“Twelve hundred men,” Von Graeb complained to his staff. “How am I to defend the southern flank of the Holy Roman Empire with twelve hundred men? Twelve thousand might be enough, seeing that we have to defend an entire mountain chain from enemy cavalry two thousand strong and footmen of three times that number. Herzog!”
“Yes, Herr Major,” answered a grizzled veteran.
“Any word from the minister’s representative?”
“He says that he can spare only three hundred men, sir. Those orders came to him direct from the Minister of Defense.”
“Three hundred? But nothing is happening up there.”
“Sir, the minister feels that if we move too many troops from Saxony, the Prussians will perceive a weakness and move to attack at their first opportunity.”
“But nothing is happening up there!” Von Graeb repeated.
“Sorry, sir. I am only relaying a message.”
“Understood. Have we tried sending a diplomatic envoy?”
“Of course, sir.”
“And?”
“Sir, he was cut down before he reached Sofia. There were no negotiations.”
“So much for the diplomatic option. How soon until the graf’s three hundred reach us?”
“Two days, sir.”
“Two days?”
“They are bringing in a pair of artillery pieces, sir.”
“They’ll be firing on the smoldering ruins of Vienna by then.”
“Surely not the entire city, sir . . .”
“Maybe more!” Von Graeb shouted, then immediately regretted losing his composure. He gained control of himself and started giving orders in a measured, if certain voice.
“We send out a squadron of cavalry to cross the enemy’s front in order to mask our numbers. That will slow them by at least a couple of hours as their generals discuss how to proceed next. Then all cannons to the front gate. They will have to thin out to surround us, no?”
“Correct, sir.”
“Then the three hundred reinforcements can provide some harassment to the enemy’s flanks and maybe provide us a narrow gauntlet for escape from the siege, should it come to that.”
“Let’s hope not, sir.”
“Let’s hope and plan, Herzog. The squadron will leave within the hour. They are only to nettle the enemy, not to fully engage, clear?”
“Clear, sir.”
“Very good. Tack my horse up. I want to be ready when the enemy arrives. But first I have someone to talk to. Lescher!”
Von Graeb’s assistant came out of the shadows.
“Major?”
“Lescher, you will meet me at the emperor’s residence as soon as my orders have been issued.”
“Of course, sir.”
“And, Lescher?”
“Yes, Major.”
“I want those orders given with exactness. You will not influence Sergeant Herzog on the matter. Any deviation, and I’ll have you sent to the front, if I have to drive you there myself. Understood?”
Lescher shrank. “Very well, sir.”
I cannot live on patriotism forever, thought Bohren. My body can’t keep up with my convictions.
He lifted his foot off the ground and tried to rotate it, but the shattered ankle had healed funny, and he could only make a circular motion from the knee, like some drunken Russian dancer whose movements made a mockery of his age. He recalled with irony how he had awoken on the trail to the Serb’s castle amidst a mud-pit of bootprints, in utter agony. His ribs, hand, and ankle had been broken in his deep sleep. As the the pain began to rush in, so did the villagers of Bozsok, trampling him a second time. This time, however, he was capable of shouting, which he did quite adamantly. The villagers were also more quiet on their return than they had been when they had originally stormed the Serb’s castle, quieted, Bohren surmised, by their own guilt at what they had done, though he felt that they had no reason for remorse at having eliminated a foreigner of suspicious motivation and intent.
Now some of those same villagers stood ready not to drive another out, but prepared to keep from being themselves driven away by foreign invaders.
The Turks were approaching, though they were not sure of the invading enemy’s numbers. The villagers of Bozsok capable of fighting numbered under a hundred. A few soldiers, recently garrisoned there by Major Felix Von Graeb, held the majority of the force’s firepower. Twenty soldiers, well-armed with muskets and sabers, took up positions on the leeward side of the mountains leading up to Bozsok from the southeast. Of the villagers, a dozen or so had firearms available to them. They had, in fact, been loath to let the imperial forces know that they held so many, but as the magnitude of the crisis became clearer, the villagers came clean and submitted to the soldiers’ pleas to “fall in.” Bohren was given charge as a provisional commander of the militia, having proven an adequate leader of the people in times past.
