The Drawing of the Dark

'Yes, Mr Duffy?' said the stable boy when he'd delivered a plate and made his way to the table.

'You've been bringing food to old Vogel? Epiphany's father?'

'I did for a few days, but he scares me. He kept calling me by the wrong name and telling me to get liquor for him,'

'You don't mean you just stopped? Holy

'No no!' the boy said hastily. 'I got Marko to do it. He's not scared of crazy old men.'

'Marko? Is he the kid with the red boots?'

'Yes, sir,' assented Shrub, obviously impressed by the idea of red boots.

'Very well. Uh, carry on.'

Perhaps as an apology for her shortness with him earlier, Anna had the new girl carry out to Duffy a capacious bowl of the stew, and he laid into it manfully, washing it down with liberal draughts of cool Herzwesten Light. At last he laid down his spoon and struggled to his feet; he looked around the room, but there was no one in the scared-eyed crowd he knew to say good-bye to, so he just lurched to the front door and out into the street.

To the plodding Irishman the whole outdoors seemed far too bright - though gray clouds hid the sky and made a diffused glow of the sun - and the breeze was too cold, and the yells of the ragged children were unbearably loud. How many hours of sleep did you get last night, Duff? he asked himself. Well, I don't know, but it was something less than adequate for a tired middle-aged soldier with a primordial king riding on his shoulders like the Old Man of the Sea.ong 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.