The Chamber of Ten

X

IT’S A very precise confluence of forces, combined with a delicate placing of the physical. There are a thousand places where it can go wrong. But it must not go wrong.”

He’s talking to me, Nico thought, but he could not be sure. Volpe had come to the fore and taken complete control, relegating Nico once more to the periphery. Not quite as deep as that dark, hidden place where nothing was felt or known, but close enough for it to be a threat. Challenge me now and I’ll cast you down again, the threat spoke, and while Nico simmered with restrained, useless rage, he had no wish to be blacked out again. So he watched and listened, and the more he saw and heard the more he felt lectured to.

He had moved the braziers to the four corners of the room, retreating briefly to the nave to retrieve some of the broken wood and making sure the fires were adequately fed. They gave that bare room a curious appearance, with pools of light at four corners and a more shadowy area in the center. It was as if the firelight could not quite reach that far. Outside, the sun would still be shining, but in here it felt like midnight. The flames were even and undisturbed, and the gentle spitting of burning wood was the only sound in the room, other than Volpe’s occasional low, deep voice. Nico had stopped wondering how his own mouth, his own vocal cords, could make such a noise. But compared to the reality of what was happening, that was minor.

“The Book of the Nameless has always been the only true magical text,” he went on. “Until the time I left this world that was true, and between then and now I have no reason to believe it has been usurped. I’ve seen wondrous things in my brief time walking the modern Venetian streets and canals, but nothing to convince me that magic is part of this place anymore. Magic has its own smell and taste, its own raft of senses, and Venice smells as it always did. This book, then, has the power, and from this book the new Exclusion shall be drawn.”

What are you talking about? Nico asked.

“All in time,” Volpe replied.

Despite his question, however, Nico knew some of this already. Volpe had used him to gather the materials needed to cast a spell of Exclusion, to keep his enemies out of Venice. But those enemies … they could not be the men Nico saw in Volpe’s mind. Those men had been dead five hundred years and more.

Volpe knelt in the center of the room and placed the book on the ground before him, open to a page decorated with drawings, sigils, apparent formulae, and words that Nico could not read. Next he took the objects from the bag and placed them beside the book. Then he began to chant.

Nico drew back, repulsed by the strange words Volpe was spouting. He did not know them—they were in a language he had never heard before—but their cadences, their ebb and flow, carried a sickly weight of dread that he could not ignore. It was like hearing his own death pronouncement in another language, knowing the final meaning but not understanding the words used to reach it. His deep voice rose and fell in that small hidden chamber, and the firelight began to dance, as if his breath had disturbed the air of that place.

Before him, his shadow flitted across the book and the objects beside it. It jerked beside and behind him as well, a shadow cast four ways, and each shadow was moving to a different light.

“Grasp the hand of a dead soldier,” Volpe said, “connecting the living with the dead and confirming that they are allied in this spell.” He picked up the hand and clasped it as though in greeting.

Nico cried out, and Volpe gave it voice. He saw a flash of something too quick and remote to be memory, but it burned one scene indelibly onto his mind: an Italian woman leaning over him, tears collecting at the corners of her eyes. In one hand she held a bloodied cloth while the other was clasped around a small golden cross. Behind her, several more shapes. Family come to watch him die.

Volpe started chanting again and Nico returned to the present, terrified at what Volpe might be doing. But he had no control. He was so far back and down that he could only watch.

The chanting ended and Volpe placed the hand on the other side of the book, turning a page and dismissing it entirely. When he started reading from the next page he picked up the seal of the city—something that had likely put the official stamp on many important documents, an innocuous object that Nico knew had extreme value to the right people. He wondered what would become of it after this, and amazingly he felt a smile in his mind, because he thought of Geena then and how she’d be impressed that—

—he is still thinking about his job.

Geena reeled from the flash, staggering sideways and leaning against a wall. She recovered quickly, turning her head left and right, concentrating, trying to sense what direction the flash of words had come from. Keeping her mind open she stood straight again and looked along the nearest canal.

Words she does not know … an object clasped before her, it might be a stamp or seal of some sort, and when it’s brought closer she sees that it is one of the old stamps of the city, Venice’s coat of arms clearly visible on the raised underside, and then the hand—Nico’s hand, she knows its look and touch so well—closes around the seal. He places it in the pages of a book open before him, touches some of the inscriptions on the right page, and—

She lost it. There almost solidly one second, gone the next, and not even any residual tingling on the back of her neck. But she was left staring across the canal at a wider waterway leading westward, and she had a very real sense that she needed to go that way. Had Nico urged her in that direction without consciously doing so? She did not know, and to question too much might be to implant doubt. A hundred yards along there was a footbridge, and she ran for it, her footsteps lonely in the night.

