Drawing of the Dark

by Tim Powers

  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.

  * * *

  Chapter Twenty

  At long last the waxing glow of dawn divided the irregularly edged paleness of the gap from the high blackness of the leaning walls; what had two hours ago been no more than three stippled lines of bright orange dots in the dark could now be seen to be three ranks of silent, kneeling harquebusiers along the crest of the rubble mound. Behind them, though still outside the new barricade, stood two more companies apiece of landsknechten and Reichshilfe troops, motionless except for the occasional bow of & head to blow on a dimming matchcord.

  One of the companies along the mound was Eilif's, and Duffy was crouched in the center of the front line. He unclamped his hand from the gunstock and absently stretched out the fingers. It seemed to him that in the depths of his mind a bomb had been detonated, which, though too far down to be directly perceptible, had blown loose great stagnant bubbles of memory to come wobbling up to the surface; and he thanked God for even this faintest first light, for it restored to him external things to focus his attention on. During the last five hours he had been staring into a cold blackness as absolute as Gustav Vogel's final drawing.

  The faint click of metal on stone, as one of the
sentries up on the wall grounded his pike, finally snapped Duffy completely out of his terrible night-meditations. He breathed deeply the chilly dawn breeze and tried to sharpen his senses.

  The man to his right leaned toward him. 'You couldn't get me upon those walls,' he whispered. 'The mines have got them tottering.'

  The Irishman raised his hand in a be-silent gesture. Damn this chattering idiot, Duffy thought - did I hear another sound? From the shadowy plain? He peered suspiciously along the barrel of his propped-up harquebus. Every patch of deeper gloom on the plain beyond the white chalk line seemed to his tired eyes to seethe with wormy shapes, but he decided finally that he could see no real motion. He sat back, shivering.

  Several long minutes passed, during which the gray light brightened by slow degrees. Through carefully cupped hands Duffy peered at his slowmatch, and was relieved to see that the dawn dampness had not dimmed its red glow. His mail coif was itching his scalp, and from time to time he instinctively tried to scratch his head, forgetting that he had on a riveted steel salade.

  'I sure hope that hunchback's kept his cannon-primings dry,' muttered the man on Duffy's right again. 'I think-'

  'Shut up, can't you?' Duffy whispered. Then he stiffened; he'd seen the gray light glint on metal a few hundred yards away, then at several points along a dark line. He opened his mouth to whisper a warning to the other men, but he could already hear the rustle as they flexed chilled joints and looked to their powder and matches. There was a low whistle from atop the warped wall, showing that the sentry too had seen the activity.

  The Irishman screwed his match into the firing pin, made sure his pan was filled with powder, and then looked along the barrel at the furtively advancing line. His heart was pounding, his fingertips tingled and he was breathing a little fast. I'll give one shot, he thought - two at the most, if they're slow in getting over the obstruction fence - and then I'm flinging this machine down and using my sword. I just can't seem to feel really in control with a firearm.

  Then there was the muted drum-roll of boots on dirt as the Turks broke into a run - they're akinji, Duffy realized, the lightly armed Turkish infantry; thank God it isn't the Janissaries, whom half the men expected to shift back to this side during the night. The man beside Duffy was panting and scrabbling at the trigger of his gun. 'Don't shoot yet, fool,' the Irishman rasped. 'Want your ball to drop short? Wait till they reach the chalk line.'

  In perhaps thirty seconds they reached it, and the gap in the wall lit up briefly as the first line of harquebuses fired, followed a moment later by a flame-gushing blast of gravel and stones from one of the culverins on the battlements. The front of the advancing akinji tide was ripped apart, scimitars flying from nerveless fingers as torn bodies tumbled and rolled across the dirt, but their maniacal fellows pressed on without a pause, over a wide segment of the fence that had been blown down. A rank of standing harquebusiers fired into the Turkish force, and then the akinji were mounting the slight slope below the wall.

  There was clearly no time to reload, so Duffy tossed his still-sparking gun aside and, standing up, drew his rapier and dagger. I wish the light were better, he thought. 'Two steps back, my company!' he called. 'Don't get separated!'

  Then the Turks were upon them. Duffy sighted the man who would hit him, parried the flashing scimitar with his rapier guard and stabbed the man in the chest with his dagger. The jolt of impact pushed the Irishman back a step, but didn't knock him over. A sword-edge rang against his helmet, and he gave its owner a quick slash across the face as another blade snapped in half against his hauberk. The defenders' line was slowly giving way when a harsh call sounded from behind them: 'We're reloaded back here! Christians, drop!'

  Duffy parried a hard poke at his face and then fell to his

  hands and knees even as a mingled roar of gun-fire went off at his back and the cold air around him was filled with the whiz-and-thud of lead balls striking flesh. 'On your feet!' he yelled a moment later, hopping up to meet the next wave of akinji as their predecessors reeled back and fell.

