The Chamber of Ten

XVIII

I HAD TO try, Geena thought.

Nico’s reply did not come in words but in an outpouring of anguished love. As she stared at the two mad Doges and their hired killers, at cold eyes and gun barrels, she knew that she was about to die. Aretino and the depraved Foscari had not waited for dawn. Her only regret was that Nico would die with her, and that he would die with Volpe still inside of him. She’d tried to drive the magician out, thinking it was her only chance to free the man she loved, the only opportunity to prevent Volpe from claiming his body forever.

The Doges had to be stopped, but she’d told herself that she and Nico could do it. They’d already killed one of the ancient lunatics. It could be done. She’d been taking huge risks, flying by the seat of her pants, relying on hope and the way fate seemed to have been running her way … as if the city itself was on their side. And if Volpe was right, and she and Nico were meant to become the new Oracles of Venice, maybe it had been. But now her luck had run out.

She hadn’t expected so many guns.

“My friends, if you’d be so kind,” Aretino said. “Kill her.”

Nico moved to block the killers’ aim—or was it Volpe, wearing Nico’s body? Would the magician do that for her? Surely not, and yet …

He stood straighter, his head slightly cocked, and she knew that if she could have seen his face his features would have changed in that subtle way that told her who looked out from those eyes at any given moment. He had fooled her once, but this was no performance. This was Zanco Volpe.

The Doges knew it, too. Geena could see it in their eyes.

“You were fools to come back,” Volpe said, speaking with Nico’s lips, protecting her. “I will never allow you to uncap the well. Akylis’ evil has caused enough strife in my city. Venice will be tainted no further.”

Foscari laughed. “We’ve been waiting for this moment, Volpe. Now it has finally come, do you think there is anything that would have kept us away?”

The killers paused a moment, glancing back and forth between Aretino and Volpe, unsure.

Geena cast a glance at the granite disk set into the floor perhaps twenty feet away from her. She had risked so much. If her risk led to the release of that evil, to the fate that the Doges had in store for Venice and the world, she would never forgive herself.

But once exposed to the full power of Akylis’ evil, would she even care? The thought made her sick.

Aretino shook his head almost sadly. “Honestly, Zanco. You’ve been out of the world for centuries. You’re nothing but a ghost.”

“I am far more than a ghost,” Volpe snapped.

Geena glanced around quickly and spotted the bloodstained knife on the stone floor. She measured the distance in her mind, wondering if she could reach it and make it to cover behind an obelisk before bullets cut her down. But there was no way. It would be suicide.

“Venice is ours,” Foscari said, preening. “The fullness of Akylis’ power will be ours. Whatever power you had is nothing to us now. If you still had a shred of your true power, you would not have allowed me to wound that shell you’re wearing.”

“You shot me because I had no experience with guns,” Volpe said. “I did not understand them. I do now.”

“You bled. This time I’ll cut you into pieces.”

“Then do it. Until you do, I am still the Oracle of Venice. Her soul is under my protection.”

Aretino blinked slowly, a predator just coming awake. He glanced at the man in the gray suit, then down at his gun. His left eye twitched with anger.

“Didn’t I tell you to kill the woman?”

The man in the gray suit nodded toward Volpe. “He’s in the way.”

Aretino glared at him in disgust and the gray suit got the message. He and the blond woman started forward again, eyeing Volpe warily. Geena’s breath quickened, pulse racing as she cursed. The knife lay perhaps ten feet to her left. She had no choice.

No, Nico said in her mind. Volpe, you keep her alive.

She just tried to kill me.

“You’re already dead, you son of a bitch,” Geena whispered to his back. You had your friends cut out your heart.

Gray suit and the blond aimed their guns at Volpe’s skull as they began to edge around him. Four other thugs stood with the Doges, awaiting the opportunity to kill someone.

Tears began to well in her eyes and she grew furious with herself for letting these monsters see her cry.

I love you, Nico. You were the best thing about living.

