Rats and Gargoyles (47 page)

Zar-bettu-zekigal’s hand moved to her mouth. She
felt Elish tug at her shoulder; refused to turn away.

A figure hung over the screaming man, clawed feet
gripping the wet bark, grinning with lengthened teeth. Its head turned as she
watched. Subtly altered, strangely disfigured: the mirror-face of the impaled
man stared at her. Pointed teeth smiled. The head continued to lift, to turn. It
pivoted full-circle, neck cracking, until it stared down again at the pierced
man: coughing quietly, laughing.

She looked just long enough to see how many human
figures the root cages trapped, each accompanied by its distorted mirror-image
tormentor; how far the islands stretched . . .

"I think I—" She faced about, spat bile on to the beach of tiny skulls.

"The pollution of nightmare. Dream-debris. Solid."
Elish-hakku-zekigal turned, embracing her, gazing back up at the semicircle of
thrones. "Solid. Real."

The two of the Night Council paced back and climbed
the steps to their thrones. Fog began to soften the horizon.

"You
infected
the world below." The Lord of
the Night Council pointed a red-nailed finger at Plessiez. "Necromanthy.
Magia
of the dead, the truly dead . . . It ith your plague that kilth above,
and in the Fane, and allowth the Night Thun to thine. You brought it below. Now
you mutht dethtroy it."

The black Rat’s lip twitched, showing a gleam of
incisor.

" ‘Kills above’?" Zar-bettu-zekigal asked.

Black serpent eyes turned upon her.
Zar-bettu-zekigal shivered, hacked one booted heel into the miniature skulls and
looked away. The voice echoed softly from the curving granite cliffs.

"We are not contherned with the above. Do what you
will. We do not need you. But we will not have you corrupt uth! Your plague
makeths their nightmareth real, here below." The cobra-head dipped, unblinking
eyes watching. "Memory, tell what you have heard of pethtilenth."

All laughter gone cold, she lifted her head and
stared at Plessiez. "Oh, I’d rather tell what I’ve
seen
–up there. Now.
But you listen."

She began speaking with the concentration of
Memory.

"
‘Plagues may exist in flesh, in base matter,
and bring bodies to death. And, we discover, there are other pestilences that
may be achieved, plagues of the spirit and soul. And there are plagues that can
be brought into existence only by acts of magia. They bring their own analogue
of death to such as our masters
—’ "

"Not alone to such as those," Elish interrupted. Zari
saw the brown Rat catch the remark and shrug carelessly.

"
‘–such as our masters, the Thirty-Six Lords of
Heaven and Hell, the Decans.’
Is that what you want? See you, there’s more.
The Hyena.
‘Memory, witness. Certain articles of corpse-relic necromancy to
be placed at septagon points under the heart of the world, for the summoning of a pestilence
—’ " She broke off,
lifting her chin, staring at the Cardinal-General. "Did you
know it would kill humans? Do this to them?
Did
you?"

Charnay turned a surprised and blandly supercilious
face. "What do you care? You’re Katayan."

"Messire!"

The Rat looked down over his shoulder. Fog dried on
his black fur, leaving it dull. He reached to place his hands on her shoulders,
long fingers warm through the fabric of her dress. She looked up at brilliant
black eyes; his whiskers unmoving, the light shining through his ears.

She
demanded: "Did you?"

The black Rat removed his hands. He reached down to
his haunch, ringed fingers unknotting the green silk sash, brought it up
two-handed and looped it over her head. For a moment he still held the two ends
of it.

" ‘How now . . .’ " His incisors showed in a grin;
his black eyes, feral, shone with a kind of fallen recklessness. Nothing to mark
him as cardinal or priest now, all gone; he wore only silver head-band and black
plume, sword- belt and harness. " ‘How now, two Rats! Dead, for a ducat, dead!’
"

Charnay scowled. "What!"

"I forget you’re no follower of our great poets."
He reached to tug Zar-bettu-zekigal’s short hair sharply, and swung round and
strode back up the beach. Without lifting his head he called up to the Council:
"Messires, I’ll do what I can. Charnay!"

"What?" The big brown Rat started, looked, and
loped up the beach after him. "Messire, I don’t understand."

Zar-bettu-zekigal stared after them, touching the
still- warm sash. She slid one trailing end across her shoulder to fall
scarf-like down her back. "Messire . . ."

