Rats and Gargoyles (58 page)

Voices thundered in her head. Visions blurred her
eyes. The smell of corruption choked her, sickly sweet. The White Crow retched,
dry heaves that twisted her gut.

"Don’t hesitate!" The White Crow lifted her head
and shouted.
"Now,
my lord Bishop, now!"

Wood-sunlight limned his bony fingers. The old
man’s eyes narrowed, wincing. "He hurt me, hurt me unbelievably. I can’t find in
me the charity to forgive him."

Acerbic fear tugged her smile crooked. "You don’t
forgive gods, Theo, my lord, the day for
that
isn’t in the calendar. And
what can you expect from a Decan who’s had entirely too much contact with
humans?"

" ‘Too much’?"

His beaked nose jutted as the corners of his mouth
came up, deepening the folds of his skin. His brows contracted, and the skin
around his eyes wrinkled. Sudden laughter spluttered in his voice.

"What can I
expect
—?"

She fell forward on both hands.

The sweet smell changed.

Her hands slid in the cool flesh of maggots, and it
changed. On hands and knees she stared down. White rose-petals covered her
hands, buried them to the wrists; she knelt on them. The thick heavy sweetness
of roses breathed up from crushed flowers.

She knelt up, head lowered, staring at the
wave-front of whiteness traveling away from her among crumbled marble: the
heaving bodies of grubs transmuting to flowers. She bent and pushed her hands
forward into the mass.

Thoms snagged her skin.

Her skin, tanned, gold by contrast with these white
petals and green spiked stems; her skin that smelt of sweat and dirt, now
stitched across each arm with the dotted scars of rosethorns. A bead of blood
swelled. She lifted her arm to her mouth and licked.

"Oh, but
what
—?"

She began to laugh.

"Above, beneath: branch and root . . ."

His voice from behind her resonated with a calm
casual expectancy. She, magus, Master-Physician, echoed him joyously; feeding
the power of the words into the world: "Above, beneath: branch and root—"

"Pillar of the world . . ."

A bramble coiled her ankle, the spikes too young
and soft to do more than tickle. Roses fingered their way across her thighs
where she sat; coiled up an arm; spread into the masses of her dark-red hair.
She shook her head, white petals fluttering down, the corners of her eyes wet
with laughter.

"Oh, hey—"

Ten yards away, he stood with his back to her. The
old man, the Bishop; his hands folded calmly behind him, his chin a little
raised. The wave-front of generation pulsed out from where he stood. "Leaf in
bud: shelter and protection."

"Light of the forest . . ."

She stood up, naked, the white roses hanging heavy
in her hair. A scent of them breathed on the suddenly blowing breeze. Heat fell
down across her shoulders, unknot- ting the muscles there, relaxing her spine;
so that she stood with her weight back on one heel and reached up with both
arms, stretching up to light that glowed gold and green.

Spikes pushed up through the drifts of white roses.

She took one step forward and then another,
unsteady on her feet; and twigs poked up, growing, sprouting into the air,
knitting the air together about them–great clumps of blackthorn and may, elder
and wild roses: sparkling with green shoots, pale in the light.

"Protection of the branches that support the sky .
. ." Saplings jutted from the earth around his feet.
Brown twigs, one looped leaf spiking up from each.

"Heart of the wood . . ."

"Oldest of all, deepest of all—"

Blackthorn grew, tough wood spearing higher than
her head now. She felt how it knitted earth together
within its roots, beneath the roses; how it knitted together, too, at
microcosmic levels, binding energy, possibility, structure.

"Rooted in the soul of earth—"

"Who dies, not, but is disguised; who sleeps only."

"Heart of the wood!"

On the nearest branch a tiny leaf uncoiled, bright
green beside the thom-spikes and white flower. So close that she crossed her
eyes to focus on it, giggled and stepped back. Leaf and flower together,
spidered now with flowering creeper, the horns of morning glory, columbine, old
man’s beard, and ivy: green and white and dappling the light with new shade.

The White Crow spread her arms wide.

She traced through her fingertips the divine and
demonic in the structure.

"Theodoret! Theo!"

Heady: oxygen and excitement filled her lungs. The
light of her inner vision blazed green and gold, filling her veins. Beech
saplings sprouted from the earth all around her.

