the room, pushing Muller aside, seizing the Holy Mother, and rushing for the door. It would be easy, but his feet would not move. The burned man watched him. There was no judgment there, and no assistance. Ioannes’ words came back to Matthew. The work’s power was too strong, it bent intentions. Why had he come to this house? Remember. To save a life. Not for the icon, but to try to save a life.
The towel had come off somewhere, and his right hand bled freely from the bullet hole in his palm. Matthew ignored it, bent low to the dusty carpet to suck in a last breath of smokeless air, then proceeded to haul his struggling godfather onto his shoulder.
“What are you doing?” raged the Snake.
Legs shaking with the effort, Matthew rose to his feet, his head immediately shrouded in mist. Weak fists pounded on his back, old legs kicked the air.
“No, no, not me, boy. The Mother. Save the Mother.”
Matthew shuffled out of the room without a backward glance. Fire had reached the back of the second floor, and the visibility was very poor. He found the railing without going over it, and slid along to the top of the front staircase. Whoever and whatever waited below could not be worse than the conditions upstairs had become. Fotis was frantic.
“You fool. Go back for the Mother. What do you think you are doing?”
Choosing the living, thought Matthew as he started down.
Andreas had traveled over great time and distance before the girl awakened him. Some places he did not know, others he remembered well. The crypt beneath the church, and the child Mikalis, staring at him with the eyes of an old man. Pretty Glykeria smiling as they passed on the village street. Young boys mixing clay and straw with their feet, to make the bricks that would rebuild their burned homes. The balcony of his old apartment, with Maria, young and dark-haired, and Alekos playing with toy soldiers at their feet, the sweet resiny smell of a summer dusk in Athens. He went back to the hillside chapel again, with Kosta and Ioannes, and he noticed something new this time, something he had to remember for Matthew. He went to Muller’s well-guarded house at dawn; he watched the German’s face as Muller promised there would be no executions. He sat among the old, twisted apple trees in the late morning, eating bread, exhausted by his night’s work, and heard the ordered rattle of twenty rifles. The bread falling from his hands, the knowledge that he had been betrayed. All over again, though less intensely, he felt horror turn to rage, rage to sadness, sadness to resolve. He saw the hasty grave and the wooden cross in the Argentinean countryside, the end of the journey.
The anger was gone. In dreamtime, he could not maintain it. The white-haired specter who had walked into Fotis’ apartment had Muller’s eyes but was otherwise a pale imitation. A tired, desperate old man. Andreas could summon neither hate nor forgiveness; the fellow was simply pathetic. It would be best if he died, but Andreas doubted that he would be the man to kill him. In fact, he had no expectation of seeing the conscious world again until Ana Kessler woke him. And then, how hard it was to return. He had been light as a breath of air in his dreams, able to see and understand events that had been veiled in fear, rage, sorrow, lust the first time through. He had felt himself making the separation from petty concerns. How hard it was to return to the world, to this feeble aching form, to this weak and sluggish mind. Every bruise, every scar and strain, every insult to body and spirit over seventy-nine years was reintroduced to him in the space of a few moments. This brutal accumulation of experience was his life, and it was not done with him yet.
But Matthew’s Ana was beautiful, and beauty was always worth waking up for. Matthew’s Ana, that was what she called herself after he almost took her head off. The cold water on his face was effective, but it had felt cruel to him just then. Something bit at his wrists. He was surprised to be alive. He had no idea where Muller had gone, but it seemed logical that he was in the house, with Matthew, Fotis, and whomever else. Andreas’ will leaped ahead, his body dragged after, and he did not fight the woman when she gave him her shoulder for support.
The sound of the blast deep within the house caused them to stop. They waited a minute before moving, to see what would follow. When nothing did, they again made for the open door, from which smoke had now begun to drift.
To the left was a handsomely furnished living room. Ahead, stairs went up to a corridor already filling with smoke. Smoke was also billowing in from the rear of this lower hall and gathering against the ceiling of all these front rooms. To the right a dark-paneled dining room was gathering smoke fastest, as actual flames spat from a doorway in back. A bloodied figure sat against the far wall, next to the French doors. Ana saw him just as Andreas did.
“Benny.” She rushed toward him.
“Stay down,” Andreas commanded, “stay below the smoke.”
She slipped down and crawled the rest of the way. Very well, let her look to Benny; the stillness of the form told Andreas his friend was dead, but he put the thought aside. He went the opposite way, into the white living room, half walking, half crawling across the flokati rug, as far as the doorway into the study. Black fog filled that room, and there was no sound of activity, only the growing snap and sizzle of flames. Anyone in the rear of the house would be overcome by smoke already, and he was in no condition to help. He returned to the hall, the pungent reek beginning to burn his sinuses. Where was Matthew? His eyes drifted up the stairs. The air would be even worse up there, but there was no place left to search. He might last a few minutes. In any case, he could not face Alekos if he left without Matthew. Ana was now trying to drag Benny across the dining room.
“Ana,” he shouted. “Leave him, get out of the house.”
She seemed not to hear, and he realized that retrieving her would mean losing his chance at the second floor. He trusted in her survival instinct and started up, being careful of his feet, aware of how easy it would be to fall in his current condition. Halfway up, Andreas stopped suddenly as a strange form emerged from the gray mist above. Bent over, moving a careful step at a time. Matthew, with Fotis kicking and raging on his shoulder. The younger man stopped a few steps from his grandfather.
“Papou. Thank God.”
“Keep going, get out of the house.”
“Don’t go up there.”
“No, no. Keep going now.”
“Andreou,” screamed Fotis, red-faced and bulging-eyed, grasping at his old comrade as he passed him. “Get the Mother. Mikalis would want you to save her. The bedroom. The Prince is there.” The rest was lost in a wave of painful coughing, and Matthew moved on down the stairs, one hand bleeding badly.
Andreas looked up into the boiling maelstrom of smoke. Leave it. Let the fire do its work. There was no way out the back. The devil would come down these stairs, or not at all. No sooner had he thought it than another hacking cough sounded from above, and another form emerged from the smoke. Two legs with a square shape above them, white hands gripping the edges. Those eyes that Andreas had not seen in more than fifty years: dark, almond eyes on gold leaf, a maroon cowl of robe, rocking back and forth, moving down toward him, a painting with legs. Only gradually could Muller’s face be glimpsed above the frame, blue eyes squinting, just noticing Andreas below. He stopped, but there was no way to go but forward. The German was nearly paralyzed with coughing, but one hand disappeared into his jacket and reemerged holding a pistol. The blue eyes sized him up coldly. A loud shot rang out, and Andreas flinched.
But the shot had come from behind, not in front, and a large hole had opened in the icon, just above the Mother of God’s eyes. Muller reeled back violently, and fell across the upper landing, swallowed by the smoke, the icon vanishing with him. Andreas turned around to see Ana below, both hands gripping Benny’s.45, eyes wide with disbelief. He looked up again but could make out nothing. Suddenly, his lungs could not pull in air, only heat, and he moved down the stairs with all possible speed. Ana seized him at the bottom, dropping the pistol. Tears streaked her sooty face and her expression was wild.
“Matthew.”
“He is already outside.”
“Benny’s dead.”
