“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.”