A door appeared amid the shimmering glass, the shape and size of a coffin lid, opening straight up, sticking out at a right angle from the structure. There was even more intense light from within, a searing brightness that the Fugger, still standing behind von Solingen by the door, instinctively shielded his eyes from. But not before he’d recognised the man in flowing robes who emerged, yelling angrily at someone behind him, within.
Giancarlo Cibo, Archbishop of Siena, was furious. They had made two attempts to attach the hand of Anne Boleyn to his handless ‘volunteers’ and each had failed. No matter how drunk and insensible he rendered them – and he’d poured considerable amounts of grappa down each of their willing throats – the men would become instantly sober at the touch of the six-fingered hand. The hand itself did nothing. No one apart from Cibo himself had ever seen it move. It lay inert; yet as soon as stump was pressed to stump, the men shrieked as if burned by a white heat and flailed about the room. Two burly guards could barely hold the scarecrow victims still. To start with they’d tried to sew the hand and stump together using fishing line, but the thread seemed to dissolve in contact with the skin. Cibo eliminated the variable by getting rid of the ‘volunteer’, but he had no luck with the second either, who had just joined his fellow in the long water ride out. The next one, he’d decided, would not be sewn. He’d had another idea. And this was what had finally caused the always malleable Abraham to balk.
‘We are metallurgists!’ Cibo shouted over his shoulder at the Jew who sat at his table, his head resting on his arms. ‘What is the point of all this equipment? What could make more sense?’
He saw Heinrich standing at the door. He barely glanced at the Fugger.
‘Is he drunk?’
The Fugger gave a little giggle and belched extravagantly.
‘As you see, my Lord.’
‘Well, I want him more so. You two’ – he called to the two guards who were replacing the cover on the water hole – ‘feed this pawless dog more liquor. And you’ – he turned back to von Solingen – ‘make up another pipe for the Jew. Not too much. I need him awake.’
Then he returned to the chamber and began pulling pieces of equipment to the crucible at its centre.
The Fugger was taken to a corner of the stone hall. Even though much of it was obscured by smoke and heat haze, he could sense the immensity of it. And looking up, he saw the smoke funnelling away through some kind of hole.
The guards gave him a bottle filled with harsh brandy. He turned side-on to them, placed the neck of the bottle beside his face and allowed the liquid to slip slowly down his thumb and onto his shoulder. He gasped, spluttered and giggled until it was half empty, then feigned passing out. The guards caught the bottle and moved away, finishing it between them.
The Fugger reached behind him and pulled out the raven. Jet eyes reflected the flames of the chamber.
‘It is time, O Daemon dear,’ he whispered. ‘You must go and bring help.’
But how, oh how? he thought. If there was a vent at the roof of this dark cave, Daemon might find it eventually. If the hole was big enough he might slip out. But then? Would he find Beck waiting outside? And what could the lad do, beyond knowing that there was another way in to the palace? A way he had sought for years and never found?
Despair threatened to overwhelm him, worse than anything he’d ever faced in the midden cave. There, at least, he was safe, his own master, however low and filthy and lost. Here … well, he had no doubt that he would soon be following his predecessors’ corpses to watery doom. And that might come as a blessed relief after whatever was being prepared for him within the glass vault.
He wanted to release Daemon but somehow he couldn’t bear to, knowing he would never see him again. He held him, wedging the warm body against his side, within the blanket. His one hand plucked at its red thread, unravelling row after row. It made him think of his mother, in the warmth of their kitchen in Munster, forcing her young son to sit still and hold his hands out so she could untangle the wool and render it into skeins for her knitting. He’d pretend that he hated to do it, to be so domestic when he should be out with his father learning the ways of men, of commerce and property. In reality, he loved the soft texture wrapping around his hands, his two good hands, his mother crooning some old song or lullaby as she wound the thread round and round.
