Rats and Gargoyles

Book 399: Gateway Essentials

by Mary Gentle

Genres: Fantasy; Dark Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

It is a nameless city somewhere between past and future, a mythic realm at the "heart of the world," where wicked Rat Lords have reduced all humankind to slaves, and god-daemons make the decision to end all existence. This energizes a compelling quest for survival, and prompts the powerful White Crow to order an uprising against this chaotic strike that threatens them all. Among those who respond to her are the defiant Prince Lucas of Candover, a student at the University of Crime, and no mans's slave; and Zari, the young Katayan woman who is destined to become the living Memory of all that follows. And others rally to join them in one final desperate revolt, hoping to create a magic powerful enough to reshape the very nature of how they live.

Release date: July 25, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 503

Sample

In the raucous Cathedral Square the crowd prepared to hang a pig.

A young man slowed his pace, staring.

The yellow wood of the gallows wept sap; hastily nailed together; the scent of pine reached him. Stronger: the stench of animal dung. Lucas reached for a kerchief to wipe his sweating face. Finding none, he distastefully used a corner of his sleeve. He thrust a way between the spectators, head ringing with their noise.

A man and a woman stood up on the platform. Between them, a great white sow snuffled, wrapped in a scarlet robe that her split feet fouled, jaws frothing. She shook her snout and head, troubled by the loose hemp rope around her neck. It went up white against the sky, to the knot on the gallows-tree.

Sun burned the moisture from the flagstones, leaving dust that took the imprint of the young man’s booted feet. The steps and entrances and columns of the cathedral towered over the square: a filigree of brown granite against a blazing early sky; carved leaves and round towers still wet with the night’s dew.

‘This beast has been duly tried in a court of law.’ The priest’s voice carried from the platform to the small crowd. ‘This she-pig belongs to Messire de Castries of Banning Lane, and has been found guilty of infanticide, most filthily and bestially consuming the child of the said Messire de Castries’ daughter. Sentence is passed. The animal must be hanged, according to the law and justice. Do your duty!’

The priest lumbered down the rickety steps from the gallows-platform, her leaf-embroidered robe tangling at her ankles. She elbowed Lucas aside just as he realized he should move, and he bristled despite himself.

The man remaining on the platform knelt down beside the sow. Lucas heard him say: ‘Forgive me that I am your executioner.’

‘Hang the monster!’ One fat woman in a velvet dress screeched beside his ear, and Lucas winced; a tall weather-beaten man cupped his hands and shouted through them: ‘Child-killer!’

The executioner stood up and kicked back the bolt holding up the trap.

The trapdoor banged down, gunshot-loud. The sow plunged, a crack! cut off the squealing, screeching – the groan of stretched rope sang in the air. In the silence, Lucas heard bone splintering. The sow’s legs kicked once, all four feet splayed. The scarlet robe (‘I’ for infanticide stitched roughly into the back) rode up as she struggled, baring rows of flopping dugs.

‘Baby-killer!’

‘May your soul rot!’

Lucas wrenched his way free of their rejoicing. He strode across the square, dizzy, sweating. The ammoniac stink of pig dung followed him. He stopped where a public fountain and basin stood against the cathedral wall, tugging at the buttons of his high collar, pulling his jacket open at the neck. Sweat slicked his skin. He bent and scooped a double handful of water to splash his face, uncertain at the novelty of it. Burning cold water soaked his hair, his neck; he shook it away.

Then he leaned both hands on the brown granite, head down. Sun burned the back of his neck. The water, feather-stirred by the fountain’s trickle, mirrored a face up at him: half-man and half-boy, against a blue sky. Springy black hair, expensively cropped; eyes deep-set under meeting brows. For all that his skin was tanned, it was not the chapped skin of an apprentice.

He shifted his padded black jacket that strained across his muscled shoulders; moved to go – and stopped.

The moon gleamed in the early morning sky. He saw it clearly reflected beside his face, bone-white; seas the same pale blue as the sky.

