The Chamber of Ten hc-3

by Christopher Golden

  “I don’t know what you’ve been smoking, you crazy old fool,” Nico said. “Now get out of here and mind your own business.”

  “My business?” Caravello asked. He was still scrutinizing Nico—a discomforting experience. He took one step closer and Nico smelled him for the first time. There was nothing normal about his smell; he stank solely of age.

  “He followed me,” Geena whispered, and Caravello glanced her way. Nico did not. He kept his eyes on the old man because—

  Soon, Volpe whispered. I can feel him gathering his senses, and we must not let him win. This is the first, but it will not be the most difficult. Right now, we still have some element of surprise on our side, because he’s not quite sure.

  “Everything in Venice is my business,” Caravello said softly.

  The left side of his face barely moved, as if it had melted and then set. The drooping muscles beneath that flesh might have been the result of stroke or disease, but Nico caught a stray thought in Volpe’s mind and knew the truth. Caravello’s ruined visage had been caused by dark magic in the hands of an ambitious amateur.

  He is an amateur no longer, Volpe whispered in Nico’s mind.

  The right side of Caravello’s face was animated and filled with confidence.

  “Venice was mine,” the Doge said. “And it will be again. A united three are so much greater than one, Volpe. Do you hear?”

  He jerked forward and Nico took a step back before Volpe took control at last.

  The ancient Doge sensed the change in him immediately.

  “Ahh,” Caravello sighed. “So it is you.”

  Volpe swung the knife. It hissed through the air inches from the old man’s face. Caravello slipped back to the top of the steps and threw off his cloak, revealing two short swords stuck in his belt. As he drew them, Volpe lunged, punching him in the face and sending him stumbling down the steps.

  “What have you been doing all this time?” Caravello laughed, regaining his balance. He had the swords out now, and he spun them with amazing dexterity. “Hiding away? Keeping the city safe?”

  “It worked,” Volpe growled.

  “Until now.”

  “A minor interruption,” Volpe said, then he went at Caravello again.

  Geena screamed. Nico heard her, but Volpe was fully in charge now, using Nico’s fitness to compliment his experience. He ducked one sword swipe and went in low, punching at Caravello’s crotch, missing, then stabbing with the knife. Caravello—upright, and with the advantage—kicked Volpe in the face. He should have screamed as his broken nose was crushed, but he had known much worse.

  Nico gasped in surprise, his voice unheard.

  “A knife?” Caravello said again, and he laughed. “Look at you, Volpe. Little more than a shade inhabiting a stranger’s body.” He circled Volpe, both of them tensed and ready for another attack. “And look at me. You know me, you old bastard. You’ve been dead all these centuries. Whereas I … I have advanced. Grown with the world. I’ve danced around this globe, Zanco, and seen things you cannot imagine. I’ve learned so much. But Venice has always been my home.” He took in a deep breath. “It’s good to be home.”

  “So where are the others?” Volpe asked.

  Caravello sneered. “Not far at all. They’ll be so envious that it was my hand that took your life.” He kicked out, faster than Volpe had believed possible, and his foot struck cracked ribs. Volpe gasped, because even if he could withstand the pain, the pressure on his lungs was immense. He went down, coughing blood.

  “You should have ignored the Council and killed me when you had the chance,” Caravello said. He raised one sword, lowered the other, and came in for the kill.

  Geena jumped from the third step and collided with Caravello, her shoulder striking his hip, hands clawing into his clothing as she fell. Unbalanced, he followed her down. One sword clattered to the ground, and Geena grunted as the man landed across her shoulders.

  Volpe stood and darted forward, ignoring the crippling pain in his chest, and Nico heard the calm calculation in his mind: While he kills the girl, I’ll deal with him.

  No! Nico tried to scream, and with a supreme effort of will he pushed himself forward, knife lashing out. He feigned right and darted to the left, slicing across Caravello’s stomach with the blade. It parted his shirt but did not draw blood.