A jangle of it lay before him. He looked into the lustrous eyes of his companion; then, pulling the bird up to his mouth, after a struggle with teeth and fingers he finally succeeded in tying the end of the wool tightly round the raven’s left foot. He then frantically unwound more and more of the blanket, using his two feet like his mother had used her son’s hands, until over half of the blanket lay in a circle of red before him.
The command ‘Bring him’ was issued from within the glass dome, and Heinrich von Solingen emerged and made towards him.
‘Go with all my prayers,’ the Fugger whispered. Then he released the raven, just as the big German bent over him.
With a screech, Daemon took off, causing Heinrich to reel back with a curse. Foul creatures, he thought, and swiped air as the bird flapped down at him once, twice and again before giving a last cry and heading for the ceiling. Heinrich had the oddest feeling that the bird had a trail of red behind it, like an exhalation of smoke, but he knew it to be nothing more than a figment conjured by his still-throbbing head and the swirling haze of the chamber. He ordered the guards to pick up the bundle on the floor that the Fugger had become, hiding in feigned unconsciousness.
When they brought him within the kaleidoscopic room, Cibo looked up from his preparations and said, ‘What was that noise?’
‘A bird, my Lord. They sometimes creep in through the vent.’
‘Well, what are you waiting for? Put him on the table. No, not that way, idiot. His stump up this end. Nearest the crucible.’
Even though he’d long since lost all feeling in the wrist, the Fugger could feel through it the intensity of heat emanating from the iron cauldron half buried in the floor. Opening his eyes to slits, he looked into a face that was a stranger’s yet oddly familiar. Grey hair burst from beneath a skull cap straggling a sharp, haggard countenance. Dark eyes regarded him dully, and it was these he felt he had seen before.
‘Well, Abraham, shall we begin?’ said the Archbishop, coaxingly. ‘And no more scruples, eh? A few may suffer, true, wretches who are all but dead anyway, but only so the many will gain. The Philosopher’s Stone is within reach. We have its secret before us, in this witch’s hand, in this handless man. Come, for life eternal.’
Abraham muttered a few words and looked away.
‘You will see, my friend, you will see.’ Cibo gestured to the guards. ‘Place the stump on the crucible.’
The Fugger’s arm was lifted and stretched towards the white heat. All pretence of sleep gone now, he struggled, vainly, to pull it away. An inch, a finger’s breadth, already the pain intense.
‘No!’ he screamed, and there was a hammering on the dungeon door and voices calling Cibo’s name. The guards, at a gesture from their leader, released the Fugger’s arm.
‘Your Eminence?’
It was Giovanni, Cibo’s manservant and master of his household.
‘My Lord, the council is here. They await you above. The final arrangements for the Palio. We need your commands.’
Cibo looked down at the gibbering Fugger, then across at the glazed eyes of Abraham.
‘Well,’ he laughed, ‘duty over pleasure, I suppose.’
At his signal, one of the guards swept the hand into its velvet bag, then slipped that into the saddle bags. Slinging them across his shoulders the guard came and stood behind Cibo, who said, ‘Will you carry on without me?’
The other man finally spoke. ‘There may be some tests I can conduct in your absence. Leave the one-handed subject with me.’
‘Good.’ At the door of the kaleidoscope Cibo stopped, then turned slowly. ‘You know, Abraham, I think we may have been approac
hing this incorrectly. We are men of science, yes, but this, in here’ – he tapped the leather bag – ‘this belonged to nothing less than Hecate, a Queen of Witches – its uncorrupted flesh proves it to be diabolic in its very nature. Believe me, I have seen that to be true.’ He shuddered. And then a little smile came to his lips, a glow into his eyes. He continued, ‘Therefore, forces beyond science should be harnessed in our quest.’ He turned to his bodyguard and his master of ceremonies. ‘We will hold a Black Mass. Here, tonight. See to it, both of you. We’ll need the usual participants. Tell my mistress. Oh, and find a virgin – if there are any left in Siena.’
He swept from the chamber, followed closely by Giovanni and the two guards.
Heinrich left more slowly, muttering curses. Thinking.
