The Alchemist's Code

by Dave Duncan

  “Alfeo, Alfeo! You cannot say you were not warned. I have told you many times not to meddle in matters that imperil your immortal soul. See where it has gotten you now? Do you not feel repentance?”

  “I feel homicidal. It has gotten me to thinking that I would rather be beheaded than burned at the stake. I’m a better swordsman than you are. Giorgio won’t notice a quick murder—will you Giorgio?”

  Normally Giorgio pretends not to overhear what is said on his boat, but this time he answered. “Not if it is done in a good cause, clarissimo.”

  “Couldn’t be better,” I replied, but my threat failed to worry the vizio, who merely smirked more broadly than ever.

  I truly thought that a day that began with my finding a corpse on the doorstep and continued through my being charged with homicide, menaced by a demon, and then accused of witchcraft could not possibly get any worse. I was wrong. Back at the Ca’ Barbolano, I jumped ashore and trotted up the stairs without waiting for Vasco, who would be certain to stick to me tighter than my ears from now on. I heard his boots tapping close behind me as I reached the piano nobile. To my dismay, one flap of the great double doors stood open and on a stool outside it sat Renzo Marciana. His relief at seeing me suggested that he had been ready to expire from boredom. The Marcianas jump to our landlord’s bidding also, just as high as the Maestro and I do.

  “Sier Alvise wants to see you,” he explained. With an uneasy glance at my keeper, he rose and went in to announce my return.

  “No doubt the noble lord dislikes corpses cluttering up his watergate,” Vasco opined at my shoulder. “So untidy!”

  I suspected the crusty antediluvian patrician liked the recent living intruders even less than the dead ones and in a few moments Barbolano came dithering out to confirm my suspicions. I know from auditing the Marcianas’ ledgers that he must have one of the largest incomes in Venice, yet he and his wife never employ more than a single servant; they wear old-fashioned garments, faded, threadbare, and often in need of a wash.

  He peered at Vasco with extreme distaste and then literally wagged a finger in front of my nose. “I won’t have it, you hear?”

  “God bless you, messer,” I said. “How have I displeased you?”

  “How?” the old man barked, spraying me. “Sbirri all over the place? Inquisitors, Missier Grande himself, and”—he pointed—“him? You think I run a house of ill-repute? I won’t have it! Get out, all of you! Go! Go and tell Nostradamus to take his rubbish and leave! Today! Now!”

  He might have continued in the same vein for some time, but my display of horror stopped him. “Why’re you pulling faces, boy?”

  “Because of the date, clarissimo! The stars! This is a fearfully inauspicious day. The Maestro says he has never seen a day so ill-omened for making decisions.”

  The old man shied. “Stars?”

  “And planets. Mars is in Libra in opposition to Mercury, messer! The moon in your own birth sign of Virgo makes you especially vulnerable. I beg you to wait at least until Tuesday before making any move that you might possibly regret later. Any decision you make before that will certainly be star-crossed.”

  Barbolano chewed his tongue for a few moments indecisively. Then he pointed again at Vasco. “Well, at least get rid of him! You write out a notice evicting Nostradamus and bring it to me to sign on Tuesday without fail!”

  I bowed. “Very wise, clarissimo.”

  He disappeared in a thunderclap of the great door.

  “A disastrous decision, I would say,” said Vasco. “So that is how it is done? Bombast and stultiloquence!”

  “You think this day is not disastrous?” I strode off up the stairs.

  He followed. “So far it has proved highly auspicious, one of the best I can recall.”

  I marched into the atelier, closed the door in his face, and locked it.

  “Greetings, noble master!” I proclaimed, detouring around by the big mirror to make sure the spyhole from the dining room was closed. “I unmasked Algol for you. I foolishly saved Filiberto Vasco from the demon and out of gratitude he accuses me of witchcraft. Messer Ottone Gritti is much inclined to agree with him. Also sier Alvise has given us notice to vacate the premises by Tuesday and what’s the matter?”

