Rats and Gargoyles (16 page)

"Casaubon!"

The White Crow smacked the side of his head. Lucas
seethed as she pulled out the tail of her shirt, grabbed first one and then the
other of the Lord-Architect’s plump hands, and wiped each relatively clean.

"Master Desaguliers has put a factory
production-line at my disposal." He sucked a finger clean. "And the King offers
me ample funds."

"The King’s as interested in military engineering
as Desaguliers?" The White Crow picked up her glass of red wine again. She left
her shirt-tail hanging out.

"His Majesty are interesting people," Casaubon
remarked.

"Why don’t you go back to your rooms and your
books," she inquired pointedly, "instead of making a mess of mine?"

Casaubon’s head turned as he surveyed the book-
strewn, map- and chart-walled room. One eyebrow quirked up.

"Mess?"

Lucas took a deep swallow of wine, slid down in his
chair and continued to glare at the Lord-Architect. Blue- gray storm-light
blurred the window. The heavy air and wine made his temples throb.

The remains of a meal were spread across the round
table. White Crow–or Valentine–walked restlessly about the room, glass in hand.

"In any case," Casaubon added, in tones of injured
reasonableness, "the porters are still moving my belongings into
my
room."

His fat arm reached up to the table. He grabbed two
tomatoes from a dish and bit into both at once. Through a handful of red pulp
and seeds, he added: "Who does Master Desaguliers wish to attack, or defend?"

"Who cares?" Valentine paced back across the book-
cluttered floor. She hitched a hip up to sit on the window-sill. "Lucas will
know. Won’t you, Lucas? Tell us about the politics, Prince."

He struggled to sit up, meeting her tawny eyes.

"Any news I had at my father’s court will be
eighteen months out of date. I’ll have to speak with my uncle. He might be able
to tell you something."

"You do that, Prince."

Her grin blurred; and she reached over to pick up
the winebottle, nursing it on her lap before refilling her glass. Her eyes moved
to the Lord-Architect, and Lucas could not read her expression.

"Why are you here—? Lazarus, no!"

Lucas shifted his legs as the timber wolf trotted
in from the further room. Its ice-pale eyes fixed on the Lord- Architect, and it
began to whine: a nail scratched down glass. Casaubon reached down and shoved
his fingers through the animal’s hackle-raised ruff, gripped the wolfs muzzle
and shook it.

"There was blood on the moon," he reminded the
White Crow.

The timber wolf made an explosive
huff!
sound and curled up beside the armchair.

Lucas scratched through his springy hair and stood
up, striving for calm or authority or anything but confusion.

"I saw," he insisted. "I saw that when I hadn’t
been in the city an hour."

The White Crow nodded her head several times. She
lifted one shoulder; the cotton slid across the curve of it and her breast. "You’re talented, Prince—"

Footsteps sounded on the outer stairs. Evelian put
her head around the door. She knocked on the open door lintel. "Messire
Casaubon?"

"–He’s here," the White Crow finished.

"The porters can’t get everything up to your room."
Evelian wiped a thick coil of yellow hair back with her wrist. Her smile showed
pale; flesh bagged under her eyes. "If you’re not over in two minutes to sort it
out, I’m telling them to leave the rest in the street!"

Her blue-and-yellow satin skirt flashed as she
turned, and her footsteps clattered down the steps.

Casaubon tossed a handful of tomato-skins to the
timber wolf. It snapped them out of mid-air, chewed–and immediately hacked the
fruit back up, onto the carpet. The Lord-Architect stood, agile. He drew the
skirts of his coat about him, bent to peer out of the casement, and held a fat
palm out to test the air.

Heat-lightning whitened the rooftops, erratic as
artillery. Spots of rain darkened the blistered paint on the window-sill.

"Brandy is good for aposthumes and influenzas," he
remarked hopefully. "I’ll return shortly, Lady Valentine.
Ah.
Excuse me."

He bent ponderously and picked up an object from a
corner of the room.

Lucas slammed his glass down, slopping wine;
staggered across the room, and made it to the window at the same time as the
cinnamon-haired woman grabbed the frame and leaned dangerously far out. He
leaned out beside her, rain cool on his face.

Casaubon strode across the yard, coat flying, one
massive hand gripping the stem of a lace parasol.