I am no theologian, but a Black Mass? An abomination in God’s eyes, surely? Yet God has ordained this Italian to be His true rock, the bulwark of the One Church. To God and Cibo my oath of obedience is sworn. In all things. All!
He had never attended a Black Mass; but he could not balk at it, he would have to play the part required of him by Christ’s representative. Yet, as he left the chamber Heinrich began to cross himself repeatedly, for he had heard of dangerous things appearing at such rituals. Evil things. Things with more than a whiff of brimstone about them.
When the door slammed behind him, the Fugger once more opened his eyes. Abraham hadn’t moved, continuing to regard him in that unfocused way. The two men looked at each other, the only sounds the hissing of molten metal in the crucible, a distant rumbling of flames, the steady drip of water.
The Fugger thought he knew where he had seen the old man’s eyes before. If he was right … well, he had to take that chance.
‘Master,’ he said, ‘I have come from your son.’
Abraham’s expression did not change. He showed no hint that he had even heard words spoken.
‘Your son, master. He waits outside this evil place. He is trying to free you.’
Abraham got up and shuffled towards the open doorway of the glass chamber. He was almost through it when the Fugger called again.
‘It is true. Your son will rescue you.’
The haggard man didn’t even turn around to say it. ‘I have no son.’
For the raven that some humans called Daemon, it was an easy choice. Caverns were not places where he liked to hunt, and he’d got the faintest whiff of something freshly dead, up beyond the fug of the cave.
So when his creature had released him, he’d followed the scent up on the spirals of smoke and swiftly came to a hole beyond which lay the promise of prey. It was narrow, so he’d squeezed his wings tight about him and pushed through, into a passage that curved upwards.
Eventually Daemon saw light, and within a moment had bumped into a metal grate. Beyond it, through slats, lay the early-evening sky. On the grate lay a rat’s body.
He was not concerned now that he could get no further. He was concerned with hunger. It was awkward but, clinging upside down, he was still able to pull a brown haunch through with a red-tagged talon, to plunge in his razor beak, to rend and tear. The more he did, the easier it became.
It was hunger that brought Beck reluctantly along the side of the palace, away from her vantage point before the main gates. The longer she waited, the greater her anxiety. She’d been a fool to let the Fugger take the risk he had denied her. Now she was both helpless and alone. Back watching the building she knew held her father prisoner within it. Back doing nothing, able to do nothing but watch and wait.
For what? She’d sat there for a year before and not a single chance had occurred in that time to get in, or to pursue the Archbishop outside. He was always too heavily guarded, or surrounded by people. Once she had nearly lost all patience and attempted an assault single-handedly, despite the odds, but had held off knowing that one chance was all she would have.
That chance had now come and gone, on the road to Toulon. It should have been just her, Cibo and the hulking bodyguard – good odds! The man should have died there, his seal of office hers with which to forge documents for her father’s release. Instead, other men with other motives had got in her way. One man especially. She had hesitated then, and again in Toulon, distracted by feelings that had never affected her before. And now, with that man gone and probably dead, she was back where she seemed to have spent her life, waiting for another chance that might be years in the coming.
Despite this realisation, she was still reluctant to leave her post until hunger forced her to, her own and the growling Fenrir’s at her feet. In the winding alleys beside the palace, foodsellers had already staked their pitches, for the Palio was due to take place the next day. Prices had already started to climb, and Beck reluctantly paid three scudi for a meagre loaf of bread and some cooked meat which she didn’t consider too closely. Long gone were the days when she ate according to the dictates of her tribe. Life on the streets of Siena didn’t allow such luxuries. And Fenrir didn’t mind the gristly meat at all.
It was while they were returning down the side alley to the front of the building that Fenrir suddenly growled and jerked the length of rope from her hand. He ran to the palace wall and began to paw at something on the ground. She saw a rat’s corpse and was about to pull the dog away when she noticed the rat move. Since it was obviously dead, she looked closer. Something was moving it from below, and it wasn’t the steady stream of smoke she now noticed rising around the body.
