Rats and Gargoyles (38 page)

Lucas leaned tight into the steel wall-shield of
the siege-engine, the metal platform hard under his knee. Curving hot metal
sheltered his body ahead and to the side. From where he crouched, he could see
the other King’s Guard behind the shelters.

Tens, dozens, hundreds of faces turned upwards.
Looking at the siege-engine. Faces caked with white lead and yellow ochre, the
colors of the House of Salomon.

The engine’s noise drowned all but the tolling of
the charnel bells, coming raggedly from the quarters beyond Fourteenth
District’s square. His grip on the support-strut grew sweat-slippery. Blood
pounded in his head, and his hand went automatically to the talisman at his
neck.

"Casaubon! Lord-Architect!"

Lucas rapped on the hot metal of the engine-hatch.
Heat throbbed from a bright sky.

"Slow down! If we hurt anyone, the rest’ll tear us
to pieces!"

"Pox rot it, I’m doing what I can!"

The thudding vibration of the machine diminished,
the juggernaut wheels slowing. Heat shimmered across packed bodies.

The Lord-Architect Casaubon heaved himself up
through the hatch, swore as his bare arms touched metal, and lifted his immense
buttocks up to rest on the rivet- studded platform.

"And at that, we’re almost too late."

His stained linen shirt and corset obviously
discarded somewhere in the engine compartment, sun pinked the slabs of fat
cushioning his back and shoulder-blades. Black smears of oil covered his faint
freckles, glistened on the copper hairs on his chest. He picked his nose and
wiped the result on the metal hatch-casing.

"Let me get this thing on to its station and
primed, and I’ll shake the truth out of that sleek ruffian who calls himself a
Cardinal!
Then
we’ll see!"

The Lord-Architect reached up. Lucas stretched out
a hand, gripped his; steadying the immense bulk as the man rose to his feet.

He let go, wiping his now-oily palm on the back of
his breeches.

Casaubon drew himself up to his full six foot five,
lifted his foot, brought it down, and with his stockinged toe hooked his
discarded blue satin frock-coat across the platform towards him.

Sun hammered Lucas’s scalp. He blinked rapidly.

"Nearly noon. The White Crow. She will be all
right, won’t she?" His voice thickened. "Stupid question. She won’t be all right
unless she’s very lucky. And that goes for all of us, doesn’t it?"

The Lord-Architect reached into the voluminous
pockets of his once white silk breeches and brought out a silver flask. Lucas
reached across as the big man offered it, up-ended the flask down his throat,
spluttered into a coughing fit, and at last managed to hiss: "What
is
this?"

Casaubon scratched at his copper hair and examined
his fingernails for oil and scurf. "Turpentine?"

"What!"

"I beg your pardon," the Lord-Architect said
gravely, "metheglin is what I meant to say. She’s a Master- Captain, boy, and a
Master-Physician. More than that, she’s Valentine."

"What . . . ? I don’t . . ."

As Lucas watched, bewildered, the fat man slid down
to seat himself with his broad back against the ram-casing. The Lord-Architect
screwed up his eyes almost to the smallness of raisins against the glare off the
page, and began to write painstakingly in his notebook, resting it against his
bolster-thigh.

"There." He tore the pages out with a delicate
concentration, folded them, retrieved a gold pin from the lapel of his rescued
jacket and pinned the paper shut.

Lucas hunkered down, resting his brown arms across
his thighs. "Well?"

"We arrive, but in time to do nothing." Casaubon
lifted his head, losing at least one chin. "Get over to the University of Crime.
Rouse the students. Give this to the Board of Governors–no,
don’t
argue
with me, boy. Tell them it’s no use their thinking all this pox-blasted foolery
is beneath them; they must act, and I’d be obliged if they’d do it
now."

"Explain to me just exactly how I. . ." Lucas
stopped. "You’re serious, aren’t you? I don’t know why, messire, but the White
Crow thinks you know what you’re doing. Tell me how I get away from here and
I’ll give it a try."

"Prince Lucas!"

The Lord-Architect lifted one copper brow at the
new voice. "Monstrous inconvenient."

