by Tim Powers
'Come on, now, Brian,' spoke one - what had his name been? Klaus somebody. 'You're not a part of this picture anymore.
'Out of my way, you poxy toad,' Duffy said, in a voice loud enough to turn heads in the nearer pews. 'Hallstadt! Damn your eyes, you won't -'A fist in his stomach doubled him up and, silenced him for a moment, but then he had lashed out with a punch of his own, and Klaus was jigging backward at an impossible-to-maintain angle, and colliding with the baptismal font...
The yard-tall pillar with its marble bowl tottered, leaned
- as Klaus rolled off to one side - and then went to the
floor-tiles with a terrible echoing crash. Holy water splashed up into the faces of appalled ushers, and shards of marble were spinning across the floor. Another of Hallstadt's friends seized Duffy by the arm, but the Irishman shook him off.
He took a step up the aisle. 'Hallstadt, you son-of-a-whore, draw your sword and face me if you're not the eunuch everyone takes you for!'
People were leaping to their feet, and he caught one glimpse of Epiphany's veiled, horrified face before a hardy altar boy felled him unconscious with a tall iron crucifix.
Then he was simply falling through a vortex of old scenes and faces, over the muted babble of which he could hear an older man's voice raised in strong, delighted laughter.
* * *
Chapter Eighteen
When he opened his eyes he was in deep shadow, and the wall of the inn, which he could just see from where he lay, showed dark gray around the yellow of the windows. God, he thought blurrily. Just a dream this time, was it? It was bad enough to go through those unhappy days in early 'twenty-six, without having to re-live them in my dreams. Ah, but at least they're my memories; better a dozen such than one of those damned dreams of that moonlit lake -which you were risking, drinking all that cursed beer. Stick to wine, lad. He rolled to his feet, slapped straw from his doublet and combed his hair with his fingers, then took a deep breath, let it out, and started toward the building.
From habit he walked in through the kitchen's back door, and caught the red-booted Marko snitching a sweet-roll from a cupboard. 'Marko,' Duffy said, stopping. There was something he'd meant to ask this boy about. What had it been?
'Werner said .1 could have it,' the boy said quickly. I don't care about your damned pastry. Uh. . .oh yes, you've been bringing food to Gustav Vogel. I understand?'
'I was for a while. Werner said I didn't have to anymore.
'Well who is?'
Marko blinked. 'Is what?'
'Bringing the old man food, you idiot.'
'I don't know. Why can't he go out and scavenge it, like everybody else?' h
The boy dashed out the back door, leaving the Irishman wearing a scowl of annoyance and worry. C
The new girl who'd served him earlier was staring at him U from the other side of the fireplace, where she was ladling out bowls of apparently the same stew. 'Where's Epiphany?' Duffy asked her.
'She went to bed early,' the girl answered. She didn't feel well. What are you doing in the kitchen? Guests are supposed to -'Where's Anna, then?'
'Around at the taproom end of the dinning room, I believe. If you want supper you'll have to -'
'You can have mine,' Duffy told her with a smile as he strode past her into the hall. The dining room was full, and alive with the gaiety that comes to people who know they might well be dead in twenty-four hours. Beer was being drunk at a prodigious rate, and Duffy found Anna' crouched beside one of the decorated casks, holding a pitcher under the golden stream from the tap.
She looked up and saw him. 'I thought you left.'
'No, just fell asleep out back. Epiphany's gone to bed?'
'That's - Shrub! This is for Alexis and Casey's table, hurry up - that's right. Why?' She glanced at him suspiciously.
'Oh, give it a rest, Anna, I'm not planning to go up and force any attentions on her. Listen, she had Shrub bringing food to her father, and -'
Shrub scampered up again. 'Hello, Mr Duffy! Anna, two more pitchers for Franz Albertzart and that old lady.'
'Coming up. What were you saying, Brian?'
'Well, Shrub here got Marko to do it, but I ran into Marko just now and he says he stopped.'
'There you go, Shrub.' The boy took the pitchers and' hurried guiltily away. 'Stopped what?'
'Damn it, listen to me. Nobody's been bringing food to old Vogel. Now I'm not going to be too upset if he turns up dead, but I think his daughter might be.'
