The Stress of Her Regard (68 page)

"We're on our own now," he told Josephine grimly.

He took her arm and hefted the sword, and together they limped on down the hall, through patches of moonlight and darkness.

At last he could see a door in the wall ahead, and he was dizzily hurrying Josephine toward it when he heard heavy steps on the stairs behind him.

He fell forward into a jolting, flapping run, dragging Josephine along beside him. His lungs were heaving and his sleeve-socks had completely come apart, the ribbons loose and whipping at his ankles, but he didn't slow down until he and Josephine had collided with the tall door.

There was a plain iron latch, and he had fumbled at it for several seconds before he realized that it was bolted on the other side.

He turned around and raised his sword.

The stairs were far behind now, and the three Austrian soldiers were uneven piles on the floor in the middle distance. It occurred to him that the hall stretched so far south that he and Josephine must by now be within the walls of the Ducal Palace.

"Stay away from the windows!" came a call in Venetian Italian from the head of the stairs. "The Austrians have a cannon loaded with shot in a boat in the canal."

Crawford let himself fall against the wall in relief—it was the Carbonari.

Bearded men were running up the hall toward him, with pistols drawn, and a couple of them crouched briefly over each of the three downed Austrians and worked briefly with knives.

The man in the lead came sprinting up to Crawford in a low crouch, a pistol in each hand. "What in hell are you doing? This is no place for humans." He gave Josephine a hostile stare. "Though it's where I'd expect to find
nefandos
."

"Help me," gasped Crawford, "kill the man we'll find behind that door." He waved over his shoulder.

"No," the man said angrily. "He can't be killed. Two of my men are dead on the Piazzetta—is that what you called us for, to try to kill
him
?"

From beyond the narrow windows Crawford could hear voices, and the splashing of an oar in the water of the canal.

"You've got guns," Crawford said.

"We couldn't have got in here if we didn't," the man said impatiently. "Guns weren't working when the sisters were blind this evening. The Austrians found that out and then tossed theirs aside. We saved ours."

"Can you at least shoot up the lock on this door?"

"We may not even be able to do that," said the Carbonari. "The blood on the pavement is drying and cooling, and if the sisters lose their blood-eye the iron won't spark the flint."

But a moment later he had beckoned three of his followers forward and given them orders, and each of the four men aimed a pistol at the latch. One after another they fired at it, the four detonations lighting the hall in livid yellow flashes and battering at the windows.

And a second later the pair of windows nearest to Crawford exploded inward in a spray of glass, and as a mattress of hot, compressed air flung him into the far wall, and as he rebounded onto his back on the floor, he dimly heard the echoes of a cannon shot batting away between the buildings along the canal outside.

Two of the Carbonari were lifting him up—they had all been crouching below the windowsills, but several were bleeding freely now from glass cuts—and their leader was staring at him angrily. Crawford's ears were ringing loudly, and he could hardly hear the man say, "Are you hit?"

Crawford weakly brushed splinters of glass off his shoulders. "Uh . . . apparently not," he said, speaking loudly to be able to hear himself. "I was to the side."

"Do you think you
can
kill him?" the Carbonari leader demanded.

Blood was running from Crawford's nose, and he wasn't at all sure he would even be able to stand unaided. "Yes," he mumbled through chipped teeth.

"And is this woman . . .
helping
you? Sincerely?"

"Yes," Crawford said.

The man visibly made a decision. "Very well." He handed Crawford his unfired pistol and then pulled a long, narrow knife from his belt and slapped the grip into Josephine's hand.

"We will hold them off," he said, "for as long as we can." He tossed his spent gun to one of his men, who caught it and threw a fresh one to him, and then he went to the window and pointed the gun down toward the canal.

He pulled the trigger, and the hammer snapped down, spilling powder, but there was no detonation.

"The blood has cooled," the Carbonari leader said, tucking the useless gun into his belt. "That cannon shot was the last shot there will be in this area until they spill more blood. We have knives, and can use them—but do be quick."

