Josephine leaned out over the gunwale and cupped up some water in her clawed hand. She leaned forward and splashed it across Crawford’s forehead.
Crawford blinked at her in irritable puzzlement for a moment, then smiled. “I said in Rome that I might want that sometime, didn’t I? Thank you.”
He dipped his own hand in the water and rubbed his wet hand across her forehead too, vertically and horizontally.
Now baptized, they turned to look anxiously back toward the Piazza San Marco.
CHAPTER 26
Nothing is sure but that which is uncertain,
What’s evident to all is most obscure;
Only when snared in doubts can I be sure.
Only to enigmas, never to Logic’s lure,
Knowledge surrenders, and draws back her curtain …
—François Villon,
“Ballade for the Contest at Blois,”
the W. Ashbless translation
The gondolier sighed theatrically and waved one imploring hand to heaven, but he obediently swung the gondola into a wide curve, back the way they’d come, probably because they were closer to the Piazza than to the Lido, and he’d be rid of these mad people sooner.
Crawford’s mouth opened again. “They might just arrest both of you at the mooring stairs.” Crawford massaged his throat and wished Byron wouldn’t speak so harshly. “If we see soldiers near the stairs we’ll go on by, and let me off somewhere else.”
Josephine had been staring at him with desperate hope. “What is it you’re going to do?” she asked now.
“I’m going to undo—try to undo—the link between the species.”
“How?”
“I don’t know, precisely.” He rapped one knuckle against his head. “Byron—the Graiae are still awake, but right now they’re blind. What does that mean? It means that, unless the Austrians keep a steady flow of blood running in the Piazza, my friend Carlo has lost his livelihood as the premier coin-lagger in Venice. He’ll be unable now even to toss a penny reliably through an open window from three paces—and if he can, there’s no way anyone will be able to predict with any certainty where it will land—and it won’t even still be the same penny in any sense that makes sense. The field the Graiae are projecting right now is one of indeterminacy and imprecision. I wish Shelley had lived to see it, he did so love disorder.”
It was clear from the tone Byron put into Crawford’s voice that Byron did not love disorder.
“Did your Armenian priests tell you how quickly the whole field changed, once the radiating heart of it is altered? It changes instantaneously, Aickman—or, as the fathers insisted on putting it, at the speed of light. But they told me that it’s like St. Elmo’s Fire, or the electricity stored in a roomful of Leyden jars: it’s not a current, it’s a static field, and so there will probably be patches where the old field is still standing—leaky, but still standing—though such … high spots … will probably have faded out and conformed with the predominant field within a day or so.”
Crawford nodded. “Unless they get the eye back, or keep drenching the pavement with blood. Can you find Carlo? If he’s still alive. He won’t have moved—until tonight this was coin-lagger heaven.”
Crawford watched the lights of the Piazza drawing closer. The Graiae columns seemed slightly flexed, and the Doge’s Palace was a motionless but unpredictable beast crouching on a thousand stone legs.
He dug into Josephine’s bag and pulled out one of her blouses. “This looks nothing like the shirt I was wearing earlier,” he observed, pulling it on. He smiled at her tiredly. “I don’t suppose there are any shoes in here?”
She shook her head. “Your last pair you lost in the canal.”
“Huh.” He pulled out a blue shirt of his own and, with some effort, tore off the sleeves and drew them over his feet. The cuffs flapped loosely a few inches in front of his toes, so he unlaced a couple of ribbons from one of Teresa’s dresses and bound up the loose sleeve-ends with them, lacing the ribbons up around his insteps and ankles and then tying them off low on his shins. “There,” he said. “They may be looking for someone who has shed his shoes.”
Josephine shook her head doubtfully. The gondolier was making the sign of the cross.
“I think,” Crawford said, “that there will be one main pocket of the old, determinate field still standing; it’ll be near the Piazza and the Ducal Palace, and it’ll be where Werner is being kept. He’ll have made sure he’s living in the equivalent of a Leyden jar.”
A boat was approaching them, and belatedly he noticed the guns in the hands of the men aboard it—these were the Austrian soldiers who had shot to pieces his hijacked gondola only half an hour ago.
He tensed, ready to tell his gondolier to angle away from the boat, then realized that there was no possibility of eluding the Austrians. Instead he gaped at them as they drew near, and nudged Josephine and said, “Look, dear—those men have guns!”
“Gracious!“ Josephine exclaimed.
The Austrians stared at them, but rowed on past to look at other gondolas.
Crawford relaxed, one muscle at a time. “I guess they’re not looking for a couple, especially two people on their way in.” He took several deep breaths.
“Anyway, Byron, if your friend Carlo can’t help us find the field, and if we can’t manage to … undo Werner, Werner will probably have his Austrians put the Graiae back to sleep before his determinacy pocket bleeds away, and then he’ll be at least no worse off than he was before he came south from Switzerland. And then he can set his people searching for the eye.”
He had paused for only a moment when Byron took his throat again. “Who cares about this Werner?”
The gondolier swung the craft’s stern out to port and then leaned on the oar to push the gondola forward into an empty space between the lean hulls of two others.
Crawford stuffed into Josephine’s bag the balled-up shirt that contained Shelley’s heart and the Graiae’s eye. “Don’t lose that,” he told her, handing it to her and standing up.
“Werner,” he said quietly as the gondolier hopped out and began looping lines around the mooring poles, “constitutes the link between the two species, human and nephelim. Eight hundred years ago he revived the nephelim, who at that time had been dormant for thousands of years, by having one of them—a little, petrified statue—surgically sewn into his abdomen. And the two of them, one being contained inside the other, now constitute the overlap between the two forms of life on Earth—the overlap that keeps the nephelim species revived, and able to prey on humans.”
He started to step out of the boat, but Josephine caught his arm. “I’m coming with you,” she said. “Look at the square—obviously they haven’t spilled a lot of blood there. They have no eye.” Her own glass eye was staring into the sky, though her human eye stared intensely at Crawford.
“Not yet,” Crawford told her, “but they might do it at any moment. If—.He’s right,” Byron interrupted. “Go back to the Lido and wait for us.”