Cardinal-General Plessiez stepped out from the
group of Guards on the platform and approached Lucas, pitching his voice over
the crowd-noise. Sun shimmered from his black fur, from his
ankh
and
green sash.

"An interesting woman, your magus, Prince Lucas.
What can she hope to say to the Twelfth Decan?"

Buildings blocked the view behind them now; no sign
of the marble terraces and the hill they had descended. Sun blurred Lucas’s
vision; he rubbed his eyes. Nothing to see from here. Not even that last glint
of sun from her sword, herself a tiny blob of color walking into heat-shimmer.

Sudden, clear, he feels the shade and cool interior
of the house on Carver Street; a holistic flash of white walls, piled books,
cracked mirror-table, and the woman’s heat-roughened voice.

"According to you, there’s no way into the Fane."
He attempted to eradicate hostility from his voice, achieved only sullenness.
"What’s it to you, priest?"

"Still intransigent. I should have known when I met
you. A King’s son."

Lucas frowned. On the north-aust horizon, around
the Fane’s black geometries, the summer air swarms thick with acolytes;
gargoyle-wings beating as they hover, sink, aimlessly circle.

The smooth voice insinuated. "And yet you’re not
with her now, messire. Did she just need a university student to steal her a
horse when there are none to be had?"

The siege-engine creaked past the facades of ornate
buildings lining the square. Pale plaster shot back sunlight and heat. Lucas
stared grimly up at ornaments, strapwork, hanging flower-baskets. Rat-Lord
spectators crowded balconies and windows. A brown Rat flourished a plumed hat;
two drunken black Rats began tossing broken flowers down from pots on to the
heads below.

"I can thieve," he said. "I don’t have
magia.
She’d have been wasting her power protecting me. That’s why I’m here and not
with her."

"But a magus—"

Something slithered across Lucas’s bare ankle. A
coiled paper streamer drifted across the platform, snagged, then pulled away.

Casaubon slammed his hand against the side of the
machine. Iron echoed. "What’s happening, Plessiez? Where’s your damned Master
Builder? And young Zaribeth?"

A brown Rat called: "Your Eminence!"

"You see we face some delay. The crowds," Plessiez
said silkily; and before he could be answered strode back to take a report from
the Guard.

Lucas glanced back with a casual intensity, seeing
the blue-liveried Guards positioned at each of the metal ladders. At the foot of
the engine the crowd massed concealingly thick. The Lord-Architect beamed and
prodded Lucas’s chest with a fat finger, nearly overbalancing him.

"It’ll work. You’ll see."

The black Rat, Plessiez, standing with the Guard,
cast speculative glances up at the gleaming beaked rams and the high cup of the
ballista. He murmured: "We
must
stay on-station here at the south-aust
side, at least until the stroke of midday."

"Yes." The Lord-Architect sounded grim. "We must."

Canopies of silk rose on this side of Fourteenth
District’s great square, great tents shining white and painted with the gold
cross of the House of Salomon and the Sun of the Imperial Dynasty. Light glinted
off laminated armor. Beyond the soldiers, scaffolding rose, great
spider-structures of poles and platforms and cranes.

Lucas stood and shaded his eyes. "Will you look at
that!"

"It may have been wise to bring more men." Plessiez
walked to the front of the platform just as the Lord- Architect rose to his
feet.

Heat shimmered over desolation.

A spiderwork of girders and scaffolding stretched
away, covering sixty or more acres, the site rawly hacked out of the classical
buildings surrounding it. Lucas stared at men and women swarming over heaps of
brick and masonry. A great granite block towered in the foreground.

Lucas felt his skin shudder as a beast shivers.
Realization hit hard and sudden: a jolt of cold injected into the blazing heat.

"They’ve started building."

He shot a glance over his shoulder, knowledge of
foundation rites brimming on his tongue; silenced himself in the face of the
Rat-Lords, and turned back to stare at worked stone, sunk in the earth, cut in
proportion and inscribed.

"There is your revolution," Plessiez remarked
acidly at his side.

