Rats and Gargoyles (45 page)

They sat each one high upon their thrones, the
light of torches sliding on their bronze human flesh. Giant figures, twice the
height of a man. The torches flared and glinted from scales, from lidless black
eyes, from pulses beating in the white soft scales under serpentine jaws.

Elish’s arms loosened. She breathed: "The
Serpentheaded . . ."

Now each of the Thirteen arose, standing before
their thrones, scales shimmering, forked tongues licking between blunt lips; old
with the age of granite, of bone, of earth.

Plessiez sheathed his rapier with a tiny click that
echoed back from the towering walls. The black Rat raised his head, gazing at
the giant figures.

"You are the Night Council?"

A scent of musk and sand-hot deserts breathed from
the beach, from the miniature human skulls tumbled to the foot of the thrones.
From the center throne the figure arose, standing with brown hands resting on
the granite.

Light shone on his human body, brown, smoothskinned
and naked; and Zar-bettu-zekigal let her gaze rise to where skin transmuted into
scale and his spine curved inhumanly. Rearing up, haloed by hooded skin, the
eyes of a cobra surveyed them with bright anger.

He spoke.

"Yeth."

She turned from the cell doorway, staring out into
the Fane.

"You could not have healed him, if I had desired
him truly to die."

White stone walls shone in sourceless light. The
White Crow looked out across a floor littered with broken glass, alembics,
bainsmarie and furnaces; eyes narrowing to witness the machinery of the
alchemist. Flat glass bubbles, set in ranks into the wall, danced with moving
pictures. She registered in peripheral vision outer views of the city. Past that
. . .

This high vaulted hall opened into a nave, into a
colonnade; into balconies, oratories, galleries . . .

So clear the air, no possible distance could make
it blurred or diffuse. She saw into the heart of the Fane: all bright, all in
focus. Colonnades of white arches hooped away, growing smaller in perspective;
vaults shone and soared; galleries ran the walls, drawing zigzag lines into the
distance. All around: tower-stairs and loggias, porches and steps and halls
starkly clear; white and intricate and shining as if carved from ivory and milk.

Glass rolled aside as she moved, ticking across the
stone. She glanced down.

A rose-briar lay across the flagstones, jet-black,
bristling with thorns. One withered leaf clung to the stem. Something had eaten
away the petals of the remaining black rose. She raised her head, following it.

Insects crawled.

Cockroaches, locusts, scarab beetles, flies: a
towering mass of bodies filled all the near end of the hall. Cluttering, feelers
waving, chitinous wings rasping; the insects crawled on a mountainous bulk that
heaved although still.

The White Crow caught a glimpse of blackness under
the mass, began to make out shapes. The circular rim of a great nostril, crusted
with the bodies of locusts. Higher up the shapes of scales, cockroaches crawling
under the rims. Tendrils of darkness sweeping back to where, through chitinous
crawling bodies, an eye opens, disclosing a darkness greater than the Night Sun.

One-handed, she sheathed the rapier and beckoned
the others to leave the cell.

He filled the whole space of the hall, so that she
could hardly take in more than rising shoulders, basalt-feathered wings, tusked
and toothed muzzle furred with insects. Cockroaches, locusts, black beetles;
carrion-flies and scarabs; they clung, flew up a few inches, and fell to crawl
again in worship over the body of The Spagyrus.

Dizzy with expense of power and sick with the
receding tide of pain, the White Crow walked drunkenly across the flagstones
until she stood before the Decan. A cockchafer burred past her face. Her head
jerked back.

She held up her blood-stained and black-pitted left
hand, and knelt to touch one knee to the stone floor.

"Divine One, Lord of the Elements, you healed him
through me. I thank you for it."

The shining basalt eyes closed.

The great body sprawled the length of the hall,
flank up against curtain-tracery walls, head rising twenty-five feet into the
air. Roses covered the massive paws and shoulders, clustered on the joint of a
wing.

White light shone on living black basalt.

Clear now, unshadowed, she traced every lineament.
Crusted nostrils, thick with hair and flies, in an upper muzzle that overhung
the lower jaw by ten feet. Jutting tusks above the nostrils. Teeth spiking up
from the lower jaw, digging into scaled cheeks; flowing tendrils around the head
and tiny naked ears.

