Rats and Gargoyles (56 page)

"Valentine.
White Crow
!
"

Cold blossomed.

As swiftly as if it were the light of some dawn,
cold air fractured the world. Thick spikes of ice jolted down from the
scaffolding. Marble paving crackled underfoot. He scrambled to his feet and
stumbled, falling awkwardly, sprawling on his back with a heel caught in the
skirts of his coat. The metal bee fell from his hand.

The Word of Seshat faded from the foundation-stone,
remaining for a long moment imprinted on his vision.

In the dark he called out: "White Crow!"

Broken marble littered the stone.

As far as her human eyes could see, ruined stone
lay. From fragments small as a finger-bone to blocks the size of houses: all
tumbled, splintered into a landscape of rubble. Occasional crags jutted up,
white slopes yet covered with burning candles. A mist of light curled across the
stone.

The White Crow stood with the Bishop of the Trees
in a clear circle some thirty yards across.

A marble cricket, large as her hand and carved
intricately, squatted on a ledge of the broken jaw. Its hind legs rasped
together. The small voice sounded clear and perfect after the thunder of stone:
"Little animal, you are laughing at me, I think."

The stone under her bare feet crumbled, becoming
friable and then dust. She sifted it between her toes. The White Crow smiled,
not able to stop; sensuous in the new awareness of her self. She stood naked
with no embarrassment.

Theodoret laughed.

"Why, what do you think I was doing, my lord Decan,
while I lived in death here? I learned. There’s much to be learned in the Fane,
when only a miracle stands between you and death, and," the old man said tartly,
"you wish that it didn’t."

"You have learned to wish to die."

"No, my lord.
You
learned that of
us.
My young friend Candia always swore you pried too closely into mortal concerns
and mortality."

The White Crow squatted, running her hands through
the dust of the Lord of Noon and Midnight. It sparkled on her fingers. Only the
tiny voice remained now, guttering as a candle . . .

She sat back, bumping her bruised buttocks,
grinning. The alabaster dust sparkled white and silver on her shins, in the
red-gold curls of her pubic hair. She rubbed her hands against her nose,
smelling sweat and frost and fire.

"The Eleventh Decan told me, Divine One. The Lady
of the Ten Degrees of High Summer. You can forget, you can change your nature;
it’s only Rats and humans that have to live with limitation." She stretched out
a leg, examining bruises already yellow and purple. Fierce unreasonable joy
fired her. "Forget, change, become a miracle."

"I have made true death. "

"Black miracles. Black miracles."

"And I will become One."

The White Crow gripped fistfuls of stone dust,
sifting them out into the cold air. Abruptly she folded her legs under her
buttocks, dug her feet in, pushed; and stood up without using her hands: every
muscle electric with energy. She turned, arms outstretched, letting the last of
the dust fall.

Theodoret, his hands folded primly on his knees,
said: "I learned that I am a fool, for thinking to instruct one of the
Thirty-Six. I learned that when the Decan of Noon and Midnight pretends
ignorance of human conspiracy it may be because he is using that conspiracy;
letting us place your true-death necromancy under the heart of the world;
bringing the plague and the Night Sun and your sickness—"

All the joy of the Scholar-Soldier in her, the
White Crow put in: "Or else, being clouded by base Matter, only taking advantage
of what conspiracies mortals had already put into action—"

"–and I learned, my lord Decan, that foolishness is
not a province of humanity. But that," Theodoret said, "I always knew."

The cricket’s fretted hind legs ceased moving.
White stone gleamed. No voice formed.

The White Crow gazed up at the old man. She touched
his warm shoulder with a faintly proprietorial air and smiled. The air about
them crackled, temperature falling towards sub-zero.

"I should despair." She shook her head, grinning
ruefully. "It’s this, I think. When you were healed, did you feel . . . ?"

"Master-Physician, yes."

"As if it were impossible to be hurt, ever again?"

He put both hands on her bare shoulders, the touch
of his fingers warm. Light gleamed in his gray eyes like water; silver and silky
as his flowing hair. Briefly he kissed her, on the dark-red hair above her
temples. The White Crow startled. His breath, warm and damp, smelt of cut grass.

"Now," he said.

He turned, kneeling, burying his hands in the dust.

