Rats and Gargoyles Read Online Free PDF Page A

that it could not be under better circumstances,
heir of Candover. Oh–your uncle the Ambassador is an old acquaintance. Present
my regards to him, when you see him."
    Zar-bettu-zekigal nodded to Lucas, thrust her hands
deep in her greatcoat pockets and walked jauntily up the steps at the side of
the black Rat.
    "When you’re ready, messire."
    Charnay’s heavy hand fell on Lucas’s shoulder.
     

    As always, the height of the enclosed space jolted
him. Candia reached to grip the brass rail as they were ushered out onto a
balcony. The sheer walls curved away and around. Twilight rustled, shifted. The
darkness behind his eyelids turned scarlet, gold, black. A stink of hot oil and
rotten flesh caught in the back of his throat.
    One of the servants clapped his hands together
twice, slowly. Sharp echoes skittered across the distant walls.
    A kind of unlight began to grow, shadowless,
peripheral. Candia’s eyes smarted. In a sight that was not sight, he began to
see darkness: the midnight tracery of black marble, pillars and arches and
domes. Vaulting hung like dark stalactites. A rustling and a movement haunted
the interiors of the ceiling-vaults. The gazes of the acolytes that roosted
there prickled across his skin.
    Pain flushed and faded along nerve-endings as a
greater gaze opened and took him in.
    Hulking to engage all space between the
down-distant floor and the arcing vaults, the god-daemon lay. Black basalt
flanks and shoulders embodied darkness. Behind the Decan the halls opened to
vaster spaces, themselves only the beginning of the way into the true heart of
the Fane, and the basalt-feathered wings of the god-daemon soared up to shade mortal sight from any vision of
that interior.
    Between the Decan’s outstretched paws, and on
platforms and balconies and loggias, servants worked to His orders: sifting,
firing, tending liquids in glass bains-marie, alembics and stills; hauling
trolleys between the glowing mouths of ovens. Molten metal ran between vats.
    "My honor to you, Divine One." Candia’s voice fell
flatly into the air.
    "Little Candia . . ." A sound from huge delicate
lips: deep enough to vibrate the tiled floor of the balcony, carried on carrion
breath.
    Lids of living rock slid up. Eyes molten-black with
the unlight of the Fane shone, in chthonic humor, upon Candia and the Bishop.
The grotesque head lifted slightly.
    A bulging pointed muzzle overhung The Spagyrus’
lower jaw. Pointed tusks jutted up, nestling against the muzzle beside nostrils
that were crusted yellow and twitched continually. Jagged tusks hung down from
the upper jaw, half-hidden by flowing bristles.
    "Purification, sublimation, calcination,
conjunction . . . and no nearer the prima materia, the First Matter."
    Down at cell-level, the voice vibrated in Candia’s
head. He stared up into the face of the god-daemon.
    The narrow muzzle flared to a wide head.
Cheek-bones glinted, scale-covered; and bristle-tendrils swept back, surrounding
the eyes, to two small pointed and naked ears.
    Theodoret leaned his head back. "Decans practicing
the Great Art? Dangerous, my lord, dangerous. What if you should discover the
true alchemical Elixir that, being perfect in itself, induces perfection in all
it touches? Perhaps, being gods, it would transmute you to a perfect evil. Or
perfect virtue."
    The great head lowered. Candia saw his image and
the Bishop’s as absences of unlight on the obsidian surfaces of those eyes.
    "We are such incarnations of perfection already."
Amusement in the Decan’s resonant tones. "It is not that alchemical
transformation that I seek, but something quite other. Candia, whom have you
brought me?"
    "Theodoret, my lord, Bishop of the Trees."

‘ Purification, sublimation, calcination,
conjunction . . . and no nearer the prima materia . . .’ Reconstructed from
an illustration in Apocrypha Mundus Subterranus by Miriam Sophia, pub.
Maximillian of Prague, 1589 (now lost)

 
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