The Chamber of Ten (11 page)

Volpe cannot allow it. The man’s dark ambitions must be ended before they can blossom any further
.

He glances around Tonetti’s music room, admiring the harp and the lute and the violin upon their stands, but appalled by the ridiculously ornate piano, which is painted in such a way that it appears almost to be dripping gold. The rear wall of the room is a tile mosaic done in the Moorish style, which clashes dreadfully with the paintings in the room’s entryway. Tonetti knows next to nothing about art, but he acquires it with vigor in order to impress other wealthy people. Still, it is a beautiful place, and each of the servants seems both obedient and happy—an unusual combination
.

“How long, then?” Il Conte asks. “Now that you have the book, how long until we move against the Doge?”

“Days,” Volpe says. “It will take me time to master these spells. I only hope that he does not grow brash and attempt to kill me first.”

“He’ll never reach you,” Il Conte says. “You’re too well protected.”

Volpe thinks on this for a few moments, then narrows his eyes. “Are you certain only two of the Ten are his allies?”

Il Conte nods. “As certain as I can be. I believe the others are loyal, and those two—”

“Caiazzo and Soldagna.”

“Caiazzo and Soldagna,” Il Conte repeats, confirming. “They chafe at the bit. The Doge has promised them many things.”

“I have promises to give them as well,” Volpe says
.

He smiles, again caressing the warm leather binding of the book, staring down at its featureless cover
.

“Two days. The day after tomorrow, you and the others will turn on Caiazzo and Soldagna. Kill them in the Chamber. I want to show Aretino the evil fruit borne of his deceptions before he is banished from Venice forever. If the Council would not rebel against it, I would kill him as well, but they would turn on me in an instant, and that, I cannot afford. Without influence, I cannot control the city. Without control, I cannot protect her properly. No, the Council would never stand for me killing the Doge.”

Volpe raises the book and presses his lips against the warm leather, in a gentle kiss
.

“Fortunately, they are not so precious about their fellow Council members.”

Geena blinked against the brightness of the sun, tasting blood on her lips. She felt hands on her arm and allowed herself to be helped up to a sitting position. The water bus swayed at the dock just a few feet away. The
concerned man holding her arm—young, a student maybe—asked her several times if she was all right before she could focus enough to answer.

Her fingers flexed as though searching for the book they had held in the vision that had invaded her mind, spilling over from Nico, she felt sure. Where was he now? In an old mansion near the Rialto Bridge?

Maybe so.

And she had to find him. If these flashes were filling his thoughts constantly, she worried that Nico might well go mad.

If he wasn’t already.

Music played out in the street, a tinny melody that sounded like the sort of thing an organ grinder’s monkey would dance to. Nico blinked, then shook himself and took a deep breath. He glanced around the room and found himself sitting in a chair in a rich man’s kitchen.

Fuck. It had happened again.

“What now?” he asked aloud.

Instinctively his right hand reached out and touched the ancient book, which lay on the iron and glass kitchen table. Plants grew from hanging pots near one of the two tall windows. Some of them were herbs used for cooking, so whoever lived here took their culinary tasks very seriously.

A blink of his eyes and he saw it differently. A ghost-image lay over the whole room like some three-dimensional double-exposure photograph. He had been here before, a very long time ago. The building must have been cut up into luxury apartments, but once upon a time it had been the home of Count Alviso Tonetti. He sat now at a kitchen table in the 21st century, but his eyes
saw Il Conte’s music room as it had looked in the dawning years of the 15th, complete with the garish piano.

The room where Zanco Volpe had received
The Book of the Nameless
from the Frenchman. The very place where he had first opened it and begun to peruse the dark power in its words.

Nico understood now. He had been overcome by the impulse to return here—a safe and private place in which he could delve into the book again, away from prying eyes, and where whatever darkness might slip out of those pages would be easier to control.