She walked barefoot, wincing as a sharpness dug
into the sole of her foot; stopping to balance and pull out a thorn, and on
impulse kiss her finger and press it to the infinitesimal wound and smile, smile
as if her face would never lose that expression.

Warmth shone down.

Warmth bloomed up from the earth beneath Theo-
doret’s feet. Runners of ivy criss-crossed the ground, the leaves of other
plants poking up between. And between one step and another the coiled heads of a
myriad shoots unfurled, unwinding into flowers, and she walked knee- deep in
bluebells with the old man.

A dappled light shone on him, silvering and graying
his hair by turns: a light of trees only yet potential.

"You’re doing it!" Joy filled her; she shouted to
the growing trees.

"I can reach him, child–
just.
"

Wind creaked through the branches of trees grown
tall, skittered over a ground clear of undergrowth in this newly mature wood.

As far as she could see, the perspectives of the
wood stretched. New leaves shimmered on trees, bluebells misted the distance.
Far off, far away, in the heart of the wood . . .

The White Crow let her arms fall to her sides.
Aching, she stared; keeping the long sight down into the center as a part of
her; hidden, dangerous, glorious.

She turned.

This way the trees were not so thick, and she
glimpsed past them a light of rose and gold: swirling, granular, hot.

"You . . ."

"Me." Theodoret rasped.

He pressed back against the smooth bole of a grown
beech tree behind him. Sunlight and shadow spotted his bony chest, dappled his
legs and thighs. He pressed his hands and spine against the bark.

The waves of generation sank back.

Unsteady, the White Crow staggered towards him.

A tendril of ivy crept around the bole of the tree,
looping the old man’s wrist. His skin darkened, silvered. Before she could draw
breath his skin cracked and fissured, merging so swiftly into the lumps and
curves of the beech-trunk that she had no time to turn away her gaze.

The tree grew.

He grew with it, embedded into the wood. His long
mobile features darkened to green, to silver- brown; his hair flowed out across
the bark, rooting down into it.

He opened his mouth and called a word of healing.

She fell down, the leaves and fragments of bark
imprinting her flesh.

The call echoed into the heart of the wood.

His jaw strained open, strained further open, and
she thought it must surely crack; his head tipped back and growing into the
heartwood of the beech.

Two sprouting pale-green leaves poked from the
corners of his mouth.

Swift, swift as thought they grew; jutting out like
tusks and coiling back, growing into the trunk of the beech.

"Theo! My lord Bishop!"

She pulled herself to her feet, craning her neck to
see the tree. Already the trunk was too vast for her to perceive all of it, and
its leaves and branches shadowed the world. The coolness of forests shivered
across her skin.

"I have found him. "

A cool heartbreaking wind blew around her, out of
the heart of the wood. Awe dried her throat. Sweat slicked the skin of her
elbows, behind her ears, her thighs: blood and cells burning, warm with a
knowledge of solidity. She shook her hair back and craned her neck to look up
through shedding petals.

The sense of an old story rose in her, unbelieved,
unconquerable; and she gazed up into the heights of branches and green leaves.

"Now
. . .
"

Her spine shuddered, prickled the hairs at the back
of her neck. She touched her fingers to her mouth. Vibrating at cell- and
DNA-level, voices sang in her flesh: thirty-five of them. Voices of the Decans
of Hell and Heaven.

Something tickled her hand. She lifted it. Blood-
heat, imperceptible, red liquid trickled from her palm and dripped to the earth.
Blood smeared the sweating flesh of her knee, her ankle. The black bee-stings of
the Decan’s maze throbbed, her left hand raw and swollen.

"
Act
—"

"
Act now
—"

"
Channel us
—"

"
We will inform you
—"

"
Breathe in you
—"

"
Speak in you
—"

"
Open our Selves to you
—"

A sand-bright voice, clearer than all others, thrummed in her
human flesh:
"We made you in Our image and with Our power. You are all
star-daemons. My child, my lover, my bride of the sun and widow of the moon,
call down the universe now. Heal!"

