Chapter Nineteen

Rain swept in wide sheets along the cobbled avenues, and the splashed-up mist on the stones as each gust went by looked like waves. The air in the Zimmermann dining room was a marbling of cold drafts carrying the dry-wine scent of wet streets and hot stale air smelling of grease and wet clothing.

At a small, otherwise unoccupied table in the kitchen-side corner, Lothario Mothertongue dipped black bread into a bowl of hot chicken broth, and chewed it slowly. His eyes were anxious as they followed the frequently interrupted course of the new serving girl. Finally as she was moving past him he caught her elbow. 'Excuse me, miss. Doesn't Epiphany Hallstadt usually work this shift?'

'Yes, and I wish she was here this morning. I can't handle all this alone. Let go.'

Mothertongue ignored the order. 'Where is she?'

'I don't know. Let go.'

'Please, miss.' He stared up at her earnestly. 'I have to know.'

'Ask Anna, then. Anna told Mrs Hallstadt something that made her upset, early this morning. And Mrs Hallstadt ran out without even taking off her apron. He may be dead, she yelled, and just ran out.'

'Who may be dead?'

'I don't know,' With the last word she yanked her arm free of his grip and flounced off.

Mothertongue got up and went looking for Anna. He was ordered out of the kitchen by the cooks, and earned

a few impatient curses by staying long enough to make sure she wasn't in there; he opened the side door and peered up and down the rain-veiled alley; he even barged in on a no doubt glittering conversation between Kretchmer and Werner in the wine cellar, and was rudely told to leave. When he returned to his table he saw her helping the new girl carry trays.

He waited until she was nearby, then called to her. 'Anna! Where is Epiphany?'

'Excuse me, gentlemen. She's off visiting her father, Lothario, and I don't know where he lives, so leave me alone, hm? Now then, sirs, what was it you wanted?'

For several minutes Mothertongue sat dejected, reflexively looking up every time he heard the front door creak open. After a while a tall man came in, his hair plastered down by the rain, and Mothertongue recognized Brian Duffyand waved, a little reluctantly. He pursed his lips then, for Duffy had returned the wave and was crossing the room toward him.

'Hello, Brian,' he said when the Irishman stood over him. 'I don't suppose you'd know where Epiphany's father lives, would you? Or that you'd tell me, if you did?'

The Irishman sat down, eyed him narrowly and said something in a language Mothertongue didn't understand. Mothertongue cocked his head and raised his eyebrows, and Duffy frowned with concentration, then spoke again in Latin. In spite of an unusual accent the Englishman was able to understand it. 'You seem unhappy, friend,' Duffy had said. 'What troubles you?'

'I'm worried about Mrs Hallstadt. She's been -'In Latinae.'

Mothertongue stared in surprise at Duffy, trying to decide whether or not he was being made fun of. The intentness of Duffy's gaze reassured him, and though still .puzzled he began to speak haltingly in Latin. 'Uh . . .1 am

concerned about Epiphany. She has been feeling bad lately, and then - I am sure unintentionally - you upset her yesterday morning by abruptly reappearing after an absence of many months. Now she has evidently received some bad news about her father, whom she has gone to see, and I would like to be with her in this crisis.

'Ah. You care for this woman, do you?'

Mothertongue looked at him cautiously. 'Well.., yes. Why, do you - still have affection for her?'

The Irishman smiled. 'Still? I see. Uh, no, not the sort you mean, though I naturally have a high regard for.. .the woman. I am glad she has found as worthy a man as yourself to be concerned for her.'

'Why, thank you, Brian, it is good of you to be that way about it, rather than.. .be some other way. Damn this language. It has all looked completely hopeless to me of late, but perhaps something can still be salvaged of the old order.'

'The old order?' Two citizens shambled past, gawking at these men speaking church language.

'Yes. Perhaps.. .perhaps you remember certain hints I was making, when I first got here, this last spring.'

'Remind me.'

'Well, certain powerful authorities have summoned me

-, His face had begun to brighten, how now it fell. 'But they might better have saved the effort. It has all failed.'

Why don't you just tell it to me.'