For the first time, he felt inadequate to the task. Thirteen old, inaccurate blunderbuss rifles, eighty pitchforks and makeshift lances, not a proper sword among them outside of the old saber that Bohren now used as a crutch. This, plus twenty trained soldiers, none of who were under his command, hastily scrabbled together but not really together since the sergeant-at-arms refused to coordinate his efforts with Bohren’s; this ragtag militia was to defend the mountain village from an unknown number of Ottoman foot soldiers.
Well, they had faced these circumstances before, but not for a generation. In times past the roughness of the terrain had slowed the enemy advance long enough for help to arrive, but the sergeant wasn’t forthcoming regarding information on when to expect reinforcements or on how many men to expect. When pressed on the issue, the sergeant went silent, which did nothing to reassure Bohren or the other villagers, all of whom waited with grim resolve to defend their village or die trying. They knew that it was likely they would do both.
The morning sky was cloudy, which was good. Their numbers would be hidden, and they needn’t worry about the sun’s glare capriciously blinding them and spoiling their aim. If they were lucky, it might even rain, forcing the enemy to charge uphill on a slippery mud slope. Bohren silently prayed for the rain to come. They would need all the help they could get.
The rain came, but only as a quick misting, enough to drip down cold and discomfiting from the forest canopy, but barely enough to dampen the ground. It would do little to stop the advancing Turks.
As the noise of the rain quieted down, another sound arose from the slopes below. It had its own rhythm, more regular than the uneven rain: the steady beat of marching footsteps kept in cadence by more than one officer who counted their footsteps off in Turkish: “Bir! Iki! Üç!” The jangle of bandoliers and scimitar hangers clattered up the mountainside, closer and closer, growing louder with each moment. And with each step of the march, Bozsok’s militia became more aware of its precarious situation. The sergeant-at-arms, who had taken up a forward position behind a large embankment with a platoon of his troops, looked back uphill at Bohren. The soldier shook his head, his face grim, resigned to fate, ready to die a warrior’s death, but without any false hopes of victory this day.
Bohren understood why. His ears betrayed to him the same circumstance that the sergeant could see directly as the Turks advanced. They were hopelessly outnumbered and hemmed in on three sides.
He drew his saber at nearly the same time as the sergeant. The enemy’s noise covered the sound of the slithering blades coming free from their scabbards.
The sergeant raised his saber, his men took aim, and the sun glinted through the breaking clouds as the troops of the Holy Roman Empire shot off their first, and possibly last volley. The musket-smoke cloud obstructed the view of the enemy lines, but the eruption of battle cries and gunfire was conclusive.
Bohren wouldn’t be troubled by his bad ankle for long.
CHAPTER 25
“I remember you,” a voice says.
Pomp remembers the voice. She cannot see anything, nor does she remember
how she came to be in this darkness, but none of it matters as soon as she hears the voice.
“You are resilient,” Mowler says with a sense of perverse admiration. “You are strong. Therefore, I shall be saving you for a special sacrifice.”
The jar thuds down onto a tabletop, Pomp guesses, unable as she is to see beyond the bag in which she is wrapped. Vertigo overtakes her as the jar falls on its side, spins, rolls. She hardly knows which way is up.
The jar lid opens and she feels herself completely disoriented as Mowler removes the bag with her in it and bangs it on the table once, twice, thrice. Something in her side breaks and she is helpless to resist as the sorcerer reaches into the bag and grabs her, pinning her arms to her sides and squeezing the breath out of her.
She can’t see her surroundings, only rushing light as he throws her down on the table. She tries to fly, but something holds her down. Not Mowler, who is no longer touching her, not her injury, which, while extremely painful, is not completely debilitating. No, some force holds her there. She looks around her on the table and sees a circle of black symbols scrawled on the tabletop around her. She strains her wings against gravity, but to no avail. Her feet are rooted to the place, as if they had been doused with a quick-drying glue. She is not going anywhere, not now.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Mowler affirms.
