Rats and Gargoyles (51 page)

"Xerefu! Akeru!"

Time frosted the stone exoskeleton beneath her
wings, shimmering as if ice runs over the fabric that, after aeons of divine
incarnation, is no longer stone.

"We do not fear. "

Air whispers between the carapace-joints. The
jointed tail quivers, a point of light sparkling at the tip of the hollow sting.

"We do not fear, as you do. We may choose now to
incarnate Ourselves in the celestial world and not here on earth. Or We may raze
this world and begin again. The game does not weary Us. "

The white crow wheeled across the cliff-face of the
image, time stretching as she skimmed the distance between moon-curved claw and
claw. Her heart pounded more rapidly than a watch, ticking away her slight
bird’s lifespan.

"Sick! Sick! You have! Plague here!"

Her travesty of human voice cawed, echoing from
hollow shells. One serrated claw shifts. A shining globe-eye dulled as she flew
past, and crumbling stone dust drifted down on the air.

"Xerefu! Akeru!"

The whispering air lies silent.

The hollow stone that incarnates the Decan of
Beginnings and Endings, the Lord of the Night of Time, two-aspected and of two
separate speeches, begins to crumble into fragments.

"Craa-akk-kk!"

Wing-tips beat down against unyielding air. The
white crow folded wings to body and dived, feathers out-thrust to brake and
sending her whirling into the passage and stairs to a crypt. Her wings clipped
the corner of the wall. Falling stone misses her by a heartbeat.

Out of the crypt: now great rounded pillars rose up
to either side of her. She flew on a level with their carved tops: human faces
tall as ship’s masts, with lilies growing from their mouths and eye-sockets. The
corded stone columns sheered down into the depths of the Fane below. She flew
too hard and too high to see what lies there.

The white crow flew under ribbed vaults, and into
the Fane of the Twenty-Sixth Decan.

A ledge reared up.

One wing-tip flicked up in shock; she skidded to
land, claws scrabbling, on an ancient surface. The white crow folded her wings.
She raised her head, jerking her beak from side to side, rawly disgusted at
ridiculousness no human eye can see.

Hard as mountains under aeons of permafrost, the
ledge chilled her.

"Chnoumen! Destroyer of Hearts!"

The ledge ran around the inside of a domed round
hall, the color of old blood. Gold veined the red walls. Arched, huge; too vast
even for echoes. Her bird’s vision brought her sight of black line paintings on
the dull red: thirty-six images coloring the walls around the three-
hundred-and-sixty-degree circle. Too distant for their subjects to be
deciphered.

"Chnachoumen! Opener of Hundreds and Thousands of
Years!"

The floor of this round hall, blood red and blood
dark, ripples: stone becoming liquid. She tilted her head, staring down. The
stink of rotting weed dizzied her. Under the surface of the water, dark shapes
moved.

"You have no business here."

Translucent suddenly: glowing transparently scarlet
as arterial blood, the interior sea ripples with white and gold light. Carved in
planes of diamond, the coils of a great kraken fill up the pool. Tentacles
curve, sinuous. The Decan of Judgments and Passing incarnate in adamant.

"Divine One!"

The white crow paces the ledge jerkily; cocking her
head to one side to clearly see ahead. Scales shine on the beaked head of the
kraken. But a dim film covers the golden eyes. She steels her voice to
discipline.

"Divine One, if you created us you owe us
something. You at least owe us the acknowledgment that we have universes inside
us
!
"

The arterial scarlet of the inland sea lightened,
becoming rose. The living diamond of the Decan’s limbs coiled into rose-petal
patterns. Liquid tones hissed from the domed ceiling and walls, amused.

"Why else should We take on flesh, but that for
flesh has such universes within it?"

Her harsh crow’s laughter lost itself in the spaces
of immensity.

"To hurt? To be cold, to be hot? To bleed, kiss,
fuck, shit? To eat? To love?"

"Child of flesh, We have loved Our creation, but
nothing lasts, not even love."

Her clawed feet slipped. A flake of red stone
crumbled from the ledge.

She flicked into flight without thought, skimming
down to follow it: this substance that should not be subject to time and decay.
Her pinions spread, the wide-fingered wings of a crow. From the red water, rose
light shone up through her feathers.

Heat scalded.

