The Alchemist's Code

by Dave Duncan

  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.”

  25

  Girolamo’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 hol
low, 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.

  26

  Aunt Fortunata was having hysterics in her bedroom. The family had just run to see what was wrong when Grazia came tearing in and threw herself into her mother’s arms. There was much shouting and alarm as the stench of smoke wafted up from the mezzanine floor. The two fanti ran down to see. Vasco and I, following Grazia up, were accosted in the salone by Inquisitor Gritti demanding an explanation.

  “Witchcraft!” Vasco said. “Zeno conjured some sort of paper animal out of a statue and it attacked us. Then he used more witchcraft to set it on fire.” The vizio had suffered a severe fright and showed it, but he also wore a savage grin of triumph. This time he truly had me, he thought; this time I would not escape.

  I was inclined to agree with him. So was Gritti, for I had never seen a man so resemble a cat that can feel a mouse’s tail under its paw.

  “Your Excellency, I located the jinx,” I said. “My dowsing rod found it for me. It was hiding in madonna Grazia’s room, although she did not know it was there. It did attack us, as Filiberto says. He took refuge on the bed, I climbed on a table, and the lady on a chair. Fortunately it burst into flames and—”

  “Zeno burned it!” Vasco cried. “He pointed his hand at it like this and made gestures and spoke in a strange language and it went on fire instantly. And then a loose page attacked him and he did it again!”

  “A loose piece of paper attacked him?” Gritti licked his lips.

  “The vizio is a little upset,” I suggested. “His recollection of events is confused. I was, in fact, saying a prayer, and Our Lady took pity on us and saved us from the demon. Of course paper that old can be so dry that when it is exposed to the air…”

  Then the Sanudos came flocking out of Aunt Fortunata’s room, demanding to know what was going on, and the six-way conversation became more than a little confused.

  An hour or so later, the situation had been somewhat clarified. The jinx had been accepted as a reality and its destruction as good fortune. From that point of view, I was being hailed as a hero. Vasco insisted that I had used witchcraft to locate it and destroy it, and possibly to create it in the first place, although even Gritti seemed unwilling to accept that suggestion—he was reserving judgment on the rest. He had lots of time. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  Aunt Fortunata looked and sounded several years younger and every few minutes would mumble how much better she was feeling.

  Grazia was very quiet, staying close to her mother. I wanted to believe that her nose was less conspicuous than it had been, but perhaps that was just charitable thinking. Vasco and I had both testified that she had been as frightened of the jinx as either of us, had not known where it was hiding, and it had not been her familiar. She refused to discuss what had happened, neither confirming nor denying that I had used witchcraft.

  Giro had disappeared into his room and shut the door on the world. Sier Zuanbattista had retreated behind the traditional gravitas of the Venetian aristocracy, watching everything and saying nothing. He certainly was not going to thank me for my actions until they had been cleared of the taint of sorcery, and he was too much a gentleman to denounce them when they had so obviously worked to his benefit.

  About then we had all descended to Grazia’s room to reenact the encounter with the jinx, inspect the scorch mark on the floor where it had died, and peer into the base of the Neptune statue. I spotted Danese’s portmanteau again and decided that it might make a welcome diversion. I carried it over to the bed and prepared to tip out its contents.

  “Stand back, Zeno!” Gritti barked. “I distrust those nimble hands of yours. Marco, Amedeo, search that bag and see if there is anything in there that should not be.”

&nb
sp; A few minutes later we were all standing around the bed admiring sixty gold sequins and a gold and amber bracelet. In fact we were admiring two bracelets—the brass-and-glass one that Grazia had fetched from her jewel box, and the genuine one that had emerged from Danese’s underwear.

  Grazia wept on her mother’s bosom again. Madonna Eva’s face was rock hard, but her emotions were no doubt disheveled by this exposure of the viper she had nourished so long. Even Vasco admitted that I had had no opportunity to plant the evidence, at least not that day.

  “No Ca’ Barbolano silverware,” I admitted. “My suspicions were unfounded.”

  “I shall have every valuable in the house appraised,” Zuanbattista declared, and even his studied impassivity could not completely conceal his fury. “I am very grateful to you for drawing this treachery to our attention, sier Alfeo.”

  I bowed. “I am saddened to have increased your sorrows. Meanwhile, Your Excellency, I beg leave to return to my master, who may have need of me.”

  Pause.

  Then Gritti nodded. “I shall come calling tomorrow, as arranged, and when we have completed that business, we can pursue the question of just how you located the jinx and managed to set it on fire.” He smiled. “In the meantime, the vizio will keep you safe from harm.”

  27

  Giorgio was sitting in the government boat, trading gossip with Gritti’s boatmen—waiting for me is a large part of his job. He knows me so well that one look at my face was enough to inform him that I was not my usual cheerful and witty self. He said, “Home?” and accepted my nod as sufficient reply.

  Feeling understandably malicious, I spread myself on the felze cushions, forcing Vasco to sit on the thwart outside. Unfortunately the rain had stopped. Finding my contempt amusing, he beamed around benevolently at the scenery as Giorgio sped us along the Rio di Maddalena and Rio di S. Marcuola. When we emerged onto the Grand Canal, he honored me with the most sanctimonious smile I had ever seen.