He stared at the book. Where had that thought come from? How could darkness escape the pages of a book? No matter how ugly the intentions of its author, it was still nothing more than words on paper. And yet he felt somehow unclean now, as though some invisible stain had settled into his skin that could never be removed.

A tremor went through him. His right hand was stiff and ached with a deep, throbbing pain that he had not noticed immediately. Now he looked down at his hands and found that not all of the stains upon him were invisible. The knuckles of his right hand were swollen and bruised and blood smeared the back of his hand.

What did I do?
he thought. Then he said it aloud, but it came out differently. “What did you do?”

Nico rushed to the window. If he cocked his head just right, he could see the Rialto Bridge. That tinny music came from the throng in the marketplace that ran alongside the canal. Tourists milled amongst carts laden with leather goods, T-shirts, pocketbooks, jewelry, and a million so-called souvenirs. On the canal, gondoliers shouted good-naturedly at one another as they poled their slim vessels through the sludgy water.

If the back of the building had that kind of view, and with this gleaming kitchen—the appliances alone probably cost more than he made in a year—he figured the rest of the place must be pretty swank as well.

So whose apartment was this, and where was the owner?

What the hell am I doing here?

He snatched the book off the table by pure instinct, not wanting to be parted from it, and went exploring. The apartment was not enormous, but whispers of money were everywhere. The high metal ceilings, expensive woodwork, and marble fireplace told him all he needed to know. Every room was so immaculate that he assumed the owner had a cleaning service. Odd that he had never connected cleanliness with wealth before, but the thread was there.

A small table near the apartment door had been overturned, spilling a picture frame, a stack of mail, and a dish of Murano glass made to look like pieces of candy across the floor. On the wall behind the table was a single streak of blood.

Nico held his breath, turning in a circle, trying to figure out where the struggle would have led him. Down a short hallway, he found two bedroom doors, but both rooms were empty, the beds neatly made and unrumpled. Which left the bathroom.

His hand shook as he reached out and gave the door a shove. Hinges creaked as the door swung inward.

At first he thought the man in the bathtub must be dead, and his throat tightened, his stomach roiling with nausea. Christ, if he’d done this …

Black electrical tape bound the man’s ankles. His arms were behind his back, but Nico could only assume his
wrists were similarly trussed. Layers of tape had been wound around his head, covering his mouth. He’d taken a beating, face swollen and bruised and bloody.

But then he saw the man’s chest rising and falling, and he knew he wasn’t a murderer. Relief flooded him and he sagged against the open door. As he did, the book nearly slipped from his grasp and he gripped it more tightly, then looked down at it. He had almost forgotten he was carrying it. The warm leather felt as though it might as well be a part of his own body.

Revulsion made him want to drop the book, to leave it there on the bathroom floor and get the hell away, but his hand would not obey. Nico backed into the hallway and hurried to the door. He opened it and glanced out to make sure no one would see him exiting the apartment, then he slipped through and hurried along the corridor, descending the stairs toward the first floor at perilous speed, the book clutched to his chest.

Geena
, he thought.
Where are you?
He needed her, but even more so, he needed time to sit and think all of this out. On the street, he turned right, navigating alleys and bridges as fast as possible without breaking into a run. Before he could talk to Geena about what was happening to him, he had to try to make sense of it, not just go on intuition.

He hurried through a beautifully landscaped courtyard, its stone and brick foundations crested with an abundance of flowers in full bloom, their vivid colors bright in the summer sun, the heat of the day trapping the scents of a dozen varieties like a city hothouse. A black dog ran by in the opposite direction as if it was chasing something, or being chased, and Nico smiled humorlessly as he saw himself in the same situation.

He would head back to his own apartment, make himself a cup of coffee, and think. Though just holding that book made him uneasy, he knew he would have to open it if he was going to figure out what had happened to him. If Volpe’s presence in his mind was more than psychic resonance, he wanted to know how to get it out of him. He needed to be able to think clearly again, without fearing a blackout.