Sprawling naked, without sword or book, her
suntanned flesh scratched with the thorns of impossible roses, the White Crow
reached out. With her left hand she drew hieroglyphs, skeining down the bright
air to twist in
magia
patterns. Watching how the light shifted, as leaves
shift in a high wind; feeling for the moment and sensing it—

At some level above or below perception, binding
took place.

A sapling birch brushed her arm, white bark peeling
like paper. Transparent green leaves sprinkled the branches. Heat burned into
her back.

The dappled light of beech shade fell cool across
her skin.

She reached up, holding her hand in the sign of
protection. The feedback of power between microcosm and macrocosm,
Scholar-Soldier and the elementals, filled her with an electric energy; drawing
power down the chains of the world from the Thirty-Six houses of the heavens.

She sprang up, barefooted, stamped a foot down into
new grass. Beeches surrounded her, growing up to the invisible sky. Their great
boles towered like pillars, soaring up a hundred feet to where they arched
together, new green leaves rustling, and a bird sang.

Divine and demonic: demonic and divine.

Tall slender branches rose as pillars to the sky,
meeting overhead in arches of new foliage. Birds sang in the branches,
caterpillars and woodlice crawled among the roots.

A mass of broken marble lay embedded in the earth.
Walking closer, she gazed up at it. Solid, some fifteen or twenty feet high;
cracked and fissured and gold, still, with the light of extinguished candles.
The last of the ruined mortal matter that had hosted a god-daemon. The White
Crow walked close enough to touch, to feel the cold radiating from it.

She drew rapidly, smearing blood from her hand in
complex astrological and cabbalistic signs on the broken surface of the marble.
A frown indented the dark-red eyebrows, and she rested her free hand against the
stone as support, leaning her forehead on that arm. The scrawled signs covered a
half, two-thirds of the rock. The symbols grew cramped, smaller as the surface
became more crowded; and the White Crow frowned in concentration, muttering the
remembered first prayers of training.

"O thou who are the four elements of our nature,
and the hundred elements of nature itself; Powers; star- daemons; rulers of the
Thirty-Six Houses of the Sky and Earth . . ."

"Draw down power. As above, so below. You are Our
creation and We created you kin to Us. Draw power down the linkages of the world
and heal!"

The stone split under her fingers.

Cracking like a shell: sliding, splitting; stone
fragments falling to splinter on the floor of the wood. She stumbled back. Her
hand dropped, lifted again to draw with bloodstains on the air. Rubble fell
away, echoing like gunshots, from the massive shape disclosed.

In a shaft of sunlight, great wings unfurled.

Ribbed wings opened, glowing first pearl and then
pale rose and then gold. The wind from their beating knocked her from her feet.
Earth hit her. She grunted, breath jolted from her body. Grass and twigs
imprinted her bare stomach. She raised herself up and rested on her forearms.

A great muzzle dipped, vast dark-gold eyes opening.
Scales glinted on monstrous cheek-bones. Tiny naked ears flicked alertly.
Tendrils floated upon the air, anchored across the head and around the eyes.
Tusks jutted up alongside the pit-nostrils, crusted with deposits of adamant
crystal. The overhanging upper lip wrinkled.

She hardly breathed. "Lord of Noon and Midnight."

The leonine body unfolded, rising from marble
fragments to stand forty feet high: spotted yellow as a leopard, brown-gold as a
hyena. Great wings sheathed. Lids slid up to narrow the eyes watching her. The
full closed lips curved.

"I had forgotten how it is, to become so young . . .
I had forgotten how it is to forget
. . .
"

Miracle beat in her blood, staggered her feet, so
that she stumbled to her feet, head fizzing as with wine. She held out one hand
empty of sword, the other empty of scroll; grinning up into the newborn face so
hard that it hurt her jaws.

The overhanging muzzle dipped. She flinched. Closed
lips touched her. She smelt fire, comet-dust, the green breath of trees.

"Where’s Theo? Divine One . . ."

The massive head lifted. Ivy coiled, ringing the
tusks with white and green. Insects crept in the folds of the upper lip;
woodlice and wild bees and lizards. She stared up into eyes liquid with golden
blackness; smelt from the delicate-lipped mouth a scent of cut grass. A shiver
walked up her spine, exploded between her shoulder- blades.