The Drawing of the Dark

“And there was a tumult as of great battles out upon the plain that night, and shifting fires no man could explain, and wonders in the sky...”

—from the journal of

Kemal Pasha Zadeh,

official scribe to the Sultan

Suleiman el Kanuni

Chapter Fifteen

THE SQUARE OF early afternoon sunlight had shifted a few inches up the plaster wall, and Brian Duffy straightened up a bit more to keep his face clear of it; if he didn’t get up and move soon, he knew, he’d have to give up staying above it and slide down almost prostrate on the bench in an attempt to get his face under the dazzling beam instead.

“Do you want one or not?” the young man who stood in the doorway repeated, a little impatiently. He jiggled a tiny gray manlike figure on the end of a string.

Duffy blinked owlishly at him and had a long sip of lukewarm red wine to postpone the effort of answering. The boy is far too elegantly dressed, the Irishman decided. Those baggy blue sleeves, ornamentally slashed to admit puffs of red satin, are good enough for swaggering in front of the ladies, but when it’s fighting to be done give me old leather and thick-backed gloves. “Are you going to go out dressed that way?” he asked. “If so, I hope that’s your second-best suit.” Then, remembering the lad’s question, he answered, “No, thank you. I don’t need any mandrake roots. I’ll just duck and weave and take my chances.”

The young landsknecht shook his head dubiously and replaced the ugly little root in his pouch. “It’s your life,” he conceded. “Say, when were you born?”

Several joking answers occurred to the Irishman, but he was too sleepy to voice them. “Huh?” he contented himself with saying.

“What month were you born in?”

“Uh... March.”

“Hm.” The young man pulled a chart out of his pouch and scrutinized it. “Well, you’d be better off if you were a Libra or a Cancer, but being a Pisces you needn’t fear being shot in the feet.” He grinned, bowed and walked outside.

“Do you mean it won’t happen, or I just shouldn’t fear it?” Duffy called after him, but got no reply.

Though he was sitting up as straight as he could, the sun was now lancing at his eyes from the top of the window. Not wanting to be found slouched on his back messily finishing a cup of wine just before combat, he swung his legs down off the bench and stood up and stretched, thus accidentally spilling the rest of the wine onto the dirt floor. Well, he thought, taking it philosophically, it was about time to get ready anyway. He sat down on one of the bunks and pulled on his boots, then stood and picked up his sword, hauberk, doublet and helmet, and walked outside into the shifty and heatless mid-October sunlight.

A series of warehouses in the southeast corner of the city had been hurriedly converted to barracks, and several companies of landsknechten, including Eilif’s, were quartered in them. Duffy emerged from the southernmost of them and pushed his way into the mob of mercenary soldiers assembled in a square of the Schwarzenbergstrasse. He found the table at which Eilif’s armsmaster was dispensing harquebuses, and took a long-barrelled matchlock and pouches of powder and balls.

“Duff,” the old soldier said, “I’ve got a wheellock back here I Was saving. You want to take it?”

“You take it,” Duffy told him with a grin. “Last time I tried to fire one of them I got my hair caught in the wheel. Had to retreat waving a sword and dagger, with the damned gun attached to my head.”

“I won’t call you a liar,” the man said amiably, handing Duffy several lengths of matchcord.

The Irishman carried all his stuff away to one side of the square and laid it on a curb while he put on his hauberk and leather doublet. Sporadic gunfire popped and spattered from the top of the wall, and he looked up for a moment. That’ll be the sharpshooters, he thought, warming up with some long-distance covering fire from rifled guns. He listened, but could hear no answering gunfire from outside the walls. He sat down and began the task of loading his matchlock. Vienna had been totally invested by the Turks now for twelve days.

The young man he’d seen in the barracks, whose mandrake root dangled now from his belt, ambled up and watched Duffy’s efforts critically. “Your matchcord is supposed to go through that little metal tube on top of the barrel,” he pointed out helpfully. “So the sparks from your first shot don’t light it in the middle somewhere.”

Duffy sat back and grinned up at him, squinting against the sun. “Well now, that’s the first time I ever heard that,” he said gently. “Here I thought that tube was for grating cheese with, after the battle.”

A white-bearded landsknecht who was crouched several feet away looked up from whetting his sword and barked a laugh. “If you young calves could grasp the idea of aiming,” he said, “you’d see how that match-guide can be used as a sight. Hell, Duffy’s an old soldier; he wouldn’t let his cord get near the flash-pan.”

“I’ve been known to do some beastly things, but never that,” the Irishman agreed.

Guns cracked again along the wall and the young mercenary jumped, immediately hopping through a few practice sword-thrusts to disguise the involuntary motion. An eddy in the breeze brought down to the street the curried smell of gunpowder. Straightening and stretching after his extempore exercises, he asked Duffy offhandedly, “Do you think this is it?”

“Hm? What’s what?’

“This sortie this afternoon. You think this’ll be the one that breaks the siege one way or the other?”

The older man laughed scornfully, but Duffy just smiled and shook his head. “No,” he said. “They know they can’t hold that little rise. It’s mainly a gesture. So we make another gesture: we run out there and push them back. Men will be killed, but this won’t be a decisive encounter.”

“Well, when will there be a decisive encounter?” In his efforts to keep his expression unconcerned, the lad had let some hysteria enshrill his voice. “If they back off, why don’t we just keep pushing?” he went on, in a deeper voice. “Or for matter of that, if we fall back, why don’t they?”

Duffy carefully laid his loaded gun on the pavement. “Why, because we’re old veterans, on both sides. The landsknechten know the wages of hot-headed charges—and those Turks out there are Janissaries, the best fighting men in the East. They’re not just fierce, like the akinji or the iayalars; they’re smart as well.”

“Ah.” The young man looked then across the street at the shot-scarred faces of the nearer buildings. “They’re... Christians, areni’t they?” he asked. “The Janissaries?”

“Well, they were,” Duffy said. “The Turks conscript them from Christian families inside the Ottoman Empire, but they take them before the age of seven. Then they bring them up as the most fanatical Moslems and highest-favored soldiers of the Sultan. They’ve been baptized, yes, but you couldn’t call them Christians any longer.”

The lad shuddered. “It’s like the old stories of draugs or changelings. To take our own people away, and change them, and then send them back to destroy the place they can no longer even recognize as their fatherland.”

“True,” agreed Duffy. “The men we’ll be shooting at this afternoon could well be the sons of men who fought beside the knights at Belgrade.”

“As men further west will be shooting at our tur-banned sons if we don’t turn them back,” the young man said. “But we shouldn’t have any trouble holding out, should we? I mean even if the Imperial reinforcements don’t come?”

“It’s a race,” Duffy said, “to see which gives out first: our walls or their supplies. At night you can already hear their miners digging away at the foundations underground.”

“Defeatist talk!” snapped the white-bearded mercenary, hopping nimbly to his feet and whirling his newly sharpened sword in a whistling circle over his head. “It takes a besieging force a hell of a lot longer to undermine a city’s walls than to shatter them down with big guns. You’ll notice they’ve got nothing but light cannon out there—good for arcing over the walls to break windows and knock in a few roofs, but useless for battering a way inside. Fix your mind on what a lucky thing it’s been that the heavy rains these past months forced the Turks to leave all their heavy artillery bemired on the muddy road behind them!”

He strode away, still brandishing the blade, and the somewhat cheered young man wandered off a few moments later.

Duffy remained sitting where he was, frowning and suddenly wishing he’d had more wine that morning; for the old landsknecht’s words had reminded him of the last time he’d spoken to Aurelianus, just a day or so before the Irishman had left the Zimmermann Inn to live in the barracks.

It had been a bright morning in mid-May five months earlier, and the old sorcerer had approached him in the Zimmermann dining room, smiling as he set down beside Duffy’s beer a small wooden chest that rattled as if it were full of pebbles.

“Suleiman and his entire army left Constantinople yesterday,” he said. “Let’s you and me go for a walk out by the east end of the Donau Canal.”

Duffy sipped his beer. “Very well,” he said, for it was a pleasant day and he hadn’t been out of the city in weeks, “but I don’t think we’ll be able to see them—much less hit them with your collection of sling-stones.”

“Not hit them with them, no,” Aurelianus agreed cheerily. “Come on, now, finish your beer while I go tell Marko to saddle us a couple of horses.”

Duffy was happy to comply, for Epiphany was due back before long; and she’d shown a tendency, lately, to burst into tears every time he spoke to her. The most recent example had occurred in the dining room during dinner.

Shuddering at the uncomfortable recollection, he drained the beer and followed Aurelianus outside. He helped Marko saddle the second horse, and mounted quickly. “After you,” he said to the sorcerer with as sweeping a bow as is possible on horseback.

They rode out of the north gate, and then let the horses choose their own lazy pace southeast across fields of new grass starred with peonies. After about two miles Aurelianus bore left, toward the willow-banked southern arm of the canal, and soon they were drawing to a halt in the waving green shade.

“What do you intend to do with that box of rocks?” asked Duffy finally; he hadn’t inquired during the ride, not wanting to let Aurelianus know how curious he was.

“Make rain magic. They’re meteoric stones—bits of falling stars,” replied the sorceror, dismounting and scrambling down to the water’s edge.

“Rain magic, hey?” Duffy peered up into the cloudless blue vault of the sky. “A likely day for it,” he observed. “Wait up.”

“Hurry. It’s just about noon right now.”

When he reached the water Aurelianus crouched down, and waved Duffy to be silent. He dipped a cupped hand into the water and sipped some of it, then rubbed the rest into the dirt. He opened the wooden chest—Duffy, peering over the old man’s shoulder, was distinctly disappointed to see the little raisin-wrinkled lumps it contained—and sprinkled a second handful of water over the stones. He closed the lid, stood up with the chest, and began to shake it rhythmically, whispering in a language Duffy was careful not to listen to.

The willow branches began swaying in the still air as the percussive rattle took on a faster and more complicated pace. Soon the leaves were rustling together, and though Duffy tried not to notice it, he had to admit the new sound was in the same rhythm.

Then the tempo of the shaken stones quickened again—it was almost twice as fast—and then again. Aurelianus’ hands were moving so fast that they were actually just a blur to the sight, and no intervals could be heard in the rattling: it was just a loud, textured hiss. The thrashing willow branches were being all but ripped from the trees.

Duffy took an involuntary step back, for the sustained pitch of it all seemed suddenly to be a line of entry for something, something that existed always at such a pitch. The air was tense and close, and Duffy felt the pregnant tingle of the moment between a gasp and a sneeze.

Then with a shout the wizard flung the box at the water. It opened in mid-air and the stones ripped up the water like grape-shot, and a gust of wind from behind them accompanied the shout with such abrupt force that Duffy nearly followed the stones into the canal.

The burst of wind whipped past the two crouching men for a dozen seconds; then Duffy’s hair fell back into place and the willows went limp, though the Irishman could see the trees flailing further south. After a few seconds they too were still.

Aurelianus sat down heavily, letting his hands rest on the ground. “Ah,” he sighed after a minute of open-mouthed panting. “There are... many more powerful spirits, but these rain spirits certainly are among the most... energetic.” He started to stand, then thought better of it. “And they demand a good deal of energy on the part of their conjurors, too.” He lifted his trembling hands and peered at them. “It must have been almost precisely noon when I started,” he said, “for them to have come through so quickly and easily. The last time I did this trick, several years ago, I had to shake the damned box for nearly half an hour.”

Duffy watched the wooden chest bobbing slowly away downstream. “Noon?” he repeated absently. “What’s so special about noon?”

Aurelianus tried standing up again, and made it this time. “All these magics involve a breaking or violation of the natural laws,” he told Duffy, “and those laws relax just a little, are weakest, at noon and midnight.”

Duffy was about to frame some statement about himself being weakest at those hours, when Aurelianus started energetically toward the horses. “I’m glad I got that done,” the old wizard said. “With the kind of pace Ibrahim has been keeping up, I’m afraid this magic will be impossible before long. But those rains should considerably hamper Suleiman’s northward progress.” He swung into the saddle.

The Irishman followed suit. “Why impossible? Will there soon be no more noons or midnights?”

“No, but when two adepts, such as Ibrahim and myself, come into close, proximate conflict with one another, a deadlock of magic results—like two knife fighters gripping each other’s wrists. Whole categories of higher magic are damped out by the disharmony of our overlapping auras. When that happens, the issue has to be settled by swords and cannon; sorcery is stifled.” He turned his horse about and nudged it up the bank to the level expanse of the grassy plain.

“Ah,” said Duffy, following him and squinting in the suddenly unobstructed sunlight. “So when the Turks get here you won’t be able to... say... send a flock of giant wasps out at them, or turn the ground to quicksand under their feet?”

“I’m afraid not. In fact this, today, may be the last bit of major sorcery I’ll be able to do until it’s over; I’ve already noticed a trace of resistance in certain everyday spells and tricks.”

“Like that candle you tried to light a few weeks ago, that blew up?”

“Yes. In such a deadlock of contending adepts, minor hearth-and-kitchen magic can still operate, but even it is much more difficult. And the big stuff, as I say, is out.”

“I don’t know why you old lads even bother to show up, then,” remarked Duffy. “What’s the use of you, if this deadlock is completely unbreakable?”

“Well... virtually unbreakable,” corrected Aurelianus. “Why, to advise the rest of you, I suppose. I think before too long you’ll be Arthur completely, all the time, and you’ll... he’ll... need coaching and re-educating.”

Duffy had said nothing, though his eyes narrowed; and by the time they’d returned to the Zimmermann he had made a decision. Gathering together his few belongings and Eilif’s sword, he quietly vacated the premises. Eilif was happy to sign the Irishman on as a member of his company, and Duffy took up residence with the landsknecht mercenaries, who were at that time quartered in the north barracks, near the Wollzelle.

A month or so later word had officially reached western Europe that Suleiman was advancing toward Austria with seventy-five thousand men. Charles had been too busy pursuing his conflicts with the French king to send troops to Vienna, so his brother Ferdinand had gone before the Diet of Spires to beg aid from the princes of the Holy Roman Empire, and to point out to them that if Austria were to fall to the Turks, they would be moving on into Bavaria with little delay. And, despite the pressing Lutheran controversy, Protestants and Catholics had agreed on providing a Reichshilfe, a collection of troops for the defense of the empire. A month was spent assembling this force, but finally on the twenty-fourth of September, 1529, Count Nicholas von Salm had arrived in Vienna with eight thousand professional fighting men and took command of the defense. He’d beaten Suleiman to the city by only three days—and if it hadn’t been for the inexplicably heavy rains that had dogged the Sultan’s entire progress northwest along the Danube, von Salm would have arrived much too late to be anything more than a harrassing spectator at the siege of Vienna.

Duffy now shook his head and stood up, pleased to feel the buoyancy of the wine still filling his head. He had, several months ago, hit upon drunkenness—with wine, not Herzwesten beer—as a cure and preventative for lake-visions and Arthur-visitations; and to judge by their total absence since, the remedy was an effective one.

A horn’s sharp blare cut through the babble and clatter that filled the crowded square, and the mercenaries began forming into lines. The Irishman flipped his Venetian salade to the back of his head and then pulled it down in front by the nose-piece so that his cheeks, jaw and nose were protected. Then he drew on his heavy gloves, hefted his matchlock and sprinted over to where Eilif’s company was assembling.

The seething crowd of soldiers had separated into four columns of about forty men apiece, some dressed more grandly than the young man with the mandrake root, some more shabbily than Duffy. There wasn’t much talking now. The firemasters of each company, carrying their long torches, worked their way up and down the lines, stopping beside each man to set his matchcord-end aglow. Duffy had Eilif’s man light his at both ends, for the Irishman could recall times when an unexpected tumble had extinguished the one lit end.

Eilif and Bobo left a group of company captains and lieutenants and crossed the square to their assembled men. “We’re going to escort fifty of von Salm’s knights out toward the Turk position,” Eilif barked, “which, as you’ve probably seen from the walls, is a hill topped with a low stone wall. The idea is for us to drive them back to a point where our cannons can get at them and blow them back to their own lines—then we stand around behind the wall long enough to show we could keep it if we wanted to, then we come back inside, knights first. We’ll be on the left front flank, and I want you to stay there, don’t go running around. And make this look good—all the landsknecht captains and lieutenants are meeting with von Salm and the city council at the Zimmermann Inn tomorrow morning to ask for more money, so I want you lads to look like indispensible professionals. Right?”

“Right!” roared the whole company in unison.

“Right. So keep your heads, give the men behind you time to re-load, and let the Turks put themselves where you can kill them. No heroics—this isn’t the last card to be dealt.”

The horn was blown again, and the landsknechten filed out of the square to the Kartnerstrasse, where they turned left. The knights were already mounted and assembled in the yard inside the gate, and the fitful sunlight gleamed on a polished helmet or gauntlet here and illuminated a bobbing plume there. The tall, armored figure of von Salm himself was visible, bestowing last-minute afterthoughts on the warriors.

The landsknechten marched up in two columns that enclosed the knights. These knights too were battle-tempered professionals, veterans of the Peasant Wars and Tokay and a dozen other campaigns. They had outgrown the dilettante horseman’s contempt for the footsoldier, having too often seen the inverted-turtle fate of knights unhorsed when there was no friendly infantry to keep the enemy away.

A wide cloud had glided like some gray sea-bottom creature across the face of the sun; and when a priest stepped up beside von Salm to pronounce a blessing, several men swore and cupped their hands over their match-ends, thinking the drops of holy water sprinkled in the dust to be the beginnings of rain.

A groom hurried up with a portable framework of steps and set them beside a richly caparisoned white horse; von Salm stepped up them and lowered himself into a saddle as high in front and back as a Spanish galleon. Even from this distance, Duffy could see the black spheres of two deeply incised fragmentation bombs lashed forward of the stirrups. The count raised a hand—cannons abruptly boomed along the top of the wall and the great bolt of the Carinthian gate was noisily ratcheted back—and then pointed forward. Added to the din then was the rattle of hooves and boot-heels on the cobblestones as the troops got into motion and began filing, four footsoldiers and two knights abreast, through the gate.

The covering cannon fire, shooting mostly grapeshot and the rubble of newly shattered house walls, was only intended to disorganize the Turks and kill any who might be poking their heads up for a look. The light barrage ceased as soon as the defenders were all outside the gate. Duffy, standing in the indistinct shadow of the wall, could see the plumes of cannon smoke drift away to eastward, white against the gray of the clouds.

“Landsknechten advance two hundred yards,” barked von Salm, “then split to make room for us, dig in and give covering fire. When we charge through and hit them, you follow us into the mêlée.”

There were curt nods from the four captains, and the hundred and fifty mercenary soldiers broke into a matched jogging trot forward. Duffy craned his neck as they rounded the southeast corner of the wall, but the only motion at the Turk position was a cloud of dust raised by the scattered shot. He could hear the bells of St. Stephen’s beginning to peal behind him—they were the church bells announcing one o’clock mass, not the strident, clanging alarum bells that would have warned of an attack. He sneaked a look over his shoulder a moment before the southernmost of the im-mobile knights receded out of sight around the high shoulder of the wall. We’re alone out here now, he thought, still breathing easily as he trotted across the ripped-up plain. I hope they follow quickly when we start shooting.

They ran for many long minutes due east on a course that would bring them around the southern end of the low wall that was sheltering the venturesome band of Turks. Duffy was keeping a cautious eye on the established Turkish lines, but no evident activity there hinted at a counter-charge. The Irishman was panting now, and dreading the possibly frantic run back.

As the jogging body of soldiers crested a shot-scarred rise, he took the opportunity to get a comprehensive look around. The Mohammedan host bulked in solid ranks ahead and further away to his right. Barely visible in the southern haze was the red spot that was the tent of Suleiman himself. Greetings, exalted sultan, thought the Irishman dizzily. Greetings from one who was once offered your job.

When the two first shots were fired, the wind blew most of the sound away, so that all Duffy heard was a dry knocking like stones being struck together; an instant later, though, two of the landsknechten reeled backward and fell, tripping several of their fellows.

By God, thought Duffy, experiencing his first real chill that day, they’ve got harquebuses now. They didn’t three years ago, at Mohács.

Eilif had sprinted to the front; still running, he turned to the mercenaries. “Split now!” he shouted. “Advance another fifty yards, then halt and fire!”

There was more firing from the Turkish position, and several mercenaries fell during that fifty-yard run. Eilif had planned it well, though, for when they halted they were a little to the east of the wall, which they now viewed end-on, and could plainly see the white robes of the several dozen Janissaries.

Duffy, being in the front line, knelt to prepare his gun for firing. He was panting, welcoming the cool western breeze on his sweaty face and neck. Another popping burst of harquebus-fire sounded from the Turkish emplacement, and a ball struck just in front of the Irishman, spraying dirt in his face as it rebounded away over his shoulder. The morning’s wine fumes had worn off, and he had to force himself to be calm as he screwed one end of his matchcord into the top of the S-shaped serpentine bolted to the side of his gun. His powder-flask hung from his belt, and he fetched it up with his left hand and tapped a pinch of the gray powder into the flashpan.

The Janissaries still stood in the lee of the wall, apparently re-loading for another volley. Duffy braced his right arm on his knee and aimed at a tall one, lining him up through the match-guide tube. He squeezed the trigger, which threw the top of the serpentine with its glowing match-end into the flashpan. The charge went off with a bang, burning the Irishman’s cheek with the flare of the priming. He was deafened, too, for most of the landsknechten fired at about that same second. When he’d blinked the tears out of his eye and looked up again, he couldn’t tell whether he’d hit his man or not, for the remaining Janissaries had flung down their guns and were charging with drawn scimitars.

Where are the knights? Duffy thought desperately as he commenced re-loading his matchlock. The wild, wailing cry of the Janissaries was all around him like the racket of insects or tropical birds, and very soon he could hear also the rapid, heavy scuff of the Turks’ sandals. It quickly grew louder.

He risked a hurried glance up. God, they were close! He could see the white teeth snarling in the brown, straining faces, and actually met one man’s eyes. Powder in the pan, now, he snapped at himself; there! As much of it in the pan as on the ground, anyway.

One of the white-robed Turks was only three strides from being on top of him, so Duffy thrust the gun at him like a spear and yanked the trigger. The match was slammed into the pan so hard that it was extinguished.

Sparks actually flew as the Irishman parried the hard-driven scimitar with the barrel of the useless gun; then the man had collided with him, and they were both tumbling in the dust. Duffy rolled to his knees and drew sword and dagger. He sank the dagger into the slower recovering Turk’s neck and blocked another whistling scimitar with the sword, riposting with a short, hard chop to the leg. The Turk’s wobbly remise clanged off Duffy’s salade, and the Irishman hopped to his feet and punched his dagger into the man’s face.

Without pausing, he kicked away a crescent blade that was coming at him in a low line, and clubbed the wielder in the jaw with the heavy sword-pommel. Another of the battle-maddened Turks was rushing at him, and he knocked the scimitar away with a high parry and let the man run onto the extended dagger.

Then a physical shock whiplashed through the press as the galloping knights ploughed into the Janissary-choked gap between the two groups of landsknechten. The huge broadswords in the hands of the steel-cased riders rose and fell, and the Turks gave way like a tangle of driftwood before a crashing wave.

Duffy took advantage of the distraction to strike the head off one Turk with a whirling chop, axe-style. A moment later there were two landsknechten beside him and one hard-pressed Turk in front; then that one turned and was running, along with perhaps a dozen other remaining Janissaries.

“Let them go!” boomed the deep voice of von Salm. “Advance at a walk to the place they held!”

A walk was all Duffy could have done anyway. He managed to lift and sheathe his weapons, and plodded forward, panting, lacking the strength to reach up and wipe the froth from his lips.