Across the moon’s reflected face, a line of blood appeared, thin as a cat’s scratch. Another scraped across it, curved; dotted and scored a third bloody weal across the almost-globe. A symbol, glistening red.

He spun round and jerked his head up to look at the western sky. The moon hung there, sinking over the city’s roofs. Pale as powder, flour-dust white. No unknown symbols …

A pink flush suffused the gibbous moon, now almost at its full; and the seas flooded a rich crimson.

He turned, grabbed the edges of the basin, staring at the clear water. The reflected moon bore a different symbol now. As he watched, that faded, and a third set of blood-lines curved across that pitted surface.

Men and women passed him, dispersing now that the pig’s execution was done. He searched their faces frantically for some sign they saw his bloody moon; they – in spruce city livery, open to the heat – talked one with another and didn’t glance above the rooftops.

When he looked back, and again to the sky, the moon was clean.

‘’Prentice, where’s your workshop?’

The man had obviously asked twice. Lucas came to himself and, seeing the man wearing the silk overalls of a carpenter, assumed the extreme politeness of one unfamiliar with such people.

‘I have no workshop, messire,’ he said. ‘I’m a student, and new to your city. Can you tell me, please, where I might find the University of Crime?’

Not far away, a gashed palm bleeds. The hand is cupped. Blood collects, trickles away into life-line and heart-line and between fingers, but enough pools to be used.

The moon’s face is reflected into a circular mirror, twelve hand-spans in width. This mirror, set an a spindle and in a half-hoop wooden frame, can be turned to face the room’s ceiling, or its east, or (as now) its west window.

Through the open window comes the scent of dust, heat, fur, and boiled cabbage. Through the open window comes in the last fading image of the morning moon.

With the tip of a white bird’s feather, dipped into the blood, she draws with rapid calligraphic strokes. She draws on the mirror glass: on the reflected image of the moon’s sea-spotted face.

She draws, urgently, a message that will be understood by those others who watch the moon with knowledge.

White sun fell into the great court, on to sandstone walls as brown as old wax. Sweeping staircases went up at eater-corners of the yard to the university’s interior, and Lucas thought of eyes behind the glazed, sharply pointed windows, and straightened. He stood with two dozen other cadets under the sun that would, by noon, be killing, and now was a test of endurance.

‘My name’, said the bearded man pacing slowly along the lines of young men and women, ‘is Candia.’

He spoke normally, but his voice carried to bounce off the sandstone masonry walls. His hair was ragged blond, tied back with a strip of scarlet cloth; he wore boots and loose buff-coloured breeches, and a jerkin slashed with scarlet. Lucas put him at thirty; upped the estimate when the man passed him.

‘Candia,’ the man repeated. Under the lank hair, his face was pale and his eyes dark; he had an air of permanent injured surprise. ‘I’m one of your tutors. You’ve each been invited to attend the University of Crime; I don’t expect you to be stupid. Since you’ve been in the university buildings for an hour, I don’t expect any one of you to have purses left.’

Candia paused, then pointed at three cadets in rapid succession. ‘You, you and you – fall out. You’ve just told a pickpocket where you keep your purse.’

Lucas blinked.

‘Right.’ The man put his fists on his hips. ‘How many of you now don’t know whether you have your purses or not? Tell the truth … Right. You four go and stand with them. You—’

He pointed back without looking; Lucas found himself targeted.

‘– Lucas.’ Candia turned. ‘You’ve got your purse? And you know that without feeling for it, and giving it away, like these sad cases? Tell me how.’

Surprised at how naturally he could answer the impertinent question, Lucas said: ‘Muscle-tension. It’s on a calf-strap.’

‘Good. Good.’ The blond man paused a calculated moment, and added: ‘As long as, now, you change it.’

He barely waited for the ripple of laughter; flicked his head so that hair and rag-band flopped back, and spoke to them all.

