Ten for Dying

Chapter Fifteen

Dedi, desecrater of Theodora’s tomb, lurked in night shadows, watching the mansion across the street with growing impatience.

During his pursuit he would have been happy to stand still, as he had now been doing hour after hour. With his short legs it had taken all his strength to keep the fleet-footed, demonic creatures in sight.

His first thought when he saw them burst from the Church of the Holy Apostles was that the spells intended to bring Theodora back to life had gone awry and called forth two monsters from the depths instead. But if so, what were they carrying away from the church?

On impulse, he decided to pursue them. At the back of the church grounds they cut behind a looming cliff of inky buildings and raced downhill to where the Valens Aqueduct emerged from the hillside to span the valley there. They kept to the base of the aqueduct, gliding in and out of the thick shadows cast by archways in the moonlight. For an instant Dedi would see two ghostly, silvered shapes, then they would vanish into utter blackness, only to reappear as if by magick. So he ran after two flickering phantoms, until they veered off into labyrinthine alleyways.

Dedi’s snaggle-toothed mouth worked like a bellows as he sucked in the thick unwholesome atmosphere of the city night. There was a devilish air about him. He had always been able to make Theodora laugh. Perhaps his call had not gone unheeded. The empress may have heard it while chatting with the two loping creatures in front of him. “Go and see what Dedi wants,” she might have ordered.

Luckily their route continued to descend, which made running easier, or Dedi would have lost them. They avoided the main streets and open spaces. Dedi had no idea where he was. He began to fear that in their strange zigzagging flight they had traced an arcane symbol which had dropped them all into a maze leading to the anteroom of the underworld. Then they crossed the Mese in a band of moonlight and Dedi would have breathed a sigh of relief if his burning lungs had allowed it.

They plunged down toward the Harbor of Julian. Were they bearing whatever they had stolen to a waiting ship? Why would evil spirits do that when they could simply take to the skies, or sink down into the earth? But instead of continuing to the docks they ran along the periphery of the harbor in the direction of the Hippodrome and the Great Palace. The moon threw a shaft of icy light across the basalt sea. Dedi raced on until his legs began to cramp, but the moon remained always at his one shoulder and the reflection at the other so he seemed to be churning along in place, as in a nightmare.

As they came into sight of the curved end of the Hippodrome one of the creatures suddenly vanished. They had run into a pool of shadow but only a single one emerged, the other having apparently dissolved into the darkness from where it had come. Or, perhaps, cut abruptly into an alley.

Dedi forced his legs to move faster, determined not to lose the remaining demon, the one that was carrying whatever had been pilfered from the church.

He was not surprised when, at last, the creature ended its flight by slipping through a side door into a mansion Dedi recognized as belonging to General Belisarius and his wife Antonina. The magician had entertained there so often he knew many of the staff by name. He knew that the fortress-like granite exterior, adorned only by a wide marble staircase, concealed an interior as luxurious as that of the Great Palace.

He remembered too how uneasy Antonina made him. Her stare seemed to penetrate his heart, making him shiver with fear. It was not merely that she was ruthless, she was also widely rumored to practice magick, and not the harmless kind Dedi performed. Antonina’s magick was malignant and self-serving. Thus had Belisarius been assisted in his rise to generalship, or so it was claimed by chattering courtiers.

Could Antonina be involved in the theft from the church?

He would rather wrestle with a denizen of hell than be caught looking at her askance. Suddenly he felt a presence at his back. Something infinitely cold with menace. He staggered around, heart leaping, but there was nothing to see except the icy moon hanging high up in the sky, beyond the grasp of the countless crosses reaching up from the rooftops of the Christian capital.

Nevertheless, he fled, peering this way and that, fearful of being observed.

Dawn and a nap had cleared away the black cobwebs of Dedi’s fears. Having been frustrated in his attempts to revive his employer, he began to consider other schemes. It hadn’t taken long to discover that the object clutched by the demon had been the shroud of the Virgin. News spread fast. Half the city had probably learned about the theft while Dedi pursued the perpetrators. Both Justinian and the church would be grateful if he were able to restore the relic to its rightful place. Could he steal it back?

He wasn’t certain what he might learn, but he would soon be out on the streets and idle anyway.

So now a shriveled face peered out from behind a statue of Virgil. Although looted from Rome, the statue was not, in truth, a very good example of classical art, barely good enough to fill one of the many niches needing residents in the nether walls of the Hippodrome. Dedi had no interest in either sculpture or poetry, but only in the concealment offered by Virgil’s voluminous marble toga.

Invisible though he was from the street and the mansion, his terror returned. However, his fear of demonic forces and Antonina were outweighed by his fear for his future. He might have taken consolation in being free of Theodora’s whims, for nobody could have shielded him from her wrath if he had offended her, even if the offense arose, as a storm on the Sea of Marmara, for no other reason than that she was bored. But the fact was, with Theodora gone, he no longer had a place at court.

The empress had delighted in his magick. Dedi’s talking, human-headed snake might be an obvious fraud, but its often obscene repartee always made the empress laugh. Not that her laughter was a pleasant sound. Thus did the jackal cough over the dead and crows croak over their carrion. Still, coaxing that hellish noise out of her earned him a comfortable place to live, and the jingle of coins in his purse pleased him.

“Send for Dedi of Egypt,” Theodora would order, and he had never failed to make her scimitar smile appear.

It didn’t hurt that his shrunken stature almost qualified him as one of the dwarfs on which she doted. He puffed out his sunken chest with pride at the recollection. His elation did not last long. For she and her scarlet smile were gone forever and he had made enemies who sneered at him and whispered of unholy practices as he passed by in the frescoed halls of the Great Palace. And it was true, not all of his tricks were as patently fraudulent as the talking snake. Ironically, the courtiers were afraid of him. Afraid his magick would do them harm. But now, without Theodora’s protection, his reputation was going to harm him.

During his solitary hours behind Virgil’s toga, Dedi had reached a frightening conclusion. The desecration of the mausoleum was sure to be identified as his handiwork and by extension he would be accused of stealing the sacred icon on the same night.

Dedi wished he hadn’t forgotten the Egyptian talisman in his panic. Still, he could never have caught all the frogs, and they were equally damning. It was unfair. He had only wanted to bring Theodora back from the halls of the dead, or at least within earshot of the emperor. Who could fault him for that? He had nothing to do with the theft of the holy relic. The Christians did not understand that the magick he practiced was not the same as their magick. What use would their holy charm have been to an Egyptian magician?

Except now he desperately needed it to save his own ugly little head.

And how did he plan to regain the shroud of the Virgin? It was one thing to trick the empress into laughing and quite another to do battle with forces of evil. Would the malign spirits he needed to overcome be as powerful as Shezmu, slaughterer of wicked souls in the underworld? He recalled tales he and his childhood friends had used to scare each other. Shezmu employed a press and the heads of such souls to make wine for the virtuous dead.

Movement at the side of the mansion caught his attention. A figure emerged from the side door, just visible in the light from an open window, and slunk away.

Things were becoming clearer. But what, exactly, was he going to do now he knew the demon had disguised itself as Antonina’s servant Tychon?