hand over hers.

"Students, Charnay; but of a particular talent. The
young woman is a Kings’ Memory."

The brown Rat looked Zar-bettu-zekigal up and down,
and her blunt snout twitched. "Plessiez, man, if you don’t have all the luck,
just when you need it!"

"The young man is also from"–the black Rat looked
up from tucking the canvas bag more securely under his sword-belt–"the
University of Crime?"

"Yes," Lucas muttered.

The Rat swung back, as he was about to mount the
stairs, and looked for a long moment at Zar-bettu-zekigal.

"You’re young," he said, "all but trained, as I
take it, and without a patron? My name is Plessiez. In the next few hours
I–we–will badly need a trusted record of events. Trusted by both parties. If I
put that proposition to you?"

Zari’s face lit up. Impulsive, joyous; cocky as the
flirt of her tail-tuft, brushing dust from her sleeves. She nodded. "Oh, say
you, yes!"

"Zari
. . ." Lucas warned.

The black Rat sleeked down a whisker with one ruby-
ringed hand. His left hand did not leave the hilt of his sword; and his black
eyes were brightly alert.

"Messire," Plessiez said, "since when was youth
cautious?"

Lucas saw the silver collar almost buried under the
black Rat’s neck-fur, and at last recognized the
ankh
dependant from it.
A priest, then; not a soldier.

Unconsciously he straightened, looked the Rat in
the face; speaking as to an equal. "You have no right to make her do this–yeep!"

His legs clamped together, automatic and
undignified, just too late to trap the Katayan’s stinging tail. Zari grinned,
flicking her tail back, and slid one hand inside her coat to cup her breast.

"I’ll be your Kings’ Memory. I’ve wanted a genuine
chance to practice for
months
now," she said. "Lucas here could practice
his university training for you!"

"Me?"
Her humor sparked outrage in him.

"You heard Reverend Master Candia. There
are
no rules in the University of Crime. Think of it as research. Think of it as a
thesis!"

Frustration broke Lucas’s reserve. "Girl, do you
know who my father is? All the Candovers have been Masters of the Interior
Temple. The Emperor of the East and the Emperor of the West come to meet in his
court! I came here to learn, not to get involved in petty intrigues!"

"Thank you, messire." Plessiez hid a smile. He
murmured an aside to the brown Rat, and Charnay nodded her head seriously,
scarlet plume bobbing against her brown-gray pelt.

"You’ll guest at the palace for two or three days,"
Plessiez went on. "I regret that it could not be under better circumstances,
heir of Candover. Oh–your uncle the Ambassador is an old acquaintance. Present
my regards to him, when you see him."

Zar-bettu-zekigal nodded to Lucas, thrust her hands
deep in her greatcoat pockets and walked jauntily up the steps at the side of
the black Rat.

"When you’re ready, messire."

Charnay’s heavy hand fell on Lucas’s shoulder.

As always, the height of the enclosed space jolted
him. Candia reached to grip the brass rail as they were ushered out onto a
balcony. The sheer walls curved away and around. Twilight rustled, shifted. The
darkness behind his eyelids turned scarlet, gold, black. A stink of hot oil and
rotten flesh caught in the back of his throat.

One of the servants clapped his hands together
twice, slowly. Sharp echoes skittered across the distant walls.

A kind of unlight began to grow, shadowless,
peripheral. Candia’s eyes smarted. In a sight that was not sight, he began to
see darkness: the midnight tracery of black marble, pillars and arches and
domes. Vaulting hung like dark stalactites. A rustling and a movement haunted
the interiors of the ceiling-vaults. The gazes of the acolytes that roosted
there prickled across his skin.

Pain flushed and faded along nerve-endings as a
greater gaze opened and took him in.

Hulking to engage all space between the
down-distant floor and the arcing vaults, the god-daemon lay. Black basalt
flanks and shoulders embodied darkness. Behind the Decan the halls opened to
vaster spaces, themselves only the beginning of the way into the true heart of
the Fane, and the basalt-feathered wings of the god-daemon soared up to shade mortal sight from any vision of
that interior.

Between the Decan’s outstretched paws, and on
platforms and balconies and loggias, servants worked to His orders: sifting,
firing, tending liquids in glass bains-marie, alembics and stills; hauling
trolleys between the glowing mouths of ovens. Molten metal ran between vats.

"My honor to you, Divine One." Candia’s voice fell
flatly into the air.

"Little Candia . . ." A sound from huge delicate
lips: deep enough to vibrate the tiled floor of the balcony, carried on carrion
breath.

Lids of living rock slid up. Eyes molten-black with
the unlight of the Fane shone, in chthonic humor, upon Candia and the Bishop.
The grotesque head lifted slightly.

A bulging pointed muzzle overhung The Spagyrus’
lower jaw. Pointed tusks jutted up, nestling against the muzzle beside nostrils
that were crusted yellow and twitched continually. Jagged tusks hung down from
the upper jaw, half-hidden by flowing bristles.

"Purification, sublimation, calcination,
conjunction . . . and no nearer the
prima materia,
the First Matter."

Down at cell-level, the voice vibrated in Candia’s
head. He stared up into the face of the god-daemon.

The narrow muzzle flared to a wide head.
Cheek-bones glinted, scale-covered; and bristle-tendrils swept back, surrounding
the eyes, to two small pointed and naked ears.

Theodoret leaned his head back. "Decans practicing
the Great Art? Dangerous, my lord, dangerous. What if you should discover the
true alchemical Elixir that, being perfect in itself, induces perfection in all
it touches? Perhaps, being gods, it would transmute you to a perfect evil. Or
perfect virtue."

The great head lowered. Candia saw his image and
the Bishop’s as absences of unlight on the obsidian surfaces of those eyes.

"We are such incarnations of perfection already."
Amusement in the Decan’s resonant tones. "It is not that alchemical
transformation that I seek, but something quite other. Candia, whom have you
brought me?"

"Theodoret, my lord, Bishop of the Trees."

‘
Purification, sublimation, calcination,
conjunction . . . and no nearer the prima materia
. . .’ Reconstructed from
an illustration in
Apocrypha Mundus Subterranus
by Miriam Sophia, pub.
Maximillian of Prague, 1589 (now lost)

"A Tree-priest?"

The unlight blazed, and imprinted like a magnesium
flare on Candia’s eyes the gargoyle-conclave of the Decan’s acolytes:
bristle-spined tails lashed around pillars and arches and fine stone tracery;
claws gripping, great wings beating. Their scaled and furred bodies crowded
together, and their prick-eared and tendriled heads rose to bay in a conclave of
sound, and the unlight died to fireglow.

"I will see to you in a moment. This is a most
crucial stage . . ."

On the filthy floor below, servants worked
ceaselessly.

The platform jutted out fifteen yards, overhanging
a section of the floor (man-deep in filth) where abandoned furnaces and
shattered glass lay. Here, the heat of the ovens built into the wall was
pungent.

"Take that from the furnace," the low voice
rumbled.

One of the black-doubleted servants on the balcony
called another, and both between them began to lift, with tongs, a glowing-hot
metal casing from the furnace. Sweat ran down their faces.

"Set it there."

Chittering echoed in the vaults. A darkness of
firelight shaded the great head, limning with black the foothill-immensity of
flanks and arching wings. One vast paw flexed.

"We reach the Head of the Crow, but not the Dragon.
As for the Phoenix"–unlight-filled eyes dipped to stare into the
alembic–"nothing!"

Candia said: "My lord, this business is
important—"

"The projection continues," the bass voice rumbled.
"Matter refined into spirit, spirit distilled into base matter, and yet . . .
nothing. Why are you here?"