The Stress of Her Regard (66 page)

Crawford took back control of his throat. "I'm not going to bring Josephine along. She won't step out of the gondola, so she shouldn't be visible to her vampire even if they have already done the blood trick. And
I
wasn't in their net even before we took the eye, so it's no danger to me." He turned and spoke to the gondolier. "Take us back to the Piazza, please."

Josephine leaned out over the gunwale and cupped up some water in her clawed hand. She leaned forward and splashed it across Crawford's forehead.

Crawford blinked at her in irritable puzzlement for a moment, then smiled. "I said in Rome that I might want that sometime, didn't I? Thank you."

He dipped his own hand in the water and rubbed his wet hand across her forehead too.

Now baptized, they turned to look anxiously back toward the Piazza San Marco.

Nothing is sure but that which is uncertain,
What's evident to all is most obscure;
Only when snared in doubts can I be sure.
Only to enigmas, never to Logic's lure,
Knowledge surrenders, and draws back her curtain . . .

—Francois Villon, "Ballade for the Contest at Blois"
the W. Ashbless translation

The gondolier sighed theatrically and waved one imploring hand to heaven, but he obediently swung the gondola into a wide curve, back the way they'd come, probably because they were closer to the Piazza than to the Lido, and he'd be rid of these mad people sooner.

Crawford's mouth opened again.
"They might just arrest both of you at the mooring stairs."
Crawford massaged his throat and wished Byron wouldn't speak so harshly. "If we see soldiers near the stairs we'll go on by, and let me off somewhere else."

Josephine had been staring at him with desperate hope. "What is it you're going to
do
?" she asked now.

"I'm going to undo—
try
to undo—the link between the species."

"How?"

"I don't know, precisely." He rapped one knuckle against his head. "Byron—the Graiae are still awake, but right now they're blind. What does that mean?
It means that, unless the Austrians keep a steady flow of blood running in the Piazza, my friend Carlo has lost his livelihood as the premier coin-lagger in Venice. He'll be unable now even to toss a penny reliably through an open window from three paces—and if he can, there's no way anyone will be able to predict with any certainty where it will land—and it won't even still be the same penny in any sense that makes sense. The field the Graiae are projecting right now is one of indeterminacy and imprecision. I wish Shelley had lived to see it, he did so love disorder."

It was clear from the tone Byron put into Crawford's voice that Byron did not love disorder.

"Did your Armenian priests tell you how quickly the whole field changed, once the radiating heart of it is altered?
It changes instantaneously, Aickman—or, as the fathers insisted on putting it—at the speed of light. But they told me that it's like St. Elmo's fire, or the electricity stored in a roomful of Leyden jars: it's not a current, it's a static field, and so there will probably be patches where the old field is still standing—leaky, but still standing—though such . . . high spots . . . will probably have faded out and conformed with the predominant field within a day or so."

Crawford nodded. "Unless they get the eye back, or keep drenching the pavement with blood. Can you find Carlo?
If he's still alive. He won't have moved—until tonight this was coin-lagger heaven."

Crawford watched the lights of the Piazza drawing closer. The Graiae columns seemed slightly flexed, and the Doge's Palace was a motionless but unpredictable beast crouching on a thousand stone legs.

He dug into Josephine's bag and pulled out one of her blouses. "This looks nothing like the shirt I was wearing earlier," he observed, pulling it on. He smiled at her tiredly. "I don't suppose there are any shoes in here?"

She shook her head. "Your last pair you lost in the canal."

"Huh." He pulled out a blue shirt of his own and, with some effort, tore off the sleeves and drew them over his feet. The cuffs flapped loosely a few inches in front of his toes, so he unlaced a couple of ribbons from one of Teresa's dresses and bound up the loose sleeve-ends with them, lacing the ribbons up around his insteps and ankles and then tying them off low on his shins.

"There," he said. "They may be looking for someone who has shed his shoes."

Josephine shook her head doubtfully. The gondolier was making the sign of the cross.

"I think," Crawford said, "that there will be one main pocket of the old, determinate field still standing; it'll be near the Piazza and the Ducal Palace, and it'll be where Werner is being kept. He'll have made sure he's living in the equivalent of a Leyden jar."

A boat was approaching them, and belatedly he noticed the guns in the hands of the men aboard it—these were the Austrian soldiers who had shot to pieces his hijacked gondola only half an hour ago.

He tensed, ready to tell his gondolier to angle away from the boat, then realized that there was no possibility of eluding the Austrians. Instead he gaped at them as they drew near, and nudged Josephine and said, "Look, dear—those men have
guns
!"

"Gracious!"
Josephine exclaimed.

The Austrians stared at them, but rowed on past to look at other gondolas.

Crawford relaxed, one muscle at a time. "I guess they're not looking for a couple, especially two people on their way
in
." He took several deep breaths. "Anyway, Byron, if your friend Carlo can't help us find the field, and if we can't manage to . . . undo Werner, Werner will probably have his Austrians put the Graiae back to sleep before his determinacy pocket bleeds away, and then he'll be at least no worse off than he was before he came south from Switzerland. And then he can set his people searching for the eye."

He had paused for only a moment when Byron took his throat again.
"Who cares about this Werner?"

The gondolier swung the craft's stern out to port and then leaned on the oar to push the gondola forward into an empty space between the lean hulls of two others.

Crawford stuffed into Josephine's bag the balled-up shirt that contained Shelley's heart and the Graiae's eye. "Don't lose that," he told her, handing it to her and standing up.

"Werner," he said quietly as the gondolier hopped out and began looping lines around the mooring poles, "constitutes the link between the two species, human and nephelim. Eight hundred years ago he revived the nephelim, who at that time had been dormant for thousands of years, by having one of them—a little, petrified statue—surgically sewn into his abdomen. And the two of them, one being contained inside the other, now constitute the overlap between the two forms of life on earth—the overlap that keeps the nephelim species revived, and able to prey on humans."

He started to step out of the boat, but Josephine caught his arm. "I'm coming with you," she said. "Look at the square—obviously they haven't spilled a lot of blood there. They have no eye." Her own glass eye was staring into the sky, though her human eye stared intensely at Crawford.

"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."