The Undrowned Child (32 page)

“Are they waiting for a human sacrifice,” Teo wondered, “to send them off to war in hearty spirits?”

And where was the Butcher Biasio, speaking of human sacrifice?

At the sight of their leader, a great roar had gone up, making Il Traditore’s green-black heart blaze with red sparks inside his hollow ribs.

But he did not reveal his trophy. He had raised his one hand to his troops. Then Teo had felt her captor walking through a doorway. She peered out through a gap in his cloak at a room of abandoned desks and typewriting machines.

Il Traditore, without warning, wrenched open his cloak and dropped her on a wooden table in the middle of what appeared to be the ticket office of the pavilion. It was a relief to breathe clean air, but Teo feared her back would break with the pain of falling on the hard surface of the table. The bottles of Venetian Treacle tinkled but did not shatter. She dared not cry out, even when she saw the tank of Vampire Eels by the window. Bajamonte Tiepolo was stalking around the room, looking perplexed at the sight of all the typewriters and stenographers’ pencils. He slammed his fist down on the table, shouting, “This ordure will not serve me!”

Teo’s belly clenched up with fear again, shifting the warm weight of The Key to the Secret City hidden between her bodice and pinafore. Fortunately Bajamonte Tiepolo had not yet noticed the book.

Il Traditore peered at the machines, and experimentally thrust his skeletal fist through one. He shouted at the jangling ruins of the typewriter. “Only the forces of ignorance and the rabble could have conjured up an ugliness liken unto this!”

His language, she noticed, was a strange mixture of modern and ancient. He had not quite assumed his old persona, neither was he wholly of the modern world. His form had come to rest as a human being—of sorts—but without the Spell Almanac, she guessed, he could not fix himself in any one time or place.

Bajamonte Tiepolo was still glaring at the typewriters in angry perplexity.

“Girl!” snarled Il Traditore. “Explain to me what these beastly devices look upon, and what they think upon.”

“They … don’t think,” stammered Teo, surprised at her own ability to speak. “They make information quick and neat, and people use them instead of writing by hand in books.”

“They no more scribe books? Or consult them?” There was a note of disgust and wonder mixed in Il Traditore’s voice. “Or their own memories? Or their comrades’? Or the oratory of their superiors? These guttersnipes speak with the writing machines?”

“I am afraid that it is getting that way.”

“What vulgar education! In my new Venice, the writing machines shall all be smashed. Forthwith.”

Teo did not doubt it. As for the books, she guessed, most of them would be drowned when he flooded the city. The thought of books in danger brought her mind back to her own situation. What was she, if not a book that would be destroyed once Bajamonte Tiepolo had extracted what he wanted from her?

Sadly for Teo, Il Traditore’s thoughts were turning in an identical direction.

“I must have ink!” he shouted. “And parchment! You, buffle-headed girl, fetch them me upon the instant!”

Teo clambered down from the table and went to what looked like a stationery cupboard. She felt Bajamonte Tiepolo’s eyes burning into her back. Paper there was in plenty, though her captor found it flimsy.

“Poor stuff,” he snarled. “In my day the parchment was thick and strong. One could lift a stone upon its surface.”

“There’s nothing else,” Teo dared, only because it was true.

“Ink! Bluest ink! A pig’s bladder of ink now!”

“People don’t use pig’s bladders anymore,” said Teo. “Ink comes in bottles.”

Teo held one up, but Il Traditore knocked it from her hands. It shattered on the ground. Not a drop of ink spilled out.

“Where is the ink? You dare to defy me?”

Unfortunately Teo had picked an empty bottle. She felt the blade of his sword at the back of her neck as she turned to pick up a second bottle.

“I promise you there’s ink in this one,” she pleaded, shaking it to make sure. She emptied a wooden tray of pins and poured the ink into it.

Teo was suddenly aware of the craziness of the situation. Here she was, helping Bajamonte Tiepolo to find what he needed to extract the spells from her body and so destroy not just herself but all Venice. But what choice did she have?

The Vampire Eels had caught sight and scent of Teo. They began to splash in their tank. Rows of white snouts now lined up against the glass, following her every motion.

“This ink shall serve, carrion,” said Bajamante Tiepolo. “Lay yourself down upon the table now.”

