The Chamber of Ten

IV

NICO STOOD on the tiled courtyard in front of the church of Madonna dell’Orto, watching the rising sun lighten the brick façade from brown to rose to a pale peach. The arched windows of the bell tower were steeped in shadows, as though the night had barricaded itself inside to try to outlast the sun. The white stonework of the arches and the various statues in the façade all seemed to be emerging from shadows themselves, and gleamed like ivory as the morning light revealed them.

The Madonna dell’Orto at sunrise was a sight to behold. But Nico would have been better able to appreciate it if he could have remembered precisely how he had come to be there.

He swayed a little, then regained his balance. His thoughts were muzzy and he tried to shake the feeling. The morning seemed to be burning off the shadows in his mind just as it did those that had cloaked the city.

Think. You kissed Geena while she slept, got out of bed and dressed, careful not to wake her, and left her place.

That much he did recall, along with the confusion that had roiled within him. His departure had been urgent and he had hurried through the maze of passages and bridges to the edge of the Grand Canal, with his pulse racing and the sense that some vital task must be accomplished. Paranoia made the small hairs stand up on the back of his neck and he had reached out with his thoughts, seeking the heightened emotions he could often sense. Fear had its own flavor. And malice. How many times had he escaped violence in a bar or club by departing just before things turned ugly?

But he had sensed no malice, no violent intentions, no one following him. Why he should think someone might be following him, Nico didn’t know. It made no sense, but he could not escape that suspicion and had hurried onward, more frantic than ever to reach his destination …

… only he didn’t know where he was going. Not at first. It felt to him as though some enormous hook had been set into his rib cage and was tugging him forward. He had hurried along the edge of the Grand Canal in vain hopes of discovering a water taxi running in the pre-dawn hours, knowing that crossing the water was the next step toward his destination.

His memory had holes in it. Blackouts, like some awful drunk.

He remembered sitting in a creaking traghetto, its small motor buzzing, echoing off black water below and black sky above. Somehow he had persuaded the man to take him across the Grand Canal from Guideca to San Marco. The fellow had looked exhausted; he’d probably been up all night ferrying revelers to various hotels and clubs. Nico had tried to pay him, but the man had gotten a pale, frightened look on his face and had shooed him away.

Only when he walked through the vast emptiness of St. Mark’s Square at half past three in the morning, and then into the labyrinth of alleys and bridges and canals beyond, did it occur to him where he was headed. The destination had popped into his head the way a song title might once he had given up trying to remember it.

He had nearly turned around then. Geena had been soft and warm and in need of reassurance. Yet the compulsion had been impossible to resist, sending him out to wander Venice in the small hours of the morning with only the sounds of scurrying rats and the water lapping the sides of the canals to keep him company.

Now he found himself here, gazing up at the beautiful face of this church, and he could recall only about half of that journey. Portions of his memory, even of the path he had taken to get here, were blacked out.

In their place, other memories rushed in—vivid recollections of the sounds of construction, the stink of men working, the hoisting of statues into place, sculptors at work.… His hands trembled as he stared at the church.

“Impossible,” he whispered, there in the light of the rising sun.

Yet if he closed his eyes he could practically see the workers constructing the church’s façade, placing the pilasters, laying the brickwork around the enormous circular rose window that lit up now with the dawn’s light.

“What the hell is happening to me?” he asked the sunrise.

A piece of paper skittered across the tiles in the breeze, eddied in a circle, then continued on its way. He ought to turn around and go back to Geena, spoon behind her and press his nose into her hair, breathing in the scent of her. That was what he wanted to do. But somehow the commands did not travel from his brain to his muscles, and his body did not obey him. He felt like a marionette.

Go in, he thought.

Or someone thought for him. That was exactly what it felt like. The ideas that kept bubbling to the surface of his mind did not feel like his. Sensitive to the thoughts and emotions of others, able to touch their minds with his own, he had spent his entire life learning to sort out the difference between his own internal voice and those of others, and he knew that this voice did not belong to him. Nico was afraid, and yet fascinated as well.

The stone jar, he thought. The urn. And he knew it had begun with that. Down in the strange subchamber beneath Petrarch’s library, he had tapped into some enormous psychic repository from Venice’s past. He could see and taste and smell things as they had been in centuries past. These sensations came in flashes and visions and in whispers in his mind.

As a boy, whenever he had changed schools and been surrounded by new people—even when he had first attended university—he had needed to take time to adjust to the tidal wave of new minds around him, to build up fresh walls. A day or two would be all he needed to sort himself out, to quiet the voices in his head and reassert his own thoughts. To be himself.

