The Descent (24 page)

Within a few weeks, Adair received a letter from his father informing him that he’d agreed to the marriage arrangements. He even wrote a few words about the benefits of an alliance with Elena’s Florentine family, but Adair knew it was all for show: with any luck, he would remain in Italy after the wedding and would, for all his family cared, cease to be their worry anymore.

Finally, after a month had passed since the arrest and Adair could stand it no longer, he went down to the dungeons very late one night. He brought coin to bribe the guard into letting him see Cosimo. By then, the old man had been let out of his manacles and put in a cell, although it was so small that he couldn’t stand fully upright in it. The floor was covered with filthy straw that had probably never been changed, and the walls were damp, as though the lagoon were trying to reclaim the doge’s palazzo by stealth.

Adair lifted the lantern to see the old man’s face turned up to him expectantly. Cosimo was in a terrible state. His royal robes were crusted with his own blood and gore and torn to give the torturers access to his vulnerable spots. All the parts of him Adair could see—his wrists, his bare feet, his throat—were raw with evidence of torture.

Adair handed him a package of food, enough to last several days if the rats didn’t get to it, and a bottle each of wine and water. Cosimo looked suspiciously at the package even as he accepted it. “Why did you bring this? To assuage your guilt for being the one responsible for my arrest—”

“I hope you know me well enough not to listen to that. It was a story I made up the night you were arrested to get entry to your house. I was trying to save the books . . .”

Cosimo’s eyes glittered with life for the briefest instant. “And did you?”

He shook his head. “I could carry only a few. I hid some in a square not far from your house but I fear they’ve since been discovered. There is a massive witch hunt going on.” He hung his head. “In the end, I was able to save only one, the blue book.”

Cosimo nodded. “Of all the books in my library, that was
a good one to save. Take care of it. Don’t let the inquisitors get their hands on it. Save it for the ones who come after us.”

“Don’t give up, Cosimo,” Adair said, trying to comfort him. “I’ve asked the doge to release you. I’ve even agreed to marry Bishop Rossi’s goddaughter in exchange for his support in the matter. Now it’s up to Zeno.”

Cosimo shook his head. “My boy, there is no way for Zeno to pardon me. He’s made too much of a spectacle over my arrest. And now this witch hunt . . . The townspeople will see a Satanist behind every bush. It would be impossible for it to end any other way than with my death.” He said all this with an air of detachment, as though he were talking about someone else.

Adair was shocked. “How can you say that? You mustn’t give up hope.”

“It is impossible.”

“Then . . .” Adair thought again about using magic to help Cosimo escape. If anyone would know how it could be done, he should. “Tell me how to use the spells to get you out of here. There must be a way for magic to help you escape.”

The old man seemed resigned to his fate. “I don’t have the strength or the necessary equipment to do anything from inside the dungeon.”

“Then tell
me
what to do, which spell to use . . .”

“No. I will not have you put yourself at risk any further by trying to help me escape. I am very old and, given that I made my living for many years as a knight, should have been dead a long time ago. I’ve already had more years on this earth than I deserve. I’m ready to die.”

“It’s my decision—”

“No.” He squeezed Adair’s hand one last time. “It’s
my
decision. I want you to bide your time and then make your escape. I know you to be a headstrong boy, but this one time, young squire, listen to me.”

Adair left the dungeon with his heart aching. He had to find a way to save Cosimo, even if the arsenal of recipes he had to choose from was much reduced. He stayed up as late as he could that night, poring over his loose pages and the blue book, trying to find a spell that could help Cosimo. But when Adair went downstairs in the morning, he was told that the old knight had taken his life last night in his cell. He’d broken one of the bottles Adair had brought and used the glass to slice his wrists and his throat.

P
RESENT
D
AY

The light in the room in which Adair lay with Lanore had grown dim. Outside the window, a storm tossed violently, the kind that swept up on the island without warning and battered the rock mercilessly. Adair huddled closer to Lanny for warmth, fingering a lock of her hair absentmindedly while he listened to the wind rattle the glass panes.

He was covered in sticky sweat from his recollections of Venice. He could remember those days in Zeno’s palazzo with precision: the damp of the streets, the moldering smell of his bedchamber, the bottle-green silk lining of his cloak, and the long pheasant feathers fixed to his cap.

And yet he had other memories of Cosimo, impossible ones from another time, an
earlier
time. Of Cosimo not in Italy but in the Ceahlău Massif mountains where Adair had grown up, the stretch of land that had been traded over the years, back
and forth, between Hungary and Romania. In these memories, Cosimo was dressed in a rough peasant’s shift and coarse woolen leggings, and was not the regal figure he’d known in Venice. Adair, a boy of seven or eight, stood in a mud cottage with a thatched roof, a primitive place with pigs running in and out of the house as though it were a barn. Adair was being restrained by his father as Cosimo was dragged out of the cottage by two of his father’s men. They were forcing Cosimo to kneel in the mud before the stump he used for splitting firewood, and next to the stump stood an executioner in his black leather hood, a massive broadsword in his hands.

Adair shook his head to clear it but the image lingered. How could he have two memories of the exact same incident? He couldn’t have known two Cosimos; it was impossible. Just as his mind told him he was a boy in the wild, craggy mountains of Romania in the 1000s
and
a man of fifteen in Venice in 1262. It was impossible—and yet both memories were seared into his mind, unforgettable.

