The Undrowned Child (31 page)

His voice was deeper, but Bajamonte Tiepolo’s accent sounded the same as when he had presented himself as a young man—with an edge to it like sandpaper. It was the voice Teo had heard all those days ago in the church, ordering the deaths of the poor little gargoyles. And Teo saw the same Gothic script in the air, though the letters were thicker and stronger now. He was becoming himself.

“Kill every Venetian who resists!” Bajamonte Tiepolo was telling his troops. “The streets shall run with their arrogant blood! Did Venetians spit on you? Look down on you like worms? You shall have the joy of humbling them at last.”

The emerald ring flashed on Il Traditore’s finger and the eyes of a thousand beings swiveled to follow his jabbing gestures of revenge, murder and triumph. The magòghe circled overhead, cawing with fierce joy.

“Lussa must hear about this,” whispered Teo, chilled to the heart.

“Do you think she doesn’t already know?” hissed Renzo. “The mermaids have been protecting Venice for thousands of years. They know all these villains. It’s just that they’ve never faced them all together at one time before.”

“So what are we supposed to do now?”

“We haven’t finished the puzzle of the crest yet, from The Key. If we can find Bajamonte’s headquarters, then we’ll find Maria. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“And while he’s here, perhaps we can do something there to disrupt his plans.”

Teo opened the book. The crest appeared again. The balls had disappeared: that part of the riddle was solved. The two last pieces of the puzzle were the single star and the stripe of red with the blue and yellow diagonals underneath.

The two children stared at it fiercely, as if their gaze alone could draw its secret out of it. A ripple passed through the diagonal stripes like a breeze.

Teo whispered, “I know where I have seen that! It’s the fabric of those new curtains at the Bar Tiepolo in the Hotel degli Assassini.”

“You mean we have to go back to exactly where we came from?”

“Yes, but at least now we have the Venetian Treacle to help our soldiers against the poison arrows.”

Outside the pavilion, a shadow passed over the children’s heads, and then passed again. One of the magòga seagulls had seen them. The bird circled around, cocking its head, and regarding them with an expression of vicious curiosity.

“It looks like it’s sneering!” said Teo.

Renzo giggled nervously, “Well, you are a bit of a sight in all those clothes!”

An uncontrollable fury welled up inside Teo. “What? Even now you’re carrying on about how I look, Mr. Shop-Model? You … you … fop! Easy for you to make jokes—you’re not wearing a Spell Almanac.”

Renzo flushed. “How dare you? You know I didn’t have a choice.…”

The children turned their backs on each other, fuming. Unseen, the magòga landed and sneaked up behind Teo. It cawed noiselessly, opening its mouth up to a red triangle. Then it edged closer, close enough to lift up the sleeve of Teo’s jacket and look inside.

Too late, Teo felt the cold yellow beak on her arm. When it saw the writing there, the magòga shrieked in triumph, a great coarse belly-laugh, as if the inscription on Teo’s arm was the filthiest, best joke it had ever heard. The laugh turned nasty and ended on a threatening note. As Teo wrenched her arm away, the yellow beak lunged at her again, neatly slitting her sleeve right up to her elbow, and shearing through all the shirts underneath to reveal her bare skin. The magòga nodded its head vigorously. With a final joyful sneer, it took flight and disappeared over the wall.

“It’s a spy.” Renzo grimaced. “It’s gone to tell Bajamonte Tiepolo.”

“Where can we hide?” asked Teo desperately. There was no shelter. A grove of trees swayed in the wind a few hundred yards away.

“Sant’Elena. Let’s run for it. We’ll get a vaporetto if we’re lucky. The steam ferries are still running. Take off that jacket—that red color is too easy to see. Just drop it. Good, there’s a gray one underneath. Now, run.”

A church clock struck eleven.

Into Teo’s mind came the timetable she had memorized for the vaporetto. Her inner eye traveled to the column that said “Sant’Elena.” She gasped, “There’ll be a ferry in precisely four minutes.”

“How do you …?” Renzo almost paused. “Never mind. Teo, you are incredible.”

Even though the heat was searing, her heart was pounding, her breath was short, and her eyes desperately scanned the lagoon for the vaporetto, Teo still felt the impact of those words, “Teo, you are incredible.” But she did not have time to dwell on them. “Later,” she promised herself. If there was a later.