This would be the same, he felt certain. Somehow he had tapped into some kind of psychic reserve and now it echoed around inside of him, making him feel as though his thoughts were not his own. For now, that meant trying to shut out the rest of the world—even Geena—and focus on this opportunity. He could see the past as though his own eyes had witnessed it, feel the power of the man whose memories had seeped into his own … for certainly he had been powerful. And a psychic as well. He must have been, for Nico to pick up such powerful emotional residue from that chamber.

What are you thinking? You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

He mocked his own presumptions. True, he had never experienced anything like this, nor even heard of anything remotely resembling this turn of events in the research he had done about his own abilities. But what else could it be? It made a bizarre kind of sense. He thought about scientific theories concerning haunted houses, in which “ghosts” were explained as the resonance left behind by traumatic or otherwise emotional events. He wasn’t sure how much of that he believed, but he knew what he felt right now, and “haunted” was as good a word as any.

A day or two and he’d be just fine. The blackout moments would go away, the compulsions would vanish, the voice and its memories would be gone. But while they were with him, he knew he had to use them, to glean what he could about the history of Venice from the information and the feelings suffusing his every thought. Most people would find it terrifying—and the compulsion to act did frighten him a little, as did the blackouts—but now as his thoughts regained some semblance of order, Nico realized that for an archaeologist, this was the opportunity of a lifetime.

When he and Geena made love, and sometimes even just in quiet moments they spent together, he felt as though her thoughts were a part of him instead of some external thing he could tap into. This made that seem like nothing. He felt the presence of this “other” inside his every thought, there with him, and he even knew the name of the man whose psychic echoes were reverberating through his mind and had drawn him here.

Zanco Volpe.

Nico knew Geena had sensed some of this, though how much he could not be sure. He ought to have talked to her about it. She would have been fascinated, wanting to know every detail, and it would have been natural for him to share that with her. Yet he had found himself attempting to hide his thoughts from her, trying to put up barriers between them. It hurt and confused him to shut her out, and he could not really have said why he did it.

But some of the wild tumult of his mind had spilled out to her, he knew. Geena herself was not a sensitive, but over the course of their relationship they had built up a rapport so intimate, their minds so open to each other, that he could not shut her out completely.

Only now it occurred to him that it might not be him who was trying to shut her out. Not really.

He only wished he could control what parts of Volpe’s psychic echo he could touch and see. As he had walked through the streets he had seen two images, the past superimposed over the present, and it had taken his breath away. No one alive had ever seen Venice the way it had been in ages past. Sixteenth century? Fifteenth? He wasn’t quite sure.

Stray thoughts that had to be Volpe’s swam up inside of him. And there was that hook in his chest that drew him onward and filled him with a sense of purpose. Perhaps Volpe had had some unfinished business when he’d died, and the echoes of his purpose filled Nico, overriding his own intentions.

He had been confused at first, fighting it, two sets of thoughts in conflict inside his head. But now he wanted to go along, to see where these psychic echoes would lead him before they diminished to nothing and then vanished altogether.

He took a breath, closed his eyes, then opened himself to Volpe’s voice and the memories that stirred within him.

We’re here, he thought. What now?

Nico felt an overwhelming compulsion to enter the church. He began walking, unnerved by the peculiar sensation that he was only along for the ride, a passenger in his own body. As an experiment, he tried to resist, to fight his forward momentum, and for a moment he could feel anger that was not his own flaring in the back of his mind.

Then he blacked out. His thoughts were extinguished like a snuffed candle flame. Yet even in his unconscious state, he remained vaguely aware that his legs had continued to move.

After she’d woken to find Nico gone from her bed, Geena had managed only a fitful, restless sleep. Deep slumber had proven elusive, and by the time the sky outside her bedroom window had turned from black to indigo to a powdery blue, and the gentle morning light had suffused the room with its warmth, she could not force herself to stay in bed a moment longer.

She’d been off-kilter ever since the ruin of Petrarch’s library and Nico’s brief disappearance, and she didn’t like the feeling. As a little girl, she had been shy and unsure, and she had spent the entirety of her adult life refusing to allow that little girl to rule her. Half of her initial attraction to Nico—beyond the physical, at least—had been that he never questioned her ability to accomplish things for herself. Geena thought it must have something to do with him being so much younger, but whatever it was, she liked it. No second-guessing. No underestimating. No presumptions.

It was time to put the little girl away and be Dr. Geena Hodge again.

So what are my priorities here?