The stench of a butcher’s shambles choked her. She
flung herself up into suddenly blazing air, wings thrashing, blindly flying: one
glimpse of water turned thickly bloody and the threshing of diamond limbs left
imprinted double behind her eyes.

"Craa-akk!"

Gravity pulled her: not down, but onwards. The
white crow spread her wings to their widest. The changing stone spun past below
her feathered body. The names of Decans beat in the confines of her brain and
blood:
Chnoumen, Chnachoumen, Knat, Biou, Erou, Erebiou, Rhamanoor, Rheianoor
. . .

A faint echo came down one high hall, a whisper
caught out of time:

" ‘
I
also know how difficult it is to get
thirty-six of anybody to agree on anything and act as one. ’ "

She cawed a crow’s harsh bitter laughter.

A wall reared up before her. Her wing-tips brushed
an arch of brick. Small smooth ochre bricks; the ghost of sun’s warmth in their
depth. The touch against her feathers froze her through to her hollowed bones.

Her feathered shadow skipped across a courtyard.

Black roses lay worm-eaten, tangled, dead in the
Garden of the Eleventh Hour. The gravels of the knot garden lay smeared,
patternless.

The crow’s wings flapped slowly, curving into a
descent.

A brown blight covered the brickwork eaten away by
lichen. Grubs gnawed the leaves of black roses. Tiny curled dots showed on the
earth, black bees lying dead.

The sky above shone brown, yellow, the color of
paper about to burst into flame.

"Divine One! Lady! Of the Eleventh Hour!"

The white crow wheeled, feathers cutting the air,
gliding to land among ivy and lichen at the base of the great brick paw. The
sand-bright sphinx bulked above her, mortar crumbling from between ochre bricks:
the Decan of the Eleventh Hour, of Ten Degrees of High Summer, the Lady of
Shining Force.

A crow is a large bird, some eighteen inches from
beak to tail, and unwieldy: she landed heavily in a skirr of feathers. She
raised her head, double vision shining with the ivy-bitten forepaws and breasts
and head of the god-daemon.

"Divine One, you see all. Know all. Are all. The
Decan of Noon and Midnight sends me. To tell you the Great Circle of the world
breaks now."

A sand-blast of heat breathes from Her curving
lips.

"It is so."

"To tell you. If it can be re-created from chaos.
There won’t be Thirty-Six, but One. I begin to see–why he wishes it. What other
change–can omnipotence
desire
? What else could be impossible?"

The brick-curved linen draperies of Her head drift
dust into the air. The lids of Her slanting eyes slide up. A gaze as pitiless as
deserts impaled the crow.

"I am omnipotent, child of flesh, and
I
do
not desire non-being. If I tire of this world, I will make more. If I tire of
the cosmos, I will make things other than universes. It has been long and long
that I have guided the Great Wheel, long and long that I have created and
changed it; it shall be longer still before I weary of all that is and all that
can be."

Gravel chilled her bird-claws. Silence shimmered in
the Garden. The white crow strutted on the earth, making a movement of wings and
body oddly like a human shrug. She stabbed a hard carrion-tearer’s beak at the
air.

"He’s weary. The Spagyrus."

"Flesh corrupts him. We do not weary unless we
choose. It is not beyond us to forget, when we weary. Each springtime is the
first of the world. Each winter the ending of an aeon. We need not weary of it.
"

"You can’t let him!"

The Decan’s head tilts, facing down to the earth;
to the bird strutting among dead rose briars and the curled bodies of black
bees. Aeons of deserts under noon fire and arctic cold burn in Her eyes, burn
with the pain of fissure, dissolution, decay.

The white crow’s wings open slightly, on the verge
of panic flight.

"Gods are not permitted, or hindered. If He can
uncreate, then that is well. If He can uncreate us all, then that is well. All
things done by the Divine are well."

"Naw!" The bird’s croak sawed the air: comic,
ludicrous before the Decan of the Eleventh Hour. "No! You’re wrong!"

"The Divine are not wrong, child of flesh, for
whatever we do is right, because it is We who act."

"You sent! Me! To heal!"

"For then it would have been
I
who was
right, and not the Lord of Noon and Midnight. Child of flesh, heal if you will.
If you can. Until now, the hour had not yet quite come–but it has come, now.

"Now."

"It is time and the Hour is striking!"