His head was high. He did not look up. As he
disappeared into the passage Lucas heard his voice rumble, baritone, and the
noise of a dropped crate.

"Oh!" The White Crow’s arms clamped tight across
her ribs. Mouth a rictus, she leaned against the casement and wheezed for air.
Lucas opened his mouth to speak and caught the infectious laughter.

"Shit!" he said. "Oh, shit, what a sight!"

The woman rubbed her eye with the heel of her hand.
Storm-light gave a warmth to her fine skin, her dark-red curls; and from the
open neck of her shirt Lucas breathed a scent of sun and grass and flesh.

He sat down on the opposite side of the sill.
Laughter slowly stopped shaking her.

Finding words from nowhere, he explained: "I
thought that you were on your own in the city."

"So did I."

Relaxed, her mouth curved; and the terrible warmth
of her eyes hit him in the pit of his stomach.

"I am," she contradicted herself softly. "Sometimes
I look ahead, and I can see the days, each one a little cell. He knows me, you
see. The clown. He thinks that if he entertains me I’ll . . ."

Lucas picked up her hand and rubbed it against his
face, feeling the warmth; the calluses on her middle finger.

"No." The woman shook her head. "The easiest thing
in the world to say to you: stay. Don’t listen to
la belle dame sans merci.
I won’t listen to her, either."

Lucas marveled.

"I didn’t think you knew I was here at all."

She took her hand back, slid one cotton sleeve of
her shirt to show the, curve of her shoulder, and winked at him. Her breath was
soft with wine.

"Ah, but now it wouldn’t be because of you."

"Valentine—"

"No. Not ‘Valentine’," she said. "Not ever again."

Not ever again
beat in his pulse with the wine.
Thinking how a Lord-Architect would not be here for ever, and how a student might be three years in the city,
Lucas grinned crookedly.

Wood creaked with the returning tread of the fat
man. The banisters protested his grip. The Lord-Architect and Knight of the Rose
Castle stooped, still cracking his head lightly on the door-lintel.

"There was too little space," he confided sunnily.
"I told the porters to store certain items in another room. The Lady Evelian
suggested yours, young Lucas. I thought that particularly apt, since you’re my
page."

The light is green, the color of sunlight through
hazel leaves in April. It shines on the frost-cracked masonry of a tiny cell. It
shines on a thick rusty iron spike.

The air curls with vapors.

His hair is the same, gentle silver-white waves,
and it is an untidy thatch above the same creased labile features. Vulnerably
swimming eyes blink, would turn away if they could. Instead the mouth stumbles
to form words, responds to insistent questioning.

The iron spike is slippery, clotted with blood,
plasma, mucus; stringy with sinews. Knobbed bone shows a gleaming red and white.

His head ends raggedly at the stump of a neck . . .
torn muscle, wrenched vertebrae, split skin upon which age- freckles are still
brown. His head is impaled on the iron spike.

Time has ceased in the stone labyrinths of the
Fane. He is lost in a moment of butchery, endlessly prolonged; still balancing
his endurance against the endless, endless demands for his knowledge.

The gray eyes brim with tears: not because of the
moment’s pain, but because the Bishop of the Trees has discovered that the
tortures of the gods are infinitely diverse, and eternally prolonged.

"I am not
your page!"

The White Crow rolled wine in her mouth, the
numbness of alcohol pricking her tongue. The muscular young man stiffened, spine
straightening; his black brows scowled: turning in a second from relaxed adult
to tightly buttoned boy.

"He’s a prince." She sighed, the last vestiges of
humorous teasing falling away from her. "Princes can’t be servants, you see."

Casaubon placed one hand on his massive chest, and
inclined his head in a bow to Lucas of Candover. His heel struck the door, and
knocked it to.

"Page of Scepters," he said.

She walked to the reversed-mirror table,
concentrating on the lifting and pouring of a bottle. Cool damp storm-air
rustled the star-charts pinned to the walls.

"I know. Yes. Lucas is concerned in this somehow,"
the White Crow admitted, clunking the bottle of straw- colored wine down on the
wood.

The Prince sank into the cleared chair at the
table, his dark eyes not leaving her face.

"So."