Bajamonte Tiepolo tore the paper into thick strips. He dipped one strip into the ink and, without warning, pressed it down on the sole of Teo’s bare foot. The cold of his fingers sent goose pimples up her leg. Then he ripped it away and pressed it down on another piece of paper. Three lines of writing appeared on the page, the right way up and the right way around. Bajamonte Tiepolo snorted with satisfaction and reached for another strip of paper.

“He’s printing me,” realized Teo. “He’s printing the spells from my body.”

Slow footsteps slithered into the room. Teo became aware of another pair of eyes fixed on her. Behind Il Traditore, she glimpsed a bloodied apron and a stump of a wrist. And again, that awful grunting, bubbling noise that she had first heard in the Church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo. The ankles of the turned-around feet twitched and one struck the wall so the creature who owned it stumbled, causing a flurry among the Vampire Eels.

Bajamonte Tiepolo laughed. “Ah yes, the Butcher becomes impatient! I have promised him your worthless corpse, when I have done with it and after my Eels have drunk their fill of you. He has already acquired a taste for it, it seems.”

Teo, flattened on the table, was at exactly the same height as the sweating, severed head the Butcher Biasio carried under his arm. For one long, chilling moment their eyes met. Then, bloodshot and bulging, the Butcher’s lit up with unmistakable greed.

How long would it take for Bajamonte Tiepolo to print out the contents of her body, and what would happen when he discovered The Key to the Secret City?

Because that was exactly how long Teo had to live.

in the heat of the afternoon, June 14, 1899

“I have nothing to lose,” thought Teo.

She lay staring at the white ceiling while Bajamonte Tiepolo took the impression of the spells on her left ankle. Each touch of his icy hand made her shiver, even in the sweltering air of the close room. She could hear the Butcher Biasio’s labored breathing behind him and the impatient tapping of that hideous backwards foot.

The spells, as far as Teo could see, were written in a flowery old-fashioned Latin mixed with some ancient Venetian dialect. Some were in Greek; others in Arabic. Of course, she now remembered, they had been collected from all over the Mediterranean.

So far Il Traditore had extracted a Tickling Malediction, a Pain as if Toenails are Being Extracted Spell and a long curse involving leprosy and fingers dropping off that started “ulcus acre … foedi oculi.” Teo recognized the Latin words for “a nasty sore … festering eyeballs.” There was a diarrhea spell, something rather disgusting about avèr la mòssa. There was a spell for Making Wood Alive. A very short spell for Sudden Death at a Distance read simply, “Eminus repente nunc morere!”

Il Traditore was in a fury of impatience, his hands trembling, his eyes straining. He whispered to himself, “Calm, calm! There’s no help for it. I must print the child methodically, from the feet up, or I risk missing the one spell I truly need.”

That spell, Teo knew, was one that would allow his soul to migrate back into a permanent form, in which it could make use of its full murderous memory again.

That spell could be on Teo’s other foot, on her ankle or at the top of her head. It could take him all day, dipping the paper in ink and pressing it on to Teo’s flinching skin. He had already slashed off the hem of her skirt and pinafore with his sword so that he could print from her feet without anything flapping in his way.

“If this goes on, he’ll remove all my clothes!” Teo shuddered at the image of being naked and vulnerable on that table in front of Bajamonte Tiepolo. And the Butcher’s head, a step away from her, was already looking at Teo as if she were a nice cut of meat on a slab. In the silence of the room, the sound of the Butcher swallowing was horribly loud.

Desperation stirred a new notion in Teo’s mind. “Surely anyone who read these spells,” she speculated, “could make use of them?”

Bajamonte Tiepolo was busy with her right foot now. Teo tilted her head to the side of the table where he had laid out his printed spells. She could read the Tickling Malediction tolerably well, but he had placed upside down (from Teo’s viewpoint) the spell for a Pain as if Toenails are Being Extracted.

“You can do this,” Teo urged herself silently. “You have your library trick of reading upside down.”

A smaller, scared Teo replied, “Yes, works well in the library. Will it work on a table with a murderer inches away?”

And what of the spell itself? Things were different today. It was 1899, not 1310. Nearly six hundred years had tumbled over and over, smoothing the rules, breaking them. Baddened magic had come to Venice. There were new rules.

Anyway, Lussa had said that it was not as simple as just reading out the words of the spell, Teo recalled. You had to send your soul out with it. She thought desperately, “I don’t know how to do that. Do I?”