‘You’ll learn how to take a purse from a calf-strap so that the owner doesn’t know it’s gone missing. You’ll learn about marked cards, barred cater-trey dice, the mirror-trick, and the several ways of stopping someone without quite killing them.’

Candia’s gaze travelled along the rows of faces. ‘You’ll learn to conjure with coins – get them, breed them, lend them out and steal them back. There are no rules in the university. If you have anything still your own at the end of the first term, then well done. I didn’t.’

He allowed himself a brief, tailored grin; most of the cadets grinned back.

‘You’ll learn about scaling walls and breaking windows, about tunnels and fire-powder, and when to bribe a magistrate and when to stage a last-minute gallows-step confession. If you live to learn, you’ll learn it. Now …’

Heat shimmered the air over the flagstones. Lucas felt it beat up on his cheeks, dazzle his water-rimmed eyes. His new cotton shirt was rubbing his neck raw, and when the shadow crossed him he was conscious only of relief. He glanced up casually.

The blond man raised his head. Then he took his hands from his hips, and went down on one knee on the hot stone, his head still raised.

Lucas gazed upwards into the dazzling sky.

He glimpsed the lichen-covered brick chimneys, wondered why a bole of black ivy was allowed to twine around one stack, followed it up as it thickened – no, it should grow thicker downwards, towards the root – and then saw the clawed feet gripping the chimney’s cope, where that tail joined a body.

The sky ran like water, curdling a yellowish brown. Lucas felt flagstones crack against his knees as he fell forward, and a coldness that was somehow thick began to force its way down his throat. He gagged. The air rustled with dryness, potent and electric as the swarming of locusts.

Wings cracked like ship’s sails, leathery brown against the shadowed noon.

It clung to the brickwork, bristle-tail wrapped firmly round the chimney-stack, wings half-unfolded and flicked out for balance. The great haunches rose up to its shoulders as it crouched, and it brought the peaks of great ribbed wings together at its flaking breast, and Lucas saw that the bat-wings had fingers and thumb at their central joint.

All this was in a split second, reconstructed in later memory. Lucas clung to the other cadets, they to him, no shame amongst them: each of them having looked up once into the great scaled and toothed face of the daemon poised above them.

A fair-haired girl of no more than fifteen stood up from the group. She began to walk towards the iron gates. Candia’s gaze flicked from her to the roof-tops; when he saw no movement there, he relaxed. The girl paused, turned her thin face up to the sky and, as if she saw something in the gargoyle-face, slipped out of the side-gate and ran off into the city streets. Her footsteps echoed in the quiet.

The sky curdled.

That same gagging chill silenced Lucas’s voice. He coughed, spat; and then the heat of the sun took him like a slap. He winced with the feeling that something too vast had just passed above him.

The blond man rose to his feet, dusting the knees of his buff breeches.

‘Why did you let her go?’ Lucas demanded.

Candia’s chin went up. He looked down his nose at Lucas. ‘She was commanded. The city proverb is: We have strange masters.’

His gaze lingered on the gate. Then, with a final flick at buff-coloured cloth, Candia said: ‘You’ll all attend lectures, you’ll attend seminars; most of all you’ll attend the practical classes. Punishments for absence vary from stocks to whipping. We’re not here to waste your time. Don’t waste mine.’

Lucas rubbed his bare arms, shuddering despite the morning heat.

‘First class is at matins. That’s now, so move … You four,’ the blond man said, as an afterthought. ‘Garin, Sophonisba, Rafi and Lucas. Accommodation can’t fit you in. Here’s addresses for lodgings.’

Lucas paused over his slip of paper. The other three cadets wandered away slowly, comparing notes.

As Candia was about to go, Lucas said amiably: ‘I don’t care to live out of the university. Fetch the Proctor.’

Candia shot a glance over Lucas’s shoulder, Lucas turned his head, and the man cuffed him hard enough across the face to send him cannoning into the sandstone wall.