'I will. It's an outmoded secret now. I - he looked up, with a certain battered dignity. 'I am the legendary King Arthur, re-born.'

Duffy's gray eyebrows were as high as they could get. 'Would you please repeat that, giving special care to your use of the verb?'

Mothertongue repeated it as before 'I know how

fantastic that sounds, and I doubted it myself for years; but a number of visions, supplemented with a lot of logical reasoning, finally convinced me. As a matter of fact, I was aware that Arthur had come back long before I deduced that it was I. I believe several of my men have been re-born as well, and that some high power intended us to meet and lead the way to a final dispersal of the Turks.' He shook his head. 'But it has failed. I found the men, but was unable to awaken the older souls in them. I told my secret to Count von Salm, and offered to assume command of a part of the army, and I was actually mocked -actually laughed at and ordered to leave.' Mothertongue waved in the direction of the door. 'And then, idle here in my defeat, I noticed Epiphany. I happened to look in her eyes one day, and got a conviction as clear as my first convictions that Arthur had been re-born - I suddenly knew that this woman had known Arthur very well.' He shrugged. 'Need I say more?'

'Just a bit, if you would.'

'She is Guinevere. The gods are kind! I was unable to awaken the dormant souls of my men with a call to duty, but I think I can awaken her soul with love.'

The Irishman stared at him with the wondering respect one feels for a child who has done some tremendously difficult, absolutely pointless thing. 'I wish you well,' he said.

'Thank you, Brian! I would like to say I am sorry for the way I -'

He was interrupted by a sudden jolt and rumble that seemed to come up through the floor. Duffy's face changed in an instant, and he leaped up and sprinted to the front door, wrenched it open and stood there listening. Several patrons cringed at the gust of cold air and the louder hiss of the rain, but nobody dared voice any objections. After several seconds another sound cut through the rain: the strident clangor of the alarum bells in the tower of .St Stephen's.

'My God,' Duffy breathed, speaking contemporary Austrian for the first time that day. 'That was the wall'

He ran back through the dining room, flinging several people out of his way, through the steamy kitchen and out the back door into the yard; splashing across to the stables, he dragged a reluctant mare out of the shelter, leaped and scrabbled up onto the creature's bare back, and rode her out to the street, goading her to a gallop when they reached the south-ward-stretching, rain-swept expanse of the Rotenturmstrasse.

The echoing pandemonium of the bells was deafening as he drummed past the cathedral square. Though the rain was thrashing down out of the gray sky as hard as ever, quite a number of people were kneeling on the pavement. Make it count, you silly bastards, he thought grimly. If ever there was a morning for a high-density volley of prayers, this is the one.

Soon he could hear the thousand-throated roar of battle, and he had taken a left turn and ridden half-way down a narrower, slanting street when he saw ahead of him, dimly through the curtains of rain, half of a great, ragged-edged gap in the high wall, and a maelstrom of men surging back and forth over the hills of rubble. Even from this distance he could see the white robes of the Janissaries. 'Holy God,' he murmured, then whirled out his sword and put his heels to the mare's flanks.

The Viennese forces had been assembled within minutes of the mine-detonations, and were now grouped in two tightly packed divisions, trying by sheer weight and advancing force to drive back the waves of wailing Janissaries. This was desperate, hacking savagery, in which there was no thought except to press forward and kill. Long gone was the almost formal restraint of yesterday afternoon's sortie. A culverin hastily loaded with

scrap metal and gravel had been unbolted from its moorings and was being awkwardly manhandled by a dozen men along the top of the wall toward the jagged edge, where it could be re-positioned to blast its charge down into the massed Turks; but the rain made the use of matchlocks impossible - point and edge were the order of the day, with all the bloody intimacy of hand-to-hand combat.

Duffy charged headlong into one of the peripheral skirmishes that were clogging the wall street to the north of the main fighting. He parried a scimitar and then chopped down into a Janissary's shoulder, and the force of the swing sent him tumbling off the back of the wet horse so that he rode the Turk's body to the ground. Rolling to his feet with the sword he somehow hadn't dropped, he waded into the męlée with wide-eyed abandon.

