The Alchemist's Code

by Dave Duncan

  She shrugged, a magnificent sight. “He owns huge estates on the mainland.”

  Our thighs and shoulders were touching. I was going mad.

  “And how do you know that his wife dreams of being dogaressa?”

  Medea laughed harshly, but the laugh ended as something much gentler. Diamond features softened to pearl and emerald eyes to the dark of a moonlit night. Helen was back.

  “An entertaining young noble I met on the mainland. He made a bid for my affections. He was mad at Eva—a beautiful young wife abandoned by an ancient husband in pastoral tedium, and he so-o-o handsome.”

  “She was not responsive either?” I could guess that the young man’s bid for Violetta had not been high enough, or she would not be discussing him.

  “He never saw even the outside of her bedroom door, so he told me. She claimed she dared not risk her husband’s political future with a scandal. As if anyone would care!”

  “I care,” I said, rising from the table. “And now I really must leave.”

  Medea flickered into view for a moment. “Don’t you dare!”

  I shrugged and turned for the door. I felt the terrazzo floor shiver as she moved. Two soft arms went around me. Hands groped. I moaned and leaned back.

  And so on. Fill in the details for yourself.

  No, it was much better than that. Violetta is the finest courtesan in Europe.

  Later, while we floated together in what the major poets refer to as postcoital euphoria, she inquired sleepily what else I needed to know. Violetta as Helen is the sexiest woman in the world, but that was not her voice. I peeked at her, nose to nose, and confirmed that her eyes had changed from dark to blue, from night to day. She was Aspasia again, ready to share political gossip.

  “And Giro, the son?”

  Violetta, you will recall, had pointed out that gentleman to me at the theater for no apparent reason, so I expected her to clam up at that point, because she will never discuss her patrons. She didn’t.

  “A lawyer.” She sounded oddly uninterested. “Attended university at Padua, served on the Quarantia, elected to some minor post on the mainland.” She paused, reflecting. “He never seemed to care much about politics and they stopped electing him, until last month when they suddenly made him a minister. There were rumors that he wanted to refuse.”

  “He couldn’t!”

  “Not without the Great Council slapping a huge fine on him. They were really honoring his daddy, I heard.”

  It may seem odd that Venice would honor a man by electing his son to an office he did not want, but it does happen. The Great Council can be even more perverse than that, as for example, when it is angry at the doge and keeps on nominating his relatives to posts just for the satisfaction of voting them down.

  “Giro himself ’s a nonentity,” Aspasia said dismissively. “I’ll ask around. Tell me why you need to know.”

  Fair’s fair, although I knew that the reaction was bound to be stormy.

  “Zuanbattista’s daughter may have been kidnapped.”

  Violetta lurched upright, rocking the bed like a minor earthquake. “Or may have run away?” Claws flashed.

  “That’s certainly possible.”

  “You let her be, Alfeo Zeno, or I’ll never speak to you again!”

  Medea was back and I was in imminent danger of losing my eyeballs or worse.

  “Even if she’s been trapped by some predator?”

  “And you will decide which, of course? You won’t let her opinion count at all! Just a stupid, lust-ridden flibbertigibbet, you think, whose life has to be organized by men?”

  I had no answer to that, because an apprentice must obey his master and madonna Eva had bought mine for one thousand ducats.

  3

  Dinnertime was over and a dozen men and boys of the Marciana family were back at Ca’ Barbolano’s watergate, busily unloading the lighter, but not so busy that they failed to notice my emergence from 96. I worked my way along the ledge and fled upstairs pursued by much jealous ribaldry. A man cannot smile at a girl in San Remo without the entire parish discussing what he is up to—usually in intimate detail.

  Armed with a glass of water from the kitchen, I returned to the atelier. The Maestro had made his way back to his favorite chair, but he was hunched over and shrunken, obviously in pain. Clairvoyance is an ordeal for him, leaving him drained and incapacitated, sometimes for days. He sipped the water, passed it back to me, then again bent over and held his throbbing head in both hands.

  “What did I see?” he mumbled.