There was one other thing that confused him about Cosimo. The memories of those nights at the old knight’s palazzo, sitting by the fireplace as Cosimo mixed potions in the cauldron, taking a handful of this and a pinch of that from his many jars and bottles to fling into the pot . . . and of copying out recipes on scraps of paper and rolling them up to hide in his sleeve so he could bring them into the doge’s house undetected. . . . Did those stories not remind him of something else? Of the stories
he
told of the peasant boy whose body he’d stolen? The peasant boy who had sat at his hearth and watched him prepare potion after potion? Who had stolen his recipes and tried to escape, earning a horrific beating?

The thought made Adair’s blood freeze in his veins. It was impossible to trust his mind anymore it seemed. Did this mean he was going mad, finally? It had always been his greatest fear. Man was not meant to have so many memories, the collected stories from a thousand years of existence. It was inevitable that one day the well of memory would overflow.

These conflicting memories had been coming to him since he’d set foot on the island. It was as though whatever forces were alive on this piece of rock were demagnetizing his brain, and all the little bits and fragments of his past were lifting from the shoals where memories were kept. Lifting and becoming tangled, mixing and shifting before disappearing into the ether, clouded and then lost to him forever.

He looked at the woman lying in his arms and wondered if the same thing would happen to his memories of her. Would he start to forget their time together or confuse her with someone else? As much as the possibility hurt him, there was one memory he would be happy to lose, that of her betrayal. As it was, he was doomed to live with the knowledge that she could brick him up in a wall and leave him there to face eternity, that she had it in her to be as cold-blooded as—well,
he
. Maybe he was a fool to love such a woman, but love her he did.

Too, he wondered if—seeing that he had two memories of his childhood and of Cosimo—there were two versions of his life, and if in the other version he’d never hurt Lanore. Perhaps there was a version where he’d never abused or imprisoned her, never gave her a reason to doubt that she could trust him with her love. If that were the case, he’d do anything to lift the memories she
did
have of him and replace them with this
other set. What he wouldn’t give to take away all her unhappy memories—her memories of that bastard Jonathan, too. He ran a hand over her brow with a heavy sigh: he would remake her entire life so that she never experienced one moment of sadness; he would make her the only human who had never been lonely or unhappy or afraid, the only one in the history of the world, if only he could.

THIRTEEN

I
made some excuse to Sophia in order to take my leave, but I don’t remember what I said in my desperation to get away from her. As sad as I was for her and her baby, to be perfectly honest, I was horrified by what had become of her, horrified that a person could be made to endure such a merciless penance in the afterlife. Was the next plane of existence nothing more than a prison? If that was the case, that meant the queen might be its warden, making sure the offending souls did not escape from their punishment. But if she was the warden, who was the judge who handed down the sentences? Who had put her in charge of hell?

I ran out of my old childhood home and down the dirt wagon trail. I didn’t think to linger in town; no, I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. Luckily, this St. Andrew was exactly like the St. Andrew of my past and not like a
location in a dream, where a road suddenly grows twice its length, or where you take a turn only to find that you’ve ended up somewhere else entirely, a place you’d never seen before. This St. Andrew remained true to form and so I could find my way back to the spot in the forest where I’d entered. I found the door without too much difficulty, locating it in the middle of a big, old oak tree as though that was perfectly normal.

Once on the other side, I leaned against the door huffing and puffing from exertion and fright, trying to force the vision of Sophia’s blue-faced baby from my mind. I was relieved to be in the quiet hall again and wondered if it would be possible to sit for a minute and collect my thoughts. Again, I listened for the heavy thump-thump I’d heard before, the sound I’d been sure was an indication of a demon. Nothing. Cautiously optimistic, I looked in both directions. The hall to the right seemed the shorter of the two. I could almost see the end of the hall, where it turned a corner. What waited down those other hallways? I wondered. Perhaps this hall was
my
hall, the doors representing different phases of my life, and the doors on those other halls led to someone else’s life, perhaps someone close to me. Perhaps they led to Jonathan’s life. It was a silly notion, undoubtedly, but I had to try to make sense of the fantastic world in which I found myself.

I trotted down the hall as noiselessly as possible and peeked around the corner. The red runner stretched away from me, beckoningly, down the new hallway. This hall was longer, one of those fun house ones that seemed to go off into infinity. I tiptoed up to the first door and pressed my ear against it: there was silence within. I gripped the doorknob, and opened the door.

It opened onto a great, whistling canyon, its walls of craggy
yellow rock climbing to the pale blue sky. The canyon itself was narrow, barely wide enough for a man to pass through. I didn’t recognize it at first, but as I crept along the trail, running my hands over the pebbly walls, I remembered the Hindu Kush and my adventures there with Savva during the Great Game, living among the Afghans.

What a strange place the underworld was turning out to be, not nearly as frightening as I’d feared, the episode with Sophia notwithstanding. It was like getting to live forever in your memories, reuniting with old friends over and over, revisiting the places you’d lived. Take this place, for instance: if I was in the Hindu Kush, that meant I might be about to meet up with Abdul, the wonderful tribal warlord I’d met and fallen in love with. Fate had dealt with us unfairly and we’d had only a short time together. I would be absolutely delighted for an opportunity to see him again. The thought made my heart beat excitedly, and I’d even begun to jog down the path, expecting to find him around the next corner, when I realized I was being foolishly optimistic. This was the afterlife, not a video game. I couldn’t expect to dial up an old memory and relive it on the spot. I could be in the mountains of Afghanistan, or not. I could be in someone else’s life. I was running toward nothing. In any case, the chances of finding Jonathan here seemed slim.

Deflated, I retraced my steps and found the door I’d entered stuck incongruously in the side of the canyon wall. Strangely, as I stepped back into the hall, in that split second suspended between the canyon and the corridor, it came to me: I suddenly knew what I had to do to find Jonathan. I had to go to the place
my dreams
had told me I would find him. I had to go to the cellar.