The Chamber of Ten hc-3

by Christopher Golden

  She tried to lift her head and the darkness swept in again and she was …

  … blinking … careful this time. What did she hear? Murmuring, so softly, like whispered sins coming from inside a confessional.

  Taking a deep breath, she opened her eyes wide and gave herself a second to focus. Nico sat cross-legged on the floor perhaps four feet from her, on the other side of the blood he—no, Volpe—had taken from both of them. She blinked, studying his face. She knew it intimately, had traced the lines of that face with her fingers and her lips, had gazed into those eyes and thrown herself open to the man.

  Tears of blood streaked Nico’s face. The disease, taking its toll.

  But it wasn’t Nico. Exhausted as he must be, Volpe did not want to die for eternity. With horrible tenacity, he seemed to be hanging on inside of Nico, propping up the body around him like a boy in his father’s old suit. The body seemed to be shrinking in upon itself. The blotches on his throat had gone black now and spread, and his neck had bloated hideously.

  A bar rag lay spread out on the floor in front of him and with one blood-wetted finger, he dabbed and scrawled something she could not see from this angle.

  “What is your name?” Volpe gasped. “The name you were born with?”

  Though she was confused and curious, she did not have the strength to ask why he needed to know.

  “Geena Louise … Hodge.”

  Volpe nodded. “Geena Louise Hodge. Nicolo Tomasino Lombardi.”

  He dipped his finger in the blood again and again, smearing the cloth. A gelatinous mush quivered in the midst of the spilled blood, and it took her a moment to understand that these were Caravello’s eyes.

  She hadn’t the strength to vomit.

  The murmuring, the whispers, were coming from Nico’s lips, and it took her a moment to realize that Volpe was chanting some sort of rite. Spellcraft, she remembered he called it. Meant to heal them.

  But the darkness encroached again. She fought to stay conscious.

  Nico, she thought, an abyss of sorrow opening up to swallow her. I think I’m going to die now.

  His reply was weak, but he was there. We live or die as one.

  “Quiet, you fools,” Volpe growled. He took a rattling breath and continued his strange song.

  Geena saw the rats before she heard the skittering of their claws upon the wood. They skittered toward Volpe as though dragged upon strings. When they reached him, they waited, quivering and squealing but frozen in place.

  “What are you doing?” Geena asked, coughing. “Did you call them?”

  “Our lives are fading,” Volpe rasped. “If we’re to survive … we have to steal life from elsewhere.”

  When he had finished scrawling on the bar rag, he reached out a shaking hand and picked up one of the rats. It did not scratch or bite; it gave no resistance save those screams. Volpe placed it in the bloody mess on the floor, pressed the point of the knife to its belly, and slit it open.

  Geena closed her eyes and drifted again …

  … disoriented, eyes fluttering open, she saw that the second rat was already dead. Small mercies; she had not had to witness it. The smell of blood filled her nostrils and she felt it sticky on her cheek. It had trickled along the wood and pooled beneath her head.

  Volpe sat unmoving, slumped down upon himself. If not for the phlegmy rattling in his throat, she would have thought he had died.

  Dying, Geena thought. The three of us are dying.

  Even as despair overcame her and bloody tears began to clot her eyes, she saw Nico’s body twitch. One of them—she no longer knew if it was Nico or Volpe—raised his head. He lifted up the bar rag and began the chant again, though now it was little more than a low gurgle. She could see the rag now, arcane letters and strange sigils scrawled in blood upon it.

  He dropped it onto the mess on the floor and blood began to soak into the fabric.

  “I will not die,” he snarled, even as he slid onto his side, blood pouring from his ears and nostrils. He choked, coughed, and then reached out a hand, holding his palm open above the cloth and the words and the death he had carefully prepared.

  As before in the courtyard, it all burst into flame, an instantaneous eruption of fire that consumed the entire mess. The blood that had trickled toward her ignited, flames leaping up and racing toward the pool of blood beneath her face.

  Geena tried to scream through her ragged, swollen throat, and a wave of pain crashed through her.

  Then, once again, the darkness took her.

  XIII

  THE SMELL hit her before she was even fully awake—a rancid stew of odors, of blood and death and illness. Geena recoiled as she drew herself up to a sitting position, her face and hair tacky with blood, her clothes stinking of disease. She glanced around the abandoned taverna in the golden gloom cast by street lamps outside and saw Nico lying six feet away.

  “Nico?”

  Her head throbbed dully as she rose to her feet, surprised to find she had the strength to stand. She reached up to touch her throat and found the pain had vanished, along with the swelling. Dried blood crusted on her face and around her ears and had stained her shirt, but when she experimented tentatively with clearing her throat, she found it clear.

  “No way,” she whispered to herself in English.

  Grinning in spite of the stench, she stepped around the bloody, scorched spot on the floor where Volpe had done his spell. Geena went to her knees beside Nico’s body and shook him.

  “Wake up.”