He gathered his men with a gesture, and Crawford sat down hard when the two men released him and went loping away down the hall with their fellows.

Josephine rushed to him and helped him stand, but for a moment he forgot the door ahead, and simply stared at the wall across from the devastated windows.

The wood panelling was peppered with shot pellets in vertical patterns—but not in
two
lines, as he would have expected from the fact that the blast of shot had come in through two windows.

Instead there was a series of vertical strips of splintering, and the strips were widest in the center of the pattern and narrower and fainter toward the edges. It was a wave pattern, similar to the ones he had often seen in the water between a long ship and a long dock.

He knew instinctively that this was a consequence of the indeterminacy field that the Graiae, blind again, were projecting; and he knew too that it meant that von Aargau's pocket of determinacy, his individual Leyden jar, had lost a good deal of its potency, perhaps all of it. If Carlo had been here tossing his coins now, they'd still be disappearing.

Josephine had been cutting her skirt hem into long strips, and now she knotted a couple of them tightly around his ribs, over his sword cut.

"Can't have you bleeding to death," she muttered when she had cinched the knots.

"Not yet, anyway," Crawford said.

Leaning on Josephine, he reeled to the door the Carbonari had shot at. The latch had been shattered and the wood around it was splintered away and the bolt broken, and the door swung open at his first tentative push.

What rites are these? Breeds earth more monsters yet?
Antaeus scarce is cold: what can beget
This store?—and stay! such contraries upon her?
Is earth so fruitful of her own dishonor?

—Ben Jonson,

"Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue"

A narrower hall doglegged away beyond the door, its brick walls dimly illuminated by lamplight from around the corner. Crawford was staring blankly, so Josephine took his hand and pulled him forward; he took a step to keep from falling, and then the two of them were shambling down the little hall.

Crawford's nose was still steadily dripping blood onto the front of the blouse of Josephine's that he was wearing, and he was leaving the red track of one bare foot on the stones of the floor. His arms were too tired to hold the sword and gun extended, but he thought he could raise them if he had to, and he was pleased with his hands for being able to stay clamped on the grips.

Josephine had tucked the knife into the waistband of Teresa's skirt, and was holding the leather bag in front of herself with both hands. Crawford thought it was a good idea, but he wondered what would happen if a sword or a pistol ball should strike the heart.

They shuffled around the corner—a lamp burned in a niche in the wall, and Crawford could see that the floor was carpeted ahead, and the walls panelled in dark wood. The hall made another turn a few yards beyond that point, and the light from around that corner was brighter.

Crawford was dully surprised to realize that the only emotion he felt was anticipation of the softness of the carpeting under his bare feet.

They reached it and turned the corner, and then for a moment they both paused, swaying.

An open doorway stood only a few paces ahead, and the room beyond it was wide. Crawford could see a lot of elegantly dressed men standing on the marble floor, though none of them moved or was speaking.

"There's nowhere else to go," Josephine whispered.

He nodded, and they walked forward.

The room was vast and high-ceilinged, and brightly lit by candles in crystal chandeliers high overhead. The two dozen men in the room were all staring blankly at the walls, as if drugged or listening intently for something.

They're all brothers, he thought—and then he realized that the features they all shared were those of the young Werner von Aargau whose stab-wound he had sewn up in Venice six years earlier, and for whom he had subsequently worked.

"Good evening, Werner," Crawford said loudly.

The men all turned toward him—and a moment later he swore in panic and stepped back, and Josephine had dropped the bag and convulsively drawn her knife.

The men's bodies were changing.

One man's head was stretching away toward the ceiling like a pulled piece of dough—the tongue emerged, seemed to try to speak for a moment, and then rapidly lengthened for yards like a long, weightless snake and commenced busily curling around the elongating head; another's eyes had by now swelled so grossly that the head was just a toothy bump behind the two gleaming, staring globes; a third had one giant horny plate like a toenail growing out of its shirt collar, concealing the mouth, and then the nose, and finally the eyes of the face.