The last outcrops of rounded marble slumped into
dust, white light blazing hard enough to bring tears to her eyes. She raised her
head. Her heart beat in her ears and groin.

"I have learned," Theodoret said.

A dank smell of leaf-mold penetrated her nostrils.
The sole of her foot moved in some slick substance, and the White Crow looked
down. Ankle-deep in stone dust, her skin sensed a moment’s texture of river mud.

A faint light the color of sun through beech leaves
burns around the Bishop’s hands–fades, fails and dies.

The Thirty-Six feel the great wheel of the world
hesitate in its turning: pause, poise. Wait.

Some fractional movement above, where iron flood-
doors hung suspended in grooves in the tunnel roof, warned Plessiez. He leaped
forward as the chains and shutter crashed down.

"Plessiez'"

"Charnay, is all well?"

Her voice came, muffled, from behind the iron door.
He picked himself up off his knees, realized that he stood in a brighter light
than the fallen torch could account for.

The brown Rat’s voice faded. His ears rang with the
noise of the shutter’s falling. After a moment she appeared at one of the
close-barred window-openings where the tunnel doubled back on itself. "I’ll get
round to you another way. Press on, messire. Courage!"

Under his breath, the black Rat murmured: "And if
what I find now is some way of slipping past you, regaining the surface?"

Sound scuttered at the edge of hearing. He snatched
up the fallen rapier, the leather-wound hilt warm and worn under his palm. Here
brown bones stacked the walls, racked up in barriers eight or nine feet tall;
the close-packed knobs of bone broken only by jutting inset skulls. Plessiez
moved cautiously down the wet slope. Ahead, the floor of the tunnel ran steeply
down and the ceiling rose, until both widened out into the central cavern of the
ossuary.

"A little short of omens and nightmares," he
whispered, sardonic, shaking.

The sound ran down ahead of him, hissing into
echoes, not fading but growing; increasing in volume until it yawped up the
scale into laughter.

"Charnay?"

Steep flights of steps angled down into the great
cavern from other, higher entrances. Marble altars stood to each side, among the
bones and obelisks. Light glowed on the smooth walls, rounded almost into
bosses, brown strata hooping up with the curve of aeons. Black candles towered
in ornate stands, each one lit. His shadow on the passage wall and the cave roof
leaped, agile, frantic, despite his even pacing.

"Fool," said the Hyena.

She swung lithely down from an entrance whose
tunnel must cross above his. A basket-hilted rapier balanced in her right hand.
Greasy hair fell down over her slanting brows, over the shoulders of her red
shirt that hung torn to her waist. Her filthy red breeches were cut off at the
knee; her bruised and cut feet moved without hesitation across the gravel as she
ran towards him.

"Lady, you follow me fast enough to outdistance
me."

She yawped a laugh that made his pelt shiver.

Quickly he knelt and took the bundle of bones from
his belt, tucking them under the nearest protruding wall. Skulls brushed his
hand, friable and warm. He tightened his grip on his rapier. Without further
speech he ran forward, seeking the flat cavern floor.

"Gods
—"

Her blade leaped fire and light in the corner of
his vision. He parried; scrabbling back to look wildly at what lay in the center
of the ossuary cavern.

On the far side, the catafalque of the Rat-Kings
stood on a raised dais, on a dozen marble steps: a fragile lacy thing of white
stone, engraved with the symbols of each of the Thirty-Six, with the insignia of
the Churches– including Plessiez’s own Guiry–of which the Rat-Kings would be
titular head. Friezes of ancient nobles in procession circled the body of the
catafalque, upon which, in equally execrable taste, a circle of seven robed Rats
lay in a King. Under their bier, carved in precise mirror- detail, seven Rat
corpses, their bony vertebrae intertwined, lay in various stages of stony
decomposition: this one a skeleton, snout crumbling, incisors gone; the next a
shrunken fleshly body, with tiny carved marble worms emerging from it; the next
a petrified mummy . . .

Plessiez ignored the floridly baroque bad taste,
staring past the dark-haired woman, past the blade that shot highlights from the
candles.

"That—" Some bright sanity burned in the woman’s eyes. For a moment she straightened from her
sloping crouch, the animal gaze gone. "Is
that
what they all were? What
we took from you, what we placed under the heart of the world?"