  I went over to inspect the results, the scrawl chalked on the slate table. His writing is atrocious at the best of times; when he is foreseeing it can become totally illegible, even to me, and he never recalls what he has written.

  “Impressive,” I said. “Almost legible and the words make so much sense I fear I must be missing something.” Clarity normally means short-range prophecy, as this one seemed to be.

  Where the fish stands on a shore of wine and no flags fly,

  Why does a black swan wear a white collar?

  Amid a hundred bronze mouths the great one is silent.

  Steel will ring louder and tears must flow.

  He grunted. “Tomorrow.”

  “That’s how I read it, master.”

  The news would sound a bitter note in Ca’ Sanudo. Give the girl a night away from home with her accomplice and “unharmed” would mean less than her mother was hoping. For my part, I disliked the mention of steel ringing. At least the quatrain mentioned tears flowing, not blood, but drawn swords automatically increase uncertainty and thus blur foresight.

  The Maestro was aware of that also, of course, since he had taught me. “You need not do this, Alfeo,” he mumbled. “Unless you want to.”

  “Good! It sounds far too dangerous. I won’t.”

  He looked up in dismay, visualizing a thousand ducats subliming away like his sulfur crystals.

  I laughed to put him out of his misery. “If you had thought there was one chance in a million I was going to say that, you wouldn’t have made the offer, right? Of course I’ll go. I am the knave of swords who stands between the lovers and the world.”

  “What?”

  “Tarot.”

  He grunted again and heaved himself upright. I handed him his staff. He seemed steady enough, so I left him to thump his way across to the door while I headed for the desk.

  “We need a contract,” he said as he left. “And her father’s authority.”

  “Italic, roman, or gothic?”

  He slammed the door without answering, so I trimmed a quill to write italic.

  Giorgio and I trotted downstairs to sea level and stepped out into the gondola. “That way,” I said, making myself comfortable on the cushions in the felze. “Ca’ Sanudo.”

  “Which one?” Giorgio Angeli is a wiry little man with the strength of a horse. He adjusted his feathered gondolier’s cap and set his oar in the rowlock.

  “Zuanbattista.”

  “Don’t know it.”

  I turned to peer up at him in amazement. “I thought you knew every building in the city.”

  He shrugged, pleased but rueful. “Venice has more Sanudos than seagulls. I can ask.”

  A stroke of his oar sent us off along the Rio San Remo. It is a quiet little backwater canal, but on a Saturday afternoon it had traffic enough, and it had the timeless beauty of Venice, where every building is different, shining in dancing, ethereal reflected light, never the same from one moment to the next. Voices shout greetings or ribaldry, others sing. People going by in boats call to people in windows or on bridges, but there is never the clatter of hooves or rattle of carts that mar other cities.

  Giorgio pulled up close behind a gondola going in our direction and shouted, “Giro?”

  The gondolier looked around and said, “Ey? Giorgio!”

  Obviously this was not the same Giro—noblemen elected to the Collegio do not row gondolas on Saturday afternoons, nor any other
time. This Girolamo did not know the Ca’ Zuanbattista Sanudo either, so he shouted to another boat going the other way. I hastily closed the curtains on the felze, but I could not disguise my gondolier and it would soon be all over the parish, if not the city, that Master Nostradamus’s henchman Alfeo was looking for Zuanbattista Sanudo.

  The third man asked advised us that the palazzo we needed was the old Ca’ Alvise Donato in Santa Maria Maddalena parish, over in Cannaregio. There are even more Donatos than Sanudos in the Golden Book, but Giorgio knew the house and shouted thanks. If sier Zuanbattista had just bought himself a grand new mansion, he must have done well in Constantinople.

  “I’ll need you tomorrow morning,” I said. “Early. Bruno, too.”

  “Good cause?” Giorgio paused from eyeing the canal ahead to give me a shrewd, appraising look. He has seen the murky labyrinths into which my work for the Maestro can lead me.

