The Chamber of Ten (8 page)

“I have no wish to frighten you,” Volpe says. “Just to kill you. Give thanks to the Council that you suffer only banishment.”

He steps back and nods to the soldiers, and they move forward hesitantly, none of them catching Caravello’s eye as they herd him slowly toward the boat
.

“Faster!” Volpe hisses. “The man is no longer Doge. He’s lower than you all, and I’m already sick of the stench of him.”

Caravello glares at each soldier as he boards the boat, and every one of them averts his eyes
.

Volpe grins. “Enjoy your small victories. They will be your last.” Then he presses both hands together before him, chanting, shoulders tensing, and Caravello falls onto his back in the boat. He shouts, but his voice sounds muted and pained. A hazy redness surrounds his face
.

“Go well,” Volpe says. He turns his back on the boat and walks toward the heart of the city, and as he passes by, the canal turns from red to black
.

Geena snapped awake, gasping into her pillow, reaching for Nico but finding only cool sheets. She sat up and scanned the gloom of her bedroom, but he was not there.

I knew everything they were saying
, she thought, but already the vision seemed to be fading. Like any vivid dream, it seemed to be built on air and mist, and waking cast the first eddies that would disperse it.

“That was no dream,” she said out loud, hoping to hear a reply. But her apartment was silent, empty of anyone but her. She sat there for a while, sore from the night before, wondering where Nico had gone and wishing for the safety of dawn.

N
ICO 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.