Volpe flinched as he overheard this thought. He turned his head just enough so that she could see the thin smile on his face. He lifted his left hand, clutched into a fist, and whispered a single word—it might have been “araignées,” French for spiders—and popped open his hand as though releasing something from his grasp.

Gray suit and the blond cried out in unison, dropping their guns as they reached up to claw at their faces.

“No!” Aretino barked, and raised both hands, beginning a guttural chant.

Volpe took a step toward the Doges and brought both hands together in a single clap that echoed off the stone walls. As if struck by a sudden gale, the Doges and their lackeys were blown backward, limbs flailing as they hit the floor with a splash.

Find cover! Nico shouted in her thoughts.

Geena had already started running. The blond and the man in the gray suit had collapsed to the ground and were having some kind of seizures, still tearing at their faces.

“They’re in here!” the man in the gray suit screamed. “The spiders are inside my head!”

Geena bent to snatch up the knife as she ran by, then sprinted for the three columns at the center of the Chamber of Ten. Any of the obelisks would have hidden her, but from in there she might be able to defend herself, to survive precious seconds or minutes—long enough for Volpe to kill the Doges and their hired help. Until now, casting spells had drained him. The lack of a body of his own had weakened his magic. But something had obviously happened, because now the Doges seemed outmatched.

She darted between two of the stone columns, took cover, and peered back out at the magicians.

Just in time to see Volpe fall to his knees in the inch of water, too weak to raise a hand in his own defense, or in hers.

“Is that the best you can do these days?” Foscari said, wiping at a bloody scrape on his face as he stood.

Aretino rose stiffly, hatred burning in his eyes. “You know, Francesco, I think that might have exhausted our old friend. I think that might well be the last spell he will ever cast.”

Get up! Geena thought. Goddamn you, get up!

As if in reply, Volpe snapped his head back and grinned wildly at the Doges. “Just waiting for you to catch your breath,” he said. “I want to make this last.”

Brave words. Cruel words. But only a ruse. From the darkness of the three columns, Geena saw his face in the flickering lantern light and the features had changed again. Volpe had burned himself out and retreated back into Nico’s mind, leaving Nico himself to face the Doges, pretending to be Volpe.

“Come, then,” Nico said, trying his best to mimic Volpe’s arrogant sneer. “Do your worst.”

“Oh, we will,” Foscari promised, licking his lips.

What are you doing? Geena cried in her mind.

Venice chose us as her Oracles—

We’re not the Oracles yet!

And maybe we never will be, Nico replied. But we were chosen. We can’t let them win.

Geena felt the weight of the knife in her hand. She tightened her grip on the handle and looked down at the blade, dark with her blood and with Nico’s. They only had Volpe’s word on it, and she did not trust the old magician at all, but somehow she knew that much was true.

Grim-faced, she narrowed her eyes and peered out into the Chamber of Ten, raising the knife.

Nico held his hands in front of him, fingers hooked into claws as though any second he might sketch a spell on the air. He had experienced Volpe’s casting of such enchantments before and prayed he looked convincing enough to make the Doges wary. Aretino’s eyes gleamed with hatred and ambition, but Foscari seemed excited only by the prospect of causing pain.

No time to lie down on the job, he thought, trying to jostle Volpe. If they kill me, we’ll both be dead! Come on, do something!

But the magician had diminished somehow, fallen down deep inside of him like a light at the bottom of a well. He had managed the appearance of strength, but those two spells had drained him. Nico felt him stirring, but only weakly.

I can’t fight them, Volpe said. The Chamber is filled with residue from my magic, but I can barely draw on it. Without physical form—

You’ve got physical form! Me!

It isn’t the same. I need a foundation to provide leverage. Volpe did not explain further, but an image flashed through Nico’s mind and he understood at last what the magician meant. Without his own body, casting spells was like trying to lift something heavy while swimming in deep water.

Foscari began to chant in a language Nico did not even recognize—something ancient and ugly—and the Doge’s grin widened. Aretino gestured for their hired killers to hang back. Nico felt his mask of courage begin to slip and Aretino must have noticed something amiss, for he narrowed his eyes and took a step forward.