In a few minutes they stood on the wall-topped rise. Ignoring an admonitory bark from von Salm, Duffy sat down on the masonry and stared back at the high walls of Vienna. The city looked impossibly safe and far away. If Suleiman orders a vigorous counter-charge now, he thought dully, the knights would make it back, but damned few of the landsknechten. I wouldn’t make it, for damned sure.

He heard a heavy, multiple-clank thud and looked behind him. One of the knights had fallen from his horse, though whether from a wound or heat-prostration Duffy couldn’t tell. “Strip off his armor,” von Salm ordered. The count had raised his visor, and with his red, sweat-gleaming face looked on the verge of heat-prostration himself.

“Do we have time?” one of the mercenaries asked anxiously. The silence was beginning to weigh heavily on the small, isolated group. “We could just carry him—”

“Damn it, will you... obey me?”

With a shrug the mercenary squatted and began tugging at the straps and buckles. He was quickly joined by two of his fellows, and in a few moments they had unfastened all the armor—revealing the knight to be dead, of a thrust in the side between the breast and back plates.

“Very well,” said von Salm wearily. “Now untie these two bombs, join their fuses and splice a length of matchcord to them. I want a long fuse.”

The dozen retreating Janissaries had reached the Turkish lines, and there seemed to be activity there. What is he clowning with? Duffy wondered impatiently. This is a time for retreating, not cleverness.

“Good,” said the count. “Now reassemble that armor with the bombs inside.” He looked at the knight beside him. “I had planned only to demolish this wall, but possibly we can lure in an eager Moslem or two as well.”

When the sweating footsoldiers had done as he ordered, and leaned the suit of armor in a standing position against the wall, von Salm had them light the cord that dangled from the empty helmet. “Back home now!” he called. “At a leisurely pace, landsknechten flanking.”

Duffy had almost completely got his breath back, and walked around the assembling horses to where Eilif’s company was regathering. Eilif stood apparently unscathed at the front, but Duffy didn’t see Bobo. The Irishman got in line and just stared at the ground, channeling all his attention into the tasks of breathing and relaxing his cramped hands.

“I see you’ve made it so far,” came a voice from beside him.

He raised his head. It was the young man of the mandrake root, his clothes dusty and torn and his face already showing bruises, but evidently unhurt. “Oh, aye.” He looked the young man up and down. “I warned you about those clothes, if you recall. And I see you lost your magicus.”

“My what?”

“Your root, your mandrake charm.” He pointed at the lad’s undecorated belt.

The young man looked down, startled, saw it was true and pressed his lips together. He stretched on tiptoe to see von Salm, off to his right, and muttered, “When are they going to get us moving?”

Before Duffy could answer, von Salm had flicked the reins of his horse and the several columns got under way, marching at a slow, easy walk west, toward the high city walls.

Though he had always been as at home in forests or at sea as in cities, the twelve-day confinement of the siege had given the Irishman something of the habitual city-dweller’s point of view; it now felt unnatural to be seeing the walls of the city from the outside—an unnatural perspective, like looking up at the hull of a ship from under water, or seeing the back of one’s own head.

They tramped on and the walls slowly drew nearer and still they heard no wailing battle cries or thunder of hooves from behind. Duffy could recognize men on the battlements now, and saw Bluto peering along a cannon barrel.

Then there was the drumming of hoof-beats from the east, and von Salm raised his hand to check the instinctive increase in speed. “We will not run!” he shouted. “They cannot reach us before we are inside. Anyway, I believe they want to deal with the guard we left by the wall.”

So the columns of knights and landsknechten marched on at the same agonizingly restrained pace, while the pursuit grew audibly nearer. The men on the walls were now calling to them to hurry.

Duffy turned to stare behind—a mercenary’s luxury; the knights were etiquette-bound to look straight ahead and take their leader’s word for what was happening—and saw perhaps two dozen mounted Janissaries riding after them, their long white robes whipping about like wings in the head-on breeze. He’s right, the Irishman admitted to himself. They can’t possibly get here before we get through the gate, and they’d be mad to ride within cannon-range in the attempt. I guess they must really think we’ve left men to guard that damned little wall.

Then the Janissaries had reached the wall, and were wheeling around it; and a moment later the wall’s mid-section silently turned into a skyward-rushing dust-cloud, and Duffy saw several horses and riders on the periphery flung to the ground. After a second or two the boom of the explosion rolled across him.

They could hear the Carinthian gate being opened as they rounded the southeast corner, and von Salm, swaying in his saddle, did not object when they all quickened their pace.

Chapter Sixteen

AS HAD RECENTLY BECOME his involuntary habit, Duffy awoke as suddenly as if someone had punched him. He rolled out of his bunk and stood up, glaring round-about in an unspecific panic, wondering where he should have been at this moment and whether the dim light beyond the window was that of early dawn or late evening.

At Duffy’s abrupt movement another man gasped and scrambled out of a bunk. “What the hell?” he shouted, blinking rapidly and grabbing for his boots. “What the hell?”

Several groans arose out of the room’s shadowy expanse, and one voice at the other end called, “What’s the trouble, Suleiman goosing you in your sleep? Get drunk before you go to bed—then you won’t dream.”

Well, I’m not sure that’s true, Duffy thought. He relaxed and sat down on the bunk, having remembered, in less than the usual ten seconds, who he was, and where, and when. That’s evening out there, he told himself proudly; this afternoon we sallied forth to drive the Turks back from that little rise, and my gun misfired, and poor old Bobo ate one scimitar while parrying two others. I remember it all.

He pulled on his boots and stood up again, wishing, not for the first time during the last twelve days, that there was water to be spared for bathing.

“That you, Duff?” came another voice, nearby.

“Yes.”

“Where you headed?”

“Out. Go drink somewhere.”

“Eilif’s at the Peerless Ploughman, on the other side of the Kartnerstrasse by the Capuchin church. Know the place?”

“Oh, aye.” Duffy had, during the last five months, been making up for his three-year absence from the legendary mercenaries’ tavern, which had been founded in 1518 by an expatriate Englishman who’d lost a leg in a minor skirmish on the Hungarian border. “Perhaps I’ll trot round that way myself.”

“A wise plan,” the other man agreed. “He said he had something he wanted to tell you anyway.”

“That’s where I’m likely to be, then. Come yourself whenever you think you’ve had enough sleep.”

Duffy stepped outside, breathing deeply in the cool west breeze that hadn’t slacked in the last two weeks. The day’s cloud cover was breaking up, and he could see Orion lying almost prone across the rooftops. Bonfires and braziers already flickered here and there on the rubble-strewn pavement; groups of soldiers hurried by with an air of purpose, and the little boys who sold firewood were scrabbling about in the wreckage of several shattered buildings, cautiously pleased by the quantity of windfall kindling they were able to fill their baskets with. Someone was strumming a lute in the next barracks, and Duffy hummed the tune as he strode away up the Schwarzenbergstrasse.

There was nothing much about the exterior of the Peerless Ploughman to distinguish it from any other building in the area; it was a low, shingle-roofed house whose small, leaded-glass windows spilled only a slight gleam of light out onto the cobblestones, and its sign, a rusty plough, was bolted flat against the bricks of the wall and practically invisible at night. Duffy clumped up to the heavy oaken door and pounded with his fist on the worn spot below the empty knocker-hinge.

After a few seconds the door swung inward, letting more light and a mixture of smells—beef, beer, spices and sweat—out into the street. A big, sandy-haired young man with pop eyes peered at him over the top of a foaming beer mug.

“Can I come in?” Duffy asked with a smile. “I’m with—”

“I know,” said the beer drinker, lowering the mug and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Eilif’s company. I saw you from the wall today. Come on in.” He stepped back and waved Duffy inside.

There were five steps down to the main floor, which made the heavy-beamed ceiling seem high. Lamps and candles cast a diffused yellow light from a dozen tables, and the surf-roar of conversation and laughter and rattling cups surged back and forth in the place, so completely contained by the massive walls and thick door that a passerby in the street outside would scarcely have known the house was occupied. There was music, too, for old Fenn, the host, had got out his antique harp—booty from God-knew-what long-forgotten campaign—and was strumming on it old country airs to which he’d improvised filthy and blasphemous lyrics. Duffy picked his way down the steps and began weaving through the crowd toward where he knew the wine was.

“Duffy!” sounded a shout through the babble. “Damn it, Brian! Over here!”

The Irishman looked around and spotted Eilif, sitting with a couple of other landsknecht captains at a table by the wall. Several men stepped out of his way and he crossed to the table and sat down. Bits of bread and sausage-ends on the table top told Duffy that the captains had been there since dinner.

“Brian,” said Eilif, “meet Jean Vertot and Karl Stein, captains of two of the Free Companies.”

Duffy nodded at the two men. Stein was tall and rangy, with an old scar curling vertically through the network of wrinkles around his left eye and down his cheek; Duffy had met him fifteen years ago, during the fighting on the Rhine. Vertot was a burly giant whose full beard was still pure black, despite at least two decades of being captain of one of the most savage bands of landsknechten—or lasquenets, as they were known in his native Normandy—in all of Europe.

“What are you drinking, Duffy?” asked Stein in a gravelly voice. Then before Duffy could answer Stein had reached behind him and snared one of the men from his own company. “Ebers,” he said, “bring us over the cask of that bock beer.”

“The cask, sir?” repeated Ebers doubtfully. “Isn’t it bolted down? How about—”

“Damn you, if you were this slow to obey me in battle we’d all have been wiped out years ago. You’ve got your orders—go!”

Duffy had opened his mouth to voice his preference for wine, but now shut it. I guess I can’t turn down the beer, he thought helplessly, now that poor Ebers is off risking his life to bring it to us. He shrugged inwardly and turned to Stein with a smile. “Bock beer? In October? Where does Fenn get that?”

“It’s Herzwesten,” Stein said. “The owner of the Zimmermann Inn—what’s his name, Eilif? He hired your company.”

“Aurelianus,” Eilif answered.

“That’s right. Aurelianus evidently saved a lot of the spring production for just such an emergency as this—” The broad wave accompanying the statement took in, Duffy gathered, the Turkish ranks massed outside the city, “—and now he’s distributing all of it among the troops. It’s been twelve days now, and there must be ten thousand soldiers of one sort or other in the city; I’m amazed there’s still any left.”

“Maybe its like the loaves and the fishes,” Duffy suggested.

“I like this fellow Aurelianus’ miracle better,” commented Vertot.

“Anyway, Duff,” said Eilif, who hadn’t followed that last exchange, “I called you over here because poor old Bobo was killed out there today. Tomorrow morning all the landsknecht captains and their lieutenants are meeting at the Zimmermann Inn with von Salm and some highly placed boys to ask for more money—our feeling is that we’ve got them over a barrel, you see—and we want to be well-represented. You, therefore, are hereby promoted to the post of lieutenant.”

“Me?” Duffy felt vaguely frightened by the sudden conjunction of drinking the Herzwesten bock and visiting the Zimmermann Inn. For the first time in five months he felt his sense of independence begin to waver. Maybe none of this, he thought, from Bobo’s death to Ebers’ beer-fetching mission, was accidental. “But good God, Eilif, I’m your most recently acquired man! A dozen of your old wolves deserve the post more than I do, and they’ll probably mutiny if I’m put over them.” There was shouting from the other end of the room, and the sound of splintering wood.

“To hell with that,” said Eilif carelessly. “They’ve tried to mutiny before, and with a lot more cause than that. I have a talent for putting down mutinies. Besides, you are the man for the job—few of my lads have had the years of experience you have, and you’re lots smarter than they are.”

“And for you to refuse,” Vertot pointed out with a smile, “would almost constitute a mutiny right there.”

“Duffy knows that,” snapped Eilif.

“Of course,” acknowledged the Irishman. “And I’m not going to refuse.” He looked away and saw Ebers, a cask under one arm, elbowing angry drinkers out of his way as he struggled back toward the table.

“The beer arrives,” Stein pronounced, getting to his feet. He drew his sword with a ringing rasp of steel and confronted Ebers’ pursuers. “What he has done was by my order!” he shouted. “Back, you dogs, unless you want to leave here carrying your livers in your hands.”

The gang of irate landsknechten fell back, grumbling about the privileges of rank. Ebers set the cask on the table and saluted. “Mission accomplished, sir.”

“Well done. Draw yourself a cup and then go away.”

“That’s settled, then,” said Eilif, who had opened the tap and was filling several cups from the steady brown stream. “You’ll accompany me to the Zimmermann in the morning.” He turned the tap off and set one of the filled mugs in front of the Irishman, then commenced wiping up the puddle of spilled beer with a crust of bread.

“Right.” Duffy took a deep breath and drained half the mug at one draught. Damn, he thought. The stuff is good. Eilif, chewing with relish on the soggy bread, seemed to be of the same opinion.

Fenn stumped up to the table, pivoting expertly on his wooden leg. “What’s the riot here?” he inquired, grinning wolfishly. “I run a quiet, family-type place.”

“We know you do, Fenn, and that’s why we brought your excellent beer over here for safekeeping,” Duffy told him, “away from those damn drunkards.” By way of punctuation he drank off what remained in his cup and refilled it.

“Am I to understand you are buying the whole cask?”

“That’s right,” confirmed Stein. “In celebration of Duffy’s promotion to lieutenant.”

“Hah!” barked Fenn, pounding his peg leg on the floor in what was evidently a substitute for slapping his knee. “Duffy? The human wineskin? A wise move! That way you’re sure to have Dionysus and Silenus and Bacchus watching over you.” The Irishman looked up suspiciously at the last name, but Fenn was just laughing good-naturedly. “This calls for a song!” the host shouted.

There was scattered applause at that, and a slight quieting of the steady din of voices, for Fenn’s songs were popular. “Give us The Signifying Monkey,” bawled one soldier. “No, Saint Ursula Going Down for the Third Time,” yelled another.

“Shut up, you rats,” said Fenn. “This is a serious occasion. Brian Duffy has been promoted to the office of lieutenant in the company of Eilif the Swiss.” There were cheers, for despite Duffy’s predictions of mutiny, he was liked and respected among the troops. The one-legged man moved quickly, with a gait like a barrel being rolled on one corner, to the counter on which sat the wine kegs and his harp. Picking up the latter, he caressed a long, soft chord out of the instrument; then he smote the strings with the first notes of the old goliard song, Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi.

Fenn sang, and nearly the entire crowd raised their voices in approximate harmony in the chorus, shouting the ancient lyrics that celebrated the vagaries of Fortune’s wheel. Duffy sang as loudly as the rest, after pausing only long enough to drain his refilled cup so that he might beat time with it on the table top.

When Fenn finished the song, the company showed no intention of ceasing to sing the choruses, so the host shrugged and began it a second time. Duffy sat back and filled his cup once again with the brown beer. He sipped it thoughtfully.

Just as certain tunes will bring clearly back decades-old memories, and occasional untraceable aromas call up long-forgotten emotions of childhood, so the taste of the beer, combined with the antique goliard melody, was prodding some sleeping memory of his, something pleasant he’d forgotten long ago. Usually reluctant to rouse his faculties of recollection, he pursued this one elusive scrap with all the recklessness and single-mindedness of a drunkard.

Then Eilif was blinking up at him with an expression of puzzlement, for the Irishman had risen to his feet with a shout that broke the back of the song, which had been limping a bit by this time anyway. He glanced around at the merry and curious faces, and, raising his foaming cup, called something in a language no one in the room understood.

“That’s Gaelic or something,” Fenn said. “Ho, Duffy! None of your barbaric tongues here! You’re lucky I don’t make everyone speak God-fearing Latin in my house.”

The Irishman seemed to see that no one had understood him, so he laughed and strode up to where Fenn stood, and held out his hands for the harp.

The host laughed uncertainly, as if not entirely sure he knew who this was; but after only a moment’s hesitation he let him have the harp. Duffy took it, and his fingers played softly over the strings, wringing out soft flickering snatches of melody, like music faintly heard from far away. He looked up, started to speak, and paused. Then, “Aperte fenestras!” he called.

“Hah!” Fenn was delighted. “Latin I asked for and Latin I get. Didn’t you hear him, you clods? Open the windows!”

Puzzled but drunkenly willing to go along, a number of the mercenaries leaped to the several narrow windows, unlatched them and pushed them open. Duffy turned to a heavy door behind him, slid back its bolt with one hand and drove it open with a forceful shove of his boot. It couldn’t have been a door Fenn intended for use, for there was the sound of boxes falling on the other side, but the host just laughed as the western breeze swept through the room.

Then the Irishman began to play, and it was a quick, darting tune in which tension and menace were tempered by a strong note of exhilaration. There was in it the wary excitement of crouching in the chill of dawn, fingering the worn grip of a trusted weapon and eyeing the near gap from which the enemy would appear; the cold-bellied, dry-mouthed thrill of charging a horse down a dangerously steep slope; and the wonder of standing at the bow of an outward-bound ship, watching the sun sink ahead over uncharted seas. The room became almost quiet as the soldiers harkened to the music, and much of the haze of drunkenness was sluiced out of their eyes as if by the fresh breeze.

A certain tune had been building up in the background of his playing, and now he brought it to front and center, giving full rein to the alternately regal and elfin melody. His audience stirred with recognition, so the Irishman began to sing, in the language Fenn had described as “Gaelic or something.”

Several German voices joined him, and a moment later several more. But it was an ancient song that had passed through many languages, and soon Fenn was roaring English lyrics, and Vertot’s Frenchmen were singing along in a minor key that reflected the main theme and was almost a mirror image of it, convex to concave.

Before long the room thundered with the song, and many of the men had got to their feet to give their lungs fuller play, and the interweaving polyglot chorus set the fancy glass beer pitchers rattling musically on their high shelf.

The Irishman wrung stronger chords from the instrument as the song neared its crest, and then, just as it did, the bells heralding eight o’clock mass began ringing in the tower of St. Stephen’s. The song reached crescendo gracefully, effortlessly taking in the pealing of the bells as accompaniment; and a moment later a deep, window-rattling bass was provided by rumbling cannon-fire from the city walls.

After whipping the tail end of the melody through a couple of unnecessary flourishes Duffy handed the harp back to Fenn. All the men were on their feet now, clapping and cheering, and Duffy bowed and made his way back to his table.

His eyes looked a bit haunted and scared, but nobody noticed it. “That was good,” pronounced Stein. “After twelve days of being cooped up within these walls, the men tend to lose heart. Music like that gives it back to them.”

“And you can fight too, from what I hear,” Vertot commented. “Yes, you have picked a good man to be your lieutenant, Eilif.”

The cannon-fire was not followed by the alarum bells, so they knew Bluto was just sending a few balls arcing through the night to remind the Turks he was there. More beer was poured, and the evening proceeded noisily but uneventfully. After a while someone complained of the draft, and the windows were closed again.

A couple of hours later Eilif and Duffy were staggering back toward the barracks. “Grab as much sleep as you can,” Eilif advised. “We’ve got this meeting to go to tomorrow morning.”

“Meeting! What meeting?”

“Never mind. I’ll have one of the lads dump a bucket of water over you when the time comes.”

“Make it beer.”

“Right. A malty baptism. Say, when did you learn to play the harp?”

Duffy stared at the street, which seemed to be rocking in front of him. “I never did,” he said. “I never did.”

The second hour after dawn found Eilif and Duffy, both dressed fairly respectably, striding up the Rotenturmstrasse. The sky was overcast and the air was chilly, and the Irishman pulled the gauntlets of his gloves up over his tunic sleeves.

“How are we doing for time?” he asked, his breath steaming.

“We’re a bit early—I don’t think Stein had left yet when we did. Von Salm will probably be late anyway, to show us that he isn’t impressed by our position. I think we can make a good case, though—and you just nod and look determined at whatever I say, got it?”

“Certainly,” Duffy agreed airily, though privately resolving to speak up if he should want to. They turned left, and soon he could see their destination, several blocks ahead.

The Zimmermann Inn stood at the wall end of the Tuchlauben in the north section of the city, a good half mile from the actual focus of the Turkish offensive, and something very like Vienna’s normal daily life still went on here. No soldiers trooped by, the streets were free of rubble and charred lumber and masonry-scarred cannon balls, and the west wind kept the smoke away; it was possible to imagine, seeing the usual milkmaids and beggars, that there were not seventy-five thousand Turks only three miles to the south.

The place looked, in fact, just as it had five months ago when he’d last seen it, and he couldn’t suppress a reflexive home-at-last feeling. He had to remind himself that this was also the home of a sorcerer whose goal it was to drive him literally out of his head.

And it’s also Epiphany’s home, he thought, my old girl-friend who, until I finally left here, had got to the point of bursting into tears every time she saw me. The Irishman had a tendency to let long-standing guilt dry out into annoyance, and it had happened in his dealings with Mrs. Hallstadt. Why do women have to be that way, he wondered impatiently. Very well, I did let her down, broke a promise—I admit it! But do you suppose a man would let something like that sour the rest of his life? Hah! Why, you could show me the Nine Virgins of Luxor this minute, all of them naked and beckoning, and spirit them away from me a minute later, and a cup of wine would clear me of the tragedy. And it’s been five months, after all. Hell, maybe she has got over me by now.

He strode on more cheerfully then, ignoring a faint, uneasy suspicion that he had not quite honestly assessed Epiphany’s feelings, nor his own.

Eilif led the way up to the step and pulled open the front door. They stepped through the vestibule and entered the dining room, where a couple of captains already sat at a long table by the windows. From a corner of his eye Duffy noticed Lothario Mothertongue sitting by himself at a table in the far corner. I see nothing’s changed, he thought—except that Lothario is looking a bit more haggard. But so are we all.

“Good morning, lads,” Eilif greeted. “This is my second-in-command, Brian Duffy. Brian, this is Fernando Villanueva of Aragon, and Franz Lainzer of the Tyrol.”

Duffy nodded as he sat down, and the Spaniard smiled. “I enjoyed your harping last night,” he said. “You must play for us all once again before the walls come down.”

“I’m not sure that gives me enough time,” replied Duffy with a grin. “I have to have drunk a huge quantity of beer to do it, and Suleiman’s likely to have the wall down by mid-day.”

“Then you’d certainly better start now,” Villanueva decided. “Ho, someone in the kitchen there! Beer for our musical friend! And for the rest of us, too!”

Eilif was looking out the window, which had been repaired with clear glass after Bobo’s passage through it. “Several people coming,” he said.

Behind him the kitchen door swung open, and Epiphany came walking across to the table, carrying a tray with a pitcher of beer and a half dozen mugs on it. Duffy averted his eyes uncomfortably, reflecting that she looked both older and dearer. Then she saw him—he heard a gasp, and a moment later a clatter and splash as the tray hit the floor. He looked up in time to see her run, weeping, back into the kitchen. Mothertongue got up from his seat and hurried after her.

The Spaniard blinked in astonishment. “She obviously disapproves of drinking in the morning,” he said. “Ho, miss! Landlord! Anyone! We don’t intend to lap it up off the floor like cats!”

After several moments Werner appeared at the kitchen door, his eyebrows raised in impatient inquiry. Then he saw the foamy puddle on the floor. “Epiphany did that?” he asked of no one in particular. “This is positively the last! Anna,” he called over his shoulder, “don’t you go look for her. She just ran off because she spilled all this beer, and knows what I’ll do this time—which is sack the lushy bitch!” He disappeared back into the kitchen.

“It’s Vertot,” said Eilif, who’d been ignoring the noise and was still watching the street. “Aha! And von Salm right behind. He’s punctual—a good sign! Sit tight, lads, this is where we straighten everything out.”

Well, Duffy thought bitterly, perhaps not quite everything.