  The Maestro was huddled in his favorite red chair, clutching a pottery jug in both hands and looking about a thousand years old. He grunted. I paused at the slate-topped table with the crystal ball, whose cover lay crumpled on the floor. He had been foreseeing and the resulting chalk scrawl was just one more horror to add to the day. I would need an hour to decipher it, if I ever could.

  “It doesn’t help,” he muttered.

  “What does it say?”

  “I don’t know. It’s too far off to be relevant.”

  I noticed with relief that the late Danese Dolfin had been removed, although the medical equipment and a bloodstained sheet still lay under the couch. I headed in that direction to tidy up.

  “Sit down here and talk.” The Maestro raised the jug to his mouth and drank.

  Obediently I settled on one of the green chairs—an unusual honor for me—and talked. I gave him everything that had happened since I left with Gritti to visit madonna Corner. I didn’t mention eating, since I hadn’t, but only barely managed not to mention that I wasn’t mentioning it.

  Although never predictable, Nostradamus is almost always bad tempered after a farseeing. But when I came to the end of my morning and told him how I had deterred Alvise Barbolano from evicting us on the spot, he actually swore, which he almost never does. We were in trouble.

  “So that nuisance Vasco is still underfoot?”

  “Like dirt.”

  “Bah! Well he mustn’t find out what we’re doing. I promised to deliver Algol to Gritti personally, and I shall.”

  I repeated that sentence to myself and decided I had heard it correctly. “You don’t think the walking book was the ghoul?”

  “Bah! No. Certainly not! You are confusing Algol with the jinx, and they’re completely different. Oh, the jinx made the Sanudos prone to disaster. You notice that Sanudo himself did very well when he was in Constantinople, far out of its range, but plunged into trouble as soon as he returned? It cursed everyone who came in contact with it. As soon as we became involved in the family’s affairs, it blurred my clairvoyance and blinded your tarot. But Algol is a person, one of the jinx’s evil effects, no doubt, but not the jinx itself. The fact that Algol’s employers, whoever they are, named him The Ghoul may be only a coincidence. I don’t recall the Church ever informing us of a patron saint of coincidences, but a patron demon may be more appropriate. It’s the human Algol that the Ten want. I could tell Gritti what he’s overlooked and he would put all his spies to work and find the real Algol in a few days, but I promised to turn him in myself, so I must.”

  To call Maestro Nostradamus pigheaded is an insult to swine.

  “Yes, I know. Tomorrow at breakfast. Can you think of a way to stop him burning me at the stake for witchcraft right after?”

  “You were an idiot to use the Word in front of a witness, especially him.”

  “I didn’t use it in front of Gritti himself, but I agree it was stupid. After all, how much worse could demonic possession make Vasco? And he might have bitten the jinx, instead of the other way around.”

  “I’ll worry about you later,” my master said impatiently. “Meanwhile the most important thing is to preserve my reputation by exposing Algol. I decided there were three ways to proceed—three strings to my bow.”

  “And the first one didn’t work?” I jabbed a thumb over my shoulder at the crystal ball.

  He pouted, which was agreement. “I overshot the mark by at least a century. You’ve eaten?”

  Astonished, for food rarely enters his mind, I said, “Not this week, I think, master.”

  “Well, I am waiting for—”

  Knuckles rapped.

  I raised an eyebrow and, when he nodded, the rest of me also. I went and opened the door
to find the twins, Corrado and Christoforo, beaming eagerly. They will never interrupt the Maestro without express orders to do so, so I stepped aside and let them enter. Then I closed and locked the door again, although there was no sign of Vasco out in the salone. The boys were sweaty and puffing as if they had been running, but they had taken time to rehearse, because they reported in counterpoint.

  Corrado began, “Marco Piceno, cobbler…”

  “Marco Gatti, attorney…”

  “Matteo Tentolini, musician…”

  “And Dario Rinaldo, carpenter,” Chris concluded triumphantly.

  The names meant nothing to me, but from the Maestro’s demonic expression, I guessed that they were bad news, so the second of his three bowstrings had just proved as untuneful as the first. Two down, one to go.

  “Very good!” he said. “Alfeo will give you two soldi apiece after he has dined. Meanwhile, I have another errand for you. Fetch Michelina if she is around. Go and eat, Alfeo.”