Then he laughed softly, holding up a hand.

“Wait, Francesco. It’s over.”

Foscari pulled up and glared at him liked a dog rounding on his master. “What do you mean, ‘over’?”

“That’s not Volpe talking to us. It’s the boy, Lombardi. Volpe’s blown out his own candle already,” Aretino said, smiling at Nico. “Isn’t that right, Nico?”

Nico wanted to smash the old bastard’s skull against the stone floor until his brains leaked out. Boy? He tried not to change his expression, tried to hold on to Volpe’s sneer.

Are you hearing this? Volpe, fucking do something!

You’ve got to surrender.

They’re not here for prisoners!

To me, Volpe said, his inner voice stronger. It’s the only way. Give yourself over to me willingly, let us merge completely. It may be confusing, it may only make it more difficult to fight, but it’s possible it will truly join us and I will be able to use your body fully as my own, and wield the most powerful spells without collapsing.

Nico stared in horror at Aretino’s fading smile and the growing delight on Foscari’s face.

“Get the girl,” Aretino said.

“Allow me,” Foscari said, giving their lackeys a savage glance that made even those hardened killers fall back.

How can I trust you? How do I know I’ll get my body back?

Even I don’t know if you’ll get your body back. This merging could be permanent. But choose quickly, or the choice will be taken from you.

It was no choice at all. He saw Foscari striding toward the three columns at the center of the Chamber, caught a glimpse of Geena huddled there, knife glinting in her hand, and he knew.

“Do it, you bastard!” he shouted.

Aretino flinched in surprise. Thinking Nico had been talking to him, Foscari turned to leer at him.

Take a deep breath and then let it out. When you inhale again, let it be with an invitation in your heart. Let me fill the spaces in you.

Just hurry, Nico thought.

And he did as Volpe asked. Closed his eyes. Deep breath in, let it out, another breath, let it out. It felt to him as if he were growing, as though when he opened his eyes he ought to be a giant. But when he did look, he had not changed physically. Inside, though … he bristled with vigor, alert to the slightest sound or shift in the texture of shadows in the Chamber. He could see skeins of light like spiderwebs throughout the room—gold and silver, green and red and black, purple as a bruise, pink as a woman’s secret flesh.

Volpe did not like to call it magic because it did not come from within him. But the power—the magic—it was there, all around them, and if he could only reach out and touch those skeins, weave them together with the right gestures, the right words, he could bend the world to his whim.

Nico had never been so terrified or so aroused.

“Hello again, Pietro,” Volpe said with Nico’s mouth. Or is that me? It was impossible now to know where he ended and Volpe began. They were one.

Aretino swore. He lifted his hands, about to cast a spell. A whip-thin gunman behind him sensed the change, saw it all happening, raised his weapon, and pulled the trigger.

Water, Volpe thought.

Even as the sound of the gunshot erupted in the Chamber, Nico twitched a finger, throat working a subaudible grunt that was in itself a spell so ingrained in Volpe that it required nothing more.

The bullets splashed against him, dampening his clothes where they struck, nothing but water now.

Foscari turned at the gunshot’s echo and threw up his hands, beginning a spell. Nico held up both hands, whispered words he had never learned, and the spells slid harmlessly away from him.

“This city is under our protection,” Nico said. “And this Chamber … this is mine, laid with magical traps five hundred years ago. Fools, indeed.”

Foscari roared and ran at him, drawing a dagger laden with curses.

Nico dropped to one knee, slapped his open palms on the stone floor, and shouted two words to trigger a spell Volpe had cast half a millennium ago.

“Expergefactum amicitiae!”

A tremor ran through the Chamber, a groan from deep beneath the city, and dust rained down from the ceiling. One of the obelisks had shattered during the flood, and now the rest of them cracked, lines running through the identical Roman numeral X engraved upon each one, and split open. Arms thrust out, knocking black stone aside, and the Council of Ten emerged from their tombs draped in crumbling robes and flaps of withered skin.

