“I’m sorry, Geena,” he said. Nico’s English was excellent, but he knew that she adored his accent. And she knew that he could speak English fluently, if he so desired. Usually he did not.
“Just don’t do that again.”
He caressed her breast slightly, then let go and sat up. Looking around the bedroom, he sighed with what sounded like contentment. But when he turned back to her, she realized that he’d been working himself up to saying something.
“For a while yesterday it was as if I was … somewhere else,” he said. He spoke quietly, as always when he was serious, leaning down on one elbow and not quite meeting her eyes. He looked past her at the bedside table piled with books on history and archaeology, as if the truth of what had happened could be contained within them.
“What did you feel?” she asked. She could never quite get used to talking like this; his strange ability was always acknowledged between them, but rarely discussed.
“Everything was suddenly old. Not just that chamber and the things in it, but the air around us, the water pressing at the walls. The time that was passing us by. I was removed from everything, letting it all flow past. Like a stone in a stream. But everything that passed me left a taint. Old. All old.”
“Something in the jar,” she said, sitting up so that he had to look at her. “When the water burst through you were holding something. Feeling it.”
Nico looked away, running a hand through his hair. He sniffed. Said nothing.
“I felt a lot of what you—”
“I know!” he snapped. “I can’t help it.”
“I wasn’t blaming you.” He was suddenly exuding disinterest—a palpable, almost offensive attitude that made her feel queasy. They’d spoken of love and even marriage, but right then he felt like a stranger. She shuffled behind him and put her arms around his chest, resting her chin on his shoulder. Hugged tight. He resisted for a few seconds, then softened into her embrace, leaning back against her and reaching around to stroke her thigh.
“Let’s sleep on it,” she said, mainly because she was exhausted thinking about it all. He was alive and back with her, and whatever had happened down there would fade with time. Sleep makes everything better, her father had told her in the days and weeks following her mother’s death. And though she knew that was not literally true, she had come to realize that the passage of time did make difficult things easier to cope with. They became history, which could be mused upon and recalled, instead of a painful, injurious present.
They stripped and lay down, Geena cautious about making advances in case that morning’s episode in the shower was repeated. But later, when the sun had fully set and moonlight cast the silvery light of make-believe through the room, she woke to find Nico pressing against her. He was stroking her, hard against her leg, and passion rose from sleep with her, making her wet and receptive to his touch. She turned on her side and hooked a leg over his hip. As he entered her he sighed heavily, and she buried her face in his neck because his breath still carried the taint of Venice.
He took complete control, making love to her as if it were the first time in months. She welcomed the passion and opened her mind to him, seeking the mysterious union that made their loving so powerful. Her skin tingled, and as she closed her eyes she felt Nico’s movements as if they were her own, felt her breath gasping against his neck, the feel of her breasts squeezed gently in his hands. It was always the most powerful sensation she had ever experienced, the sense of someone else enveloped in the open and frank throes of passion. She lost herself to it, tasting Nico’s skin and tasting herself through his mouth, penetrated and penetrating, and she also experienced that brief moment of sheer delicious panic that this would be too much for her, this would drive her mad. But beyond that always lay the staggering impact of mutual climax, and she held him tight, embracing and embraced as they cried out together.
As Nico came he growled, then chuckled in a voice far too low to be his.
“Nico?” she said after she’d caught her breath. She was shaking. Their minds were suddenly parted, and when he lifted his head and looked down at her, his face was expressionless. “Nico?” He slid aside and lay on his back, one arm above his head. His eyes closed. Asleep.
But Geena lay awake for a long time. Her heart was thumping, but no longer with exertion. She wanted to rouse him, look into his eyes to see who she would see. The lovemaking had been as amazing as ever, but somewhere there at the end, hazed by passion, there had been an instant of utter dislocation … as if she were making love with a stranger.
She lay down beside him at last, but still she could not sleep. And with every intake of breath, she searched warily for the scent of that old flooded chamber.
There’s a mist coming in from the sea. On the left is the Madonna dell’Orto church, its façade glittering with moisture from the mist. To the right, a canal leading out to open water. It’s quiet—no motors, no voices, only the gentle wash of water against the shore. It’s a very long time ago.
The man through whom she is viewing this memory—the same tall man from that flashback in the chamber, she is sure—walks beside the canal, heading for a boat moored against a wooden jetty. Several steps ahead of him walks another man, wearing wide trousers and tights, a narrow cloak, and a codpiece studded with fine jewels. He carries a sword, which remains in its scabbard. There’s a grace about him, but when he glances back his face shows signs of illness. The left side droops, eye downturned and opaque, mouth dipped.
There are several soldiers waiting in the boat, all of them heavily armed, each of them shifting nervously as they watch the approaching group.
Surrounding the droop-faced man are several more soldiers. They give him a wide berth, but their pikes are held horizontally, blocking any route through their ranks.
The tall man who owns this memory is chanting, and dark droplets spatter the cobbles behind him. In this pale, gloomy morning they have no color, but they splash like blood.