She can move her head, so she looks around, as much to avoid having to look at Mowler as to assess her situation.
He is as hideous as ever. But there is something different about him now. Something has changed since the last time she saw him die. Burn scars in the shapes of writhing tentacles line his neck, spine, both jaw lines, and his chin—as if a fiery octopus had swallowed him up to the shoulders, then tried to pull the rest of him into its beak before he managed to free himself from its grasp with one last, desperate effort. He walks now with a gait that defies gravity, as if he is always about to fall flat on his face until some spectral puppet master violently pulls him upright. Pure evil ambition animates him in a perpetual Saint Vitus dance, a mockery of nature that makes death itself turn away in ashamed impotence. His limbs bend, jerk, and snap with such suddenness and at such awkward angles that Pomp wonders if his bones have been completely shattered.
Still, he moves swiftly, snatching up supplies from around the room with spastic accuracy. Pomp feels a cold chill, followed by a deep aching in her belly as she watches him grab a long, slender, curved knife that seems very familiar to her. After picking up a piece of chalk, he plucks a jar from a table other than the one to which Pomp is frozen.
This jar speaks. Screams, really.
She knows the voices.
“Doribell! Ilsie!” Pomp calls out.
But they are too busy screaming to hear.
Mowler shakes the jar so violently that Pomp can hear the ring of the metal lid and glass bottom as the fairies’ bodies bounce around inside. He then pours the pair out of the container and on to the floor. Their wings have been plucked off, and their backs are bleeding from the cavities where their wings used to be. One of them—Pomp thinks it’s Ilsie—shakes off her dizzies and tries to run away only to be grabbed by the teetering sorcerer who grasps one of her legs in both hands and snaps her knee backwards with a sickening crunch. Doribell is in too much shock to help her injured sister. She just sits up and stares at a wall.
“No!” Pomp screams. “Leave them alone!”
“Or what?” The madman turns to look at Pomp with a baleful glare. “You have no say in the matter,” he says, picking up Doribell and ripping the hair from her head like a spiteful child with a broken doll. Doribell screams, then stops as the stunning pain leaves her gasping and voiceless. “However, as a favor, you will get a foretaste of what is to come. But you will do so in silence!”
He thrusts a crooked arm at her, as if throwing something across the room. She finds her lips instantly sewn shut with some kind of rough, itchy thread that irritates the new puncture wounds that perforate her lips. She is helpless, able only to weep and watch.
Mowler lopes over to a corner of the room and wheels over a full-length mirror, positioning it so that Pomp can see herself standing on the table. He takes a piece of chalk and scrawls something on the floor halfway between her and the mirror. Then he writes across the mirror with a piece of soap. The flowing script resembles that which she has become accustomed to seeing: the language of devils and sorcerers, Hell’s alphabet. Next he retrieves Doribell and Ilsie, dangling them by their raw head and broken leg, respectively. He drops them, unresisting, onto a matrix of symbols on the floor, sets the knife down on the perimeter of the magic square, and kneels down with his back to Pomp. She can still see his every move in the mirror.
The old man’s eyes roll up and back into his head as he repeatedly chants the words “Kek kek agl agl nathrak”. He raises his hands toward the ceiling, palms up, then pulls his fingers to his palms, beckoning.
The mirror ripples, distorting the room’s reflection, then returns to normal. It ripples again, bulges from the flat glass, then roils, sending out glass bubbles that gently float through the air before touching the floor or some nearby object and shattering into a miniature shower of glass. Bubbles soon pour out of the mirror, and the room becomes a scintillating orchestra of popping globes and tinkling glass.
A hand emerges from the mirror. At the tip of each finger and on the back and palm of the hand are eyeballs. Each orb darts about, scanning the surroundings from every possible angle. Then another hand, also studded with eyes, emerges. The hands part the bubbles like a curtain.
