Veil of the Goddess (39 page)

Overhead, American helicopters and fighter jets circled the city, creating a continual blanket of noise and of the crackling red-colored power that was seeking them out.

Venice had seemed like a refuge when they'd crossed Asia and Europe to reach it. Now, it felt like a trap. If she and Zack fled the city, with the Cross or without it, Ivy knew they would be detected, captured, and killed. If they stayed, eventually the Foundation would hunt them down, dig them out, and finish them that way.

It would take a miracle for them to survive the next week, and miracles were suddenly in short supply.

Ivy looked up from her prayer as a clutch of elderly Italian women shuffled into the church.

Several of them nodded to her. The priests had rounded her up a baggy dress that hung down to mid-calf and an oldfashioned wig. The combination made her look dumpy unattractive, and unthreatening. She'd spent enough time in the church over the past couple of days that she'd become a familiar figure. The women probably thought she'd been dumped at the altar by her handsome gondolier. All of which made her a lot more sympathetic than when they'd thought her a man-hungry tourist.

One of the women shoved a shopping bag at her, a couple of oranges and a small loaf of Italian bread poking through the mesh net of the sack.

"
Grazie
,” she responded. She hadn't eaten in better than twenty-four hours and was feeling a bit weak, but completely uninspired.

"
Siete benvenuti
,” the woman responded before taking her place on a pew.

A pair of altar boys led Father Paulo up the center aisle of the Church, one carrying a crucifix and the other swinging an incense burner around so wildly that it smacked into Ivy's knee.

"Ouch."

Father Paulo gave her a frown.

Well, he was right. Better for her to suffer a few bruises than to let everyone know she was American. Venice might be a big city, but its rumor mill was equal to that of the smallest small-town in America. And rumors could go two ways. She had to believe that the Foundation was tapped into it at least as well as were Fathers Paulo and Francis.

The altar boy gave her an apologetic smile, waved another cloud of incense at her, then headed toward the altar at the front of the church.

She inhaled deeply.

Church incense had always reminded her of funerals and long, boring sermons. Although Catholic churches always smelled of it, and now that she consciously thought of it, Orthodox churches had too, her brain tuned it out.

But when the altar boy had waved the burner under her nose, she'd caught a hint of memory.

When they'd stumbled onto the cave, there she'd smelled fire and smoke. Zack had argued that they'd been drugged, that her visions had been hallucinogenic rather than real. He'd come to believe this wasn't the case, that her second sight was as real as anything else on Earth, but that didn't mean that the smoke had been meaningless.

For the first time in days, Ivy had an idea of what to do next.

She sat through Father Paulo's service, listening to the rich baritone of his voice as he chanted the holy creeds of the Church.

Father Paulo didn't look like a man conflicted with doubts about his Church's teachings. And, Ivy realized, he probably wasn't. He wasn't a simple man. He'd graduated from college in Milan and spent several years in Africa working with AIDS patients before returning to his beloved Venice. By examining him through her second sight, Ivy saw that his faith was pure. He believed in a merciful God who would forgive anyone who asked for forgiveness in his Son's name, who tried to do what was right, and who truly repented his errors when he fell short of his ideals. Not for Father Paulo was any notion of a cold and calculating God ever-watching for that momentary misstep that would lead straight to hell.

Father Paulo was certain that God would forgive him if helping Ivy was a mistake, but his God would have a harder time forgiving the priest if he refused to help any who fled to his church as sanctuary.

She almost dozed off during his sermon, not what any priest would like to see, but she understood so little Italian that she could only wallow in the rich tones of his voice and the shining color of his faith.

After the sermon, as always, the women from his flock gathered around him bringing him small gifts of homemade food and seeking his attention, his blessing. Which he gave without stint.

"Anything?” he asked when the last of them had left and he'd sent the altar boys off to school.

"No."

The priest's shoulders drooped a bit. “I'm sorry, Ivy. Perhaps you were wrong. There may have been something else you were supposed to accomplish instead of just waiting for the messenger to return."