‘You address tutors as “Reverend Master”,’ the man said loudly, bent to grab his arm and pull him up; winked at Lucas, and added: ‘Do you want everyone to know who you are?’

Lucas watched him walk away, the cat-spring step of the man; opened his mouth to call – and thought better of it. He read the printed slip of paper:

Mstrss Evelian by the signe of the Clock upon Carver streete neare Clocke-mill. Students warned, never to leave the Nineteenth District between the University and the Cathedral. And then, after the print, in a scrawling hand: Unless commanded by those greater than they.

Candia pushed the cathedral door open and moved rapidly inside, shutting the heavy wood smoothly behind him. He stopped to quieten his breathing, and to adjust to the dimness. Light the colour of honey and new leaves fell on to the smooth flagstones, from the green-and-gold stained-glass windows.

The blond man’s nostrils flared at the incense-smell: musky as leaf-mould and fungus. He padded slowly down between the pillars towards the altar, and his boots, practised, made no sound. He saw no-one in all that towering interior space. The pillars that were carved of a silver-grey stone to resemble tall beeches concealed no novices.

Once he froze, reached out to a pillar to catch his balance and remain utterly still. The stone was carved into a semblance of roots, with here and there a carved beetle or caterpillar, as above where the carved branches met together there were stone birds. The sound (if there had been a sound) was not repeated.

Coming to the altar, Candia settled one hip up on it, resting against the great polished and swirl-veined block of oak. He listened. Then he drew out his dagger, and began to clean casually and delicately under his fingernails.

He swore; stuck his finger in his mouth and sucked it.

‘Master Candia?’

A man stood up in the shadow of a pillar. White hair caught a dapple of green-gold light. He dropped a scrubbing-brush back into a galvanized-iron bucket; the noise echoed through all the cathedral’s arches.

Candia straightened up off the altar. ‘My lord Bishop,’ he acknowledged.

The Bishop of the Trees came forward, wringing water from one sleeve of his robe. The robe was full-length, dark green, embroidered with a golden tree whose roots circled the hem and whose branches reached out along each arm. The embroidery showed threadbare; the cloth much worn and darned.

‘The most recent intake – is there anyone?’ He paused to touch the wooden altar with thin strong fingers, mutter a word.

‘No. No-one. Four from Nineteenth District, nine from docklands and the factories; the rest from Third, Eighth and Thirty-First Districts. Three princes from the eastern continent incognito – two of whom have the nerve to assume I won’t know that.’

‘None disguised? Scholar-Soldiers travel disguised; one might be waiting to test you.’

Now Candia laughed. ‘One of the acolytes came and took a girl. Just an acolyte terrified all of them. No, there’s no Scholar-Soldier amongst them.’

‘And this was our last hope of it. We can’t wait for the Invisible College’s help indefinitely.’

White hair curled down over the Bishop’s collar. Seven decades left his face not so much lined as creased, folds of skin running from his beaked nose to the corners of his mouth. His eyes were clear as a younger man’s, grey and mobile, catching the cathedral’s dim light.

‘Are you willing to risk waiting now, young Candia, with no assurance our messages have even reached them?’

Candia glanced at the washed flagstones (where the traces of scrawled graffiti were visible despite the Bishop’s work) and then back at the man. ‘So events force us.’

‘To go to The Spagyrus.’

‘Yes. I think we must.’ Candia put the knife back into its sheath at his belt, fumbling it. He drew a breath, looked at his shaking hands, half-smiled. ‘Go before me and I’ll join you – if the faculty see me with a Tree-priest, that’s my lectureship lost.’

He followed the Bishop back down the central aisle, through green light and stone. Dust drifted. The man picked up a broad-brimmed hat from a pew. Then he opened the great arched doors to the noon sun, which had been triple-locked before Candia chose to pass through.

‘You and your students’, he said, ‘make a deal too free with us—’

‘I send them here, Theo. It’s good practice.’

