He had to get off this wide street. There were bound to be people about, not to mention occasional patrols.
With difficulty, Felix convinced the beast-or it convinced itself-to enter what was little more than a noisome crevice between tenements. Dark shapes swarmed around the cart and the wheels went over bumps that let out piercing shrieks.
The panicked donkey moved faster. Felix shouted orders, futilely. It didn’t respond to any of the curses he tried.
The cart careened through various gradations of almost total darkness, banging walls, splashing through blessedly invisible filth, turning corners when the way ahead seemed blocked. Not that the route mattered. Felix was not familiar with the back ways here. As long as he continued downhill, as seemed to be the case, he would reach the water, which was all that was necessary. Constantinople was a long, narrow peninsula. He couldn’t help but find the water eventually.
When the cart reached more level ground and emerged from its dark narrow passage into what seemed by comparison a blaze of light, he discovered he had been optimistic, not to mention badly disoriented. Instead of the sea wall he had expected, he faced a thoroughfare broader than the one he had fled and more brightly lit.
It could only be the Mese.
Felix looked back into the cart. His dark, shapeless burden still lay there. Had he expected it to get up and walk away?
Considering everything that had happened lately he wouldn’t have been surprised.
Now what? He hadn’t calculated on having so much difficulty navigating or driving. Craning his neck, he was able to spot the glow from the dome of the Great Church rising toward the moon, now visible, surrounded by a misty halo, in a gap in the gathering clouds.
Perhaps he had better brave the Mese. If he simply continued straight on, he could dump the body in one of the cemeteries outside the city’s inner walls. The worst risk of his being discovered had been near to his house, hadn’t it?
He ordered the donkey forward.
Few pedestrians were abroad and mostly in the noisy vicinity of taverns. Horses trotted by, thankfully none carrying military men.
Despite the muggy air, Felix kept getting chills. He couldn’t help recalling Anastasia telling him she’d been afraid the dead courier would reach up from the bath and put its cold hand against her back.
He resisted the urge to twist around to peer into the cart.
The eerie feeling that there was something there, reaching out, behind him, grew stronger. He could almost sense a hovering presence a finger’s breadth from his neck.
“Don’t be a fool,” he growled. He didn’t like the uneasy note in his voice. The courier was as dead as a grilled fish. No, Felix wouldn’t turn. Wouldn’t give in to irrational fear. He stared straight down the street.
He could hear the voices of those he’d interviewed at the church, describing the supernatural thieves they’d glimpsed fleeing, recalled the strange spectacle in the mausoleum, the dead frogs, the scarab on Theodora’s sarcophagus.
Who could say for certain what might be out here in the night?
Where was he?
Wasn’t that the fork, where the Mese split into a northern and eastern branch? The northern way led past the Church of the Holy Apostles.
“South, then!” Felix told himself, yanking at the donkey’s reins. The beast resisted, slowed. Exasperated Felix swung his whip. Too hard.
“Gently, gently, my boy. The whip is only to direct the animal,” he heard his father telling him.
The donkey leapt forward in its traces, jerking the cart. Felix grabbed his seat to avoid falling into the street.
The terrified beast would have tired itself out quickly but it didn’t get the chance. A gaping rut spared it the effort.
Felix saw the jagged hole looming an instant before the cart hit with a bone-shaking jolt. There was a sickening crack from below and the cart tipped over sideways as one wheel flew off onto the nearby colonnade.
His precious cargo slid out, hit the ground, and lay there in the bright illumination of a nearby torch, looking exactly like a dead body wrapped in a blanket.
Chapter Fifteen
Dedi, desecrater of Theodora’s tomb, lurked in night shadows, watching the mansion across the street with growing impatience.
During his pursuit he would have been happy to stand still, as he had now been doing hour after hour. With his short legs it had taken all his strength to keep the fleet-footed, demonic creatures in sight.
His first thought when he saw them burst from the Church of the Holy Apostles was that the spells intended to bring Theodora back to life had gone awry and called forth two monsters from the depths instead. But if so, what were they carrying away from the church?
On impulse, he decided to pursue them. At the back of the church grounds they cut behind a looming cliff of inky buildings and raced downhill to where the Valens Aqueduct emerged from the hillside to span the valley there. They kept to the base of the aqueduct, gliding in and out of the thick shadows cast by archways in the moonlight. For an instant Dedi would see two ghostly, silvered shapes, then they would vanish into utter blackness, only to reappear as if by magick. So he ran after two flickering phantoms, until they veered off into labyrinthine alleyways.
Dedi’s snaggle-toothed mouth worked like a bellows as he sucked in the thick unwholesome atmosphere of the city night. There was a devilish air about him. He had always been able to make Theodora laugh. Perhaps his call had not gone unheeded. The empress may have heard it while chatting with the two loping creatures in front of him. “Go and see what Dedi wants,” she might have ordered.
Luckily their route continued to descend, which made running easier, or Dedi would have lost them. They avoided the main streets and open spaces. Dedi had no idea where he was. He began to fear that in their strange zigzagging flight they had traced an arcane symbol which had dropped them all into a maze leading to the anteroom of the underworld. Then they crossed the Mese in a band of moonlight and Dedi would have breathed a sigh of relief if his burning lungs had allowed it.
They plunged down toward the Harbor of Julian. Were they bearing whatever they had stolen to a waiting ship? Why would evil spirits do that when they could simply take to the skies, or sink down into the earth? But instead of continuing to the docks they ran along the periphery of the harbor in the direction of the Hippodrome and the Great Palace. The moon threw a shaft of icy light across the basalt sea. Dedi raced on until his legs began to cramp, but the moon remained always at his one shoulder and the reflection at the other so he seemed to be churning along in place, as in a nightmare.
As they came into sight of the curved end of the Hippodrome one of the creatures suddenly vanished. They had run into a pool of shadow but only a single one emerged, the other having apparently dissolved into the darkness from where it had come. Or, perhaps, cut abruptly into an alley.
Dedi forced his legs to move faster, determined not to lose the remaining demon, the one that was carrying whatever had been pilfered from the church.
He was not surprised when, at last, the creature ended its flight by slipping through a side door into a mansion Dedi recognized as belonging to General Belisarius and his wife Antonina. The magician had entertained there so often he knew many of the staff by name. He knew that the fortress-like granite exterior, adorned only by a wide marble staircase, concealed an interior as luxurious as that of the Great Palace.
He remembered too how uneasy Antonina made him. Her stare seemed to penetrate his heart, making him shiver with fear. It was not merely that she was ruthless, she was also widely rumored to practice magick, and not the harmless kind Dedi performed. Antonina’s magick was malignant and self-serving. Thus had Belisarius been assisted in his rise to generalship, or so it was claimed by chattering courtiers.