'Oh, hell,' Anna said quietly. 'You're right. I'll tell her first thing in the morning.' She stood up and brushed a lock of hair out of her face, then looked at him with a little sympathy. 'Brian, what did go wrong, anyway, between you and her?'
As Duffy paused to frame a credible and more or less accurate answer, the door banged open and five young men stamped in. 'Anna!' one of them bawled across the room. 'Five pitchers, pronto!'
The Irishman grinned with one side of his mouth and punched her very softly on the shoulder. 'I'll tell you sometime,' he said, and walked away toward the stairs. He turned and saw that she was watching him. He mouthed the name, Aurelianus, pointing upward.
There was a man asleep on the stairs, and Duffy stepped carefully around him, reflecting that besieged towns probably tended to surrender sooner if there was no wine or beer inside to divert the defenders, now and then; from the bleakness of their position. He got to the top landing and found Aurelianus' door, but just as he was about to knock remembered that the old sorcerer had told him nine 'clock.
Damn, he thought. It's probably not even eight yet. I should have slept a bit longer, maybe carried the dream on to when I left town to go fight at Mohács. He started tip-toe away, then snorted impatiently, strode back and rapped sharply on the door.
There was a squeal from inside, and overlapping it came Aurelianus' flustered but authoritative, 'Who is it?'
'Finn Mac Cool.'
After a moment the door opened and one of the maids,
with face averted, ducked around the Irishman and hurried away. 'Come in, Brian,' said Aurelianus with weary patience.
The room might have been completely rearranged since Duffy's last visit, but it hadn't changed; it was still a heaped, candlelit collection of tapestries, jewelled weapons, beakers a-bubble with no source of heat, books big enough to serve as walls for a small man's house, and obscure animals stuffed in unlikely postures. The old wizard sat cross-legged on an upholstered stool.
Duffy jerked a thumb after the retreating maid when he'd shut the door. 'I thought that kind of thing wasn't good for you half-breeds.'
After closing his eyes for ten seconds, Aurelianus stared at him and shook his head. 'Your years as a mercenary soldier have coarsened you, Brian, to the point where you're unfit for gracious company. I was merely asking her if any of the maids had tried to come into my room recently; a new girl might not have been told that this room isn't to be entered. And didn't I say nine o'clock?'
'I decided I might have to be heading back to the barracks at around nine. Why don't you just lock your door?'
'Oh, I do, most of the time, but I forget occasionally, and I often misplace my keys.'
'Isn't that kind of careless?' Duffy found a chair, tipped a cat out of it and sat down. 'After all, I suppose some of this junk must be valuable to somebody...'
'Yes,' the old man snapped. 'Very valuable, quite a lot of it. The thing is, I tend to rely - perhaps too heavily! -on other protections.' He nodded toward the door, above and around the top of which Duffy noticed a structure that combined the features of a parrot-perch and a dollhouse. 'Would you like some brandy?'
'What? Oh, certainly.' He waited until the wizard had
poured two glasses of a golden Spanish brandy and handed him one. 'Thank you. What was it you wanted to see me about?' He took a sip, swallowed it, then took a bigger one.
'Nothing special, Brian, I just wanted to chat. After all, I haven't seen you in months.'
'Ah. Well, there's one thing I wanted to ta
lk to you about. Werner intends to fire Epiphany, and this job is just about all she's got in the world. I'd be grateful if you'd tell him she's a permanent employee, and that he'd better not torment her.'
Aurelianus blinked at him quizzically. 'Very well. I gather you and she are not... seeing each other anymore?'
'That's right. She blames you for it, and I'm not sure I don't agree with her.'
To the Irishman's surprise, Aurelianus did not raise his eyebrows and protest. Instead, the old man took a long sip of his wine and said, 'Maybe that's fair and maybe it's not. If it is, try to imagine what things would have broken it up, if I hadn't. Or do you really think you would have run off and lived happily ever after in Ireland?'
'I don't know. It's not - it wasn't - impossible.' Duffy picked up the bottle and refilled his glass.