  “A very good cause,” I said firmly. But was it? I was going to make at least one person utterly miserable. The man might be a seducer and predator but more likely was just a crazy young lover like me. I would return Grazia to the unwelcome attentions of the king of coins, whoever he was, or condemn her to lifelong imprisonment in a convent, but her swain faced even more terrible consequences.

  Nowhere is far from anywhere in Venice. I recognized the Sanudo arms of anchor and swan on a gondola tied up at some public watersteps, and Giorgio pointed out the house about three doors along. The arcades of rounded arches in white Istrian stone marking the ground floor and piano nobile were in Byzantine style, so it was probably at least three hundred years old. It was also much smaller than I expected and squeezed between two larger buildings, an odd contradiction of Violetta’s judgment that Sanudo might possess enough wealth to serve as doge. Some junior government posts pay a stipend but the senior ones do not. Some bring a severe financial burden, which reserves them for the rich. Perhaps Zuanbattista was merely observing the old republican tradition of frugality.

  I banged a big brass knocker in the shape of an anchor. The door swung open almost at once, as if someone had been waiting for me, and the opener was no mere servant, but Minister Girolamo himself, the man Violetta had pointed out to me at the theater. Nobles shed their formal robes at home, and he was dressed like any other rich man, in breeches and hose, doublet and cape, with a fashionable white ruff, although the outfit was less colorful than most and of humbler stuff than the silk I should have expected. It seemed odd for a man of his age and station.

  Hand on heart, I bowed, but he spoke before I could.

  “Sier Alfeo?”

  “Sier Girolamo, Maestro Nostradamus sends me with good news, messer.” Goodness always depends on one’s point of view. I would rather have delivered bad.

  “Then you are doubly welcome to our house. Come and comfort my parents. My mother is anxious for word.” I heard a hint that the Sanudo menfolk were humoring the foolish woman. “You know where Grazia is?” He bowed me in and almost rushed me along the hallway to the stairs.

  There were no heaped bales and kegs of merchandise in Ca’ Sanudo, as there were in Ca’ Barbolano, but the walls were lined with bookcases all the way to the end and the floor was cluttered with crates, a few of which stood open, revealing that they contained books. The air was sickly with the odor of wood, varnish, and leather. This was a major library, many times larger than the Maestro’s, but of course Zuanbattista had inherited the estate of his publisher brother-in-law.

  “My master has foreseen her,” I said, reluctant to have to tell the story twice. In fact, of course, the quatrain had given me a fair idea of where Grazia had gone and certainly the Maestro had seen that also, but the prophecy said to wait for her tomorrow on the Riva del Vin, so that was our best chance of apprehending her.

  Giro mumbled something about not being properly settled in yet as we reached the midpoint of the hall and turned to climb the stairs. The treads were dished by centuries of feet, and slightly tilted. That is typical of Venice, built on the mud of the lagoon; everything sags after a century or two.

  “It is astonishing,” he said, probably meaning clairvoyance.

  Of course lawyers are trained not to be too human or too trusting. What could be more alien to them than clairvoyance? If we all had it, they would all be out of work. If Giro himself was at all surprising, it was that he seemed surprisingly nondescript for a nobile homo. His hose covered spindly calves; his shoulders were narrow, his face, voice, and manner equally uninspired. Violetta had called him a nonentity.

  We turned at the mezzanine level and a second flight brought us to the piano nobile. More crates stood around there, several of them too large and flat to contain anything other than paintings. Among them stood pedestals and busts, and a couple of freestanding statues, awkwardly placed. The Sanudos were still in the process of moving into their new city home.

  Amid this transient clutter stood our host, smiling through his forest of beard. He, too, had discarded his formal robes, and he greeted me as an equal, which was an astonishing concession to my humble station. No aristocratic reserve there—Sier Zuanbattista was probably even more of a skeptic about clairvoyance than his son, but I was a guest and he had a politician’s slant on life. By the time he was ready to make his play for doge, I might be a voting member of the Great Council.

  “My wife is lying down,” he explained. “She is very distressed, as you would expect.”

  Distressed enough to throw away a thousand ducats; distressed enough for him to keep her well away so she couldn’t increase her offer.

