Rats and Gargoyles (52 page)

Brushwood rustled. Sound hissed back from the
walls, with the drip of water. Niter spidered white patterns. Plessiez stepped
down into the hollow, bending to pick up his torch. Flames glimmered blackly
along the pitch. The fingers of his other hand cramped on his rapier’s hilt; the
point circling, alert.

On the steps above a voice Charnay’s and not Char-
nay’s hissed:
"Go back little animal go back go die go away!"

He spun, sword raised. "What?"

Her blunt snout lowered, regarding him. She
frowned. "I said, this is strangely altered since the last time we ventured down
here."

"You–heard nothing?"

"Heard?" Charnay stared past him. A constricted
passage some six feet high remained between roof and floor. This tunnel,
lightless now, hissed unidentifiable echoes back.

"Bring another torch."

The brown Rat trod heavily. Her scaly tail lashed
debris on the steps: brick rubble, desiccated wood, the brown knobs of animal
vertebrae. She tugged her stained blue sash across her chest, scratching at her
furred dugs.

Brick gave way underfoot to earth and gravel.

He held up his torch, blinking. The yellow light
and black smoke of burning pitch faded into a wider open space.

Twin gibbets now stood by the entrance to the
catacombs. Outlined in a pale silver glow, their nests of chains hung down,
wound about bones, ragged flesh, cerements.

"
Those
weren’t here before."

Gravel crunched under the brown Rat’s clawed feet.
Charnay rested a hand against one of the white marble obelisks that flanked the
opening, staring up at the inscription. She snorted.

"
‘Halt! Here begins the Empire of the Dead
. . .’ You always did have odd humors, messire."

"
Magia
indicated this one of the septagon
sites, not I."

All perspective vanished in darkness. No torches
burned inside the catacombs. Cold struck up from the graveled earth beneath his
clawed feet. A smell of niter and dank mud sank into his fur.

"Charnay . . ."

Sound whispered back from the galleries.

". . . you would do me a greater favor, I think, to
go back up the shaft and guard the way against our over-enthusiastic follower."

A hand clamped on his shoulder. The brown Rat
stared him in the face, lowering her head to do it.

"I’m not in the business of doing you favors,
Plessiez, man. I don’t trust you. You see your own advantage in matters very
clearly. I don’t trust you not to work out some even more clever plot, and make
things even worse." She cut him off before he could interrupt. "I don’t
like
all of this. I want things back to normal. You’re going in to put an end to
this, and I’m going to be at your back every step of the way!"

She drew a deep breath. Plessiez, shaken, turned
his gaze pointedly to where she gripped his shoulder. After a long minute her
fingers loosened.

"You were compliant enough when it was a matter of
a little sickness among the human servants, and the Decans our masters being
persuaded to remove further off—"

"Ahh!" The Lieutenant spat. She held up the torch,
shadows leaping violently in the gibbets’ chains. "You and his Majesty are a
pair of fools, all of you. Now this dangerous nonsense with black suns and
acolytes out of control–and you call
me
stupid, messire priest!"

A knob of bone rattled across the earth, rolling to
rest at Plessiez’s feet. "I think . . . I think we should go back."

Muted light dazzled his eyes as she lowered the
torch, peering at him.

"Obviously we can do no good here; it was idiocy to
suggest so." Plessiez faced about, putting his back to the catacomb-entrance.
One-handed and with some difficulty he sheathed his rapier. "I don’t have the
knowledge, I don’t have the equipment for
magia;
we should retreat and
reconsider this. Perhaps return later, better equipped. You as a soldier will
recognize the sense in this."

His tail twitched an inch one way, an inch back; he
fell to grooming the fur of his shoulder for a moment.

"What?"
Charnay demanded.

"I’ve told you. We’re leaving. We’ll return here in
due course."

The brown Rat said: "You’re going in there."

Plessiez leaned his hand up against the brown brick
wall. Niter sweated under his long-fingered hands. He lowered his head for a
second, then lifted it, staring up at the rusting gibbet-chains, and the
white-painted inscription across the entrance.

"No," he said. "No."

"Plessiez, man—"

"I won’t do it!"