Nico. Petrarch’s library. BBC co-financing. Making the boss happy. If she dealt with the second and third things on that list, the fourth would surely follow. Part of that was finding out what exactly had happened down in the subchamber. The Chamber of Ten, she thought, remembering the Roman numerals written on the door and on those obelisks, as well as the vision that had spilled out of Nico’s mind and into her own. And what of the granite disk set into the stone floor? Could it really cover an entrance into an even deeper chamber?

All of these threads were intertwined. All pieces of some kind of puzzle that, for the moment, had only revealed its edges to her. And she had a feeling if she found the answers to the questions that were plaguing her, she would learn more about what was going on with Nico. If all was well, he would show up early today, either at the university or at the site.

The site. Her head hurt just thinking about it.

The director of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana—a petite, blue-eyed Roman named Adrianna Ricci—had no doubt been racing around in a fury for the past two days, trying to figure out who to blame. The water had poured in from the canal, filling Petrarch’s library almost to the ceiling, but only the subterranean chambers had flooded. The Biblioteca itself had suffered no damage. Still, Adrianna would not be pleased with the equipment they were having to bring through in order to deal with the flooded rooms, or the potential damage being done to the building’s foundations.

Geena would sic Howard Finch on Adrianna and he would undoubtedly throw a little BBC money her way, if it hadn’t been done already. The university would show the video to city officials, who would see that the research team had done nothing that would affect the walls of the chamber and—if Geena knew her boss, Tonio, the way she thought she did—would persuade them to blame the Italian government. All of the canal disruptions caused by the MOSE project or any number of a dozen other factors, not least the gradual sinking of the city and rising of the sea level, would be blamed as contributing factors as Venice tried to get Rome to foot the bill for a levee wall beside the foundations of the Biblioteca.

The factor that might speed things up was that the hole in the canal wall was dangerous. It could grow and undermine the Biblioteca, causing the entire building to collapse. The effect on tourism alone—one of the landmarks of St. Mark’s Square devastated—would be enough to get the city moving. They would already have engineers planning and a repair crew would be gathering.

Still, it could take days even for a temporary solution, such as pumping the chamber out, and Geena had no intention of waiting that long. If Tonio had not already put it in motion, she intended to send Sabrina and a team of divers down into the flooded chambers today. She wanted to know what those obelisks were, what might be in them—though she had an idea—and to see if there was anything else that they had missed.

But Nico had to be her first priority, and though she hoped that he would show up for work today, she feared otherwise.

The curtains billowed with a warm morning breeze as she hurried from her bedroom to the apartment’s tiny bathroom. She ran the shower and then tied her hair back with a rubber band, not waiting for the water to get hot before she stepped under the spray. Her shower last night had been refreshing, but she did not want to take the time to wash her hair again, so she soaped up and rinsed off and then toweled dry, all in a matter of minutes.

Trying to distract herself.

Nico’s my top priority.

She had responsibilities to the university and to her team. Tonio might have been worried about her after things went haywire and sympathetic in giving her time to recover yesterday, but today he would expect answers and action, and he had every right to that expectation. She had work to do. The public would be intrigued, the media would try to find some way to paint them all as incompetent, and scholars would scream for their heads. They had saved roughly eighty-five percent of the books and manuscripts from Petrarch’s library—most of which had already been removed before the incident—but some would no doubt shriek over the loss of fifteen percent and claim that those were the most valuable of the manuscripts.

All of these things had been rolling around in her mind over the course of the hours of darkness since she had woken to find Nico gone. She had slept and dreamed and then woken to thoughts about the project—who would handle the media inquiries, and whether or not she should expand her team once she had the BBC funding.

These were genuine responsibilities, real problems to be solved, but she focused on them in order to prevent herself from thinking about the thing that was really troubling her: the silence in her mind.

Other than the vision she’d had during the night, she had not felt the touch of Nico’s mind since they had made love. And even during their lovemaking, there had been something cold and unfamiliar in him, as though she had touched the mind of a stranger.

Been touched by, she reminded herself. Her closeness to Nico sometimes made her forget that he was the sensitive, not her.

Now she moved about the kitchen, cracking two eggs into a frying pan and then shredding some cheese and strips of ham into the mix and scrambling the whole thing together. Two slices of toast. A glass of bitter orange juice—you couldn’t get decent OJ in Italy—and a cup of coffee strong enough to make a lesser woman cry. And while she prepared her breakfast … and while she sat and ate it … and while she pulled on a clean pair of black jeans and a sleeveless white top, leaving her hair in the ponytail … she thought about Nico.