'How old are you, Brian? You ought to know by now that something always breaks up love affairs unless both parties are willing to compromise themselves. And that compromising is harder to do the older and less flexible and more independent you are. It just isn't in you, Brian. You could no more get married now than you could become a priest, or a sculptor, or a greengrocer.'
Duffy opened his mouth to voice angry denials, then one corner turned up and he closed it. 'Damn you,' he said wryly. 'Then why do I want to, half the time?'
Aurelianus shrugged, 'It's the nature of the species. There's a part of a manes mind that can only relax and go
to sleep when he's with a woman, and that part gets tired of always being tensely awake. It gives orders in so loud a voice that it often drowns out the other components. But when the loud one is asleep at last, the others regain control and chart a new course.' He grinned. 'No equilibrium is possible. If you don't want to put up with the constant seesawing, you must either starve the logical components or bind, gag and look away in a cellar that one insistent one.'
Duffy grimaced and drank some more brandy. 'I'm used to the rocking, and I was never one to get motion-sick,' he said. 'I'll stay on the seesaw.'
Aurelianus bowed. 'You have that option, sir.'
The Irishman smiled at the sorcerer with something akin to affection. 'Do I gather you've been through one or two of these affairs yourself?'
'Oh, aye.' The old man leaned back against a bureau, reached up over his head and found one of his dried snakes. He rolled it unlit between his fingers, staring at it thoughtfully. 'Not in the last three centuries, thank the heavens, but in my comparative youth - yes, a number of entanglements, artfully baited, but each one eventually ending with its own version of the one standard ending.'
Duffy drained his glass again and set it on the table. 'This is a side of you I never glimpsed,' he said. 'Tell me about these girls - tell me about the last one, three centuries ago, for God's sake.'
The wizard's glass was empty, too, and for a moment he goggled at the snake in his left hand and the glass in his right. Then, coming to a decision, he held the glass out for Duffy to refill. 'She was a Sussex witch named Becky Banham,' he said as the liquor splashed messily into his glass. 'She was a small-time country witch, but definitely the real thing - not one of these horoscoping crystal-gazers.'
'And this.. .Liaison broke up because you were too old to compromise and didn't care to starve your logical -'
'Well, no. Not this one'.
'Oh? It was her decision, then?'
'No. She -' He glared defensively at the Irishman. 'She was burned at the stake.'
'Oh! Sorry to hear it.' Duffy didn't know what more to say about a woman who, whatever else might be said of her, had still been dead longer than his great-great-grandfather.
Aurelianus nodded. 'Sorry, you say? So was I, so was I. When I heard of it, a week or two later, I... visited that village.' He sipped his brandy thoughtfully. 'You can still see a chimney or two of the place these days, sticking up from the grassed-over mounds.'
Getting up abruptly, the old man lurched over to a chest in the corner. 'Somewhere in here,' he said, lifting back the heavy lid and flinging small objects carelessly to the side, 'is a book of her country-spells she gave me. Ah? Aha!' He straightened up, holding a battered leather-bound little book. He flipped open the front cover and read something on the flyleaf, then slammed it shut and stared at the ceiling, blinking rapidly.
Duffy found himself regretting his momentary flash of sympathy. For God's sake, man, he thought, show a little restraint, a little control. To steer the sorcerer onto less maudlin ground, he asked, 'And how does the siege look to you lately? Any sorcerous hints or glimpses of the outcome?'
Aurelianus put the book down on a cluttered table and resumed his seat, a little self-consciously. 'No, nothing. Sorcerously I'm blind and deaf, as I'm sure I explained to you. When I want to know how Vienna stands I ask someone like yourself, who has been out there and seen it happening.' He put the snake in his mouth at last, and stared hard, cross-eyed, at the thing's head. After perhaps
a minute a red glow showed on the end, and then with a brief gout of flame the thing was lit, and he was cheerfully puffing smoke.
Duffy cocked an eyebrow. 'How much of that sort of thing can you still do?'
'Oh, I can do small things only, tricks, like making beetles stand up and jig or making girls' skirts blow up over their heads. You know the sort of thing? But I can do nothing that is directly aggressive to the Turks, not even send them scalp-itch or foot-stink. Of course we're protected to the same degree from Ibrahim... it's simply a deadlock of all the powerful areas of magic, which I think I predicted to you five months ago.'
