The Chamber of Ten

VI

GEENA 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.—”

“Count on you to know that,” Geena said, her mood lightening for a fleeting moment.

“It’s my job to know that,” Domenic reminded her.

“What about a Doge named Pietro … shit, something, I can’t remember the last name … and a count called Alviso Tonetti?”

She came to an alley too jammed with people and turned left, seeking an alternate route. Striding past a puppet shop where she always loved to stop and stare at the extraordinary marionettes in the window, she spared only a glance.

“That’s an easy one,” Domenic said. “The Doge was Pietro Aretino—”

“That’s it, yeah.”

“—and, according to the history books, Tonetti was his nemesis. Records from the period say that the Doge plotted to dismiss the Great Council, Venice’s equivalent to the Senate, as well as the Council of Ten and make himself some kind of emperor. Tonetti persuaded the Great Council to banish the Doge, and two of his conspirators—members of the Ten—were executed. Well, murdered, really, because it wasn’t as though they were tried for crimes against the state or anything. They called Tonetti ‘Il Conte Rosso’ after that because of the bloodshed.”

“Holy shit, it’s real,” Geena muttered.

“What?”

“Nothing, nothing,” she said quickly. A glimpse into a shop window filled with Carnival masks gave her a start. Too many faces watching her. Too many people around her.

“What year was that? With the ‘Red Count’?” she asked.

“Early 1400s. Maybe 1415, 1417, around there.”

Then she remembered the second of Nico’s weird visions that had spilled over into her brain, of soldiers escorting another banished Doge to the canal, forcing him to leave the city.

“There were other Doges banished, weren’t there?”

“Two that I know of. Geena, what’s this all about? Are you coming to the Biblioteca today, or what? We’ve got a lot of prep work to do before the BBC crew shows up tomorrow. And, honestly, I’m sick of the dirty looks I’m getting from Adrianna Ricci.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said, dodging around an elderly couple walking arm in arm past shop windows, taking up the entire alley. “Just trying to track down … I just have to meet Nico and then I’ll be there.”

“I thought he was with you?”

Geena cut through a cluster of people and crossed a wide, well-preserved bridge. The buildings along the narrow canal that flowed beneath it had beautiful façades and many windows were filled with flower boxes, but the first floors were crumbling and stained by past high tides.

“Who were the other two Doges?” she asked, ignoring his question.

“Giardino Caravello in the 1390s, and then the most famous, Francesco Foscari, in 1457.”

“Foscari?”

“Yes. One of the subjects of Lord Byron’s play The Two Foscari. The same family the university is named after. Actually, some of the research I’ve read suggests all three of the banished Doges were related—perhaps distant cousins. Caravello, the first of the three, was apparently banished because he wanted his relatives in all levels of Venetian government. And not just Venice. The family had spread out to other powerful Mediterranean cities, sort of insinuating themselves into government wherever they could. Caravello was much more interested in power for his family than the glory of Venice.”

“And the other two, Aretino and Foscari, were related to him?” Geena asked.

“According to some sources,” Domenic said, impatiently. “Now are you going to tell me what all of this is about?”

Geena emerged from an alley and turned right on Riva del Ferro, the Grand Canal on her left. It had always seemed strange to her that this stretch of water was considered part of the Grand Canal, as it was so much narrower than other segments, but it was still broad enough that water buses, taxis, and private boats purred in both directions. The Rialto Bridge was just ahead, with its series of arches forever enclosed to protect the many shops inside the bridge.

But Geena knew she wasn’t going that far. In the flash of memory that Nico had blasted into her head, apparently unintentionally, she had known this place. She knew the house that had once belonged to Il Conte Tonetti.

A small crowd had formed in front of the once grand mansion. A police boat was moored at the edge of the canal and other officers had come on foot. Half a dozen of them clustered outside the front door, keeping people back from the old building.

From somewhere behind her, around the curve of the canal, she could hear the siren of a water ambulance. The noise echoed off the water and the bridge and the faces of the buildings, growing into a sound that was almost a scream.

Heart fluttering in her chest, imagining the worst, Geena shoved her way into the crowd. People snapped at her in Italian. Whatever tourists had been in the vicinity when the ugliness had begun had made themselves scarce. These were Venetians now, the people of the city. Neighbors and shopkeepers and even a couple of gondoliers, who she thought must have been having coffee in the café two doors down.

“What happened?” she asked. “Can someone tell me what happened?”

