Rats and Gargoyles (57 page)

He grabbed at his belt, finding the main-gauche
lost somewhere; lunged again, one foot on the bottom step, drove her up three
steps;, brought a heel down half off the edge of the sheer flight; leaped
backwards and landed on the earth, left hand and tail out for balance. She
halfloped and half-fell down the steps towards him.

The point took his gaze away. He only sensed her
hand move.

Reflex brought his left hand up. The thrown femur
jarred his wrist, clattered away on the floor. She lunged, leaping from the
steps; and he bound her blade and kicked, crouched, whipped his scaled tail hard
across her ankles. She fell.

She pitched past him, into the ossuary wall that
she had loosened the bone from: in a rush and shatter of femurs and skulls and
ribs and pelvises the mass of dry brown bones avalanched down on her. She
sprawled face-down, greasy hair flying, one bare foot scrabbling for purchase.
In the same second he fell forward into the furthest extent of his lunge and
felt the penetration of flesh clear up the blade.

Through his grip on the hilt he felt his own pulse
or the last fibrillation of her heart.

A Rat skull bounced across the floor. Vertebrae
scattered like dice. The bone-pile slid to an unsteady halt, balanced up like
kindling. The woman sprawled, partly covered in splintered brown bone, the
half-inch-wide blade jammed up through her stomach and under the lowest rib.
Blood rivuleted, staining her shirt; a dark stain marked her breeches as bowel
and bladder relaxed. Her bubbling, blood-filled breath echoed into silence.

The rapier blade scraped a rib as he withdrew it,
bracing his clawed foot against her shoulder.

Light tore. In the whiteness of the bones of the
truly dead, a rip appeared.

Tumblers click, numbers roll.

In the university building Lucas scrambles from
under the meshing gears of an analytical engine. There is no noise, no smoking
oil, no ripping metal. Only an intolerable strain that holds the fabric of the
air taut, taut.

Away across the heart of the world, a makeshift
lath- and-plaster model of a building glows, moon-bright. A fifteen-year-old
girl on her knees beside it, ear-rings jangling, breaks into tears at something
she cannot explain: perhaps simply the extravagant order and complexity of its
proportions.

Enamel-imaged dice, scattered and chipped, lie
among the discarded Thirty Trionfi cards, in a hollow of whiteness where a man
and an old woman fall, fall endlessly.

Breaking strain. As if in the weak forces that glue
the universe together, some sudden slippage could be felt. Strings pulling
apart, order losing its probability.

Plessiez staggered back, sitting down on the bottom
step of the nearest flight of stairs.

Blood pooled from the rapier’s point to the earth.
He sat staring at it, how it glistened in the white light. His chest heaved. He
brushed his wrist across his mouth, touched matted fur; touched it again and
took his hand away.

One cut ripped his lip, just over the left incisor.
He tasted blood, not knowing until he felt the slick matted fur on his right
haunch that she had wounded him twice. Numbness began to fill the cavern, hiding
the pain. Feeling the weakness of her deep wound, he with shaking fingers
unbuckled his sword-belt and rebelted it tightly around his haunch as a
tourniquet.

"Well, now . . ."

His voice, even at a whisper, sounded loud as
gunfire in a cathedral. He wiped the rapier, fumbling it; leaned the point on
the graveled earth and pushed himself upright.

With a sharp snap, the blade broke.

The black Rat staggered. His naked bristling tail
whipped out for balance. He stood, eyes half-shut, peering at the clouded air
before his face. The white light leached color from the fallen bones, from the
great catafalque and the ossuary cavern itself. He gazed up at the dark
tunnel-entrance to which the stairs led.

Plessiez looked back.

The great Wheel falters, loosens and forgets the
unheard cadences of the Dance of all things; particles of earth and stone and
bone dissolve upon air.

He let the broken sword fall.

One hand clenched hard enough to drive rings into
his flesh.

Not a light, but a leaching-away of substance.

The earth beneath his numb feet not lost in
brilliance, but dissolving into air, and air itself dissolving into nothingness
. . .

Plessiez squatted down awkwardly, one arm resting
across his unwounded knee, staring at the bones.

