The Alchemist's Code (21 page)

W
e trooped downstairs, Grazia and I, with our macabre shadow treading close behind. Grazia had abandoned any pretense of liking me. I was a
barnabotto
, I worked for a living, and I was continuing to meddle in her affairs. So why her sudden desire for a private tête-à-tête? I had a strong suspicion that we would shortly be discussing horoscopes.

“Danese,” she murmured. “He did die quickly, didn't he?”

No.
“Yes,” I said. “It must have been instantaneous. He would have known nothing.”

“I am glad. He is with the Lord. He never reached his mother's house?”

“So the lady says.”

“Was she lying to you?”

“I do not know, madonna.”

By this time we were parading along the
androne
amid all the books, and Grazia stopped suddenly, as if to add import to her next question. “Or are you saying that
sier
Danese lied to me?” She was back to using her speaking-to-servants voice to me, but clearly the unwelcome truth was starting to sink in.

“I do not know, madonna.”

She bit her pretty lip. “He must have been killed on his way to see her?”

Even as a child I had despised Danese's mendacity and I felt that Grazia deserved the truth from somebody. “He first went back to Ca' Barbolano to fetch his sword. The Maestro and I were busy, so he could not find it, and he borrowed mine instead. We don't know why he needed a weapon. Do you?”

In the gloom of the
androne
, her memorable eyes seemed even more huge than usual. “No! You have no idea who did this terrible thing?”

“Not yet, but we will catch him, I am sure.”

“And I suppose my husband's death was the upturn in my fortunes you read in my horoscope?”

There are times when lies are necessary. “No, I do not believe that at all, madonna. I am hoping that what your horoscope predicted was the removal of the jinx. Let us proceed with that, please. We are dealing with a very potent evil.”

Now, that was the truth. What I was about to try might be dangerous. Not dowsing—I was deliberately cozening with that—and not much in arousing Gritti's suspicions of witchcraft, but in looking for Neptune. Two of my fire visions had proven to be true predictions, so I could hope that the Neptune one would lead me straight to Algol, and I had developed a deep respect for Algol's demonic powers.

We continued our trek to the back door and out into the garden and a misty rain. My guide pointed her dainty finger at an apple tree, which was not the one I had had in mind and would be harder to climb. No matter, we hot-blooded young gallants can always be trusted to show off in front of a fair damsel. I jumped high to catch a branch. The result was an instant deluge, drenching me. Ignoring Vasco's hoots, I hauled myself up and into the tree. There I chose a twig as long as my leg, with good side-branches, and cut it off with my dagger. I followed it down and we all retreated under the shelter of the upper-floor balconies where I stripped leaves and unwanted growth off it, leaving only the traditional
Y
shape.

“This is exciting!” Grazia informed Vasco. “Have you ever watched anyone dowsing for evil before,
Vizio
?”

“No, madonna. I don't suppose I ever shall again.”

“You should let me teach you,” I said. “Except that we must concentrate on your fencing lessons first.” I opened the door and bowed Grazia ahead of me, letting Vasco follow us. “Now, madonna…”

I surveyed the long hall lined with ten-foot high bookshelves along either side, fitted with wheeled ladders for access to the upper layers. There were still two or three thousand volumes on the floor, in stacks and boxes. My heart failed me. Even to fake a survey of all this would take hours, and Gritti might decide to leave at any moment. Either he would take me with him or the Sanudos would evict me as soon as he had left; my chance to find Neptune would have gone.

The wall of bookshelves along the right side of the
androne
—which was currently on my left since we were at the rear of the house—was broken by three doors, opposing two doors and the staircase on the other side. The nearer door on my right was open and led to the kitchen, directly under Grazia's chamber. Marina and Pignate were bustling around in there, preparing dinner. I told my mouth to stop watering.

“I think I will leave the main collection until I have surveyed the rest of the house, madonna. That will help me get the wand attuned. And I will leave the kitchen until the end, so I do not interrupt the cooks' important labors. Now, what are those other rooms? Not more books, I hope?”

I had spoken in hope and jest, but Grazia said, “Yes!”

She crossed to the right side and threw open the rearmost door. The room beyond was packed with crates of books, piles of lumber, and half-completed bookshelves. I believe I groaned.

“Tiring work, is it, dowsing?” Vasco murmured behind me.

“And that's still not all!” our guide proclaimed, heading to the front of the house. The room there was in much the same condition, except that the construction was further along. “This will be for the most valuable volumes.”

