by Tim Powers
“Out of the way, Aickman,” he gasped, “we’ve got her.”
Crawford could now see that the burden the men were carrying was a rolled carpet that sagged in the middle, and he knew it must contain Josephine; the man who had spoken was holding up one end, and Crawford hoped it was where her feet were.
Crawford smiled and nodded agreeably—and then leaped up four more steps, grabbed the back of the man’s collar and pulled, hiking his feet up so that his entire weight was behind the pull.
The man toppled over backward with a panicked yell, and though Crawford tried to twist him around in midair, Crawford was still between the stairs and the heavy body above him when they slammed into the iron stair-treads several yards down; all the breath was punched out of him in one harsh, agonized bark, so that when, a moment later, the dropped roll of carpet thudded solidly into them before going end over end down the stairs, he could only scream in his mind as he felt broken rib-ends grind together in his chest.
The man on top of him had his legs in the air and, screaming and flailing uselessly at the brick wall, he slowly overbalanced and then went tumbling away himself in a backward somersault, off of Crawford. The stairs were ringing dully.
Someone leaped over Crawford and ran on down the stairs, and then someone else hoisted him roughly to his feet, and he was dimly aware of angry faces in lantern light, and loud questions being shouted at him.
He was only able to shake his head. His battered lungs were heaving in his chest, trying to draw in air, and he was distantly aware of hot blood running down his chin from his nose.
Finally one of his questioners spat an impatient curse and looked past Crawford down the stairs. “I can’t get any sense out of him, Emile, but there’s been too much noise,” he called, loudly enough for Crawford to hear him over the ringing in his ears. “Never mind taking her to the river—kill her here, and leave Marco where he is and let’s be on our way.”
Crawford turned and began frantically shambling down the stairs, his feet flopping and slipping under him, his hands clutching the rail, and sweat springing out coldly on his ashen face. He was able to breathe now, but only in great rasping whoops.
When he got down to the narrow courtyard he was sure he would have to pause to vomit; but by the light from the quickly descending lantern behind him he saw the man who’d hurried past him on the stairs—Emile, apparently—bend over the carpet and drive a knife twice, hard, into the streetward end of the carpet roll.
The light was good enough now for Crawford to see blood on the blade as Emile drew back his arm for a third stab. The roll was heaving now, and Emile seemed to be trying to judge where Josephine’s neck was.
Crawford drew the pistol from his belt—tearing some skin, for the jagged lock mechanism had apparently been driven into his stomach—and, whimpering in horror, pointed it at the man and fired it.
Recoil punched the pistol out of his hand, but Emile spun away from the carpet and sat down hard against the wall, and Crawford hunched across the pavement to him, stumbling over the limp body of the man he’d pulled down the stairs, and hurriedly searched Emile’s blood-wet pockets.
He found another pistol and, turning on his heel so fast that he thought he might pass out, aimed it back up at the men who by now were nearly at the bottom of the stairs. Lights had been lit behind several of the courtyard-facing windows, and women were screaming and calling for the guardia.
“Run,” Crawford choked, “or I’ll … kill you too.”
They backed up cautiously until they were out of his line of sight, and then he heard them scramble away—farther up the stairs or down some hall.
Crawford gingerly pushed the pistol down inside his belt, then crouched by the still-heaving roll of carpet.
He noticed that there were two nuns peering at him from a doorway, and he called, “C'è una donna ferita qui dentro—forse maria—aiutatemi srotolare!”
The nuns exclaimed in alarm but hurried over to him, and in less than a minute had unrolled Josephine.
She sat up, and Crawford was relieved to see by the blood on one of her ankles that Emile had been stabbing the wrong end of the carpet. He looked around until he saw Emile’s dropped knife, and he automatically bent and picked it up.
The men on the stairs had carried their lantern away with them, but enough lamps had been lit behind the nearby windows now for Crawford to see that Josephine was deep in her mechanical defense—her eyes were wide and her head was snapping back and forth, and she got to her feet like a rusty iron puppet, apparently unaware of the blood coursing down over her right foot.