The frantic edge in her voice made her cringe, but it seemed to draw the right attention. A young man, no more than twenty, tossed his cigarette to the ground and stamped it out.

“A break-in at one of the apartments,” the guy said. “I heard one of the cops say the owner was beaten badly. The weird thing—at least from what the police were saying—is that the apartment wasn’t even robbed.”

Ice trickled along Geena’s spine. Flush with guilt by association and fear for Nico, she continued to forge her way through the crowd, searching for his face. But she knew in her heart that he had already gone. How long ago had he been there? An hour? Thirty minutes?

Retreating to the shadow of the Rialto Bridge, she pulled out her cell phone and called Domenic again.

“Are you on your way?” he asked upon answering.

“Dom, listen. You know everyone in Venice. You must know someone with the police, right?”

For just a second, Domenic was quiet. When he spoke again, his levity had vanished.

“What’s wrong, Geena? What’s going on?”

She hesitated, hand clutched tightly around the phone. If she let someone else into this craziness, what would happen? It already felt completely out of her control, but at least for the moment it was still between her and Nico. Intimate. Their problem and nobody else’s.

But she knew that was a lie. Their intimacy had been shattered, turned into a twisted mirror of itself. Whatever they were sharing now, it wasn’t natural, and it frightened her.

“It’s Nico,” she said. “He’s gone missing again. I … I don’t think he’s in his right mind, Dom. I’m afraid something terrible is going to happen.”

As she spoke the words, the water ambulance pulled up to the edge of the canal and two EMTs jumped out with their gear, hurrying toward the front door, the crowd clearing them a path.

“I’m afraid it may have happened already.”

The hand of a soldier…

The very idea was abhorrent to Nico, and he’d been trying his best to turn his mind away from what it might mean. But he was finding it difficult to concentrate. His thoughts were scattered, darting here and there, calling up images and pushing down recollections that could not be his. As one thought seemed to coalesce, another would stalk in and rip it to shreds. His head ached, his eyes throbbed, and he felt more apart from this city than he ever had before.

The thing inside him, though—Zanco Volpe—that felt very much at home. And he had to accept now that the presence lurking in the shadowy corners of his mind was not merely an echo. Somehow, it had will and purpose. Volpe’s ghost? Nico didn’t know. But he knew for certain this was more than psychic residue.

Nico was being steered and directed, his movements dictated by the subtlest commands from deep inside. From Volpe himself. Sometimes he thought he heard a voice—deep, guttural, and cruel—and other times it was like walking through a waking dream. He knew he was dreaming, but he had no control over where this dream took him. Volpe could usurp Nico’s consciousness, sometimes with only a thought or an urge, but other times blotting it out completely. Those were the blackouts, and they frightened Nico the most. Bad enough that Volpe could take him over, make him see through his own eyes without any control over his body, but the idea that he might come awake at any time to find himself having done something hideous made him sick.

What if he had killed the man in that apartment, where Il Conte Rosso had once lived? Christ, how do I stop this?

Leaving the old mansion he had struggled to fight against this loss of control, and for a while he had stumbled through the streets with the book clasped to his chest. He must have looked like a drunk, staggering into walls, talking to himself in a dialect he had only ever seen written in books. More than once he had come close to falling into a canal.

Maybe that would be for the best, he’d thought, and then that presence within had reared up and screamed, raging with anger at such a casual intimation of death. Nico had drawn back, terrified, and the landscape around him had changed, as if a panorama of yesterday was always just below the surface of his perception. For a time after that, Volpe had walked him through the city, and Nico had shivered in the dark, cool places of his mind.

Now it was Wednesday afternoon, and he was on his way to San Michele. Sitting in the small water taxi and watching the cemetery island draw closer, Nico could relax against Volpe’s influence. The old Venetian seemed to have eased back a little—

Does he need rest, is that why? I have to remember that. Have to file it away somewhere deep, where even Volpe can’t reach.

—which meant that Nico could close his eyes and try to rest as well. But only try. Because the darkness behind his eyelids was filled with the impact of fist against flesh, and flashes of terror in that man’s eyes.

The boat rocked from swell to swell as it crossed the Canale delle Fondamente Nuove. The driver sat rigid in his seat, eyes focused on their destination, and he had never once turned around to try to enter into conversation. Nico had only vague memories of boarding the boat—Volpe had been at the fore then, aiming his flesh-and-bone host in the direction he wanted—but he sensed fear in the man’s stance, and a nervous set to his shoulders. What did I say to him? he wondered, and almost laughed at the acceptance that had already settled in him. Acceptance that it was not only Nico in this body now, but someone else as well. Someone powerful and determined, whose aims were still clouded in mystery.

