The Black Opera (83 page)

Click
.

“What?”

Pulling the trigger again got the same result.

He looked up from his pistol, only then realising that no shot had been fired from below.

Two or three men waved their arms in urgent talk; Conrad could see that. The noise of a stretta—that, up here, came to him without difficulty—concealed if they shouted. One walked forward.

He stopped at the edge of the black line that crossed the arena floor from the north-west to the south-eastern main entrances.

It took Conrad a long moment to realise that it was a gap in the earth.

A collapsed underground passage?

It must be deep, Conrad realised. They made no attempt to scramble across it. The distance down was deceptive: it might have been ten feet across, or twenty.

None of the Prince's Men below raised a weapon.

Without bothering to aim, Conrad pulled the trigger again.

Click
.

“Signore
Corrado
—” Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily pushed through the bushes and saplings, two tiers above, sounding highly impatient. “—Oh.”

Conrad slowly and painfully stood up, as men from the
Apollon
and Ferdinand's own Rifles began to filter down from the bank of earth above onto the highest tier of seating.

They stared, each of one them.

Conrad kept his eye on the King.

“The black opera, sir,” he said, unnecessarily.

Perhaps
I
just need to say it
.

Ferdinand Bourbon-Sicily gaped like a peasant.

“Don't bother,” Conrad finished, seeing the King about to collect himself and give an order. “I believe I know what else their ‘miracle' is doing, as well as allowing their singers to breathe.”

The brown-haired man stepped carefully down until he stood beside Conrad, gazing down all the tiers.

“…That's a small enough audience. But I suppose they had a smaller one at Tambora. Corrado, what did you say?”

“I know why they stabbed Corazza—Rather than shot him,” Conrad corrected himself soberly.

Ferdinand apparently couldn't take his eyes off the current central figure among the singers on the arena floor—a tenor, singing what Conrad recognised from his brief acquaintance with
Il Reconquista
as the aria of oath-taking by King Ferdinand of Aragon.

The King of the Two Sicilies, at Conrad's elbow, prompted him. “What?”

“They don't want to take the slightest risk of their singers being hurt.”

Conrad held out his flint-lock weapon.

“Try my pistol if you like, sir. I believe that—along with the clear air—they've used the beginning of their opera miracle to make it so that any firearms don't work within this amphitheatre.”

Tullio folded his arms aggressively, staring down the stone tiers.
“Told
you I could hear the bastards singing.”

Conrad found the distant furnace-roar of Vesuvius more terrifying than the blast and eruption outside on the Burning Fields. But the architecture of the amphitheatre produced its effect. As if they sang in his ears, only for him, he heard now, soprano voices in unison.

Flawlessly voicing a chorus that he ought to be hearing in bass or baritone.

“If that chorus is in the same place, we're halfway through Act Four.”

“Better tell his Majesty that.”

Lines deepened at the edges of Ferdinand's eyes. “How long do we have, Corrado?”

“If the scores are identical, we have only twenty minutes to the end.”

Conrad looked away from the tiny figures—none of which was Nora, he could tell at one glance—to see Roberto Capiraso with two soldiers flanking him, all three in the blue and burgundy of Alvarez's Rifles.

“A few minutes difference, perhaps,” Roberto murmured. “If they conduct at that tempo, then the
finale ultimo
will begin in—twelve minutes.”

Tullio rumbled, “They think they've won.”

Conrad narrowed his eyes, taking in the men and women of the Prince, below. They appeared to ignore being interrupted, as much as they ignored the half of the sky now drowned in boiling cloud.

Down on the far front row, he saw the elbow of a violinist lift. A drum let go with swift beats. It should have been inaudible this far off. It was clear enough to make the hairs stand up on his neck.

“They think they'll win because they've succeeded so far.” Ferdinand sounded grim. “It's up to us to see that they go no further.—What's that?”

The odd sunlight, filtered through the ash that still fell outside the Flavian Amphitheatre, meant detail was difficult to make out. “Where?”

“Around the edges of the arena.” Ferdinand sounded disbelieving: Those are men in Colonel Alvarez's uniforms!”

Conrad reached for the small spy-glass as Tullio put it into his hand. Clumsily, he focused the lenses.

Men sat along the edge of the dividing fallen passageway, and at the base of the stone tiers. They had their wrists behind them—
tied
, Conrad thought—and their ankles together in front. What must be Prince's Men paced among their prisoners.

Conrad thought he recognised some of the faces in the Rifles' uniforms. They had come on their off-duty days to listen to rehearsals, and make comment.

Men in dark uniforms sitting, bound, among them were—Conrad turned the focusing wheel—from the Naples police.

“I think we found out what happened to Colonel Alvarez's company.” Conrad passed the spy-glass over to the King. “And Commendatore Mantenucci's men. At a guess, I'd say there are a lot more Prince's Men than we can see.”

“If they could subdue a company of riflemen? Yes! They may be part of the audience.” Ferdinand spoke, telescope shifting as he studied the tiers in turn. “Ah! Adalrico di Galdi. We were right to be suspicious of the man. And there's his son, with him, and—”

Conrad took the glass away, after Ferdinand was silent for a whole minute.

