The Black Opera (4 page)

“You are—unwell.” The man's voice held an undertone of satisfied malice, as if he thought some vice had earned the pain Conrad suffered. That was confirmed a moment later. “So you are the drunkard that rumour makes you out to be. Not that I'm surprised—heretic, blasphemer, and atheist—”

The dark man's attention suddenly shifted.

Conrad caught the noise, too. Doors opening on the landings above, and
the creak of stair-rails as his neighbours leaned over them. In Naples, nobody's business is their own.

The Dominican smiled.

“Conrad Scalese—” He pitched his voice to be intensely carrying. Any of the gossiping old women in the apartment building will hear it, deaf as they claim to be.

“You're under arrest—by the authority of the Congregation of the Holy Office of the Inquisition!”

“Perhaps we should speak in private,” Conrad said flatly. Pain half blinded him, but left him even less inclined to be bullied. He stepped back into the sitting-room before he could be shoved, a pace in front of the Dominican friars, and gripped Tullio's wrist. It might look like an appeal for physical support. In fact, it forced Tullio to keep his flick-knife hidden in his other breeches pocket.

And who knows, it might make them underestimate me
.

Releasing the ex-rifleman, Conrad faced the first priest. “And you are, signore?”

“My name is an unimportant matter between myself and my God,” the man said dryly. “More importantly for you, I stand here as a representative of Christ Miraculous and His Church—”

“Let me see your authorisation.” Conrad held out a demanding hand.

A steel cuff snapped shut over his wrist.

For a vital moment he failed to react.

“Brothers, shackle him! Search the rooms!”

“Y
es, Canon-Regular!”

The first blow put Conrad so far back into agony that he could hardly struggle. If not for the pain's razor edge, he would have screamed like a woman, but it left him literally breathless.

He hit back blindly, powered by fear.

The leader seemed clerically ageless—he could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. All the other Dominican friars were in their twenties or early thirties, and all evidently trained for this. Two men pinned Conrad's arms, and another kicked the back of his knee with a solid boot.

Conrad overbalanced under the hammering blows, and went down with all
three of them, rolling on the threadbare carpet and the varnished floorboards. His mind seemed to absent itself, fleeing from sensation, and he found himself hyper-aware of small details—the dusty marks of boot-soles printed on his knee-breeches and stockings; the pattern of the Turkey carpet as the side of his face pressed into it.

Two men knelt on him.

Cloth rucked up against his face—one of the Dominican cloaks, pulled off in the struggle, and now blocking light from his eyes. A seam ripped as he fought; it felt like the under-arm of his shirt. Hands at his wrists and ankles locked the shackles shut.

He strained to get an arm free, or to kick, and found himself rolled over on his back, with their fingers digging painfully deep into his muscles. Three or four men pinned him, discussing in barely breathless voices what ‘evidence' might be hidden in the apartment.

“Padrone?” Tullio sprawled a few feet away, flat on his face, a Dominican friar kneeling in the centre of his back. His wrists were tied with plain rope. Unusually, fear showed on his face.

For me as well as him. Damnation
.

Conrad coughed, clearing the dust from his throat. “I see they weren't chosen for their
spiritual
gifts…”

It reassured him immensely when Tullio chuckled, even if the sound was gruff and breathless.

Footfalls jarred his head. One of the friars searching the premises pelted back out of the bedroom, stuttering.

“Canon Viscardo! A rear window is smashed, but from the outside!”

The Dominican Canon jerked his head and two of the junior priests left the lodgings at a run. Conrad heard them clattering down the stairs.

I hope JohnJack and the others are streets away by now!

Conrad couldn't move from his starfish-sprawl. He strained to lift his head, to see what the men holding him did.

Intrusive hands settled over his eyes, from behind.

Before he could pull away, the fingers of the right hand landed with peculiar accuracy over the exact area of puffy flesh that hurt.

“God afflicts you.”

Conrad recognised the Canon-Regular's dry voice close beside his ear. The touch felt harmless.

And that might easily change.

Temporise—placate him
—

No!
Conrad thought.

No, I'm in their hands, I'm handcuffed,
che cazzo!
; they're going to interrogate me whatever I do or say. And—

Too many memories, too fast, flash past, from the mountains of the north, where in that freezing, gritty, mud-locked campaign they had often occasion to question peasants and supposed enemy spies.

—And I will break, because any man who's not a fanatic does. And some fanatics do, too.

But they will have to break me
first
.

Conrad snorted at the Dominican he could not see. “I have an affliction? Yes. I doubt it's from a deity!”

“Of course you doubt. You're an atheist. But… He may also intend that you be fit for interrogation by his Eminence Cardinal Corazza…” The last sounded like a self-addressed question.

Conrad weighed up the certain pain of trying to fight free. The injury the men might do him for resisting this arrest.

Who can I appeal to? I have no powerful patron if Domenico Barjaba's left—

An abrupt movement wrenched pain through his skull and spine.

Hands dragged at him—lifted him, he realised through the shattering hemicrania; or rather, lifted his head and shoulders off the floor.