Muffled screams echoed from the ocean, invisible in
the thickening fog. Granular mist rolled across the beach, glimmering. It swept
across the departing figures of the brown and black Rats.

"What will you do?" she shouted. "Messire! What
will you do?"

Mist blurred distance; she glimpsed his hand
perhaps raised in salute.

"Your plathe ith not with them," the viper-headed
god said. His slender body seemed a young man’s; his black eyes unblinking and
ageless. "We have your tathk, tham-an-woman. You mutht be a guide back to the
world above. Take what ith not ours, what we will not keep, and what you mutht."

Zar-bettu-zekigal followed Elish’s gaze.

A few yards from the beach of skulls, resting low
in the shifting debris and black water, an unmoored ship floated. Twenty feet
long, clinker-built of wood and coated in black tar. No oars. No mast. One curve
from prow to stern.

No reflection of that hull in the mirror-black
water.

"What . . . ?" Zar-bettu-zekigal took a few
crunching steps down the beach. Fog made the inhabited islands invisible.

Behind her, Elish-hakku-zekigal chuckled.

Zari raised her head, seeing the boat still
floating just offshore, growing larger as she stepped closer: thirty feet long
at least.

A sibilant voice echoed from the amphitheater of
thrones: the cobra-headed Lord of the Night Council. "We warn you. Your way will
not be unoppothed."

Zar-bettu-zekigal stared. "It’s the
Boat.
See you, I swear it; I swear it is!"

"Only when the Night Sun shines. Only when all laws
cease for that certain hour . . ." Elish-hakku-zekigal’s eyes showed a dazzled
appalled wonder.

"Elish, don’t!"

"Oh, you can
touch
it. Here, you can." The
Katayan woman strode past her, down the long skull-pebbled slope, splashing
knee-deep into the black waves, ignoring her soaked breeches and the tails of
her blue silk coat. Dark objects bobbed away on ripples, antennae feebly
twitching. She gripped the edge of the Boat and expertly timed her leap so that
it dipped, wallowed, but shipped hardly any water.

"Elish, I don’t understand!"

The older Katayan woman stood up on the deck,
gazing back over Zar-bettu-zekigal’s head at the half-circle of thrones and the
bedrock foundations of the world. Each of the Serpent-headed now stood, left or
right hand up-raised. A smile broke out on her pale features.

"Lords, I came here because of a prophecy! It was
foretold to me: ‘Your sister will travel on the Boat.’ I didn’t want her to die
and so I came to give what help I could. But I see she
will
travel on the
Boat, and living!"

"Act thwiftly; your time ith almotht patht."

The Katayan woman’s eyes glowed. She laughed; a
gamine-grin very like her younger sister’s. "Don’t fear. I can guide the Boat
back to the world above. Zar’!"

Zar-bettu-zekigal padded down the slope to the edge
of the sea. She slipped her boots off and slung them around her neck by the
laces, wading out into black water icy about her ankles, her calves. She refused
to look at what floated near her.

"The Boat?"

She reached out tentative fingers, laying them
against the tarred wood of the hull. Elish braced a foot on the far side and
reached down, grabbing her, pulling her up. She staggered and sat on the rocking
deck, and felt her shoulders taken in a tight grip; Elish’s blue eyes fixed on
her face.

"You must jump ship the
instant
we get back.
Once we’re in the world above, none but the . . . dead . . . sail this Boat . .
."

"The dead." Zar-bettu-zekigal gripped her sister’s
wrist. "See you, what you told me: Lady Luka, people’s
souls
–what’s
happening to what she’s doing if the Boat isn’t there!"

Elish-hakku-zekigal looked down, blue eyes suddenly
vague.

"Who is Luka?"

Nightmares knocked softly against the hull.
Zar-bettu- zekigal felt the tarred planks rock under her. The Boat drifted. Fog
shut out the skull beach now, the vanished thrones of the Serpent-headed; fog
hid the islands of splintered rock and flesh.

Droplets of mist dampened her face, clung to her
lashes. She shook her head sharply. "Elish!"

The black-haired Katayan woman swayed as she stood
on the deck of the Boat. Water pearled on her blue silk coat, her lace ruffle.
Her left hand, up-raised in a shaman’s gesture of power, hovered forgotten. She
stared at Zar-bettu-zekigal.

"Who are you?"