  Michelina is a year older than the twins and a splendid beauty, engaged to be married. The only reason the Maestro could possibly want her then was to dictate a letter, because she writes a fine secretary hand. I taught her myself.

  “I won’t die of starvation in the next hour,” I complained, resentful that anyone else would sit at my desk and do my work.

  “No, no.” He waved his hand in dismissal. “You must keep up your strength for tonight’s ordeal.”

  When he gets in that mood, he keeps secrets even from me, because he is convinced my face always gives me away when I tell a lie. This is an absurd untruth, but that day we had that historically celebrated snoop Filiberto Vasco underfoot and peering underbed, so extreme caution might be justified.

  “I dread the prospect,” I said and marched off in search of nourishment, ignoring the twins’ wide-eyed stares at this hint of dark deeds ahead.

  28

  It was long past our usual noon dinnertime, but nothing daunts Mama Angeli and I found Vasco in the kitchen cleaning up a plate of her magnificent Burano-style duckling, Masorin a la Buranella. I asked her to send mine to the dining room, where the company was more appealing, and on my way there I helped myself to one of the few remaining bottles of the Maestro’s hoarded 1583 Villa Primavera. This might be the last decent meal I would ever eat.

  I was not allowed long to enjoy my solitude, of course, before Vasco sauntered in to join me, bringing his raisin fritters dolce with him. He sniffed the wine bottle and pursed his lips.

  “Nice! The condemned man ate a hearty last meal?”

  “Not at all. Celebrating the coming exposure of the false witness.”

  He smiled and leaned back to admire the ceiling art and chandeliers. “Nice place you had here. A pity about your landlord’s little fit of pique.”

  “He laughs best who laughs last.”

  “I entirely agree,” Vasco said solemnly. “And I admit it feels very nice. I have warned you so often!”

  “Nil homine terra pejus ingrato creat.” Violetta taught me that, but she was not applying it to me at the time.

  “The ingrate is certainly the worst of men,” Vasco agreed, “but what makes you think I have reason to be grateful to you? You have always been an upstart, conceited, interfering pest.”

  If I accused him of ingratitude for denouncing me after I had saved him from the jinx, he would claim I was confessing to performing magic, so I ate on in silence. I took comfort from reflecting that I had been in tight corners before and the Maestro had always jumped to the rescue.

  Corrado peered in. “Old…The Maestro wants to know if we have…I mean if he has any henbane and, er, mandrake?”

  “Henbane is the third jar on the second shelf down, labeled Hyoscyamus,” I said. “Mandrake root is in the fourteenth jar, bottom shelf, Mandragora. Be careful with those!” I yelled after him as he ran off. The Maestro knew the answers quite as well as I did, so the purpose of his questions had been to misinform Vasco, who must know those two plants’ reputation for magical powers. Misinform him of what, though? And why? Well, it was an encouraging sign that the old mountebank had something in mind. Or up sleeve, perhaps.

  Later, as Mama was asking me if she should fry up a third plateful of fritters for me and I was regretfully deciding that I would not be able to do them justice, Christoforo appeared.

  “Maestro says he is going to rest, but we must waken him when anything develops. And he says you should rest, too.”

  “Tell him my strength won’t fail him.”

  “And he wants to see you, Mama.”

  His mother frowned and waddled out.

  “Burning isn’t so bad really,” Vasco remarked. He took a swig from the wine bottle. “They strangle you with a cord before the flames get to you. Usually, that is.”

  Could my position be any more desperate if I set his hat on fire right then?

  A scream of mortal agony echoed along the salone, loud enough and long enough to bring Vasco off his chair and startle even me.

  “Mama has a weakness for dramatics,” I explained as my companion bolted out the door, hell-bent on rescue. “Nostradamus probably found a spider under his bed,” I called after him. By the time I had polished off the last scraps of my dolce, drained my glass, and followed the vizio, I was just in time to see the Maestro disappearing into his bedroom and Mama Angeli shooing almost her entire clan out the front door—Giorgio, Corrado, Archangelo, Christoforo, Michelina, and even Noemi. The most junior members were apparently being left in the care of Piero, who is only eleven. Two of them thought they had been abandoned and were screaming in terror.