The White Crow got awkwardly to her feet. She heard
someone kick glass as Candia, Heurodis and the Bishop came to stand beside her.
The great eyes remained closed.

"Now . . ." She tapped her closed right fist against
her mouth. "What do we do now?"

"What we do now is . . ." Candia stepped forward,
shaking out the stained lace of his cuffs, tugging his loose shirt into order.
"We play cards."

"What?"

The blond man held out a filthy hand to Heurodis.
The white-haired woman felt in the pocket of her blue cotton dress and brought
out a thick pack of cards. Candia grinned, boyish, and she tutted.

"Tarot cards." Elegant, faintly comic, he stripped
off the binding ribbon and held the pack up one-handed, cards fanned into a
circle. The White Crow gazed at images stained-glass brilliant against the white
walls and the wreckage, against the million insects crawling, worshiping, on the
living stone skin of The Spagyrus.

"You’re out of your mind, Messire Candia," the
White Crow remarked quite cheerfully. "You know that, don’t you?"

He ignored her, scooping the cards into a pack
again. Automatically his feet took him a few paces one
way, a few paces the other; glancing up at the silent Decan as he spoke.

"Divine One, you’ll remember me. My name is Candia.
Reverend tutor, University of Crime. Now, my talent is the use of the tarot
pack. Four suits: Swords, Grails, Sceptres, Stones. Thirty trumps. Watch."

The White Crow craned her neck to look up at the
god-daemon’s face. Briars and black roses tangled in the scaled and tendriled
head, coiled to ring a forearm; rustling with the living garment of worshiping
insects. The basalt eyes remained closed.

The blond man gave Heurodis his hand as the small
woman seated herself limberly cross-legged on the flagstones. Theodoret stood
behind her. Candia very carefully lowered himself to sit opposite. His
long-fingered and dirty hands shuffled the pack.

Bemused, the White Crow moved to look over his
shoulder.

"A reading of all eighty-six cards," he announced.
His fingers quickened, the pasteboard images flashing past. "To determine the
immediate and near future. My own method. Now."

The man laid out three cards swiftly, slapping them
face-down on the stone floor. Another three, then five grouped in a diamond with
one in the center. He paused. More sets of three, five and six.

"Hey!" She grabbed at his wrist, missing it.

The strong thin fingers dealt two more cards off
the bottom of the pack as she watched. Candia glanced up through flopping hair,
eyes bright. He indicated the backs of eighty-six cards with a careless gesture.

"Broadest reading, three cards in the Sign of the
Archer. What have we got?"

Heurodis leaned forward, grunting, and turned over
the three cards. The White Crow saw a castle struck by lightning,
The House
of Destruction,
the knot of a shroud,
Plague,
and a skull with blue
periwinkle flowers set into the eyes,
Death.

"I think . . ." Candia’s hand hovered over the cards.
"Probably not."

He grinned at the White Crow, replacing the three
cards face-down and then reaching out to them again. He paused, hand in mid-air,
and gestured to her. "You."

She knelt cautiously and turned the three cards.
The first, in bright colors, showed two children playing at noon in a garden,
The Sun.
The second, a man and a woman embracing,
The Lovers.
On the
third, a hermaphrodite dancing among balanced alchemical symbols,
The World.

"You can’t do that!" Wide-eyed, she stared; aware
of the distraction but not of when it had occurred.

Heurodis gave a long-toothed smile.

"I don’t mean it won’t work if you do, I mean that
you can’t do it!"

Candia fell to shuffling some of the lower cards,
keeping
The Sun, The Lovers
and
The World
at the top of the
reading. The White Crow stared intently, drew a deep breath and tried again.

"You can’t sharp these cards. It isn’t possible.
They’re constrained by the future. All the tarot’s links are with what’s going
to happen; you can’t cheat what’s Fated!"

Fair hair fell across his eyes as he looked up.
Practiced, he shook back the lace cuffs from his wrists; a deliberate staginess
in his gestures.

"Readings influence what will come, as well as
being influenced
by
it."

The White Crow stood, rubbing her calf muscle with
her right hand. The humming of insects made her dizzy. An incredulous laugh
bubbled up. She stifled it.