Moments ticked past, marked by the slow spreading
of blood from the murdered woman. A tension thrummed deep in the stone. On the
edge of audibility, Plessiez sensed the loosing of bonds in the heart of the
earth. The bones and their red ribbon imprisoned his gaze, nested in the warm
whiteness of oblivion.

He spoke softly.

"Now we are the same, you and I . . . Myself
stripped gradually and willingly of all I’ve earned: cardinal’s rank,
priesthood, power, and friends and skills. And you stripping the heart of the
world until nothing remains. True death. Your portent in the sky: the Night
Sun–there by a god’s conjuring, and mine. Well, we are the same."

He lifted his snout, looking up at one of the
stairs and exits.

"No matter how fast, I would be very close, still,
when it happens. So where is the point of running?"

One translucent ear twitched. He heard no sound of
Charnay, lost in the ossuary labyrinth; and the rattle in the dead woman’s
throat would not be repeated.

"Believe that I did not know you would be like
this– but, then, one is seldom sure of outcomes, dealing in matters pertaining
to the Divine. Does The Spagyrus regret you, I wonder?"

Above his head, the stone roof of the cavern
creaked.

"And I am like you in this: I admit of no
possibility of victory. Even though I think I perceive–I
think
–a method
towards it. But you could not expect it of me."

Talking to the bones as if they were his mirror
image, the black Rat slid down to sit on the gravel: the nearer stones leached
of color and substance.

"Well, and if it were fire I might manage that, and
if it were flesh and blood there’s
her
" One
slender dark finger pointed to the corpse of the Hyena.
"But hardly of use, I fear, with the life departed from it. Death’s no cure for
entropy."

A large chunk of stone dislodged itself from the
roof and fell, cracking the corner from the catafalque of the Rat-Kings. Part of
a carved rose rattled down the steps. The smell of blood and ordure began to
lessen, and even the chill in the air became mild.

"But
—" The black Rat argued obsessively,
leaning forward. "You could not expect it of me. Even if I
willed it, even if I saw nothing else to be done, even if–and it is possible,
oh, I grant you it is possible–I
desired
it, well, still the flesh would
not let me. That has its own desire for survival."

He lay down now, on his side, tail coiled up to his
flank, and one arm cradling his head. His black eyes glowed. With his free hand
he reached out, testing the limits of absolute numbness near the bones: the
milk- white bones glowing in brilliance.

Expecting a pulse of tension, it brought fear hot
into his throat to feel, through fingertips, the sensation of fracturing thin
ice, of falling suddenly from the step that is not there—

The knowledge of how short a time before the world
split and rolled up like cloth burned in him. His eyes half-closed. White light
split into rainbows.

"Well," he said.

Plessiez,
ankh
and priesthood discarded
both, all conspiracies broken and bloody, lying on one elbow now, as if to read,
or by the side of some lover, reached out and with a gentle touch took hold of
the infinite whiteness of bone.

The ceiling of the cavern cracked and fell.

High above darkness, high above where the labyrinth
in city streets gutters and dies; high above the straining wings of eagles, and
soaring into the face of darkness, flies a moth with death’s-head markings on
its wings.

Airbreathed wings of dark fire reach out.

The Night Sun’s blackness burns, a beacon. In the
thin air, thinning with height of atmosphere, and with the loosening charges of
electrons, the moth beats black- dusted wings furiously, rising, reaching up—

A sparrow stalls in the air, snaps, crunches the
moth’s soft body. Its gullet jerks twice, swallowing.

The wind thins.

Caught in dissolution, in air dissolving; the
strangeness of matter that is its body fading, the bird begins to fall.

And suddenly the sky is gold.

"
Messire!
"

Through rock that tumbled down, immense and slow,
great boulders bounding and crushing heaps of bones, Lieutenant Charnay dodged
and lumbered down the longest flight of steps, sword-rapier in hand.

She ran across the floor of the ossuary cavern,
moving fast, sparing one glance for the dead woman; heading for the slumped
black figure before the catafalque. Shouting, voice lost in the roar of
splintering rock.