Casaubon grabbed a cold chicken-wing from the table
as he passed, eased himself down into the creaking armchair, bit into the oily
flesh and, in an indistinct but inviting tone, echoed: "So?"

The White Crow walked to the street-side window.
She leaned up against the jamb, banging her shoulder, and pushed the casement
open. Rain spattered her face.

A yellow storm-light colored the streets, and the
roofs of the houses beyond. Past them, on the swell of the hill and horizon,
running in a south-austerly direction to mark the quarter’s boundary, a toothed
line of obelisks and pyramids made a stark skyline.

Chitinous wings whir, too distant for human
hearing. Like distant fly-swarms, acolytes darken the air over the distant
stone.

She tasted rain on her lips.

"I know exactly what this is about."

She heard the armchair creak, knew Casaubon’s vast
bulk must have shifted. The thinning rain glistened on the tiled roofs opposite;
and an odor of straw and oil drifted up to her. She fisted one hand and
stretched that arm, feeling the wine unlock the muscles.

"Here at the heart of the world . . . it’s lazy,
don’t you feel it?"

Cloud-cover tore in the high wind. She tasted in
her mouth how the skyline runs true on Evelian’s side of the building: another
black chain of courts and wings and outyards, the Fane cutting across
aust-easterly to divide the Nineteenth District from the Thirtieth and Dockland.

From behind her Lucas’s voice volunteered, "We’re
souls fixed on the Great Wheel."

The White Crow spluttered, wiped her hand across
her nose and mouth, and turned around and sat down on the damp window-sill in
one unwise movement.

"Now gods defend us from the orthodox!" She shook
her head. The room shifted. She set her empty glass down clumsily. "Next you’ll
think you have to tell me that everything that is is alive, and held in the
constant creation of the Thirty-Six. From stones, bees and roses, to worlds that
in their orbits move, singing with their own life that moves them . . ."

"Unquote." The Lord-Architect belched. He settled
back down into the armchair. "Valentine, you’ve grown regrettably long-winded
since we last met."

The White Crow stood. Anger moved her precisely
across the room, avoiding piles of books and the table.

"Four times."
Her index finger stabbed at him.
"The first time it happened was the first year I came here. It’s why I stayed.
Then another, three years later. And then
two
in this year alone: one in
winter and one a month ago. Now, don’t tell me the College can’t read the stars
as clearly as I can. Don’t tell me that’s not why you’re here!"

Casaubon watched her with guileless china-blue
eyes.

"What
happened four times?" Prince Lucas asked.

She swayed, and reached out to steady herself on
empty air. The stale smell of an eaten meal roiled her stomach.

"I’ll show you."

The White Crow walked unsteadily to where a chest
stood against the wall. Leather-bound volumes weighed down the lid. A chair
scraped: Lucas was beside her, suddenly, lifting the books and setting them down
on the carpet. The smell of leather and dust made her nostrils flare.

She pushed up the lid of the chest, and took out,
first, an old backpack, the straps cracked from lack of polish; and then a basket-hilted rapier, oiled and wrapped
in silk.

"Scholar-Soldier!"

The White Crow ignored the Lord-Architect’s
muttered exclamation. She let herself grip the hilt, lifting the sword; and the
memory of that action in her flesh made her eyes sting.

"You’ll make me maudlin," she snarled. "Here, look
at these."

She flung the rolled-up star-charts at Casaubon.
Lucas moved to stare over the Lord-Architect’s shoulder as he unrolled them. The
White Crow rose cautiously to her feet, and sat down in Lucas’s vacated chair.

"The Invisible College must know," she said, "that
The Spagyrus practices Alchemy. Yes? Up there, in the heart of the Fane. While
we turn with the Great Wheel, and return on this earth,
he
practices
sublimation and distillation and exaltation, to discover the elixir of life– or
so I thought, until this year."

"Mmmhmrm." The Lord-Architect swiveled a star-
chart with surprisingly precise movements.

"And since there’s no eternal life but the life of
the soul, that would have been harmless enough. He is a Decan, eternal, divine.
He’d be playing. You see?"

"Oh, yes. Certainly."

She was aware of the dark-browed young man
frowning. The White Crow leaned back, struts of the chair hard against her
spine. A half-inch of wine remained in the bottle. She held the bottle, tilting
it gently from one side to the other.