Epiphany did not reappear during the meeting, in which Duffy found he could take no great interest. Anna served beer and sausage, giving the Irishman occasional glances of angry reproach.

Damn it, he thought during a long statement by the elegantly dressed and bearded von Salm, it wasn’t my fault. Was that any way for the old girl to go on, after all this time? It must have been affectation, a pose—surely Anna can see that! Hell, no romantic reverse ever gave me more than a week’s upset...

Oh? spoke up sarcastically another part of his mind. Then I guess it must have been some other Irishman that went off to fight the Turks at Mohács in ‘twenty-six, just because his girl married another man; it took him three years to face her again.

“... isn’t that right, Brian? Or would you say I’ve overstated the case?” Eilif was eyeing him expectantly.

Duffy raised his head, letting his frown of worry look, he hoped, like one of grim determination. “There was no exaggeration in what you said,” he told Eilif.

The Swiss turned again to von Salm. “Hear? And that from a man who fought with Tomori! You can’t deny...” And the discussion swam away again out of the Irishman’s focus of attention. Despite a vow he’d made at dawn, he was doing more than his share of putting away the beer.

At last the captains were pushing the benches back and standing up.

“As a limited representative of Emperor Charles V, that is all I can offer to add,” von Salm said. “You can be sure, though, that when the Turks are driven off—assuming you landsknechten maintain your present level of performance—I will vehemently recommend a fuller payment for you all.”

The captains nodded and broke up into conversing groups, having evidently got as much as they’d hoped for.

Eilif turned to the Irishman. “Heading back, Duff?”

“UK... no.” Duffy grimaced at the kitchen door. “No, I’ve got to settle a thing or two.”

“Well, I’ll see you back there.” The grizzled Swiss captain grinned at him. “Don’t give it all more worry than it’s worth, lad.”

Duffy shrugged. “I forget what it’s worth.”

Chapter Seventeen

HE FOUND HER in the flour-dusty storeroom, sitting on a keg of salt and sobbing so convulsively that it looked as if a pack of invisible dogs was mauling her.

“Epiphany?”

She turned a tear-streaked face up toward him, then looked away, crying harder than before. “Why did you come back?” she asked finally. “Just to make me lose this job?”

“Hey, Piff,” Duffy said. “Don’t cry. Werner can’t fire you; it’s Aurelianus who owns the place, and I’ve still got influence with him. Hell, I’ll tell him to give you a raise.”

“Don’t,” the old woman choked, “mention the name... of that little snake.”

“What little snake?” Duffy asked, bewildered. “Aurelianus?”

“Yes. He’s the one that put... some kind of filthy spell on you, to make you indifferent and cold toward me. Ohhh.” She went off into howls of grief again.

Duffy considered it unfair of her to switch the subject around like that. “It’s Werner we’re talking about,” he said. “And I’ll see to it that he behaves himself in the future.”

“What do I care about the future?” Epiphany moaned. “I have no future. I’m counting the hours until the Turks cut down the walls and knock my head off.” Duffy guessed she’d said that last sentence so often lately that she didn’t even bother to get the verbs in the right order anymore. “I haven’t even seen my father in two weeks,” she said brokenly. “I simply intended to abandon him when you and I left... and now, remembering that, I just can’t face him anymore!”

“Good Lord,” Duffy said. “Who’s bringing him food, then?”

“What? (sniff.) Oh, I’ve got Shrub doing it.” She looked up at him blearily. “Brian, if you do talk to that horrible Aurelianus, could you have him speak to Werner about my brandy? I’ve always been in the habit of having just a sip before I go to bed and when I get up in the morning, to help me work, you know, but now Werner insults me and says I can’t have any, so I have to sneak it when no one’s looking, which is so degrading. As if Werner ever does any work himself—he’s always hidden away talking to that damned poet friend of his. Talk to him about it, Brian. You’ll do at least that for me, won’t you?”

The Irishman stared at her thoughtfully. Is this a gambit, he wondered, a story to make me feel properly guilty? Oh, Brian, look, you’ve driven me to drink, you heartless wretch. Is that what I’m supposed to understand?

My God, he thought suddenly, listen to yourself, Duffy. You are a heartless wretch. This old girl was quietly happy here until you showed up and made crazy promises to her that you couldn’t keep. You have driven her to drink.

He reached out a hesitant hand and lightly squeezed her shoulder. “I’ll talk to him,” he said softly, and left the room.

Anna was in the kitchen, and looked up when, simultaneously, Duffy appeared from the storeroom and Mothertongue stepped in from the yard.

“Where is—” both men began at once.

“After you, sir,” said Mothertongue.

“Thank you. Anna, where is Werner?”

“The same place he was before all the racket and weeping brought him out here a few minutes ago: his private wine cellar.” As the Irishman turned in the direction she’d pointed, she added, “I wouldn’t just barge in; that poet Kretchmer’s in there with him—they’re writing an epic or something, and won’t have interruptions.”

“They’ll have one,” Duffy predicted, walking on.

Behind him he heard Mothertongue ask, “Where did Mrs. Hallstadt go? She isn’t out in the yard.”

“She’s in the storeroom,” replied Anna tiredly.

Duffy paused and looked over his shoulder at Mothertongue, who, facing the storeroom door, had paused to look back at him. The two men stared at each other for a second or two, then thoughtfully resumed moving in their separate directions.

The Irishman had never been in Werner’s wine cellar, but he knew it was tucked under the main stairs, a step or two below floor level, and in a moment he stood before the low door, his hand raised to knock. Before he did, though, it occurred to him that there was no reason to be polite—so he just grabbed the latch and yanked the door open.

The low-ceilinged room beyond was perhaps twelve feet long by eight wide, and bottles, casks and amphorae cluttered the shelves from floor to ceiling, softly lit by a lamp on the small table in the middle of the floor. Two men who had been sitting at the table had now sprung halfway up from their chairs, startled by Duffy’s entrance, and he stared at both of them.

Werner was a bit heavier than Duffy remembered him, and his unusually fine clothes only served to set off the powdered pallor of his face and the gray in his oiled hair. Kretchmer was a tougher-looking man, his face tanned behind a startling red beard, but he was the one who seemed most upset.

“Ach!” the poet exclaimed in a high, hoarse voice, staring nervously at the Irishman’s feet. “Common ruffians interrupt the sacred labors! A man of bloody hands intrudes into Aphrodite’s very grove! I must avaunt!” He edged past Duffy, eyes still downcast, and hurried away down the hall.

Werner resumed his seat and threw up his hands. “Can art not be wrought without all these mundane distractions?”

Duffy stared at him. “What?”

Werner took a deep breath, then let it out. “Never mind, Duffy. What do you want?”

The Irishman looked at the littered table and picked up a little wooden whistle that had only one finger-hole. “Don’t tell me: you’re composing a musical High Mass.” He blew through it, but failed to get any audible note. “I’d recommend a new pitch-pipe.”

Werner got up from the table and, with much suppressed wincing, limped around the table and snatched the whistle from Duffy’s hand, then just as awkwardly returned to his chair. “Was there something you wanted to say, or are you just bored?”

Duffy started to ask about the innkeeper’s injuries, then remembered why he’d come.

“I want to tell you that you can’t fire Epiphany Vogel. You—”

“I can do as I please in my place.”

The Irishman smiled and sat down in Kretchmer’s chair. “That’s the crux of it, all right. How is it that you keep forgetting this isn’t your place? Aurelianus owns it, and he’s an old friend of mine. He won’t—”

“You’ve been gone half a year. I don’t think he’s a friend of yours anymore. And in any case,” he added with sudden heat, “I run this place, damn you! I have my finger on the pulse at all times. He listens to me when it comes to operating the inn. Do you think he could do it himself, without me? No sir! The little old—”

Duffy laughed. “Finger on the pulse? I like that! This place must be able to run itself, for as I recall you’re hardly ever on the premises. You’re always over at the house of that caricature of a poet. Hell, I remember Easter night, when Zapolya nearly blew this inn to bits—and you hadn’t even heard of it the next morning! You were over at his place... quoting Petrarch and kissing Kretchmer’s boots, I expect...”

Oddly, a sly look had sprung up in the innkeeper’s eyes. “Well... it wasn’t exactly his boots.”

The Irishman squinted at him. “What the hell do you mean?”

“Well, if you must know, Kretchmer wasn’t home that night—but his wife was.” Werner smirked. “His marvellously young and attractive wife, I might add.”

Duffy was genuinely puzzled. “Do you mean to tell me his wife... and you... ?”

“I say nothing!” exclaimed Werner, still smirking. “I merely observe that sensitive, pretty young ladies tend to be swayed by the sort of verse I write. Swayed to an astonishing degree.” He actually winked.

Duffy stood up, somewhat surprised and disgusted. “Swayed right over to horizontal, I gather. Where was Kretchmer when all this wonderful stuff was going on? Over here swigging the new bock, I suppose.”

“Possibly. I only know she gave me to understand he’d not be back until morning, at the soonest.”

“If you’ll excuse me,” Duffy said, waving at the papers on the table, “I’ll leave you to your epic now, and—vacate poor Aphrodite’s grove. But Epiphany still works here, do you understand? And she’s permitted to keep a bottle of brandy in her room. I’ll have Aurelianus trot down presently and confirm it for you.” He walked to the door and turned around. “You know, you’d better be careful. Have you taken a good look at the shoulders on that Kretchmer fellow? Damned wide, for a poet. He could rip you to hash.”

The powdered innkeeper chuckled confidently. “I am not physically unfit. In fact, I have consistently beaten him at arm-wrestling.”

Duffy paused another moment, then shrugged. “You’d know best,” he said, and left, closing the door behind him.

There’s no way, he thought as he headed back to the kitchen, that Werner could honestly beat Kretchmer at arm-wrestling; either Werner lied or Kretchmer voluntarily allowed himself to lose. And why would he do that? And why—weirder still—would the wife of a big, healthy-looking fellow like that be attracted to the likes of Werner? And why do you bother your head about it? he asked himself impatiently.

He found Anna scraping a pile of chopped, dried meat off a board into a pot. “Genuine beef,” she announced when she looked up and saw him. “Most of the inns have been serving dog and cat since before the weekend, though not calling it that, of course. We were better stocked—we’ll have real pork and beef till about Thursday.” She laughed wearily. “And even then we’ll probably keep our integrity, because there won’t be any dogs or cats left.”

“I’ve been in long-besieged towns where even the rats were all eaten,” Duffy said softly, “and we ate ants, termites and cockroaches. Some ate worse things.”

Anna put on a fair imitation of a bright smile. “Really? I must say this does open up whole vistas for a revised menu.”

He hooked a thumb at the storeroom. “Piff still in there?”

“Well,” she answered cautiously, “yes...”

He pushed the door open quietly so as not to startle her, and saw her and Lothario Mothertongue sitting together on one of the few remaining hundred-pound sacks of flour. They were talking in low mutters and Mothertongue was stroking her hair. The Irishman closed the door as silently as he’d opened it.

He stood beside Anna and watched her chop an onion and then dice it. “How long has that been going on?”

She scooped up the white bits and flicked them off her hand into the pot. “A few days. It seems like everybody’s behavior has changed during these last two weeks.”

“Do tell. Well, I’ll still speak for her to Aurelianus.”

“Now there’s generosity!”

He nodded. “Biting, Anna, very biting. Rest assured I’m cut to the quick. Where will I find him?”

“Hell, I’m sorry. In the old chapel, probably. He spends a lot of time in there, doing all kinds of peculiar things with weights and pendulums and little tops like the ones Jewish children play with. And any time there’s a bit of sun he’ll be waving a little mirror out one of the windows. Like he was signalling, you know, but it’s a windowless, high-walled court out there—the only ones who could see the flashes would be birds overhead.”

“That’s the sort of thing these magicians like to do,” Duffy told her. “See you later.”

The long hall to the western side of the inn was just as dark at mid-day as at night, and it took Duffy several minutes to grope his way through its length of varying height, width and flooring all the way to the two tall doors of the chapel. He had been hearing voices for the last hundred feet, and now saw that one of the iron doors was ajar.

Though he couldn’t hear distinct words, there was something in the tone of the voices that made him cover the last few yards silently, his hand dropping to loosen his dagger in its scabbard. The same piles of boxes and stacked mops obstructed the doorway, and he carefully sneaked around the side so that he could peer into the chapel from between two inverted metal mop buckets set atop a stack of ancient carpet rolls.

Though the light through the stained glass windows was gray and dim, Duffy’s long grope through the dark hall had made his eyes sensitive to the slightest illumination. The tableau he saw at the altar looked, he thought, like the frontispiece of a treatise on some League of Outlandish Nations; of the six—no, seven—men confronting Aurelianus, two were blacks (one in feathers, the other in a long robe and a burnoose), one was the copper-skinned, leather-clad savage Duffy remembered seeing about the place five months ago, another seemed to come from the same far isles as had Antoku Ten-no, and the other three were apparently Europeans, though one was a midget.

“You’ve asked this before,” Aurelianus was saying with perhaps exaggerated patience, “and I’ve answered before.”

The midget spoke up. “You misunderstand, sir. We aren’t asking any longer.”

Duffy softly drew his dagger.

“You’d take it by force?” Aurelianus was grinning. “Ho! You’re children with sticks coming to rescue a favorite lamb from a hungry lion.”

The black man in desert garb stepped forward. “Two things, Ambrosius, are unarguably true. First, your power is severely circumscribed by the proximity of your inimical peer, Ibrahim, while our powers, though initially less, have remained undiminished—you are on nearly an equal footing with us now, and I don’t think you could overcome all seven of us if we were to work together.”

“Were those both true things,” Aurelianus asked politely, “or was it just one?”

“That was one. The second is this: Ibrahim will have this city, and he’ll have it long before the thirty-first. The walls are tottering already, and there are fifty thousand fanatic Janissaries out on the plain waiting for a gap to run in through. There’s no way on earth this brewery will last these two weeks until All Hallow’s Eve. Ibrahim will be in here in half that time, and he’ll poison the Mac Cool vat, or more likely just blow it to splinters and vapor with a bomb. Do you understand? What you hoped to accomplish with the Dark is simply impossible.”

“I’m being a dog in the manger, you’re saying.”

“Precisely. You would preserve the Dark beer untouched—which only means that Ibrahim will be able to destroy every last drop of it, thus insuring that it will never do anyone any good. On the other hand, if you sell some of it to us—at a fabulously high price, never fear!—it will have served a purpose, two purposes, actually: it will have saved our lives; and out of gratitude we will help you and your King to escape from this doomed city. For though the Dark, if drawn now, would not have quite attained its full empire-redeeming strength, you know it would certainly be powerful enough to restore and rejuvenate a few old men.”

“What makes you think escape is possible for anyone?” Aurelianus asked. “The Turks surround the city completely, you know.”

The midget spoke up again. “You’re not dealing exclusively with foreigners, Ambrosius. You and I both know half-a-dozen subterranean routes out of Vienna—one of them,” he added, nodding at the altar, “accessible from this very room.”

Aurelianus stepped up onto the dais around the marble altar, giving the seven men the look of supplicants. “The battle being fought here,” he said, “is not the concern of any of you, for you have all dispensed with whatever allegiances you may once have had to East or West. My counsel to you is that you flee, by any of the routes your colleague here knows of—and bring water or wine to quench your thirst, for you won’t have a drop of the Dark.”

“Very well,” said the black man in the burnoose, “you force us to—”

“Don’t talk, old man,” Aurelianus interrupted. “Show me. Come up here.” He stepped back and spread his arms wide, and Duffy, peering from his hiding place, thought he could see the old sorcerer’s hands flickering almost imperceptibly, like a mirage. The seven Dark Birds hesitated. Contempt put a sneer in the wizard’s voice as he went on: “Come up here, you children-playing-at-magic! Try your little spells and cantrips against the Western Magic that was growing in the roots of Britain’s dark forests ten thousand years before Christ, the magic at the heart of storms and tides and seasons! Come up to me! Who is it I shall face?” He threw back his black hood. “You know who I am.”

Duffy was actually brushed with tingling awe, for the gray light seemed to make ancient, weather-chiselled granite out of the face that looked down on them all. This is Merlin, the Irishman reminded himself, the last prince of the Old Power, the figure that runs obscurely like an incongruous thread through the age-dimmed tapestry of British pre-history.

The sorcerer reached out a hand—it wavered, as if seen under agitated water—and seemed to grab an invisible loop or handle, and pulled. The black man stumbled forward involuntarily. Aurelianus stretched forth the other hand toward the midget, whose hair Duffy saw twitch and stiffen at a straight-out angle; the wizard closed the fingers of that hand and the little man yelped in pain. “I’m going to show you another way to leave Vienna,” Aurelianus said softly.

Then all seven of the Dark Birds were running for the doors, the two held ones having wrenched themselves out of Aurelianus’ magical grip. Duffy scarcely had time to scuttle around to the other side of the carpet stack before they rushed past him and were sandal-slapping away down the hall.

He looked back at the altar, and saw Aurelianus staring at him. “You appear out of a carpet, like Cleopatra,” the old wizard observed.

Duffy stood up and walked to the communion rail. “I see Antoku wasn’t the only one to get demanding,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t ask for permission before snitching my sip of it.”

Aurelianus cocked an eyebrow at him. “The Dark? You tasted it? When?”

“Easter night.”

The wizard frowned, then shook his head. “Well, you wouldn’t have been able to turn the tap if they didn’t want you to have any.” He looked intently at Duffy. “Tell me—how was it?”

The Irishman spread his hands. “It was... incredibly good. I’d have gone down for more, but it seemed to paralyze me.”

The old man laughed quietly. “Yes, I’ve heard of it having that effect.” He crossed to a couple of narrow chairs by the windows, sat down in one and waved at the other. “Drop anchor. Drink? Snake?”

Duffy thought about it as he walked over. “Snake,” he said, and kicking his rapier out of the way, perched on the edge of the chair.

Aurelianus opened a little box and handed Duffy one of the sticklike things. “You’ve been fighting these days. How does it look? Was our thirsty friend correct about the walls?”

The Irishman leaned forward to get the snake’s head into the flame of the candle Aurelianus held toward him. “They’ve got miners and sappers under them, yes,” he said when he’d got it well lit, “but your blackamoor is wrong in thinking that it’s decisive. You’ve got to keep in mind that October is insanely late in the year for the Turks to be here—as far as supplies go, I suspect they’re in worse shape than we are, and they still have to turn around and face a damned long trip home.” He puffed a smoke ring, grinned, and tried without success to do it again. “The walls could probably be tumbled in a day or two; the question is, do they dare wait another day or two? To say nothing of the—I’d estimate—additional day or two of street-to-street fighting that would be necessary for them actually to take the city.”

Aurelianus waited a moment, then raised his white eyebrows. “Well? Will they dare it?”

Duffy laughed. “God, I don’t know.”

“Would you, if you were in charge?”

“Let’s see—no, I don’t think I would. Already the Janissaries are probably on the brink of mutiny. They’ll be wanting to get back home to Constantinople—for it will take months for them to get home, and even now they’ve waited too long to hope to elude winter. If Suleiman stays for the—let’s say—additional week it would require to break and seize Vienna, he’d almost have to winter right here, and leave in the spring; and that’s long enough for even Charles the Tardy to do something about it.” He shrugged. “Of course guessing is just guessing. He may think he could keep his Janissaries in line and hold the city till spring, crumbled walls and all. It’s hard to say. I think he’s shown inexcusably bad judgment in hanging on here as long as he has.”

Aurelianus nodded. “I suppose you’re right, militarily speaking.”

The Irishman grinned sarcastically. “Ah. But I’m all wrong spiritually speaking, eh?”

“Well, you’ve got to remember that Ibrahim is the one who finally decides, and his first concern is ruining the beer—when it comes to betting on the last card, he doesn’t really care if Suleiman actually takes Vienna, or if the Janissaries all die on the way home, or if Charles bloodily evicts them all from here during the winter. If he can wreck the beer before the thirty-first of this month, when we hope to draw the Dark and give it to the Fisher King, he’ll have done what he set out to do—and no cost will have been too dear.”

The Irishman stood up, trailing smoke. “Then we’ll have to rely on the homesickness of the Janissaries.”

“Tell me, are Bugge’s Vikings proving to be of any use in the defense?”

“Well, no. Von Salm says they’re unsuited for disciplined warfare. I suppose they’ll be useful if it does come to hand-to-hand fighting in the streets, but right now they’re just sitting idle and frustrated in a lean-to by the north barracks. You might as well have kept them living here.”

“I couldn’t. It seems one of them mauled Werner and pitched him down the stairs, and he insisted they be thrown out. Bugge denied it, but Werner was adamant. Poor fellow still limps.” He tapped the ashen head off his snake. “You know, I still have hope that they’ll figure in this in some significant way. They were sent here so... purposefully...”

“They’re a bunch of old men.”

“Yes. This is a war of old men. Oh, I know Suleiman is only thirty-four, and Charles isn’t yet thirty, but the conflict is old, the true kings are old—and I am perhaps the oldest of all.”

Unable to think of a reply, Duffy turned to leave.

“Will you have a drink with me tonight in my room?” Aurelianus asked.

“No,” said the Irishman, recalling what had prompted him to leave five months ago. Then he remembered the harp-playing episode of the previous night, and he shrugged fatalistically. “Oh, why not,” he sighed. “I’m not really due back at the barracks till noon tomorrow. What time?”

“Nine?”

“Very well.”

Duffy left the chapel and made his way back to the dining room. The Zimmermann was too far north and west to attract many soldiers these days, and it was haggard citizens that filled the tables around him. A new girl was working, and he signalled her.

“I’ll have a bowl of whatever Anna’s got in the pot,” he told her, “and a flagon of Werner’s burgundy—oh hell; forget the wine, make it a flagon of beer.” Speaking of Werner had reminded him that he’d intended to talk to Aurelianus about Epiphany’s job. I’ll tell him tonight, he thought. “Say, does Bluto come in here anymore?”

“Who, sir?”

“The man in charge of the cannons. He’s a hunchback.”

“I don’t think so.” She smiled politely and went on to the next table.

Duffy sat quietly waiting for his beer, savoring the weirdly wheaty aftertaste of the snake—which he’d ditched before entering the dining room—and ignoring the curious stares of the citizens around him. When the beer came, he poured himself a mug and sipped it slowly. After a while he noticed Shrub helping to carry steaming plates out to the tables.

“Hey, Shrub!” he called. “Come here a minute.”

“Yes, Mr. Duffy?” said the stable boy when he’d delivered a plate and made his way to the table.

“You’ve been bringing food to old Vogel? Epiphany’s father?”

“I did for a few days, but he scares me. He kept calling me by the wrong name and telling me to get liquor for him.”

“You don’t mean you just stopped? Holy—”

“No no!” the boy said hastily. “I got Marko to do it. He’s not scared of crazy old men.”

“Marko? Is he the kid with the red boots?”

“Yes sir,” assented Shrub, obviously impressed by the idea of red boots.

“Very well. Uh, carry on.”

Perhaps as an apology for her shortness with him earlier, Anna had the new girl carry out to Duffy a capacious bowl of the stew, and he laid into it manfully, washing it down with liberal draughts of cool Herzwesten Light. At last he laid down his spoon and struggled to his feet; he looked around the room, but there was no one in the scared-eyed crowd he knew to say good-bye to, so he just lurched to the front door and out into the street.

To the plodding Irishman the whole outdoors seemed far too bright—though gray clouds hid the sky and made a diffused glow of the sun—and the breeze was too cold, and the yells of the ragged children were unbearably loud. How many hours of sleep did you get last night, Duff? he asked himself. Well, I don’t know, but it was something less than adequate for a tired, middle-aged soldier with a primordial king riding on his shoulders like the Old Man of the Sea.

