Rats and Gargoyles (21 page)

The young man squatted down, fiddling with one of
the chests against the wall.

"You know what’s truly stupid?" She turned her head
towards Casaubon. "What’s stupid is that it comforted me, sometimes, to think
that I might be part of the College still–whoever we are, and however many there
may be of us. I had to leave you, but I lost something when I left."

"And so did I."

The White Crow felt her cheeks heat. She rubbed her
flat palms against her face.

"And so did you . . . And now I don’t want anything
to do with this. I sent that warning because I want nothing to do with this; I
wanted someone wiser to come here and
do
something about it!"

Casaubon
tsk
-ed ironically. "Poor
Valentine."

Lucas’s hand passed over her shoulder, and she sat
up as a long bundle clattered on to the mirror-table.

"I asked the Lord-Architect about
Scholar-Soldiers," the young man said. "You should be carrying this."

She ignored Casaubon’s startled look. Her fingers
undid the wrappings, sliding scabbard and sword onto the table. The
sweat-darkened leather grip on the hilt fitted her fingers, ridged to their
exact shape. The weight on her wrist when she lifted it, familiar and strange
now, made her throat ache.

"Why does the College need a Master-Physician
here?"

"I would like to know that," Casaubon said.

She rubbed her finger along the oiled flat of the
blade. Cold metal, cold as mornings walking the road, or evenings coming to an
inn. The smell of the oil mixed with the smell of the ink on the table, drying
on the hiero-glyphed parchments.

"What could possibly need
healing?
"

In one flawless movement she clicked the rapier
home in its scabbard. The straps and buckles of the sword-belt tumbled across
the table.

"I’m frightened."

The Lord-Architect’s voice rumbled above her head.
"That makes me afraid."

"Well, that’s sense enough." Hands still on the
scabbard, she looked across at Lucas. "Oh, and if I wear this in the street I’ll
be in the palace dungeons before you can say
his Majesty."

"You need to wear it," he insisted. "You need to.
Not for protection."

She looked down at hands tanned and with a fine
grain to the skin, the blue veins showing faintly under the surface. She flexed
her fingers.

"A wise child. My lord, you have a wise child with
you." She took Casaubon’s cuff between thumb and forefinger. The sweat-damp
satin smelt of an expensive scent. "Something formal, is it?"

"The Fane. An audience, at the eleventh hour."

"What?
Who with? The Spagyrus?"

The Lord-Architect spread padded hands. "How can I
tell you that? You’ve left the College."

The White Crow drew in a breath, saliva tasting
metallic. Gaining time, she stood, her practiced fingers unbuckling the straps
of the sword-hanger and belt. She muttered irritably, waving away Lucas’s
offered help; and busied herself for almost two minutes in slinging straps over
her shoulders and around her hips, buckling the scabbard so that it hung
comfortably across her back, hilt jutting above her right shoulder.

"If I accept Master-Physician?" she queried.

Casaubon pushed the piles of paper from the table
onto the floor, spun the table to its mirror side, and began to comb his copper
hair into a neat Brutus style. Before she could get breath to swear he
straightened, and pulled white cotton gloves from his capacious pockets.

"I am told"–Casaubon tugged glove-fingers snugly
down–"that I shall be seeing the Thirty-Sixth Decan, whose sign is the Ten
Degrees of High Summer."

The White Crow worked the belt around her waist,
made an alteration of one notch to a buckle. Then she reached across and brushed
the Lord-Architect’s fingers away, and buttoned his gloves at the wrist.

"Lucas . . ."

She crossed the room and hugged the young man,
having to stand up on the balls of her feet and stretch her arms around his
muscled back. His eyes shone. She stepped back, reaching up to touch the hilt of
her sword, where it hung ready for a down-draw over the shoulder.

"Thank you," she said, and to Casaubon: "I’ll come
to the Fane with you. Lucas, can I ask you a favor? I need you to go and see
your uncle, the Ambassador."

Blinding and imperceptible, the sun rose higher.

Pools of rain in Evelian’s courtyard shrank
fraction by fraction. The heat of the sun drew mosquito nymphs to the water’s
surface. The wooden frieze of skulls and spades grew warm, and hosted colonies
of insects swarmed out of cracks.