"Maybe. But the incense gave me an idea. When I saw the Priestess the first time, herbs were burning nearby. I think they may have been a part of opening the pathway."

Father Paulo frowned. “I cannot allow illegal drugs in my church. You do understand that, don't you?"

Ivy bristled. They were facing a group of angry men who were trying to bring about the end of the world in what Father Francis had called the ‘ultimate blasphemy’ but Father Paulo was worried about petty legalities.

Going non-linear wouldn't help, though.

"First things first, Father. I don't know that she was burning controlled substances. There's got to be someplace in Venice where I can look for herbs and spices. I've got to try to find something that matches what Zack and I experienced outside of Nineveh."

Ivy was used to the farmers’ markets of Pittsburgh and expected something similar in Venice. Instead, Venice's open-air market spread across the city's narrow alleys and spilled onto barges and flat-bottomed outboards in the canals.

Thousands of people shouted at each other, bargained over prices, insulted merchandise, or sipped on espresso shots while watching the next generation try their skills. Here and there, pretty girls and college-aged boys on motor scooters zipped through the crowds, always at the point of hitting someone, but always managing to swerve out of the way at the last minute.

Other than the scooters and the occasional sound of an outboard motor, the market seemed little changed from what it would have been in late-medieval days when Venetian ships ruled the Mediterranean, and when Marco Polo returned to the city with his fabulous tales of Kublai Khan and the glories of China.

Ivy tried to use her second sight to identify the herbs she'd smelled outside of Mosul. As at the pier on the Grand Canal, though, the multitude of religious objects overwhelmed her senses.

"Does anything look familiar?” Zack asked. He was wearing one of Father Paulo's black suits with the Roman collar while Ivy had been made up to look like an aging woman doing her shopping.

"Nothing,” she admitted. “My senses are suffering from overload."

He sniffed the air then pointed down an alley. “I think the spices are this way."

She followed behind him, doing her best to ignore the submachinegun-toting policemen scattered through the market.

Sure enough, Zack's nose led them around a corner to a section of the market that she hadn't even guessed at.

Venice's herb and spice market featured people from around the world, most dressed in traditional garb. Nutmeg, clove, garlic, cinnamon, cocoa, and the complex odors of pepper all clamored for her attention.

From behind tie-died curtains, accompanied by the soft gurgle of water pipes, wafted the sweet scent of hashish, painfully familiar to Ivy after the time she'd spent with Cejno.

From below the decks of small boats, she picked up even more unsavory exchanges—cocaine, opium, heroin.

Second only to Constantinople during the middle ages as the hotbed of illicit behavior and decadent wealth, Venice didn't seem to have slowed down a bit.

Zack chuckled. “That smells way too familiar."

Ivy followed his lead, away from the drug-infested corner of the market where they'd emerged, toward the sunlight and open stalls.

In the midst of the familiar, they found hundreds of herbs, fresh, dried, and powdered, that Ivy had never heard of—many with odors that made her wonder what had driven anyone to taste them in the first place.

Trusting her nose rather than her overwhelmed second sight, she made her way to a small stall marked with Arabic lettering.

She didn't recognize the herbs and couldn't pronounce the names of the spices when the Middle-Eastern-looking attendant, an attractive woman who was dressed in a pair of pants that could have been painted on her body and a top that plunged between more than ample breasts, repeated them. But Ivy recognized the scents. They'd found what they were looking for—and they didn't even look to be illegal.

"I'll bet she doesn't dress like that when she goes back to the old country,” Zack whispered.

"Keep your eyes to yourself, Father,” she reminded him.

"Hey. Even a priest can look."

She wasn't sure that was good theology but couldn't afford to attract attention by having an argument with him. Not with the Italian police swarming the city.

Instead, she paid the ridiculous price the woman demanded for small plastic bags of the herbs Zack's nose confirmed as being correct, using money Father Paulo had forced on her.

Sun streamed down on the city as they headed back toward their base in the Church of Mary of the Sailors. Despite the omnipresent police, the city had taken a festive atmosphere. A young couple skipped past them wearing a pair of feathered masks of the type that spoke of the Venetian carnival.