He sighed heavily, and turned right at the corner of the inn instead of pressing on toward the Rotenturmstrasse. Soon he had come round into the inn’s stable-yard, and he leaned on a clothesline pole for a few moments and looked reminiscently about.

I see Werner hasn’t re-roofed the stalls that were blown up by that petard, he noted. I wonder if he still thinks I was responsible for that. Probably he does. At least somebody patched the fence where Zapolya’s damned forty-pound iron ball passed through it. And over there’s where the northmen were quartered.

He crossed the yard to the stables and saw that there were still several straw-filled bunks against the back wall. Almost without conscious thought he rolled into the lowest, closed his eyes and was soon asleep.

With the lucidity typical of afternoon dreams, he was sitting across a table from Epiphany. Her hair was still more dark than gray, and her expressions and gestures hadn’t yet lost the careless spontaneity of youth.

Though he couldn’t hear his own words—in fact could apparently only speak as long as he didn’t try to listen to himself—he knew he was talking earnestly to her, trying to make her understand something. What was it he had been trying to make her understand, that long-ago morning? Oh, of course! That she’d be mad to go through with her planned marriage to Max Hallstadt—that she ought instead to marry Duffy. He paused in his speech for a sip of beer, and had a moment of difficulty in regaining the thread of his faultlessly logical argument.

“Oh, Brian,” she said, rolling her eyes in half-feigned exasperation, “why do you only bring these things up when you’re sick, drunk or tired?”

“Epiphany!” he protested. “I’m always sick, drunk or tired!”

The scene flickered away, and he found himself shoving his way into the vestibule of St. Peter’s Church. Several of Hallstadt’s friends were there, evidently posted for the specific purpose of keeping the Irishman out if he should attempt to get in and disrupt the wedding.

“Come on, now, Brian,” spoke one—what had his name been? Klaus somebody. “You’re not a part of this picture anymore.”

“Out of my way, you poxy toad,” Duffy said, in a voice loud enough to turn heads in the nearer pews. “Hallstadt! Damn your eyes, you won’t—” A fist in his stomach doubled him up and silenced him for a moment, but then he had lashed out with a punch of his own, and Klaus was jigging backward at an impossible-to-maintain angle, and colliding with the baptismal font...

The yard-tall pillar with its marble bowl tottered, leaned—as Klaus rolled off to one side—and then went to the floor-tiles with a terrible echoing crash. Holy water splashed up into the faces of appalled ushers, and shards of marble were spinning across the floor. Another of Hallstadt’s friends seized Duffy by the arm, but the Irishman shook him off.

He took a step up the aisle. “Hallstadt, you son-of-a-whore, draw your sword and face me if you’re not the eunuch everyone takes you for!”

People were leaping to their feet, and he caught one glimpse of Epiphany’s veiled, horrified face before a hardy altar boy felled him unconscious with a tall iron crucifix.

Then he was simply falling through a vortex of old scenes and faces, over the muted babble of which he could hear an older man’s voice raised in strong, delighted laughter.

Chapter Eighteen

WHEN HE OPENED HIS EYES he was in deep shadow, and the wall of the inn, which he could just see from where he lay, showed dark gray around the yellow of the windows. God, he thought blurrily. Just a dream this time, was it? It was bad enough to go through those unhappy days in early ’twenty-six, without having to re-live them in my dreams. Ah, but at least they’re my memories; better a dozen such than one of those damned dreams of that moonlit lake—which you were risking, drinking all that cursed beer. Stick to wine, lad. He rolled to his feet, slapped straw from his doublet and combed his hair with his fingers, then took a deep breath, let it out, and started toward the building.

From habit he walked in through the kitchen’s back door, and caught the red-booted Marko snitching a sweet-roll from a cupboard. “Marko,” Duffy said, stopping. There was something he’d meant to ask this boy about. What had it been?

“Werner said I could have it,” the boy said quickly.

“I don’t care about your damned pastry. Uh... oh yes, you’ve been bringing food to Gustav Vogel, I understand?”

“I was for a while. Werner said I didn’t have to anymore.”

“Well who is?”

Marko blinked. “Is what?”

“Bringing the old man food, you idiot.”

“I don’t know. Why can’t he go out and scavenge it, like everybody else?” The boy dashed out the back door, leaving the Irishman wearing a scowl of annoyance and worry.

The new girl who’d served him earlier was staring at him from the other side of the fireplace, where she was ladling out bowls of apparently the same stew. “Where’s Epiphany?” Duffy asked her.

“She went to bed early,” the girl answered. “She didn’t feel well. What are you doing in the kitchen? Guests are supposed to—”

“Where’s Anna, then?”

“Around at the taproom end of the dining room, I believe. If you want supper you’ll have to—”

“You can have mine,” Duffy told her with a smile as he strode past her into the hall. The dining room was full, and alive with the gaiety that comes to people who know they might well be dead in twenty-four hours. Beer was being drunk at a prodigious rate, and Duffy found Anna crouched beside one of the decorated casks, holding a pitcher under the golden stream from the tap.

She looked up and saw him. “I thought you left.”

“No, just fell asleep out back. Epiphany’s gone to bed?”

“That’s—Shrub! This is for Alexis and Casey’s table, hurry up—that’s right. Why?” She glanced at him suspiciously.

“Oh, give it a rest, Anna, I’m not planning to go up and force any attentions on her. Listen, she had Shrub bringing food to her father, and—”

Shrub scampered up again. “Hello, Mr. Duffy! Anna, two more pitchers for Franz Albertzart and that old lady.”

“Coming up. What were you saying, Brian?”

“Well, Shrub here got Marko to do it, but I ran into Marko just now and he says he stopped.”

“There you go, Shrub.” The boy took the pitchers and hurried guiltily away. “Stopped what?”

“Damn it, listen to me. Nobody’s been bringing food to old Vogel. Now I’m not going to be too upset if he turns up dead, but I think his daughter might be.”

“Oh, hell,” Anna said quietly. “You’re right. I’ll tell her first thing in the morning.” She stood up and brushed a lock of hair out of her face, then looked at him with a little sympathy. “Brian, what did go wrong, anyway, between you and her?”

As Duffy paused to frame a credible and more or less accurate answer, the door banged open and five young men stamped in. “Anna!” one of them bawled across the room. “Five pitchers, pronto!”

The Irishman grinned with one side of his mouth and punched her very softly on the shoulder. “I’ll tell you sometime,” he said, and walked away toward the stairs. He turned and saw that she was watching him. He mouthed the name, Aurelianus, pointing upward.

There was a man asleep on the stairs, and Duffy stepped carefully around him, reflecting that besieged towns probably tended to surrender sooner if there was no wine or beer inside to divert the defenders, now and then, from the bleakness of their position. He got to the top landing and found Aurelianus’ door, but just as he was about to knock he remembered that the old sorcerer had told him nine o’clock.

Damn, he thought. It’s probably not even eight yet. I should have slept a bit longer, maybe carried the dream on to when I left town to go fight at Mohács. He started to tip-toe away, then snorted impatiently, strode back and rapped sharply on the door.

There was a squeal from inside, and overlapping it came Aurelianus’ flustered but authoritative, “Who is it?”

“Finn Mac Cool.”

After a moment the door opened and one of the maids, with face averted, ducked around the Irishman and hurried away. “Come in, Brian,” said Aurelianus with weary patience.

The room might have been completely rearranged since Duffy’s last visit, but it hadn’t changed; it was still a heaped, candlelit collection of tapestries, jewelled weapons, beakers a-bubble with no source of heat, books big enough to serve as walls for a small man’s house, and obscure animals stuffed in unlikely postures. The old wizard sat cross-legged on an upholstered stool.

Duffy jerked a thumb after the retreating maid when he’d shut the door. “I thought that kind of thing wasn’t good for you half-breeds.”

After closing his eyes for ten seconds, Aurelianus stared at him and shook his head. “Your years as a mercenary soldier have coarsened you, Brian, to the point where you’re unfit for gracious company. I was merely asking her if any of the maids had tried to come into my room recently; a new girl might not have been told that this room isn’t to be entered. And didn’t I say nine o’clock?”

“I decided I might have to be heading back to the barracks at around nine. Why don’t you just lock your door?”

“Oh, I do, most of the time, but I forget occasionally, and I often misplace my keys.”

“Isn’t that kind of careless?” Duffy found a chair, tipped a cat out of it and sat down. “After all, I suppose some of this junk must be valuable to somebody...”

“Yes,” the old man snapped. “Very valuable, quite a lot of it. The thing is, I tend to rely—perhaps too heavily!—on other protections.” He nodded toward the door, above and around the top of which Duffy noticed a structure that combined the features of a parrot-perch and a dollhouse. “Would you like some brandy?”

“What? Oh, certainly.” He waited until the wizard had poured two glasses of a golden Spanish brandy and handed him one. “Thank you. What was it you wanted to see me about?” He took a sip, swallowed it, then took a bigger one.

“Nothing special, Brian, I just wanted to chat. After all, I haven’t seen you in months.”

“Ah. Well, there’s one thing I wanted to talk to you about. Werner intends to fire Epiphany, and this job is just about all she’s got in the world. I’d be grateful if you’d tell him she’s a permanent employee, and that he’d better not torment her.”

Aurelianus blinked at him quizzically. “Very well. I gather you and she are not... seeing each other anymore?”

“That’s right. She blames you for it, and I’m not sure I don’t agree with her.”

To the Irishman’s surprise, Aurelianus did not raise his eyebrows and protest. Instead, the old man took a long sip of his wine and said, “Maybe that’s fair and maybe it’s not. If it is, try to imagine what things would have broken it up, if I hadn’t. Or do you really think you would have run off and lived happily ever after in Ireland?”

“I don’t know. It’s not—it wasn’t—impossible.” Duffy picked up the bottle and refilled his glass.

“How old are you, Brian? You ought to know by now that something always breaks up love affairs unless both parties are willing to compromise themselves. And that compromising is harder to do the older and less flexible and more independent you are. It just isn’t in you, Brian. You could no more get married now than you could become a priest, or a sculptor, or a greengrocer.”

Duffy opened his mouth to voice angry denials, then one corner turned up and he closed it. “Damn you,” he said wryly. “Then why do I want to, half the time?”

Aurelianus shrugged. “It’s the nature of the species. There’s a part of a man’s mind that can only relax and go to sleep when he’s with a woman, and that part gets tired of always being tensely awake. It gives orders in so loud a voice that it often drowns out the other components. But when the loud one is asleep at last, the others regain control and chart a new course.” He grinned. “No equilibrium is possible. If you don’t want to put up with the constant seesawing, you must either starve the logical components or bind, gag and lock away in a cellar that one insistent one.”

Duffy grimaced and drank some more brandy. “I’m used to the rocking, and I was never one to get motion-sick,” he said. “I’ll stay on the seesaw.”

Aurelianus bowed. “You have that option, sir.”

The Irishman smiled at the sorcerer with something akin to affection. “Do I gather you’ve been through one or two of these affairs yourself?”

“Oh, aye.” The old man leaned back against a bureau, reached up over his head and found one of his dried snakes. He rolled it unlit between his fingers, staring at it thoughtfully. “Not in the last three centuries, thank the heavens, but in my comparative youth—yes, a number of entanglements, artfully baited, but each one eventually ending with its own version of the one standard ending.”

Duffy drained his glass again and set it on the table. “This is a side of you I never glimpsed,” he said. “Tell me about these girls—tell me about the last one, three centuries ago, for God’s sake.”

The wizard’s glass was empty, too, and for a moment he goggled at the snake in his left hand and the glass in his right. Then, coming to a decision, he held the glass out for Duffy to refill. “She was a Sussex witch named Becky Banham,” he said as the liquor splashed messily into his glass. “She was a small-time country witch, but definitely the real thing—not one of these horoscoping crystal-gazers.”

“And this... liaison broke up because you were too old to compromise and didn’t care to starve your logical—”

“Well, no. Not this one.”

“Oh? It was her decision, then?”

“No. She—” He glared defensively at the Irishman. “She was burned at the stake.”

“Oh! Sorry to hear it.” Duffy didn’t know what more to say about a woman who, whatever else might be said of her, had still been dead longer than his great-great-grandfather.

Aurelianus nodded. “Sorry, you say? So was I, so was I. When I heard of it, a week or two later, I... visited that village.” He sipped his brandy thoughtfully. “You can still see a chimney or two of the place these days, sticking up from the grassed-over mounds.”

Getting up abruptly, the old man lurched over to a chest in the corner. “Somewhere in here,” he said, lifting back the heavy lid and flinging small objects carelessly to the side, “is a book of her country-spells she gave me. Ah? Aha!” He straightened up, holding a battered, leather-bound little book. He flipped open the front cover and read something on the flyleaf, then slammed it shut and stared at the ceiling, blinking rapidly.

Duffy found himself regretting his momentary flash of sympathy. For God’s sake, man, he thought, show a little restraint, a little control. To steer the sorcerer onto less maudlin ground, he asked, “And how does the siege look to you lately? Any sorcerous hints or glimpses of the outcome?”

Aurelianus put the book down on a cluttered table and resumed his seat, a little self-consciously. “No, nothing. Sorcerously I’m blind and deaf, as I’m sure I explained to you. When I want to know how Vienna stands I ask someone like yourself, who has been out there and seen it happening.” He put the snake in his mouth at last, and stared hard, cross-eyed, at the thing’s head. After perhaps a minute a red glow showed on the end, and then with a brief gout of flame the thing was lit, and he was cheerfully puffing smoke.

Duffy cocked an eyebrow. “How much of that sort of thing can you still do?”

“Oh, I can do small things only, tricks, like making beetles stand up and jig or making girls’ skirts blow up over their heads. You know the sort of thing? But I can do nothing that is directly aggressive to the Turks, not even send them scalp-itch or foot-stink. Of course we’re protected to the same degree from Ibrahim... it’s simply a deadlock of all the powerful areas of magic, which I think I predicted to you five months ago.”

Duffy was refilling his glass again. “Yes. You wanted to get your rain-magic done while you still had no restrictions on your power—and it may well have worked.”

The old wizard was mildly annoyed. “May have worked? It did work, you clod. Have you seen any big cannons among the Turk formations, like the ones they overthrew Rhodes with? No, you haven’t. My heavy rains forced Suleiman to leave them behind.”

“The rain was damned fortunate, certainly,” Duffy agreed. “But can you be sure it was summoned rain, and not a natural phenomenon that was going to happen anyway?”

“You were there. You know. You just want to argue with me.”

“Very well, I admit it worked that time in May. But what’s the use of having a wizard on our side if he can’t do any wizardry?”

Aurelianus let a long stream of smoke out in a sigh. “Picture yourself in a corps-à-corps with a swordsman who is your equal in skill; your dagger is blocking his dagger, and your sword his sword. Now your dagger isn’t free to stab with—but would you say it’s useless?”

“No... but I wouldn’t just stand there straining. I’d knee the bastard and spit in his eyes. Listen, when you were describing this deadlock in advance, you said it would be virtually unbreakable.”

Aurelianus frowned. “Yes. It is.”

“Virtually doesn’t mean the same thing as absolutely.”

“Hell, man, the sun is virtually certain to rise tomorrow morning, the sea is—”

“It could be broken, though? It’d be tremendously difficult or unlikely, but it could?”

“Could a man amputate, butcher and cook his own legs to avoid starvation? Yes.”

“How? Not this starving man, I mean—”

“I know. Very well, there are two courses I could take that would free all the potency of military magic. One is horribly uncertain, and the other is horribly certain. Which one would you like to hear about?”

“Both. What’s the uncertain one?”

“Well, the present balance is between Ibrahim and me; it would tilt in our favor if the Fisher King himself were actually to ride out and join his will with mine in a battle. Do you understand? He’d have to be there physically and take part in it. That’s unthinkably dangerous, like recklessly advancing your king out from behind the pawn wall in a chess game when your life and the lives of everyone you know are somehow at stake.” He spread his hands. “After all, Vienna isn’t the absolutely final place in which to make a last stand against the East. There are other strength-spots where we could regroup and not be too much worse off than we are now.

“But there is no other Fisher King to be had. If he were to be struck by a stray harquebus ball, or cut down by a particularly energetic Janissary, or simply suffer heart failure from exertion or tension... well, that would be the end of the story. If the West seems chaotic and disorganized now, when he’s only injured, try to imagine how it will be if he dies.”

“Pretty bad, no doubt. Uh... there’d be no way for the Turks to counter this escalation?”

“Not as things stand, no. The only way would be for the Eastern King to join in the conflict too, which would simply maintain the deadlock; it would just be tenser, with more force being exerted on both sides. But of course their King is safely hidden in Turkey or somewhere.”

Duffy scratched his chin. “Would it really be so mad to bring the Fisher King into a battle? It seems to me—”

“You have no conception of the stakes,” Aurelianus snapped. “If anything went wrong we’d lose everything. There would be no kingdoms of the West, just a wasteland of hastily organized tribes, living in the burned-out ruins of cities, waiting, probably eagerly, for Suleiman to ride through and take formal possession.”

“Oh, come on,” Duffy protested, “let’s be realistic. I’ll take your word that it would be bad, but it couldn’t be that bad.”

“Said the expert on metaphysical history! Brian, you’ve never seen a culture that has lost its center, its soul. I was not exaggerating.”

The Irishman took a deep sip of the brandy. “Very well. Tell me about the other way, the... ‘horribly certain’ way.”

Aurelianus frowned deeply. “I will, though it will mean breaking a fairly important vow of silence. There is a... process, a certain unholy gambit, which would shatter the deadlock and blow away all obstacles for any number of devastating magical attacks on our enemies. It would be equivalent to—”

“What is it?” Duffy interrupted.

“It’s a physical action which, with certain entreaties, becomes an invocation, a summoning of a vast spirit that is old and evil beyond human understanding. His—its—participation would break this present balance of power like a keg of bricks dropped on one tray of a jeweller’s scale.”

“What is it?” Duffy repeated.

“To the handful who know of it it’s known as Didius’ Dire Gambit Overwhelming; it was discovered by a Roman sorcerer roughly a thousand years ago, and it has been hesitantly preserved and recopied through the centuries by a few notably educated and unprincipled men. It has never actually been used. At the present time I believe there are only two copies of the procedure in the world—one is said to exist in the most restricted vault of the Vatican Library, and one—” he pointed at his bookcase, “is in a very old manuscript there.” The Irishman started to speak, but Aurelianus raised a hand for silence. “The action that opens the gates for this dreadful aid is, baldly stated, the blood sacrifice of one thousand baptized souls.”

Duffy blinked. “Oh. I see.”

“I could be done, of course. I imagine I could exert all my influence and trickery and engineer a suicide charge of a thousand men, and then watch from the battlements as they died, and pronounce the secret words. And it would certainly save Vienna... from the Turks. I think, though, that it would be better to die clean, without such assistance. A black gambit like that would ruin the soul of the sorcerer who performed it—among other effects, I’d likely be nothing but a drooling idiot afterward—but more importantly, it would taint the entire West. A connoisseur would be able to taste the difference in the very beer.”

Duffy drained his glass again. “I notice,” he said finally, “that you... haven’t destroyed your copy of the thing.”

Aurelianus didn’t answer, just gave him a cold stare. “Do I tell you how to grip a sword?”

“Not lately. Sorry.”

In the awkward silence that followed, Duffy refilled his glass yet again, and took a healthy swig. Good stuff, he told himself, this Spanish brandy. He sat back in his chair and had another sip. Yes sir, truly excellent...

For several minutes Aurelianus puffed on the short stub of the burning snake and stared at the snoring Irishman with a dissatisfied air. Finally it was too short to hold comfortably and he ground it out in the open mouth of a stone gargoyle’s head on the table. He was about to awaken Duffy and send him back toward the barracks when the Irishman’s eyes opened and looked at him, alertly and with no sign of drunkenness. He looked carefully around the room, then just as carefully at his own hands.

When he spoke to Aurelianus it was in a Dumnoiic Celtic dialect. “I was wondering when I’d meet you,” he said. “I’ve been drifting back into wakefulness for some time now.” He smacked his lips. “What the hell have I been drinking?”

“Distillate of wine,” Aurelianus said. “Are you Brian Duffy at all?”

“Not at the moment. Did... did I dream a conversation with you, Merlin, in which you offered me the sword Calad Bolg and I refused it?”

“No. That occurred—right in this room a little more than five months ago.”

“Oh? It seems more recent. I wasn’t quite awake, I think. I could remember and recognize things, but not control my speech.”

“Yes. It was still mostly Brian Duffy, but there was enough of you present to give him inexplicable memories... and thoroughly upset him, incidentally.”

“I know. Before that I had been dreaming, over and over, of the end of things before—that last cold night beside the lake. Then afterward there was that fight in the forest—I was fully awake then, but very briefly. I saw you, but was snatched away before we could speak.”

“He’s been out of my sight for the last several months. Have you been completely awake at any time since that day?”

“I seem to recall waking up in the night three or four times, seeing torches and sentries and then going back to sleep. I don’t know when—they could even be memories from my... life. And then last night I found myself in a soldiers’ tavern, and wound up playing a harp and leading them in one of the old, heartening songs. They all knew lyrics for it, in one language or another—things like that never really change.” He smiled. “And here I am now with, evidently, time to talk. What are the stakes and how do they stand?”

“Let’s see, what terms shall I use?” For a full minute he sat silent, his fingertips pressed together; then he leaned forward, and in the rolling syllables of a tremendously old precursor of the Norse language, asked, “Do you remember, Sigmund, the sword you pulled from the Branstock Oak?”

Duffy’s face had turned pale, and when he spoke it was still in the Celtic. “That... that was a long time ago,” he stammered.

“Longer than I like to think about,” Aurelianus agreed, also in the Celtic. “But what’s happening now is something we saw coming then.”

Duffy was sweating. “Do you want me to... withdraw, and let him surface? I fear it has been too long—I don’t think there is much of him left—but I’ll try if you say to.”

“No, Arthur, relax. You have most of his important memories, I think, and that will do. You see, it may be want maps of the local terrain, and an accounting of last. The entire West—which means more than you know—is menaced and tottering, and for what it’s worth I think this is the battle we heard prophecies of so long ago.”

The Irishman had got his color back, though he still looked shaky. “Do you mean... actually... that Surter from the far fiery south... ?”

“His name is Suleiman.”

“... and a horde of Muspelheimers...”

“They call themselves mussulmen.”

“And they are menacing... who? The Aesir? The Celts?”

“Aye, and the Gauls and the Saxons and the Romans and everyone else west of Austria, which is where we are.”

Duffy frowned. “We fight in Austria? Defending Saxons? Why don’t we fall back and fortify our own lands, so as to be ready for them when they get there?”

“Because if they crash through here there may not be enough stones in all of England to build a wall they couldn’t shatter. We can’t let them work up the momentum. And they induct and train as soldiers the children of conquered nations, so the families we’d pass in our retreat would be the source of men we’d have to fight someday.” The old man sighed. “It may indeed prove necessary to abandon Vienna and fall back—but it would be like falling back from the sundered walls of a castle to defend the keep itself. It’s not a move you’d make if there was any choice.”

“I see. Very well, then, we fight them here. I’ll want maps of the local terrain, and an accouting of our army, and a history of how the siege has gone so far. We do have cavalry, don’t we? I could lead them in a—”

“It’s trickier than that, Arthur,” Aurelianus interrupted gently. “Listen—can you hover, awake, just below the surface of Duffy’s mind, so that you could take over if I called you?”

“I think so. He might sense me, of course. You have a plan, do you?”

“Oh, no, no. I do have one option, but it’s a thing,” and suddenly he looked old and frightened, “it’s a thing I’d... almost... rather die than do.”