For ten minutes the battle raged at a maniacal pitch, like a bonfire into which both were throwing every bit of fuel they could find. The culverin was wedged into an adequate position on the crumbled lip of the wall, and two men were hunched over the breech, trying to ignite the charge.

A blade rang off the slightly too large casque Duffy had earlier snatched from the head of a slain soldier, and the helmet skewed around so that one eye was covered and the other blocked by the chin-guard. With a yell of mingled rage and fright, the Irishman ducked his head and dove at his assailant, both his weapons extended. The scimitar edge, being whipped back into line, grated against Duffy's jawbone, but his own sword and dagger took the man in the belly, and Duffy fell to his knees, losing the helmet entirely, as the Turk's body folded. An eddy in the tide of battle left him momentarily in a corpse-strewn clearing, and he knelt there for a moment, panting, before unsheathing his weapons from the Janissary's vitals, struggling to his feet and lurching back into the fight. At that moment the culverin went off, lashing thirty

pounds of scrap into the heaving concentration of Turkish soldiers and killing three of the gunnery men as it tore free of its new mooring and went tumbling away outside the wall.

As if it were one huge organism the Turkish force recoiled, and the Viennese soldiers crowded up to retake every slack inch of ground. Men were still being skewered and chopped and split by the dozens with every passing minute, but the Eastern tide had slowed to a pause and was now ebbing. The European force pressed the advantage, crowding the enemy back into the gap. At last the Janissaries retreated, leaving almost half of their number scattered broken and motionless across the wide-flung heaps of rubble. The rain made their white robes gray.

During the battle Duffy had eventually found himself among Leif's company of mercenaries and stayed with them; when the Turk retreat left the defenders clumped like driftwood on the new stone slope, the Irishman and Eilif were only a dozen feet apart. Eilif was bowed forward, hands clenched on his knees, gasping through a slack mouth, while Duffy sat down on the bright, unweathered face of a split block of masonry. The cold air was sharp with the acid smell of new-broken granite.

Finally Eilif straightened and took off his helmet, letting the rain rinse his sweat-drenched hair. 'That... could have tilted either way,' he panted. 'I don't... like it that fast and hard. There's no control. You can't survive.. .many of those.'

'Spoken like a professional,' commented Duffy, wincing in mid-word at the flash of pain in his jaw. Hesitantly he fingered the gash - the cold rain seemed to have stopped most of the bleeding, but the edges of the wound were far apart, and he could feel fresh air in unaccustomed places.

'Damn it, lad!' exclaimed Eilif, noticing the cut. 'They landed one on you, didn't they? I can see one of your back teeth peeping through. As soon as we get reassembled and take roll, I'll sew that up for you, eh?'

Duffy managed to unclench his sword hand, and the released blade clattered on rock. 'You'll sew it up? No chance - 'Then he looked around and noticed for the first time the appalling casualties the Vienna force had suffered. There were arm-stumps to be cauterized and tarred, jetting wounds to be staunched, crushed limbs to be set and splinted or amputated - the surgeons would be far too busy during the next several hours to attend to so relatively minor a task as sewing up Duffy's jaw.

'Half my boys need plucking from the fire,' Eilif said softly.

'Of course,' Duffy said, trying to speak out of the right side of his mouth. 'I just don't trust your seamstress skills. Look, I think Aurelianus is versed in the surgical arts. What would you think if I trotted back to the Zimmermann and had him stitch me up?'

Eilif regarded him narrowly, then grinned. 'Why not? I'd probably sew your tongue to your cheek. And God knows we can't leave you like this - you'd lose as much beer as you swallowed. In fact, you might be wise to catch a nap there, where there's still a roof.' He pointed. 'Their damned mine collapsed our barracks. Lucky most of us were outside. But I want you back here by midnight, understand? There will be a heavy watch kept here, and I'll oversee our part of it until then.'

'I'll be here,' Duffy promised. He stood up on fatiguetrembling legs, sheathed his sword and began picking his way over the wet, tumbled stones.