She glanced over her shoulder as she went, but only shadows followed.

Volpe read again for a moment, then started sketching shapes in the air with his left hand. Nico could feel his own arm and hand moving, his fingers flexing and twitching, but there was no sense at all of his controlling any of the movement. He was disassociated, an observer. It made him feel sick, but… fascinated as well.

Volpe continued sketching, and Nico tried to discern the shapes he was making in the air. They were formed of dancing shadow and flickering firelight, but they did not hold, and nothing was left behind. Volpe glanced down at the book again, and then Nico saw that some of the shapes echoed a series of sigils inked into the old paper.

Volpe picked up the seal again, licked its etched base, and stabbed it at the air. He did so five times, repeating the same phrase over and over, seemingly sealing his commitment with the darkness.

I hope I didn’t hurt anyone getting that, Nico thought. Not like that man in the apartment, and maybe that monk. I don’t think there were blackouts in the Palazzo Cavalli, but … maybe they’re so severe I can’t even remember that they happened.

“Quiet,” Volpe said, his voice full of menace. Inside, Nico shut himself off for a moment, the psychic equivalent of closing his eyes and taking a breath. When he looked again he saw—

—the knife!

Geena gasped and went to her knees, looking behind her, ahead again, listening for approaching footsteps and wondering if Nico had lured her here just so that he could …

But no, she had more faith in him than that. Breathing hard, she stood again, hiding from the late afternoon sun in the shadows of a doorway. Clearing her mind, she tried to sense where that new sudden flash had come from. It had been fast, sharp, almost like the—

—knife, coming up toward his face with the dried smear of blood still on its blade, pressed to his mouth, stroked by his tongue, and even though it’s Volpe doing this she can still feel the cold metal against her own tongue, and taste the stale tang of her own blood. She hears his voice again, deep and guttural, nothing like Nico has ever spoken before. There are flames, and shadows. The air is heavy. His excitement rises, a terrible thing, and the vision blurs as Nico draws back until—

She leaned against the cold stone jamb, breathing hard and yet more used to the transition from psychic flash to reality than she had been before. They’re in an old basement somewhere, she thought, and she knew she had been heading in the right direction.

“Some weird ritual,” she muttered. If she could reach him before the ritual was over, perhaps she could do something to help.

But she had to remember that he was still carrying the knife.

A small rowboat slid toward her along the canal. The old man rowing it offered her a grumbled greeting as she drew even with the boat.

“Lovely afternoon,” he said.

“Hadn’t noticed,” Geena replied. He didn’t respond to her rudeness, but neither did he stop rowing. At least he knows where he’s going, she thought. The walkway ended, and she was faced with turning back or trying to continue along the canal herself. Water taxis were rare in these narrow canals, unless they were carrying travelers to and from hotels, and making her way out to one of the wider waterways would only waste time. But there were three rowboats tied alongside the canal.

Her skin tingled, and it was a very different feeling from Nico’s touch. Eyes were upon her … or attention, at least. Someone was concentrating on her. Her skin grew cold, her spine ice-bound, and she hugged herself tight. Goosebumps speckled her arms and the fine hairs on her neck stood on end. Turning a full circle, squinting against the late afternoon sun, she tried to peer into gloomy alleys and shadowy corners. When the horrible feeling suddenly receded, it felt like a molester’s hand stroking across her skin as he departed.

“Damn it,” she said aloud, needing a noise to break the silence hanging heavy around her.

She looked up and around her at the buildings looming overhead, two- and three-story structures with the water as their foundation. Directly above her a second-floor set of French doors opened onto a small balcony. If anyone had been watching her from up there, they had gone back inside.

“Spooking myself,” Geena said as she started unknotting the rope securing one of the dinghies. But she was not sure what had spooked her. She worked quickly, then bundled the line into the boat and stepped in. She unclasped the oars, placed them in their brackets, and pushed off from the canalside. No one shouted Thief, and if anyone did watch as she began rowing away, they were unconcerned.