Duffy was refilling his glass again. 'Yes. You wanted to get rain-magic done while you still had no restrictions on your power - and it may well have worked.'
The old wizard was mildly annoyed. 'May have worked? It did work, you clod. Have you seen any big cannons among the Turk formations, like the ones they overthrew Rhodes with? No, you haven't. My heavy rains forced Suleiman to leave them behind.'
'The rain was damned fortunate, certainly,' Duffy agreed. 'But can you be sure it was summoned rain, and not a natural phenomenon that was going to happen anyway?'
'You were there. You know. You just want to argue with me.'
'Very well, I admit it worked that time in May. But what's the use of having a wizard on our side if he can't do any wizardry?'
Aurelianus let a long stream of smoke out in a sigh. 'Picture yourself in a corps-a-corps with a swordsman who is your equal in skill; your dagger is blocking his dagger, and your sword his sword. Now your dagger isn't free to stab with - but would you say it's useless?'
'No.. .but I wouldn't just stand there straining. I'd knee the bastard and spit in his eyes. Listen, when you were describing this deadlock in advance, you said it would be virtually unbreakable.'
Aurelianus frowned. 'Yes. It is.'
'Virtually doesn't mean the same thing as absolutely.'
'Hell, man, the sun is virtually certain to rise tomorrow morning, the sea is -'It could be broken, though? It'd be tremendously difficult or unlikely, but it could?'
'Could a man amputate, butcher and cook his own legs to avoid starvation? Yes.'
'How? Not this starving man, I mean -'I know. Very well, there are two courses I could take
that would free all the potency of military magic. One is horribly uncertain, and the other is horribly certain. Which one would you like to hear about?'
'Both. What's the uncertain one?'
'Well, the present balance is between Ibrahim and me; it would tilt in our favor if 'the Fisher King himself were actually to ride out and join his will with mine in a battle. Do you understand? He'd have to be there physically and take part in it. That's unthinkably dangerous, like recklessly advancing your king out from behind the pawn wall in a chess game when your life and the lives of everyone you know are somehow at stake.' He spread his hands. 'After all, Vienna isn't the absolutely final place in which to make a last stand against the East. There are other strength-spots where we could regroup and not be too much wo
rse off than we are now.
'But there is no other Fisher King to be had. If he were to be struck by a stray harquebus ball, or cut down by a particularly energetic Janissary, or simply suffer heart failure from exertion or tension.. .well, that would be the end of the story. If the West seems chaotic and disorganized now, when he's only injured, try to imagine how it will be if he dies.'
'Pretty bad, no doubt. Uh. . .there'd be no way for the Turks to counter this escalation?'
'Not as things stand, no. The only way would be for the Eastern King to join in the conflict too, which would simply maintain the deadlock; it would just be tenser, with more force being exerted on both sides. But of course their King is safely hidden in Turkey or somewhere.'
Duffy scratched his chin. 'Would it really be so mad to bring the Fisher King into a battle? It seems to me -'You have no conception of the stakes,' Aurelianus snapped. 'If anything went wrong we'd lose everything There would be no kingdoms of the West, just a wasteland of hastily organized tribes, living in the burned-out ruins of cities, waiting, probably eagerly, for Suleiman to ride through and take formal possession.
'Oh, come on,' Duffy protested, 'let's be realistic. I'll take your word that it would be bad, but it couldn't be that bad.'
'Said the expert on metaphysical history! Brian, you've never seen a culture that has lost its center, its soul. I was not exaggerating.'
The Irishman took a deep sip of the brandy. 'Very well. Tell me about the other way, the.. ."horribly certain" way.
Aurelianus frowned deeply. 'I will, though it will mean breaking a fairly important vow of silence. There is a.. .process, a certain unholy gambit, which would shatter the deadlock and blow away all obstacles for any number of devastating magical attacks on our enemies. It would be equivalent to -
'What is it?' Duffy interrupted.
'It's a physical action which, with certain entreaties, becomes an invocation, a summoning of a vast spirit that is old and evil beyond human understanding. His - its - participation would break this present balance of power like a keg of bricks dropped on one tray of a jeweller's scale.'