By the time he had walked all the way back to the Zimmermann Inn - God knew where the mare had wound up - the rain had stopped and his wound had started to

bleed again, so it was a gruesome figure that finally pushed open the front door and lurched into the dining room. There was a large but silent crowd, and they all looked up fearfully at him.

The black man in the burnoose stood. 'What news?' Duffy didn't relish the idea of a long speech. 'The wall is down at one point,' he said hoarsely. 'It was a near thing, but they were beaten back. Heavy losses on both sides.'

The man who'd asked looked around significantly and left the room, followed by several others. The Irishman paid no attention, but let his blurring gaze waver around the room until he saw Anna.

'Anna!' he croaked. 'Where is Aurelianus?'

'The chapel,' she said, hurrying to him. 'Here, lean on me and -'I can walk.'

The Irishman clumped heavily down the long, dark hall, and when he reached the tall doors he pushed through without stopping, stumbling over a half dozen brooms on the other side. In the chapel Aurelianus stood facing the same seven men that had been there the day before, but today each of them carried a drawn sword.

The midget looked around at the interruption. 'Why it's Miles Gloriosus. Out of here, clown.' He turned back to Aurelianus, extending a short blade. 'Did you understand what Orkhan just said?' he asked, indicating the black man. 'The wall is down. They'll be in by dusk. Lead us to the cask now, or be killed.'

Aurelianus looked indignant, and raised a hand as if he were about to throw an invisible dart at the man. 'Be grateful, toad, that I am at present too occupied to punish this trespass. Now get out of here - while you can.'

The midget grinned. 'Go ahead. Blast me to ashes. We all know you can't.' He jabbed the old sorcerer lightly in the abdomen.

The quiet, incense-scented air of the chapel was suddenly shattered by a savage yell as the Irishman bounded forward into the room, doing a quick hop-and-lunge that drove his sword-point through the midget's neck. Whirling with the impetus, he slashed black Orkhan's forearm to the bone. The copper-skinned man raised his sword and chopped at Duffy, but the Irishman ducked under the

I clumsy stroke and came up with a thrust into the man's belly. Duffy turned to face the remaining four, but one of them cried, 'Why kill Merlin? It's the Dark we want!' The five survivors ran from the chapel, angling wide around Duffy.

As soon as they were running away down the hall he collapsed as if dead. Aurelianus hurried to him, rolled him over onto his back and waved a little silver filigreed ball over the Irishman's nostrils; within seconds Duffy's eyes sprang open and a hand came up to brush the malodorous thing away. He lay there and stared at the ceiling, doing nothing but breathing.

Finally, 'What.. .just happened?' he gasped.

'You saved my life,' the sorcerer said. 'Or, more accurately, Arthur did; I recognized the old battle-cry. I'm flattered that the sight of me in peril brings him out.'

'He.. .does the heroics.. .and leaves the exhaustion to me'.

'I suppose that isn't quite fair,' said Aurelianus brightly. 'And what- have you done to your jaw?'

'Sew it up, will you? Surgeons too busy.' He flicked his eyes around without moving his head, and saw nothing but dusty pews to one side and shifting raintracks on the I stained glass to the other. 'Where did your Dark Birds go? Did I kill them all?'

'No. Two of them are dead on the floor over here - I'll have someone come in and deal with the corpses - and five of them ran off to steal a sip of the Dark.' The old man had produced various pouches and boxes from under his

robe, and was already cleaning and dressing the wound.

'Shouldn't you be - ouch! - stopping them?' Aurelianus had got out a needle and thread and was stitching the cut now; Duffy felt no real pain, just a tugging sensation across his left cheek and temple.

'Oh, no,' the wizard said. 'Gambrinus has defenses against such as those; as they probably suspected, since they wanted me to fetch the stuff for them. Still, desperate men will face almost anything, and trapped rats throw themselves into the catchers' nets. I'm glad to let Gambrinus finish the job for us.'

'The wall is down, by the southeast corner,' Duffy muttered sleepily. 'Wrecked our barracks. I'm going to sleep here, out in the stables where the Vikings were; I can't remember anything about last night, not one isolated thing, but it certainly doesn't feel like I got any sleep. Those Janissaries just kept coming, like it had been a dam that burst. There are corpses everywhere - if tomorrow and the next day are sunny, there'll be plague. I wonder why they pulled back? That was the best chance they could have hoped for, with them in force and us completely taken by surprise.'

