The Chamber of Ten hc-3

by Christopher Golden

  Just after four o’clock, her wounded arm aching more now than ever before, she was sitting at a table toward the back of a great pizzeria she’d been to with Nico several times before. She had skipped lunch and needed to refuel. She’d eaten, and was making short work of a strong cup of coffee when someone passed by the window.

  Many people had passed the restaurant window in the half hour she’d been inside, but something about this one had snagged her attention like a hook in her cheek. She felt drawn to it, standing and knocking her table so that coffee slopped over the lip of her cup. The figure was already gone.

  Not for a moment did she think it was Nico. This person moved quickly, yet with a slight stoop, and there was nothing about the fleeting silhouette that she recognized. Yet she was drawn to the restaurant’s front door, opening it and staring after whoever had passed. The street was empty, the canal running alongside silent for now but for the gentle lap of water against stone.

  Looking into the emptiness, she shivered and knocked her wounded arm against the doorjamb.

  “Would you like the bill?” the little waitress who’d been serving her asked. She was standing at Geena’s elbow, perhaps afraid that Geena was about to leave without paying, or maybe just concerned.

  “Yes, please,” Geena said, still peering out the door. “The city’s quiet today.”

  “It’s a dreadful day,” the waitress said.

  Geena let the door close, keeping the air-conditioning inside, and turned to look at the waitress. “What do you mean?”

  The young woman’s eyes widened. “You haven’t heard? Terrible stuff. An old building collapsed in Dorsoduro, just fell into the canal. Seven people were killed. They’re saying there’s some kind of tomb underneath.”

  “A tomb? What are you talking about?” Geena asked, more sharply than she’d intended.

  The waitress shrugged. “All I know is what my customers tell me. I wish I could go home and watch the news.”

  Geena stared at her for a few seconds before the waitress shrugged again and went to fetch her bill, leaving her to wonder. Her archaeologist’s mind went into overdrive. She wanted to know what building this was, how its foundations had been undermined enough for it to crumble into the canal, and—more than anything—if there really had been some kind of tomb revealed by its collapse. With her team busy at the Biblioteca, Tonio would send someone else on the university’s behalf. The city council would want someone from the department there, especially if there was some kind of archaeological value to the site. But if people had been killed, such concerns would hardly be the first things on anyone’s mind.

  And they can’t be your concerns, she told herself. It has to be someone else’s job.

  Unless it was related to the madness that had begun when Nico had shattered the stone jar at the center of the Chamber of Ten. Could it really be coincidence that an ancient tomb had been discovered buried beneath a building in Venice only days after they had found the Chamber of Ten and had its wall give way? She supposed it might be possible, but it didn’t seem likely.

  But if it was all connected, then how?

  It occurred to her that Nico might be responsible for the building collapse, but she forced the thought away. How could one man accomplish such a feat? She was letting her anxiety get the best of her. The only way to get the answers she wanted, to find the truth, was to track him down. Until she managed to do that, all of her questions would have to be put on hold, along with whatever crisis might be unfolding in Venice.

  X

  IT’S A very precise confluence of forces, combined with a delicate placing of the physical. There are a thousand places where it can go wrong. But it must not go wrong.”

  He’s talking to me, Nico thought, but he could not be sure. Volpe had come to the fore and taken complete control, relegating Nico once more to the periphery. Not quite as deep as that dark, hidden place where nothing was felt or known, but close enough for it to be a threat. Challenge me now and I’ll cast you down again, the threat spoke, and while Nico simmered with restrained, useless rage, he had no wish to be blacked out again. So he watched and listened, and the more he saw and heard the more he felt lectured to.

  He had moved the braziers to the four corners of the room, retreating briefly to the nave to retrieve some of the broken wood and making sure the fires were adequately fed. They gave that bare room a curious appearance, with pools of light at four corners and a more shadowy area in the center. It was as if the firelight could not quite reach that far. Outside, the sun would still be shining, but in here it felt like midnight. The flames were even and undisturbed, and the gentle spitting of burning wood was the only sound in the room, other than Volpe’s occasional low, deep voice. Nico had stopped wondering how his own mouth, his own vocal cords, could make such a noise. But compared to the reality of what was happening, that was minor.