She flung herself to her knees beside Plessiez and
turned him over.

And stared into a face so changed she might never
have recognized it if she had not, once, met his grandfather.

His black fur was now faded gray; white about the
jaw. His shrunken body moaned as she held it, light as sacking. Under his loose
pelt, his ribs and collar-bone jutted in stark angles; slim fingers reduced to
thin bony sticks.

His head fell back. The flesh of his ears had
turned translucently gray; and, as he blinked slowly, she took one look at his
eyes–milky with cataracts–and turned her head aside to vomit.

One of Plessiez’s age-withered hands grasped a
skull’s lower jaw: brown and old and fragile. A coil of red ribbon ringed his
wrist. All the nails of his hand were cracked, yellow, waxen.

His other hand moved feebly. She dropped her sword
and clasped it.

"Plessiez, man."

The black Rat, whiskers quivering, raised a hand
that trembled. His head bobbed on his thin corded neck. He peered at her.

"And I had always wagered"–his thin voice shook–
"that I would not live to die old."

A roar from above warned her. She had one second to
look up at the falling rock, to see how many layers of the catacombs now fell in
towards their foundations. Plessiez groaned. The brown Rat tightened her grip on
his hand. She threw her body protectively across his, at the last reaching out
for her sword.

Stone soughs into dust.

A weakness as of internal bleeding hamstrings her.
The White Crow presses both fists into her stomach under the arch of her ribs.
Body shaking with sudden cold, teeth grinding, she sits down hard in the
alabaster whiteness.

Maggots boil up like milk.

Their soft bodies slide against her skin. Revolted,
too weak to stand, she reaches out a hand to sketch a hieroglyph on the air. Her
hand drops to her side, the powerless shape left unfinished.

"He’s dying—"

Waves of maggots belly up, silky and cool about her
shins and ankles. The solidity of what stone remains under her begins to soften.

Quietly, the White Crow laughs.

"Theo, my lord, you did say ‘corrupted.’ The divine
and demonic souls of the universe don’t decay into
maggots
when they die!
Oh, he learned this of us."

The absence that weakens her grows now, as if her
heartblood leaks away through weakened aorta and ventricle at every pulse. At
some deep level of cells, still resounding from the miracle of shape-changing,
the White Crow shivers into dissolution.

She shouts: "You didn’t have to do this! You’re a
god; even these rules don’t bind you!"

"He chooses that they do."

Theodoret stands, Candia’s doublet still kilting
his waist. Age-spotted skin gleams sallow in the growing intensity of light
breaking down. His red lips part, he frowns; his head high, gray hair flowing.

"Young woman, the Thirty-Six were fool enough to
choose to exile the Church of the Trees and degrade their worshipers. I’ve
suffered from that all my life. Don’t tell me about Divine capriciousness and
stupidity!"

She twists around on her knees, smearing the
crawling maggots to a paste. Effort burns her lungs. As if the cells behind her
eyes dissolve also, her vision whitens.

"Ahhh—"

Not her vision, it is the world that whitens. She
perceives with preternatural clarity this last moment; her voice hissing in her
ears like static: "He’s dead!"

Weakness grows, pressing against her skin from
inside. A void too large to contain. Her numb fingers no longer feel each other,
nor her arms pressed to her sides; thighs drawn up tight to her belly and
breasts.

Her fingers, touching her flesh, feel the decaying
voices of the Thirty-Six. Scholar-Soldier, student of
magia,
Master-Physician: she has the skill to hear their last cry, fading in the wake
of dissolution—

And something else.

"Listen!
Feel
! Something’s happening."

The old man looks sharply down at her. "What is
it?"

Far across the city that is called the heart of the
world, echoes of destroyed
magia
vibrate. She, in the wasteland of ruined
marble and maggots, points up at his hands. A faint luminescence clings to them,
the color of green shadows and sunlight.

* * *

Above the city, the sky is suddenly gold.

Dusty wings beating, the sparrow falls. In the
bird’s bead-black eyes, reflected clearly, the Night Sun is overspotted with a
leprous golden light.

Flat as an illustrated manuscript, the sky over the
heart of the world sears yellow as fever.