Echoes hissed off the low walls. Cold and damp
struck deeper, chilling blood and bone. A soft chuckle rustled through the
chains of the gibbets. The black Rat leaned dizzily against the brickwork.

"Now I envy you. Charnay, I would to gods I had
your thick skull and your ability not to foresee."

The brown Rat lugged out her long sword, leaning
the point on the earth. She cocked her head to one side, a frown on her blunt
muzzle. "Messire,
I
don’t know what to do in there."

"Neither do I!"

The black Rat rubbed his hand across his face,
smoothing fur that slicked up in tufts. His eyes glinted darkly, meeting
Charnay’s.

"Now, listen to me, Lieutenant Charnay. I suspect
that when we emerge on the surface it will be to find the servants, humans and
all, in confusion. H’m? Their temple destroyed, their ranks thinned by
pestilence."

Plessiez picked at his incisors with one broken
claw.

"His Majesty, gods preserve them, I fear to be
dead, if what young Fleury said is true. And the Lords of the Celestial Sphere,
one might prophesy,
returned
to that plane and only overlooking our earth
with their Divine providence. All which, if I am right, leaves clear room for
one determined in his aims. He–he and his friends, Charnay–might do much, now,
in the government of the heart of the world."

"You’re going in there."

The black Rat knelt, driving the shaft of the torch
into the soft earth and gravel. He got to his feet slowly. Black eyes bright, he
said: "No. Not for my life. No."

Silver glinted on the onyx rings on his fingers, on
the head-band that looped over one translucent pink ear and under the other;
shimmered on the black feather plume that moved with his breathing. Nothing of
the priest about him now: more gone than
ankh
and insignia. Charnay took
in his febrile tension.

"I’m not a fool." She shrugged. "I know enough to
be afraid. Leave
magia
alone and working for weeks, and the gods alone
know what it’s become now! But we don’t have any choice. I told the Night
Council that if you destroyed one of the seven points it would stop the
necromancy working. Get in there and
do
it. You promised the little
Kings’ Memory."

The black Rat turned his head, staring into the
depths of the catacombs. He scratched at the back of his head, sliding a dark
palm round to rub his snout as he lowered his arm.

"So I did."

He shuddered: cold drifting out from the low arch
of the catacombs. A visible pulse beat in the soft fur of his throat. His
sword-harness clinked.

"What will you do now, my friend?"

The brown Rat, torch and long rapier in her hands,
blocked the way back to the stairs. Her eyes narrowed. She thrust her torch at
him so suddenly that he must grasp it or be singed; swung the sword up
two-handed, and cut at the rusty chains.

Bones and cloth hit the earth; Plessiez skittered
back. Charnay, backhanding, cut at the other gibbet. The rusty chains resisted;
the rotten wood of the support cracked loud as musket-shot, teetered, and fell
forward into darkness.

"Now you’re equipped, messire. Now
move."

A hard knot of tension under his breastbone,
Plessiez knelt, holding high the torch, swiftly and distastefully fumbling
through the heaps of bones. What seemed most useful he wrapped in cerements;
after a moment’s hesitation tucking the bundle securely under his sword-belt.

"Well, then," he said. "Well."

Damp cold prickled his spine, and he stepped
forward with his tail carried fastidiously high. Smoke from the pitch made his
eyes run with water. He raised the torch as he walked through the
catacomb-entrance. Shadows of rib and pelvic bones danced on the cavern walls.

At his right hand rose the beginning of a wall of
bones.

Forearm and thigh bones, laid crosswise like
kindling and as brown, built up a retaining wall a head taller than himself.
Into the space between the arm and leg bones and the cavern wall, ribs and
vertebrae, carpals and metacarpals, pelvic bones and all else had been
carelessly thrown. Along the top of the wall, jammed jowl to jowl, lay skulls.
Rows of skulls jutting their eyeless long snouts into darkness, yellow incisors
impossibly long.

The brown bone glowed, sprinkled with niter as with
frost.

Skulls, set into the walls of knobbed bone joints,
made patterns of chevrons and
ankhs;
and long intact skeins of
tail-vertebrae snaked around them, jammed in tight.

"We can be followed in here." Charnay rescued the
other torch, waving it to cast light down the curving passages and
cross-passages of the royal catacombs. Another wall rose beside her;
unencumbered with torch and rapier she could have stood in the center of the
passage and touched a hand to both.