Duffy’s knees popped as his body stood up. “It sounds like sorcery, and it sounds like something better left alone.” He walked to the door. “It’s late—I’ll let you get some sleep. I think I’ll walk around the city for a while.”

“You don’t speak the language. Wait until morning and I’ll give you a tour.”

“I think I’ll manage well enough.” He smiled, opened the door and was gone.

Chapter Nineteen

RAIN SWEPT IN WIDE SHEETS along the cobbled avenues, and the splashed-up mist on the stones as each gust went by looked like waves. The air in the Zimmermann dining room was a marbling of cold drafts carrying the dry-wine scent of wet streets and hot stale air smelling of candle grease and wet clothing.

At a small, otherwise unoccupied table in the kitchen-side corner, Lothario Mothertongue dipped black bread into a bowl of hot chicken broth, and chewed it slowly. His eyes were anxious as they followed the frequently interrupted course of the new serving girl. Finally as she was moving past him he caught her elbow. “Excuse me, miss. Doesn’t Epiphany Hallstadt usually work this shift?”

“Yes, and I wish she was here this morning. I can’t handle all this alone. Let go.”

Mothertongue ignored the order. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know. Let go.”

“Please, miss.” He stared up at her earnestly. “I have to know.”

“Ask Anna, then. Anna told Mrs. Hallstadt something that made her upset, early this morning. And Mrs. Hallstadt ran out without even taking off her apron. He may be dead, she yelled, and just ran out.”

“Who may be dead?”

“I don’t know.” With the last word she yanked her arm free of his grip and flounced off.

Mothertongue got up and went looking for Anna. He was ordered out of the kitchen by the cooks, and earned a few impatient curses by staying long enough to make sure she wasn’t in there; he opened the side door and peered up and down the rain-veiled alley; he even barged in on a no doubt glittering conversation between Kretchmer and Werner in the wine cellar, and was rudely told to leave. When he returned to his table he saw her helping the new girl carry trays.

He waited until she was nearby, then called to her. “Anna! Where is Epiphany?”

“Excuse me, gentlemen. She’s off visiting her father, Lothario, and I don’t know where he lives, so leave me alone, hm? Now then, sirs, what was it you wanted?”

For several minutes Mothertongue sat dejected, reflexively looking up every time he heard the front door creak open. After a while a tall man came in, his hair plastered down by the rain, and Mothertongue recognized Brian Duffy and waved, a little reluctantly. He pursed his lips then, for Duffy had returned the wave and was crossing the room toward him.

“Hello, Brian,” he said when the Irishman stood over him. “I don’t suppose you’d know where Epiphany’s father lives, would you? Or that you’d tell me, if you did?”

The Irishman sat down, eyed him narrowly and said something in a language Mothertongue didn’t understand. Mothertongue cocked his head and raised his eyebrows, and Duffy frowned with concentration, then spoke again in Latin. In spite of an unusual accent, the Englishman was able to understand it. “You seem unhappy, friend,” Duffy had said. “What troubles you?”

“I’m worried about Mrs. Hallstadt. She’s been—”

“In Latinae.”

Mothertongue stared in surprise at Duffy, trying to decide whether or not he was being made fun of. The intentness of Duffy’s gaze reassured him, and though still puzzled he began to speak haltingly in Latin. “Uh... I am concerned about Epiphany. She has been feeling bad lately, and then—I am sure unintentionally—you upset her yesterday morning by abruptly reappearing after an absence of many months. Now she has evidently received some bad news about her father, whom she has gone to see, and I would like to be with her in this crisis.”

“Ah. You care for this woman, do you?”

Mothertongue looked at him cautiously. “Well... yes. Why, do you—still have affection for her?”

The Irishman smiled. “Still? I see. Uh, no, not the sort you mean, though I naturally have a high regard for... the woman. I am glad she has found as worthy a man as yourself to be concerned for her.”

“Why, thank you, Brian, it is good of you to be that way about it, rather than... be some other way. Damn this language. It has all looked completely hopeless to me of late, but perhaps something can still be salvaged of the old order.”

“The old order?” Two citizens shambled past, gawking at these men speaking church language.

“Yes. Perhaps... perhaps you remember certain hints I was making, when I first got here, this last spring.”

“Remind me.”

“Well, certain powerful authorities have summoned me—” His face had begun to brighten, but now it fell. “But they might better have saved the effort. It has all failed.”

“Why don’t you just tell it to me.”

“I will. It’s an outmoded secret now. I—” he looked up, with a certain battered dignity. “I am the legendary King Arthur, re-born.”

Duffy’s gray eyebrows were as high as they could get. “Would you please repeat that, giving special care to your use of the verb?”

Mothertongue repeated it as before. “I know how fantastic that sounds, and I doubted it myself for years; but a number of visions, supplemented with a lot of logical reasoning, finally convinced me. As a matter of fact, I was aware that Arthur had come back long before I deduced that it was I. I believe several of my men have been re-born as well, and that some high power intended us to meet and lead the way to a final dispersal of the Turks.” He shook his head. “But it has failed. I found the men, but was unable to awaken the older souls in them. I told my secret to Count von Salm, and offered to assume command of a part of the army, and I was actually mocked—actually laughed at and ordered to leave.” Mothertongue waved in the direction of the door. “And then, idle here in my defeat, I noticed Epiphany. I happened to look in her eyes one day, and got a conviction as clear as my first convictions that Arthur had been re-born—I suddenly knew that this woman had known Arthur very well.” He shrugged. “Need I say more?”

“Just a bit, if you would.”

“She is Guinevere. The gods are kind! I was unable to awaken the dormant souls of my men with a call to duty, but I think I can awaken her soul with love.”

The Irishman stared at him with the wondering respect one feels for a child who has done some tremendously difficult, absolutely pointless thing. “I wish you well,” he said.

“Thank you, Brian! I would like to say I am sorry for the way I—”

He was interrupted by a sudden jolt and rumble that seemed to come up through the floor. Duffy’s face changed in an instant, and he leaped up and sprinted to the front door, wrenched it open and stood there listening. Several patrons cringed at the gust of cold air and the louder hiss of the rain, but nobody dared voice any objections. After several seconds another sound cut through the rain: the strident clangor of the alarum bells in the tower of St. Stephen’s.

“My God,” Duffy breathed, speaking contemporary Austrian for the first time that day. “That was the wall.”

He ran back through the dining room, flinging several people out of his way, through the steamy kitchen and out the back door into the yard; splashing across to the stables, he dragged a reluctant mare out of the shelter, leaped and scrabbled up onto the creature’s bare back, and rode her out to the street, goading her to a gallop when they reached the southward-stretching, rain-swept expanse of the Rotenturm-strasse.

The echoing pandemonium of the bells was deafening as he drummed past the cathedral square. Though the rain was thrashing down out of the gray sky as hard as ever, quite a number of people were kneeling on the pavement. Make it count, you silly bastards, he thought grimly. If ever there was a morning for a high-density volley of prayers, this is the one.

Soon he could hear the thousand-throated roar of battle, and he had taken a left turn and ridden halfway down a narrower, slanting street when he saw ahead of him, dimly through the curtains of rain, half of a great, ragged-edged gap in the high wall, and a maelstrom of men surging back and forth over the hills of rubble. Even from this distance he could see the white robes of the Janissaries. “Holy God,” he murmured, then whirled out his sword and put his heels to the mare’s flanks.

The Viennese forces had been assembled within minutes of the mine-detonations, and were now grouped in two tightly packed divisions, trying by sheer weight and advancing force to drive back the waves of wailing Janissaries. This was desperate, hacking savagery, in which there was no thought except to press forward and kill. Long gone was the almost formal restraint of yesterday afternoon’s sortie. A culverin hastily loaded with scrap metal and gravel had been unbolted from its moorings and was being awkwardly manhandled by a dozen men along the top of the wall toward the jagged edge, where it could be re-positioned to blast its charge down into the massed Turks; but the rain made the use of matchlocks impossible—point and edge were the order of the day, with all the bloody intimacy of hand-to-hand combat.

Duffy charged headlong into one of the peripheral skirmishes that were clogging the wall street to the north of the main fighting. He parried a scimitar and then chopped down into a Janissary’s shoulder, and the force of the swing sent him tumbling off the back of the wet horse so that he rode the Turk’s body to the ground. Rolling to his feet with the sword he somehow hadn’t dropped, he waded into the mêlée with wide-eyed abandon.

For ten minutes the battle raged at a maniacal pitch, like a bonfire into which both sides were throwing every bit of fuel they could find. The culverin was wedged into an adequate position on the crumbled lip of the wall, and two men were hunched over the breech, trying to ignite the charge.

A blade rang off the slightly too large casque Duffy had earlier snatched from the head of a slain soldier, and the helmet skewed around so that one eye was covered and the other blocked by the chin-guard. With a yell of mingled rage and fright, the Irishman ducked his head and dove at his assailant, both his weapons extended. The scimitar edge, being whipped back into line, grated against Duffy’s jawbone, but his own sword and dagger took the man in the belly, and Duffy fell to his knees, losing the helmet entirely, as the Turk’s body folded. An eddy in the tide of battle left him momentarily in a corpse-strewn clearing, and he knelt there for a moment, panting, before unsheathing his weapons from the Janissary’s vitals, struggling to his feet and lurching back into the fight.

At that moment the culverin went off, lashing thirty pounds of scrap into the heaving concentration of Turkish soldiers and killing three of the gunnery men as it tore free of its new mooring and went tumbling away outside the wall.

As if it were one huge organism the Turkish force recoiled, and the Viennese soldiers crowded up to retake every slack inch of ground. Men were still being skewered and chopped and split by the dozens with every passing minute, but the Eastern tide had slowed to a pause and was now ebbing. The European force pressed the advantage, crowding the enemy back into the gap. At last the Janissaries retreated, leaving almost half of their number scattered broken and motionless across the wide-flung heaps of rubble. The rain made their white robes gray.

During the battle Duffy had eventually found himself among Eilif’s company of mercenaries and stayed with them; when the Turk retreat left the defenders clumped like driftwood on the new stone slope, the Irishman and Eilif were only a dozen feet apart. Eilif was bowed forward, hands clenched on his knees, gasping through a slack mouth, while Duffy sat down on the bright, unweathered face of a split block of masonry. The cold air was sharp with the acid smell of new-broken granite.

Finally Eilif straightened and took off his helmet, letting the rain rinse his sweat-drenched hair. “That... could have tilted either way,” he panted. “I don’t... like it that fast and hard. There’s no control. You can’t survive... many of those.”

“Spoken like a professional,” commented Duffy, wincing in mid-word at the flash of pain in his jaw. Hesitantly he fingered the gash—the cold rain seemed to have stopped most of the bleeding, but the edges of the wound were far apart, and he could feel fresh air in unaccustomed places.

“Damn it, lad!” exclaimed Eilif, noticing the cut. “They landed one on you, didn’t they? I can see one of your back teeth peeping through. As soon as we get reassembled and take roll, I’ll sew that up for you, eh?”

Duffy managed to unclench his sword hand, and the released blade clattered on rock. “You’ll sew it up? No chance—” Then he looked around and noticed for the first time the appalling casualties the Vienna force had suffered. There were arm-stumps to be cauterized and tarred, jetting wounds to be staunched, crushed limbs to be set and splinted or amputated—the surgeons would be far too busy during the next several hours to attend to so relatively minor a task as sewing up Duffy’s jaw.

“Half my boys need plucking from the fire,” Eilif said softly.

“Of course,” Duffy said, trying to speak out of the right side of his mouth. “I just don’t trust your seamstress skills. Look, I think Aurelianus is versed in the surgical arts. What would you think if I trotted back to the Zimmermann and had him stitch me up?”

Eilif regarded him narrowly, then grinned. “Why not? I’d probably sew your tongue to your cheek. And God knows we can’t leave you like this—you’d lose as much beer as you swallowed. In fact, you might be wise to catch a nap there, where there’s still a roof.” He pointed. “Their damned mine collapsed our barracks. Lucky most of us were outside. But I want you back here by midnight, understand? There will be a heavy watch kept here, and I’ll oversee our part of it until then.”

“I’ll be here,” Duffy promised. He stood up on fatigue-trembling legs, sheathed his sword and began picking his way over the wet, tumbled stones.

By the time he had walked all the way back to the Zimmermann Inn—God knew where the mare had wound up—the rain had stopped and his wound had started to bleed again, so it was a gruesome figure that finally pushed open the front door and lurched into the dining room. There was a large but silent crowd, and they all looked up fearfully at him.

The black man in the burnoose stood. “What news?”

Duffy didn’t relish the idea of a long speech. “The wall is down at one point,” he said hoarsely. “It was a near thing, but they were beaten back. Heavy losses on both sides.”

The man who’d asked looked around significantly and left the room, followed by several others. The Irishman paid no attention, but let his blurring gaze waver around the room until he saw Anna.

“Anna!” he croaked. “Where is Aurelianus?”

“The chapel,” she said, hurrying to him. “Here, lean on me and—”

“I can walk.”

The Irishman clumped heavily down the long, dark hall, and when he reached the tall doors he pushed through without stopping, stumbling over a half dozen brooms on the other side. In the chapel Aurelianus stood facing the same seven men that had been there the day before, but today each of them carried a drawn sword.

The midget looked around at the interruption. “Why it’s Miles Gloriosus. Out of here, clown.” He turned back to Aurelianus, extending a short blade. “Did you understand what Orkhan just said?” he asked, indicating the black man. “The wall is down. They’ll be in by dusk. Lead us to the cask now, or be killed.”

Aurelianus looked indignant, and raised a hand as if he were about to throw an invisible dart at the man. “Be grateful, toad, that I am at present too occupied to punish this trespass. Now get out of here—while you can.”

The midget grinned. “Go ahead. Blast me to ashes. We all know you can’t.” He jabbed the old sorcerer lightly in the abdomen.

The quiet, incense-scented air of the chapel was suddenly shattered by a savage yell as the Irishman bounded forward into the room, doing a quick hop-and-lunge that drove his sword-point through the midget’s neck. Whirling with the impetus, he slashed black Orkhan’s forearm to the bone. The copper-skinned man raised his sword and chopped at Duffy, but the Irishman ducked under the clumsy stroke and came up with a thrust into the man’s belly. Duffy turned to face the remaining four, but one of them cried, “Why kill Merlin? It’s the Dark we want!” The five survivors ran from the chapel, angling wide around Duffy.

As soon as they were running away down the hall he collapsed as if dead. Aurelianus hurried to him, rolled him over onto his back and waved a little silver filigreed ball of the Irishman’s nostrils; within seconds Duffy’s eyes sprang open and a hand came up to brush the malodorous thing away. He lay there and stared at the ceiling, doing nothing but breathing.

Finally, “What... just happened?” he gasped.

“You saved my life,” the sorcerer said. “Or, more accurately, Arthur did; I recognized the old battle-cry. I’m flattered that the sight of me in peril brings him out.”

“He... does the heroics... and leaves the exhaustion to me.”

“I suppose that isn’t quite fair,” said Aurelianus brightly. “And what have you done to your jaw?”

“Sew it up, will you? Surgeons too busy.” He flicked his eyes around without moving his head, and saw nothing but dusty pews to one side and shifting rain-tracks on the stained glass to the other. “Where did your Dark Birds go? Did I kill them all?”

“No. Two of them are dead on the floor over here—I’ll have someone come in and deal with the corpses—and five of them ran off to steal a sip of the Dark.” The old man had produced various pouches and boxes from under his robe, and was already cleaning and dressing the wound.

“Shouldn’t you be—ouch!—stopping them?” Aurelianus had got out a needle and thread and was stitching the cut now; Duffy felt no real pain, just a tugging sensation across his left cheek and temple.

“Oh, no,” the wizard said. “Gambrinus has defenses against such as those; as they probably suspected, since they wanted me to fetch the stuff for them. Still, desperate men will face almost anything, and trapped rats throw themselves into the catchers’ nets. I’m glad to let Gambrinus finish the job for us.”

“The wall is down, by the southeast corner,” Duffy muttered sleepily. “Wrecked our barracks. I’m going to sleep here, out in the stables where the Vikings were; I can’t remember anything about last night, not one isolated thing, but it certainly doesn’t feel like I got any sleep. Those Janissaries just kept coming, like it had been a dam that burst. There are corpses everywhere—if tomorrow and the next day are sunny, there’ll be plague. I wonder why they pulled back? That was the best chance they could have hoped for, with them in force and us completely taken by surprise.”

There was a snip sound, and Aurelianus stood up. “There,” he said. “You’ll have a scar, but at least the hole’s closed and it ought not to fester.”

Duffy rolled over, got up on his hands and knees, and from there to his feet. “Thanks. Eilif was going to do it. Probably would have got things inside out, so I could grow a beard in my mouth and taste things with my cheek.”

“What a disgusting idea.”

“Sorry. The charming, sprightly ideas aren’t so easy to come by anymore.” He picked up his sword, wiped it and sheathed it, and strode wearily out of the dim chapel.

Anna worried for a while about the five wild-eyed men who’d burst past her and clattered down the stairs to the brewing cellar, and when she heard thin, reedy screams faintly from below she got Mothertongue, for want of anyone hardier, to go down there with her to see what went on.

A charred meat aroma was blended not unpleasantly with the usual malt smell, and they found Gambrinus placidly juggling a number of small irregular spheres of ivory. He assured them that all was well, and Anna didn’t begin to feel ill until, back in the dining room, Mothertongue asked her where she supposed the brew-master had got those five little monkey skulls he’d been playing with.

At eleven the rain began to abate, and by noon the clouds were breaking up, letting a strained, pale sunlight play intermittently over the sundered section of wall. The gap was roughly two hundred feet wide, and the wall as it continued on either side—a surprising hundred-and-fifty feet thick in exposed cross-section—leaned dangerously outward. While sharpshooters with fresh loads hammered into their rifled guns watched the distant Turkish lines, hastily assembled gangs of soldiers and laborers built solid barricades in a straight line across the rubble-choked gap, and threw up a fifty-yard-radius semicircle of deep-moored open-frame wooden obstructions on the slope outside. Chalk dust was scattered thickly beyond the semicircle, most of it darkening into gray mud as it soaked up moisture from the wet ground.

Several smoldering fires started by the explosion were finally put out, a task that hadn’t been top priority because the rain had prevented them from spreading. All three corpse wagons were working their slow way across the devastated area, collecting their grisly cargo—one had already filled, left, and returned.

During that morning and afternoon the hunchbacked figure of Bluto was to be seen everywhere along the battlements, ordering the re-laying of many cannon and culverins, overseeing their cleaning and loading, shouting ignored advice down to the men outside who were building braces and buttresses to prop the leaning wall in place.

Count von Salm, ostensibly in charge, paced the street and watched all the activity, content to let experts pursue their crafts. He had ordered most of his troops to go eat and rest in what barracks remained, keeping only a minimal force on watch; there were men along the wall, though, who kept their eyes, on the Turkish lines, ready at the first sign of offensive movement to signal von Salm and the bellringer in the St. Stephen’s spire.

Through the afternoon there was shifting along the Turkish front, banners moving back and forth above the occasional distant glint of sun on metal, but they seemed to be grouping to the west, toward the southern front of the city and away from the break in the wall.

At four the haggard von Salm climbed the stone stairs of the wall at the Schwarzenbergstrasse and walked a hundred yards west along the catwalk to confer with the hunchbacked bombardier. The freshening western breeze swept the crenellations, drying the sweat on the commander’s face and neck; in no hurry to climb back down to the muddy, windless streets, he chatted with Bluto about various aspects of the morning’s battle.

“I’m tempted to cluster a large number of guns right along here,” Bluto said presently, “from the Carinthian gate to the western corner.”

“Because of this shift of theirs? It’s got to be a feint,” von Salm objected. He ran his fingers through his graying hair. “Obviously they’re not going to attack here, along this completely fortified and unweakened side, when there’s a damned two-hundred-foot hole in the wall around the corner a hundred yards east.”

“Look at them, though,” said Bluto, leaning between two merlons and pointing south across the cloud-shadowed plain. “There’s no one moving around to the eastern side; they’re all focusing straight ahead, due south. Hell, man, if it is a feint it would take them a good half hour to re-group on the eastern plain—unless of course they want to run up close to the wall here, and run that hundred yards within range of our guns.”

“That could be what they have in mind,” von Salm said.

“They’d lose a thousand Janissaries, even if half our lads were asleep.”

“Maybe Suleiman doesn’t care. He’s got more soldiers than time at this point.”

Bluto shook his head. “Very well, if Suleiman isn’t concerned about massive casualties, why not attack directly at the gap, and push until the defenders give way? Why this westward shift?”

“I don’t know,” admitted von Salm. “They may shift back under cover of darkness. That’s what I would do, if I were Suleiman. But yes, set up... five guns along here, and I’ll see you get enough men to work them. And if I see them come this way, or hear it during the night, I’ll send more.” He gnawed a knuckle and stared at the plain. “What’s the date today? Oh, the twelfth, of course. I wish there’d be more moon tonight, and a clear sky. I’ll have a gang trot outside here and dump chalk in a wide line along this front, just to make you feel better, eh?”

“Both of us,” said Bluto dryly as the commander turned and began walking back the way he’d come.

The hunchback strode back and forth along the catwalk, peering through the crenels and thoughtfully laying flagged sticks at each point where he felt a gun should be wheeled up and bolted down, as the red sun sank behind the wooded hills to his right, and lights began to glow in the windows of the city at his back and, distantly in front of him, among the tents on the plain.

Since he’d lit the snake just as the bells overhead had ceased their deafening, bone-jarring announcement of nine o’clock, and it was now nearly burned down to his fingers, Duffy deduced that it must be nearly time for him to brace himself for the one stroke of the half hour. He flipped the coal-tipped stub spinning out over the rail, and watched it draw random red arabesques as it tumbled toward the square far below; then he turned to the wizard who was, crouched over the telescope. “Aren’t we about due for—” the Irishman began, but he was interrupted by the preludial mechanical grinding from above, so he closed his eyes and shoved his fingers in his ears until the single bong had been struck, and the echoes were ringing away through the dark streets below.

“Dut for what?” snapped Aurelianus irritably.

“Never mind.” Duffy leaned out on the rail and looked up at the stars that were visible behind the high, rushing clouds. The crescent moon was nothing but a pale blur glowing intermittently in one of the widest patches of cloud.

A gust of particularly cold wind buffeted the cathedral tower, and the Irishman shivered and got back in under the sculptured arch of the small observatory alcove. Their narrow and drafty vantage point was not the highest or most easily accessible, but von Salm and various military advisors had two weeks ago sealed off and taken possession of the platform that commanded the best view. Aurelianus had said it didn’t matter, that the little open landing they now occupied was high enough above the rooftops and street-smokes to make star-gazing possible; and for what Duffy considered to be a very long hour now that was what he had been doing.

Finally the old sorcerer leaned back from the eyepiece, rubbing the bridge of his nose with one hand and balancing the telescope on the rail with the other. “It’s chaotic,” he muttered. “There’s no order, nothing to be read. It’s... unpleasant to see the sky this way, it’s like asking a question of an old, wise friend and getting imbecilic grunting and whining for an answer.” The image seemed to upset Aurelianus, and he went on quickly. “You’re the cause, you know, the random factor, the undefinable cipher that makes gibberish of all the trusty old equations.”

The Irishman shrugged. “Maybe you’d have been better off without me from the start. Saved your time. Hell, I haven’t really done anything so far that any hired bravo couldn’t have done.”

“I don’t know,” Aurelianus said. “I’m limited to what I can actually see and touch—I don’t know!” He looked at Duffy. “Did you hear about the newest movement of the Janissaries?”