Taking a huge breath to try and expunge her fears, she aimed the boat the way she thought she needed to go and, mind still open for more flashes from Nico, started rowing hard.

With Geena’s blood wetted again, Volpe flicked the knife toward all four walls, chanting, “North, south, west, east.” Specks of moisture flew, though they made no sound as they landed. Almost as if the air was absorbing the blood.

He turned several pages in The Book of the Nameless, still clasping hold of the knife in his other hand. Running his finger along lines of text, muttering. Nico thought Volpe had lost himself somewhere in the ritual.

“I know what comes next,” Volpe said, answering the unasked question. “The words must be precise for the Expulsion and Repulsion to be renewed. Then the city will be closed off once more from the three bastard Doges.”

Mad, Nico thought. He must be—

“Mad? Because they’re so old, they’re bound to be dead, of course. Is that what you mean?” Nico did not answer, and Volpe did not need one. “Dead, like me?”

You survived in spirit only, not in flesh, Nico thought. Is that what you’re saying? Somehow they’ve done the same thing?

Volpe hesitated. Nico felt the uncertainty within him.

“I don’t know,” the old magician admitted.

What?

Volpe glanced around the chamber, surveyed the materials of the spell in progress in front of him, and Nico felt him grow impatient.

“Quickly, then,” Volpe said. “And I’ll save the rest for later. I preserved my essence because, without me, the Repulsion would break down. I knew the three of them, the damnable cousins, had each acquired enough of Akylis’ magic to prolong their lives, and I intended to outlast them. When the last of them died, the spell that preserved my heart and spirit was meant to unravel, and then, at last, I could move on to the world beyond this life.”

So, if your spell never unraveled—

“It means that at least one of them is still alive, these long centuries later,” Volpe said. “But one or all three, it matters not. They can’t be allowed to return to Venice. I should never have let them live, but I feared compromising my position in the government and the influence it granted to me. Had I simply killed them …”

But why keep them out? Nico asked. What is it you fear?

“Their hideous ambitions,” Volpe replied. “Each of them, in his own time, fancied himself a magician of sorts. They were novices and fools, and they tapped into a power—an evil—that tainted them, turning their already monumental arrogance and greed into something monstrous.”

This power … that’s Akylis?

But Volpe’s impatience had reached its breaking point.

“Enough,” he said. “No more delays.”

So Nico could only watch as Volpe began the final stage of a ritual designed to keep three six-hundred-year-old men from the city. He read from the book in that old language, punctuating the end of each sentence with a gentle stab of the knife at the air, north and south, west and east. He repeated the process twice more, then he set the knife down and settled back.

It’s done? Nico thought, meaning it as a question for Volpe.

“Almost,” Volpe said. “All that’s needed now is …” He fell silent, perhaps concentrating, perhaps not wishing to give away the final ingredient to this strange ritual.

Then he held out his left hand, pressed the blade to his palm, and stroked it left to right.

Nico gasped. Blood flowed. He winced against the pain, but there was none.

“Ouch,” Volpe said, then he chuckled. He flicked the knife again as he had before, but this time there was no chanting, and his actions had a casual grace. He fisted his hand, then wiped the dripping blood on his trousers. When Volpe glanced at the wound again, Nico saw that it was not too deep or long. The knife was sharp.

“And it’s done,” Volpe said, sighing, relaxing back on his haunches. His shoulders drooped and then the pain sang in Nico, the keen burning across the palm of his left hand. He wanted to scream, but Volpe still had his mouth.

Now will you leave me alone? Nico asked. Volpe raised his head, smiling … and then his smile froze into a grimace.

The air began to vibrate. Nico felt it through the body he did not control—a gentle murmur that grew in intensity and volume, setting the air shimmering like a heat-haze, shaking dust from the ceiling and shrinking the flames in the braziers.

“No!” Volpe said, and Nico had never heard such passion in that spirit’s voice.

“What’s happening?” Nico asked, and he spoke aloud. He looked down at his hand and lifted it; Volpe had let his control slip. In his other hand, Nico still clasped the knife that had slashed Geena’s arm and his own palm, and he moved to throw it away. His muscles cramped, and it felt as if the bones of his arm had fused into glass. One wrong move and they would shatter.

“No!” Volpe roared. For a second his voice was as loud as the increasing disturbance in the chamber. He dragged Nico to his feet and took control again, complete control, and Nico was shoved deep like a body being stuffed down a well. “It’s all wrong!” Volpe screamed, but this time the chaos around him was louder.

