The Drawing of the Dark

Page 38

'So did I.' Aurelianus squinted out over the dark rooftops. 'And maybe I do. Maybe Ibrahim has got the Vatican copy... or hopes somehow to get mine.' He shook his white head thoughtfully. 'As soon as I heard of the shift it occurred to me - it's the Janissaries, the troops conscripted from among the children of conquered Christians...'
'At least a thousand baptized souls.'
'Right.'
'Look, he's probably got spies in the city - it may very well be that he doesn't yet have a copy of Didius' Loathesome Whatnot, and is counting on having yours stolen.' The sorcerer stared at him blankly, so Duffy went on. 'Isn't it obvious? Destroy your copy.'
Aurelianus looked away, frowning deeply. 'I'm... not ready to do that.'
The Irishman felt a wave of pity and horror. 'Don't even consider it, man! There must be clean strategies - and even if we do lose Vienna, you've said the main thing is having the Fisher King alive. You and he could escape through those tunnels the Dark Birds mentioned, and set up for a better stand somewhere else. The Turks can hardly come any further into Europe this season.'
'Quite possibly true, Brian, but how can I know? With the right kind of sorcerous aid maybe they could come further, maybe much further. Maybe the Fisher King will die if he doesn't get a draught of the Dark - he'll certainly get no better. Hell, it's not hard to do the honorable thing when you can see, up ahead, how it is going to turn out. Damn this blindness,' he hissed, pounding a fist against the stone, 'and damn Ibrahim, and damn that old painter.'
Duffy blinked. 'What old painter?'
'What? Oh, Gustav Vogel, of course. He's clairvoyant, as I've told you, and he isn't allied to the presently occluded old magic. If I could have got that sanctimonious old bastard to do a few more visionary paintings, I might have been able to see what is coming, and able to forget this.. .terrible move. But the old wretch was afraid of me - may the Janissaries use his head for a cannon ball! - and in the last two years he has done nothing.'
'That's true,' agreed Duffy with a sympathetic nod. 'Aside from that crazy Death of the Archangel Michael on his wall, I guess he hasn't.'
Aurelianus emitted a choked scream, and the telescope
spun away over the rail. 'What, damn you? Llyr and Mananan! Such a work exists?' He was on his feet, waving his fists. 'Why didn't you tell me this before, fool? You are Michael the Archangel to him - don't you remember the portrait you sat for, that led me to you? Michael is the only Christian identity he can put to what you are. Idiot, don't you see the importance of this? This old artist has clairvoyant, and likely prophetic, powers. And he's done a picture, I gather, of your death. There may very well be a clue in it to the outcome of this battle.'
From below came the muted crash of the telescope hitting the pavement. 'Oh?' said Duffy, a little stiffly. 'Whether or not it shows my corpse surrounded by bloody-sworded Turks, you mean?'
'Well, yes, roughly. There would be a lot of other, more esoteric, indications to look for as well. But haven't you seen this picture, at least? What is it of?'
The Irishman shrugged apologetically. 'I seem to recall a lot of figures. To tell you the truth, I have never really looked. But if you're right about all this, I hope it's a picture of an incredibly old man, surrounded by hundreds of friends, dying moderately drunk in bed.'
Visibly controlling his impatience, the wizard took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. 'Let's go and see,' he said.
They clattered down the stairs and set out across the city at a trot that brought them to the old Schottengasse boarding house in ten minutes, and left Aurelianus gasping
• asthmatically for breath. 'No,' he croaked when Duffy indicated a bench to sit down on in the entry hail. 'Onward!'
They had not brought a light, and so had to grope and stumble up the dark stairs. For a moment Duffy was nervous about having the lake-vision again, but then he sensed that in some way things had gone beyond that. It was not a reassuring thought.
When they reached the third floor landing Duffy himself was panting heavily, and Aurelianus was incapable of speech, 'though he managed jerkily to wave one arm in furious query. Duffy nodded, found Gustav Vogel's door by touch and pounded on it.
There was no answer or sound of any kind from within. The Irishman knocked again, louder than before, and several people opened other doors in the darkness to complain - Aurelianus summoned enough breath to damn them and order them back into their holes - but Vogel's room was silent.