Bajamonte Tiepolo had his back to her. She inched her hand out towards the Toenail spell and pulled it two inches closer to herself. Il Traditore did not pause in his work. She craned her neck over as far as she dared. Now she could read the spell, even though it was upside down. Fortunately it was a short one.

She felt the desperate beginning of hope, which was in fact more upsetting than blanket despair. Then she thought of Renzo, and of Venice. Almost delirious, she thought she heard the sound of angry miaowing in the distance.

News of the Gray Lady’s demise had spread through the town on the wings of the two loyal cocai seagulls who had mourned at her grave. The Syrian cats of Venice, after centuries tucked away in the Giardini and Sant’Elena, were not immune to the delicious possibility of avenging their dead sister the Gray Lady. And a fine feed of magòghe was a not unappetizing prospect.

So it was that Renzo, lying in his ditch, was the first Venetian in centuries to see that the Syrian cats of Venice were no myth, but absolutely palpable. Moreover, in their long period of seclusion, they had developed useful wings.

Flying cats! Like the winged lions of Venice, only smaller, and in all colors and shades of tabby. Even silvery, like the Gray Lady. And like the Gray Lady, these cats were many times the size of a normal house cat, and carried themselves with enormous dignity, even when swooping down on their furry wings.

At first sight of the cats, the seagulls took off in an undignified and disorganized rabble. They crashed into each other and tangled their wings in an effort to escape the grim-faced felines now just seconds away from them.

A shower of nervous droppings rained down on Renzo in the ditch.

“Yeuuch!” he shouted, as his clothes turned green with slime. Whereupon he realized that it was better to keep his mouth closed.

Suddenly the grass around Renzo’s ditch was a mass of writhing fur and feather, a din of desperate caws and angry yowls. The cats rolled over and over, crushing as many gulls with their great bodies as they killed with jaws and claws.

Finally, all was quiet. A hundred birds lay dead, foam bubbling out of their beaks. The cats were sitting up on their haunches, grooming themselves vigorously. They bestowed the odd quizzical look on Renzo. They were acting for all the world as if they had just happened upon a crowd of annoying seagulls and that it was the merest coincidence, nothing to do with them really, that they had saved his life.

“Thank you!” exclaimed Renzo. Then he understood that this hardly sounded impressive, coming from a filthy boy lying in a ditch. He climbed up, clinking his bottles of Venetian Treacle. He bowed low. “O incomparable Felines, you have delivered my almost entirely worthless self from our mutual enemies, and I am eternally grateful.”

The cats stopped grooming and stood with their tails straight up in the air, just slightly kinked over at the tip, an unambiguous sign of satisfaction in the cat world, winged or otherwise.

“I hesitate to ask you another favor,” groveled Renzo. “But …”

The cats sat back down on their haunches and swished their tails in unison.

Renzo started again. “Your Feline Majesties, Venice has need of your noble help. Being omniscient, you will already know all about the terrible plot of Bajamonte Tiepolo.…” Here he was interrupted by loud hissing. “Well, we must make an urgent plan to stop him and get his Spell Almanac back.”

The cats gazed at Renzo with expressions deeply tinged with cynicism, for cats know that all human plans are exceedingly likely to go wrong.

the afternoon draws on, June 14, 1899

The words of the toenail spell were complicated, in both Latin and Venetian. Teo knew less than half of them. “Pedes …,” she read. “Now, that’s ‘foot’ in Latin … and ferii … that’s ‘hurt’ in Venetian, isn’t it?”

Her imagination filled in the grammatical gaps. So she would need to read aloud, from upside down, a spell that she did not completely understand. If she got it wrong, it might be her own toes that felt the searing pain of having their nails rent off. Or she might simply alert Bajamonte Tiepolo to her idea, and get herself killed even more quickly.

“He wants my body moist and fresh,” she tried to reassure herself. “But it would stay that way for a while after I was dead, surely? Even in this heat? If the Butcher … and the eels …”

Outside in the pavilion, she could hear stamping feet. The creatures out there had been promised Venetian blood, and they were in a hurry for a taste of it.

A bead of sweat dropped from Il Traditore’s bony forehead onto Teo’s foot. He muttered, “Rascals! Cutpurse bungs! Be patient, animals!”