The Alchemist's Apprentice aa-1

by Dave Duncan

  “And whom will your master denounce?”

  This was the problem. “I do not know, Your Excellency. He would not tell me.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  Icy water trickled down my ribs. “I swear it is the truth, Excellency.”

  “Your master expects us to give him a free hand to slander anyone he fancies?” The old man made a gesture of impatience. “I will ask you once more. If you do not answer my question willingly, you will answer it unwillingly and at great personal cost. Who is your master accusing?”

  “He would not tell me. Believe me, Your Excellency, I did ask him. I begged him to tell me. He would say only that he has very good reasons.”

  “Take him away and teach him better manners.”

  I turned. The guards who had brought me had been replaced by three very solid men in dark workmen’s clothing, and with them stood my companion of the previous day, Vizio Filiberto Vasco, our juvenile Caesar in his fancy red cloak.

  Without any open sneering or gloating, he gestured for me to accompany him. He led the way, carrying a lantern, and I followed. More heavy footsteps and lanterns came behind.

  When we reached the stairs, I said, “Wait! Where are we going?”

  “You know very well where we’re going, Alfeo.”

  “But he can’t do this, can he?” I could hear my voice growing shriller by the word. “Doesn’t he need a vote of the Ten, or at least another inquisitor’s approval?” There was an unreal quality about this experience. That I might be locked up until the Maestro came to apologize and explain had always been a risk, but we had never dreamed of extempore torture.

  The vizio smiled mirthlessly. “All he needs is men to obey him, Alfeo. Do you want a sword point in your back or not?”

  I did not. The stairs seemed shorter than I expected, but they could not have been long enough for me. The torture chamber is surprisingly large, but then it plays an important role in government. I looked around in despair.

  Vasco was watching me. “Give him the tour, Carlo.”

  One of the jailers said, “If messer would come this way…” I was appalled at how huge he was-he could not possibly have been as big as Bruno, but I was feeling unusually small. He conducted me around the room, courteously explaining the machinery for breaking, twisting, burning, choking, wrenching, dislocating, crushing. In truth, the entire collection seemed quite insignificant, just a bag of tools spread out on the floor; all that really mattered was the rope dangling in the center.

  When the circuit was completed, I was back at the vizio. I knew he must see my shaking hands and hear my teeth clattering. No doubt the tormentors could tell exactly how long I would resist before I broke. And when I did I would not be able to tell them what they had been told to find out. I had to speak or go mad, even knowing that this was just evidence of my terror.

  “You enjoy this part of your job?”

  “No, I hate it,” Vasco said seriously. “I would enjoy watching you take forty or fifty strokes of the lash, Alfeo, but even you don’t deserve this. Fortunately I do not have to stay and watch what happens. As soon as you have been secured, I am free to go. Do you want to do it the easy way or the painful way? The easy way is much better.”

  Coward that I was, I would do anything to postpone the start of pain. I took off my hat and handed it to the monster looming over me. Then cloak, doublet, shirt, until I was bare to the waist. He took them as politely as a valet, then turned and threw them down in a corner beside a bucket.

  “You can keep your britches on,” Vasco said. “For now.” He pointed to the bucket. “You need to use that?”

  To my shame, I did need to use that, and all four of them watched while I did so. Humble as a mouse, I crept back to the rope, where they waited for me.

  “If messer will pardon…” The big torturer pulled my arms behind me and knotted the rope around my wrists and forearms, hauling my elbows together. The torture known as the cord, or strappado, is more feared than the rack. A man who denies his crime on the cord cannot be hanged for it afterwards. Since he will no longer have any use of his arms, that is a doubtful blessing, and one that cannot be earned very often.

  A moment’s respite, then a pulley creaked and the rope began to tighten, raising my arms and bending my torso forward. My elbows could not bend at all at that angle, and my shoulders very little. When my head was level with my crotch and I stood on tiptoe, a voice said, “Tie it there.”

