“Carefully now,” he said tightly. “Here it comes.”
He began lifting.
“Hemorrhage, Doctor,” said Josephine urgently.
Crawford had been blinking sweat out of his eyes and staring at the statue’s head; now he looked down and saw that purple venous blood was flowing in strong spurts from under his probing hand.
Werner’s gasps sounded like weak laughter now.
“Get your hand in under mine,” Crawford told Josephine, “and push against the area of the bleeding.”
Crawford kept his own hand behind the statue’s head as Josephine’s blood-slick fingers wormed in under his knuckles. For a moment he was afraid that the stretching of the incision might cause more bleeding from somewhere else, but Josephine was skilled at her job—her hand moved quickly but carefully, probing and testing the tension of the tissues, and in seconds the bleeding had slowed.
“Good,” Crawford said between clenched teeth. “We’ll have to sew that up soon, or tie it off or something, but that’s good for now.”
He began lifting the stone head.
The statue flexed, making its stone substance squeal in stress. It was resisting him, trying to tense itself wider and stay in the fleshy nest it had occupied for eight hundred years.
“The tissues are too tight,” said Josephine quickly, “something’ll tear if it keeps that up.” She glanced up at Crawford and gave him a haggard smile. “The mother’s life is definitely endangered.”
Crawford instinctively winced, for in childbirths that sentence generally meant that the baby would have to be sacrificed, killed and brought piecemeal out of the womb.
The statue had had to soften its substance to move, but nevertheless Crawford could see cracks, filled with Werner’s blood, where its stony substance had given way.
One stretched across the thing’s neck, and he inserted the point of his blade into it, and pushed.
The thing stopped moving. He pushed harder, and felt the knife blade slide a little farther into the stone as it extended the crack.
The statue blinked at him from its upside-down face, and its mouth opened and, in a bird-shrill voice, said something rapidly in German.
Crawford hadn’t caught what it had said, and he passionately didn’t want to hear what the thing might say; he pushed harder, ignoring Werner’s screams and the pain in his own left hand, wedged under the statue’s head—
—And the tip of the knife blade broke off. Crawford managed to yank his hand back before the jagged end of the knife could do more than slightly nick the exposed peritoneum.
The statue was frozen now with the eisener breche in its throat. Its mouth was still open.
Crawford put down the broken knife and resumed pulling at the stone head. He tried to hold Werner’s incised tissues apart with his free hand.
The old man had fainted, but he was still breathing, and Crawford knew that if his pulse had begun to weaken Josephine would have told him.
He could feel his own strength failing, so he cursed and braced himself, and then gave the statue one very strong tug—and a moment later he fell over backward onto the floor with the horrible thing in his arms.
The room shook ponderously, and the chandeliers were swinging, and he could hear a roaring from outside the building as the city of Venice rocked in the grip of an earthquake.
Josephine had fallen too, and her eyes were clenched shut in pain and she was pressing her bloody forearms across herself. Crawford guessed that the nephelim twin was dying inside her.
He rolled the statue away and, after an anxious glance at the ceiling, he leaped back to his patient.
The broken vein had started spurting again when Josephine had fallen, but he found it and pinched it off. Werner’s breathing was fast but regular and deep, and Crawford let himself relax for a moment with his left hand inside the ancient man’s abdomen.
Josephine slowly sat up, opening her arms cautiously, as if too fast a move might bring the pain back.
With his free hand Crawford had now begun mopping blood away from the edges of Werner’s gaping wound, but he took a moment to glance at Josephine. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“I … think so,” she said, resuming her place beside him.
“Be ready with the sutures,” he said, and Josephine picked up one of the long strings into which they’d torn the ribbons from his ankles.
He took it from her and, after cutting the vein free of the surrounding flesh with the edge of his broken knife blade, he one-handedly tied the ruptured vein off between where it was split and where his left thumb and forefinger were squeezing it shut.
He let his cramping fingers relax—the vein bulged against the knot of ribbon, but nothing broke. If blood was leaking through the constriction of the knot, it was doing it very slowly.
He turned his attention to closing up the incision.
“Josephine,” he said thoughtfully, handing her the truncated knife, “do you think you could break the heel off one of your shoes, and then use the edge of this knife to pry one of the nails free?”
Josephine looked at her shoe, then at the knife. “Yes.”
Within a minute she had handed him a nail, and he went to work.
His attention hanging agonizedly on each inhalation and exhalation of the old man, Crawford carefully used the point of the cobbler’s nail to poke holes into the edges of the cut tissues—then he took one of the ribbon-strips from Josephine, sucked the end of it to stiffen it, and began lacing up the deepest incision.
After a long minute of the delicate work he drew each successive inch of it tight, so that the incision in the peritoneum had been drawn closed, and nothing gave way.
He breathed a sigh and held out his hand for another piece of ribbon.
When they had stitched up the muscle layer and finally the skin, Werner was still breathing, though he hadn’t recovered consciousness. Blood was seeping from the incision, but not at an alarming rate.
Crawford stood up, his scalp itching with awareness of the ceiling stones six yards over their heads. He crouched by the blood-smeared statue, got his hands under it, and then made himself straighten his legs and stand, though the effort darkened his vision and started his nose bleeding again. “Out,” he gasped. “Quickly, the way we came.”
Josephine snatched up the leather bag, and they reeled and limped toward the door that led to the wide hall.
The statue just fit through one of the narrow windows that had had the glass blown out of it by the Austrian cannon. Not trusting his own battered ears, Crawford wouldn’t move on until Josephine assured him several times that she had heard it splash into the canal below.
At last he nodded, took her hand, and started toward the stairs.
Figures were running back and forth across the square, and twice Crawford heard the boom of gunfire echo back from the lacy pillared wall of the Doge’s Palace, but no one approached them until they had limped and shuffled past the massively tall but inert Graiae columns and had started toward the stairs and the gondolas.
A man stepped out of one of the shadowed arches of the palace and held up his hand. Crawford raised his sword and his still unfired pistol.
“I’m Carbonari,” the man said quickly, and when Crawford made his eyes focus he recognized the bearded face. It was the leader of the group of Carbonari they had met in the hall upstairs.
“There’s a boat to take you to the Lido,” the man said, speaking quietly and quickly, “in the little canal below the Drunkenness of Noah.” He stepped behind Crawford and Josephine and began pushing them along by their elbows.