Crawford glanced nervously back up the stairs, then limped over to her. “We’ve got to get out of here, Josephine,” he said. “Those men won’t leave the area until they’ve killed you.”
She stared at him blankly and recoiled from the arm he’d put around her; he was ready to simply drag her away, but then he remembered the nonsense she’d spoken to Byron and him on the Wengern, and remembered the name under which she’d been working for Keats.
“Julia,” he said, “this is Michael, your husband. We’ve got to get out of here.”
The rigid blankness left her face, and she gave him a grotesquely delighted smile. She seemed about to speak, but he just grinned as cheerfully as he could and led her toward the arch and the street beyond, waving Emile’s knife reassuringly back at the bewildered nuns.
He bumped into one of the life-size wooden statues, and in a moment of panic stabbed at it with the knife, striking it in the face.
The knife-grip was suddenly red-hot, and he snatched his scorched hand away. His palm was red, with a black spot in the center.
He thought he heard a shout far away in the night, and on a sudden impulse that he didn’t bother to analyze, he left the knife sticking in the wooden saint’s cheek.
He pulled Josephine out into the street.
The rain was coming down even more heavily than before, raising waves of splash-spray that swept like nets across the pavement. There were no carriages on the street, and he hadn’t brought any money anyway. He had one arm draped around Josephine; with the other he drew Emile’s blood-slick pistol, and he kept glancing back at the nurses’ home as the two of them reeled across the street.
They had nearly got to an alley on the far side when something punched his thigh like a hammer blow, and he folded, at the same moment feeling Josephine jerk and pitch forward away from him; and as he landed on his hands and knees on the cobblestones he realized that the two heavy bams that had for a moment battered the building fronts had been gunshots.
He knew he was being killed, but he was too exhausted and hurt to derive any alarm from the thought, only depression and a leaden impatience that it was taking so long, and hurting so much.
He wondered if Josephine was dead and, if not, if he could somehow get her free of this before the men behind them came over to finish off the job. He swung his head dizzily back and forth, squinting in the cold rain, and finally saw her sprawled only a few yards from him. Her skirt, already dark from the rain, was pulled up, and he could see the quickly diluted blood running from two gashes in her right calf.
He crawled over to her, dragging his shot left leg, and lifted her face. Her hair was full of fresh, hot blood—evidently she’d been shot in the head—but he put his ear to her mouth.
She was breathing, in fast gasps.
Over the ringing in his ears he could hear footsteps thudding and splashing,
louder by the second, behind him. He had dropped the pistol when he fell, but it was next to Josephine’s head, and he picked it up; he rolled over, careful not to jar his mercifully numb left leg, and sat up, facing back the way he’d come. It was hard to see through the rain, and he pushed wet hair away from his eyes with his free hand.
He raised the pistol in shaking hands. He could dimly see two figures approaching through the veil of the rain, and he waited for them to come closer.
They did, in great bounding leaps, and at
nearly the last moment he remembered to click the hammer back, wondering if he could pull the trigger on a human being again.
Then there was the sound of hoofbeats from the direction of the Via Montebello, and the two men in the street halted and turned toward the noise, raising pistols of their own.
Not caring who the newcomers might be, but grateful for the diversion, Crawford aimed at one of the men in the street and, unconsciously whispering curses and fragments of half-remembered prayers, carefully squeezed the trigger of Emile’s pistol.
The bang hammered his already abused eardrums and the gun’s barrel clouted his face as the recoil kicked it up and back—and the man he’d been aiming at did a backflip and disappeared in the spray of the rain above the pavement. Crawford reversed the spent pistol and held it by the hot barrel and waited for the last man to come for him—but the horsemen were galloping forward now, and then he was dazzled into momentary blindness by a muzzle-flash as the last of Crawford’s attackers fired his gun at the riders in the moment before being ridden down.