"You’re telling me the University of Crime can
sharp
tarot
cards?"

Heurodis said: "Not often, girlie. But when we need
to we can."

Candia turned over a Ten of Grails, Three of
Scepters and
The House of Destruction
in the position of the Sign of the
Wilderness. He lifted his gaze to meet the White Crow’s, one brow raised; and
when she glanced down it was to see the Ten of Grails, Ace of Scepters and
Fidelity.

"Damn you, you just might exercise some influence.
Here. You just might. Are you a good cheat, Messire Candia?"

"The best."

A breath reached her: saline, musky. Black basalt
eyes opened, twenty-five feet above her head. The great lips moved apart, and
she stared up at a cockroach picking its way across the living basalt of the
Decan’s skin.

"Bait for a healer . . . which of my ten million
souls here in the heart of the world, think you, is fated now truly to die? Can
you tell, little magus? I tell you: they are already grievous sick. "

Insects buzzed. The White Crow gazed up at empty
vaulting over the Decan’s head.

"I don’t think to outwit omnipotency, Divine One.
That would be stupid."

"My sister of the Ten Degrees of High Summer gave
you a certain hour. You have not used it well."

She grinned up at the Decan: a rictus of pain, fear
and defiance. She held up her left hand. The wound in its palm gaped, raw but
not bleeding. Her fingers, red and swollen, bore pin-prick marks from the briars
of black roses.

"All the same, aren’t you? All Thirty-Six. The hour
isn’t over yet."

"WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME .
. .
!
"

Echoes shuddered. Quietly, beside her, the Bishop
of the Trees said: "He’s sick. His Sign is occluded."

He reached down to his side, more firmly knotting
the sleeves of the buff-and-scarlet doublet around his hips. He wore the
makeshift covering with an old man’s slow dignity. A faint green light began to
gather about his fingers.

"No. I agree. But even so . . ." The White Crow shook
her head warningly. "This is the crucial hour. Plague outside, sickness in the
Fane; and somewhere, somewhere . . ."

Great lips breathed carrion on the air.

"They are far from here, and sick, and soon to die.
Both the death of the body, and the death of a soul. "

The White Crow cocked a jaundiced eye at the
insect- ridden slopes of flank and shoulder rising, mountainous, before her.

"Yes? And will they die of the . . . same . . .
sickness . . . ?"

She stopped. Her left hand burned, the pain
connecting her to the substance of the Fane and the
magia
acted within
it; and slowly, aloud, she followed the connection.

"You’re the heart and center of it," the White Crow
said. "The truly dead, the plague, the death of souls, and the
magia
of
necromancy. All of it begins here. Tell me, I know! I feel your power through
the stone, I’ve spilled my blood here, I’ve healed a man with pain and your
power channeled through me, and
I know
!"

She stopped to draw breath, grinning through tears
that poured without volition down her face.

"One plague. Here and outside.
One
plague.
Black alchemy . . . Oh, they will die of the same sickness, won’t they! It
doesn’t have to be a human death, or the death of a Rat-Lord. Why didn’t I think
of it! What death would really uncreate the world?
One of the Thirty- Six!"

Crowned with roses, worshiped by carrion-flies, his
Sign occluded by his power still immanent in the Fane about her, the Decan of
Noon and Midnight smiles.

"The most ancient question," Theodoret murmured at
her ear.
"Can
the omnipotent gods unmake themselves?"

She ignored him. Theodoret stepped back to where
Candia and the white-haired woman bent over the spread of cards, their intensity
of concentration aware but not admitting influence of even the Lord of Noon and
Midnight.

"I will let them play, little magus, until my Sign
is past its occlusion. I will even let your bait keep his life, for as long as
is left to him."

Insect-clouds swarmed as the great body shifted,
one hind claw rasping at his basalt ribs. The great eyelids slid down, up;
darkness glimmering in the depths of the eyes. The voice dropped to quietness.

"We are not all of us alike: the Thirty-Six. We
should not all hold equal powers. 1 give you a secret, little magus. When the
Great Circle flies in pieces, then one of us will re-create it. And there will
be not Thirty-Six but One alone.
"