The Undrowned Child (33 page)

“He’s under pressure,” she realized. “They’ve no idea that he’s not yet recovered his full powers. He must have lied to them, to get them here; otherwise they would not dare attack Venice like this.”

In the absence of Bajamonte Tiepolo, the crowd outside had evidently found a leader of its own. The harsh accent of a Serb commander echoed through the pavilion. “Bajamonte Tiepolo, show yourself to us. We have waited long enough. We shall not be denied our chance to raze Venice to the ground, just because you falter in courage and resolve.”

“Human latrine!” hissed Bajamonte Tiepolo. “You shall not come home from the battleground, scullion. And it shall not be the pretty fishwives that do unto you.”

Pretty fishwives! Of course, the scolopendre had told him about the mermaids.

The wobbling forehead of Il Traditore was slick with sweat. His hands shook as he pressed the strips of paper on Teo’s ankles. Cowardice, the old rumor, was coming back to haunt Bajamonte Tiepolo. In his first attack on Venice, he had cut and run. His new troops would not let him forget it now.

Teo thought, “The skin of the hero Marcantonio Bragadin is a poor fit in more ways than one.”

The creatures outside roared in support of the Serb commander, “Bajamonte Tiepolo, show yourself!”

Teo took her chance. Under the cover of the din, she read the toenail spell aloud as quickly and as clearly as she could, given the violent trembling of her whole body and the feeling of faintness that swept through her. As she spoke the words, she deliberately pictured Venice drowned in black water, Renzo lifeless under the yellow beaks of the magòghe, her real parents dragged to the bottom of the sea, all by the evil of Bajamonte Tiepolo. She saw Chissa lying dead in the cavern, the Gray Lady’s bloodied muzzle disappearing under the soil when she and Renzo had buried her. A feeling surged up inside Teo like a scream. She could feel it tingling on the end of her tongue and her fingertips.

“Pedes …,” she murmured desperately. “Ferii …” The words forced their way out of her mouth like drops of blood.

“Is this casting my soul?” she wondered. It felt like emptying her heart. She felt, as she spoke the words, bleached and scoured of every emotion.

“But do I have enough soul to make this work?”

The effect was instantaneous. Bajamonte Tiepolo dropped the piece of paper in his hand and crouched down on the floor, screaming in a high, tortured voice, “My foot, my foot! Desist! Do not do it, aaagh!”

Teo pulled her legs up and stood on the table, poised to jump. The Butcher too had collapsed onto the floor, where he writhed in agony, emitting high-pitched grunts. The Vampire Eels crowded to the nearest corner of their tank.

But Bajamonte Tiepolo was rising back to his feet. He shrieked, “May your lips rot off, you cur of a female!”

His sword flashed out of its scabbard. Il Traditore plunged it straight into Teo’s heart …

… where it met resistance. Such strong resistance that it arched up and snapped in half, throwing its owner against a filing cabinet. He slumped back to the ground.

For The Key to the Secret City was still there, secreted between Teo’s layers of shirts. Somehow the book had taken the whole force of Il Traditore’s murderous blow. Teo had the sensation that someone had punched her quite lightly in the chest. The little bottles of Venetian Treacle in her pockets had not even shattered.

Hardly able to believe her luck, she hurtled off the table and out of the room. At the end of the corridor were two doors. One, ajar, led out to the pavilion. The Serb commander was still braying his demands, and the roaring from the seats had reached a deafening pitch.

The other door opened on a dark dank stairwell; not an inviting prospect, but better than the other two possibilities available. Teo ran though, slammed it behind her and started climbing down the steps. She had reached the tenth one when, back at the top, the door opened. Light rushed through the aperture and she could see the silhouette of Bajamonte Tiepolo glaring into the gloom. She flattened herself against the wall, just out of the light.

Il Traditore stood there for a long time.

He too, she calculated, was unwilling to go through the other door, the one that led out to the pavilion.

But the Serb commander’s tone had now risen to the imperative. Even from his outline, Teo could see that at that moment something in Bajamonte Tiepolo stirred, a call of his ancient noble blood, which would not tolerate orders from a mere soldier, which would not accept the leadership of anyone else but himself. He was, after all, a Venetian, a lord among men. He shook with anger, raised his fist, and stormed back into the corridor, and out of the door into the pavilion.