‘Mistress of the House of Books, Lady of the Builder’s Measure.’
From
Rituale Aegypticae Nova
, Vitruvius, ed. Johann Valentin Andreae, Antwerp, 1610 (now lost–supposed burned at Alexandria)

The Lord-Architect’s head swiveled ponderously,
surveying. His chins creased as he beamed, looking down at the Cardinal-General, nothing but innocence in his blue gaze.

"Wonderful! Obvious why they’ve started building
now, of course. Someone’s given them the Word of Seshat."

Plessiez’s fur, where it brushed Lucas’s arm,
prickled with a sudden tension.

Lucas looked up, met his black gaze. "Yes, my uncle
told me you have an interest in architecture, your Eminence. Human architecture.
Speculative
and
operative."

Plessiez stood four-square on the iron platform,
balancing on bare clawed hind feet. A smile touched his mouth, the merest gleam
of incisors. His head came up, the line of snout and jaw and sweeping
feather-plume one clean curve in the midday heat. He turned his black eyes on
Casaubon.

"Being a Lord-Architect, I suppose that would
become immediately apparent to you. Yes. It’s true that I put Messire Falke in
the way of finding the lost knowledge he sought. I did not, until now, know the
name of it. So the lost Word to build the Temple of Salomon is the Word of
Seshat?"

"Mistress of the House of Books," Casaubon said
reverently, "Lady of the Builder’s Measure."

The siege-engine inched forward, slowing now to a
crowd-pressed halt. The Lord-Architect swung his arm around until it rested
lightly across Plessiez’s shoulders. He looked down over the swell of his belly
at the black Rat.

"Why, Master Cardinal?"

A kind of relaxation or recklessness went through
the black Rat. Lucas saw him look up at Casaubon, fur sleek and shining in the
sun, one ringed hand touching his pectoral
ankh
while his scaly tail
curved in a low arc about his feet.

"I thought it not amiss, in this time when all
changes, if your people had a Temple of their own. You have built for our
strange masters, and for his Majesty, and never for yourselves. I thought,"
Plessiez said, a self-mocking irony apparent in his tone, "that it might stave
off at least
one
armed rebellion. We shall see if I am right."

Obscurely angry, Lucas demanded: "What did he pay
you? This man Falke, you didn’t give him what he wanted as a gift."

Plessiez invested two words with a wealth of irony.
"He paid."

"You–halt!"

The immense sweating crowd pulled back. Lucas
stared down from ten or twelve feet high on to the square’s paving stones.
Across them clattered a woman.

The sun blazed back from her. He twisted his head
aside, afterimages swimming across his vision. Her mirror-polished armor blazed,
sending highlights dancing across the metal carapace of the siege-engine and the
Guards’ uniforms.

Plessiez put up a narrow-fingered hand to shield
his face. "Lady Hyena."

The woman looked up, a slanting-browed face framed
in the open sallet helm. Her sheathed broadsword clanked against her armored
hip.

"Here in person, Eminence?" she grinned toothily.
"A miscalculation, maybe."

The black Rat beside Lucas shot one glance upwards,
at the sun. "I have no quarrel with you, Lady."

"Nor with—?" She turned bodily, the sallet
restricting her neck-movements, and pointed back to a man on the distant steps
at the edge of the building site. "Nor with the head of the House of Salomon?
Don’t make me laugh. Well, will you fire on the crowd or not? What say you? Do
you take the chance?"

Lucas stared at the stranger. An excitement
familiar from exercises at arms in Candover tingled through his body. Readiness,
anticipation–and no arms, no defenses; and the black muzzles of armed Sun-banner
men pointing full at the siege-engine. Lucas shuddered. The excitement still
would not be killed. He knelt up, leaning one arm on the steel shield-wall,
grinning fiercely at the human troops.

"Madam, have I offered you violence?" Plessiez said
mildly.

The woman deliberately surveyed the towering
engine, now coughing clouds of blue exhaust; the baroquely-cast beaked rams and
the catapult. Sardonic, she observed: "That’s a fair offer of it!"