Not just about him, but to him. Geena kept her mind open, waiting for that familiar prickling of the skin at the back of her neck, the comforting caress of his thoughts against her own. When Nico was close by she felt it nearly all the time, often with images and words and emotions. But even when they were apart, as long as he was in the general vicinity she could get a sense of him—his moods, mostly. It had made her relationship with Nico the greatest of her life, not only because of the extraordinary way their thoughts mingled during sex, but because he kept himself so open to her. She had a freedom that she could never have had with another man—the freedom to love without reservation, knowing that if Nico stopped loving her, or fell for someone else, he would never be able to hide it from her. She hungered for him all the time, but more than that, she felt safe with him. At home.

Now, her thoughts wide open as though trying to lure him in, she could not sense him at all. For a short time after the incident yesterday it had been like this, with Geena so cut off that she had been certain he was dead. Now she knew that Nico was alive, and so this silence could mean only two things. Either he had left Venice completely, or he had gone silent purposefully.

She tossed back the last of her coffee and rose, scraped the remains of her breakfast into the trash, then left the dish in the sink for later.

It took her a minute to find her cell phone. She had no memory of bringing it into the bathroom with her, but there it was on the shelf above the toilet. The battery needed charging, but she refused to take the time for that now. There were half a dozen messages from Tonio and members of her team, but nothing more. Nothing from Nico.

She called him, waiting for the ring.

An ancient David Bowie song played somewhere in the apartment—Nico loved Bowie—and for half a second she let herself believe that her boyfriend had returned. Stupid, of course. Nico’s phone was here, but that didn’t mean he was.

Following David Bowie, she found the phone on the windowsill beside her television in the living room, but the song ended just as she reached for it. Her call went through to voice mail and she hung up. She would take the phone with her, and return it to Nico when she found him. She hated being out of touch.

Geena thought about writing a note but then didn’t bother. Anything she might say in a note, he would already know.

“What the hell’s happening to you?” she whispered into the empty apartment, and she didn’t know if she meant the question for Nico, or for herself.

Tucking her and Nico’s phones into her pocket, she left, locking the door behind her. As she went down the stairs, she forced herself to be calm despite how weird it all was.

She would go to the university first—she needed to touch base with Tonio—and then she would head over to the Biblioteca. If she did not cross paths with Nico at either location, then she would have to go looking for him.

The church bells were silent this morning.

Nico frowned, staring not out one of the arched windows but into a corner of the square bell tower. The heavy bells loomed above him, their weight oppressive, as though they might tumble down at any moment. Plaster strips on the walls led up into the cell that surrounded the bells.

The bell tower had been constructed of brick in the waning days of the 15th century and the first few years of the 16th, but remained an elegant and impressive combination of styles, including the Byzantine dome at its peak. Yet it was the corner that drew his attention—ordinary brick, put together by Venetian masons, which was to say, the greatest in the world.

How the hell did I get up here?

A little ripple of fear went through him. The fascination and even excitement he had felt before now took a backseat to the unsettling nature of these blackouts. Somehow he had entered the church and found his way to whatever private stairs led up into the bell tower. Had doors not been locked to bar his path? Had no one attempted to stop him? And if someone had …

Did I hurt anyone?

He took a moment to survey his own body, searching for pain in his fists or elsewhere that might indicate a fight, but everything seemed perfectly fine, except for the fact that he had no memory between the moment he had started walking toward the church and seconds ago, when he had found himself staring into the brick corner of the bell tower.

Nico turned and looked up at the bells again. Not the original bells, he knew. Zanco Volpe had seen to the installation of the original bells of Madonna dell’Orto, and he had given very specific instructions to the workers, just as he had overseen every element of the casting of the bells themselves. He had done something to the metal in its liquid state, added some ingredient that seemed unclear in the midst of the psychic residue bouncing around in Nico’s head. But Volpe had altered the metal in some way, in secret, with no one there to see him. He had engraved ancient sigils in the bells, so tiny that only a metal-smith would have noticed.

On the day that the bells had been rung for the first time, the men pulling the cords were his men, and they had practiced for days to get the sequence and timing exactly right. He remembered it as clearly as Volpe himself had at the time of his death, more than four hundred years earlier.

The bells had rung in perfect sequence, their emanations a harmony that sealed the spell into the metal, so that every time they were rung thereafter, on down the years, the enchantment had been reinforced. Centuries of spellcraft, all focused on this one location, for the protection of the single item that Volpe had hidden away here.

Until some unthinking fool had replaced the bells.