Wings skirred: one of the Lord-Architect’s sparrows
fluttering to the eaves.

Beyond Clock-mill, lizards sunned themselves in
corners of streets left drowsy and deserted. White dust and white blossom snowed
the streets of the city.

The sparrow flicked from eaves to tiles to
roof-ridge, crossing the quarter. Where the Fane’s obelisks cut the sky, the
bird scurried for height, lost in the milk-blue heavens; flying swiftly
south-aust.

Down between marble wharfs, heat-swollen helium
airships tugged at mooring-ropes. Crews rushed to the gas-vents. The bird’s
bead-black eyes registered movement. A dusty-brown mop of feathers, it fell
towards an airship’s underslung cabin.

Aust, north, south, east and west: the city
stretches away below, reflected in the sparrow’s uncomprehending vision.

A day later, one woman crewing an airship will find
the bird, half-frozen, and feed it drops of warm milk and millet. Thinking to
keep it as a pet, when the airship’s long overseas voyage is done.

The Lord-Architect’s sparrow rests, cushioned under
her shirt, between her breasts. The bead-black eyes hold a message that is
simple enough for those with the power to read it.

* * *

"Carrying a sword?" the Candovard Ambassador
exclaimed.

"It was wonderful.
She
was wonderful!" Lucas
sobered. "At first . . . I don’t know what she’s seen to cause her so much fear.
But she’s going to the Fane at eleven this morning."

"A sword," Andaluz repeated.

"Well, yes, technically she shouldn’t, but . . ."

Andaluz scratched his salt-and-pepper hair. One
stubby finger pointed at his Prince.

"This is the heart of the world, not the White
Mountain. Candover sees its Rat-Lord Governor only once or twice a year, and
you’re let carry weapons there because who else could? Here, every Rat with
pretensions to gentle blood carries a sword. Gods preserve men or women who
trespass on their privileges!"

Dust drifted in from the compound. Flies haunted
the ceiling, undeterred by the
wck-wck-wck
of the fan.

"I . . . didn’t realize." Lucas, who had carried
his shirt in his hand, slung it about his neck like a towel, and tugged it back
and forth to mop up sweat.

"Your father could never bear it. I discourage him
from traveling here." Andaluz pushed his chair back from the big desk. "Lucas,
dear boy, here I’m the ambassador from savages–yes,
savages
–who are
suffered to live with only minor supervision, because we’re far away and beneath
the Rat-Lords’ notice."

"And I told her to carry a sword." Lucas’s eyes
showed dark in a face gone greenish-white. "I’ll have to warn her!"

"If this White Crow woman has been five years in
the heart of the world, I assure you that she knows."

"She
needs
it. To be what she should be."
Lucas looked up from the dusty patterned carpet. "She asked if you would attend
at court today. I told her that you would. I told her that you’ll use all of
Candover’s influence with the King, Uncle, if she’s troubled or arrested."

"Yes,
Prince." Andaluz made a face. "What there is of it. Ah . . . the university?"

"I’ll take care of that. Reverend Mistress Heurodis
has her own way with students," the young man said. "I’m coining with you to
court. A prince’s word may carry weight."

"Aww, this sun’s too bright. Hold on a minute." The
cinnamon-haired woman clattered back up the stairs from the street-door.

The Lord-Architect Casaubon waited by the carriage,
easing his shirt away from the rolls of flesh at his neck. Sweat trickled down
his back.

She re-emerged holding a white felt hat,
wide-brimmed and with a dented crown. It had a black band, and small black
characters printed into the felt. She clapped it on to her head and tilted it,
shading her eyes.

"And you say
I
have no dress sense."

She smiled. "No sense of any kind, as far as I could
ever make out . . . You know what this hat needs?"

"Euthanasia?"

"A black feather. Tell me if you spot one."

She leaned automatically up against his arm,
sparking backchat off his deadpan replies with the ease of habit and practice.
Now he saw her frown. She moved away.

"Master-Physician." The Lord-Architect very
formally offered a glove, handing her into the carriage.

He settled himself opposite her, with his back to
the driver, the carriage sinking on its springs. The oxen lowed and pulled away.
The red-haired woman tilted her hat further down towards her nose, and rested
one heel up on his seat.