“Yes. They’ve shifted west, as if they intended a suicide charge at the unweakened southwestern front. What about it?”

“What do you think would happen if they did attack there?”

Duffy shrugged. “Like I said—suicide. They’d lose a thousand men in five minutes.”

“Might one call it a... sacrifice?”

“To gain what? There’d be no sense in sending the Janissaries, their finest troops—oh my God.” The Irishman carefully sat down and leaned his back against the rail. “I thought you had one of the only two copies of the damned thing in the world.”

“So did I.” Aurelianus squinted out over the dark rooftops. “And maybe I do. Maybe Ibrahim has got the Vatican copy... or hopes somehow to get mine.” He shook his white head thoughtfully. “As soon as I heard of the shift it occurred to me—it’s the Janissaries, the troops conscripted from among the children of conquered Christians...”

“At least a thousand baptized souls.”

“Right.”

“Look, he’s probably got spies in the city—it may very well be that he doesn’t yet have a copy of Didius’ Loathesome Whatnot, and is counting on having yours stolen.” The sorcerer stared at him blankly, so Duffy went on. “Isn’t it obvious? Destroy your copy.”

Aurelianus looked away, frowning deeply. “I’m... not ready to do that.”

The Irishman felt a wave of pity and horror. “Don’t even consider it, man! There must be clean strategies—and even if we do lose Vienna, you’ve said the main thing is having the Fisher King alive. You and he could escape through those tunnels the Dark Birds mentioned, and set up for a better stand somewhere else. The Turks can hardly come any further into Europe this season.”

“Quite possibly true, Brian, but how can I know? With the right kind of sorcerous aid maybe they could come farther, maybe much farther. Maybe the Fisher King will die if he doesn’t get a draught of the Dark—he’ll certainly get no better. Hell, it’s not hard to do the honorable thing when you can see, up ahead, how it is going to turn out. Damn this blindness,” he hissed, pounding a fist against the stone, “and damn Ibrahim, and damn that old painter.”

Duffy blinked. “What old painter?”

“What? Oh, Gustav Vogel, of course. He’s clairvoyant, as I’ve told you, and he isn’t allied to the presently occluded old magic. If I could have got that sanctimonious old bastard to do a few more visionary paintings, I might have been able to see what is coming, and be able to forget this... terrible move. But the old wretch was afraid of me—may the Janissaries use his head for a cannon ball!—and in the last two years he has done nothing.”

“That’s true,” agreed Duffy with a sympathetic nod. “Aside from that crazy Death of the Archangel Michael on his wall, I guess he hasn’t.”

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 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 hall. “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 boys’ 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,” he 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 hearing 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 moments Duffy carefully 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—he 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, moonless 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 a 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 up on 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 gunfire 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 spining 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 of ten, 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 disspirited; 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 quick improvisation. Because actually, he thought, your first suspicion was right, Eilif. 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?”

The Irishman felt something that might become a vast anger begin to build up in himself. “I don’t think I understand,” he said carefully. “Are you talking about my... the way I... the way Epiphany died?”

“I’m talking about your theft of my book, damn it, while I was pottering about in the chapel afterward. You will give it back.”

Sudden apprehension scattered the kindling of Duffy’s rage. His eyes widened. “Good God, do you mean Didlio’s Whirling Gambits or whatever it’s called? Listen, I didn’t—”

“No, not Didius’ Gambit.” Aurelianus was maintaining his offended frown, but his wrinkle-bordered eyes were beginning to look disconcerted. “I hid that Monday night, after talking to... you. No, I mean Becky’s book.”

“Who the hell—oh, that book your witch girlfriend gave you, three hundred years ago? I didn’t take it.” Duffy shrugged. “What would I want with the damned thing?”

Aurelianus’ expression held for another moment, then without too much change became a frown of worry. “I believe you. Hell! I was hoping it would turn out to have been you.”

“Why?”

“Because, for one thing, I’d have been able to get it back without much trouble. You wouldn’t have been troublesome about it, would you? I didn’t think so. And for another thing, I could have assumed no one had interfered with my guards.”

Duffy sighed and sat down again beside the fire. “What guards?”

“Little birdlike creatures that live in that dollhouse structure above my door—pretty things they are, with fine leathery wings of a mother-of-pearl luster, but savage as kill-trained dogs and quick as arrows.” Aurelianus crouched near him. “I have a dozen of them, and I’ve trained them to refrain from attacking me, or any visitors that come into the room with my evident approval. When you were there five or six months ago I conveyed to them by signals that you were to be permitted to enter the room alone. Don’t be too flattered—I just figured that in the heat of these last battles I might sometime want to send you back there for something, while staying at the scene of the action myself.”

Duffy nodded. “Ah. Don’t worry, I wasn’t flattered. And there is no one else they’ve been instructed to let in alone?” The wizard shook his head. “Then you’ve got inadequate guards,” the Irishman said helplessly. “Somebody got by them. Did you check whether they’re still in their nest, and alive?”

“Yes. They’re in there, in perfect health.” He rubbed his eyes tiredly. “That means the intruder was an initiate of certain very secret mysteries, or the lackey of such a one. Those creatures are from another sort of world, and very few people know about them. Ibrahim probably knows, and no doubt whoever broke in was a spy of Ibrahim’s which I should have anticipated. Why do I keep failing to—”

“How would this person have knocked them out?” Duffy interrupted. The sun was beginning to clear the mound, and he raised a hand to shield his eyes.

“Oh, there are two notes which, though pitched too high to be audible to the human ear, can counter and blank out the brain waves of these things; the two notes correspond to the pulse of their brains, but are contrary, and have an effect like stopping a garden swing by leaning back and forth at the wrong times. I’ve seen it done—the man used a tiny one-holed pipe and blew a long steady breath, rapidly covering and uncovering the hole with one finger: the cageful of little fellows just pitched over as if dead. Then when he stopped they all got up again.”

“Could he do it inhaling?” Duffy asked sharply.

Aurelianus looked started. “No, as a matter of fact. The tones would be wrong—two low, maybe even audible. No.”

“Quick as arrows, you said. By how far is that an exaggeration?”

“Not very damned far.” The sorcerer smiled sheepishly. “I see what you mean, of course. For anything more than the quickest look-and-grab it would have had to be two men taking turns, one piping while the other catches his breath and uses two hands on something.”

Duffy got to his feet and moved to the side, so that he could see Aurelianus without squinting into the sun. “Are you certain someone got in? To judge by the mess that room is in, losing one book would be so easy as to be almost inevitable.”

“I’m certain. I know exactly where I left it. Besides, there were other signs of an intruder—things were picked up and replaced in not quite the same position, a number of books were looked at, to judge by the scuffing of the dust on the shelves, and one of my smoking-snakes was bitten. Someone evidently assumed it was a sort of sweetmeat.”

Duffy shuddered, imagining the person’s surprise and dismay. “It was Werner,” he said.

“Werner? Don’t be ridic—”

“I saw a one-holed pipe on the table in his little wine-closet, and I remember it wouldn’t produce any noise I could hear. This poet friend of his, this Kretchmer, must be a spy for the Turks. Wait a minute, don’t interrupt! Through flattery of Werner’s doubtless trashy poetry, and the bestowal of sexual favors by some woman pretending to be Kretchmer’s wife, the man has got your poor innkeeper into a state where he’d do anything for him.”

Aurelianus was silent for a few moments. “Even a woman, eh? The silly old fool. Fancies himself the great poet and lover, I expect. I’ll bet you’re right. Damn, why wasn’t I suspicious of Kretchmer from the start?” He slapped his forehead. “I’m as easily taken in as poor Werner. Kretchmer must have been ordered by Ibrahim to get my copy of Didius’ Dire Gambit Overwhelming. Yes, and wasn’t Werner asking me months ago if he could borrow some books sometime, with the hint that he’d like free access to my library? Then when I refused, Kretchmer would have had to learn of my little guards—I’d like to have seen that brief encounter—and then consult Ibrahim for a way to get around them. It must have taken some time to get in touch with the Turkish adept, for it was only this last Monday I thought I saw footprints in the dust on my floor; the two of them must just have been taking inventory that time, after which Kretchmer would somehow have got outside to show the list of books to the then nearby Ibrahim. Right! And Ibrahim would have known which of those books it would be in, and he sent them back to get it.”

“But you hid it Monday night,” Duffy remembered.

“Yes. So last night, Tuesday night, they whistled their way in again, failed to find the book where they’d last seen it, and grabbed probably several books at random, of which Becky’s is the only one I’ve missed. I’ll have to do an inventory myself. Damn. I should probably check the wine cabinet, too.”

Duffy started to speak, but Aurelianus interrupted him with a bark of laughter. “Do you remember when Werner turned up all bloody and limping, and claimed one of your Vikings had got drunk and tried to kill him? No, that’s right, you had already moved out by then. In any case, Bugge denied it when I asked him about it.”

“So?”

“So Werner was probably the one who first discovered my guards. He couldn’t have got more than a step or two into the room, or he’d never have got back out alive.”

The cool west wind had blown away the gunpowder smell, and now Duffy could catch the aroma of a pot of oniony stew cooking somewhere. He looked up and down the street, and soon noticed the half-dozen men huddled around one of the fires fifty yards south of him. The Irishman yanked straight his hauberk and tunic with, he hoped, an air of finality and conclusion. “So what will you do now?” he asked.

“Kretchmer and Werner won’t know we’re aware of their deceits, so I don’t think they’ll be hard to find. We’ll go confront them, make them return whatever they took, and then you can kill them.”

Duffy stared at him. “I can’t leave this area. I’m on call. I’m defending the West, remember? Hell, why don’t you just go sift something deadly into their wine?” He started to leave, then paused. “Oh, and I’d try to get them to admit some of it. It’s just possible that Werner had some other reason to own that silent whistle. Here, I’ve got it—put some disabling venom in their wine, and then tell them they can have a sip of the antidote only after they’ve told you all. Then if they should somehow happen to be innocent, you can give them the antidote and apologize.”

Aurelianus shook his head. “You’re all right with a sword, Brian, but you’d make a hair-raising diplomat. No, I think Werner alone I can effectively crack without the stage props, and with his testimony I’ll be able to get a dozen armed men to grab Kretchmer for me... assuming he’s still in the city.”

“Ah. Well, good luck in capturing the pair.” Duffy yawned. “I guess the main thing is that they didn’t get Didius’ Horrors, eh? And now if you’ll excuse me there is a plateful of stew down there waiting for me to ladle it out of the pot, and beyond that, under an improvised canvas roof, is a cot waiting to fulfill its purpose in the scheme of things by letting me fall asleep on it.”

“Good enough,” said the wizard. “I’ll go set my traps. Oh, and I’ve got to try to see von Salm, and tell him that the Turks are likely to re-form in the vulnerable east again, since Ibrahim no longer has any reason to sacrifice his thousand baptized souls.”

“Well, give him my regards,” Duffy said, his words made almost incomprehensible by a huge yawn. “And thanks for this latest patch-up job.”

“You’re welcome. Get a new hauberk, hmm?” Aurelianus turned and strode away west. Duffy pointed himself south, toward the stew. The sun was up now, shining through a break in the golden clouds, and Duffy had to squint against the glare.

Throughout the long morning, patches of light and shadow dappled the plain in shifting patterns, and once or twice veils of rain whirled across the city or the Turkish tents like the skirts of the passing clouds.

As Aurelianus had predicted, the Turkish troops were shifting around to face the eastern wall with its gap like a missing tooth in a stony jaw. Sentries crouched to lay their ears against the pavement, and many claimed to hear the digging of miners at several points north of the collapsed section of wall. There was sporadic trading of booming cannon-fire, but, aside from a particularly heavy burst of Turkish firing by the south wall at about noon, the cannonade was little more than a desultorily observed formality.

Battle was anticipated, and the sellers of horoscopes and luck pieces did a good business among soldiers and citizens alike. Prostitutes and liquor vendors clustered around the makeshift landsknecht barracks, taking their own share of the weirdly inverted economy common to all long-besieged cities. The solace of Faith was free, but nothing else was—and food was much harder to buy than luck, sex, or a drink.

Duffy opened his eyes and crossed without a jolt from unremembered dreams into wakefulness. St. Stephen’s was tolling two, and the gray light that slanted in under the awning waxed and waned as the tattered clouds moved across the sun. He stood up and put on his boots, hauberk, doublet and sword, pushed the curtain aside and stepped out into the street. A wine vendor was wheeling his cart past, and the Irishman called for a cup. The man’s young son trotted over with it and asked an exorbitant price, which Duffy paid after bestowing his fiercest frown on the unconcerned lad. His company wasn’t due to muster until three o’clock, so he took the wine—which proved to be sour—over to a corner where the tumbled wall of a warehouse wall formed a rough bench.

He leaned back and closed his eyes, and ran one open palm over a gritty stone surface. He was mildly surprised to discover that he felt now none of last night’s stark, guilty horror—just a tired sadness about the losses of a lot of things, of which Epiphany was admittedly the most poignant. There was a distance to it, though—it was the sort of melancholy that can be taken down from the shelf and bitterly savored during a leisure hour, and not any longer the plain pain that is no more escapable than a toothache. He suspected that this not unpleasant abstraction was the numbing effect of emotional shock, and would, like the quick, natural anesthesia of a serious injury, wear off before long. It did not occur to him that it might be resignation to the idea of his own death.

Opening his eyes and straightening up, he was not surprised to see Aurelianus in the area again, fussily picking his way toward him over and around the scattered chunks of masonry. As he stepped closer Duffy noticed a new bandage tied around his forehead and under his ears that had blotted red over his cheek.

Duffy smiled, a little surprised to discover that he could find no anger in himself toward the ancient sorcerer. “What ho, wizard?” Duffy boomed politely when Aurelianus was in earshot. “Did von Salm take a poke at you with his rapier? You were probably explaining to him how things are not what they seem, am I right?”

“I didn’t see von Salm,” Aurelianus said, trying to scratch his forehead under the bandage. “They wouldn’t let me up in the cathedral spire to speak with him.” He shook his head in angry exasperation. “Damn it—if this impasse between Ibrahim and me didn’t render the whole magical field so inert, he’d be no more necessary than a child with a sling-shot.”

“Well, you can still do low-power magics, right? Couldn’t you have got by those guards?”

Aurelianus sighed deeply and sat down. “Oh, certainly. I could—with a mere gesture!—have given them all... some damn thing... the bowel-quakes, say, and made it impossible for them to stay at their posts. But it’s so undignified. And I know von Salm wouldn’t listen anyway. Yes, the small-time country type spells still work as well as ever, but there’s not any battle-handy magic in them—just homey lore on how to harvest your wheat, milk your cows and brew your beer, or how to foil a disliked neighbor’s attempts to do those things. Hell. I hope Ibrahim is as discouraged as I am.” He looked up cautiously. “You missed Mrs. Hallstadt’s wake.”

Again the Irishman felt a wash of the almost mellow regret, as if of events that happened centuries ago. “Oh? When?”

“Early this morning they... found the bodies. When the news reached the Zimmermann a spontaneous wake developed, and Werner wasn’t due back until nightfall—he and Kretchmer are off somewhere, I don’t know where—so the affair proceeded unhindered for several hours.”

“Ah.” Duffy sipped his inferior wine thoughtfully. “So what are you going to do about our two poets?”

“I’ve got a half-dozen armed men waiting for them, led by my man Jock—Giacomo Gritti, remember?—and they’ll capture them and bind them to await my interrogation.”

Duffy nodded. “I see.” He emptied his cup and shuddered. “Incidentally, what has made the bandage necessary? Did you cut yourself shaving?”

“Oh—no, I was, on the wall watching Mothertongue’s charge.”

Duffy raised an eyebrow. “Mothertongue’s charge?”

“Didn’t you hear about it?”

“I’ve been asleep,” Duffy explained.

“Huh. I would have thought all the cannon-fire would have awakened you.” The wizard shrugged sadly. “The poor idiot. He got a full suit of old plate armor from the stores somewhere, made somebody lock him up in it, and then rode his horse through an unguarded ferrier’s door in the outer wall, right beside the Wiener-Bach—that little stream that runs along the eastern side of the wall.”

“I think I know the door you mean,” Duffy said. “I didn’t know it had been left unguarded, though. So poor old Mothertongue charged off to save the day, eh?”

“That’s right. All by himself, too, since Bugge and the northmen have finally convinced him that they don’t want to be knights of the round table. He even carried a makeshift lance and banner, and recited a lot of poetry or something outside the wall before he galloped off. All the men on the battlements were cheering him on and making bets on how far he’d get.”

“How far did he get?”

“Not far. A hundred yards or so, I guess. He must have startled the Turk gunners—this high-noon charge by one rusty old knight. They soon got over their surprise, though, and touched off several guns. It was mostly canister and grapeshot for cutting down troops, but they even let go with a nine-pounder or two. That’s how I cut my cheek—a few bits of flying metal or stone came whistling around the parapet.”

“And they got him... ?”

“Mothertongue? Certainly. Blew him and his horse to bits. It served one purpose, at least—we sealed up that door and included it in the sentry’s rounds.”

“Damned odd,” said Duffy. “I wonder what pushed him over the edge.”

The hollow cracking of four cannons interrupted Aurelianus’ reply. Duffy looked up at the battlements. “Sounds like the twelve-pounders,” he observed. “I guess Bluto figures the Janissaries have no business taking afternoon naps...”

Two more cannon detonations shook the pavement, and then he heard the cracking of the sharpshooters’ rifled guns. He was on his feet immediately. “It must be a charge,” he snapped, and was running toward the square by the gap even as the cacophanous alarum bells began clanging across the city from the St. Stephen’s tower.

Abruptly, with a peal of thunder that rattled his teeth, the pavement punched his running legs aside and rushed up to slam his chest and face and bounce him over onto his back. For an instant he lay dazed, choking on his own blood and watching the top of the wall, which was leaning inward toward him, slowly dissolving from an architectural structure into a churning cascade of bricks, stones and dust. Then he was rolling, tumbling and crawling back, his breath blowing in and out in wet wheezes, trying desperately in the seconds remaining to put as much distance as possible between himself and the collapsing wall.

It seemed to take forever to come down. His wounded-spider scuttling had taken him past the midpoint of the square when a vast hammer impacted on the street behind him and he was tossed forward in a multiple somersault that ended in a painful twenty-foot slide. He wound up lying on his side, and managed to sit up. His ears were ringing, and for almost a minute the air was so thickly opaque with smoke and dust that trying to breathe was a solitary nightmare of gagging and coughing.

Then he could hear gunfire, a lot of it, and the steady western breeze was blowing the mushrooming dust cloud back through the new gap, into the eyes of the charging Janissaries. Several companies of soldiers were trotting up in orderly formation as the hastily assembled harquebusiers fell back to reload, and trumpet calls were sounded to summon more troops. Duffy looked over his shoulder and saw Aurelianus fifty yards down the street hurrying away.

He took a long breath, coughed deeply twice, then got to his feet and plodded forward into the gathering press of European soldiers.

The two fallen segments of wall had left an unsteady tower between them, and for twenty furious minutes the fighting seethed around it like waves crashing around an outcropping in the surf, with no ground really being gained by either side. Presently, though, the Viennese forces managed to bring some bigger guns to bear—six ten-barrelled ribaldos adding their rat-tat-tat snare drum detonations to the din, and a dubiously moored culverin, on the southern edge of the solid wall, that every five minutes rocked back and sent loosened stones clattering down as it whipped charge after charge of gravel into the ullulating mass of white-robed Janissaries.

Through the early afternoon the Turkish troops kept advancing and falling back, and losing hundreds of men in a vain effort to summon up the impetus that would break the desperate ranks of Europeans. Finally at about three-thirty they retreated, and the Viennese forces took turns standing in the gaps, trooping outside to construct advance defense positions, and marching back in for a brief respite in which to sit and drink wine and croak queries and braggadocio declarations at each other.

The sun was well down the western side of the sky, silhouetting in red the rooftops and steeples of Vienna, when several hundred of the akinji came yelling down along the wall from the north, evidently trying to shear off the body of Viennese soldiers that was outside. Eilif’s company was out on the plain when they came, and led the way in a counter-charge that drove the Turkish footsoldiers back up to the Weiner-Bach, the narrow sub-canal that flanked the north half of the east wall. The mob of akinji—for they were too undisciplined to be called troops—broke at the banks of the little canal, and only those who retreated to the outer side of it managed to survive and return to the Turkish lines. As night fell the guns of both sides set about making the plain a hazardous no-man’s-land of whistling shot and rebounding iron balls.

Chapter Twenty-one

THE DIRTY WATER of the Wiener-Bach, agitated by the occasional spray of ripped-up earth or shattered stone, reflected the blasts of flame from the cannons on the battlements above, so that Duffy, standing by the bank a hundred yards north of the new gap in the wall, saw two flashes for each shot when he looked behind him. The Turkish guns returned fire, distant flares of red light in the gathering darkness.

“Back inside, all of you!” shouted Count von Salm from the battlements. “They won’t be coming back tonight—it looks like we’re just going to trade shot for an hour or so.” As if to emphasize his words, there came the jarring thumps of a couple of Turk cannon balls falling-short.

The three companies outside the wall trotted wearily south, and though Duffy tried to hold his position in the lead company, he fell gradually back and was among the last to stumble over the mounded jagged stones of the new gap. He heard a clanking, realized he was absently dragging his sword, and carefully sheathed it. It took some nicks today, he thought; I’ll have to get them pounded out sometime.

Inside the wall the soldiers were gathering around a fire. “Hey, Duffy!” barked a tired, dust-streaked Eilif. “It’s past six, and Vertot’s crew will stand in the hole for a while. Come here and have a cup of mulled ale. You’re looking bashed-about.”

The Irishman strode on stiff, aching legs to the fire, and sat down in front of it with a deep sigh. He accepted a cup of hot ale from someone and took a long sip, exhaled, and then took another.

“Ah,” he breathed, stretching like a cat after a minute of letting his muscles adjust to the luxury of sitting down. “Well, you know, lads,” he said expansively, “I wouldn’t like an easy defense. It wouldn’t give me the feeling my capabilities were being truly tested.”

The men paused from drinking and tying bandages to laugh at that, for Duffy was paraphrasing an inspirational sermon a priest had made to the troops during a respite period that afternoon. There followed a few weak jokes speculating about the battle tactics that priest would probably employ, and how he’d be likely to disport himself afterward, and whether Suleiman’s troops had to put up with similar speeches from God-knew-what sort of Mohammedan elders.

“Dead!” came a call from up the dark, rubble-choked street, extinguishing the men’s good humor like a bucket of sand flung on a candle. “Night call for the dead!” A creaking, high-sided cart appeared from the shadows, and no one looked at the grisly cargo stacked in it. The driver was gibbering garbled prayers between calls, and his eyes glittered insanely between his tangled hair and beard. Somehow, though, Duffy thought uneasily, I think I know that man.

A crew of anonymous laborers left off their attempts to clear the street of debris, and set about carrying the day’s corpses to the wagon and flopping them into its bed. While this was going on the driver buried his face in his hands and wept loudly. Whoever he is, Duffy thought, he’s clearly mad. The soldiers around the fire shifted uncomfortably, embarrassed and vaguely upset in the presence of lunacy.

“Why can’t they get a sane man to do that?” one of them whispered. “We fight all day and then have to put up with this.”

“Listen,” said Eilif, wiping dust and ale from his moustache, “he may have been sane when he started.”

The cart loaded at last, its tailgate was swung up and latched, and the vehicle squeaked and rattled away down the street, the driver once again voicing his melancholy cry.