Teo crept back up the stairs and peered out across the corridor. Through the open door to the pavilion, the outline of Bajamonte Tiepolo’s back was black against the sea of angry faces.

Il Traditore scanned the crowd until his gaze rested on the dark, bearded face of the insubordinate Serb. Then he raised his hand and the emerald ring sent a jet of green light into the man’s eyes. Teo heard Bajamonte Tiepolo hiss the spell he had just printed from her body, the one for Sudden Death at a Distance.

As Il Traditore spat the final words, “Nunc morere!” the Serb commander crumpled to the ground, screaming in agony. His body twitched for a moment, and then fell still. His head lolled to one side.

“Now, those gentlemen whom I am currently permitting to live,” Bajamonte Tiepolo whispered, “your attention please.”

The very quietness of his voice had an electrifying effect on his audience. All tongues fell silent. All heads turned to him. Down the hallway, Teo strained to hear him.

“Gentlemen,” he lied, “as you have just seen, I have performed the needful thing to restore every single one of my old powers. Spring is rioting through my veins. I feel a lovely little war coming on!”

Except for the Serbs, who stood sullenly around their commander’s corpse, Il Traditore’s forces bellowed with joy.

Their leader spoke over them: “Take your positions and prepare for the destruction of Venice. First, do you all have your masks?”

The crowd roared its assent.

Teo turned to look back down the murky stairwell. But what if it was a trap? Just a dead end, a room down there?

Slow footsteps slithered along the corridor behind her. The Butcher!

Teo did not wait to hear any more.

Down, down, down went Teo. Venice floated on water, so there were no basements. She expected to hit rock bottom at any moment. But the stairs descended so low that she was certain that the stone walls were just a thin crust against a lagoon full of water that could at any minute gush in and sweep her away. There was a hollow sound to her footsteps, as though she was in a tank. The cool darkness was welcome, but the shambling, awkward footsteps of the Butcher, just a few hundred yards behind, echoed in the dark, empty tunnel. Her thoughts were just as hollow.

Eventually the stairs bottomed out and she felt her way along a damp, stifling corridor. The rats down here could not have heard the prophecy that had sent their cousins streaming out of Venice. Every few minutes, rough pantegana fur brushed past Teo’s skirts, accompanied by hysterical twittering.

At last she stubbed her toe on a step. With a new burst of energy, Teo started climbing rapidly upwards. Where did this tunnel lead? Would she emerge right in the path of Bajamonte Tiepolo’s forces? Perhaps he had simply set an arduous trap for her, something that would keep her occupied—and exhausted—until after he had subdued his rebellious army. Teo tried to put that idea out of her head but it forced itself back in.

She bumped her head on the low ceiling. Another unhelpful thought crossed her mind—this tunnel was more likely to have been built for dwarves than human beings. And lately the dwarves were the friends of Bajamonte Tiepolo.

She trudged on and on, the Butcher’s steps echoing hers. Teo fought to breathe. She simply couldn’t walk any faster in the dark.

Another tight swarm of rats dashed past her, heading back into the darkness. She heard the Butcher stumble and fall. There came a slithering sound and a thump, as if he had tried to raise himself and failed. Something rolled audibly down the stairs. With a shudder, Teo realized that it must be the Butcher’s head. More of the pantegane rushed between her feet, hurtling to the place, perhaps a hundred steps back, where the Butcher now moaned in terror. The rats squealed with delight and hunger.

A fine-rimmed outline of light appeared above her, in the shape of a door. The mere idea of breathing fresh air again was enough to make Teo reach for the handle, whatever was waiting for her outside.

Renzo was not getting anywhere with the cats.

He had tried flattery, courtly manners, low bows. He reinforced his words with the appropriate mimes, acting out the whole situation like a one-man theater company. He mimed the evil creatures, the pavilion, poor Teo—at best—trapped inside with Il Traditore. At worst—that did not bear thinking of.

But either the cats did not wish to understand him, or they understood him all too well, and had taken a silent decision among themselves that thirty winged cats, however efficacious at massacring a flock of magòghe, were unlikely to score a notable victory against a hundred thousand bloodthirsty pirates, Ottomans and Serbs, all led by an evil being who was a known murderer of felines.

Finally Renzo shrugged. “Well, I’ll just go on my own then, shall I?”

