The Chamber of Ten (15 page)

“I think you need to leave,” he whispered in her ear. “A doctor, or rest. I’ll come with you.”

She shook her head and shrugged his hand from her shoulder.
Nico’s coming
, she wanted to say, but Domenic would only ask how she knew.

“We’re heading down,” Sabrina said. “The water down here … much colder. Strange.”
Strange
. The picture was all shadow and movement, and there seemed to be no
order to what Geena could see on the screen. They watched, none of them speaking, as the image opened out into one of greater shadow. Their powerful diving lights played around the chamber, barely piercing the murk, alighting on one toppled obelisk with a broken lid. Geena stretched forward, frowning to concentrate her vision.

“What
is
that?” Finch said. He turned and spoke directly at her. “You don’t think there are still …?” She could smell garlic on his breath, and stale wine, and for some reason she wondered where he had spent the night.

Zoom in
, she thought, and Sabrina seemed to have the same idea.

“Concentrate your lights here,” Sabrina said to the others, but neither of them did. “Hey, can’t you—?” Her voice was cut off, and the image on the screen became confused again: blurs, shadows, flickering lights. The technician played with the sound levels.

“It’s not that,” Geena said. “I can still hear her breathing.” And she could … slightly harsher than before, heavier, and when Sabrina’s voice came again it suddenly seemed much louder.

“What
is
that?” The camera steadied and homed in on a tumbled section of wall, and glaring pale from the slump of rocks, silt and building blocks slewed across the chamber floor, things that looked like bones.

“My God,” Finch said.

“I don’t think so,” Domenic said

Geena gasped.
They built those walls using
… And then everything faded again.

Zanco Volpe waits outside the grand Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, enjoying the sun on his face and the
cool breeze blowing in across the lagoon. There is a hint of anticipation about him—something is coming, and it will change everything—but there is also a warm glow of satisfaction. He looks at his hands, feels a sense of pride and excitement at what they have done, and within him there lies a solid heart of magic. Black or white, it does not matter. The nature of magic is not dictated by its source, but by its user. And Volpe knows that his aims are pure
.

He remains seated on the ornate stone bench even as he sees movement in the building’s doorway. Il Conte Tonetti appears, still hidden by shadows but twitchy as a hunted bird. He lowers his head and walks from the building, down the steps and across to where Volpe is waiting. He only looks up when he approaches; people move out of his way. He’s dressed in his best finery and is redder than usual
.

“It is done,” Il Conte says. “Caiazzo died quickly. Soldagna put up a fight.”

“Good for him,” Volpe says, and he feels the butterflies of excitement stroking his insides
. It’s almost done,
he thinks
. I’m almost free again.

As Volpe stands, Il Conte reaches out to take his hands, his own hands smeared with blood
.

“Not on mine!” Volpe shouts, stepping back with his arms raised. He has no idea what effect another man’s blood on his skin might have. The spells are delicate as yet, his talents still uncertain, and he will not risk them for an instant
.

“I … I apologize,” Il Conte says, and his face crumples
.

“Be a man,” Volpe says, his voice strong and deep. “You are Il Conte Rosso now. That’s how you’ll be known. And you helped save Venice today.”

“Yes,” the Count says, “of course.” Though he cannot conceal his doubt
.

“Tonight we move on Aretino.” Volpe turns away from the Count and the building that hides the Chamber of Ten. The next time he sets eyes upon this place, the city will have a new Doge, and he will have moved on yet once more
.

“I’ve never felt such power,” he says. For the first time in a long while, he cannot feel his many decades weighing down upon him
.

Outside
, Geena thought.
That’s all from outside
. She opened her eyes but still everything seemed dark. Someone was pulling her against their chest, arms around her waist—Domenic. Her legs felt weak, and she shifted position until she could feel herself supporting her own weight again.