There was a snip sound, and Aurelianus stood up. 'There,' he said. 'You'll have a scar, but at least the hole's closed and it ought not to fester.'

Duffy rolled over, got up on his hands and knees, and from there to his feet. 'Thanks. Eilif was going to do it. Probably would have got things inside out, so I could grow a beard in my mouth and taste things with my cheek.'

'What a disgusting idea.'

'Sorry. The charming, sprightly ideas aren't se easy to come by anymore.' He picked up his sword, wiped it and sheathed it, and strode wearily out of the dim chapel.

Anna worried for a while about the five wild-eyed men who'd burst past her and clattered down the stairs to the brewing cellar, and when she heard thin, reedy screams faintly from below she got Mothertongue, for want of anyone hardier, to go down there with her to see what went on.

A charred meat aroma was blended not unpleasantly with the usual malt smell, and they found Gambrinus placidly juggling a number of small irregular spheres of ivory. He assured them that all was well, and Anna didn't begin to feel ill until, back in the dining room, Mother-tongue asked her where she supposed the brewmaster had got those five little monkey skulls he'd been playing with.

At eleven the rain began to abate, and by noon the clouds were breaking up, letting a strained, pale sunlight play intermittently over the sundered section of wall. The gap was roughly two hundred feet wide, and the wall as it continued on either side -a surprising hundred-and-fifty feet thick in exposed cross-section - leaned dangerously outward. While sharpshooters with fresh loads hammered into their rifled guns watched the distant Turkish lines, hastily assembled gangs of soldiers and laborers built solid barricades in a straight line across the rubble-choked gap, and threw up a fifty-yard-radius semicircle of deep-moored open-frame wooden obstructions on the slope outside. Chalk dust was scattered thickly beyond the semicircle, most of it darkening into gray mud as it soaked up moisture from the wet ground.

Several smoldering fires started by the explosion were finally put out, a task that hadn't been top priority because the rain had prevented them from spreading. All three corpse wagons were working their slow way across the devastated area, collecting their grisly cargo - one had already filled, left, and returned.

During that morning and afternoon the hunchbacked figure of Bluto was to be seen everywhere along the battlements, ordering the re-laying of many cannon and culverins, overseeing their cleaning and loading, shouting ignored advice down to the men outside who were building braces and buttresses to prop the leaning wall in place.

Count von Salm, ostensibly in charge, paced the street and watched all the activity, content to let experts pursue their crafts. He had ordered most of his troops to go eat and rest in what barracks remained, keeping only a minimal force on watch; there were men along the wail, though, who kept their eyes on the Turkish lines, ready at the first sign of offensive movement to signal von Salm and the bellringer in the St Stephen's spire.

Through the afternoon there was shifting along the Turkish front, banners moving back and forth above the occasional distant glint of sun on metal, but they seemed to be grouping to the west, toward the southern front of the city and away from the break in the wall.

At four the haggard von Salm climbed the stone stairs of the wall at the Schwarzenbergstrasse and walked a hundred yards west along the catwalk to confer with the hunchbacked bombardier. The freshening western breeze swept the crenellations, drying the sweat on the commander's face and neck; in no hurry to climb back down to the muddy, windless streets, he chatted with Bluto about various aspects of the morning's battle.

'I'm tempted to cluster a large number of guns right along here,' Bluto said presently, 'from the Carinthian gate to the western corner.'

'Because of this shift of theirs? It's got to be a feint,' von Salm objected. He ran his fingers through his graying hair. 'Obviously they're not going to attack here, along this completely fortified and unweakened side, when there's a damned two-hundred-foot hole in the wall around the corner a hundred yards east.'

'Look at them, though,' said Bluto, leaning between two merlons and pointing south across the cloudshadowed plain. 'There's no one moving around to the eastern side; they're all focusing straight ahead, due south. Hell, man, if it is a feint it would take them a good half hour to re-group on the eastern plain - unless of course they want to run up close to the wall here, and run that hundred yards - within range of our guns'.