He focused on the audience—all of whose attention was only for the singers—and at last found the hawk-faced and silver-haired Conte di Galdi. And a number of young men with a family resemblance. And—

“That's Enrico Mantenucci!” Conrad said aloud.

He watched the telescope's silent circle of colour and light. Saw the police Commendatore throw back his head and laugh at something a younger di Galdi said—at the same time as he clapped his hands together, applauding the soprano chorus.

“He's not a prisoner.”

Ferdinand sounded stunned. “No, he's not.”

“I don't see Fabrizio Alvarez—wait.” Conrad twisted the brass scope. “Second row of men away from that ditch in the centre of the arena. He's bound hand and foot, like the rest.”

He took the spy-glass away from his eye, and the figures sprang back to become miniatures.

The King's voice sounded low and cold.

“That
will be how Fabrizio's company were taken prisoner. He trusted Enrico.”

Conrad saw the tiny figure of Mantenucci applaud again. Hate washed over him, hot and vomit-smelling.

The King's hands clenched. “And for Fabrizio and his men to be taken by surprise—I'll make a bet that more than one of Commendatore Mantenucci's officers are Prince's Men.”

Ferdinand sucked in a breath, as if the air was impossible to take in, even without the volcano's dust.

“And so Fabrizio and his men are prisoners.”

He didn't say
sacrifices
. His tone implied it.

Tullio fell into place at Conrad's left shoulder; Paolo at his right.

For all her thoughtful tone, Paolo's voice shook. “They must
see
us!”

“Plain as a red-headed whore in church,” Tullio agreed. His gaze studied the amphitheatre's tiers, scraped clean of bushes.

Conrad remembered, as a young man, seeing the few exposed tiers of seating covered in flowering shrubs, and bushes with late fruit hanging from their branches. Even the highest seats had a furry coating of grass. The floor of the arena had been home to swaying thin mountain ash trees, as well as long uncut grass.

Now—even the edges of the pits had been cleared: brick-lined open throats, with ivy and wisteria cut back to ground level.

Tullio glared at the deserted tiers around them. “Why bother to clear this side of the Anfiteatro? Were they expecting more of an audience, maybe?”

“Acoustics,” Conrad guessed.

Isaura nodded.

“Well, it leaves us without any damn cover, guns or not!”

The King of the Two Sicilies gave a regretful smile. His voice held a roughness Conrad had not heard before. “They'll have their victory in minutes. It will only take them as long as it takes to climb this side of the auditorium. They can overpower us without guns.”

Conrad interrupted. “It'll take more than minutes—look at that.”

He pointed at the apparent ditch, running from one end of the arena to the other. Shadows and ash might confuse the eye, but the gap was wide—and deep.

No comprehension dawned on Ferdinand's face.

“The Roman amphitheatres were full of passages and rooms underneath, for the beasts and gladiators,” Conrad said, memories coming fluently from his reading in the secret museum. “This Anfiteatro would have had a whole complex underneath, with quarters for fighters, and cages for animals, and trapdoors and pulleys that raised scenery—”

He waved an arm, that took in the shafts dotting the surface of the arena. A brief fear—that the Prince's Men might have excavated under the Flavian Amphitheatre too—died as he made out how they were choked with creepers and bracken and cacti.

Ferdinand cocked his head, like an inquisitive sparrow, and Conrad thought he glimpsed the boy who had disappointed his father's louche political court by his interest in sciences and antiquities.

“A collapsed passage?”

“I'd guess, the central underground access corridor.” Conrad lifted the spyglass, focusing it on the ditch that was no ditch. “The amphitheatre is bigger, of course, but from one end of the
arena
to the other… is, what, seventy metres? And about forty across. That means that ‘ditch,' the gap—That could be
eight metres
wide at the least. And if it's cleared all the way down, it could go down two storeys.”

He made out sifting sunlight, gleaming on the wall furthest from him, where ancient brickwork went down into the dark. It had been split here and there by volcanic convulsions. Where the roof across it had fallen in, uncounted ages past, the edges were rough with loose dirt. Below sparse vegetation, it went down into stark blackness.

He lowered the scope.

“It goes out through both main entrances, or would do if they weren't blocked by earth. One at each end. It splits the place in two. I'd say the Prince's Men have been using those access stairs, up on the far side—see?” Conrad took a clear breath. “If they want to attack us, they either have to cross that gap, or else circle round and fight through the way we just came in. They won't do that.”

Tullio cocked an eyebrow. “Because they've won?”

“They might
think
they've won.” Conrad felt energy boil in his veins. “They haven't. They—”

Movement behind interrupted him.

Brigida Lorenzani left the scrub and bushes and stepped down from the lip of the earth-bank, with a delicate precision, for all her roundness and short stature. If her cloak and helm were lost, she still had a rag of skirt and the shining steel of a breastplate.

“Are you thinking we'll sing here, Signore Corrado?” She halted beside him, gazing down at the singers of the black opera. She put her hands on her hips, supporting the steel armour, and kept it turned towards the enemy.

Conrad caught Ferdinand's eye.

The King inclined his head.