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.
“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 d
estroy 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.
The Undrowned Child Page 25