“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... ?”