‘I was a fool ever to advise you to apprentice yourself to that place!’

‘So my family say to this day.’

The Bishop snorted. He wiped a lock of white hair back with the sleeve of his robe, and clapped the hat onto his head. ‘I had word from the Night Council.’

‘And there was a waste of words and breath!’

‘Oh, truly; but what would you?’ The Bishop shrugged.

Candia smelt the dank cellar-smell of the cathedral’s incense, all the fine hairs on his neck hackling. He shook himself, scratched, and moved to stand where he would not be visible when the door opened.

‘You take underground ways. I’ll follow above. We’re late, if we’re to get there by noon.’

Lucas put the address-slip in his pocket and strode across the yard, the side of his cuffed face burning.

A last student waited, leaning up against the flaking iron gate, hands thrust deep into the pockets of a brown greatcoat two sizes too large, and too heavy for the heat.

Either a young man or a young woman: the student had straight black hair falling to the coat’s upturned collar and flopping into dark eyes. A Katayan, the student’s thin wiry tail curved under the flap of the brown coat, tufted tip sketching circles in the dust.

‘I can take you to Carver Street.’ The voice was light and sharp.

‘And take my purse on the way?’ Lucas came up to the gate.

The student shifted herself upright with a push of one shoulder, and the coat fell open to show a bony young woman’s body in a black dress. Patches of sweat darkened the underarms. Her thin fine-furred tail was mostly black, but dappled with white. Her feet were bare.

‘I lodge there, too. By Clock-mill. The woman in charge – um.’ The young woman kissed the tip of a dirty finger and sketched on the air. ‘Beautiful! Forty if she’s a day. Those little wrinkles at the corners of her eyes?’

The smell of boiled cabbage and newly laundered cloth permeated the narrow street; voices through open windows sounded from midday meals. Lucas fell into step beside the young woman. She had an erratic loping stride. He judged her seventeen or eighteen; a year or so younger than his calendar age.

‘That’s Mistress Evelian?’

‘I’ve been there a week and I’m in love.’ She kept her hands in her pockets as she walked, and threw her head back as she laughed, short fine hair flopping about her ears.

‘And you’re a student?’

At that she stopped, swung round, head cocked a little to one side as she looked him up and down.

‘No, you don’t. I’m not to be collected – not a specimen. You take your superior amusement and shove it up your anus sideways!’

‘Watch who you’re speaking to!’ Lucas snarled.

‘Now, that’s a question: who am I speaking to?’

Lucas shrugged. ‘You heard the Reverend Master read the roll. Lucas is the name.’

‘Yes, and I heard him afterwards.’

‘That’s my business—’

‘This is a short-cut,’ the student said. She dived down a narrow passage, between high stone houses. Lucas put one boot in the kennel’s filth as he followed. He called ahead. Her coat and tail were just visible, whipping round the far corner of the alley.

The light voice came back: ‘Down here!’

As Lucas left the alley she stopped, halfway over a low brick wall, to beckon him, and then slid down the far side. Lucas heard her grunt. He leaned his arms on the wall. The young woman was sitting in the dust, legs sprawled, coat spread around her, wiry tail twitching.

‘Damn coat.’ She stood up, beating at the dust. ‘It’s the only thing that makes this filthy climate bearable, but it gets in my way!’

‘You’re cold?’

‘Where I come from, this is midwinter.’ She offered him her hand to shake, across the wall. ‘Zar-bettu-zekigal, of South Katay. No-one here seems to manage a civilized language. I’ll consent to Zaribet; not Zari. That’s vomitable.’

Lucas grinned evilly. ‘Honoured, Zari.’

Zar-bettu-zekigal gave a huff of exasperation that sent her fine hair flying. She crossed the small yard to a building and pushed open a studded iron door. It was cold inside, and dank. Wide steps wound down, illuminated by brass lamps. The gas-jets hissed in yellow glass casings, giving a warm light.

The side-walls were packed with bones.