Teo and Renzo were only halfway to the trees when the sky darkened. Thousands of magòghe swooped down, each consumed with a single desire: to stab at the children with its beak. In the swirling mass of feathers it was impossible to see each other. Teo snatched at Renzo’s hand and held on to it tightly.

But the magòghe had other plans. Dense packs of thrashing birds hurled themselves between the two children. Their rotten fishy breath was suffocating. Teo closed her eyes; one of those beaks could blind her in a moment. She concentrated on holding on to Renzo’s hand, trying to take courage from his warm grip. But more and more birds, an impossible number of magòghe—how could there be so many in Venice?—forced themselves between her and Renzo. She felt his hand slipping from her grasp.

“Renzo!” she screamed. “Don’t let go!”

But it was too late. Renzo’s fingers were wrenched away. She heard his screams from further and further off. The magòghe must have been pecking him, as they were pecking her, making cuts an inch long in her skin. In a few seconds she could hear nothing at all from Renzo.

“They have killed him,” she thought. “They have torn him apart.” And for a moment she did not care at all what happened to her.

“Just let it be quick,” she begged silently. An even grimmer idea crossed her mind: if the gulls did rip her to shreds then the spells on her body would be unreadable. And Bajamonte Tiepolo would not be able to make use of them.

But Teo’s survival instinct was stronger than those noble thoughts. She kept beating at the gulls, protecting her face, and shouting at them, in the hope of proving that she wasn’t worth the trouble of killing. Finally, she dropped to the ground and bent over in a ball, tucking her head between her knees, with her hands protecting the back of her neck, which felt dreadfully vulnerable. Her bottles of Venetian Treacle felt hard and comforting against her hipbone. She lay folded up like that for what seemed like ages, in a never-ending nightmare of crashing wings and snapping, shrieking beaks.

She almost did not notice when the magòghe started to diminish their attacks. They had stopped actually pecking her and were now merely nudging her from time to time to make sure that she stayed on the ground. The first thing that she felt, when her body unfroze from its panic, was the burning agony of all those little cuts.

And Renzo? Where was he? What had they done with him? Teo raised her head, fearful of what she would see. It was not what she expected. The magòghe had gone, though they had left enough gray, black and white feathers to stuff the mattresses of an entire orphanage.

“Il Traditore, Orphan-Maker,” she muttered disjointedly.

There was no sign of Renzo. Teo worried; Renzo was slight. The magòghe might have pushed him into the lagoon. Bleeding like that, he’d soon attract some sharks. Maybe he wasn’t even conscious? Then he wouldn’t be able to try to swim away.

Teo was fretting so hard about Renzo that she didn’t hear footsteps approaching from behind. She was unaware of the tall shadow falling over her, though she felt the temperature plummet, even in the shimmering warmth of the day. Her experience of ghosts should have warned her. But Teo, bleeding and dazed, was not thinking clearly at all.

It was only when she heard his voice that she realized that she was now in the presence of the very last person in the world that she wished to see.

He had thrown off his hood. He was not the handsome young boy that Teo had seen smiling and laughing in the campo with Maria, or the albino bat of the Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, nor even the human-faced bat-skeleton that had plucked Maria out of the vaporetto. His strength was growing, and he had changed again.

In this incarnation, Bajamonte Tiepolo was a tall gaunt man with a vile face that swam like a half-set custard within a loose filmy skin. His red-rimmed eyes were still blankly and milkily white, just like those of his minions, the Vampire Eels. Only the faintest green showed where the pupils should have been, but a single slit of black slashed down the center of each white eyeball. His nose was vast, overhanging his lips, which wobbled like uncooked shrimps. His coarse white cloak parted to reveal old skin tacked together with red string. The leathery covering hung off his bones in rags. It was a poor fit.

“That,” thought Teo, “is the skin of Marcantonio Bragadin.”

Instead of the dandyish cane, Bajamonte Tiepolo had a sword clanking from his belt. He drew the sword from a silver scabbard etched with intertwined Vampire Eels.

“Teodora Gasperin,” he said, “the Undrowned Child.”

the heart of the day, June 14, 1899

Bajamonte Tiepolo looked down at Teo with hatred. It was a hatred that had been festering for nearly six hundred years.

They both knew that one of her own ancestors, a fourteenth-century Gasperin, must have been the first to frustrate Il Traditore’s plans to get back his Spell Almanac. And Teo was the first Gasperin who had been careless enough and foolish enough to fall right into his hands. Worse, she had done so with the actual book clearly tattooed all over her shivering skin.