The thing that issues forth from the face of the mirror is shaped like the headless body of a very fat man. Its entire body is littered with eyes—some brown, some green, some hazel, and some ice blue. Pomp wonders how it protects the eyes on the soles of its feet, which Pomp spots as it steps down onto the floor.
“Panopticus!” Mowler says. “What news from below?”
A voice sounds, but Pomp sees no mouth on the devil, only eyes.
“Archaentus, Pollyx, and Cant report that all is in position. Vespit nearly betrayed us to him, but we discovered the subterfuge and dealt with him accordingly. It will be a long time before he regains enough wherewithal to pose a threat.”
“And by then,” Mowler says, “I will have consolidated my rule. He will have no place to hide but under the scattered remains of Beelzebub himself. I should like to feed them both to the worms for several thousand years, bite by agonizing bite.”
“It would only be appropriate, my liege,” Panopticus says.
“In the meantime, though, I have a sacrifice to arrange. Are our other agents in position?”
“The Sultan’s head eunuch is prepared to open the floodgates at your command.”
“I trust that he hasn’t yet shown his hand?”
“No one suspects a thing, my master. Only you and he know the end game.”
“And what a glorious game, Panopticus. The greatest sacrifice ever to take place on the face of the Earth. The souls of tens of thousands freed from their mortal coil, almost all at once. Can you imagine the power that will be unleashed?”
“I can, my master, yes.”
“And I shall harness it all. No one will stop me, man or devil, from ruling the dominions of Hell!”
“The devils crave order more than anything else, master,” Panopticus says. “We are helpless to overcome the entropy within and around us, the entropy that the Lord of Flies seems to embrace, unless you come to instill order.”
“Then it is critical that you heed my commands, Panopticus. You will have your king when I snatch the Crown of Hell from the defeated Beelzebub. But our preparations must be carried out. You will go to the Pasha Mustafa Il-Ibrahim in disguise as a traitor to the Holy Roman Empire. I’m sure you will impress him with your keen observations. Tell him something that he thinks only he knows. He will let you into his good graces. Then tell him that Emperor Joseph is building a secret weapon that will surely defeat the
Ottoman Empire if it isn’t destroyed. He’ll want to consult with the sultan, but you must convince him that the sultan will take all credit for having discovered the threat and rooting it out. It’s in Pasha Mustafa’s best interest to take the matter into his own hands and capture the weapon with his own army. If the sultan is impressed with his pasha’s ingenuity and bravery, it is well. If the sultan takes exception to his brash actions, Mustafa will have, in the weapon itself, the greatest bargaining chip possible. The sultan will have no choice but to praise and publicly reward his pasha.”
Panopticus bows. “What shall I tell him this secret weapon is?”
“A cannon capable of destroying a city quarter or an entire village in one shot, hidden beneath Schonbrunn Palace.”
“Yes, master.” Panopticus bows and begins to slowly back away toward the mirror, maintaining his obeisant posture.
“Before you go,” Mowler says, “you will perform one more task for me. I’m sure you’ll find it enjoyable.”
“What is your will, master?”
“I am in need of a little makeover. My disguise takes more and more energy to maintain. I need to be able to keep Edelweir’s face without so much effort. You will do this for me.”
“Yes, master.”
Mowler holds up Doribell in one hand, the nasty curved dagger in the other.
“Then prepare to receive the sacrifice,” Mowler says.
Pomp watches as he draws the knife along Doribell’s length.
“Doribell!” Ilsie cries out, then sobs.
Panopticus makes a sound like a man who has just risen from a restful sleep and is stretching out, refreshed, a sound of gratification, of needs fulfilled.
“Ah!” the devil says. Pomp can only imagine him smiling. “Her death, seasoned with your malice, tastes good. But her sister’s sorrow is delicious to me. Delectable!”
“You shall have the second course when you have done as I have ordered. If you do not . . . .” Mowler smiles a rickety-toothed grimace, “. . . well, you know what I did to Tawdragari.”
Panopticus bows. “Hell will never forget such punishment as that, master. I willingly give you all.”
Heraclix and Pomp: A Novel of the Fabricated and the Fey Page 26
