Questions and postings pertaining to the usage of ImageMagick regardless of the interface. This includes the command-line utilities, as well as the C and C++ APIs. Usage questions are like "How do I use ImageMagick to create drop shadows?".
Your two commands should work the same. What version of IM, libpng and what platform are you using? Post an example of a.png and your two d.png results to some place such as dropbox.com and then put the URLs here.
You could add a little -fuzz XX% in case some values are not quite at gray2. But in principle, you commands should work.
Your command -level 0x85% is going to brighten the image, not darken it.