'Break it,' the wizard gasped, 'down'
Duffy wearily stepped back two paces, which was all that was possible in the corridor, and leaped at the painter's door, curling his shoulder around to take the impact. The door sprang out of the frame as if it had merely been propped there, and it and the Irishman crashed into the room, overturning shabby furniture.
There was a lamp, turned down to a dim glow, on a table in the corner; when he got dizzily to his feet he saw Epiphany sitting beside it, her oddly unstartled face streaked with tears. He took a step closer and saw the body stretched out face-up on the floor - it was Gustav Vogel, and from the look of him he had died, perhaps a week earlier, of starvation.
'Good God,' he murmured. 'Oh, Epiphany, I -'He's dead, Brian,' she whispered. She tilted an empty glass up to her lips, and the Irishman wondered how many times she had done it, and when she'd notice that it was empty. 'I stopped bringing him food, because I was always drunk and couldn't bear to face him. It wasn't the boy's fault. It was my fault, and your fault, and mainly-' she looked up and turned pale as Aurelianus lurched in through the broken doorway, 'it was that monster's fault! Has he come to gloat?'
'What. . .is this?' gasped Aurelianus. 'What's happened?'
Epiphany's answering yell started as words but quickly became a shriek. She got up from the table, snatched a long knife from under her apron, and with surprising speed rushed at the exhausted sorcerer.
Duffy stepped forward to stop her -
- and then abruptly found himself standing at the other side of the room, out of breath. Aurelianus was leaning against the wall, and Epiphany, he noticed after glancing around, was huddled in a motionless heap in the corner. He looked back at Aurelianus.
The wizard answered the frantic question that burned in the Irishman's eyes. 'It was Arthur,' be said in an unsteady voice. 'Seeing me in peril, he.. .took over for a moment. Caught her and tossed her aside. I don't know -Duffy crossed the room, crouched, and rolled the old
woman over. The knife hilt stood out of her side, with no metal visible between the hilt and the cloth of her dress. There was very little blood. He bent down to listen for breath, and couldn't hear any. There was no perceptible pulse under her jaw.
His whole body felt cold and empty and ringing like struck metal, and his mouth was dry. 'My God, Piff,' he was saying reflexively, not even bearing himself, 'did you mean to? You didn't mean to, did you?'
Aurelianus pushed himself away from the wall and caught the vacant-eyed Irishman by the shoulder. 'The picture,' he snarled, cutting through Duffy's babbling, 'where's the picture?'
After a few a moments Duffycarefully lowered Epiphany's head to the ground. 'Much has been lost, and there is much yet to lose,' he said softly, wondering where he'd heard that and what it meant. Dazed, he stood up while Aurelianus seized the lamp and turned up the wick.
The Irishman led him to the wall. 'Here,' he said, waving at it. He didn't look at it himself - be just stared numbly back at the two bodies.
Several seconds passed, then Aurelianus said in a strangled voice, 'This?'
Duffy turned, and followed the wizard's gaze. The wall was solid black from end to end, from top to bottom. The artist had painstakingly added so many fine penstrokes of shading and texturing, his concern for detail growing as his sight diminished, that he had left no tiniest strip or dot of plaster uncovered. The Death of the Archangel Michael, which had, the last time Duffy had seen it, seemed to be taking place in deep twilight, was now shrouded in the unredeemed darkness of starless, moon-less night.
Aurelianus was looking at him now. 'He,' Duffy said helplessly, 'he just kept adding to it.'
The wizard gave the wall another minute of silent, useless scrutiny, and then turned away. 'You're still a cipher.'
He led the way out of the room and the Irishman automatically followed him.
Duffy's mind kept replaying for him the moment when he'd rolled Epiphany's body over. Epiphany is dead, he told himself wonderingly as they made their way down the dark stairs; and soon you'll become aware that that's one whole chamber in your head that you can close up and lock, because there won't ever be anything in it anymore. She's dead. You came all the way back from Venice to kill her.
They walked together, without speaking, until they came to the Tuchlauben; there Aurelianus turned north toward the Zimmermann Inn while Duffy continued on in the direction of the barracks and the gap, though it was still well short of midnight.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
At long last the waxing glow of dawn divided the irregularly edged paleness of the gap from the high blackness of the leaning walls; what had two hours ago been no more than three stippled lines of bright orange dots in the dark could now be seen to be three ranks of silent, kneeling harquebusiers along the crest of the rubble mound. Behind them, though still outside the new barricade, stood two more companies apiece of landsknechten and Reichshilfe troops, motionless except for the occasional bow of & head to blow on a dimming matchcord.
