From beyond the narrow windows Crawford could hear voices, and the splashing of an oar in the water of the canal.
“You’ve got guns,” Crawford said.
“We couldn’t have got in here if we didn’t,” the man said impatiently. “Guns weren’t working when the sisters were blind this evening. The Austrians found that out and then tossed theirs aside. We saved ours.”
“Can you at least shoot up the lock on this door?”
“We may not even be able to do that,” said the Carbonari. “The blood on the pavement is drying and cooling, and if the sisters lose their blood-eye the iron won’t spark the flint.”
But a moment later he had beckoned three of his followers forward and given them orders, and each of the four men aimed a pistol at the latch. One after another they fired at it, the four detonations lighting the hall in livid yellow flashes and battering at the windows.
And a second later the pair of windows nearest to Crawford exploded inward in a spray of glass, and as a mattress of hot, compressed air flung him into the far wall, and as he rebounded onto his back on the floor, he dimly heard the echoes of a cannon shot batting away between the buildings along the canal outside.
Two of the Carbonari were lifting him up—they had all been crouching below the windowsills, but several were bleeding freely now from glass cuts—and their leader was staring at him angrily. Crawford’s ears were ringing loudly, and he could hardly hear the man say, “Are you hit?”
Crawford weakly brushed splinters of glass off his shoulders. “Uh … apparently not,” he said, speaking loudly to be able to hear himself. “I was to the side.”
“Do you think you can kill him?” the Carbonari leader demanded.
Blood was running from Crawford’s nose, and he wasn’t at all sure he would even be able to stand unaided. “Yes,” he mumbled through chipped teeth.
“And is this woman … helping you? Sincerely?”
“Yes,” Crawford said.
The man visibly made a decision. “Very well.” He handed Crawford an unfired pistol and then pulled a long, narrow knife from his belt and slapped the grip into Josephine’s hand.
“We will hold them off,” he said, “for as long as we can.” He tossed his spent gun to one of his men, who caught it and threw a fresh one to him, and then he went to the window and pointed the gun down toward the canal.
He pulled the trigger, and the hammer snapped down, spilling powder, but there was no detonation.
“The blood has cooled,” the Carbonari leader said, tucking the useless gun into his belt. “That cannon shot was the last shot there will be in this area until they spill more blood. We have knives, and can use them—but do be quick.”
He gathered his men with a gesture, and Crawford sat down hard when the two men released him and went loping away down the hall with their fellows.
Josephine rushed to him and helped him stand, but for a moment he forgot the door ahead, and simply stared at the wall across from the devastated windows.
The wood panelling was peppered with shot pellets in vertical patterns—but not in two lines, as he would have expected from the fact that the blast of shot had come in through two windows. Instead there was a series of vertical strips of splintering, and the strips were widest in the center of the pattern and narrower and fainter toward the edges. It was a wave pattern, similar to the ones he had often seen in the water between a long ship and a long dock.
He knew instinctively that this was a consequence of the indeterminacy field that the Graiae, blind again, were projecting; and he knew too that it meant that von Aargau’s pocket of determinacy, his individual Leyden jar, had lost a good deal of its potency, perhaps all of it. If Carlo had been here tossing his coins now, they’d still be disappearing.
Josephine had been cutting her skirt hem into long strips, and now she knotted a couple of them tightly around his ribs, over his sword cut.
“Can’t have you bleeding to death,” she muttered when she had cinched the knots.
“Not yet, anyway,” Crawford said.
Leaning on Josephine, he reeled to the door the Carbonari had shot at. The latch had been shattered and the wood around it was splintered away and the bolt broken, and the door swung open at his first tentative push.
CHAPTER 27
What rites are these? Breeds earth more monsters yet?
Antaeus scarce is cold: what can beget
This store?—and stay! such contraries upon her?
Is earth so fruitful of her own dishonor?
—Ben Jonson,
“Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue”
A narrower hall doglegged away beyond the door, its brick walls dimly illuminated by lamplight from around the corner. Crawford was staring blankly, so Josephine took his hand and pulled him forward; he took a step to keep from falling, and then the two of them were shambling down the little hall.
Crawford’s nose was still steadily dripping blood onto the front of the blouse of Josephine’s that he was wearing, and he was leaving the red track of one bare foot on the stones of the floor. His arms were too tired to hold the sword and gun extended, but he thought he could raise them if he had to, and he was pleased with his hands for being able to stay clamped on the grips.
Josephine had tucked the knife into the waistband of Teresa’s skirt, and was holding the leather bag in front of herself with both hands. Crawford thought it was a good idea, but he wondered what would happen if a sword or a pistol ball should strike the heart.
They shuffled around the corner—a lamp burned in a niche in the wall, and Crawford could see that the floor was carpeted ahead, and the walls panelled in dark wood. The hall made another turn a few yards beyond that point, and the light from around that corner was brighter.
Crawford was dully surprised to realize that the only emotion he felt was anticipation of the softness of the carpeting under his bare feet.
They reached it and turned the corner, and then for a moment they both paused, swaying.
An open doorway stood only a few paces ahead, and the room beyond it was wide. Crawford could see a lot of elegantly dressed men standing on the marble floor, though none of them moved or was speaking.
“There’s nowhere else to go,” Josephine whispered.
He nodded, and they walked forward.
The room was vast and high-ceilinged, and brightly lit by candles in crystal chandeliers high overhead. The two dozen men in the room were all staring blankly at the walls, as if drugged or listening intently for something.
They’re all brothers, he thought—and then he realized that the features they all shared were those of the young Werner von Aargau whose stab-wound he had sewn up in Venice six years earlier, and for whom he had subsequently worked.
“Good evening, Werner,” Crawford said loudly.
The men all turned toward him—and a moment later he swore in panic and stepped back, and Josephine had dropped the bag and convulsively drawn her knife.
The men’s bodies were changing.
One man’s head was stretching away toward the ceiling like a pulled piece of dough—the tongue emerged, seemed to try to speak for a moment, and then rapidly lengthened for yards like a long, weightless snake and commenced busily curling around the elongating head; another’s eyes had by now swelled so grossly that the head was just a toothy bump behind the two gleaming, staring globes; a third had one giant horny plate like a toenail growing out of its shirt collar, concealing the mouth, and then the nose, and finally the eyes of the face.