  Geena crawled to the steps and crouched, watching the fight, and tensed to jump again.

  Left! Nico warned, and Volpe dropped to the left just in time to avoid a descending blade. He fell onto Caravello’s arm, grabbed his wrist, and jerked down, feeling and hearing bone snap beneath his weight. The old man might have lived for those intervening centuries, but whatever dark magic he had employed to increase his longevity had done little to strengthen time-brittled bones.

  Caravello screamed shrilly, and Volpe stood and pressed the tip of the knife beneath Caravello’s chin.

  The old Doge laughed. “A knife, Volpe? Do you really think—”

  “A knife smeared with the blood of the new Oracle? Yes, I do think. The magic of Akylis cannot withstand the power of the city itself.” And he pushed, pressing down on Caravello’s head with one hand and shoving with all his might with the other, plunging the blade through the old man’s throat and mouth cavity and into his brain. When he felt the gush of rancid blood around the knife’s hilt he shoved the body aside and stepped back.

  The Doge was trying to talk, but the knife held his mouth pinned shut. Volpe knelt before him—he wanted to be the last thing Caravello saw before he died. The corpse started to wither as though the centuries had begun to catch up to it.

  Geena breathed hard, each exhalation a grunt building toward a scream.

  “We have to leave here quickly and silently,” Volpe growled, and he drew back again, giving Nico control. “I used what magic I could spare to turn attention away, so that we would not be interrupted. But I cannot sustain it.”

  Nico slumped before the still-twitching body of the old man, finding his strength. He could feel the slick blood on his hand now, and smell its rankness, like something left in a gutter to rot in the midday sun. Shocked at what had happened, still trying to come to terms with what it meant, he stood and turned toward Geena.

  She was standing in the fading sunlight on the top of the steps, moving slowly sideways across the face of the church.

  “You … killed … that man,” she said.

  “Volpe killed him,” Nico said. “Geena, there’s so much—”

  “Caravello,” she said. “He wore tights and a codpiece, and the canal was …”

  “Red,” Nico said, and he suddenly understood. “How much have you seen?”

  “I have no idea,” Geena said.

  “We have to go. He told me … We have to leave now, before anyone can ask what happened here.”

  “What did happen here?” He could see that she was descending into shock. Her eyes were glazed and fixed on the dead man. But behind the shock, she was also struggling to comprehend what she had seen, fighting with reality.

  “It’s all real,” he said.

  “Yes,” Geena said, nodding, and letting the tears come.

  “Come on.” Nico grabbed her arm, making sure he’d placed himself between her and Caravello’s corpse. The old Doge was a sad bundle in the shadows, dead, and with Nico’s fingerprints all over the knife jammed in his skull.

  “Where to?” Geena asked.

  “Anywhere but here.” They were together again, and yet their world had changed almost beyond recognition. Whatever happened now, Nico was determined to protect Geena from the future.

  “But first we have to hide the body.”

  While Geena kept watch to make sure their crime went unseen, Nico—or the man speaking with his voice—forced the door of an abandoned taverna just off the courtyard by the church. The windows were dark, all the chairs up on tables, and the old wood around the lock, softened by decades of damp, gave way easily.

  “You saved my life,”
Nico said as he hurried back to help Geena lift the body.

  “I saved Nico’s life,” she replied as she took the corpse by its feet. “I don’t know who you are.”

  “Still denying? Still doubting?” he replied, hooking his hands under Caravello’s arms.

  “I just don’t understand.” She handed him Nico’s phone. “But this is for Nico. I can’t be out of touch with him again. I just can’t.”

  They carried the body inside and set it on the floor behind the bar, then left swiftly, both of them glancing around nervously as Nico pulled the door tightly shut behind them.

  The deed had been done largely in silence. Now, though, as they hurried away, Volpe spoke to her again, using Nico’s mouth.