"I’d be obliged if you’d stop scaring the
first-year students," Reverend Master Pharamond said. "We set the exam up to
keep them out of harm’s way while all this is going on."

Lucas gulped air, injected authority into his
voice. "A message for the university. Urgent."

A Proctor swung the heavy wooden door of the hall
to, cutting off Lucas’s view of the students at their desks; Rafi of Adocentyn
half on his feet. The door muffled their rising voices.

"You’d better come with me, Prince," Pharamond
said.

Lucas let the small man steer him away from the
hall door and down the sun-darkened corridor. The smell of wax polish and paper
strong in his nostrils, he was abruptly aware of his clattering scabbard, torn
breeches and shirtless state.

He reached up slowly, tugging the red kerchief from
his head and undoing its knot. It smelt of sweat, of fear, of air made electric
by the advent of the Night Sun.

"A message for the students and Board of Governors,
from an Archemaster."

Pharamond scratched his clipped beard with long
strong fingers. A short sturdy man, he looked up at Lucas as he walked a
half-pace ahead.

"Mmm. Thought as much. We’re in emergency session; I
can take you straight along with me. Assuming that there’s some substance to
this message, Prince?"

Lucas smiled crookedly. "I’m the errand-boy, Reverend
Master. But I can tell you what’s going on out in the city
now."

"Oh, we know all about that. We’ve been subjecting
it to some intensive research over the last month. I believe events are
occurring much in the order that we predicted."

Pharamond turned on his heel,
boot squeaking on the polished boards, and threw open one of the carved wooden
doors. He said over his shoulder, entering the large staff-room: "But we can
always use your help, boy. We need every hand here."

An array of candles shivered in the door’s draught.
Dozens of them: jammed in pots and on bookshelves, on perpendicular-window
ledges, wax-glued on the edges of tables and the backs of carved chairs. Fierce
amber illumination banished the light shadows and the darkness of the sun. Two
dozen faces glanced up as Pharamond entered.

"What’s the news?" a freckled woman called from the
table.

"All as predicted. We don’t have much time."
Pharamond bustled across to where four long polished tables had been set
together and whole geological strata of city maps unrolled across them.
Gold-headed map-pins impaled the papers at intervals.

Lucas followed, automatically nodding respectful
greetings, caught between being a first-year student and Lucas of Candover; all
the while staring at the paneled walls, whose painted crests had diagrams pinned
up over them; at scattered paints and quills, and bookshelves in complete
disarray.

"Has Candia showed up?" a dark-skinned man asked,
as Pharamond arrived at the table around which the group sat.

Pharamond stepped back, avoiding an elderly woman
who pounced on the bookshelves and seized a scroll. "I don’t foresee that
happening, Shamar."

The scent of hot candlewax drenched the room. Two
dozen men and women, their ages between thirty and sixty, crowded the map table.
University gowns abandoned, flung down in disorder over the room’s chairs and
sofas, they worked mostly in shirt-sleeves and light cotton dresses.

Lucas stepped back as another woman left the table
to grab a volume from the shelves and riffle through it rapidly. The dark man,
Reverend Master Shamar, leaned across to stick a pin in a particular house or
street.

"Nor Heurodis?" an old woman asked.

Lucas saw Pharamond smile, rubbing his long fingers
together. "I suspect she’s out playing dice somewhere."

"Dice?"
His question came out involuntarily.

"Or cards." Pharamond folded his hands behind his
back, leaning over the map-table. "Prince Lucas, I suggest you read the message
to us here. We have a full session. It can be debated."

Lucas felt in his breeches pocket for the folded
paper. The gold pin pricked his thumb. Movement flickered beyond the distorting
glass of the Gothic windows. In the dark sky whirled a multitude of specks.
Birds? The Fane’s acolytes? Both? He turned his back on the windows, unfolding
the paper and holding it up to the light of a candle.

"
‘Beneath Ninth Bank House, Moon Lane. Also
beneath: The Clock & Candle at Brown Park. High Skidhill. North-aust side of
Avenue Berenger. The Chapel of the Order of Fleurimond. Tannery Row. The
Campanile at Saffron Dock. These being respectively in the 9th, 18th, 1st, 31st,
5th, 12th and 27th Districts. ’ "

Lucas paused for breath, glanced up to see heads
bent over the map-table, the men and women of the university muttering in
suppressed excitement.