He rested the book on his knees. Sometime during the noon hour he’d entered a store and bought bottled water and sandwiches, and the book was now wrapped in the carrier bag. Its cover was unstained by the blood from his grazed hands, as if the bindings had absorbed the moisture after being so long hidden away. He had vague, flashing memories of huddling in doorways or beneath street lamps and trying to open the book, but each time that happened he’d woken somewhere else, with the book wrapped in the bag once again and Volpe’s presence a smiling, excited warmth in his mind. What else has he just found out? Nico knew that the volume must be both terrible and amazing. It belonged back at the university, where Geena and he could examine and translate it with the others in their team, but even the merest thought of trying to transport it there—

My book, my hands hold it, my eyes read it, my talents use it. Volpe’s voice was shockingly loud inside his head, and Nico gasped and stiffened against the fiberglass seat.

The boat’s pilot pushed on the throttle, breaking speed limits and risking his license. They reached one of the many jetties and the driver swung the boat expertly against its edge. He remained staring straight ahead as Nico climbed out, unnerved or perhaps even afraid.

“A tip,” Nico said, holding out a folded bill. He did not like having this effect on people.

Those thumps, that face filled with fear, the thunk! as he fell into the bathtub …

But buying forgiveness could never be that easy. The driver throttled away without taking the money, leaving a raging wash behind him as he aimed the boat back across the lagoon. Nico stood for a while watching him go, thinking of heaving the bagged book out over the water and letting it soak and sink, pages disintegrating, whatever arcane knowledge contained within—

Darkness struck like lightning.

He blinked, vision clearing, and found himself walking through the cemetery on the Island of the Dead. Bile rose in the back of his throat and an icy chill ran up his spine. Who the hell had Zanco Volpe been when he lived here in Venice? Who, and what? A psychic? A fucking magician?

No. Not magic. Nico wouldn’t believe that. Telepathy was only science not yet fully understood, psychic abilities were facets of the mind. Somehow Volpe’s mind had not died with his body, it still lingered, but that didn’t make him a ghost.

Yet even as this certainty filled him, a low, chuffing laughter rippled through the hidden places of his mind, as though Volpe stood behind some curtain like the Great and Powerful Oz, pulling levers, so sure of his control.

Nico clapped his hands to the sides of his head. Get out! he screamed, inside his own skull.

But the presence growing like a tumor in his brain was silent for once.

No words were necessary. Nico’s thoughts and Volpe’s were intimately intertwined now. He knew what was necessary, and why Volpe had directed him here to the island of San Michele: the hand of a soldier.

He’d been here before many times, because a man with his interest in the past could not resist the melancholy air of a cemetery. It was an incredible location, a cemetery island in a city of islands, a burial place for two hundred years. Two islands originally, the canal that separated them was filled in the early 1800s, and since then bodies had been ferried to the island on funeral gondolas, buried for a decade, and then exhumed and kept in huge banks of ossuaries. Space restrictions meant that being put to rest on San Michele was never a permanent arrangement.

Nico had always loved cemeteries, partly for the fascinating array of tombs and memorial stones, but also because of their timeless atmosphere. They kept their history on view, and every grave told a different story. A couple of times Geena had come with him, and he remembered standing together before Stravinsky’s tomb, holding her hand and leaning in so that their shoulders were touching. She’d told him …

I won’t think of her, he thought. He closed his eyes and came to a standstill, reining in his thoughts, because he did not want Volpe to see Geena in his head, sense her, feel her … and he had no desire to share precious private memories. He would think of anything else; the Chamber of Ten, his parents’ home, his old school friend Celso who liked to joke that—

He was holding her tight, breathing in her breath as they worked their hips in harmony. Her leg was stretched over his, allowing him entry and curling around to pull him in. She was worried that something was wrong, but for a while this took them away. Her eyes were hooded and heavy. She gasped into his mouth when she came, mixing their sighs as they merged their thoughts, and it was as delicious as ever before.

“Fuck off!” Nico shouted, full of rage and hatred. He had wanted to shield the precious parts of his memory from the intruder in his mind, but Volpe stripped away layers of thought with savage ease.

With an effort of will, Nico dropped the book and tried to run, to deny Volpe what he wanted—an ingredient required for the ritual he seemed desperate to perform—but his legs would not obey.