  “Accept what you know, and what has happened. It’s much easier than fighting. That way, what you don’t understand—”

  “I don’t understand how you can be two people, and how what we did down in that chamber could lead to this. If you’re even real, how could you have survived down there? Why did our opening the door cause the chamber to flood? Why were those ten Council members entombed there? How is it that you can speak enough modern Italian for me to understand you? Why did you do those things? Those terrible …”

  Geena shook her head and stared at Nico, shivering. There was a stranger behind his eyes. Even though he was bruised and cut, she could still see it was not him. It was his hair and eyes, the mouth she had kissed so often, the hands that had caressed her and held her when she was upset or sad. But someone else watched her from inside.

  He ducked into a café and steered her to a table. They did not speak again until they had ordered and the waitress had brought them coffee. Geena drank hers down. It burned her lips and tongue, but she didn’t mind. She couldn’t stop herself from shaking, and shock was settling in. Before today, she had never seen a person die.

  “Thank you for saving my life,” he said. Volpe.

  Geena closed her eyes and remembered launching herself at that man with the two swords, and how the unreality of the scene had buffered her against the danger she was placing herself in. It had felt like a dream, so unreal that the action had seemed wholly logical and normal. The old man had been about to kill the person she loved, and there had been no hesitation at all. But was that the only reason I did it? she thought. Probably not.

  She watched Nico stand. He didn’t walk like Nico, and his voice was someone else’s. That’s Zanco Volpe. A dead man.

  “I’m not without honor,” Nico said in that other person’s voice. Geena drank more coffee and turned away.

  “I can’t look when you’re talking like that, and you still …”

  “Look like Nico.”

  She nodded, setting the cup on the table and hugging her arms.

  “Everything has changed,” he said in his deep, unreal voice. It was like an echo from history. If a mummy could speak, it would sound like this.

  “Let me speak to Nico,” she said, realizing how ridiculous that sounded but unable to smile.

  She heard a sigh, and then Nico’s hands rested on hers.

  “Geena,” he said, with a tenderness that could only have been him—Nico speaking to her now, not Volpe. “You have to believe.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” she confessed, keeping her voice low.

  She glanced at the other people in the café, all of them seemingly content with their lives in that moment. The fading light of the end of a long summer day cast a golden glow just outside the windows.

  “I’ve learned so much,” Nico said. “It took me a while to believe Volpe, too, but now there’s no alternative.” He sounded almost happy. She heard his pain, and his fear, but …

  “You sound pleased,” she said.

  “I am,” Nico said. “Geena, I’m not insane, and neither are you.”

  She had seen Giardino Caravello over six hundred years before, boarding a boat and being driven from the city. She had seen him today, wielding two swords to kill Nico. She had pushed him over and started the final series of events that ended in his death.

  “Please let him explain,” Nico said. “I think he will … he says he will. I think he needs us now.”

  “Tell me one thing first, Nico,” she said. She studied him so that hopefully she would see any lie in his eyes. “Did you kill the Mayor?”

  First he was Nico, and then he changed. His eyes grew wider and darker.

  “The Mayor has been murdered?” he said again in that deep, ancient voice. Then he closed his eyes and sat back in his chair. “That changes everything. They are moving even faster than I feared.” He opened his eyes again and stared at her, and there was something compelling about him. The mystery, perhaps, or the power she knew he must hold …

  The power Zanco Volpe must possess to do what he was doing now.

  “Geena, Nico loves you, and I see that you have a good heart. If you’ll hear me now, I’ll do my best to explain why I need you. And why the future of Venice might well rest in your hands.”

  XII

  YOU ARE a historian, are you not?” Volpe said.

  Sitting there across from him, knowing it was him speaking through Nico, Geena studied him in fascination. Nico’s face, yes, but the expressions were all wrong, and when Volpe came to the fore of Nico’s mind—took him over like some puppeteer—his eyes had a perpetual squint that had never been there before. And his speech retained the flourishes of a Venetian dialect that no one had spoken for ages. Yet only flourishes, as though he had accessed Nico’s mind to master modern Italian.