Now I had the plan clear in my mind. The right side held two rooms of books, and the other side had the kitchen at the back and a front room that I could guess.

“This,” I said, heading for it, “must be Fabricio and Pignate's?” Girolamo had said they slept close to the door. “Let us start there.”

The chamber was spacious. A bed apiece and a chest for clothes and a couple of chairs, all of them quality pieces. The Sanudos were generous to their servants, even if they worked them hard, for I have seen dormitories half its size with a dozen flunkies packed in like salted fish. Holding the branches of the wand, I raised it so the stalk pointed straight forward.

“Please do not speak for a few moments,” I said, concentrating. I mouthed a prayer, which was perfectly sincere, an appeal for forgiveness for mendacity in a good cause. Then I began to walk slowly forward gently swinging the wand from side to side to point at this or that. When I had gone all the way around, I shook my head.

“Nothing, I'm afraid.” Following Grazia out, I pointed across to the central door on the right side, between the two rooms of books and opposite the staircase. Whatever lay behind it could have no windows. “What's in there?”

“The way to the mezzanine.” She was enjoying herself, managing to forget her grief. She swept across in her mourning gown and opened the door to reveal narrow stairs, dimly illuminated by the two open doors at the top. Up we went.

The female servants' dormitory was at the front. It was a very fine bedroom, and at the moment Noelia had it to herself, except that it was also being used to store furniture. I dowsed my way around and found nothing suspicious. What sort of a Neptune was I supposed to look for? A book about Roman gods? A statue? A painting? Fiery spiders?

The other mezzanine room had been Danese's before his eviction. It had a fine view of the garden and the iron grille over the window matched Grazia's on the other side. The furnishings were superb, and the paintings on the walls cried out for study and appreciation. The only criticism I could have leveled at it as a room was that its ceiling was no more than about nine feet high, which I found oppressive after Ca' Barbolano. Even in Ca' Sanudo, the
altana
and
piano nobile
ceilings were at least twice that. But Danese had indeed done well for himself, and I wondered what quarters he had enjoyed at Celeseo, for the mainland palaces of the rich sprawl far larger than those in cramped Venice.

“You had better dowse this room well,
messer
,” Grazia proclaimed, with an attempt at aristocratic hauteur. “Who knows what missing jewels it may contain?”

I portrayed wronged virtue. “Madonna, it was your aunt who accused your late husband of theft. I never did. Remember that no one here observed how your aunt had been cursed. She looks twice as old as she should, and yet none of you noticed. When valuables disappear for a day or two and then turn up again, it is only common sense to inspect them carefully, and apparently nobody had thought to do that. It was my duty to suggest that precaution, but any servant could have made the switch. I did not hint at Danese.”

She ignored me, deaf as Odysseus to the sirens.

I persisted. “The jewel incident was recent? It happened after you moved back from Celeseo?”

Reluctantly she nodded.

“Then I should certainly suspect the new servants more than Danese, who had been employed by your family for years.” I did not point out that Danese would have found it easier to have stolen jewelry counterfeited here in Venice than he would have done in Padua, or that he might have been worried about his tenure as
cavaliere servente
since his employer's husband returned from foreign lands.

There was no obvious Neptune in sight, but I dowsed my way around the room. No demons emerged. Vasco kept yawning behind Grazia's back.

We went downstairs, crossed the hall, and started up the main staircase. At the mezzanine level, Grazia swept right by the two doors and continued on up toward the
piano nobile
without a hint that the rooms there ought to be inspected also. I caught Vasco's eye and for once we shared smiles of real amusement.

Martini and Bolognetti, the two
fanti
, were sitting patiently on a divan, and Madonna Eva was just emerging from the
salotto
, assisting the blighted Fortunata.

“Let us begin with your aunt's room,” I said. “After all, that is the most likely place to find the source of the evil that cursed her.”

Fortunata would have to be billeted on that level, being unable to manage stairs, and Grazia led us across to the right-front corner, overlooking the canal. The room itself was magnificent. The ceiling paintings alone made me want to hurl myself down on the bed and spend half an hour admiring. There were several fine oils hung on the walls, also, although they were poorly arranged and matched. The furniture was of fine quality, but scanty, and some pieces obviously old, perhaps heirlooms. The bed was gracious, standing upon golden pillars in the center of the room. I was able to dowse all the way around it. No Neptune, no jinx, no demon.