Niches and galleries had been left in the masonry – and cut into natural stone, Lucas saw as they descended. The gas-jet light shone on walls spidered white with nitre, and on black-brown bones packed in close together: thigh and femur and rib-bones woven into a mass, and skulls set solidly into the gaps. Shadows danced in the ragged circles of their eyes.

When the steps opened out into a vast low-vaulted gallery, Lucas saw that all the walls were stacked with human bones; each partition wall had its own brick-built niche. The gas-lights hissed in the silence.

‘Takes us under Nineteenth District’s Aust quarter. Too far, going round.’ Zar-bettu-zekigal’s voice rang, no quieter than before. The tuft of her black tail whisked at her bare ankles. She pushed the fine hair out of her eyes. ‘I like it here.’

Lucas reached out and brushed her black hair. It felt surprisingly coarse under his fingers. His knuckles rubbed her cheek, close to her long fine lashes. Her skin was warmly white. Practised, he let his hand slide along her jaw-line to cup the back of her neck and tilt her head up; his other hand slid into her coat and cupped one of her small breasts.

She linked both hands over his wrist, so that she was resting her chin on her hands and looking up at him. One side of her mouth quirked up. ‘What I like, you haven’t got.’

Lucas stood back, and ruffled the young woman’s hair as if she had been a child. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’ Her solemnity danced.

‘This really is a short-cut?’

‘Oh, right.’ She stepped back, hands in pockets again, swirling the coat round herself, breath misting the cold air. ‘Oh, right. You’re a king’s son. Used to stable-girls and servants; poor tykes!’

Lucas opened his mouth to put her in her place, remembered his chosen anonymity, and then jumped as the black-tipped tail curved up to tap his bare arm.

‘I recognize it,’ Zar-bettu-zekigal said ruefully. ‘I’m a king’s daughter. The King of South Katay. Last time we were counted, there were nine hundred and seventy-three of us. Mother is Autumn Wife Eighty-One. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen Father close to. They sent me here’, she added, ‘to train as a Kings’ Memory.’

Lucas took her chin between his thumb and finger, tipping her face up to his, and his facetious remark was never spoken, seeing those brown eyes turned sepia with an intensity of concentration. He took his hand away quickly.

‘Damn,’ Lucas said, ears burning, ‘damn, so you are; you are a Memory. We brought one in, once, for the Great Treaty. Damn. Honour and respect to you, lady.’

‘Ah, will you look at him! He’s pissing his britches at the very thought. Do you wonder why I don’t shout about it—?’

Her ringing voice cut off; the silence startled Lucas. Zar-bettu-zekigal’s eyes widened.

Lucas, turning, saw a cloaked figure at one of the wall-niches, and a beast’s hand halted midway in reaching to pick up a femur.

Zar-bettu-zekigal’s last words echoed, breaking the stranger’s concentration. A hood was pushed back from a sharp black-furred muzzle. Gleaming black eyes summed up the young man and woman, and one of the delicate ears twitched.

The Rat was lean-bodied and sleek, standing taller than Lucas by several inches. He wore a plain sword-belt and rapier, and his free hand (bony, clawed; longer-fingered than a human’s) rested on the hilt. In the other hand he carried a small sack.

‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.

Steam and bitter coal-dust fouled the air. The slatted wooden floor of the carriage let in the chill as well as the stink, city air cold at this depth; and the Bishop of the Trees gathered the taste on his tongue and spat.

Spittle shot between his booted feet, hit the tunnel-floor that dazzled under the carriage’s passing brilliance.

The wooden seat was hard, polished by years of use, and he slipped from side to side as the carriage jolted, rocking uphill after the engine, straining at the incline. The Bishop of the Trees stared out through the window. Up ahead, light from another carriage danced in the vaulted tunnel. Coal-sparks spat.

The window-glass shone black with the darkness of the tunnel beyond it; and silver-paint graffiti curlicued across the surface. Theodoret’s gaze was sardonic, unsacramental.