  He lolled his head with her jostling and she saw that the black swelling of his throat had vanished completely. Like her, Nico had dark bloodstains soaked into his shirt and traces where blood had run from his nose and eyes and ears. Whatever Volpe had done, he had made it just in time.

  Nico opened his right eye just a slit before blinking and opening both of them. He ran a hand over his face and wetted his lips with his tongue like a drunk waking from a bender.

  “What … what time is it?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure. I just woke up myself, but … It’s night.”

  She let the words trail off. They had been unconscious in here for hours. Volpe might have removed all evidence of the murder of Caravello out in the church square, but she still felt as though it had been a miracle that no one had discovered them. Luck and timing.

  “God, the smell,” he said, wrinkling his nose in disgust.

  Geena laughed.

  Nico stared at her. “What, in any of this, is funny?”

  She dropped to the floor, taking both of his hands in hers. “You’re you.”

  Nico blinked, glanced around curiously as though waiting for Volpe to usurp his control of his body again. When nothing happened he ran a hand through his hair and turned to smile at her.

  “So it would appear.” He took a deep breath, his smile faltering.

  He’s still in here, though. Aren’t you, Volpe?

  Geena held her breath, listening for a reply. Nico had shared the thought with her purposefully and they both waited for Volpe to acknowledge it. When nothing happened, she let herself hope for a moment before Nico brushed it off with a wave of his hand.

  “He’s still here. I feel him. Resting. But for now, I’m me.”

  When she had first woken, Geena had been slightly disoriented. Now she began to recall the details of the ritual Volpe had conducted. There had been rats and death and chanting and blood. She glanced down at the palm he had sliced open and blinked in astonishment before looking up at Nico.

  He actually healed us, she thought.

  Nico nodded grimly. He needs us.

  “He needs you,” she said aloud.

  “As a host. But he knows that if anything happens to you, I’ll fight him.”

  “But that fire,” Geena said. I thought we were both dead.

  “No. It was cleansing flame, the same as he used out on the cobblestones. It purifies, but only burns what it is intended to burn.”

  “It would ha
ve been nice if he had warned me,” she said, though she knew that in the condition they had both been in, it would have been difficult for Volpe to say anything to her at all.

  Nausea twisted through her stomach when she thought about how close they had come to death, and the feeling of the sickness clenched inside her. For as long as she lived she would never forget the panic and helplessness of the disease that had ravaged her and brought her to the brink of death in a matter of hours.

  “We can’t stay here,” Nico said. “We’ve been lucky so far—”

  “Lucky?”

  “Perhaps not. Even so, every moment we remain here, we are tempting fate. Eventually someone will notice the broken lock on the side door, or pass near enough to the building to smell the stink of Caravello’s remains.”

  Geena shuddered. The stench made her stomach churn, but she doubted anyone passing by would smell it, at least not yet. Much as she wanted to get away from that stink, she knew they had to clean up first.

  “Look at me,” she said. “Look at yourself. The owner of the building will have turned the water off. There may be enough in the toilet tanks to wash the blood from our faces, but our clothes are stained. We have to be careful not to be seen like this.”

  Nico glanced at the side door and the table they—well, she and Volpe—had bumped up against it. Even if she did not feel the worry coming off him, she would have seen it in his eyes.

  “What about Caravello? Do we just leave the body here?”

  They both looked at the bar, knowing the Doge’s corpse lay behind it. His eyes … Geena thought. Nico glanced away, responding neither in thought nor word. She could feel that he shared her revulsion, but he also would not condemn Volpe for defiling the corpse, since it had saved their lives.

  “He might not be as evil as the Doges, but he’s not your friend,” she said sharply.

  Nico glanced up. “I know that.”

  “Do you?”

  “After what he’s done to my life? To our lives?”

  She hesitated, then nodded, feeling the truth in his heart. This was the closest they would come to an argument. They knew each other too well for the kinds of misunderstandings that disrupted many relationships.

  Cleansing fire, Nico thought, and she saw an image in her mind of the building going up in flames.

  Geena stared at him, unnerved. “Isn’t that a little excessive? It’s just the body we need to get rid of.”

  Nico went to the window and looked out. “We should get rid of any evidence we were ever here.”

  “Without a body, it’s only trespassing,” she said. “Let’s not add arson to our crimes.”

  Nico hesitated, then nodded in agreement. They wouldn’t burn the building, but they did need to destroy Caravello’s corpse to erase any trace of contagion. Geena glanced over at the bar again, imagining the eyeless corpse hidden behind it, perhaps still tainted with the plague.

  There would have to be fire.

  You cannot stay together.

  Nico stood outside the taverna’s bathroom, keeping the door propped open to let the lamplight beyond the windows filter in while Geena used a swatch torn from an old apron they had found in the kitchen to wash the blood from her face. She dipped the rag into the toilet tank and swabbed at her cheeks and her throat, careful not to streak the porcelain. There was no way for them to clean up after themselves entirely, but they were trying to be as careful as possible.