Duffy knew he’d seen the man before, but these days he was not one to prod sleeping memories. “More ale here,” he said. “Top everybody up, in fact, and heat another pot of the stuff.”

Gradually, with the telling of a few jokes and the singing of an old ballad or two, the group around the fire regained their cautious, fragile cheer. Most of the soldiers who’d fought that day had plodded away to the barracks immediately; but, the Irishman reflected, there are always a few who prefer to stay up and talk for a bit, and get. some distance between themselves and the day’s events before submitting to the night’s dreams.

After an hour they began to yawn and drift away, and a light sweep of rain, hissing as it hit the fire, sent the remaining men trudging off to their bunks. Duffy had just stood up when he heard a sharp call: “Who’s that? Identify yourself or I’ll shoot!”

A moment later he heard a scuffle, and then the bang and ricochet of a gunshot, and a burly, red-bearded man burst out of a doorway under the wall and came pelting up the street, running hard.

“Guards ho!” came a shout from behind the fleeing man. “Stop him! He’s a spy!”

Wearily, the Irishman drew his sword and dagger and stood in the man’s path. “Very well, Kretchmer, you’d better hold it,” he said loudly.

The bearded fugitive whipped out a sword of his own. “Stand aside, Duffy!” he yelled.

Two guards came puffing up from one of the side streets, and a sentry on the wall was taking aim with a smoldering harquebus the rain had not yet damped, so the fleeing spy ran directly at Duffy, whirling his sword fiercely. Just before they collided, the red beard fell away on a string and Duffy was surprised to glimpse the fear-taut face of John Zapolya. Knocked unharmed to the side, the Irishman mustered his faculties and aimed a backhand cut at Zapolya’s shoulder. It landed, and the Hungarian gasped in pain as the blade-edge grated against bone, but he kept running. The wall sentry’s gun went off but was badly aimed in the uncertain light, and the ball spanged off the street several yards away. Duffy started after the fugitive, but, off balance, he slipped on the rain-wet cobbles and fell, cracking his knee painfully on a stone. When he wincingly got to his feet Zapolya had disappeared up the dim avenue, pursued by two of the guards.

“God damn it,” Duffy snarled, hobbling to the shelter of a dry doorway.

Pounding hoofbeats echoed now from the same direction Zapolya had come from, and a moment later a horse and rider appeared and paused in the middle of the street. The firelight was dimming in the rain, so it wasn’t until the rider called for the guards that Duffy recognized him.

“Hey, Aurelianus!” the Irishman called; “Zapolya was just here! He ran away up the street.”

The wizard wheeled his horse and goaded it over to where Duffy stood. “Zapolya too? Morrigan help us. Did the guards go after him?”

“Yes, two of them.”

“Did you see Kretchmer? I was chasing him.”

“That was Zapolya! Look, that’s his fake beard on the street there.”

“Mananan and Llyr! I wonder if Kretchmer has always been Zapolya.”

Duffy rubbed his knee and limped a step or two on it. “Well, of course,” he snapped irritably. “Think about it—remember, Werner said Kretchmer wasn’t home, the night of Easter Sunday? That was the night Zapolya was at the Zimmermann with his siege bombard.”

Aurelianus shook his head. “A false beard, of all things.” He spat disgustedly. “Follow me. What, have you hurt your leg? Hop up behind me here, then, we’ve got to get out of the rain and do some talking.”

Duffy swung up onto the horse’s rump and they clopped down the street to the southern guardhouse, where they dismounted. “Hey, Duff,” said the captain who opened the door, “I saw you land one on that spy. Too bad you couldn’t get some muscle into the blow, you’d have split him.”

“I know,” said Duffy with a rueful grin as he and Aurelianus clumped inside and pulled a couple of chairs to a table in the corner. “What was he doing when the sentry challenged him?”

“He was trying to open that old ferrier’s door,” the captain answered. “The one that crazy man sneaked out through this noon. They bricked it up, but apparently nobody told old Redbeard; he was trying to pull the bricks loose when Rahn saw him.”

The Irishman and Aurelianus sat down and the captain returned with a jug of fortified wine he’d been working on. When he had left the room Duffy poured two cups and looked up at the sorceror. “What went wrong with your trap?”

Aurelianus gulped the liquor. “I should have had a whole landsknecht company. Kretchmer and Werner came back to the inn just a few minutes ago, and I let them scuttle halfway across the dining room before I gave the whistle that brought two armed men out of every door. I called to the pair that they were under arrest. Werner just stood and shouted, but Kretchmer—Zapolya!—snatched up a chair and brained one of my men, then drew his sword and disembowelled another. The rest of them cornered him, but he jumped through a window and sprinted east, so I got a horse and came after him.” He topped up his cup. “He’s fast.”

“I know,” said Duffy. The rain drumming on the roof had found a hole, and a drop plunked into Duffy’s wine. He moved the cup absently.

“Werner ran for the window when his mentor had gone through it,” Aurelianus went on, “and one of my eager lads put three inches of sword into his kidney. I don’t know if he’ll survive or not.” He looked up at the Irishman, a hard speculation glinting in his eyes. “There’s something you have to do tonight.”

“You mean catch Zapolya? Hell, man, he could simply hide and sneak out through one of the gaps, or lower a rope outside the wall at some secluded—”

“Not Zapolya. He’s a played card.”

The roof-leak thumped its slow drum beat four times on the table top. “What, then?” Duffy asked quietly.

Aurelianus was picking at the candle on the table now, not looking at Duffy. “This afternoon I got to wondering just exactly what spells were in Becky’s book. I have a—”

“What does it matter what spells were in it?” Duffy interrupted. “You and Ibrahim have blocked all the useful types of magic, haven’t you? That’s what you keep saying.”

Aurelianus shifted uncomfortably. “Well, all the major types, yes. But not, I’m afraid, the kind of barnyard conjuring Becky dealt in. Hell, in a tense cease-fire, do warring kings think to forbid pea-shooters? Anyway, I keep a bibliography of all my books, so I looked up Becky’s. I’d listed the entire contents page of the book, so I could see what each of her spells is supposed to do.” He looked at Duffy unhappily. “One of them is how to fox beer.”

Duffy was tired, and staring at the widening puddle on the table, and not concentrating on Aurelianus’ words. “So?”

“So, you say? Are you even listening? How to fox beer! Have you ever seen—worse, tasted—foxed beer? It’s ropy, thick, like honey; spoiled, undrinkable. Ibrahim, if he noticed that spell—and I think we’d better assume he did—can fox the Herzwesten vat, spoil the beer for decades, maybe forever! We might just be able to save the higher levels with hyssop and salt, but the bottom levels—the Dark, do you understand?—would be hopeless.”

“Oh. That’s right.” Duffy raised his eyebrows helplessly. “I don’t know what to tell you. Set up some shields against it now. Or draw a keg off and hide it somewhere. I certainly—”

“It would take at least twelve hours to arrange counter-spells—you think Ibrahim will wait? And hiding a keg of it won’t do. For one thing it has to mature right there, over old Finn’s grave, and for another, the spell will ruin any beer within its range—every drop of beer in the city will go foul, wherever it’s hidden.”

“Are you sure Becky’s spells work?” Duffy asked, trying to be helpful. “I’ve known a lot of country witches, and they were all out-and-out fakes.”

Aurelianus shook his head. “They work. Becky was the real thing. We have only one hook for hope. She was, as you say, a country witch, and her spells have a range of only about a mile. Also, nearly all of them have to be performed, at precisely noon or midnight. The natural laws that must be overcome are weakest at those moments.”

“So?” said Duffy stonily. By God, he thought, let him say it clearly.

The sorcerer pursed his lips and spoke harshly. “Ibrahim will try it tonight. He knows he can’t delay—for one thing, the moon’s waxing, and Becky’s spells were all dark-of-the-moon ones. And because of the limited range, he’ll have to come up quite close to the walls to cast it. What you’ll—”

Duffy swept the puddle on the table pattering onto the floor. “You want me to go try to stop him? While you and the old King get ready to escape through the tunnels, I suppose, in case I fail. Well, listen while I tell you something: no. Think again. Get yourself another reincarnated hero.”

The captain, who’d apparently been dozing in the next room, leaned his tousled head in through the doorway, wondering at the anger in Duffy’s voice. Aurelianus waited until he’d returned to his bench before replying. “That is not what I’m proposing,” he said quietly. “I... have decided that it would be best to make our final win-or-forfeit stand right here, in Vienna. It would, I’m afraid, be madness to think of falling back and re-grouping somewhere and hope for even half the advantage we’ve got here and now. After all, the Turks are at least several weeks behind schedule, and Ibrahim has failed to acquire Didius’ Gambit, and we’ve unmasked—unbearded, I should say—what must have been their chief spy.”

Duffy refilled their cups. “And on their side of the ledger: they can ruin the beer from outside the wall.”

“Yes, but we know they’ll have to be pretty close, for the Zimmermann is nearly half a mile into the city from the wall. And we know he’ll do it at midnight. If this beer-fouling trick of theirs works, then I believe they’ll have won even if we could physically retreat; and if it fails they’ll go home and the Dark will be drawn on schedule. Therefore I attach a lot of importance to the outcome of tonight’s venture.” His pose of calm rationality fell away for a moment and he banged the wet table top with a fist. “Alone, or even with a body of soldiers, you couldn’t go out and fight Ibrahim. For one thing, he’s got personal bodyguards, of the species you saw when we fetched the King into the city—oh, that’s right, Arthur had the reins in that fight, you wouldn’t remember them; but they’d be something like the two things that tried to hypnotize you back in April. Anyway, they’d laugh at your swords and guns—if they were the sort of creature that ever laughed.” Though clearly apprehensive, the pale sorcerer managed to smile. “It’s a big wager, but I don’t think we’ll ever have better odds. I have decided to break the deadlock.”

“Good God, you mean you’ll use Didius’ Gambit? Why, how can you even—”

“No. Since I choose to view this as the decisive incident in the question of any continuing lifeline of the West, I’ve decided to... do the other thing.” He sighed. “The Fisher King and I will accompany you tonight.”

Duffy frowned. “The three of us? And you and I holding either end of his stretcher? Not exactly an imposing attack force.”

“It won’t be quite that bad. Von Salm would never let me have any troops, of course, for an unexplainable midnight sortie, but he did say once that he’d be grateful if I’d take Bugge and the other northmen off his hands.”

The Irishman stared at him in disbelief, then gulped some of the wine. He shook his head, laughing in spite of himself. His laughter grew like a rolling snowball, until he was leaning forward on the table and gasping, with tears running from the corners of his eyes. He tried to speak, but managed only, “... Parade... damned clowns... funny hats.”

Aurelianus hadn’t even smiled. “So we won’t be entirely alone,” he said.

Duffy sniffled and wiped his eyes. “Right. And how many men will Ibrahim have?”

“Aside from his... bodyguards? I don’t know. Not many, since of course he doesn’t want to be seen.” He shrugged. “And after the deadlock breaks—who can tell? A lot of sorcerous pressure has built up on both sides; both of the forces will change, out there tonight, when the King of the West joins the battle.”

After opening his mouth, Duffy decided not to pursue it. Instead he said, “I’m not sure I’m even ready for these bodyguards.”

“No, you’re not,” Aurelianus agreed. “But you will be, when you’re carrying the right sword. That blade you’re wearing now is fine for poking holes in Turkish soldiers, but if you’re going to face... well, those other things, you need a sword they’ll fear, one that can cut through their flinty flesh.”

The Irishman saw Aurelianus’ direction and sighed. “Calad Bolg.”

“Exactly. Now listen—you get some sleep, it’s only about a quarter of eight. I’ll—”

“Sleep?” Duffy’s momentary mirth had evaporated completely. He felt scared and vaguely nauseated, and rubbed his face with his hands. “Is that a joke?”

“Rest, at least. I’ll fetch Bugge and his men, and the King, and get the sword, and come back here. We’d better head out at roughly eleven.”

Duffy stood up, wishing he’d left the fortified wine alone. Am I bound to do this? he wondered. Well, if Merlin wants me to... But why should I care what Merlin wants? Does he care what I want? Has he ever? Well, to hell with the old wizard, then—you’re still a soldier, aren’t you? All the bright, vague dreams of a slate-roofed cottage in Ireland died last night, fell on a knife in a shabby room. If you aren’t a soldier, my lad, dedicated to fighting the Turks, I don’t think you’re anything at all.

“Very well,” he said, very quietly. “I’ll try to get some rest.”

Aurelianus laid his hand briefly on Duffy’s shoulder, then left. A moment later the Irishman heard the horse’s hoofbeats recede away up the street.

Under the rain-drummed roof of a lean-to that had been added onto the side of the southern barracks, Rikard Bugge hummed a dreary tune and pounded his dagger again and again into the barrack wall. Soldiers, trying to sleep on the other side, had several times come round to the lean-to’s door and tried to get him to stop, but he never looked up or even stopped humming. The other Vikings, sprawled on straw-filled sacks in the slant-roofed structure, stared at their captain sympathetically. They knew well what was bothering him. They had all come on a long and troublesome, if not particularly risky, journey in order to defend the tomb of Balder against Surter and the legions of Muspelheim; and they had found the tomb, and Surter was now camped not three miles south—but the men in charge would not let them fight.

So they’d languished for several months in this hurriedly built shed, oiling and sharpening their weapons more from force of habit than from any hope of using them.

Wham. Wham. WHAM. Bugge’s dagger-blows had been gradually increasing in force, and he put his shoulder into the final one, punching the blade right through the wall up to the hilt. There were muffled shouts from the other side, but Bugge ignored them and stood up to face his men.

“We have,” he said, “been patient. And we are stowed here like chickens in a coop while the dogs go hunting. We have waited for Sigmund to lead us into battle, and all he does is drink and make the old woman at the inn cry. We have obeyed the wishes of the little man who masqueraded as Odin, and he mouths burning serpents and tells us to wait. We have waited long enough.” His men growled their agreement, grinning and hefting their swords. “We will not be lulled into forgetting what Gardvord sent us here to do,” Bugge said. “We will take action.”

“You have anticipated me,” Aurelianus said in his fluent Norse as he stepped noiselessly into the lean-to. “The time for action, as you have observed, has arrived.”

Bugge scowled skeptically at the sorcerer. “We know what needs to be done,” he said. “We don’t need your counsel.” The other Vikings frowned and nodded.

“Of course not,” agreed Aurelianus. “I’m not here as an advisor, but as a messenger.”

Bugge waited several seconds. “Well,” he barked finally, “what is your message?

The wizard fixed the captain with an intense stare. “My message is from Sigmund, whom you were sent here to obey, as you doubtless recall. He has discovered a plot of the Muspelheimers to poison Balder’s barrow by means of filthy southern magic, which Surter’s chief wizard, Ibrahim, will perform outside our walls tonight. Sigmund will ride out to stop him, armed with Odin’s own dwarf-wrought sword; he sent me to tell you that the period of waiting is at an end, and to arm yourselves and meet him two hours from now at the guardhouse down the street.”

Bugge let out a howl of joy and embraced Aurelianus, then shoved the wizard toward the door. “Tell your master we’ll be there,” he said. “It may be that well have breakfast with the gods in Asgard, but we’ll send Surter’s magician to keep Hel company in the underworld!”

Aurelianus bowed and exited, then galloped away toward the Zimmermann Inn as a chorus of Viking war-songs began behind him.

Duffy was lying down on a cot the captain of the guard had told him he could use, but he was far from asleep, in spite of the extra cup of fortified wine the captain had insisted he drink. Odd, he thought as he stared at the low ceiling, how I can’t imagine death. I’ve seen a lot of it, cautiously flirted with it, seen it take more friends than I’ll let myself think about, but I have no idea what it really is. Death. All the word conjures up is the old Tarot card image, a skeleton in a black robe, waving something ominous like an hourglass or a scythe. I wonder what we will be facing out there, besides wholesome Turkish soldiers. Ibrahim’s bodyguards... I don’t remember the fight in the Vienna woods, but I suppose they’ll be like the things that flew over me that night on the south shore of the Neusiedler Lake, speaking some eastern tongue, and destroyed Yount’s hides-wagons.

Then his stomach went cold at a sudden horrible comprehension. Good Jesus, Duffy thought, that was him. I had supposed, mercifully hoped, that he was dead. God only knows how old Yount escaped those demons and made his way, mad but alive, to Vienna, to be given the village-idiot’s job of driving the night-shift corpse wagon; to be still, by some ghastly cosmic joke, a dealer in hides. Recoiling from these thoughts, the Irishman cast his mind’s eye back again to the skeletal image of death. I guess it’s not so bad, he decided hesitantly. Clearly there are worse cards in the deck.

The floor creaked as someone padded into the room, and Duffy sat up quickly, making the candle flame flicker. “Oh, it’s you, Merlin,” he said. “For a second I thought it might be... another very old, thin, pale, black-clad person.” He chuckled grimly as he stood up. “Is it eleven?”

“Coming up on. Bugge and his men are outside, armed and ready to chop the Fenris Wolf to cat-meat, and the King is lying in the wagon bed. Here.” He handed Duffy the heavy sword, and the Irishman took off Eilif’s old-rapier and slid his belt through the loops on the scabbard of Calad Bolg.

“It’ll probably weigh me down on one side, so I walk like a ship wallowing in its beam ends,” he said, but actually the sword’s weight felt comfortable and familiar.

Although the gutter in the middle of the street flowed deeply and roof spouts still dribbled onto the pavement, the rain itself had stopped. A wagon stood by the wall; Bugge’s men waited for Duffy in a group on the street, and torches in the hands of two of them reflected in their slitted eyes and on their helmets and mailshirts. Their coppery blond hair and beards had been braided and thonged back out of the way, and their callused hands fingered the worn leather of their sword grips expectantly. By God, Duffy thought as he grinned and nodded a greeting to them, whatever Turkish hell is churning out there in the dark, I couldn’t ask for a much better crew of men to face it with... though it would be handier if we had some language in common.

But that’s silly, he thought a moment later. Aren’t these Vikings? Don’t they understand Norse? He barked a greeting in a Norse dialect so archaic that Bugge could barely phrase an equivalent reply.

Duffy stepped up into the wagon’s braced rear wheel and smiled at the white-bearded old man sitting up in the bed with a rich-looking tapestried blanket over his legs. “Good evening, Sire,” he said. “A peculiar battle it is in which the soldiers stay home and the leaders go fight.”

The King chuckled. “I think it makes more sense this way. It’s the leaders that have the quarrel.” He stared more closely at the Irishman. “Ah,” he said softly, “I see that both of you are awake.”

Duffy cocked his head. “Yes, that’s true, isn’t it? You’d think that would be... clumsy, like two men in one outsize suit of armor, but it’s more like two perfectly matched horses in harness; each one knows without thinking when to take over, when to help, and when to back off. I don’t know why I spent so much time being afraid of this and trying to resist it.”

He hopped down onto the street and walked over to where the wizard stood. “Do you know for sure that Ibrahim is out there?” he asked quietly. “And if so, where? We can’t just go calling for him.”

Aurelianus seemed both steadier and more tense than usual. “He’s there. Perhaps two hundred yards east of the northeast corner of the wall, behind a low, weedy bluff. I’ve had watchers on the walls since eight, and it was only twenty minutes ago that Jock got a positive sighting.”

“Did he see any... did he see them very clearly?”

“Of course not. They’ve got dark-lanterns, apparently, and he only caught a couple of reflected blue flashes. He claims he heard them rustling around, too, but I told him he was too far away for that.”

He waved vaguely to the north. “I think we should go over the wall—lowering the King and me in a pallet and sling—at the east end of the Wollzelle, and then find a sheltered spot where the King and I can get busy on the magical offensive, while you and your Vikings make a dash straight east—”

“No, no.” Duffy shook his head. “Certainly not. A direct frontal attack? There’s not even enough moon-light to keep us from tripping over shattered tree branches; it’d take us ten minutes to reach them, and they’d have heard us coming for nine.” Aurelianus started to speak, but the Irishman raised his hand. “No,” Duffy said. “We’ll go over the wall near the north gate, cross one of the bridges over the Donau Canal and get to the little pier off the Taborstrasse where they’ve got Bugge’s old Viking ship moored. Untying her will be easy and quiet enough, and then we’ll all of us simply drift east down the canal. Our sails will be reefed, of course, to avoid being seen, and we’ll use a couple of the oars as barge poles, to keep us clear of the banks. It’s from the north, you see, that our attack will come, and with, I hope, no warning at all. That’ll put you and the King among the canal-side willows—a position that’s both more secluded and closer to the action than any hillock on the eastern plain.”

The sorcerer bowed. “Very well. Your idea is obviously better. You see my... ineptitude with matters of warfare.”

Duffy squinted at Aurelianus, suddenly suspicious. Had the old wizard intended from the start that they should attack by way of the canal, from the north, and only suggested a direct charge east so that the Irishman could gain some self-confidence by contradicting him?

Then Duffy smiled. Merlin was always devious, and it became a problem only at those rare times when his intentions differed significantly from one’s own. He clapped Aurelianus on the shoulder. “Don’t feel bad about it.”

He waved at the northmen. “Very well, then, lads, climb aboard!” he called. They just grinned and waved back, and the Irishman repeated his order in the Old Norse. Bugge translated it for his men, and they all clambered in, being careful not to kick or step on the King.

Duffy swung up onto the driver’s bench and Aurelianus got up beside him. “Everybody in?” Duffy asked. He took for assent the growls that came from the back, and snapped the long reins. The wagon rocked, wheeled about and then rattled away up the street. The two Vikings had extinguished their torches, and the street and buildings were palely illuminated only by a silvery glow that showed where the half moon hid behind the thinning clouds.

They all managed to climb unseen to the north wall catwalk, and with a couple of long lengths of rope and the aid of three of Bugge’s men, the job of lowering the Fisher King to the ground outside proved to be much easier than Duffy had imagined. Aurelianus was lowered next, and Duffy and the northmen were about to follow when the Irishman heard, a dozen yards to the right, the rutch of a pebble turning under a boot.

He turned, and the flash, bang and whining ricochet were simultaneous. The lead ball had struck one of the merlons he’d been about to climb between. He froze.

“Nobody move, or the next one takes off a head,” came a shout from the same direction as the shot, followed by hurried footsteps.

“Don’t move or speak,” the Irishman hissed in Old Norse. Bugge nodded.

“Oh, Jesus, it’s Duffy!” exclaimed a voice Duffy recognized after a moment as Bluto’s. “Just what the hell are you doing, you troublesome son of a bitch?” Bluto hobbled up, accompanied by a burly guard who carried a fresh matchlock and blew vigilantly on the glowing end of the cord.

“That’s a real quick-trigger man you’ve got there, Bluto,” Duffy observed mildly. The ball had struck so close to him that it was clear the man hadn’t intended to miss.

“He was following orders, damn it,” snapped Bluto. “All the sentries have been alerted that a spy was sighted and then lost in the city a few hours ago, and are ordered to stop anyone trying to go over the wall, and bring them, if still alive, to von Salm. I know you’re not a spy, Duff, but I don’t have any choice—you’ll have to come with me.”

In the unsteady moonlight Duffy’s eyes measured the distance from his right hand to the gun barrel; with a sideways lunge he might be able to knock it out of line. “I’m sorry, Bluto,” he said. “I can’t.”

“It wasn’t a suggestion, Brian,” the hunchback rasped. “It was an order. To put it bluntly, you’re under arrest.” The sentry took a step back, putting him out of Duffy’s reach.