One of the companies along the mound was Eilif's, and Duffy was crouched in the center of the front line. He unclamped his hand from the gunstock and absently stretched out the fingers. It seemed to him that in the depths of his mind a bomb had been detonated, which, though too far down to be directly perceptible, had blown loose great stagnant bubbles of memory to come wobbling up to the surface; and he thanked God for even this faintest first light, for it restored to him external things to focus his attention on. During the last five hours he had been staring into a cold blackness as absolute as Gustav Vogel's final drawing.
The faint click of metal on stone, as one of the sentries up on the wall grounded his pike, finally snapped Duffy completely out of his terrible night-meditations. He breathed deeply the chilly dawn breeze and tried to sharpen his senses.
The man to his right leaned toward him. 'You couldn't get me upon those walls,' he whispered. 'The mines have got them tottering.'
The Irishman raised his hand in a be-silent gesture. Damn this chattering idiot, Duffy thought - did I hear another sound? From the shadowy plain? He peered suspiciously along the barrel of his propped-up harquebus. Every patch of deeper gloom on the plain beyond the white chalk line seemed to his tired eyes to seethe with wormy shapes, but he decided finally that he could see no real motion. He sat back, shivering.
Several long minutes passed, during which the gray light brightened by slow degrees. Through carefully cupped hands Duffy peered at his slowmatch, and was relieved to see that the dawn dampness had not dimmed its red glow. His mail coif was itching his scalp, and from time to time he instinctively tried to scratch his head, forgetting that he had on a riveted steel salade.
'I sure hope that hunchback's kept his cannon-primings dry,' muttered the man on Duffy's right again. 'I think-'
'Shut up, can't you?' Duffy whispered. Then he stiffened; he'd seen the gray light glint on metal a few hundred yards away, then at several points along a dark line. He opened his mouth to whisper a warning to the other men, but he could already hear the rustle as they flexed chilled joints and looked to their powder and matches. There was a low whistle from atop the warped wall, showing that the sentry too had seen the activity.
The Irishman screwed his match into the firing pin, made sure his pan was filled with powder, and then looked along the barrel at the furtively advancing line. His heart was pounding, his fingertips tingled and he was breathing a little fast. I'll give one shot, he thought - two at the most, if they're slow in getting over the obstruction fence - and then I'm flinging this machine down and using my sword. I just can't seem to feel really in control with a firearm.
Then there was the muted drum-roll of boots on dirt as the Turks broke into a run - they're akinji, Duffy realized, the lightly armed Turkish infantry; thank God it isn't the Janissaries, whom half the men expected to shift back to this side during the night. The man beside Duffy was panting and scrabbling at the trigger of his gun. 'Don't shoot yet, fool,' the Irishman rasped. 'Want your ball to drop short? Wait till they reach the chalk line.'
In perhaps thirty seconds they reached it, and the gap in the wall lit up briefly as the first line of harquebuses fired, followed a moment later by a flame-gushing blast of gravel and stones from one of the culverins on the battlements. The front of the advancing akinji tide was ripped apart, scimitars flying from nerveless fingers as torn bodies tumbled and rolled across the dirt, but their maniacal fellows pressed on without a pause, over a wide segment of the fence that had been blown down. A rank of standing harquebusiers fired into the Turkish force, and then the akinji were mounting the slight slope below the wall.
There was clearly no time to reload, so Duffy tossed his still-sparking gun aside and, standing up, drew his rapier and dagger. I wish the light were better, he thought. 'Two steps back, my company!' he called. 'Don't get separated!'
Then the Turks were upon them. Duffy sighted the man who would hit him, parried the flashing scimitar with his rapier guard and stabbed the man in the chest with his dagger. The jolt of impact pushed the Irishman back a step, but didn't knock him over. A sword-edge rang against his helmet, and he gave its owner a quick slash across the face as another blade snapped in half against his hauberk. The defenders' line was slowly giving way when a harsh call sounded from behind them: 'We're reloaded back here! Christians, drop!'