  Vasco bent close to my ear. “Resist as long as you can,” he whispered. “If you give up too easily they won’t believe you, and then it’s terrible.”

  He told Carlo to carry on, and left, taking his lantern. I was shaking harder than ever, teeth chattering uncontrollably. Cold was a part of that, but I was scared out of my wits and do not deny it. One of the torturers came close and clasped my shoulder with a callused hand.

  “Strong one,” he remarked to the others. “We’ll need weights.” He gave me a playful slap on the buttocks. “Don’t go away. We’ll be back.”

  They left and the door boomed shut.

  19

  I thought I was alone, but could not be certain. All I could hear was the crackle of the fire, a sound I had always considered cheerful until then. All I could see was the bucket and my tormented feet. The room bore an indefinable stench, no doubt stemming from centuries of every bodily secretion imaginable. The pain in my toes was already becoming unbearable, but any attempt to ease them threw more strain on my shoulders. When the real torment began, of course, they would raise me right off the floor, with or without weights on my feet, and with or without bouncing, whatever they chose.

  The doge said, “You seem to be in trouble again, lad.”

  I started, and gasped aloud at the pain even that twitch caused me. With an effort, I made my mouth work more or less normally. “That’s a very good imitation.”

  “I really think you should leave before those fine sinners come back. Why don’t you call on little Putrid for help?”

  The voice was right beside me, but I could not see the speaker’s feet. I was in the power of a fiend from hell and yet I felt a tingle of hope. This whole experience had been just too bad to be true. Even the Three must have some procedures to follow and one state inquisitor, acting alone, sending a witness straight to torture did not seem plausible. The king of France can lock up a man in the Bastille on a whim, a French count can have a peasant flogged or hanged, but in Venice a nobleman who strikes a servant will be charged and punished. The Republic has never tolerated despots.

  “I don’t believe a word you say. Go away.”

  A cold and scaly finger scratched all the way down my bare back, making all my flesh cringe.

  The demon sighed. “We shall see. How’s this voice?”

  “Senator Tirali.”

  “Very good! A charming man. We have great hopes for him. Why aren’t you going to accept his offer?”

  “How do you know I’m not?”

  “You are. You think you’re not, but I am going to talk you into it. Violetta would love to go to Rome with you, you know.”

  I had thought of that, Rome with Violetta…

  Violetta’s voice said, “You can’t expect a harlot to stay faithful, darling, but you don’t mind sharing me and you know you can’t ever marry me. You’d be out of the Golden Book in a flash if you did that. We women are so fickle, Alfeo! We tire of our boy toys. Another month or two, if you’re lucky, and then I will send you away and find another.”

  Back to the silky tones of Senator Tirali: “You need money, lots of money, so you can be her patron and pay her. You have that manuscript. It’s quite genuine, the only surviving copy of Meleager by Euripides. Selling it here will be very dangerous. You’ll have problems with provenance, Alfeo. Too many people know about it. But in Rome? Or even better, stop in Florence on your way there. Grand Duke Ferdinand is crazy about that sort of trash. You’ll be a rich man before you even get to Rome. That way you can be Violetta�
�s patron, have her almost all to yourself. And the opportunities! A trusted confidant of the Venetian ambassador? Millions, you can make there.”

  “I have thought of all of that,” I said. “Go away. I have to say my prayers.”

  The demon laughed. He changed to the Maestro’s scratchy old voice. “And there’s me. You know where I keep my gold, Alfeo, my lovely box of ducats. Nobody else even knows it exists, so no one will look for it. You know what all my books are worth, too, every one of them. And I’ve left them all to you in my will.”

  I started to say a paternoster and was stopped by a monstrous punch on the kidney. I won’t bother to describe the results-you can guess. I screamed at the top of my lungs. I was left gagging and sobbing…Oh, Lord! If one punch made me weep like this, what would an hour on the cord do?