The Irishman heard the first notes of the bells of St. Stephen’s tolling eleven o’clock. “Look, Bluto,” he said urgently, “I have to go out there. A sorcerous attack is building up out there on the plain, and if I, and my party, aren’t out there when it starts, then things won’t go too well for Vienna. You must have seen enough in the last six months to know that magic is playing a part in this struggle. I swear to you, as your oldest friend, who once saved your life and who carries a certain obligation in trust, that I have to go. And I will. You can permit it or you can have him shoot me in the back.” He turned to Bugge and gestured toward the rope. The Viking stepped up into the crenel, seized the rope and leaned outward, walking down the outside of the wall.

There was a scuffle and thud, and Duffy looked quickly around. Bluto was holding the long gun by the barrel with one hand, and with the other arm was lowering the unconscious sentry to the surface of the catwalk. He looked up unhappily. “I hope I didn’t hit him too hard. I don’t know anything about any magic—but go, damn you. I’ve bought you some time with my neck.”

Duffy started to thank him, but the hunchback was walking away, and not looking back. Soon all the northmen had descended the rope, and Duffy climbed up and stood between the two bulky stone merlons.

As he looped the line behind his thigh and over his shoulder he sniffed the night air and wondered what quality had changed. Had a persistent sound ceased? A prevalent odor disappeared? Then he noticed the stillness of the air. That’s what it is, he thought uneasily. It’s stopped, the breeze that has blown from the west these past two weeks.

Chapter Twenty-two

THEY CARRIED THE KING over the bridge to the far bank of the canal, lifted him aboard the old ship, got in themselves and then untied all lines. Duffy and three of the northmen used long oars to push the ship away from the bank and into the current, and within a few minutes the high-prowed ship was gliding between the dim, masonry-crowned banks of the Donau, silent under the stark crucifix of its mast. The night air was cold, and smelled of wet streets; Duffy breathed it deeply, savoring the stagnant taint of the lapping water. The northmen stood at the rails, peering ahead into the darkness.

The rains had swelled the Danube, and the offshoot Donau Canal was moving swiftly. Duffy had been afraid they’d have to row to make any speed, with the unavoidable clatter of the oarlocks, but all that proved to be necessary was an oar-butt shoved forcefully against a bank from time to time to keep them from running aground. Soon the high bulk of the city wall had slipped past on their starboard side, and only stunted willows bordered the canal.

Standing to the right of the upswept prow, Duffy carefully scanned the southern bank, trying to look beyond the dark foreground foliage to the silent group he knew was out there. Do they see us? he wondered. Not likely. We’re making no noise, they have no reason to believe we even know they’re out here, and it’s only from the west they’ll be looking for possible attacks.

After about a third of a mile the canal began to curve gently to the north, as if prematurely anticipating its eventual re-merging with the Danube, which didn’t occur until several miles further south. If Merlin’s, wall-watchers know their business, the Irishman thought, Ibrahim’s party is now due south of us. He turned, hissed to the northmen and signalled them to put in at the southern bank. This wasn’t difficult, since the current had been trying for ten minutes to run them aground on that side; the men at the starboard rail simply stopped bracing the oars against the canal-edge, and within a minute the keel raked the mud and the ship canted over toward the bank, stuck fast.

Duffy stepped across the slanting deck to the starboard rail, leaning backward so as not to pitch right over into the canal. Aurelianus came up beside him. “That jar didn’t do the King any good,” the wizard whispered accusingly. “But he’s ready to be carried to the bank.”

“Good. Now listen, I’m going to go over there. When I wave, send Bugge and two others. We’ll make sure it’s safe. Then when I wave again, the rest of you carry the King across. Have you got that?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. See you soon, I trust.”

The Irishman carefully lowered himself over the side, clenching his teeth at the bitter chill of the water swirling around his thighs, and waded to the humped, tree-furred bank. Half peering in the darkness and half groping, he found a quiet way up and then waved back at the ship. Soon three of the northmen were crawling up the muddy slope beside him, shivering and rubbing their legs. Beyond the willows the landscape they faced was nothing but a black horizon of uncertain distance.

A flash of blue light pricked the darkness ahead for a moment, then was cut off as if a door had been shut.

Over the splash and slurry of the watér through the reeds Duffy now fancied he could faintly hear chanting voices and the rushing of great wings, and he was suddenly afraid to look up for fear the tattered clouds would begin to form malevolent Oriental faces. The canal at our backs, he thought, connects with the Danube, which stretches far south; has some vast white serpent crawled north along the riverbed from Turkish regions to suck us up now from behind?

Fearfully, he turned to look—and saw in the dim moonlight the wide-eyed, terror-stark faces of the three Vikings. They must have seen or heard something I missed, Duffy thought, feeling his own fear spiral higher at this corroboration; or else, he thought suddenly, we’re all responding to the same thing, which is not an object or a sound, but simply the atmosphere of outré menace that hangs in the still air here like a vapor.

That’s it, he thought with sudden conviction. Ibrahim is doing this to us. He’s set up some kind of wizardly fear-wall around himself to drive away anyone who might interrupt him. With the thought, the Irishman was able to unfasten the terror from his mind and push it away, like a man holding a snake by its throat at arm’s length. He forced a soft chuckle and turned to Bugge. “It’s a trick,” he whispered to the trembling northman. “Damn it, it’s magic, it’s only a fright-mask hung over the door to keep children from barging in!”

Bugge stared at him without comprehension, and the Irishman repeated the statement in Old Norse. Bugge caught the gist of it, gave Duffy a strained grin and then passed the message on to the other two. They loosened up a bit, but none of the four on the bank looked really at ease.

They scouted up and down the watercourse edge fifty yards in both directions without seeing or hearing anything untoward, and Duffy waved again to the ship. By the patchy moonlight he watched the remaining northmen wade across, four of them holding up, clear of the water, the pallet on which lay the old King.

When they had all made their way into the cluster of willows, Aurelianus crossed to where Duffy was standing. “The Fisher King is on the field of battle,” he said, quietly but with a savage satisfaction.

All at once the oppressive weight of unspecific fear was gone, and Duffy was able to relax the control-holding muscles of his mind. Suddenly he got the feeling that there were more men on the bank with him than he knew of—he turned, but the moon was behind a cloud and the shadows among the willows were impenetrable. Nevertheless he could sense the presence of many strangers, and from a little further down the bank he caught sounds that seemed to be those of atleast one boat pulling in to the bank and disgorging silent men in the darkness. There was flapping and a windy rushing in the air, too, and soft swirl-sounds from the water, as of lithe swimmers just under the surface. The air was as tensely still as if they were in the eye of a vast storm, but the willows all up and down the bank were now twisting and creaking.

Bugge came up beside the Irishman, and by a flitting sprinkle of light Duffy looked for signs of heightened fear in the northman’s face, but was surprised to see only an eager reassurance. And he realized that these northmen, like his horse when he was, months ago, so eerily escorted through the Julian Alps, could instinctively recognize allies of this sort, while Duffy tended to be blinded by the fears Christian civilization had instilled in him. The Viking touched him on the shoulder and pointed ahead.

The cloud cover was breaking up and clearing, and Duffy could clearly see three tall men waiting on a low hillock. Without hesitation the Irishman strode up the slope to join them while the large but indistinct body of warriors waited along the bank behind him. When he reached the rounded crest the three turned to him with respectful nods of recognition.

The tallest was as massive and gray and weathered as a Baltic sea cliff, and though an eye-patch covered an empty socket, his good eye looked from Duffy’s sword to his face, and glittered with an emotion almost too cold and hard to be called amusement. The second man, though just as big, was darker of skin, with a curly black beard and white teeth that flashed in a fierce smile of greeting. He wore a lion-skin and carried a short, powerful-looking bow. The third was rangier, with long hair and a beard that even in the leaching moonlight Duffy knew must be coppery red. In his fist he held a long, heavy hammer.

The four of them on the height turned to survey the fair-sized host gathered by the bank of the canal, which must somehow have become wider, for at least half a dozen ships were moored in it—a Spanish carack, a Phoenician galley, even a dim shape that seemed to be a Roman bireme. There was a long sigh, and the limp banners began to twitch and flap on the masts.

Looking southeast, Duffy could see an equal host gathered around a vast, black tent on the plain, and at the vanguard stood four tall figures in eastern armor.

The one-eyed man raised a hand, and the wind came up behind him, tossing his gray locks; then he brought the hand forward in a spear-casting gesture, and with the wind the Western force moved forward, gathering speed and sweeping toward the black tent. Running effortlessly in the front rank, Duffy heard the sound of hoofbeats mingled with the thudding of boots, and he caught too the flapping of wings and a soft drum-beat of great running paws.

For Duffy the battle that followed was mainly a confusion of quick, unconnected images and encounters. He clove in half a huge, beating butterfly-thing, between the wings of which was a woman’s face, mouth agape to sink long teeth into him. A grossly fat, bald man with thick snakes for arms seized Duffy and moaned in wide-eyed imbecility as he began to constrict the Irishman’s breath away; he became silent only when a glowing-eyed cat shape had surged past and with one swipe of powerful jaws snapped the bald head off. At one point Duffy faced one of the four tall Turkish warriors who had stood out in front of the assembled Eastern host—the man’s left hand, though as mobile and quick as his scimitar-wielding right, was a brassy metallic color and rang like a dagger when he used it to parry Duffy’s blade; the Irishman finally managed to sever the arm at the elbow; and when Duffy had delivered the final, beheading stroke, the golden hand was still moving, crawling on the ground like a spider.

Things with the heads of crocodiles contended with dwarfs perched one atop another to form an adversary of conventional height; men enveloped in roaring yellow flames rushed here and there, seeking to embrace their enemies; hollow-eyed corpses lurched past, pulled along by animated swords as pliant as snakes; and, above even the winged warriors that battled with scimitar and longsword high overhead, impossibly tall, luminous figures could be glimpsed rushing across the sky.

Finally Duffy burst through the far side of the seething press. Glancing around he saw that six of the northmen were still with him. Bugge grinned at him as they trotted in to re-group. Less than a hundred yards in front of them stood the circular tent of black cloth, flapping like a big, crippled bat on the moonlit plain. Even as Duffy caught his first clear glimpse of it, part of the drapery flipped back and half a dozen turbanned men, back-lit in eerie blue, stepped out of the tent, drew gleaming scimitars and waited grimly for the attack to arrive.

In ten seconds it did, and two of the Turks fell immediately, chopped nearly in half by the northmen’s swords; the other four handled their crescent blades skillfully, but refused to give ground or retreat to the flank, and so were each inevitably engaged by one man and run through by several others. Before Duffy could even get in a lick the Turk guards were dead, while his own crew had suffered nothing worse than a nicked forearm or two.

“Come out of your boudoir, Ibrahim, and share the fate of your boys!” yelled Duffy, leaping forward and with a whirling slash cutting the tent flap across the top.

The cloth fell away—and a shape out of nightmare stood, turned, and stared incuriously down at him. It seemed to have been crudely chiselled out of coal, and its face was twisted and distorted as if it had spent centuries under powerful, uneven pressure. Muscles like outcroppings of rock ridged its shoulders, and a shrill, grating yell trumpeted from its mouth as its blunt-fingered hands reached for the man.

Duffy fell over backward like an axed tree, and, when the thing rushed forward, raised his sword as a man might instinctively raise his arm while a tidal wave curls over him.

The creature moved in so quickly that it impaled itself on the long blade, which encountered no resistance in penetrating the stony flesh. A moment later it had wrenched itself back with a moan like layers of rock shifting. Dropping to the ground, it curled up in a ball as a cloud of things like blue fireflies swirled upward out of the gaping wound in its belly.

Lifting himself on his elbows and looking over the fallen monster’s bulk, the Irishman saw a dozen robed figures inside the tent, standing around a fire that gleamed bright blue. Then the northmen had bounded past him, howling with rage and swinging their swords, and Duffy hopped shakily to his feet to join them.

The tent shook then with a madman’s percussion concert as swords clanged and rasped, mail shirts jingled and helmets were ringingly struck from surprised heads. Duffy sprang at a tall, wiry Turk he took to be Ibrahim, aiming a slash that would have cleft the man in two pieces if it had connected; but the Turkish sorcerer leaped back out of the way, and Duffy spun half around with the force of the wasted swing.

Ibrahim snatched up a small book and hopped nimbly toward an open flap at the back of the tent. The Irishman saw him, realized he was too far away to catch, and flung his sword like a Dalcassian axe. It whirled through the air and struck the magician solidly in the shoulder. The suddenly blood-spattered book dropped to the ground, but the wizard regained his balance and, wincing and clutching his gashed shoulder, ducked out of the tent.

“Not so fast, you bastard,” growled Duffy, striding after him only to find his way blocked by a desperate-eyed Turk, who drove a quick cut at the Irishman’s face. Swordless, he parried it with his left hand while drawing his dagger with his right. He lunged savagely in, snarling with the pain of his mangled palm, and buried his dagger in the man’s chest.

A scimitar snapped in half on his steel cap, stunning him as he tried to parry another with his dagger guard; he deflected the blade from his face, but it whipped as he struck it aside and opened a furrow along his forearm. Fearing to riposte with the short dagger, Duffy waited tensely for another thrust—but the Turk gasped, buckled at the knees and collapsed, stabbed from behind. The Irishman whirled to take in the entire tent... and then slowly relaxed and lowered his blade, for the only figures still standing were Vikings. A few of the blue fireflies had found their way inside, but were dimming and falling silently to the ground.

The book lay where Ibrahim had dropped it, and Duffy slowly crossed the tent, picked it up with his right hand and flipped it open. In faded brown ink the flyleaf was inscribed: “For Merlin Aurelianus, these modest magics, from your own little succubus, Becky. Beltane, 1246.” After a moment’s hesitation he tore that page out, folded it and tucked it in a pocket, and then dropped the book into the blue fire. He wiped and sheathed his sword, then pulled down a strip of the tent fabric and laid it in the flames.

“Let’s go,” he panted to the blood-streaked Bugge, who nodded. Three of the other northmen were still standing, and one of them was bleeding badly from a cut in the side. Duffy led them out of the tent.

The wind was high, and raising rushing clouds of dust in the moonlight, but the plain was empty. Duffy stared around thoughtfully, and then pointed toward the city wall that stood in high, ragged silhouette three hundred yards west. With his sorcerous powers restored, Duffy reflected, Merlin can certainly transport the Fisher King back into the city without our help. The five of them set out, one of the northmen hopping on one leg and leaning on a companion. Before they’d taken a dozen steps their long-legged shadows were cast across the dirt in front of them, for the tent behind was now a crackling torch of wholesomely yellow and orange flame.

After a while there were shouts from the top of the wall, and the Irishman waved. “It’s me, Duffy!” he bellowed. “We’re Christians! Don’t shoot!”

Then the Turk guns began thumping, and there was a shattering splash to the north, in the canal. They’re trying to find the range, Duffy realized. They haven’t had cause to shoot at this corner before now. Ibrahim must have signalled them somehow... or could he have reached the Turk lines already?

Two more cannon balls struck, one breaking away several yards of the wall crenellations and one slamming into the water of the Wiener-Bach, directly in front of the wall. The wind carried the high-flung spray to Duffy’s face. And they’re finding the range, he thought grimly; we’d better find a bridge across this midget canal and get inside. I think there’s one just a bit north of us.

He turned to wave the Vikings to the right, and at that moment a muscular black shape beneath two wide-ribbed wings swooped down out of the night sky and swung a scimitar in a terrible chop at Duffy’s head. The edge clanked into the Irishman’s steel helmet and knocked him violently forward in a rolling tumble. The flier, with a low laugh and a snapping of huge wings, thrashed back up in to the darkness.

He shivered in the cold, damp wind, trying to stand at respectful attention despite his weariness and the pain of wounds. They had handed the mortally wounded Arthur aboard the barge now, and the old monarch lifted his bloody head and smiled weakly at him. “Thank you,” the king said quietly, “and farewell.”

Duffy nodded and lifted his sword in a salute as the old man let his head sink back upon the cushions. With the handful of others, Duffy stood on the shore of the moonlit lake and watched as the barge was poled away by the woman at the stern and slowly moved out across the glassy water until it was lost in the mists.

Bugge got to Duffy first, and helped him to his feet. The Irishman’s helmet had been split, and blood ran down his back from a great gash at the base of his skull.

“I’m all right,” he muttered blurrily. “I can... still walk.” He touched his forehead. “Wow. Did it go? What was it? Wow.”

Bugge didn’t understand the Austrian words, but took one of his arms while another Viking took the other, and the five battered warriors limped over the northmost Weiner-Bach bridge. A narrow gate was opened for them just short of the Donau canal, and bolted shut again as soon as they got inside.

“What the hell happened out there?” barked a scared and angry sergeant. “What were you doing? You’ve roused the Turks, that’s certain.” The northmen couldn’t answer him, and Duffy hadn’t heard the questions. He was staring absently down the street at a house under the wall whose roof had been shattered by falling masonry and from which flames were beginning to lick. The sergeant looked at the bedraggled crew more closely and then called a young lieutenant over. “These men appear to be in shock,” he told him, “and at least two need some medical ateention. That big gray-haired fellow especially—it looks like somebody ran over his head with a plow. They should be taken to the infirmary in the south barracks.”

“Right.” The young man nodded. “This way,” he said. “Follow me.” He took Duffy’s arm and led him down the street, and the northmen followed.

“Hey, Duff!” came a shout from up on the catwalk. “Are you all right? What was that thing?”

The Irishman stopped and looked up, trying to get his eyes to focus. “Who is it?” he called. “Who is it?”

“Are you drunk? It’s me!” He saw a waving arm and squinted; it was Bluto, standing beside one of the cannons, his face lit from beneath by the mounting flames.

“I was—” Duffy started to answer, but he was interrupted by the explosive impact of a Turkish cannon ball against the battlements; bits of shattered stone sprayed everywhere, and a rebounding chunk of the ball caved in a wall across the street. A moment later a hail of rocks clattered down onto the pavement, sending the northmen and the young soldier ducking for cover.

“Bluto?” Duffy shouted. The hunchback was no longer visible on the catwalk. “Bluto?”

“Sir,” said the lieutenant, stepping warily out of an alcove he’d leaped into, “Come with me. We’ve got to get you to the infirmary.”

“If you’ll wait a minute, I’ll fetch you someone else to take there,” the Irishman said, shoving him away. “I think that fool hunchback is in a bad way.” He strode to the stairs and bounded up them.

The wind was whipping the blaze below the wall, and Duffy thought he heard flapping wings. “Keep off, you devils!” he snarled when he reached the top of the stairs; he whirled out his sword, but its unfamiliar weight was too much for his slashed hand—it slipped out of his grasp and fell, glittering in the firelight a moment before it clanged against the cobbles of the street below. “Damn it!” he gritted. “I’ll strangle you with my bare hands, then!” He glared up into the night sky, but no winged afrits came diving from the darkness at him. “Hah,” he said, relaxing a little. “I’d stay clear too, if I were you.”

The catwalk on both sides of the chewed-up section of the crenellations was littered with jagged bits of stone, and Bluto lay crumpled face down against the wall.

“Bluto.” The Irishman reeled unsteadily along the walk, ignoring a slight underfoot shift of the whole stony bulk, and knelt by the hunchback. He’s clearly dead, Duffy thought. His skull is crushed, and at least one stone seems to have passed right through him. He stood up and turned toward the stairs—then paused, remembering a promise.

“God damn you, Bluto,” he said, but he turned back, crouched, and picked up the limp, broken body. Duffy’s head was spinning and his ears rang throbbingly. I can’t carry you down the stairs, pal, he thought. Sorry. I’ll leave a message with someone...

Smoky hot hair beating at his face and hands reminded him of the burning house directly below. He cautiously inched one foot toward the catwalk edge and peered down; the crumpled roof of the building was smoking like a charcoal mound between the flames belching from the windows, and collapsed inward even as he watched, in a blazing, white-hot inferno of flames. The heat was unbearable and a cloud of sparks whirled up past him, but he leaned out a little and cast Bluto’s body away before stepping back and beating out embers that had landed on his clothes.

I’ve got to get down, he thought dizzily, rubbing his stinging, smoke-blinded eyes. My neck and back are wet with blood. I’ll pass out if I lose much more.

He turned once again toward the stair, and with a grating roar the whole weakened section of the wall-top sheared away outward like a shale slope, and in a rain of tumbling stones Duffy fell through the cold air to the dark water of the Wiener-Bach, fifty feet below.

Chapter Twenty-three

THE DONAU CANAL was empty except for the old Viking ship, which rocked once again at its mooring by the Taborstrasse bridge. Dawn was no more than an hour away; the sky, though still dark, was beginning to fade, the stars were dimming, and before long the bow and stern lanterns would be unnecessary. The wind from the west blew strongly down the canal and swept the deck of the ship, eventually causing the Irishman to shiver all the way back to consciousness. He sat up on the weathered planks and leaned against the rail, gingerly touching the bandage wrapped around his head.

Aurelianus had been crouched in the bow, talking in an undertone to Bugge and the three northmen, but rose when he heard Duffy stir.

He walked back to where he sat. “Don’t fool with the bandage,” he said softly. “Luckily your skull wasn’t cracked, but you could start it up bleeding again.” He shook his head wonderingly. “You’re fortunate, too, that I’ve regained my sorcerous strengths. You were a mess when they fished you out of that canal. I had to rebuild your left knee completely—you’ll always limp some, but I figure it will lend you color—and a couple of things inside you had to be encouraged to return to their proper places and recommence functioning. I looked into your skull, and there’s no bleeding in there, though you may be nauseous and see double for a day or two. I’ve told Bugge what to watch for and what not to let you do.”

Duffy glanced over at the northman and opened his mouth for a feeble joke—then closed it. “I... I no longer know his language,” he whispered to Aurelianus.

“Yes. Arthur has gone back to Avalon, and you’re completely Brian Duffy now. That ought to be a relief—for one thing, I imagine you’ll dream less often, and less vividly.” He snapped his fingers. “Oh, and I went through your pockets, and I want to thank you,” he said, holding up a wad of pulpy paper, “for the thought that made you save the signed flyleaf from Becky’s book. The ink washed out while you were in the water, of course, but it was a... kind thought.” He stepped to the gangplank. “You and these men will be rowed away northwest, along the canal and up the Danube. There’s nothing you can do here now. Now it’s just a clean-up job for young soldiers.”

“Who’s going to row?” the Irishman inquired. “There’s not one of us with even enough strength left to chop an onion.”

“Good Lord, man, after that production tonight, do you think it’ll be any trouble for me to conjure a few mindless spirits to row your ship for a while?”

The old wizard looks exhausted, Duffy thought—probably more than I do. Yet at the same time he looks stronger than I’ve ever seen him.

“Here,” added Aurelianus, tossing a bag that clanked when it hit the deck. “A token of the gratitude of the West.”

Rikard Bugge stood up and stretched, then spoke to Duffy. The Irishman turned inquiringly to Aurelianus. The wizard smiled. “He says, ‘Surter is turned back, and must now retreat to Muspelheim. Balder’s grave-barrow is safe, and we won’t see Ragnarok this winter.’”

Duffy grinned. “Amen.”

Aurelianus stepped across the gangplank to the shore, stooped to pull the plank away, and the oars shifted aimlessly for a moment and then clacked rhythmically in the locks. The wizard untied the line and let it trail out through his fingers and slap into the water.

The Irishman got cautiously to his feet, leaning heavily on the rail. “Do you have one of your snakes?” he called to the dim figure on the bank that was Aurelianus.

“Here.” The wizard fished one from a pocket and tossed it spinning through the air. Duffy caught it, and lit it at the stern lantern.

The ship was moving now, and Duffy sat down in the deep shadow of the high stern, so that all the wizard could see of him, until the ship rounded the nearest bend and passed out of sight beyond a stone arch, was the tiny ember at the head of the snake.