The canal beside them does have color. It is red.
They reach the waterfront and the soldiers in the boat stand to attention. They blink quickly, breath pluming from their mouths, and their fear is a palpable thing.
“So those cowards wouldn’t come to see me on my way, Volpe?” the droop-faced man asks.
“On my advice, Giardino Caravello.”
“You fear me.”
“No,” the tall Volpe says mildly, and Caravello’s confidence seems to fade.
“You have no right—” he begins, but Volpe intercedes.
“I have every right!” he roars. A flock of startled pigeons lifts off behind them, wings snapping at the air as they flee through the mist. “The safety of Venice is paramount in my mind and heart. You would seek to corrupt it. Tear it.”
“And you believe that you are incorruptible—”
“No! No more talking, Caravello. The Council of Ten has decreed that you be banished from the State of Venice forever, and if you return you will be executed.” He steps forward, passing between the line of soldiers until he is almost face-to-face with the other man. He smells garlic and wine on his breath. “Your death will be quiet and unobserved, in some dirty courtyard. Your body will be weighed down with rocks. Added to the foundations of the city.”
Caravello tries to smile, but his illness turns it into a sneer. “You cannot frighten me.”
“I have no wish to frighten you,” Volpe says. “Just to kill you. Give thanks to the Council that you suffer only banishment.”
He steps back and nods to the soldiers, and they move forward hesitantly, none of them catching Caravello’s eye as they herd him slowly toward the boat.
“Faster!” Volpe hisses. “The man is no longer Doge. He’s lower than you all, and I’m already sick of the stench of him.”
Caravello glares at each soldier as he boards the boat, and every one of them averts his eyes.
Volpe grins. “Enjoy your small victories. They will be your last.” Then he presses both ha
nds together before him, chanting, shoulders tensing, and Caravello falls onto his back in the boat. He shouts, but his voice sounds muted and pained. A hazy redness surrounds his face.
“Go well,” Volpe says. He turns his back on the boat and walks toward the heart of the city, and as he passes by, the canal turns from red to black.
Geena snapped awake, gasping into her pillow, reaching for Nico but finding only cool sheets. She sat up and scanned the gloom of her bedroom, but he was not there.
I knew everything they were saying, she thought, but already the vision seemed to be fading. Like any vivid dream, it seemed to be built on air and mist, and waking cast the first eddies that would disperse it.
“That was no dream,” she said out loud, hoping to hear a reply. But her apartment was silent, empty of anyone but her. She sat there for a while, sore from the night before, wondering where Nico had gone and wishing for the safety of dawn.
IV
NICO STOOD on the tiled courtyard in front of the church of Madonna dell’Orto, watching the rising sun lighten the brick façade from brown to rose to a pale peach. The arched windows of the bell tower were steeped in shadows, as though the night had barricaded itself inside to try to outlast the sun. The white stonework of the arches and the various statues in the façade all seemed to be emerging from shadows themselves, and gleamed like ivory as the morning light revealed them.
The Madonna dell’Orto at sunrise was a sight to behold. But Nico would have been better able to appreciate it if he could have remembered precisely how he had come to be there.
He swayed a little, then regained his balance. His thoughts were muzzy and he tried to shake the feeling. The morning seemed to be burning off the shadows in his mind just as it did those that had cloaked the city.
Think. You kissed Geena while she slept, got out of bed and dressed, careful not to wake her, and left her place.
That much he did recall, along with the confusion that had roiled within him. His departure had been urgent and he had hurried through the maze of passages and bridges to the edge of the Grand Canal, with his pulse racing and the sense that some vital task must be accomplished. Paranoia made the small hairs stand up on the back of his neck and he had reached out with his thoughts, seeking the heightened emotions he could often sense. Fear had its own flavor. And malice. How many times had he escaped violence in a bar or club by departing just before things turned ugly?
But he had sensed no malice, no violent intentions, no one following him. Why he should think someone might be following him, Nico didn’t know. It made no sense, but he could not escape that suspicion and had hurried onward, more frantic than ever to reach his destination …
… only he didn’t know where he was going. Not at first. It felt to him as though some enormous hook had been set into his rib cage and was tugging him forward. He had hurried along the edge of the Grand Canal in vain hopes of discovering a water taxi running in the pre-dawn hours, knowing that crossing the water was the next step toward his destination.
His memory had holes in it. Blackouts, like some awful drunk.
He remembered sitting in a creaking traghetto, its small motor buzzing, echoing off black water below and black sky above. Somehow he had persuaded the man to take him across the Grand Canal from Guideca to San Marco. The fellow had looked exhausted; he’d probably been up all night ferrying revelers to various hotels and clubs. Nico had tried to pay him, but the man had gotten a pale, frightened look on his face and had shooed him away.
Only when he walked through the vast emptiness of St. Mark’s Square at half past three in the morning, and then into the labyrinth of alleys and bridges and canals beyond, did it occur to him where he was headed. The destination had popped into his head the way a song title might once he had given up trying to remember it.