As if summoned by the thought, the darkness began to edge in at the corners of his mind again.
No
, Nico thought, fighting to maintain control, to continue seeing out of his own eyes.

But as he crossed a narrow, crumbling bridge, with a gondolier poling a Japanese couple along the canal below, he could feel the presence that now lurked always behind the curtains of his mind. Words played across his thoughts, enchantments from the book he still held as close to his heart as a lover’s secret journal, and he wondered how long he had sat in the unconscious man’s kitchen reading that book before his own consciousness reached the surface of his mind again.

The presence inside of him—the spiritual remains of Zanco Volpe—had other things on his mind as well. He had the book, but there were other ingredients he needed to acquire if he hoped to be able to protect Venice.

Protect Venice?

He’d broken into an ancient church, a city landmark, and stolen a book that must be priceless. He had barged into some random man’s apartment and beaten, bound, and gagged him. What the hell did any of that have to do with protecting Venice?

The spell must be recast before they try to return
.

Nico staggered, caught his foot on a protruding stone,
and fell headlong down the stone steps leading down from the bridge. The book flew from his hands. He banged his right knee and skinned his palms, hissing through his teeth at the stinging pain of it. But he’d gotten away easy. It could have been much worse. The voice in his head had taken him by surprise. But had it been an answer? Was the presence inside of him self-aware? Or was it just Nico’s subconscious interpreting the things it had learned from the psychic backlash down in the chamber beneath Petrarch’s library?

Regardless, he knew what else he needed for this spell, and it was a dreadful shopping list. Even now, the words echoed in his head and he could not tell if they were his thoughts, memories of what he must have read in the book, or the murmurings of a Venetian magician who’d been dead for centuries.

The hand of a soldier, the seal of the master of the city, the blood of a loved one
.

“Fuck,” he whispered, ignoring the stares of two old widows as he bent to retrieve the book.

Its cover seemed none the worse for wear. The blood on his palm soaked into the leather and it stuck to his hand, strangely rough on his skin.

He wondered if the blood would still be there when he looked again.

G
EENA DIDN’T
bother to stop at the Biblioteca. She passed it by without giving the building so much as a glance, heels clacking on stone as she strode through St. Mark’s Square, pigeons taking flight to clear her a path. More than one tourist turned to frown at her for disrupting their feeding of the birds, which Geena had always thought a disgusting tradition. One man, a bearded fool speaking German to his companions, had pigeons roosting on his head and outstretched arms, grinning for a photograph, with no thought given to what diseases the birds might be carrying.

As she entered an alley between two restaurants—a waiter serving outdoor tables shooting her a curious glance—she pulled out her cell phone and rang Domenic.

“Good morning,” he said cheerily. “Are you two feeling any better?”

You two?
She flinched at the words. Did they all think it was all right for her relationship with Nico to be public now that she had let them see how much she cared for him, feared for him, and loved him?

“Have you ever heard of a member of the Venetian
government named Zanco Volpe?” she asked, unintentionally curt.

“I don’t think so. Was he a senator or a member of the Ten?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe just an advisor of some kind. But he had a lot of power in the city.”

Domenic knew more about Venetian history than anyone she had met since she had first come to work at the university, three years before. He knew Venice, its people and culture and politics—but he knew the history best of all.

“The name isn’t familiar,” Domenic admitted. “Why do you ask? Did you and Dr. Schiavo find something in the Petrarch manuscripts?”

Geena could not think of any way to explain it to him that would not have led to a thousand other questions, not to mention worries about her mental stability. Instead, she ignored the question and forged ahead.

“What about someone called Akylis—maybe some kind of magician or shaman or something?”

“I’ve never heard ‘Akylis’ used as a person’s name before,” Domenic said.

“But you’ve heard the word?”

“I don’t know the etymology of it, but scholars have suggested the word as the root for the naming of ancient Aquileia, on the northern shore of the Adriatic. It was founded in the second century
B.C.—
”