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The White Crow, one-time Soldier-Scholar of the Invisible College and a practioner of Hermetic science and magic, and Baltazar Casaubon, architect and lover, a man not too particular about his personal hygiene, are two of Mary Gentle's finest creations. The worlds they stride across range from the Renaissance city where aristocratic rats rule the human servant class, to a near-future London where chaos is come again. They are two of the most powerful players in the games of magic and politics, and the most colourful. This volume brings together three brilliantly imaginative, powerful and disturbing tales - Rats and Gargoyles, The Architecture of Desire and Left to His Own Devices - and the linked short fiction and confirms Mary Gentle as one of the foremost writers of dark and visionary fantasy.

In a terraced city at the heart of the world, humans are mere underlings of the arrogant Rat-Lords. Men and women are confined to certain districts of the city, while the Rats are restricted to others by their own masters, the Decans. Incarnate in living rock, the thirty-six Lords of Heaven and Hell impose their divine will over Rats and humans alike through gargoyle acolytes, who in their hundreds of thousands wait to swoop down and devour any who oppose the god-daemons.

And opposition is growing.... For generations uncounted, human slaves were forced to build the mountainous Fane, but now the long-held dream of raising their own lost Temple has spurred the builders to revolt. Forbidden the knowledge to build for themselves, they plot to uncover the Masonic wisdom that has been lost for millennia - secrets that will free them from their rulers once and for all. But they need access to parts of the city denied them, and so they strike a deal with the Rat-Priest Plessiez, who has a grand scheme of his own.

Into this conspiracy step Prince Lucas of Candover, a student at the University of Crime, and no man's slave; Zari, a young Kadayan woman who is destined to become the living Memory of all that follows; and the White Crow, a woman whose powers are far greater than anyone suspects.

Two powerful magicians -- the White Crow and her husband, Lord-Architect Casaubon -- become embroiled in a deadly conflict of politics and magic as the opposing forces of Queen Carola and Protector-General Olivia battle for control of seventeenth-century London.

SF novel (alternate history of London) with The White Crow and Causaubon, characters from Rats & Gargoyles and The Architecture of Desire.

Contents:

• Left To His Own Devices
• Black Motley
• What God Abandoned
• The Road To Jerusalem