  “Don’t interrupt me when I am tempting,” the demon said in Inquisitor Dona’s voice. “You need money, Alfeo. You need money to keep Violetta willing. You need money to restore your family name. Yes, it would be a shame to betray the Maestro when he’s taught you so much, but he can’t last much longer now, can he? You know how to use all those poisons, but a pillow will be better. When he goes to bed tonight. You’re a strong lad and he’s so frail. He won’t have time to realize what’s happening. Two minutes’ work and the world will be yours, Alfeo! Wealth, women, power.”

  “And I won’t have to come to the palace in the morning.”

  The demon chuckled. “Of course not! You’re clever, Alfeo. That’s what we like about you. You’ll do great things for us-as long as you don’t come here to the palace in the morning. If you do, we will be waiting for you, and this time it will be real. We will enjoy that, but you won’t.”

  Somebody snapped his fingers.

  I gasped at the blaze of light and almost fell off the chair.

  My mouth was a desert. Squinting through my eyelashes, I searched for the water glass. It was empty. The fire had burned to embers. The light was a single candle, reduced to a stub, its flame reflected in the crystal globe.

  “How long was I gone?” I mumbled.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” the Maestro said. “An hour? Probably nearer two. It was very interesting.” He peered at me. “Are you all right?”

  “Could be worse,” I said. “Need a drink.”

  I staggered slightly as I rose. I went to the fireplace to find a lamp, lit it, and walked unsteadily to the door. My own room was closer than the kitchen, and I had water there. It soaked into my tissues like an elixir of life; it calmed my heartbeat; it was triple-distilled dew. I knelt to unlock the chest, but my hands were still shaking enough to make me fumble, and I needed three attempts to work the hidden catch and open the secret compartment in the lid. I gasped aloud relief when I saw that the manuscript was still there. Had it not been, I might have jumped out the window.

  Back in the atelier, I went straight to the fireplace and lit more lamps to make the room bright. Every shadow held a lurking demon. I needed sunlight, lots and lots of noon sun. Tomorrow was going to be foggy. I sat cross-legged on the hearth rug, hunched close to the warmth.

  Thump, thump -The Maestro came stumping across and settled into his favorite chair with a sigh of contentment. “You hadn’t told me about Circospetto.”

  “Sciara? What about him?” I was feeding the embers, trying to coax them into a blaze.

  “That the doge told you to report to him.”

  “I would have told you when you were ready to report.”

  “Well, I was going to write to the Ten, but obviously there’s political skullduggery afoot, so we’d better do what His Serenity wants.”

  “I am sure there is but I would much rather write a letter.” Very much rather.

  “No.” He put his fingertips together and began to lecture. “You must seek out Raffaino Sciara first thing in the morning and tell him I need to see all the suspects back at the Imer residence in the evening. We can reenact the murder and I shall show who did it and how.”

  “And you’re not going to tell me who, are you?” I had the flames leaping joyfully now.

  “No,” the Maestro said firmly. “It has to be done my way. Believe me, I do have good reasons. If I tell you in advance, then they may get the name out of you tomorrow.”

  “That’s not impossible.” I shivered at the memory, the smell of the torture chamber, the harsh bite of the rope on my wrists. “How reliable is clairvoyance?”

  “Huh?” The Maestro sat up so he could peer at me suspiciously. “Why?”

  “I saw a vision.”

  “You did? Excellent, excellent! Clairvoyance is a sign of maturity. It means you are starting to get your mind off that woman once in a while. Not for very long at a time, perhaps, but…” He paused, frowning. “But I put you into the trance, and I ordered you to view the past, not the future. So whatever you saw was not clairvoyance. What did you see?”

  “The ultimate quintessence of unmitigated disaster. Answer my question, please. Is what I foresaw inevitable, or can it be prevented?”

  “Of course it can be prevented! What use would clairvoyance be if the future was inevitable? Although,” he said cautiously, “it would be more correct to say that the foreseen can sometimes only be modified, not negated. The sagacious Zosimos of Panoplis wrote of a man who was told the ordained hour of his death and therefore fled to Memphis, only to be killed there by a falling chimney pot at the time and in the place predestined. The main thrust of a prophecy can by diverted sufficiently, provided you can find the fulcrum, the single crucial item that you must change to divert the turn of events, because history is a mighty stream washing all before it and it is only when you can find the place where inserting a pebble…What are you doing, Alfeo?”