He had nearly turned around then. Geena had been soft and warm and in need of reassurance. Yet the compulsion had been impossible to resist, sending him out to wander Venice in the small hours of the morning with only the sounds of scurrying rats and the water lapping the sides of the canals to keep him company.
Now he found himself here, gazing up at the beautiful face of this church, and he could recall only about half of that journey. Portions of his memory, even of the path he had taken to get here, were blacked out.
In their place, other memories rushed in—vivid recollections of the sounds of construction, the stink of men working, the hoisting of statues into place, sculptors at work.… His hands trembled as he stared at the church.
“Impossible,” he whispered, there in the light of the rising sun.
Yet if he closed his eyes he could practically see the workers constructing the church’s façade, placing the pilasters, laying the brickwork around the enormous circular rose window that lit up now with the dawn’s light.
“What the hell is happening to me?” he asked the sunrise.
A piece of paper skittered across the tiles in the breeze, eddied in a circle, then continued on its way. He ought to turn around and go back to Geena, spoon behind her and press his nose into her hair, breathing in the scent of her. That was what he wanted to do. But somehow the commands did not travel from his brain to his muscles, and his body did not obey him. He felt like a marionette.
Go in, he thought.
Or someone thought for him. That was exactly what it felt like. The ideas that kept bubbling to the surface of his mind did not feel like his. Sensitive to the thoughts and emotions of others, able to touch their minds with his own, he had spent his entire life learning to sort out the difference between his own internal voice and those of others, and he knew that this voice did not belong to him. Nico was afraid, and yet fascinated as well.
The stone jar, he thought. The urn. And he knew it had begun with that. Down in the strange subchamber beneath Petrarch’s library, he had tapped into some enormous psychic repository from Venice’s past. He could see and taste and smell things as they had been in centuries past. These sensations came in flashes and visions and in whispers in his mind.
As a boy, whenever he had changed schools and been surrounded by new people—even when he had first attended university—he had needed to take time to adjust to the tidal wave of new minds around him, to build up fresh walls. A day or two would be all he needed to sort himself out, to quiet the voices in his head and reassert his own thoughts. To be himself.
This would be the same, he felt certain. Somehow he had tapped into some kind of psychic reserve and now it echoed around inside of him, making him feel as though his thoughts were not his own. For now, that meant trying to shut out the rest of the world—even Geena—and focus on this opportunity. He could see the past as though his own eyes had witnessed it, feel the power of the man whose memories had seeped into his own … for certainly he had been powerful. And a psychic as well. He must have been, for Nico to pick up such powerful emotional residue from that chamber.
What are you thinking? You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
He mocked his own presumptions. True, he had never experienced anything like this, nor even heard of anything remotely resembling this turn of events in the research he had done about his own abilities. But what else could it be? It made a bizarre kind of sense. He thought about scientific theories concerning haunted houses, in which “ghosts” were explained as the resonance left behind by traumatic or otherwise emotional events. He wasn’t sure how much of that he believed, but he knew what he felt right now, and “haunted” was as good a word as any.
A day or two and he’d be just fine. The blackout moments would go away, the compulsions would vanish, the voice and its memories would be gone. But while they were with him, he knew he had to use them, to glean what he could about the history of Venice from the information and the feelings suffusing his every thought. Most people would find it terrifying—and the compulsion to act did frighten him a little, as did the blackouts—but now as his thoughts regained some semblance of order, Nico realized th
at for an archaeologist, this was the opportunity of a lifetime.
When he and Geena made love, and sometimes even just in quiet moments they spent together, he felt as though her thoughts were a part of him instead of some external thing he could tap into. This made that seem like nothing. He felt the presence of this “other” inside his every thought, there with him, and he even knew the name of the man whose psychic echoes were reverberating through his mind and had drawn him here.
Zanco Volpe.
Nico knew Geena had sensed some of this, though how much he could not be sure. He ought to have talked to her about it. She would have been fascinated, wanting to know every detail, and it would have been natural for him to share that with her. Yet he had found himself attempting to hide his thoughts from her, trying to put up barriers between them. It hurt and confused him to shut her out, and he could not really have said why he did it.
But some of the wild tumult of his mind had spilled out to her, he knew. Geena herself was not a sensitive, but over the course of their relationship they had built up a rapport so intimate, their minds so open to each other, that he could not shut her out completely.
Only now it occurred to him that it might not be him who was trying to shut her out. Not really.
He only wished he could control what parts of Volpe’s psychic echo he could touch and see. As he had walked through the streets he had seen two images, the past superimposed over the present, and it had taken his breath away. No one alive had ever seen Venice the way it had been in ages past. Sixteenth century? Fifteenth? He wasn’t quite sure.
Stray thoughts that had to be Volpe’s swam up inside of him. And there was that hook in his chest that drew him onward and filled him with a sense of purpose. Perhaps Volpe had had some unfinished business when he’d died, and the echoes of his purpose filled Nico, overriding his own intentions.
The Chamber of Ten Page 6