The Stress of Her Regard

by Tim Powers

  “Not yet,” Crawford told her, “but they might do it at any moment. If—.He’s right,” Byron interrupted. “Go back to the Lido and wait for us.”

  “No,” said Josephine calmly. “You’re sure to need help, you’re sure to fail without help. I’m not going to the Lido to wait for someone who won’t be returning.”

  She held up her hand. “Listen to me, and believe me—if you don’t let me come, I swear to you I’ll … fill this dress with stones and jump into the middle of the lagoon. Enough weight and a couple of fathoms of salt water should prevent any of us from ever reappearing: these two fetuses, the heart, the eye, or me.”

  Crawford was shaking his head and moaning. “But what if they do cut off somebody’s head or something when you’re ashore?”

  “If you succeed in this, it won’t matter. And if you fail, I’ll drown myself anyway.”

  Crawford knew she meant it. He shook his head, but took her hand. “'If ‘twere done, ‘twere well done quickly,'” he said. “Macbeth again,” observed Byron as they stepped out onto the dock.

  She offered the gondolier more money, but he waved her off, again making the sign of the cross.

  “Fine,” she told him. “Thanks.” She linked her arm through Crawford’s, and they walked down the dock to the pavement and began strolling toward the Piazza. “So,” she said, as casually as if they were tourists deciding where to dine, “you plan to cut this statue out of him?”

  “That’s it,” said Crawford. He swung Byron’s sword cane with despairing jauntiness.

  “What if our human child is already infected with the nephelim stuff? Like Shelley was?” She looked at him brightly. “Wouldn’t he or she constitute another overlap?”

  Crawford stopped walking. He hadn’t thought of that. “Jesus.” He ran his maimed hand over his bald scalp. “How long have you been … eating dirt?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “A week? Less.”

  “We’re probably all right, then. I doubt that the inhuman fetus could get around to interfering with his womb-mate until he was fairly well formed himself, and it doesn’t sound as if he is yet.”

  He tried to put more conviction into his voice than he felt, and he mentally cursed any God that there might be, for having made this coming ordeal not only tremendously difficult and dangerous, but possibly pointless too. “Take the legs, Byron,” he said hoarsely.

  Byron did, without comment; Crawford relaxed in the Lerici bed and watched the pillars of the square-facing side of the Ducal Palace sweep past on the right side of his vision. The palace’s white pillars were so near that he could clearly see the rust stains on the undersides of the Corinthian capitals, and he realized that Byron was skirting the Graiae columns as widely as possible.

  Crawford assumed just enough of his body’s sensations so that he could feel Josephine’s arm in his. A frailer overlap, he thought—but just possibly the one that will prevail tonight.

  A hundred yards ahead, torchlight outlined the Byzantine arches and spires of the Basilica of St. Mark in luminous orange dry-brush strokes against the starry blackness of the night, and Crawford tried not to see the main entry arch as a gaping stone mouth. Dozens of people were strolling across the broad mosaic pavement, and several of them wore the uniforms of the Austrian military, but at least none of the soldiers was escorting a prisoner and carrying an axe.

  The faces of many of the people he passed were blurred slightly, and seemed to shimmer with multiple, contradictory expressions, and it was difficult to be sure in which direction they were looking.

  All potential, Crawford thought, and minimal actuality; it would be interesting to live in an indeterminacy field. Imagine cooking, trying to get a three-minute egg just right.

  Byron walked Crawford’s body quickly past the palace and then past the high arches of the basilica’s west face, hurrying Josephine along whenever she slowed, and under the broad face of the clock tower he turned left, toward the narrower north end of the Piazzetta.

  Crawford’s face was for a moment lifted toward the ornamental architecture above the clock face, and he wondered if Byron was as uneasy as he was to see the winged stone lion staring down at them, and above it the two bronze giants poised with hammers beside the great bell.

  With scarcely a glance around at the smaller, darker square, Byron hustled the two weary bodies toward a narrow alley-mouth on the north side.