  “What is going on?” Vasco demanded.

  “Oh, it’s often like this around here,” I said. “Make yourself useful. Practice your babysitting skills.”

  I went back to the atelier, leaving the door open so I could keep an eye on the spy. I had the big room to myself, but some badly trimmed quills were evidence that Michelina had been working at my side of the desk. I tidied that and the medical corner, then set to work on the ugly scrawl beside the crystal globe.

  Working for a clairvoyant is frustrating because you know you will never live to see half your work completed. In Nostradamus’s case, the worse his writing and the more obscure his syntax, the further out the prophecy, and that was why he had told me that this one overshot the mark. At least it was in words, not doodles, so the jinx’s evil influence was no longer evident, but I spent most of the rest of the afternoon trying to read the quatrain before I decided I had done all I could with it. I was still unsure of a few words.

  The [tide] has turned, the sands ebb

  Nine times the [greater] glass turns and only [twice] remain

  When the son of Ajaccio closes the volume

  The mainlander shall uncover.

  I didn’t know then what it meant, don’t now, and likely never will. It did not look complete and the Maestro did not include it in his next book of predictions. Who was Ajaccio? Uncover what? Angry and frustrated, I copied the verse into the book of prophecies and cleaned the slate. I could see no sign that the jars of henbane or mandrake had been disturbed. I wished I could jump across the calle and visit with Violetta, but I knew Vasco would either stop me or follow. Besides, I had to stay at my post.

  Vasco had stayed at his, draped on a couch in the salone equidistant from the front door, the atelier, and the Maestro’s room opposite, a natural hunter’s blind. One by one the Angelis returned, all carrying bundles, and none of them would tell him where they had been or what they had brought back. I did the best I could to conceal my mystification; I suppose Vasco was doing the same.

  I was standing in front of the big mirror practicing finger exercises with a silver ducat when I heard the door knocker rap and went to answer it.

  Understandably, Vasco beat me to it, but I knew the page standing there, recognized the livery of the Trau household, and almost lost my temper at the sight of the note he was clutching, because it was sealed with Fulgentio’s signet.
I do not grudge Fulgentio his wealth and good fortune, but I cannot forgive the way the Maestro shamelessly takes advantage of our friendship. He has hundreds of influential patients and clients, from the doge on down—why does he have to poach my friends?

  Besides, if he was hoping to appeal to the doge for help against Inquisitor Gritti, he was wasting his time. Foreign born, Nostradamus often has trouble comprehending how powerless our head of state really is, hemmed in by his six counselors in the Signoria and by ten other men as well in the Council of Ten. He has no vote among the Three. There was a loud scandal a few years ago when Venice learned that in some cases the Council of Ten did not just delegate some of its powers to the Three but sometimes all of them. The Great Council failed to forbid that nasty practice, so it is still possible in certain instances for the three inquisitors to reach a verdict and have Missier Grande carry it out before the rest of the Ten even know. What good could Fulgentio do?

  “I have to give this personally to Doctor Nostradamus,” the boy said, “or,” he added with a cheery smile, “to sier Alfeo Zeno.” He handed it to me. “I was told that there would be no reply.”

  “But there will be a gratuity,” I said. “Just a moment.” I removed my silver ducat from Vasco’s left ear and handed it to the page, who gasped and protested that all he had done was walk across the campo. I insisted he keep it and closed the door before he tried to kiss my shoes.

  “Trickster!” Vasco said.

  “Sneak,” I retorted. Reminding myself to enter the ducat in the ledger as expenses, I rapped loudly on my master’s door and marched in without waiting for a response. I locked it behind me.

  The Maestro had changed into his nightgown and nightcap, but he was awake, leaning back on a pile of cushions, peering at a book. He took the letter, read it, and closed it up again without a word.

  My attention had already gone to the manuscript he was consulting. It was obviously old, written in an antique hand on many sheets of bound vellum. I had thought I knew every one of his books, even those hidden in secret compartments, but this one was unfamiliar. He noted my interest and smirked.