Crawford couldn’t see if the man’s shot had hit anyone. One of the riders reined in his horse long enough to fire a shot down into the body under the horses’ hooves, and then to call, perhaps to Crawford, “Questo e’ fatto dai Carbonari, chiamato dalla mazze”—and then all of them rode away south. Crawford tried to watch them, but the rain, and the red dazzle-spots floating in his vision, made them invisible within a few yards.
This was done by the Carbonari, summoned by the mazze, Crawford translated mentally—and he was profoundly grateful for the impulse that had made him stick the iron blade into the wooden head—and grateful too that the men on horseback hadn’t recognized him from having glimpsed him earlier this evening in Navona Square.
But of course he had changed his allegiance since then.
Still sitting on the street, he laid the gun down and put his hand under his thigh, scraping the backs of his knuckles against the wet cobblestones.
He found the tear in his trousers and, though it nearly made him faint with sheer horror, he gingerly probed the hole in his leg with a fingertip. It was bleeding, but not so copiously as to indicate a torn artery. There was no exit wound, so the ball must still be inside—that was good news in some ways, bad in some others. The wound was still numb, but a hot ache was building up in there, and he knew he needed medical attention soon.
Still sitting up, he now hiked himself back so that he could assess the damage to Josephine’s head. In the rainy darkness he felt the shape of her skull, but it didn’t seem to have been shattered; and her face was fine, except for some rough-feeling scratches on her cheek and jaw from having collided with the street. Then he noticed a hard lump at her right temple, and he traced its outlines gently with his fingers.
It was the pistol ball. It had evidently struck the back of her head at an angle and, instead of punching straight through the skull into the brain, had skidded along the outside of the bone like the tip of a filleting knife.
She’d been lucky—but she could still easily die of this. And even if she lived, her brain might sustain damage from the concussion. Of course with her, he thought, it would have to be a lot of damage, for anyone to be able to tell.
She shifted and groaned, then all at once sat up. One arm came up like a hinged rake and clawed sopping hair back from her forehead. “Is,” she said in a voice like a shovel going into gravel, “the sun … down yet.”
When he’d recovered from his surprise at her abrupt return to consciousness, Crawford laboriously raised his eyes to the dark sky. “Uh,” he said, “I think so.” “We have to go to … Keats. To his apartment.”
Her voice was entirely without inflection, and Crawford found it hard to believe that there was anyone at all behind it. He wondered if her personality—or personalities—were still unconscious from the pistol shot, leaving this … this machine to work the vacated body.
“Keats’s place,” he echoed. “Why?”
“This is … not the one that knows. But we have to … go there.”
Crawford thought about that. They’d be likely to meet more of von Aargau’s men there … but none of them could know of his defection yet. All the witnesses to it were dead—or at least, as in the case of the man whom he had pulled down the stairs, injured and unconscious. He could claim … what, that he had gone to help the assassins, and had been shot at by Carbonari.
Von Aargau’s men would help him—he was a fellow-employee. They would certainly get him medical help, and they might even loan him some money.
Of course they’d kill Josephine … damn her.
“That’s the one place we can’t go,” he told her, trying to speak clearly in spite of the powerful dizziness that made the whole street seem to spin. “The people who shot us just now—more of them will be there. They’d kill … us.”
She stood up. “Stay or come along,” she said. “This is going there.”
Crawford’s hands were shaking as if he’d been drinking coffee all day. He was only breathing every five seconds or so, in great, shuddering sighs, and a cold, sweaty nausea was beginning to crawl up his throat from his stomach. He’d seen these symptoms in wounded sailors aboard ships, and he knew he was in danger of “freezing up"—going into a state in which all the body’s functions just slowed down and stopped.
He tried to think clearly. He could knock on a door in this street, and take his chances with whatever sort of doctor was summoned, or he could walk the near mile to Keats’s place with some assurance of getting the best possible care.