We were safely back out in the
salone
before the owner arrived at her tortoise creep. I crossed to the open door opposite and found myself in the dining room. Little Noelia was laying out silverware and crystal. She stared with octopus eyes at me and my twig as I solemnly paced my way around the room and her, but neither of us spoke.

Now I had the
piano nobile
worked out also: on the right, Madonna Fortunata's room and the
salotto
; on the left, the dining room and what must surely be the Sanudos' own bedchamber at the rear. With Eva attending her aunt and Zuanbattista closeted with his son and Gritti in the
salotto
, now was my chance to pry there also. Grazia started to protest, but I rapped on the door and entered.

It was different. Here the former ambassador displayed his souvenirs—rich silk rugs on the floor and walls, ornate silver urns, carved ivory tables, and other oddities. The ceiling painting seemed old and faded by comparison and, with the big doors out to the balcony closed, the air held a peculiar, foreign scent that I disliked. I did my dowsing as fast as I could without breaking out of my role and returned to the doorway, where Vasco watched me with amused contempt and Grazia with extreme displeasure.

She twitched her nose at me, “Are you ready to start on the library now,
sier
Alfeo?”

I was not going to be browbeaten by a sulky child when I was engaged in a war with Ottone Gritti. “Not quite, madonna. We still have to investigate your own room and that of your honored brother.”

G
irolamo's room I could have predicted. The furniture was minimal and Spartan: a bed, a chair, a lamp, and one small cupboard to hold his clothes, with or without hair shirts. The only art was a magnificent triptych on the wall opposite the window, which I had to stop and examine. It was old, certainly pre-Giotto, and not Venetian work. I could not guess at the artist's name and perhaps nobody could, but in its way it was the finest thing I had seen in Ca' Sanudo. I played out my act with the dowsing rod and was not surprised by the lack of results.

Vasco closed the door behind me as I crossed the little landing to the lady's chamber. Scowling at this invasion of her privacy, Grazia wrestled the door open for me, so I walked right through.

“I shall be as quick as I can, madonna,” I said, but my eye had spotted Danese's portmanteau in the far corner. That was why I missed Neptune. My rod did not; it twisted in my hands like a snake, wrenching me around to face my objective and causing me to gasp out an
Ooof!
of alarm.

“I didn't know you practiced Dalmatian dancing,” Vasco remarked with childish sarcasm. “That doesn't look much like a book to me.”

But it did look like my vision, Neptune taming a seahorse. The bronze itself was about three feet high, standing on a pedestal of green-veined marble of roughly the same height. It was magnificent, so I wondered why it was hidden away in a girl's bedroom where only she and her maid would ever see it. Had even Danese ever been in this room?

“Where did it come from?” I asked, examining it carefully without touching it. I threw the apple-wood wand away.

“How should I know?” Grazia snapped. “It's been around as long as I can remember. I asked for it when we moved back to town. Why does it matter?”

“Who made it?”

“I don't know and I don't care!” Grazia was trying to be imperious again.

It had to be hollow, I decided, or it would weigh as much as a cannon and the floor beams would collapse. I took out my dagger and rapped the hilt on the god's chest. Yes, it was hollow. Bronze castings always are.

“Stop that!” Grazia squealed. “Now finish what you came to do and go down and start dowsing the books.”

I peered closely at the top of the pedestal and thought I could see faint scratches in front of the bronze. Vasco was watching warily. He knows I play tricks, but he also knows I have knowledge he does not. I was going to make an almighty fool of myself unless there was something significant about that statue. So be it! I had never tried dowsing before and never believed in dowsing, and yet my rod had gone for the bronze before I had even seen it myself. Now I believed. I sheathed my dagger and drew my rapier.

“What are you doing?” the lady screamed.

“I want to see if there's something hidden inside that thing,” I said. “Stand well back, so I don't hit you by mistake.
Vizio
, can you lift it?” I very rarely give Vasco his title.

Giving me an even odder look, he embraced the figure and tried. “No.”

“The horse part is smaller than the god, so it should be lighter on that side. Can you push it forward until the horse overlaps the edge of the pedestal? Shout if it starts to overbalance and I'll help you push it back.”

“Crazy!” Grazia shouted, having retreated to a safe place by the door. “You have gone crazy! That statue is worth thousands of ducats.” Her outrage was convincing. If there was any evidence of witchcraft inside it, she ought to have been quaking with terror and much shriller.