  You’re in shock, she told herself. You’re just focusing on details because you’re trying not to scream.

  A thin smile parted her lips.

  “Have I amused you?”

  Geena felt her smile vanish. “Not in the least. You make me feel as if I might vomit at any moment.”

  Volpe looked—Nico looked—stung by this. His nostrils flared.

  “I hardly think that’s productive.”

  “What is productive? Murder?”

  At this, those squinting eyes narrowed further. “It has its uses,” he said, lowering his voice. “But you were there, Geena. I had no alternative. I saved all of our lives. Il Doge would have—”

  Geena closed her eyes and held up a hand. “Stop.”

  He did. For several seconds she sat and listened to the sounds of the café, the Babel of tourist languages, the clink of spoons and cups, the creaking of the fan above their heads as it turned.

  “Il Doge,” she said quietly, and it was not a question. More an affirmation.

  “Please, let’s not spend any more time pretending that you do not believe what you saw with your own eyes, or inside your mind,” Volpe said.

  Geena studied him, and though the ancient Venetian had come entirely to the fore, occupying Nico’s body to what she presumed was his full extent, she thought she saw a bit of Nico stirring in there as well.

  Are you there? she thought, sending the question out into the ether.

  And she felt a wash of love and worry in return that made her hand tremble as she lifted her coffee cup from the table. A bit of it splashed onto her lap, but it was not hot enough to burn.

  We are both here, Nico replied.

  She could sense the other in him. Volpe might not have Nico’s ability, his touch, but their mental communication was no longer private. They had an audience. Whether or not Volpe could consciously utilize Nico’s touch she did not know, nor did she have any desire to find out.

  Volpe sighed and rolled his eyes. “Really, Geena, why do you keep running from the truth? I am here. I am real. You wanted to know what all of this is about, and I think it is only fair that I explain it to you. Your life has been irrevocably changed. You can accept that, and perhaps survive, or deny it and surely die.”

  She took a sip of coffee. Hand still shaking, she set the cup down. It was much too sweet, but the fault was her own. Four sugars. What the hell had she been thinking?

  “I choose
to live,” she said.

  Volpe smiled with Nico’s mouth. If she had not known that mouth so intimately, it would almost have been convincing.

  “Back to my question, then. You are a historian?”

  “Archaeologist.”

  He waved the word away. “Yes, yes. A historian. Similar enough. I learned much of your work the first day and night after I returned, sharing this flesh with your lover.”

  Geena felt her face flush with embarrassment. Lover. She and Nico had made love that night and during sex, with him thrusting inside of her, she had sensed him become distant and cold and more aggressive, as though he did not seem like himself. Nausea roiled in her gut.

  “Go on,” she said, teeth snapping off the words.

  Perhaps Volpe read her thoughts, though she did not feel Nico’s touch. It might have been that he simply knew how to read people, to interpret their faces, for one corner of his mouth turned up in a momentary smirk, as though he knew exactly where her thoughts had led her. She hated him for that.

  Rape? She might not be able to call it that, but the violation and loathing she felt were nonetheless fierce.

  “I am the key to a thousand mysteries, the answer to a thousand riddles that you historians have encountered in your studies. Perhaps one day we will have opportunity for me to introduce you to all of the secrets of Venice and beyond, but for now—”

  “I don’t give a shit about Venice right now,” Geena said. “Tell me about you and the Doges. Tell me what you’ve gotten us involved in.”

  His nostrils flared again and she felt a ripple of fury emanating from him, felt it through Nico. And then, in her mind, Nico’s voice. Volpe. Explain.

  Volpe smiled. “Fine. But speak to me in that tone again and, Nico’s cooperation or not, I’ll leave you to the Doges’ mercies.”

  Geena felt all the blood rush from her face.

  “You wouldn’t dare. Or if you would, Nico wouldn’t let you. It’s obvious that you can’t control him completely. You need him, which means you need me. So get on with it. You’re wasting time.”

  She signaled the waitress for a refill on her coffee.