  “The Book of the Nameless has always been the only true magical text,” he went on. “Until the time I left this world that was true, and between then and now I have no reason to believe it has been usurped. I’ve seen wondrous things in my brief time walking the modern Venetian streets and canals, but nothing to convince me that magic is part of this place anymore. Magic has its own smell and taste, its own raft of senses, and Venice smells as it always did. This book, then, has the power, and from this book the new Exclusion shall be drawn.”

  What are you talking about? Nico asked.

  “All in time,” Volpe replied.

  Despite his question, however, Nico knew some of this already. Volpe had used him to gather the materials needed to cast a spell of Exclusion, to keep his enemies out of Venice. But those enemies … they could not be the men Nico saw in Volpe’s mind. Those men had been dead five hundred years and more.

  Volpe knelt in the center of the room and placed the book on the ground before him, open to a page decorated with drawings, sigils, apparent formulae, and words that Nico could not read. Next he took the objects from the bag and placed them beside the book. Then he began to chant.

  Nico drew back, repulsed by the strange words Volpe was spouting. He did not know them—they were in a language he had never heard before—but their cadences, their ebb and flow, carried a sickly weight of dread that he could not ignore. It was like hearing his own death pronouncement in another language, knowing the final meaning but not understanding the words used to reach it. His deep voice rose and fell in that small hidden chamber, and the firelight began to dance, as if his breath had disturbed the air of that place.

  Before him, his shadow flitted across the book and the objects beside it. It jerked beside and behind him as well, a shadow cast four ways, and each shadow was moving to a different light.

  “Grasp the hand of a dead soldier,” Volpe said, “connecting the living with the dead and confirming that they are allied in this spell.” He picked up the hand and clasped it as though in greeting.

  Nico cried out, and Volpe gave it voice. He saw a flash of something too quick and remote to be memory, but it burned one scene indelibly onto his mind: an Italian woman leaning over him, tears collecting at the corners of her eyes. In one hand she held a bloodied cloth while the other was clasped around a small golden cross. Behind her, several more shapes. Family come to watch him die.

  Volpe started chanting again and Nico returned to the present, terrified at what Volpe might be doing. But he had no control. He was so far back and down that he could only watch.

  The chanting ended and Volpe placed the hand on the other side of the book, turning a page and dismissing it entirely. When he started reading from the next page he picked up the seal of the city—something that had likely put the official stamp on many important documents, an innocuous object that Nico knew had extreme value to the right people. He wondered what would become of it after this, and amazingly he felt a smile in his mind, because he thought of Geena then and how she’d be impressed that—

  —he is still thinking about his job.

  Ge
ena reeled from the flash, staggering sideways and leaning against a wall. She recovered quickly, turning her head left and right, concentrating, trying to sense what direction the flash of words had come from. Keeping her mind open she stood straight again and looked along the nearest canal.

  Words she does not know … an object clasped before her, it might be a stamp or seal of some sort, and when it’s brought closer she sees that it is one of the old stamps of the city, Venice’s coat of arms clearly visible on the raised underside, and then the hand—Nico’s hand, she knows its look and touch so well—closes around the seal. He places it in the pages of a book open before him, touches some of the inscriptions on the right page, and—

  She lost it. There almost solidly one second, gone the next, and not even any residual tingling on the back of her neck. But she was left staring across the canal at a wider waterway leading westward, and she had a very real sense that she needed to go that way. Had Nico urged her in that direction without consciously doing so? She did not know, and to question too much might be to implant doubt. A hundred yards along there was a footbridge, and she ran for it, her footsteps lonely in the night.

  She glanced over her shoulder as she went, but only shadows followed.