  The man on Duffy's right took a sword through his belly and, clutching himself, somersaulted down the slope, so that the Irishman suddenly found himself facing two -then three - of the akinji. All at once his cautious confidence in his own skill was eroding, and he sensed the nearness of real, incapacitating fear. 'Get over here, somebody!' he yelled, desperately parrying the licking scimitars with sword and dagger. His troop of men had retreated away from him, though, and he hadn't even a wall to get his back to. He took a flying leap at the Turk on his right, trusting his hauberk and salade to absorb the worst of the attacks of the other two; he swept the man's scimitar away in a low line with both his sword and dagger, and riposted with a long thrust of the dagger that he accurately drove into the Turk's throat. The other two akinji struck at Duffy then; one of them swung a hard cut at Duffy's shoulder, and though the blow stung, the mail blocked the sword-edge and the scimitar flew into three pieces; the other lunged in with his sword extended straight, and his point, cutting through the Irishman's leather doublet, found one of the gaps in his mail shirt and sank an inch into his side.

  Duffy whirled back when he felt the shock of cold steel in him and sent the Turk's wide-eyed head spinning from his shoulders with a furious scything chop. The field momentarily clear, he scrambled a few steps up the slope and through one of the openings in the barricade that divided the rocky crest, to rejoin his fellow Austrians.

  As he lurched up over the top, with the scuff and rattle of the pursuing akinji sounding loud behind him, he caught

  a glimpse of soldiers standing behind a line of what appeared to be narrow, chest-high tables, and he heard someone's agonized yell: 'My God, dive for it, Duffy!'

  He caught the urgency in the voice, and without pausing kicked forward in a long dive down the inward slope, ripping his leather gloves and banging his helmet and knees as he tumbled across the raw stones. Even as he moved, a quick series of ten loud explosions concussed the air in front of him like very rapid hammer-strokes; there followed two more stuttering blasts often, and then there was a pause.

  Duffy had rolled to the gravelly bottom of the slope with his face down and his legs up, and by the time he'd struggled into a sitting position he realized what the tablelike things were - sets of ten small cannons braced together like log rafts, fired by putting a match to the trail of serpentine powder poured across all the touchholes.

  Orgelgeschutzen, the Austrians called them, though from his stay in Venice Duffy thought of them as ribaldos, their Italian name.

  'Quick, Duff, get back here,' came Eilif's voice. The Irishman got to his feet and sprinted ten yards to where the troops were clustered. 'Why did you stay out there?' Eilif demanded. 'You knew we were to fire two volleys and then fall back to let them run into the teeth of these things.' He waved at the ribaldos.

  'I,' Duffy panted, 'figured our retreat would look more convincing if a man or two hung on.'

  The Swiss landsknecht raised a dusty eyebrow and stared hard at Duffy. 'Really?'

  There was another rush of akinji over the splintered barricade along the top, but it seemed dispirited; when two more bursts of the small-calibre cannon-fire whipped them apart, the survivors backed off fast, and a few seconds later the sentries on the wall called down the news that the akinji were retreating back toward their lines.

  'Well of course really,' Duffy answered. 'What did you think, that I just forgot?'

  Eilif grinned. 'Sorry.' He gestured at the new corpses on the crest and shrugged. 'I guess it was a clever move.' He trotted away to the slope and began climbing up to see in what direction the Turks retreated.

  The Irishman felt hot blood running down his side and gathering at his belt, and suddenly remembered the wound he'd taken. He pressed a hand to it and plodded through the reassembling ranks, looking for a surgeon. His mind, though, wasn't on the sword-cut - in his head he was listening again to his brief dialogue with Eilif , and uneasily admiring his own qu
ick improvisation. Because actually, he thought, your first suspicion was right, Eiif. I did forget. And what does that say about me?

  The sun had risen above the eastern horizon, but the bulk of the ruined wall cast a shadow that was still dark enough to make readily visible the watch-fires up and down the street. Duffy stumbled about randomly until his eyes adjusted to the dimness, and very shortly he was surprised to see Aurelianus warming his hands over one of the fires. Their eyes met, so the Irishman reluctantly crossed the littered space of cobbles to where the wizard stood.

  'Keeping the home fires burning, eh?' Duffy said with a pinched and artificial smile. 'And what brings you so uncharacteristically close to the front line?'

  'This is childish enough,' the wizard said bitterly, 'without a theatrical rendition of ignorant innocence from you. What were you thinking, a - ach, you're bleeding! Come here.'

  Newly awakened soldiers were dashing up from the direction of the barracks, shivering in their chilly chain mail and rubbing their eyes, and other men were dragging the wounded back inside. Duffy sat down beside Aurelianus' fire. The sorcerer had taken his medicine box

  out of his pouch and fished from it a bag that was spilling yellow powder. 'Lie down,' he said.

  Duffy brushed away some scattered stones and complied. Aurelianus opened the Irishman's doublet and lifted his rusty mail shirt. 'Why the hell don't you keep your hauberk clean?' he snapped. 'This doesn't look too bad, though. He obviously didn't lean into the thrust.' He tapped some of the powder into the wound.

  'What's that stuff?' asked Duffy, frowning.

  'What do you care? It'll keep you from getting poisoned, which is what you deserve, wearing a rusty hauberk.' He took a roll of linen from the box and expertly bandaged the wound, running strips around Duffy's back to hold it in place. 'There,' he said. 'That ought to hold body and soul together. Get up.'

  Duffy did, puzzled by the harshness in the wizard's voice. 'What -' he began.

  'Shut up. I want to know about your little trick last night. What were you thinking, an eye for an eye, a girl for a girl?'