Still he let Nico see, and hear. Behind what was happening all around them in the chamber—the violence of an earthquake, with the echoes of something very different—Nico felt a simmering fury waiting to burst from the man who had stolen him away.

The fire in one of the braziers went out suddenly, and Nico thought of that buried chamber, the wall collapsing, and the stinking waters finding their way inside. But there was no water here, only dust and chaos. The air itself shook, bounced from wall to wall, a series of shock waves crossing and colliding, and Nico’s teeth thrummed in his jaw. His hair stood on end as he turned to run for the door.

“It didn’t work!” Volpe screamed. Nico froze again, muscles cramped, and he became a statue while everything around him seemed to move. “They’re already here!”

Nico tried walking, and slowly the blazing pain in his limbs lessened. Its dilution matched the reduction in the violence around the room. Two braziers were out now, but the other two still guttered heroically, their flames soft and blue as if there were not enough oxygen in the air.

“What … happened?” Nico rasped, and then the fury he sensed exploded upon him, and from him.

“We were too late!” Volpe growled. And Nico found himself running at full speed, head down, toward the solid stone wall.

Geena moved through the city, guided by nothing discernable or definable. Leaving the stolen boat tied to a wooden jetty, she ducked through a rose-smothered archway and emerged into a small square. There were a few people here, milling around a restaurant busy with the early dinner crowd—Americans, mostly. Europeans ate much later. The diners spoke in strangely subdued tones, and she felt oddly unnerved by their presence. She skirted the square and hoped they did not see her. There was no fear that she would be recognized—the chance of her knowing anyone here was remote—but she felt involved in something so bizarre that the company of casual strangers seemed repellent. They would nod a greeting or comment on how warm it was, meals still heavy in their stomachs and eyes softened with wine, and somewhere Nico was in terrible danger. His life hung in the balance; she was certain of that. She might well be his only hope. Muttered platitudes had no place this day.

And still she sensed something following her. On the canal, she had paused in her paddling a dozen times—once to move aside as a water taxi chugged by, the rest simply to drift and listen. The dip and splash of the oars soon became soporific, but she needed to remain alert. She never heard anything behind her that indicated pursuit, nor did she see anything. And that convinced her more than anything that she was being followed, though not by anyone she could see. It felt as if someone remained just out of sight, always hidden behind the last turn in the canal.

She had checked her cell phone, floating in the middle of a narrow canal that was usually bustling during the day. Two more texts from Domenic, the last one over an hour before, and she guessed he’d given up for the day. No more voice mails. If he’d found her trail and was somehow following, surely he would try to call her, ask her to wait for him? Surely he’d let her know?

She left the square and headed along a narrow alleyway between buildings. At the first doorway she stopped and crouched down behind some rubbish bags. She smelled rotten food and musty clothes, heard the secretive rustlings of some of Venice’s huge rat population, but no one entered the alley behind her.

“Nico?” she said softly, just in case. Speaking his name vocalized a truth she did not like—she was a little scared of him. It was a repulsive idea, because she was certain that he needed her now more than at any time in the past, but all this strangeness surrounded and came from him. Something he’d done down in that Chamber of Ten had initiated this—touching that urn, and the slick material it had contained—and though she could not find it in herself to lay blame, she did attach responsibility. She wanted to help him, but she was quietly terrified that he would not be willing, or able, to help himself.

No one followed her into the alley, and neither did she receive any more flashes from Nico. So she moved on, simply because remaining still no longer seemed a good idea.

She came to a canal with a narrow footpath along one side, where three people sat drinking outside a set of open French doors. She knew this to be a small hotel—there were many in this district, family-run places that spent most of the year filled with tourists who knew the better places to stay in Venice. She heard two American voices, and heavily accented English from a woman who might have been the owner. There was a small table between them, several wine bottles on its surface, and they each nursed a glass.

Geena passed by, trying to appear as nonchalant as possible but feeling conspicuous. As she drew level, the Italian woman said in English, “Have you heard about the Mayor?”

“What about him?” one of the American men asked.

“Dead!” the other American said, his voice slurring heavily. He lifted his glass and took a drink, and his companion glanced wearily at him.

Geena froze, wanting to eavesdrop but without getting caught. The Mayor was dead? Had he died in the collapse of the building in Dorsoduro? She patted her pockets as though searching for something.