  Volpe read again for a moment, then started sketching shapes in the air with his left hand. Nico could feel his own arm and hand moving, his fingers flexing and twitching, but there was no sense at all of his controlling any of the movement. He was disassociated, an observer. It made him feel sick, but… fascinated as well.

  Volpe continued sketching, and Nico tried to discern the shapes he was making in the air. They were formed of dancing shadow and flickering firelight, but they did not hold, and nothing was left behind. Volpe glanced down at the book again, and then Nico saw that some of the shapes echoed a series of sigils inked into the old paper.

  Volpe picked up the seal again, licked its etched base, and stabbed it at the air. He did so five times, repeating the same phrase over and over, seemingly sealing his commitment with the darkness.

  I hope I didn’t hurt anyone getting that, Nico thought. Not like that man in the apartment, and maybe that monk. I don’t think there were blackouts in the Palazzo Cavalli, but … maybe they’re so severe I can’t even remember that they happened.

  “Quiet,” Volpe said, his voice full of menace. Inside, Nico shut himself off for a moment, the psychic equivalent of closing his eyes and taking a breath. When he looked again he saw—

  —the knife!

  Geena gasped and went to her knees, looking behind her, ahead again, listening for approaching footsteps and wondering if Nico had lured her here just so that he could …

  But no, she had more faith in him than that. Breathing hard, she stood again, hiding from the late afternoon sun in the shadows of a doorway. Clearing her mind, she tried to sense where that new sudden flash had come from. It had been fast, sharp, almost like the—

  —knife, coming up toward his face with the dried smear of blood still on its blade, pressed to his mouth, stroked by his tongue, and even though it’s Volpe doing this she can still feel the cold metal against her own tongue, and taste the stale tang of her own blood. She hears his voice again, deep and guttural, nothing like Nico has ever spoken before. There are flames, and shadows. The air is heavy. His excitement rises, a terrible thing, and the vision blurs as Nico draws back until—

  She leaned against the cold stone jamb, breathing hard and yet more used to the transition from psychic flash to reality than she had been before. They’re in an old basement somewhere, she thought, and she knew she had been heading in the right direction.

  “Some weird ritual,” she muttered. If she could reach him before the ritual was over, perhaps she could do something to help.

  But she had to remember that he was still carrying the knife.

  A small rowboat slid toward her along the canal. The old man rowing it offered her a grumbled greeting as she drew even with the boat.

  “Lovely afternoon,” he said.

  “Hadn’t noticed,” Geena replied. He didn’t respond to her rudeness, but neither did he stop rowing. At least he knows where he’s going, she thought. The walkway ended, and she was faced with turning back or trying to continue along the canal herself. Water taxis were rare in these narrow canals, unless they were carrying travelers to and from hotels, and making her way out to one of the wider waterways would only waste time. But there were three rowboats tied alongside the canal.

  Her skin tingled, and it was a very different feeling from Nico’s touch. Eyes were upon her … or attention, at least. Someone was concentrating on her. Her skin grew cold, her spine ice-bound, and she hugged herself tight. Goosebumps speckled her arms and the fine hairs on her neck stood on end. Turning a full circle, squinting against the late afternoon sun, she tried to peer into gloomy alleys and shadowy corners. When the horrible feeling suddenly receded, it felt like a molester’s hand stroking across her skin as he departed.

  “Damn it,” she said aloud, needing a noise to break the silence hanging heavy around her.

  She looked up and around her at the buildings looming overhead, two- and three-story structures with the water as their foundation. Directly above her a second-floor set of French doors opened onto a small balcony. If anyone had been watching her from up there, they had gone back inside.

  “Spooking myself,” Geena said as she started unknotting the rope securing one of the dinghies. But she was not sure what had spooked her. She worked quickly, then bundled the line into the boat and stepped in. She unclasped the oars, placed them in their brackets, and pushed off from the canalside. No one shouted Thief, and if anyone did watch as she began rowing away, they were unconcerned.