In amongst the three columns, Geena began to scream.

The Doges’ hired killers swore and shouted and opened fire. A thick-necked brute bolted for the stairs. Aretino and Foscari began to cast spells. One of the dead men ignited in flames that blackened the ceiling and spread to the robes of another.

But the dead were swift. They were not slowed by bullets. In seconds they were breaking bones and tearing flesh, and the Chamber resounded with the screams of killers as the Doges’ thugs were slaughtered. Several of the Ten grabbed Foscari. The Doge held one by the face and it decayed in seconds, withered flesh sloughing off of bones as its age caught up with it, and then turning to dust.

Nico strode toward Aretino. He thrust out a hand, muttered a spell from The Book of the Nameless, and Aretino lifted off the floor and crashed into the ceiling, breaking bones and caving in the left side of his face.

But the Doge had studied well in his centuries of wandering. He rasped the initial words of a spell to drive out an invasive spirit, and Nico felt as though he were being torn apart.

Fight it! Volpe screamed in his thoughts. Without me, he’ll destroy you.

Nico fought, but as pain ripped into him, he feared that he was now so inextricably bound to Volpe that separation would kill them both.

Geena felt it happening, heard Nico scream inside of her head, and she saw what needed to be done.

Bring him down! she shouted in her mind, praying Nico or Volpe would hear her thoughts through the haze of their pain. Drop him!

With a roar of pain, Nico slashed his hands through the air and—as though he had cut the strings holding the Doge aloft—Aretino plummeted to the floor, crying out as the impact jarred broken bones. Snarling, sodden with canal water, he reached up to carve another spell from the air, but then two of the dead Ten attacked him. Geena had seen them waiting for the opportunity. From inside its tattered robes, one of them drew a long ritual dagger and hacked it down with inhuman strength, severing Aretino’s hand at the wrist.

Blood sprayed the two dead men.

Nico reeled backward and fell to his knees, but she felt the pain subside within him. For better or worse, he and Volpe were still joined.

A cry of fury erupted nearby and she twisted around to see Foscari struggling with a cluster of the Ten. He screamed words in some guttural tongue, some ancient Babel language she would never learn, and grabbed one of them by the throat. Like the other he had destroyed, it began to unravel and collapse in upon itself. But the rest had his arms then, twisting them behind him, trying to keep him from touching any more of them.

Foscari threw them off, staggering, wheeling across the floor to crash into the stone column right in front of her. His face had been clawed and beaten, cheek gashed to the bone, and his left arm was torn and bloody.

As he started to push away from the column, he saw her there in the dark.

“Bitch! I’ll have your eyes for this!”

Another dead man tugged him backward. Knife in hand, Geena followed him out. The blade felt heavy in her grasp, but the weight of consequence—what would happen if she did not stop this man—was far heavier.

Foscari laughed at the sight of the knife. “You can’t be stupid enough to think that will kill me.”

One of the Ten got a fistful of his hair, began to drag his head back. Another of the dead caught his arm. With a muttered curse, Foscari tried to strike back, but by then Geena was already moving.

He tore free, whipped his fist around and caught her with a skull-rattling backhand, but the dead man still held him by the hair. Blood dripped down her chin, her lip swollen and split, but she barely felt it as she lunged at him. Her free hand caught his wrist, held it back, and she swept the knife around in an arc that sliced cleanly through his throat. Blood sprayed her face and clothes; it stung her eyes as she blinked it away.

Choking on his own blood, Foscari gurgled laughter.

“Damn you, stop fucking laughing!” she screamed.

“… plague …” he croaked, wheezed, pointed to her. “… dead.”

Clutching a hand over his throat, sealing the wound, he sneered as he stumbled toward her. She thought of the sickness that had ravaged her and Nico after they’d killed Caravello and the spell Volpe had done to cure them, and she wondered if it had an expiration date.

“I’ll be fine,” she said with a confidence she did not feel. She held up the knife. “But you won’t.”