“Geena,” Domenic said, and she turned to look up at his face. The concern was almost heartbreaking, because she knew she had been shunning him. “I won’t take no for an answer this time. We have to get you—”

“No,” she said. “I’m not ill. I’m just …”
Seeing visions from the past? That was Il Conte Rosso, and I saw the fresh blood on his hands that gave him his name
. She could not just run now. If she did, she might miss Nico.

“You look like you’ve seen a—”

“I think he’s outside,” she said, and they both glanced through the arched door of the reading room and into the foyer of the main entrance. Sunlight, but no shadows.

“You mean Nico?” Domenic asked. Ramus was looking at them oddly, but the others—Finch, the BBC crew,
and even Adrianna—had their attention riveted to the laptop screen.

“They filled the walls with bones,” Finch said again, and it had the sound of someone trying to convince himself of what he saw.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” came Sabrina’s muffled voice. She was breathing faster, and Geena sensed simmering panic.

“Tell her to calm down,” she said, glancing back at the main doors again.
That was all from Nico
, she thought,
and he was approaching across the piazza, and then suddenly the flashback that
wasn’t
him. It was Volpe
. She shivered, because even thinking the name gave her goosebumps.

If he had approached, he was holding back, waiting outside or something. Maybe he was just afraid to come in because that would mean facing her questions.

“One of the obelisks is open!” Sabrina said, and that snapped Geena’s attention back to the laptop. She pushed her way past Finch, with Domenic still beside her, and knelt so that she could get a better view of the screen. Tonio placed one hand on her shoulder and she knew what that touch meant:
This is amazing!
Sabrina’s crazy camera work settled at last, focusing on the broken lid of one of the obelisks and the thing it contained.

“They’re tombs,” Tonio said.

In her time working in Venice, Geena had been witness to the exhumation of dozens of bodies, all of them buried many hundreds of years ago. They never frightened her, but there was always something unsettling about setting eyes on a corpse that had been out of
sight, alone, and at peace for so long. Though she was not a religious person, to Geena it felt intrusive and disrespectful, and she’d always had trouble identifying the line between recently buried and of archaeological interest.

“My God,” Sabrina’s voice hissed, “it’s wearing …”

A hat
, Geena thought.
A black hat and robe, covering less formal attire beneath
. And she thought of bleeding palms and the vague sense of ritual.

“Nico!” Ramus said. “Look everyone, it’s Nico!”

For a moment Geena scanned the screen desperately, thinking that they’d seen his drowned body down there, and in the space of a heartbeat the idea that she’d imagined everything since the flood hit hard. But then she sensed those around her turning away from the table of equipment, and she, too, stood and turned.

She bit her lip against the wooziness that still shifted the world around her. Behind them Nico was standing just inside the entrance to the reading room.

“Nico!” she said, unable to keep the rush of relief and affection from her voice.

He seemed not to hear; his eyes were blank, his face expressionless. He carried a heavy-looking bag in one hand. Then he started walking toward them, and Geena cringed at the way he moved—a stiff, stilted walk as if he’d smashed bones in both of his legs.

“What’s wrong with him?” Ramus asked.

Geena moved toward him. Domenic’s grip tightened briefly on her arm before letting go, but she knew he was still behind her.
Don’t be a fool
, she thought,
Nico would never hurt me
.

She smiled, vision blurring with tears that seemed to well up from nowhere.

Behind her the BBC team were still chattering excitedly about what they had seen, and Finch seemed to be talking into a cell phone.
Of course
, she thought.
They don’t even know about Nico
.

“Where have you been?” she asked. Nico had paused. He looked dirty, tired, and sad, and she could already tell that he hadn’t washed since leaving her apartment. “Nico, I’ve been so worried and …”

“No,” he groaned. He sounded desperate and pained, as if talking was a strain. The sudden look in his eyes—burning and triumphant—did not match that voice.

“Nico?”
I saw what he did to that man
, she thought, but could she
really
suspect him of doing something so terrible?

No. Not him. Not Nico.
But someone else
.

“Run, Geena,” Nico growled, low enough for only her to hear. Glancing back she could see others turning to watch them now, and one of the BBC men was pointing a small handheld camera their way. Domenic was approaching her, his eyes flitting from her to Nico and back again.