“We won't damage it,” I said. “Go ahead,
Vizio
.”

He shrugged and decided to humor me, since he might get me in trouble with little risk to himself. I stepped well clear and watched carefully as he began to push. At first he was reluctant to apply his full strength in case he toppled the statue to the floor, but he soon found that there was little chance of that. Still nothing happened and his face grew red with effort, but then the figure nudged forward, a finger-width at a time. The horse's flailing front feet moved clear of the base and then its belly began to move over the edge also.

“Wait!” I said and went close enough to prod the point of my rapier underneath. “Yes, it is hollow, see?”

“It doesn't feel it,” he muttered.

“Keep trying and one day you'll grow up big and strong.” I stepped back again.

The overlap grew until I began to worry about balance. As Grazia had said, that figure might be worth more money than I would earn in a lifetime, and dropping it on the terrazzo would not improve either of them. I was just about to tell Vasco to stop when something showed underneath the base, a dusty gray something. It wriggled free, dropped on the floor, and then came straight for me, fast as an arrow. No human reflexes could have impaled it with a rapier, but I flailed sideways at it, which was an easier stroke, and swatted it six feet away.

“Look out!” Sacrificing any pretense of dignity, I scrambled up on a dainty little marble table. “Don't let it bite you.”

Grazia screamed and jumped up on a chair. Faster than a striking snake, Vasco took a flying leap onto the bed. He drew his sword.

“What is it?” Grazia shrieked.

That was a very pertinent question. When I looked straight at it, I saw a primitive book, eighty or ninety pages of ancient, tattered paper sewn between soft kidskin covers, lying facedown as if some reader had just set it there for a moment, open at his place. If I looked at it out of the corner of my eye—a technique the Maestro taught me—it was much more like a huge gray spider, watching me, waiting for me to leave my perch. It certainly moved like a spider. They run so fast that the eye cannot see how their legs move, and the jinx was even faster. It must move its pages like legs.

“It is one of Zeno's stupid tricks!” Vasco said, realizing how undignified he looked standing on the bed. He jumped down.

The jinx ran at him. Fortunately he had not sheathed his sword and he struck at it as I had, flipping it away. He was back on the bed by the time it hit the floor. A loose page fluttering free.

This time the jinx was not content to lie in wait. It darted over to the bed and tried to climb a golden pillar to get at him. He swiped at it again, only this time he missed, as if it was learning to avoid rapier strokes. The jinx rushed to try another pillar. He floundered and staggered across the soft down bedding to defend that corner.

“What is this thing?” he yelled.

“It's the jinx,” I said. “Ancient, vintage evil, a curse that has grown and matured for centuries. Madonna, no!” I was just in time, for Grazia had filled her lungs and opened her mouth to scream. “If you summon help, the jinx will attack them.”

“Why don't you exorcize it?” Vasco yelled. “You're the one who summoned it.” I wish I had a good painting of him as he looked then; I would hang it in some conspicuous place.

“No, I just found it for you. Why don't you apply the law? Arrest it.”

“Oh, this is ridiculous!” The
vizio
bounded off the bed and headed for the door as if all the demons of Hell were after him, instead of one tattered manuscript. Alas, Venetian doors dislike being bullied and that one chose that moment to stick. He swung around at bay, with the jinx already almost at his feet.

I jumped down also. It dodged Vasco's sword stroke, but did not follow up its attack on him; instead it reversed course and came again for me, as if I were its preferred prey.

I extended my left arm and used the Word. Normally my pyrokinetic skills need a few seconds to obtain results, but that paper was centuries old and the horror exploded in a ball of fire. Smoke billowed upward. Grazia screamed. And so did the jinx, or at least I heard an impossibly shrill noise in my head, a sound that a tortured bat might emit in its death throes. I sheathed my sword. The floor was terrazzo, with no rugs or exposed wood to burn.

Vasco yelled, “Look out!”

The sheet of paper his sword had detached was fluttering across the floor in my direction, blown by a wind that disturbed nothing else in the room. I ignited it also and it vanished in a flash of sparks and ash.

The emergency was over. The jinx was gone, the house was not going to burn down, and all that remained were clouds of bitter-smelling smoke. Coughing and choking, Vasco and I threw open the casements. Grazia had her hands over her face, but I could see that she was pale as milk and gasping for breath. I lifted her down.

Vasco tried the door again and this time it opened sweetly, on its best behavior. We heard screaming coming from the
piano nobile
.