All of these thoughts were racing through Nico’s mind. Spellcraft? Enchantment? He stared at the corner, where the bricks had deteriorated a little, sagging backward as though a void existed behind them—which he knew to be true. It seemed amazing that no one had noticed the way the wall had sunk in that corner, or attempted to fix it.

Not that long since the old bells were taken away, then, a voice whispered in Nico’s head.

“Stop,” he said, pounding his fists against his temples.

He wanted to know, wanted to see all of the pieces of history that lurked in his brain, but he did not want Volpe whispering in the back of his head in that archaic dialect. Until now, he hadn’t even realized that the thoughts were not in his own modern Italian, but here he was thinking in a language he shouldn’t even understand to begin with.

A century or less, Volpe thought.

“Stop!” Nico shouted.

But this time his hands didn’t go to his temples. Instead he reached out for the bricks, digging his fingers into the crumbling mortar around them, scraping and prodding furiously, so that the pads of his fingertips were raw. His breath came fast. Several times the blackness swept in at the corners of his mind, only to retreat. He wanted to know what was hidden behind the wall in that brick corner, but it was not Nico doing the digging. He knew he ought to stop, or at least be more careful, but still he worked his fingers in, breaking up mortar, pulling chips of it out, loosening several bricks.

He stopped, breathing raggedly. His fingers burned with pain. He thought he ought to look at them, but seemed unable to lift his hands. He looked down and saw tiny drops of blood falling from his fingertips. He had to bind them. Get somewhere he could disinfect and bandage them.

Instead he thrust his fingers between two loose bricks. One of them tumbled into a space between the inner and outer walls, and then he began to tear others loose, pulling them out to thunk on the floor at his feet.

Damnable bells, he thought. He could have hidden it in the wall of the nave or in a crypt beneath the church, but he had thought his use of the bells ingenious …

Nico blinked, swaying on his feet. He breathed evenly, fighting off the darkness. Not my thoughts. Those were not my thoughts. How can this just be psychic residue? It doesn’t feel like echoes anymore.

He paused to listen for anyone who might have been summoned by the sound of his excavation, but he heard no urgent footsteps, nor any cry of alarm. Perhaps the church had been locked and he had broken in. Or, if the doors had been open, perhaps the priest or caretaker who had unlocked them this morning lurked in some back room, thinking it too early for anyone to be in the building.

His hands pushed into the gap in the wall, reached down, and touched something solid. A smile spread across his face as his fingers clasped its edges and drew it out. A layer of grit silted off, showering to the floor. Gently he brushed dust from the cover, running his fingers over the leather, still impossibly supple after all these years, the pages stiff and yellow but not yet brittle. Five hundred years bricked up in a wall and the book looked little different than it had on the day he had placed it there, laying the last of the bricks himself.

The cover bore no letters in any language, no markings at all, but this was only right. The Frenchman from whom he had acquired the book had called it Le Livre de l’Inconnu—The Book of the Nameless. And rightly so, for it contained unspeakable things. It was the most important and most dangerous book that Petrarch had collected during the years of his voracious acquisition of knowledge, but possessing it had so troubled the poet that he had entrusted it to the abbot of a German monastery. In time, Volpe had managed to acquire it for himself, and return it to Venice. He had made good use of it, until his time had grown short and he had realized he had to hide it away so that it would not fall into the wrong hands.

Unable to control himself, Nico lifted the book and kissed the soft leather. But he did not open it, and would not do so in this holy place.

As he left the bell tower, hurrying down the steps, his thoughts strayed far ahead, already thinking about the next thing he would need to acquire if he was to restore the protections that had been shattered when he had dropped that jar … when his heart had been exposed to the air and the spell broken.

Nico froze two steps from the bottom.

His heart. The gray, withered thing in the urn had been the heart of Zanco Volpe.

Footsteps shuffled just ahead. His throat dry, his head aching, Nico looked up to see a priest with thinning white hair and a curved spine hobbling toward him. The old man stared at him.

“Who are you?” the priest asked, righteous ire reddening his face. “What do you think you’re doing up there?”

Nico did not know the answers. Before he had entered the bell tower, the line between himself and Volpe had been distinct—one alive and one dead, one real and one an echo, one modern and one ancient. Now the two seemed more blurred. He did not know where he ended and Volpe began, whose will controlled his hands, whose soul gazed out from behind his eyes. Insane, for Volpe had been dead for centuries. He was nothing more than the smoke that lingered after the fire had burned out.

“Who are you?” the priest demanded again.

Nico tucked the book under one arm and fled, racing past the priest, through the nave, down an aisle, and out the door, with the old man shouting hoarsely after him.