Foscari’s eyes narrowed with sudden alarm. He fell to one knee. Then, furious with his sudden weakness, forced himself to rise again. But he moved slowly now, reaching for her with a trembling hand.

“This blade is stained with the blood of the chosen Oracles of Venice,” she said. “The city endures, but you’re not as immortal as you like to think.”

With a choking, wordless rage, Foscari lunged for her. Cruelty and lust still tinged his gaze, even as he began to die, and she knew he was intent upon taking her with him into death.

Geena stabbed him in the chest, putting all of her weight behind the blade, pulling him in close like a lover, and twisting. Foscari stiffened and then crumpled into her embrace. She could have laid him gently upon the ground, but he did not deserve her tenderness. She recoiled from his diseased blood and his filthy touch—just tugged the knife out and let him slump wetly to the floor.

The plague. If she was going to get sick again, how soon would she begin to cough? How quickly would the sores appear?

Finish him!

The words were Volpe’s, echoing in her mind. She’d heard little of Nico’s thoughts in the past two minutes, but had felt his fear and fury and pain. Now she spun, thinking for a moment that Volpe had been talking to her, that he didn’t realize Foscari was already dead.

But the words weren’t for her.

Four of the withered dead, the last remnants of Volpe’s loyal Council of Ten, were holding Pietro Aretino pinned against the wall. One of his hands had been hacked off and the other broken and bloodied, meaning that spells that required the use of his hands were out of the question. He began to chant something, still trying to stay alive.

“I said, finish him!” Nico shouted in Volpe’s voice. Or the other way around. There was little distinction now between one and the other.

Nico stood only a few feet from Aretino and began to claw his fingers at the air, summoning a spell that would end the life of the last Doge.

“No!” Geena screamed, running toward him, but they didn’t seem to hear her.

Nico, stop!

He hesitated, glanced over at her. Through the rapport they shared she could sense Volpe trying to finish the job. Geena slammed into Nico, knocking him to the ground, straddling him there and staring down into his eyes.

“The plague jars!” she shouted. “Didn’t you listen? If all three of them die, the waters will flood in and smash the jars and the plague will take all of Venice.”

Anger had clouded the minds of both men who lived in that body, but now the eyes cleared. She could not tell who gazed out at her from within, but she saw that reason had returned, and she exhaled.

“That’s all right,” Nico and Volpe said, in one voice. “I have a better idea.”

The dead Ten—those Foscari had not destroyed—restrained Aretino while the magician, this strange combination of Nico and Volpe, silenced the old Doge with a spell. He could not speak enchantments, could not warp the air without fingers.

Eyes wide with the terror he would have gladly brought to others, Aretino struggled uselessly as the dead men began a chant that sounded more like creaking hinges than voices. They cut the papery skin on their palms and held their hands forward, but only chalky dust fell to vanish in the water on the floor. When Nico sliced his palm open, true blood flowed and pooled and swirled in the water with that dust, and the ritual gathered its power.

So much remained to be done. With the Doge’s life essence preserved just as Volpe’s had been, his heart still alive and still beating, the spells that had been woven around the plague jars and the chambers where they had been hidden would be maintained. She and Nico would have to find every single one of those chambers and destroy the plague jars with the cleansing flame Volpe would teach them how to use. It would take time, but Geena was beginning to realize that they would have that time. Time to learn. Time to love.

But only if Volpe kept his word.

When Nico—and Volpe, always Volpe—stepped in to drive their knives into Aretino’s chest and carve out his heart, Geena couldn’t watch any longer. She bolted for the stairs, knowing as she did that she had seen the Chamber of Ten for the last time.

Aren’t you going to say good-bye? Volpe whispered in her mind.

He had promised to leave Nico, to let his spirit pass into the next world and leave Venice to a new generation of Oracles, but she still did not trust him. How could she? The question followed her up the stairs into Petrarch’s library, and then up into the Biblioteca, and finally out into golden morning of the city that had chosen her and Nico to be the keepers of its soul and its secrets.

Venice. La Serenissima.

The Most Serene.