They lay on the graveled earth before the
catafalque– the femur and tail-vertebrae and skull of a Rat, scarcely large
enough to be adult. A scarlet ribbon tied them in curious knots. One long
knobbed femur, a rib, a rib with vertebrae attached: the long decreasing series
of tail- bones. They made a kind of irregular septagon shape, the skull and
lower jaw-bone crowning it. Now Plessiez realized where the light came from.
These, that had been new and scrubbed bones–boiled down for cleanliness– now
glowed as white as roses in morning sunlight.

Fear shocked it out of him.

"Lady . . . four times the Divine upon this earth
and by some black miracle caused a soul to die. We made our necromancy from
their mortal remains."

The Hyena’s whisper hardly broke his trance:
"There’s nothing there.
Nothing."

Red ribbon tied the bones in angled geometries. Red
ribbon threaded the eye-sockets, attaching the skull to the bone framework upon
which it rested. Ribbon, and the gravel on which it rested: all solid, all
bodied into form and existence . . .

The whiteness of the bones, now, the whiteness of
absolute negation.

"I saw them with butterflies all in their mouths," she
sang, "seeking the Boat, and born again. But this . . ." The woman’s tone dropped
to growling speech. "This isn’t death, but
nothing."

Plessiez raised his eyes. The woman, unarmored,
stood as if she still wore the Sun’s ragged banners; brows come down over her
slanting dark eyes. Yellow shadows moved at her feet, mottled and smelling of
heat and dust. She met his gaze. Her eyes dulled: flat, cunning, bestial.

White light shone from behind her. The arctic
negation of that light chilled him: so small, so bright.

"They are the bones of the truly dead." He stared
around. At the whiteness sifting down upon the catafalque, upon the stacked
bones of the royal dead: each with the seed-bone removed, each long since
boarded the Boat and traveled the Night and returned again.

The chill of the earth faded under his clawed feet.
Numbness replaced it, radiating out from the tiny pile of bones in the center of
the cavern.

"You may not blame me, lady! Blame the Decan of
Noon and Midnight, who thought fit that Guiry should share his alchemical
work—"

Bare feet scuffed gravel. Her sword swung up. He
knocked it aside, metal clashing harshly, echoing up into the cavern’s dry
heights.

"It didn’t shock you." Her breath sawed. She flung
her free hand out, pointing at him. "I saw. Falke died. I saw your face. They
all started to die. It didn’t–even–
surprise
you. You
knew
the
plague would hit us—"

On the walls of the ossuary cavern the shadows of
the woman and the black Rat danced: sword-blades engaging, darting, each
movement exaggerated, each swirl of the Rat’s plume, each stoop-shouldered dash
of the woman. Laughter yammered, drowning the hiss of bare feet on the earth.

"–ours and the Decan’s, the same pestilence—"

"Wait!"

His long wrist pivoted. He beat her blade back,
wrenching his shoulder. Gravel bit his heels. His panting breath echoed back off
the walls with the clang of metal. Habit took him to guard position; found him
the snap in her concentration and lunged–parried, beat her blade down and jumped
back.

"–you
the same cause—"

The woman crabbed sideways three steps and scooped
up a brown thigh-bone from the ossuary heap nearest, weighing it in her left
hand. The bone-wall groaned, teetered.

"You’re by far a better demagogue than fighter."
Plessiez trod forward, his eyes meeting her dulled flat gaze. Anger burned him
breathless. And fear. "You’re a fool, get out."

"Yes, a fool. Yes, a fool to listen, ever, to you.
I am the last now: the last of Sun and Roses. If I
am
a hyena, 1 can make
you carrion!"

Highlights glinted in the woman’s eyes, the eyes of
a woman no more than adequate, he would guess, with a blade; but now flat and
hard and cunning, echoing the yellow shadows that moved with her, mimicked her
movements, padded in shadows, laughed inhuman laughter.

White light burned.

Now multiple shadows danced on the cavern walls.
Brightness scarred his vision. He risked a lunge, continued it on into a run:
dashing for the flight of stone steps leading up to another exit. In one loping
jump the woman made the lower step: rapier darting up at his breast, he parried,
skidded to one knee, staggered up, breath hot in his mouth.