The rain had stopped, and the night didn’t seem to be as cold as it had been.
“Let me put a tourniquet on this first,” he said.
Though Crawford sweated and swore and sobbed, and leaned ever more heavily on the fortunately mechanical Josephine, and had to sit down many times to loosen and retie the tourniquet, and toward the end started begging forgiveness from the ghosts that seemed to be walking with him, the devastated pair of them eventually came dragging and lurching into the Piazza di Spagna.
Wild piano music was playing somewhere nearby, and Crawford blinked around, trying to figure out where it was coming from and what the tormentingly familiar melody was. After a moment he realized that he had heard it only in certain unrestful adolescent dreams.
There didn’t seem to be anyone in the square—the saints on the steps had of course all left many hours ago, at dusk, and if any of von Aargau’s men were here, they were apparently inside the building that was Number 26–but the square flickered with a diffuse white light, and when Crawford forced his eyes to focus he saw that the second floor of the building was alive with the brushlike illumination of St. Elmo’s Fire.
Corbie’s Aunt is paying Keats a visit, he thought blurrily—and then he noticed the two figures that stood outside the door. Somehow in the weird light he couldn’t tell if they were robed or naked.
One was male and the other, which he recognized instantly even after four years, was female. He sighed profoundly, and knew that even if he had had his flask with him, he wouldn’t have had the strength to resist, not now, not injured and exhausted like this.
He hoisted himself away from Josephine’s shoulder and began limping forward. The music strengthened and jumped up into a higher octave.
Josephine started forward too, and though she was weaving drunkenly he fleetingly got the impression that she was somebody again. The music was in cut-time now, and wilder, like a horse galloping down a steep road at night.
“Run,” he whispered harshly to Josephine, even though he had little breath to spare. “You’ll die here. This has … nothing … to do with you.”
He looked over at her, and saw on her face the same hungrily despairing expression he knew was on his own. “He has to do with me,” she said. Her voice was a defeated monotone, but he still thought she had recovered from her mechanical mode.
The woman at the doorway kept her brightly reptilian eyes on Crawford as he approached, and w
hen at last he paused, a few yards in front of her, she smiled, baring inhuman teeth.
“You lost me in the Alps,” she hissed. “Invite me back now and I’ll heal you entirely, and you can forget everything.”
She held out to him a hand—it was slightly more like a jewelled bird-claw than like a woman’s hand, but he remembered it sliding languorously over his naked body four years ago, and his heart was pounding with the desire to take it. The music was doing arabesques around his rapid heartbeat now, and he thought he could almost remember the steps of a dance so ancient and wild that trees and rivers and storms took part in it.
A moment later Josephine rocked to a halt beside him, and the male figure said to her, “You lost me in the Alps. Invite me back now and I’ll fulfill you, and you can forget everything.”
The parallel statements had fit into the music like sections of gold thread in a vivid tapestry, and almost seemed to be lyrics, implying more to come.
Tears were running down Crawford’s face—he didn’t see how he could be expected to resist her any longer. For four years now he had ignored his nocturnal urges when he could, and had drunk himself insensible when he could not, and had lived with the memories that she could rid him of, and had not once given in to the temptation to call her—but now, surely, he could do it, could surrender his despised identity and just become an extension of her.
Faintly over the music he thought he caught an echo of harsh coughing; and then, “Not yet,” grated Josephine beside him. “Upstairs—free Keats to die.”
Crawford had vaguely assumed that she was talking to herself, but when he raised his arms toward the faintly luminous female figure in front of him, Josephine struck them down.
The music, which had been rising, fell off a little.
He blinked at her impatiently. “We do? Why?”
She waved her hands helplessly. “Because … because of the sister,” she said. She seemed to have trouble talking, but then words came in a rush. “We can’t let the sister die, not again. We’ve got to buy ourselves out of debt. Then we can go to hell.”