He secretly hoped that this would appeal to the cats’ natural contrariness, and that they would contradict him merely for the pleasure of doing so. But it was just then that events had taken a new turn inside the pavilion: when Bajamonte Tiepolo returned to his forces and pretended that he had regained all his powers by killing the Serb commander. Bajamonte Tiepolo’s voice could then be heard grating distantly and at length. Renzo guessed that Il Traditore was outlining his battle plan. There was a brief silence, like an intake of breath. The sea gates of the pavilion swung open, and the forces of Bajamonte Tiepolo streamed out. All eyes were fixed on the flag of their standard-bearer. No one saw one young boy and thirty cats standing transfixed on the Sant’Elena side of the peninsula.

The soldiers thundered into their boats, or took to the air, their weapons clattering, and their rough matted hair streaming behind them. In two minutes they were gone, and there was silence. For just a second, you could imagine that it was a normal summer day in Venice, a quiet, sleepy day, the kind of day on which nothing much happens except a slight case of sunburn.

At that moment, high up above Renzo and the cats, in the thick trunk of a tree, a door opened, and Teo’s anxious face appeared.

“Renzo!” she shrieked, and burst into tears. Renzo peered up into the branches. Yes, it was really Teo, alive, though with a shortened skirt and strangely blue feet. And—as far as he could tell, for her cheeks were mottled with crying—her skin was still covered in the inscriptions of the Spell Almanac.

“You see!” said the large golden tabby, in a tone that could not be described as anything but cat-got-the-cream smug.

“You mean you can talk?” Renzo tried not to scream.

“Oh my, His Numps is rather tetchy, is he not? Of course we can talk. When there is someone worth talking to and something worth saying. We assumed that your friend, if she was worth her salt, would find our passageway to the pantegana hunting grounds. As for you, young man, we wanted to keep you here long enough not to get hurt by some foolish act of pointless bravery.”

Teo was struggling out of the tree. There was nowhere to put her feet, and she was reduced to sliding and slithering, all the while trying to wipe her eyes and her nose, and not blubber like a baby. It was all the more difficult under the cool eyes of the cats, which expressed a clear and open criticism of her lack of grace.

Teo hesitated over the last drop. From now on down, the trunk was completely solid, with no knot-holes for her feet or branches to catch hold of.

“Jump, Teo!” urged Renzo, holding out his arms. The two of them tumbled down together in the grass and lay holding one another in silence.

“Are you all right?” Renzo was the first to ask.

Teo buried her head against his shoulder. He was not much bigger than her, and he was covered with bird droppings, and he was shaking like a leaf in the wind. But Renzo’s arms felt like a place of perfect safety just then. She sobbed, “I stopped him, Renzo, he didn’t get all the spells. Just a couple of them …”

Teo felt his eyes warm and sympathetic on her. He wiped the wetness off her face with a careful finger that still trembled a little. “I know, I can see the spells are still on your cheeks.”

“And look at you! You’ve got a great stripe of blood right across your forehead.”

“It’s nothing. It doesn’t hurt at all. Un bel niente.”

Teo pulled a bottle out of Renzo’s pocket. She dabbed his forehead with a fingerful of the sticky Venetian Treacle. The wound disappeared.

“I thought the magòghe had killed you,” she whispered.

“I thought the same thing about you. I was in luck, the cats saved me. But how did you …?”

“Those cats? They don’t look too friendly.”

“They can be helpful when they want to be. I think they did it for the Gray Lady.”

“Oh yes, they look like her, don’t they? Oh my, they’re Syrian cats, aren’t they? They’re gorgeous! Goodness, they’ve got wings!”

Renzo’s arms were still around her. Teo stammered, “I’m sorry … for what I said back there, outside the Games Pavilion. I didn’t mean it. You’re the bravest person I know. You’re not …”

Renzo did not let go of her. “You were upset. We were both terrified out of our wits. Anyway, I’ve forgotten it already. You know, we should get up.”

“Yes, we should. You first.”

“No, you.”

“Come, the cats are watching.”

At that moment Teo and Renzo heard a sound that made them tremble.

Seven long groans from the High Water siren.

They scrambled to their feet. This was the signal from the mermaids that the battle was about to begin. It was too late to find Lussa and show her the spells tattooed on Teo’s body. It was all very well that Teo had stopped Bajamonte Tiepolo from getting his hands on most of them, but unless the mermaids could make use of those that remained to give an advantage to the forces of good—then those spells were less than useless now.