The white crow’s feathers flurried as she strutted
across the gravel, the earth that smelt faintly of mold, of rot, of corruption.
Black bird-eyes glimmered, piercing. Her heavy beak stabbed the ground before
great brick claws that, closing around her, could have cracked her like a flea.

Human speech cracked out of her as a thrush cracks
a snail: shattering, raw.

"Who! Dies! Now!
Who?"

The Decan weeps.

Lids slide down over Her eyes that hold deserts,
rise to show the diamond-dust of tears. A shadow begins to cover Her breasts.
Her head is raised as if she listens to the striking of some inaudible hour.

"Cannot you tell, child of earth?

"It is he, the Decan of Noon and Midnight. How else
may he hope to be One, who is one of Thirty-Six, unless he can uncreate and
self-create himself? He must die, truly, to create himself again out of
non-being, and if he cannot
–
why, then. Nothing. For Us all."

"How! Can! You! Allow!"

"We foresee it will be so. Create it will be so.
Past his death we cannot see nor create. "

The corruption of plague shines in the desert eyes
of the god-daemon.

Past speech, past debate, past miracle; the weight
of aeons waits for the moment in which this may exist:
true death.

"No! Hrrrakk-kk! No!"

Battered by a Divine suffering that no mortal flesh
can behold, avian or human, the white crow flees, flying out into the Fane.

"You’re a fool! Hrrrrakk! I won’t! Let you! Do
this!"

Wings beat, her frail heart pulsing urgency,
sensing how in the air it trembles now: the striking of the noon of the Night
Sun.

Becalmed.

Black water slopped. Fog coiled across its cold
surface. The one lantern’s yellow light made no reflection in the water.

The forgetfulness of the Boat pulled at
Zar-bettu-zekigal, at every cell in her body. Her eyes darkened with Memory.

"You always
call
me buzzard because I used
to sound like one. When I was a baby.
Mee-oo,"
Zar-bettu-zekigal called.
"
Mee-oo
."

The harsh sound echoed back flatly from fog and
darkness. She walked across the deck, the untied laces of her black ankle-boots
ticking on the wood, arms wrapped about herself. "See you, El, you remember
that."

The older Katayan woman sat cross-legged at the
stern, by the lantern, one hand resting on the tiller of the Boat, lace ruffles
falling over her wrist. A frown of intense concentration twisted her face.

"More." .

"Oh, what! See you, I’ll tell you about the first
time I ever met Messire . . . It was in an austquarter crypt. He said,
Students, Charnay, but of a particular talent. The young woman is a Kings’
Memory.
And then:
You’re young, all but trained, as I take it, and
without a patron. My name is Plessiez. In the next few hours I
–
we–will
badly need a trusted record of events. Trusted by both parties. If I put that
proposition to you?"

She squatted down in front of Elish-hakku-zekigal.

"Trust me, El?"

Sweat plastered the woman’s black curls to her
forehead; her pallid face seemed stained, under the eyes, with brown. Elish’s
lips moved silently, concentrating on the voice, following Memory’s bright
thread.

"I remember what you said to me when I left South
Katay.
Learn hard, little buzzard, it opens all the world to you, and you’re
a wanderer. I’ll be here to hear your tales.
I love you, Elish. I’ll always
come back and see you."

Zar-bettu-zekigal knelt, hands on her knees, tail
coiled up about her hips. She leaned forward to study the compass rose set into
the deck before the shaman woman. The needle moved ceaselessly, swinging in five
ninety- degree arcs around the circle, in turn to all five points of the
compass. She sat back, willing Elish the power to steer through the amnesia of
the Boat, stronger now with night and nightmares haunting its drifting.

"Listen, there’s more—"

Outside her circle of Memory’s voice, fleering
mirror faces begin to gather.

The torch pitched forward, flaring soot across the
floor.

His vision cleared.

Plessiez climbed to his feet, rubbing his haunch.
Mist hung above him, choking the brick shaft they descended. He made to pick up
the torch, and stopped.

The guttering torches on the stairwell shone down
on a distorted curving brick floor that crested up, curved down in hollows,
rippled out in frozen curves. The last of these steps had not been the last,
once. It lay embedded in a tide of brick paving that had
flowed,
like
water. His torch rocked in a deep hollow.