“So …” He lifted her hair with the blade of his sword, peering at the words on her face. “Ah yes!” He was triumphant now. “The Insatiable Saltwater Curse! And behold—the recipe for Unquestioning Obedience. That served me well, once upon a time. What’s this? The gulls have damaged some lines with their beaks. Clumsy brutes! They shall pay for that with their blood.”

“He can read upside down and back-to-front,” thought Teo, “and he can do it better than me.”

He barked at her, “Now disrobe your feet!”

Teo scrambled to do so.

Il Traditore knelt down to examine her bare toes, separating them with the cold blade of his sword. “The Moving of Souls from One Body to Another!” he murmured. “Yes, most useful, that spell. Ah, and Sudden Desire for Drinking Poison. Some of my most unfortunate new subjects shall soon be tasting of that.”

Caught up in his reminiscing and planning, Bajamonte Tiepolo seemed to have forgotten that the spells he was reading were written on the body of a living person. Teo hoped against hope that it would stay that way. She did not wish to attract his attention to her own existence. She lay motionless and silent, trying not to flinch from Il Traditore’s breath, which stank of stale wine, stagnant seawater and the metallic tang of pure hate.

But Bajamonte Tiepolo had not forgotten Teo at all. It turned out that he was at that very minute thinking about her in dreadful detail. Suddenly he fixed his eyes on her face and Teo’s heart felt as if it had been stabbed, so strong was the shudder of fear that went through her.

“The only reason that you are still alive, Teodora Gasperin,” he told her savagely, “is that it shall be easier for me to read the spells while your miserable, doomed skin is yet moist and plump. I shall need to strip my spells from your skin before I kill you. And there is this joy to consider: that I shall enjoy the killing of you better when I have more interesting ways to do that, thanks to my Spell Almanac.”

He picked Teo up in his bony arms and wrapped his cloak around her. Inside its cold, dusty folds, through the coarse stitching of Marcantonio Bragadin’s skin, she saw a greenish heart glowing amid the ribs of his skeleton. Il Traditore’s putrid smell was intensified inside the furlike cloak. Nausea flooded through her, mixing with fear.

Meanwhile, her captor was walking at a brisk pace. Teo realized that he was carrying her back to the Games Pavilion, where a hundred thousand enemies of Venice were waiting.

Unlike Teo, Renzo had not thought to cover his eyes. He’d been far too busy punching the magòghe and tearing at their feathers. A good dozen of them had lost their best tail feathers to this inconvenient boy, who didn’t seem to know when he was outnumbered or beaten.

Like all bullies, the gulls were unaccustomed to their victims fighting back. One exceptionally large magòga had decided to teach this undersized human a lesson. In a smooth motion it flew past Renzo at eye height, with its claws extended. The gull miscalculated, for it meant to take Renzo’s eyes out. It scratched all the way across his eyebrows in a neat line. It was not a deep cut, but it was long, and a curtain of blood cascaded into Renzo’s eyes, blinding him. He rolled headlong into a ditch.

The seagulls crowded around the edge of the ditch, peering over. Magòghe will eat anything that they can get their beaks on. Pigeons, puppies, fish, squid, bread, rats, peaches, anything. A single notion was now crossing their collective bird brains.

And why not boy?

Renzo tried once more to open his eyes. But the blood had clotted with the dirt and matted his eyelashes together. With his sore, bitten fingers, he tried to prise his eyelids gently apart. It didn’t work. He felt as if he might tear his own skin if he pulled any harder.

Teo! He could not keep the thought of her out of his mind any longer. Why had he not protected her? He should have thrown his body over hers and let the magòghe peck at him. Instead he had selfishly fought for his own life. That was hardly the behavior of a true Venetian gentleman. Renzo was ashamed of himself to the core of his soul.

Hot tears welled up behind his sealed eyes and burst out, melting away the blood and mud.

Bajamonte Tiepolo had not offered Teo up to the assembled pirates, Lombards, Ottomans, dwarves, werewolves and others who filled the Games Pavilion to its brim. As Il Traditore passed through the gates, she had heard the rumble of his troops’ voices, and smelt their ancient clothes and that ripe, angry odor that comes from people who are preparing themselves for a bloody battle.