'That could be what they have in mind,' von Salm said.

'They'd lose a thousand Janissaries, even if half our lads were asleep.'

'Maybe Suleiman doesn't care. He's got more soldiers than time at this point.'

Bluto shook his head. 'Very well, if Suleiman isn't concerned about massive casualties, why not attack directly at the gap, and push until the defenders give way? Why this westward shift?'

'I don't know,' admitted von Salm. 'They may shift back under cover of darkness. That's what I would do, if I were Suleiman. But yes, set up.. .five guns along here, and I'll see you get enough men to work them. And if I see them come this way, or hear it during the night, I'll send more.' He gnawed a knuckle and stared at the plain. 'What's the date today? Oh, the twelfth, of course. I wish there'd be more moon tonight, and a clear sky. I'll have a gang trot outside here and dump chalk in a wide line along this front, just to make you feel better, eh?'

'Both of us,' said Bluto dryly as the commander turned and began walking back the way he'd come.

The hunchback strode back and forth along the catwalk, peering through the crenels and thoughtfully laying flagged sticks at each point where he felt a gun should be wheeled up and bolted down, as the red sun sank behind the wooded hills to his right, and lights began to glow in the windows of the city at his back and, distantly in front of him, among the tents on the plain.

Since he'd lit the snake just as the bells overhead had ceased their deafening, bone-jarring announcement of nine o'clock, and it was now nearly burned down to his fingers, Duffy deduced that it must be nearly time for him to brace himself for the one stroke of the half hour. He flipped the coal-tipped stub spinning out over the rail, and watched it draw random red arabesques as it tumbled toward the square far below; then he turned to the wizard who was crouched over the telescope. 'Aren't we about due for -, the Irishman began, but he was interrupted by the preludial mechanical grinding from above, so he closed his eyes and shoved his fingers in his ears until the single bong had been struck, and the echoes were ringing away through the dark streets below.

'Due for what?' snapped Aurelianus irritably.

'Never mind.' Duffy leaned out on the rail and looked up at the stars that were visible behind the high, rushing clouds. The crescent moon was nothing but a pale blur glowing intermittently in one of the widest patches of cloud.

A gust of particularly cold wind buffeted the cathedral tower, and the Irishman shivered and got back in under the sculptured arch of the small observatory alcove. Their narrow and drafty vantage point was not the highest or most easily accessible, but von Salm and various military advisors had two weeks ago sealed off and taken possession of the platform that commanded the best view. Aurelianus had said it didn't matter, that the little open landing they now occupied was high enough above the rooftops and street-smokes to make star-gazing possible; and for what Duffy considered to be a very long hour now that was what he had been doing.

Finally the old sorcerer leaned back from the eye-piece, rubbing the bridge of his nose with one hand and balancing the telescope on the rail with the other. 'It's chaotic,' he muttered. 'There's no order, nothing to be read. It's.. .un

pleasant to see the sky this way, it's like asking a question of an old, wise friend and getting imbecilic grunting and whining for an answer.' The image seemed to upset Aurelianus, and he went on quickly. 'You're the cause, you know, the random factor, the undefinable cipher that makes gibberish of all the trusty old equations.'

The Irishman shrugged. 'Maybe you'd have been better off without me from the start. Saved your time. Hell, I haven't really done anything so far that any hired bravo couldn't have done.

'I don't know,' Aurelianus said. 'I'm limited to what I can actually see and touch - I don't know!' He looked at Duffy. 'Did you hear about the newest movement of the Janissaries?'

'Yes. They've shifted west, as if they intended a suicide charge at the unweakened southwestern front. What about it?'

'What do you think would happen if they did attack there?'

Duffy shrugged. 'Like I said - suicide. They'd lose a thousand men in five minutes.'

'Might one call it a.. .sacrifice?'

'To gain what? There'd be no sense in sending the Janissaries, their finest troops - oh my God.' The Irishman carefully sat down and leaned his back against the rail. 'I thought you had one of the only two copies of the damned thing in the world.'

'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.

---