Ivy wasn't fooled. Venice might be a vacation paradise, but danger lay close beneath the surface.

After a brief negotiation, Zack took the point with Ivy trailing about ten meters behind.

Zack seemed to have picked up a sense Venice, because he led them on a route Ivy had never seen before, circling back through the city rather than taking them straight for the church.

"You notice something?” she whispered when they momentarily got closer."

"Nothing I can put a finger on. But something feels wrong.” He considered, then turned down a narrow street, a street that looked exactly like every other to Ivy.

Twenty feet down, a group of tourists stepped into the gap between she and Zack.

The tour guide, a tiny Japanese woman, gesturing to stone carvings high on an old building that seemed to Ivy indistinguishable from thousands of others scattered throughout the city.

One of the tourists snapped a picture at just the wrong moment, the flash only a few feet from her eyes, and she hesitated, abruptly blind.

Without her second sight, she would have been caught completely unaware.

Her physical blindness, though, opened her senses to the colors around her. The Japanese were almost colorless, dull beige glows. Behind her, though, a vivid maroon moved with implacable certainty.

She spun around, her hands up in a guard.

He didn't bother ordering her to surrender. Instead, he thrust his long knife at her.

Her second sight had let her to recognize the threat, but it didn't provide the detail she needed to defend herself.

The Foundation Agent, his blood-red glow reflecting the harsh certainty of the Foundation's faith, thrust straight for her heart, avoiding her warding arms.

The knife slammed into her sending a wave of pain through her body and she collapsed to the ground.

The agent had used the distraction brilliantly, attacking when Zack and Ivy were separated, unable to provide adequate backup.

But a sound had alerted Zack and he turned in time to see the agent thrust his knife into Ivy's heart, then, as she started to fall, pull her too him as if she was a drunk he was helping home.

Zack bulled through the Japanese tourists wishing he'd brought a weapon even though that would have been horribly incongruous to his disguise as a priest.

Since Zack was unarmed, it would have been nice if the Agent had at least been distracted, but one of the tourists shouted something and Ivy's assailant looked up in time to see Zack bearing down on him.

The agent dumped Ivy's body and took an awkward-looking swing toward Zack.

Fortunately, Zack had seen the knife and knew the agent had palmed it. Like most knifemen, he planned for the knife to be a surprise.

Zack wasn't taken unaware, but that didn't give him much of an advantage. The very awkwardness of the agent's attack made it that much harder to block.

Adjusting his tactics to the situation, Zack blended with the attack rather than blocking. He shifted his center and let the knife come toward where he had been. As the blade sliced a layer from his priest outfit, he added his weight to the agent's momentum.

It wasn't much, but it was enough to put the agent ever so slightly off balance.

Zack flicked a kick into the agent's kneecap just as he used his hips to roll the muscular American's hand over, then down.

The man crashed to the ground, his face suddenly bloody as it brushed against his own knife as he fell.

Zack didn't think he'd managed a fatal blow, so he kicked the agent hard in the head to slow him down further, then picked up Ivy's limp form and fled.

The two-note sound of European police sirens, a sound Zack still identified with the Gestapo from the World War II movies he'd grown up watching on television, told him that the police were not far behind.

He wasn't going to be able to make it back to the Church of Mary of the Sailors.

But Venice was filled with churches and he wasn't in a position to be fussy. He doubled back, took a couple of random turns, then ducked into the Church of Santa Lucia.

He considered the confession booths along the walls of the church but rejected them. They were far too obvious as hiding places and wouldn't give him much room to help Ivy, assuming that she wasn't past all help. The Cross had saved her before, but they hadn't carried the Cross with them and he couldn't get her back to it now.

Ignoring its morbid connotations, he ducked down into the crypt.

Although much of Venice is built on piers, at least some of the city was constructed on the original islands off the Italian mainland. This church seemed located on one such spot because the crypt was dug a good twenty feet into the ground.