  “Diverting the mighty stream,” I said, feeding more paper into the hearth. “I made a terrible mistake.”

  My master uttered a strangled cry and groped for his staff. “What are you burning?”

  “The last surviving copy of Meleager by Euripides.”

  He whimpered. “No, no! It’s priceless.”

  “It isn’t, you know. There’s one price I won’t pay for it.” I threw the rest of it in as a single wad and sat back to watch the leaves blacken and curl. I crossed my legs and balanced my forearms on my knees. I felt better already.

  “How did you get it?” he muttered, watching the fire, not me.

  “It was a present from a demon. You obviously didn’t ask me for Karagounis’s last words. He said he could help me! But he left the manuscript on his desk and a halfwit young idiot decided that he could make better use of…” I explained.

  “No!” Firelight made the Maestro’s tears shine like diamonds as he watched the paper burn. “You’re no thief! That was a cleverly set trap, Alfeo. Karagounis was dispensable. Even if the Ten did not already know about him, you had exposed him. So his demon used his death as a powerful charge of evil to break down your normal defenses, like setting off a mine under a castle wall. Your fiend had betrayed you to the chaush ’s demon, and it managed to open a portal to you, so you were vulnerable. You were bewitched!”

  That thought helped. “But if I’d listened to what he said-”

  “What he said was meaningless, just to distract you from the trap. Unwittingly, you swallowed the bait the demon had set out for you. Whatever you saw in the crystal was not clairvoyance, it was a sending, a hallucination from hell. What did you see?”

  “The hook. Have I broken the line, though?” I told him briefly about my vision of the torture chamber and the temptation of the Tirali offer. I did not include the demon’s suggestion that I murder the Maestro for his hoard of ducats. They say you can only be tempted by your own thoughts and I had been aware of that possibility for years. We all know of dark places in our souls that we stay away from, and the Maestro must be aware of that one in mine.

  He thought for a moment and then nodded, gazing wistfully at the charred mess on the burning logs. “You have repented and done penance. You spat out the
bait. You should be safe now.”

  Tomorrow I would know for certain. “Tell me what you want me to do in the morning.”

  20

  T he fog seemed thicker than I remembered, but its salty smell and the slap of ripples were frighteningly familiar. Everything was happening as before-Giorgio rowed me to the Molo and the Marangona bell boomed out, just as it had in the vision. I climbed out onto the Piazzetta, aided by the same unexpected heave from Bruno, which I had forgotten. He scrambled up beside me.

  “I’ll be as quick as I can,” I said.

  “I can wait,” Giorgio said. “It’s what I do best.”

  I resisted an urge to make a joke about babies. “Keep an ear open for gossip about the murder, will you?”

  With Bruno at my side, I walked along the loggia. The outer world was unfolding as before, only my thoughts were different. Now I knew I would never stand here waiting to be beckoned into the broglia and introduced by an influential patron. I had already written to Tirali, turning down his offer of Rome on the grounds that I owed loyalty to the Maestro; Corrado had promised faithfully to deliver the note and Christoforo to see that he did.

  If I had described my vision in greater detail, the Maestro would certainly have given me very different instructions. So why hadn’t I? Why was I here? I had broken my curse by burning the book, but why not play safe and change the future completely by having someone else deliver a letter to Circospetto? Why risk the outcome being almost what I had foreseen? I did not know the answer to that. A stubborn determination to prove my courage, perhaps, or a refusal to be intimidated by evil. Let fear deter you and the evil has won, the Maestro says.

  I hesitated for a moment at the Porta della Carta, so that Bruno went another step and turned to look for me, but then I forced my feet to move again and we entered the tunnel. The same guard shot the same startled look at Bruno, slammed the butt of his pike down on the same flagstone, and asked the same question.