A handful of young men banged their feet on the benches at the far end of the carriage. The Bishop of the Trees caught one youth’s gaze. He heard another of them yell.

First two, then all of them clattered down the length of the empty carriage.

‘Ahhh …’ A long exhale of disgust. A short-haired boy in expensive linen overalls, the carpenters’ Rule embroidered in gold thread on the front. He grinned. Over his shoulder, to a boy enough like him to be his brother, he said: ‘It’s only a Tree-priest. Ei, priest, cleaned up the shit in your place yet?’

‘No, fuck, won’t do him no good,’ the other boy put in. ‘The other guilds’ll come calling, do more of the same.’

Theodoret loosened the buckle of his thick leather belt, prepared to slide it free and whip the metal across the boy’s hands; but neither youth drew their belt-knives – they just leaned heavily over the back of his seat to either side of him.

‘Ei, you learned yet?’

Tear your fuckin’ place down round you!’

‘Tear it down!’ Spittle flew from the lips of the short-haired boy, spotting his silk overalls. ‘You didn’t build it. Fuck, when did any of you parasite Tree-priests build? You too good to work for our masters!’

‘You make our quarter look sick,’ a brown-skinned boy said. The last of the four, a gangling youth in overalls and silk shirt, grinned aimlessly, and hacked his heel against the wooden slats. The rocking car sent him flying against the dark boy; both sparred and collapsed in raucous laughter.

‘Fuck, don’t bother him. Ei! He’s praying!’

The Bishop of the Trees looked steadily past each of the youths, focusing on a spot some indeterminate space away. Anger flicked him. Theodoret stretched hand and fingers in an automatic sign of the Branches.

‘If you knew’, he said, ‘what I pray for—’

He tensed, having broken the cardinal rule, having admitted his existence; but the gangling youth laughed, with a hollow hooting that made the other three stagger.

‘Aw, say you, he’s not worth bothering – fuck, we’re here, aren’t we?’

The four of them scrambled for the carriage-door, shoving, deliberately blocking each other; the youngest and the gangling one leaping between the slowing car and the platform. The door slammed closed in Theodoret’s face. He opened it and stepped down after them on to the cobbled platform.

He grunted, head down, bullish. Briefly, he centred the anger in himself: let it coalesce, and then flow out through the branching channels of vital energy … His breathing slowed and came under control. The colours of his inner vision returned to green and gold.

He walked through the great vaulted cavern. Sound thundered from stationary engines, pistons driving. The hiss of steam shattered the air. Vast walls went up to either side: millions of small bricks stained black with soot, and overgrown here and there with white lichen.

Water dripped from the walls, and the air was sweatily warm.

Somewhere at the end of the platform, voices yelped; and he quickened his steps, but saw nothing at the exit. He stomped up the stairs to ground-level. A vaulted roof arched, scaled and glittering, that might once have been steel and glass but now was too soot-darkened to let in light. Torches burned smokily in wall-cressets.

‘Lord Bishop?’

Candia leaned indolently up against the iron stair-rail.

‘I was delayed. The lower lines are closed off,’ Theodoret said.

‘Already?’

‘I’ve always said that would be the first signal. Have you asked to see …?’

Candia flashed him a knowingly insouciant grin. ‘As we agreed. The Twelfth Decan – The Spagyrus. I’ve had dealings with him.’

Theodoret grunted.

As the Bishop of the Trees followed Candia out of the station hall, he passed the group of young men. Three crowded round the fourth, the youngest, whose nose streamed blood. The gangling youth swore at the blond man. Candia smiled serenely.

Outside the brick-and-glass cupola heat streamed down. Theodoret sweated. Pilings stood up out of the tepid sluggish water all along the canal-bank. The tide was far out, and the mud stank. Blue and grey, all hardly touched by the sun’s rise to noon.

The Bishop knelt, resting his hand on the can