She bent down. Expecting another rat, the glinting eyes that suddenly fastened on her, set within a crown of black feathers, gave her a shock, but that was nothing next to the shock of recognition.
‘Daemon!’ she cried.
The raven ceased gnawing only for the time it took to say, ‘Hand.’
Beck put down her food and looked back. The grate was set within two buttresses. For the moment, no one was in sight in the alley. She bent down and tried to pull the grate up but it was wedged solidly, held down by years of filth and sediment.
‘Don’t move,’ she said to the raven, which acknowledged her departure merely by taking a bigger bite.
Beck ran back to the stall keepers. Several were still in the process of setting up and some stalls were more elaborate than others, with sides and awnings. She spotted what she wanted beside one of them and, while the two men were distracted by the voluptuous female form of an orange seller passing by, she seized the crowbar and ran back.
Inserting it into the grate she pressed all her weight down upon it. For a long moment nothing seemed to happen, then there was a slight giving followed by a rush of movement as the grate tipped up at an angle and the rat’s body disappeared down the hole. Daemon hopped out immediately and, putting his head to one side, looked up at her with a reproachful expression.
‘Here, you can share mine,’ she said, handing over some bread.
While the bird set to munching again, Beck regarded it with wonder. She coughed and waved a gust of smoke away from her face, then breathed in again more urgently. There was some familiar savour to it. Somewhere, she had smelt it before.
And then it came to her. The smoke carried a memory of the last time she had seen her father before he smuggled her out of the palace, sitting before his crucible, its white heat reducing iron to molten metal, an acrid cloud enveloping him with its scent.
This scent. The scent in her nostrils now.
She blew her nose to the side of the hole before her. Looking down, she saw the thread trailing away into the darkness. What is that? She reached down and Daemon leapt up onto her outstretched hand. Running her fingers down the wool, Beck tugged it lightly, feeling the resistance.
‘Clever Fugger,’ she said.
She fought down the instinct to throw herself into the hole, to immediately trace the red line to its source, which she knew now must also be the source of the smoke. She had a vision of her father sitting in a cloud of it and the desire to slither into the subterranean depths and into his arms was overpowering.
&n
bsp; But she was a street fighter of old and knew that plans launched in haste usually ended in bad blood. So she swiftly untied the thread from the bird’s talons and attached it to the grate before replacing it. Then she went in search of what she would need. It wouldn’t be much. Her knife and a good length of rope should do it. And her slingshot, of course.
Preceded by Fenrir and circled by a cawing Daemon, she set out for the riverbed to look for smooth stones and to await the full darkness of midnight.
FIVE
THE BLACK MASS
Far beneath the surface, in a room that saw no natural light, the preparations were nearly complete. The score of reed torches lining the walls of the outer chamber had been reduced to a quartet – north and south, east and west. Of the Cathedral candles, only nine now burned outside the glass vault, while another seven stood within on an altar erected opposite the door, set around a huge gold cross, inverted, its top driven into the centre of the wood. The cauldron within, still glowing red from its hidden fire, had been emptied of its molten contents, half-filled instead with a mixture of spices, grappa and wine.
The scent of the sweet-smelling liquor made the Fugger’s eyes heavy; he had caught himself slipping twice into a desired sleep, until the reality of his situation brought him back. He watched as Giovanni brought in the items, alive and inanimate, that now lined the glass walls. Another time, everything might have filled him with the wonder of the curious student he had been. Now, things familiar or strange created nothing less than a sense of total dread.
Soon, all activity was over, and silence, broken only by the occasional chirrup of a bound and blinkered beast, settled over the dungeon and its kaleidoscopic centre. Abraham lay on a cot outside the glass walls, insensible, a scraggy arm thrown over his face. He had not spoken a word in the long hours since the Archbishop’s departure, and the Fugger’s further attempts to press him about Beck had met with nothing more than a curt denial.
The French Executioner Page 21