"And outdistanced . . ."

Plessiez paced forward, torch high. Black shadows
darted in the hollow rings of eye-sockets, in the channels of snouts, and over
incisors still clinging to bony jaws. The brown Rat held her torch close to the
white marble plaque, one of a number set into the wall at intervals.

"
‘Behold these bones, the . . . the nest. . .’
"

Plessiez completed, rapidly and accurately enough
to put down some of his terror,
" ‘ . . . the nest of each fledgling soul. ’
Poor poetry, I fear, but his Majesty’s taste was always less than highbrow—"

He broke off as the hilt of the brown Rat’s sword
nudged him. Without looking back, he walked into the catacombs and silence.

"And if it were only true, now, further in!"

The interior of the plague-tent shone, full of
light-shadows.

Shock chilled her back to reality. Evelian stepped
outside and let the canvas flap fall to behind her. She rubbed a work-roughened
hand across her face.

"I’ve . . . found Falke for you."

Her skin sweated, despite the Night Sun’s chill.
Slanting bars of light-shadow fell from the Imperial pavilions down into
Fourteenth District’s square. Gold-and-white banners hung limp, the canvas cloth
now thickened with ice. Frost glimmered on shattered masonry, on abandoned
muskets and greaves and shoes thrown together in a pile by the Rat-Lords’
clear-up details.

"The master builder? Here?"

Through blazing black light, the Lord-Architect
came towards her from the construction site, moving with a frighteningly rapid
stride.

"He’s . . .
Falke . .
. When he was a boy,
we used to talk about all this. About House of Salomon and how we should build
. . . I swore I’d never get mixed up in it again after it failed the first time,
but what would you? Poor bastard."

She drew a noisy breath, huffed it out; dizzy with
shock.

"
All
those poor bastards."

The fat man’s tread shook the paving-stones. She
automatically stepped out of his way. She smelt machine oil and sweaty linen.
The Lord-Architect Casaubon threw the tent-flap open, staring past her, to where
the plague- dead lay stacked like winter wood.

"Rot him, I
needed
him!"

Casaubon pushed past her into the tent, the bulk of
his body brushing aside her and the canvas with equal impatience. Evelian
stared. Outrage flared in her, old temper reasserting itself.

"Damn you, man, what right do you have to say that?
What right do you have not to care that he’s dead?"

"Oh, I care!"

She turned her eyes away from the laid-out rows of
men and women. Some wrapped in blankets or cloaks; some in summer clothing,
still with the traces of lead-and-ochre paint on their faces. Afraid of how many
she might recognize under the black disfigurement of plague.

"You
can’t
—" Evelian stopped. The
Lord-Architect Casaubon knelt down by Falke’s body, one fat hand
knotting surcoat and mail-shirt both at the shoulder, pulling him up into a
half-sitting position, while his other hand searched the recesses of the man’s
clothes.

"Rot him, he knows things I need to know. Damn him
for dying now of all times!"

White hair fell back from the plague-tattered flesh
of the dead man; his mouth gaped slightly. A thin line of white showed under his
eyelids. One hand flopped, too recently dead for rigidity. Casaubon handled the
weight effortlessly, fat-sheathed muscles tensing. Evelian grunted.

"Not the joker you were in Carver Street now, are
you, my
lord
?"

"Get out!"

Her heart pounded. She tasted blood, coppery and
cold, on her breath; suddenly certain she had stayed too long away from her
daughter. She stepped back.

Black air fogged vision, hiding the barricaded
buildings around the square and the distant reaches of the construction site.
Hiding the sky, beyond which distant wings moved; casting a veil of black across
the streets, and the aurora-geometries of the labyrinth . . .

"Sharlevian!"

High above in darkness, the Fane’s acolytes still
screamed.

Fisting the blue-and-yellow satin dress, she tugged
up the hem and stalked across the square. She strode through abandoned debris,
guns and tankards, ribbons and trowels and flowers, kicking aside a broken
marionette; running past where, head in hands, Tannakin Spatchet sat on the
marble steps, to Sharlevian leaning back and kicking one heel against the
foundation-stone carved with the Word of Seshat.