Most of them had lifted their feet from the floor, and were floating in the air.

Crawford noticed that each right hand, whether that member was a tight bunch of flesh like pink broccoli or was a cluster of long tentacles, now gripped a gun or a sword; and he realized that all the different shapes and sizes of eyes were focussed on
him
.

As if a load of bird-shot had been fired at a stretched rubber sheet, the holes of all the mouths opened simultaneously in all the faces. "Get out of here," they chorused, speaking Italian with a thick German accent. "Whoever you are, you are well advised to leave."

"You don't recognize me?" asked Crawford with fatalistic bravado. "Look closely," he added to the man whose two eyes were still growing—at the expense of the body, which had shrivelled up and was now hanging under the suspended globes as its shoes and clothing dropped one by one to the floor. "I'm Michael Aickman."

All the varieties of left hands were raised in the air and hideously flexed. "Aickman!" croaked and whistled all the voices. "Biting the hand that fed you?"

Crawford tucked the presently useless pistol into his belt, then took Josephine's free hand and walked forward.

A bell rang somewhere to Crawford's right, and a moment later the high double doors at the far end of the room were swung open and several Austrian soldiers burst into the room.

Crawford noticed that even as they entered the soldiers looked frightened and desperate; and when they saw the warping and swelling bodies moving slowly through the air like diseased fish in a vast aquarium, they simply screamed and ran back out of the room. The doors were dragged closed, and the boom of a bolt being shot shook the air and rippled the floating bodies.

"Evidently the blood between the columns has cooled," calmly observed all the stretched or puckered mouths. "They'll spill more, Aickman, at any moment, and in the restored determinacy field these bodies will resume their solidity. Go while you can."

"We can ignore the guns," Crawford told Josephine quietly, and together they stepped forward.

The floating bodies thrust awkwardly gripped swords at them, but even Josephine with her dagger was able to knock them away. Some of the twisted hands were able to pull the triggers of their pistols, but the hammers snapped down quietly on the inert powder.

The bodies were becoming more distorted with every passing second, like clouds or smoke rings. "Wait," said the mouths that were still capable of forming words. "I'm willing to . . . call it a draw, a stalemate. If you leave now, I'll see to it that you two, and anyone else you designate, will be left alone by the nephelim."

"For the rest of our lives, no doubt," said Crawford, still pushing his way forward through the insubstantial crowd, with Josephine audibly parrying blades beside him. He heard the clang of several swords hitting the marble floor, released by hands too stretched to continue holding them.

"For eternity," replied the mouths.

Crawford didn't answer. He took three more limping strides, and glimpsed through the warping forms a nude figure lying in a glass case against the right-hand wall.

He began angling toward it, making sure not to get separated from Josephine and being careful to clang the weakly obstructing swords out of the way. All around him he heard the clicks of pistol hammers falling into impotent flashpans.

Only a few of the mouths were still capable of producing human sounds now, but the ones that could laughed heartily. "I never anticipated someone being able to free, and then
catch
, the eye," they chorused. "I should have anticipated it—Perseus did it, after all. And I should have had braver
human
guards, or even blind ones. Still, it doesn't matter."

"No, it doesn't matter," came a different voice from overhead, and when Crawford looked up he thought for a moment that the winged stone lion from the clock tower had left its post and was now clinging to the wall, head down.

It wasn't until Josephine weakly said "Polidori . . ." that he recognized the gray face below the long, winged body.

A stone wing swept out to each side, throwing a gust of wind that Crawford knew must have swirled all the von Aargau duplicates to homogenous ribbons, and then the stony mouth creaked open and the claws retracted from the holes they had punched in the marble wall, and the thing that had been Polidori sprang.

It sprang toward Josephine—and in the instant when it was launched Crawford remembered the way it had tried to smash her against the pavement in front of the Casa Magni four nights ago, and in one flash he remembered too an overturned boat in gray surf and a burning house and a destroyed body in a bed—and he threw himself at her almost joyfully, slamming her out of the thing's way and falling where she had been standing.