The Drawing of the Dark

He nodded. 'Biting, Anna, very biting. Rest assured I'm cut to the quick. Where will I find him?'

'Hell, I'm sorry. In the old chapel, probably. He spends a lot of time in there, doing all kinds of peculiar things with weights and pendulums and little tops like the ones Jewish children play with. And any time there's a bit of sun he'll be waving a little mirror out one of the windows. Like he was signalling, you know, but it's a windowless, high-walled court out there - the only ones who could see the flashes would be birds overhead.'

'That's the sort of thing these magicians like to do,' Duffy told her. 'See you later.'

The long hail to the western side of the inn was just as dark at mid-day as at night, and it took Duffy several minutes to grope his way through its length of varying height, width and flooring all the way to the two tall doors of the chapel. He had been hearing voices for the last hundred feet, and now saw that one of the iron doors was ajar.

Though he couldn't hear distinct words, there was something in the tone of the voices that made him cover the last few yards silently, his hand dropping to loosen his dagger in its scabbard. The same piles of boxes and stacked mops obstructed the doorway, and he carefully sneaked around the side so that he could peer into the

chapel from between two inverted metal mop buckets set atop a stack of ancient carpet rolls.

Though the light through the stained glass windows was gray and dim, Duffy's long grope through the dark hail had made his eyes sensitive to the slightest illumination. The tableau he saw at the altar looked, he thought, like the frontispiece of a treatise on some League of Outlandish Nations; of the six - no, seven - men confronting Aurelianus, two were blacks (one in feathers, the other in a long robe and a burnoose), one was the copper-skinned, leather-clad savage Duffy remembered seeing about the place five months ago, another seemed to come from the same far isles as had Antoku Ten-no, and the other three were apparently Europeans, though one was a midget.

'You've asked this before,' Aurelianus was saying with perhaps exaggerated patience, 'and I've answered before.'

The midget spoke up. 'You misunderstand, sir. We aren't asking any longer.'

Duffy softly drew his dagger.

'You'd take it by force?' Aurelianus was grinning. 'Ho! You're children with sticks coming to rescue a favorite lamb from a hungry lion.'

The black man in desert garb stepped forward. 'Two things, Ambrosius, are unarguably true. First, your power is severely circumscribed by the proximity of your inimical peer, Ibrahim, while our powers, though initially less, have remained undiminished - you are on nearly an equal footing with us now, and I don't think you could overcome all seven of us if we were to work together.'

'Were those both true things,' Aurelianus asked politely, 'or was it just one?'

'That was one. The second is this: Ibrahim will have this city, and he'll have it long before the thirty-first. The walls are tottering already, and there are fifty thousand fanatic Janissaries out on the plain waiting for a gap to run

in through. There's no way on earth this brewery will last these two weeks until All Hallows' Eve. Ibrahim will be in here in half that time, and he'll poison the Mac Cool vat, or more likely just blow it to splinters and vapor with a bomb. Do you understand? What you hoped to accomplish with the Dark is simply impossible.'

'I'm being a dog in the manger, you're saying.'

'Precisely. You would preserve the Dark beer untouched - which only means that Ibrahim will be able to destroy every last drop of it, thus insuring that it will never do anyone any good. On the other hand, if you sell some of it to us - at a fabulously high price, never fear!

- it will have served a purpose, two purposes, actually: it will have saved our lives; and out of gratitude we will help you and your King to escape from this doomed city. For though the Dark, if drawn now, would not have quite attained its full empire-redeeming strength, you know it would certainly be powerful enough to restore and rejuvenate a few old men.'

'What makes you think escape is possible for anyone?' Aurelianus asked. 'The Turks surround the city completely, you know.'

The midget spoke up again. 'You're not dealing exclusively with foreigners. Ambrosius. You and I both know half-a-dozen subterranean routes out of Vienna - one of them,' he added, nodding at the altar, 'accessible from this very room.'

Aurelianus stepped up onto the dais around the marble altar, giving the seven men the look of supplicants. 'The battle being fought here,' he said, 'is not the concern of any of you, for you have all dispensed with whatever allegiances you may once have had to East or West. My counsel to you is that you flee, by any of the routes your colleague here knows of - and bring water or wine to quench your thirst, for you won't have a drop of the Dark.'

'Very well,' said the black man in the burnoose, 'you force us to -'Don't talk, old man,' Aurelianus interrupted. 'Show me. Come up here.' He stepped back and spread his arms wide, and Duffy, peering from his hiding place, thought he could see the old sorcerer's hands flickering almost imperceptibly; like a mirage. The seven Dark Birds hesitated. Contempt put a sneer in the wizard's voice as he went on: 'Come up here, you children-playing-at-magic! Try your little spells and cantrips against the Western Magic that was growing in the roots of Britain's dark forests ten thousand years before Christ, the magic at the heart of storms and tides and seasons! Come up to me! Who is it I shall face?' He threw back his black hood. 'You know who I am.'

Duffy was actually brushed with tingling awe, for the gray light seemed to make ancient, weather-chiselled granite out of the face that looked down on them all. This is Merlin, the Irishman reminded himself, the last prince of the Old Power, the figure that runs obscurely like an incongruous thread through the age-dimmed tapestry of British pre-history.

The sorcerer reached out a hand - it wavered, as if seen under agitated water - and seemed to grab an invisible loop or handle, and pulled. The black man stumbled forward involuntarily. Aurelianus stretched forth the other hand toward the midget, whose hair Duffy saw twitch and stiffen at a straight-out angle; the wizard closed the fingers of that hand and the little man yelped in pain. 'I'm going to show you another way to leave Vienna,' Aurelianus said softly.

Then all seven of the Dark Birds were running for the doors, the two held ones having wrenched themselves out of Aurelianus' magical grip. Duffy scarcely had time to scuttle around to the other side of the carpet stack before they rushed past him and were sandal-slapping away down the hall.

He looked back at the altar, and saw Aurelianus staring at him. 'You appear out of a carpet, like Cleopatra,' the old wizard observed.

Duffy stood up and walked to the communion rail. 'I see Antoku wasn't the only one to get demanding,' he said. 'I'm glad I didn't ask for permission before snitching my sip of it.'

Aurelianus cocked an eyebrow at him. 'The Dark? You tasted it? When?'

'Easter night.'

The wizard frowned, then shook his head. Well, you wouldn't have been able to turn the tap if they didn't want you to have any.' He looked intently at Duffy. 'Tell me - how was it?'