“But how did he die?” the less obviously intoxicated American asked.

“Stabbed to death,” the drunk man said, the seriousness quelling his drunkenness a little.

“In his house,” the Italian woman said. “His wife and daughter found him just before dinner. Tragic.”

Geena hurried quickly away, losing herself amidst the people bustling this way and that. The Mayor, dead? Who would have done such a thing? Why? Her mind was running, trying to decide if these were all pieces of a larger puzzle. Murder and disaster had struck Venice in a single day, and she could not help feeling as though chaos was spreading throughout the city. She looked at the faces of the people she passed and they all seemed troubled to her. Uneasy, as though they sensed dark forces working against them, just out of sight.

Or maybe you’re just projecting, Geena thought, and managed a small smile. But what if she wasn’t merely being self-indulgent? Could all of these things really be unrelated? Memories of the flashbacks she’d been following mixed and merged. Whatever Zanco Volpe had been—magician, murderer, manipulator—he had been first and foremost a politician, dedicated to the city he both loved and secretly controlled.

Stabbed to death, the man had said.

Though she fought against it, and ghastly though the idea was, she had little trouble imagining the knife in the hand of the man she loved; the hand now controlled by Zanco Volpe.

Volpe gave him back his nerves, but kept muscle and bone. He let him feel the pain that damage to his flesh caused, but retained mobility and impetus, exerting a terrible control that left Nico helpless in his agonies. It was a terrible, vengeful torture, and all the while Volpe kept shouting out the reason:

“You … slowed … me … down!”

He ran across the chamber again and struck another stone wall. The impact stole his vision, and he staggered back and fell.

“No!” Volpe said, hauling Nico to his feet again, wiping blood from his eyes so that he could launch himself at one of the flaming braziers. He tripped and went sprawling, pain biting in everywhere. Nico so wanted to scream, but Volpe had his mouth, using it to rant and rage.

“You made me late, you slowed me down, you let them get in!”

I let no one in, Nico thought, but he knew that was not quite true. He’d let Volpe in, and now the consequences of that mistake were mounting. The Book of the Nameless lay torn beneath him, the seal rolled across the floor, and close to his right hand lay the knife.

Volpe picked it up, and Nico screamed.

The scream was real. Volpe paused, holding the knife with its tip pointing toward Nico’s right eye, inches away and invisible in the poor light. Volpe moved it closer, and Nico could sense it there, the cool sharp metal that was now smeared with a mixture of his and Geena’s blood.

I’ve done nothing to you, he thought. You’ve done it all to me. But he tried to draw back, and thought as secretly as he could, I love you, Geena, and I’m sorry, but the monster is going to kill me.

Volpe stood, groaning as he took some of the pain he had bestowed. Nico felt a sense of wonder in the spirit, because he had not felt such pain for so long. It was almost liberating. His heart thudded, blood flowed, and as Volpe moved toward the small entrance hole into the chamber, Nico quietly assessed his injuries.

“I’m no monster,” Volpe said, his tone betraying a sense of hurt.

Then give me back my life.

“I cannot. Not yet. Things have gone … wrong. There’s danger to Venice. Its people and the city itself are in peril, and what I’ve been holding back for centuries might now—”

Might what? Nico thought. How are you any different from them? They dabbled in dark magic? They were power-hungry bastards? So what? That describes you just as well. They’re just like you!

“No,” Volpe said, “they’re not.”

What makes them so different?

He could feel Volpe’s anger subsiding into grim determination.

“Listen well, Nicolo, and I will tell you.”

For long minutes, the old magician whispered to him. Nico listened, first incredulous, then amazed, and finally terrified.

“I need rest,” Volpe said, when he was through. “You need to find somewhere quiet, somewhere private, and rest yourself. I have injured you, and for that you have my apologies. But I can heal you. The longer we are joined together, the stronger the bond between us, and the greater control I have over my magic. While we both rest, your injuries will fade and your vigor will be restored, just as mine will be. I despise the thought of losing even a moment, but we must be at our best. We have a fight ahead of us.”

“We?” Nico said, surprised at the sound of his voice. Volpe was already sinking down, and the pains across his body roared in like a fire bursting alight. Nico groaned and spit blood from mashed lips, and he hoped Volpe really could heal him.

You’ve no choice, Nico, from somewhere deep inside. Venice needs you now, as much as it ever needed me. Now rest … and later, we will scheme.