  A house clamped between its neighbors could have no windows along the sides. He led me to the rear and ushered me into a fine salotto, where several fine bronzes looked happily at home and seven paintings screamed at me to come and admire them. I also wanted to gawk at the ceiling decorations and the terrazzo floor design and even the furniture, which I rarely notice. The full-length windows stood open on a small balcony, providing welcome air on a sweltering day and a fine view of a surprisingly spacious and well-tended garden. I already knew the Ca’ Sanudo had a garden, of course, but the sight of it raised my appreciation of the house. It was old and small, but exquisite as a reliquary.

  “Sier Alfeo Zeno,” my host proclaimed loudly, presenting me to a heap of laundry in a large chair, “Maestro Nostradamus’s assistant. Madonna Fortunata Morosini.”

  The laundry nodded without taking her eyes off the crucifix she clutched in both hands on her lap. She was old and her all-black garb was normal widows’ wear, but her face was swarthy, slashed and corroded by a million sour wrinkles, as if her life had been an endless series of disappointments, like the devil’s mother’s. Had I been a girl of fifteen summers with this Fortunata hag as my chaperone, I would have thrown her out the window instead of myself.

  “Pray be seated, sier Alfeo,” Zuanbattista said. “Now what news?”

  Giro remained standing. Fortunata just stared at her crucifix. I would be the highlight of her next confession.

  I said, “The Maestro has foreseen your daughter, Excellency. He is confident that we can intercept her.”

  “Go on! Where?”

  “‘When?’ is more to the point,” I said. “The Maestro foresaw me accosting her in a certain public place early tomorrow morning.”

  The two men exchanged pouts.

  “But where is she now?” Giro demanded.

  “That was not revealed to him.”

  “Go back and tell him to try again!”

  “He could not, not today. He is exhausted. Believe me, Your Excellencies, I have tried many times to see visions in the crystal as he does. I rarely succeed, and when I do I expect my head to explode with the pain.”

  My admission made them squirm. The Church might burn me for it. Old Fortunata crossed herself, an unexpected movement proving that she was still with us in this vale of tears.

  “That is illogical!” Giro complained. “Why can he foresee tomorrow and not today?”

  Nostradam
us may risk brushing off a patrician’s questions, but I do not have an international reputation to protect me. “The way he has explained it to me, Excellency, is that there are many possible futures. The Lord gives all His children free will. There is a future where you decide to go to early Mass on Sunday, and a future where you go later, yes? There may be others, but only one of them will come to pass. The ideal situation would be that whoever has taken your sister has firm plans to remain in one place for a while, or be in some place at a certain time—a rendezvous, say. You see? Then one future is much more likely than the others and my master can foresee it and advise on appropriate action. If anything interferes to upset their plans, then the image blurs and disappears, like a canal reflection when a gondola goes by. Does that make sense?”

  “No. Where is she now? She must be somewhere.”

  “Certainly, but the Maestro has to discover where that is. She and her, um, captors may be drifting aimlessly in a boat on the lagoon. Or she may be tied up in a dark attic—” My listeners hastily crossed themselves. “Either way my master might see her in his trance and still be unable to tell where she is. Whereas it is also possible that they have made an appointment to meet someone tomorrow at a certain time and place. Is that still illogical?”

  “No,” Giro admitted. “That makes sense.” He meant that it was a plausible excuse, not that he believed it.

  I noted that no one had asked me to define they. He might be thinking kidnappers. More likely we were all agreed on lovers.

  “I will tell my wife the good news.” Zuanbattista departed.

  “Of course I will come with you tomorrow,” Giro announced.

  “That would be inadvisable,” I countered. “Suppose, for instance, that the malefactors recognized you before Grazia arrived?”

  Cold winds of suspicion blew while the lawyer considered this objection. I wished he would sit down and not loom over me. I pressed on.

  “I have brought this letter of agreement. If I do not bring your sister home safely within three days, or at least supply proof of her whereabouts, your parents owe the Maestro nothing.” Just in case he might think that we had been in on the plot from the beginning, I added, “Your sister will explain what happened and who abducted her.”