What is it, magician? Nico thought. What’s so important about your fucking ritual? He did not even believe in magic.

But then what was this?

Nico dropped to his knees there amidst the tombs of the Venetian dead and placed his hand on the book, which had spilled from the bag. And he chuckled, in a voice that was not his own. “You’re becoming troublesome, Signore Lombardi. So I shall have to take the reins from you. I am not your true enemy, but if you continue to fight against me, remember that the next time you are with your beloved, it will be my hands on her soft skin. The things I could do to her. I could give her pleasure or pain, but either would cause you torment. Now, behave.”

Nico’s rage turned to tears.

And his vision went dark again, a prisoner inside his own body.

Later, more time lost, more of his life spent knowing and sensing nothing, Nico found himself across the cemetery island in one of the mausoleum areas. All around him the huge stone structures housed hundreds of ossuaries, and the finely crafted façades were adorned with flowers, plaques, and sealed pictures of those interred. Cypress trees sprouted seemingly at random, but he knew that the cemetery had grown around them. He’d always liked the fact that this place of death paid such attention to burgeoning life.

The hand of a soldier, Nico thought, and Volpe exuded satisfaction.

Nico hugged the book to his chest and breathed deeply, trying to remain calm. He’d rather be at the fore and in control of his movements, even if doing so involved going through with Volpe’s desires. He was trapped. The blackouts were horrible, and he was desperate to avoid them as much as he could. But even his thoughts were subject to hijack, his feeling of powerlessness and vulnerability encouraged by the presence that had so quickly changed him from the man he had been.

So he walked between the mausoleums, holding the book carefully, and trying to use the sensations immediate to him to distract him from thinking of Geena.

Hand of a soldier, he thought. Look for a military grave, smash it open, steal the hand. Nico blinked because those thoughts were not his own, but he did as instructed.

Several monks appeared around the corner of a mausoleum building, nodding and smiling at him, but then frowning uncertainly as they passed by. I wonder what they see, he thought, but Volpe seemed content to stay in the background.

He walked the paths, reading names and inscriptions until he found one that looked suitable. Nico paused and took a step back, quickly jarring to a halt as though he’d struck a wall, but there was nothing behind him. Volpe’s influence, that was all.

“Leave me be, don’t touch Geena, and I’ll do this for you,” Nico whispered. “Whoever you are. Whatever you are. You’ve got me, and I can’t get rid of you, but if you keep hurting me like that—”

And then his voice changed, his whole throat seeming to twist out of shape as he lowered his head and uttered a final, awful sentence.

“I have yet to hurt you.”

Nico gasped and leaned forward against the mausoleum. He heard footsteps, and glancing to one side he saw that one of the monks had returned. The old man paused for a moment, watching Nico, and then he bowed his head softly and left. They think I’m mourning someone dead, he thought, when in fact I’m cursing them. Volpe allowed him this thought, and then Nico felt control taken from him again.

He watched, but did not command. He moved, but did not instruct. The dead Venetian pulled his marionette strings, and Nico had no option but to obey.

He wandered some more, straying into an old part of the cemetery. Here he found a broken tomb, and as he lifted a triangle of jagged rock, several lizards darted across the stone. One of them seemed to freeze and bend to look up at him. Then it lowered to its stomach and flipped onto its back, dead.

Nico’s body, Volpe’s mind, carried the heavy shard of tombstone back to the mausoleums, glancing around to make sure no one was nearby. He set the book down between his feet and swung the stone at the tomb he had chosen.

The façade cracked, but it took several more strikes before it crumbled and fell away. He cut the back of his left hand against a sharp edge, and as the pain filtered through to Nico, Volpe opened his mouth and laughed. Birds, unconcerned at the impact of rock on stone, took startled flight at the laughter. He reached inside for the metal ossuary. It was strangely warm to the touch and Nico jerked his hand back as if stung … then reached forward again, hearing a sigh in his mind as his fingers closed around a rusted metal handle. As he pulled, metal scraping across stone, the sound of approaching footsteps startled him. He tugged harder and the container slid out, dropping to the ground, lid snapping open, contents spilling across the random stone paving.

Looking up, he saw the shadow first, and then the monk rounded the corner.

“What do you think you’re doing?” the man said, aghast.

Help me, Nico wanted to say. But as he reached out his hands to plead, he felt Volpe rising again, both angry and excited, and so full of life for a man long dead.