He was suddenly immobile, released from the worst of their grip. Gravity pulled his head, neck, and shoulders back against something upright, warm and cloth-covered.

The Canon-Regular's chest.

The man knelt behind him, Conrad realised, supporting his semi-supine body.

“Don't you need the Host?” Conrad provoked, hoping to get the man away from him without physical struggle. “Blessed wine? Holy water? Some sort of Church paraphernalia for throwing out demons—”

Dry palms covered both his eyes. “All there needs to be is Faith.”

“And I don't have any!”

The man hummed under his breath. A vibration went through Conrad's body, shivering the pain into splinters of glass.

All Conrad's attention focused on his involuntary closeness to the man behind him; he didn't register the exact moment when he realised that he
could
spare attention for something beyond his body's blinding pain.

Pain that subsided.

The last of the hemicrania burned out of his vision. A sodden, thick sensation
permeated his head. The hangover from hemicrania is worse than that from drink.
But I welcome it, every time
, he thought dizzily. It means the pain is gone.

“There.” The Canon-Regular's hands moved away. “Merciful is God, who will even heal an atheist sinner.”

Conrad blinked against the suddenly bright and painless world. Overturned table—rucked-up rugs—scattered books—sheets of paper, marked with the prints of sandals—

The line of his vision left him staring up, at the one undisturbed object on the mantle over the fireplace.

“Or—it's twenty minutes by the clock since my servant gave me laudanum. And that's how long it takes to work.”

The Canon pushed Conrad upright.

It caused no pain. The relief was an intense pleasure. Conrad sat with his head supported in his hands for a moment, glad almost to tears.

Moving with care, he lifted his head from his hands—to discover Canon Viscardo, kneeling, smiling at him.

It was a disconcerting expression on the knife-sharp features.

“You have Faith,” the Canon announced. “Somewhere, deep down.” Irritated, Conrad realised he was afraid again. He abandoned his usual reticence. “If there's any man I hate, it's one who claims to know more about the inside of my mind than I do!”

A smug expression settled on Viscardo's features. It suited him better than the smile.

“My son. You don't resist the idea so strongly unless, in your heart, you still have Faith. You're just fighting against realising it.”

I am almost too angry to breathe, Conrad realised. Because I've had this said to me
so many times
.

“Canon-Regular, you're so violent against the idea of atheism because, deep down, you know it's true—you're just fighting against that realisation.”

“That's completely different!”

“I thought it might be.”

“Understand me—!” Viscardo's lean face twisted. He reached forward to quickly for avoidance. Conrad flinched, despite himself, cuffed hands lifting in a useless attempt at protection.

The sallow hand flashed past his vision, settled against his scalp, and knotted in a handful of hair.

“—You
belong
to the Holy Office now.” The Canon-Regular showed strong, broad teeth.

Water ran unexpectedly from Conrad's eyes. He didn't cry out. Viscardo's fist
pulled his head forward and down. The pain forced him into a ridiculous, bent over, position. He stared at the floor between his knees, from a matter of inches away. Chest compressed against his thighs, he grunted out inarticulate protests.

“Atheism is one of man's corrupt philosophies.” Above, the priest's voice changed, suddenly suffused with a kind of humble simplicity. “Faith leads us to God, the true God, that sacrificed His son—His
son
—so that we would be forgiven. Not because we deserve it, but through His mercy.
You
would deny the human race any dignity!”

Cold iron touched the skin of Conrad's neck. Hands gripped his arms and shoulders, professionally immobilising. Viscardo's scalp-pulling increased; he felt hairs tear free, and water ran involuntarily from his eyes. Conrad tried to twist free, and the weight and hard solidity of metal fitted around his neck, under his chin—

The lock of a steel collar snapped closed.

Cuffs and shackles are one thing. Human prisoners are subject to those. But
dogs
are collared and chained—!

A hand thrust him to one side.

Conrad caught himself and sat, jarred but free of physical pain.

The hemicrania, now that he was not experiencing it, slipped out of his memory as severe pain always does. Knowing that fact was no consolation.

Boiling with rage and shame, he snapped back at Viscardo. “‘Dignity'?
Knowledge
is dignity! That's what you'd deny us. You'd rather we go to your god in our thousands from malarial fevers in Naples, say, than have one Natural Philosopher use observation and experiment!”

The Canon-Regular snarled. “So, what, you'll follow in the footsteps of that abomination Galvani, and his nephew Aldini the shame of Italy? Eviscerating frogs and stealing bodies from fresh graves?”

“I hate to disappoint you, but most of science isn't half so exciting as that.”

Viscardo appeared likely to die of apoplexy, if his complexion was anything to go by.

Conrad pulled at the collar's animal touch. He shuddered, and forced himself to specifically human discourse:

“I did see Signore Aldini perform his ‘Galvanic reanimation,' when I was in London. Aldini did it with wires, and zinc and copper plates, and certainly the eyes of executed murderers opened, and their muscles jerked and twitched like Galvani's frogs before them. But whether this means his theory of ‘animal electrical fluid' causing life is correct, I can't say. There are sciences that are in their infancy; you can't expect everything to be known as yet.”