  The alley itself, Crawford saw when they were in it, was more brightly lit than the square behind them; lamplight spilled from shops tucked in under the arches on either side, casting onto the worn brick walls the shadows of hanging sausages and cheeses, and lights behind opened windows overhead illuminated flowerpots and balconies and frail curtains flapping in the night breeze.

  “Give me a coin,” rasped Byron with Crawford’s voice.

  Josephine dug one out of her bag and put it in Crawford’s hand, which lifted and tossed the coin against the wall, deftly catching it again when it bounced back and tossing it again.

  The alley was noisy with conversation and laughter and the strains of a man singing drunkenly somewhere nearby, but the clink … clink … clink of the coin seemed to undercut and dominate all the other sounds. Before his body had taken six more steps Crawford had become sure that the other sounds were now coordinated with, their pace dictated by, the rhythm of the ringing coin.

  Then there were two clinks for each impact of the coin against the wall. Crawford’s hand caught the coin and his face looked upward.

  On a balcony above, a fat man was tossing coins against the far wall. The coins rang against the bricks, but none of them fell down into the alley, or were even visible after hitting the wall.

  The man looked down, apparently with recognition. “They’re awake now,” he said in Italian, fear putting a quaver into the careful nonchalance of his voice. “And blind.”

  “We need your help, Carlo,” Byron said. “I’m Byron, the—”

  “I know,” the man interrupted. “Byron’s face is visible behind the face you’re wearing, like one patterned veil behind another. This is an evil night.” He threw one more coin into ringing oblivion, then gripped the balcony railing firmly with both hands, as if to stop it from vibrating. “What help?”

  “We believe that somewhere nearby is a pocket of the old way—in this pocket you would still judge that they can see. We need you to help us find it.”

  “What will you do there?”

  “If we succeed we’ll kill the columns, and the vampires—all the unnatural stony life—or at least reduce them to a dormant state they haven’t been in for eight hundred years.”

  “I’ve got a wife,” Carlo said thoughtfully. “And children.”

  “You rent, don’t you? I’ll buy you an estate anywhere in Italy.”

  After a long pause—during which Crawford, in the room in Lerici, whimpered with impatience as he imagined soldiers leading a prisoner out onto the square and drawing a knife—Carlo nodded. “But you don’t speak to me or in any way indicate that I am with you.”

  “Fine.”

  The fat man turned and entered the building.

  With some of the lire Josephine still had they bought a bag of coins and gave it to Carlo, who took it and walked out of the alley into the Piazzetta; Crawford and Josephine followed him at a distance of a dozen feet.

  Carlo walked halfway across the pavement toward the basilica, then flipped a coin into the air. It glittered for a moment in the torchlight and then Crawford lost sight of it; a few seconds later he heard a metallic clink-and-roll far out to the right, toward the tall brick tower of the campanile.

  Carlo walked in that direction for a few steps, then flipped his thumb up again. This time Crawford never saw the coin, and heard nothing but the voices and laughter from the alley behind them.

  Carlo turned around and walked the other way, toward the rear of the basilica. After twenty steps he tossed another coin. Byron was able to keep Crawford’s eyes on it, but it landed well behind
Carlo, and for an instant after it hit the pavement it was clearly three coins, then two, and then it was simply gone.

  Carlo nodded, and kept walking.

  Crawford took control of his mouth long enough to whisper; “We could have done this.”

  “So far, yes,” Byron had him saying a moment later. He took a firmer grip of Josephine’s arm and walked in the same direction as Carlo without appearing to be following him.

  The fat man ambled in an apparently random pattern across the mosaic tiles, each of his tossed coins flying in a different direction and then rolling away at impossible angles.

  An alley stretched away in darkness at the northeastern end of the Piazzetta,

  and after several minutes it became apparent that he was walking inexorably toward it.

  Eventually he disappeared into it, and after a pause and a yawn and a bored glance around, Crawford found himself escorting Josephine into the shadowed gap between the tall, ornate buildings.