  Taking a huge breath to try and expunge her fears, she aimed the boat the way she thought she needed to go and, mind still open for more flashes from Nico, started rowing hard.

  * * *

  With Geena’s blood wetted again, Volpe flicked the knife toward all four walls, chanting, “North, south, west, east.” Specks of moisture flew, though they made no sound as they landed. Almost as if the air was absorbing the blood.

  He turned several pages in The Book of the Nameless, still clasping hold of the knife in his other hand. Running his finger along lines of text, muttering. Nico thought Volpe had lost himself somewhere in the ritual.

  “I know what comes next,” Volpe said, answering the unasked question. “The words must be precise for the Expulsion and Repulsion to be renewed. Then the city will be closed off once more from the three bastard Doges.”

  Mad, Nico thought. He must be—

  “Mad? Because they’re so old, they’re bound to be dead, of course. Is that what you mean?” Nico did not answer, and Volpe did not need one. “Dead, like me?”

  You survived in spirit only, not in flesh, Nico thought. Is that what you’re saying? Somehow they’ve done the same thing?

  Volpe hesitated. Nico felt the uncertainty within him.

  “I don’t know,” the old magician admitted.

  What?

  Volpe glanced around the chamber, surveyed the materials of the spell in progress in front of him, and Nico felt him grow impatient.

  “Quickly, then,” Volpe said. “And I’ll save the rest for later. I preserved my essence because, without me, the Repulsion would break down. I knew the three of them, the damnable cousins, had each acquired enough of Akylis’ magic to prolong their lives, and I intended to outlast them. When the last of them died, the spell that preserved my heart and spirit was meant to unravel, and then, at last, I could move on to the world beyond this life.”

  So, if your spell never unraveled—

  “It means that at least one of them is still alive, these long centuries later,” Volpe said. “But one or all three, it matters not. They can’t be allowed to return to Venice. I should never have let them live, but I feared compromising my position in the government and the influence it granted to me. Had I simply killed them …”
<
br />   But why keep them out? Nico asked. What is it you fear?

  “Their hideous ambitions,” Volpe replied. “Each of them, in his own time, fancied himself a magician of sorts. They were novices and fools, and they tapped into a power—an evil—that tainted them, turning their already monumental arrogance and greed into something monstrous.”

  This power … that’s Akylis?

  But Volpe’s impatience had reached its breaking point.

  “Enough,” he said. “No more delays.”

  So Nico could only watch as Volpe began the final stage of a ritual designed to keep three six-hundred-year-old men from the city. He read from the book in that old language, punctuating the end of each sentence with a gentle stab of the knife at the air, north and south, west and east. He repeated the process twice more, then he set the knife down and settled back.

  It’s done? Nico thought, meaning it as a question for Volpe.

  “Almost,” Volpe said. “All that’s needed now is …” He fell silent, perhaps concentrating, perhaps not wishing to give away the final ingredient to this strange ritual.

  Then he held out his left hand, pressed the blade to his palm, and stroked it left to right.

  Nico gasped. Blood flowed. He winced against the pain, but there was none.

  “Ouch,” Volpe said, then he chuckled. He flicked the knife again as he had before, but this time there was no chanting, and his actions had a casual grace. He fisted his hand, then wiped the dripping blood on his trousers. When Volpe glanced at the wound again, Nico saw that it was not too deep or long. The knife was sharp.

  “And it’s done,” Volpe said, sighing, relaxing back on his haunches. His shoulders drooped and then the pain sang in Nico, the keen burning across the palm of his left hand. He wanted to scream, but Volpe still had his mouth.

  Now will you leave me alone? Nico asked. Volpe raised his head, smiling … and then his smile froze into a grimace.

  The air began to vibrate. Nico felt it through the body he did not control—a gentle murmur that grew in intensity and volume, setting the air shimmering like a heat-haze, shaking dust from the ceiling and shrinking the flames in the braziers.