"The Decans," she said, "won’t swallow any story
about your being a traveling horologer or garden-architect, or whatever nonsense
you gave Captain-General Desaguliers. Who have you said you are?"

"A Scholar-Soldier of the Invisible College."

He beamed, seeing Valentine reduced to complete
speechlessness. "They’ll know, in any case," he added.

"And you think they’re going to let us out of there
after that!"

He smiled.

"Casaubon!"

Casaubon dug in one pocket, thumbed ponderously
through a very small notebook, extracted a pencil from the spine, and began to
write, with many hesitations and crossings-out. The carriage jolted into wider
streets.

The White Crow stood it for all of three minutes.
"What are you writing?"

His blue eyes all but vanished into his padded
cheeks as he squinted in concentration.

"Poetry," said the Lord-Architect, "but I can’t
think of a rhyme for ‘Valentine.’ "

His formally buttoned black doublet left Lucas
dizzy with the heat. He fingered the short ruff, moving a step closer to
Andaluz. Loud talk resounded from almost two hundred and fifty Rats and humans
crowding the main audience chamber.

The clover-leaf-domed hall soared, and Lucas lifted
his head, gaping up at the four bright domes. Andaluz’s pepper-and-salt brows
dipped in the family frown.

"Two of the–no,
three
of the Lords Magi are
here," he said, looking through the crowd at black Rats in sleeveless gold
robes. "And most of the noble Houses . . . And all seven Cardinals-General of
the Church . . ."

Rows of paired guards in Cadet uniform lined the
interlocking circular walls, black fur gleaming. At regular intervals
ceiling-length curtains were drawn across windows that, none the less, admitted
chinks of sunlight.

"Whatever this is, it’s blown up fast as a summer
storm."

"What . . . ?" Lucas moved away from the main
entrance’s staircase. He began walking towards the point where two of the four
semi-circular floor areas intersected.

A treadmill stood a little out from the blue-draped
wall, on the spindle of some paneled and bolted metal machine. Blue-white sparks
shot out of the metal casing.

The treadmill itself stood eight feet tall. In its
cage, two men and a woman, stripped to breech-clouts, trod the steps down in
never-ending repetition. Lucas, shoved by the press of assembled bodies, turned
away. He saw two more treadmills over the heads of the crowd.

Thick cables wound up from the machines to the
ceilings. In the four hollow domes, a stalactite-forest of chandeliers hung
down. Lucas saw clusters of glass, wires burning blue-white and blue-purple, and
lowered his gaze, blinking away water.

"Impressive," Andaluz said. "If they didn’t have to
close the curtains to show it off, and stifle all of us."

The actinic light wavered down on Rats in the
sleeveless robes of Lords Magi, on the jeweled collars and swords of nobles and
soldiers, the red and purple of priests.

"Uncle . . ." Lucas turned. Startled, he met the
gaze of a youth much his own age. The young man smiled. Fair-haired, stripped to
breeches and barefoot, he wore a studded collar round his throat. From it hung a
metal leash. A middle-aged black Rat robed in yards of orange taffeta held the
end of the leash casually in her hand.

"Bred from the finest stock," Lucas heard her say
to another female black Rat, "and trained fully in
all
skills."

She trailed the chain-leash over one furry
shoulder, and tugged the metal links. The fair-haired young man squatted down on
his haunches at her side.

"A pretty little thing, yes." The second black Rat,
slender in linen shirt and breeches enclosing furry haunches, her rapier slung
at her side, turned to eye the treadmills. Two men and a woman in the wheel
plodded, heads down, gripping the central bar with sweat-stained hands.

"Don’t stare," Andaluz murmured. "You’re being
provincial."

The Rat in linen and leather swaggered a little, by
the treadmill, hand on her sword, ears twitching. The other Rat tugged the
leash, walking away with the young man trotting at her heels.

"I must confess," Lucas heard his uncle saying to a
robed man as he rejoined them, "that I feared an incident of some magnitude. For
one of your King’s daughters to be killed here . . ."

The South Katayan Ambassador shrugged.

"I knew Zari briefly." Lucas met the man’s pale
amber eyes. His white robe had been slit at the back, and a sleek black tail
caressed the tiled floor.