  Crawford could hear running water ahead, and he knew it must be the canal on the east side of the palace. The comparative brightness of the open night loomed ahead, and he saw Carlo toss another coin and then disappear around a corner ahead. The coin bounced once behind Crawford, then again far behind him, and then rolled to a stop ahead of him.

  Carlo had turned right, and Crawford’s left leg ached as Byron began walking faster so as not to lose him.

  When they had rounded the corner too they found themselves on a catwalk over the narrow canal, with the skull-like Bridge of Sighs silhouetted ahead of them against the glow of the lights along the broad Canale di San Marco.

  Byron followed Carlo more closely now, and walked up beside him when he had paused at a closed, iron-banded door at the end of the catwalk.

  “Well?” Byron whispered.

  “This is the sacristy of the basilica,” said Carlo quietly. “What you’re looking for is somewhere inside.” He shrugged.

  Josephine reached forward and took hold of the door latch, and pulled. The door swung open, revealing a dim, high-ceilinged passage beyond.

  Muttering prayers, Carlo went in. Crawford followed him, and Josephine pulled the door shut behind them.

  Carlo moved forward slowly, pausing every few feet to send another coin spinning into the air. The coins were landing closer to him now, and not rebounding in startling directions.

  Crawford could no longer see anything erratic in the courses of the coins. Carlo was catching them easily—but clearly the man was still aware of deviations, for when confronted with a choice of doorways he stepped toward one as he tossed and caught a coin, then toward the other as he did it again, then nodded and walked unhesitatingly through one of the doorways.

  After threading a path through a number of ground-floor rooms, Carlo led his two companions up a stone stairway, and halfway down another hall. Pairs of high, narrow windows slitted the canal-side wall between broad wooden pillars, and the light was good enough to throw vague shadows onto the panelled wall on the other side.

  All at once Crawford seemed to weigh more, and the light was clearer, and the scuff of his ravaged shirt-sleeve socks on the floor was raspier.

  Carlo tossed another coin—he caught it, as he had been doing for several minutes now, but he grunted in surprise.

  He tossed it higher, almost to the ceiling, and closed his eyes as he held out his hand.

  Again he caught it.

  He put his finger into his mouth and bit, and then walked a few yards forward, shook a drop of blood onto the flagstones, and walked back.

  He took two more coins out of the bag and began juggling all three, humming a random tune. The coins spun around faster and faster, and his humming became louder and seemed to start up a maddening itch in the stump of Crawford’s wedding-ring finger.

  Then one of the coins bulleted up, pinging rapidly off the ceiling and against one wall and then the other; it hit the floor spinning so fast that it seemed to be a glassy globe, and it moved in a hissing spiral around the spot of blood, getting closer to the spot with every loop.

  At last it wobbled to a stop and fell over, exactly covering the spot.

  “We’re there,” Crawford heard himself say.

  “Not quite,” came a familiar voice from a shadowed doorway ahead of them. “A tourist has had an accident—quite a bloody accident—in the Piazza.” Polidori limped unsteadily out of the shadows into the dim light, and smiled. “Right between the columns.”

  Crawford was walking toward one of the nearest pair of tall, foot-wide windows, and his hands unlatched one of them and swung it open. He turned and said to Carlo, “Into the canal with you. Swim back, and go home to your family.”

  The fat man hurried to the window and managed to squeeze his bulk into the gap and halfway over the sill, and then he wriggled furiously and scraped his way through it and fell away forward into empty air; a second later they heard a splash.

  Byron turned Crawford’s head toward Josephine and raised his eyebrows.

  “No,” said Josephine. “I’ll see this out.”

  “You certainly will, darling,” said Polidori, hunching forward, his smile a grimace of pain now. “You’ll see Mister Crawford’s liver out, torn out by your own hands, and then you’ll eat it. Happily.”

  Crawford’s body shifted its weight on his feet as he mentally pushed Byron out. “Where is Werner von Aargau?” he asked, concealing his horror and regret behind a determinedly conversational tone.

  “Von Aargau? In his chamber in the Ducal Palace, where else? Perhaps you imagined he’d be out boating on the canal?” He stared at Crawford. “Were you looking for him?”