She turned back. “We’re going to find out exactly what happened,” she said.

“No!
Run!”
Nico repeated, louder this time. The terrible urgency in his voice gave her a frisson of fear.

He leaned forward, and then his walk turned into a headlong rush, a controlled fall that set his feet stumbling against each other. And for the first time she saw what he had in his other right hand.

A knife.

“Come here, sweetness,” Nico said. But the voice was no longer his own. Deep, guttural, harsh, she had heard
it before in those strange flashes of a time long gone. And it carried a madness she could have never expected in someone she loved so much.

Just as Nico fell against her, Domenic pulled her back.

But the knife still did its work.

S
TABBED ME
stabbed me Nico stabbed me …

She felt hands ease her fall as she slumped to the cool tiled floor. Voices were raised, and somewhere in the distance pounding footsteps faded away, leaving only the taunting ghosts of their echoes. More than one pair of footsteps, too, and someone must be chasing him, and she thought,
Don’t hurt anyone else
. Faces gathered above her and she did not recognize any of them. She felt for the pain, searched for the flash of agony that would show where the knife had punctured and how much damage it had done. She held her breath, terrified, and then gasped again in case she would never draw another.

Someone was holding her arm too tightly and she tried to twist it away, but there was no give. Her head rested on something soft—a leg, a hand, a bag, she didn’t know—and then Domenic was above her, his strong features stark in the light that had suddenly become so clear and defined.
Shouldn’t my vision be fading, not solidifying?
She’d read somewhere that hearing was always the last sense to go before death, and when she gasped again
her ears seemed to pop and the confusion and panic roared in.

“Don’t move her. Don’t
move
her!”

“Ramus, stay away from him. He’s still carrying the knife!”

“Call an ambulance—”

“Call the police—”

“I’ll get the first aid kit.”

And from a distance, “I’m going after him!” Ramus, running, pursuing Nico because he’d appeared here at the library and
stabbed
her.

“Oh shit,” Geena groaned, and she looked up into Domenic’s face as she probed for the injury. She drew breath without it bubbling, felt her heart thumping good and strong, and there was no rush of warmth in her stomach. And the person holding her left arm squeezed even tighter.

She turned her head slightly and there was the wound. A slice across her shoulder, a bloody tear in the fabric of her blouse. The wound pouted slightly, and though gruesome it was also strangely beautiful. Such vibrant colors. She worked in the faded stone- and dust-shades of history, and yet here was the true lifeblood of her, and it was as bright and alive as any color could be.

“Don’t look,” Finch said. She realized that he was kneeling on her left side, leaning over her and sheltering her from the bright sunlight streaming in the library’s high windows. He touched her arm, turned it this way and that, then caught her eye for the first time. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he said. “No artery hit. It’ll bleed like a bugger and you’ll need stitching, but you were lucky.”

“He didn’t get me anywhere else?” she asked, and
her soft voice sounded surreal.
Am I really asking that? About Nico?

“No,” Finch said. “I’ve checked. That’s the only place. And he was hardly here long enough for that. Here.” He plucked the folded handkerchief from his jacket pocket, shook it open, folded it again, and placed it on the wound.

Geena hissed, body stiffening.

“You press down on it,” Finch said. “It’ll hurt, but we need to stop the bleeding.”

Geena nodded her silent thanks, then put her right hand over the material and pressed. The pressure hurt but there was also a comfort there as well.
Covering part of me that should never see daylight
, she thought.

“You seem to know what you’re doing,” Domenic said. She was leaning back against him, and he felt strong and secure. He was very much there, whereas Nico—

I have to help him
, Geena thought. And she remembered his eyes, and what he’d said as he lunged for her.

“First Gulf War, and Bosnia,” Finch said. “I was a reporter back then. Saw lots of nasty stuff, and went on all the first aid and self-defense courses I was offered.”

Come here, sweetness
, he’d said. Those eyes had not been his.