  Crawford didn’t answer, and Polidori turned to Josephine. “Were you?”

  She threw a pleading look to Crawford, who stepped forward and put an arm around her shoulders. “Yes we were,” he said quietly. He was certain that they had lost everything, including their child, but he couldn’t bear to let this … rival for Josephine’s affections see despair in him.

  Crawford looked up at Polidori with raised eyebrows. “Tell me,” he said politely, “can one get to his chamber from here?”

  Polidori laughed, and Crawford was fiercely glad to hear pain putting anger into the sound.

  “Well,” said Polidori, mockingly imitating Crawford’s courteous tone, “I’ll tell you a secret, Doctor—yes one can. His projections of himself, the substantial, handsome ghosts through which he lives, often use this hallway to enter and leave the palace discreetly. There’s a door at the end of the corridor behind me, and a little dock downstairs—he likes to emerge into Venice from under the Bridge of Sighs.”

  “Fitting.”

  “Why were you looking for him?”

  “We mean to kill him.”

  Polidori laughed—a strangled, wheezing sound. “That would be difficult. He’s got many, many guards, and none of them will ever take bribes or bring him poison or fight half-heartedly, for they’re all his handsome, muscular projections. And even if you did succeed in killing him, you’d die yourselves a second later.”

  Footsteps echoed on the stairs behind Crawford.

  “Austrian soldiers,” Polidori said. “I’d advise you not to resist.”

  Crawford let his shoulders slump, and he clasped his hands on the head of the cane, and part of his evident resentful surrender was genuine, for he hated the necessity of letting Byron do this—and then he forced himself back into the bed in Lerici and let Byron take his body.

  Instantly the two good fingers of his left hand spun the collar below the cane’s grip, and then he sprang forward in a thigh-straining, long lunge, simultaneously whipping free the length of steel and whirling it into line.

  Polidori lurched aside to Crawford’s right, but in midair Byron twisted Crawford’s wrist outward into a deep sixte line and managed to drive two inches of the blade into Polidori’s side.

  “Eisener breche, you bastard!” Byron gasped as Crawford’s right foot slapped down at the end of the lunge.


  Polidori shrank off the end of the blade; he was still human in form, but only a couple of feet tall now. His facial features, handsome a moment ago, had now cramped together in a toadishly broad face. He scuttled away backward down the hall, burping and retching.

  Josephine, biting her lips, watched him go but at least didn’t follow.

  The footsteps were in the hall now, and running, and Byron spun to face them. Six soldiers with drawn swords skidded to a halt at the sight of his sword, and then advanced cautiously, their blades extended. Oddly, not one of them carried a gun, and their eyes shone with an uneasiness that clearly had nothing to do with Crawford or Josephine.

  Reminded of something by Byron’s cry, Crawford took advantage of the momentary pause to override Byron and swing the sword at one of the wooden pillars between the windows, leaving a horizontal dent in the wood.

  Byron swore as he resumed control, and then he hopped forward impatiently with a feint at one of the soldiers and a corkscrewing bind to the blade of another; Byron’s point darted in and gouged the man’s forearm, and then Byron had leaped back out of range.

  The wounded Austrian fell back with a startled curse, and the two of his fellows who had been flanking him ran forward with their swords held straight out, and Byron feinted high and then flung himself down and sideways so that he was in a low crouch, supported by Crawford’s left hand and holding the sword extended in the right, and the window-side soldier unwittingly lunged himself onto the point.

  Byron straightened, yanking the blade free as the man tumbled backward, and Crawford intruded for a moment to make his hand lash the sword at the wooden pillar again, cutting another dent next to the first.

  “Stop that!” yelled Byron as the four unhurt soldiers all attacked at once. Byron swung his blade in a horizontal figure-eight, parrying all four of the blades for the moment, and then he hopped forward in a short lunge and darted his point into the cheek of the man on his far right—instantly he swept the blade down and across, knocking aside the other three swords, and ducked to quickly but deeply stab the kneecap of the next man.