  He loved to watch her move. Even now, filthy as they were, he took great pleasure in the arch of her back and the swell of her breasts beneath her shirt.

  Geena turned to smile at him, hearing or sensing his thoughts. Nico had created such a powerful connection between them that sometimes he could not hide his thoughts from her even if he wanted to.

  “He’s awake, isn’t he?” she asked.

  Nico nodded. “For the past few minutes. He is not very strong yet, but he is here, yes.”

  “He’s right, you know,” she said, dropping the rag into the toilet tank.

  “About what?” Nico asked. He had cleaned himself up already.

  “He said we can’t stay together. He’s right.” She replaced the top of the tank and stepped out of the bathroom to join him. “I hate it as much as you do, but if we’re ever going to get Volpe out of our lives, we have to help him figure out if the other Doges are here and what they’re planning. You and he will have to work together. He’ll have ideas about what to do next. But there are things I can find out that you can’t, starting with the building collapse in Dorsoduro and the tomb under it. Obviously the Doges have figured out that it’s where Volpe put their dead relatives, but why knock the building down? Just to expose the tomb? To make sure those deaths are not forgotten? Or is there more to it?”

  Nico hesitated, then nodded. He pulled her into an embrace, kissed her temple, and then stepped back to regard her grimly.

  “Whatever you can learn will help,” Nico said. “But as far as I’m concerned, you have something more important to do. I want to have a life for us to go back to when this is all over. You need to do whatever it takes to make sure it isn’t in ruins. You’ve got to check in with Tonio, look in on the Biblioteca project. Don’t cut the strings that connect us to our lives or I fear we’ll be swept away.”

  Geena kissed him softly. “I won’t let that happen.”

  “Good,” Nico said. “But if the other Doges are here, and Caravello found you, they may be able to as well. You have to be very careful. You shouldn’t go back to your apartment.”

  Geena frowned as she considered this, then shook her head.

  “No,” she said. “If Caravello followed me, it was from the Biblioteca. It was the project that brought him there, the shattering of Volpe’s heart and the opening of the Chamber of Ten. We don’t have any reason to think that he knew where I lived. Never mind that this is all happening so quickly. It doesn’t make sense to think Aretino and Foscari would know anything about me, if the other two are even here.”

  Nico did not like it, but he could see she would not be dissuaded.

  “If you see or even sense anyone following you or anything out of place at your apartment, tell Tonio and Domenic and the others the whole story. They might not believe you, but they’ll keep you safe for a time. Long enough to finish this, I hope.”

  “Where will you go?” she asked.

  “I suppose we’ll keep moving,” he said, feeling Volpe waking up further, growing restless inside of him. “Make sure you have your cell phone. Call me if you learn anything, and I’ll do the same. But if, for any reason, we can’t reach each other, we will meet on the north side of Rialto Bridge tomorrow night at eleven.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Meanwhile, be careful.” Nico reached out and cupped her cheek in his hand, then bent to kiss her softly, ignoring the lingering stink of disease on her breath, just as she must be doing in return.

  I wish you could just come with me, Nico thought.

  Geena touched his hand and gently pulled it away. “I can’t. We need to know what’s happening with that tomb. And you’re right. By now Tonio will be furious with me. I need to get myself out of hot water and try to smooth things over for you, too.”

  “Is that even possible? As far as the rest of the team is concerned, I stabbed you.”

  “Let me worry about that,” she said, walking over to a window. “Besides, I’m more concerned about the fact that they reported the attack. If we want to have a future in this city, I’ve got to start with the police.”

  Caravello’s corpse burned like the newspaper Geena’s father had always used to start fires when she was a girl, crumbling up the movie section or the real estate pages and shoving them under the logs before setting them alight. They’d caught quickly, the edges flaring orange and red with rising flames, and then they would ignite with crackling, hungry fire.

  Her heart pounded as she watched the flames burn away the ancient Venetian’s clothing and flesh as if it were nothing more
than yellowed papyrus.

  “We’ve got to go,” she said, reaching out to tug on Nico’s wrist. “Someone will see.”

  But in the darkness the fire cast dancing shadows on his face and she could see in that smile and those narrowed, furtive eyes that Nico was absent again, and Volpe had taken over.

  “Cleansing fire,” he whispered.

  She squeezed his wrist. “If we’re caught—”

  Volpe shot her a dark look that reminded her that should they be discovered here, it would not be them who were in danger, but whoever had the misfortune to attempt to interfere.

  “We won’t be caught,” Volpe assured her.

  “If they are already in Venice, Foscari and Aretino will be looking for Caravello by now,” Geena reminded him. “What if they’ve tracked him here? What if they’re out there in the square right now, waiting for us?”

  The old magician turned and glared at her with Nico’s eyes, then looked at the side door through which they had originally entered. With a wave of his hand, not even looking at the corpse, he doused the flames. The fire crackled and popped and burned down to cinders in the space of seconds, and all that remained of Caravello were black ashes.

  “This way,” Volpe said, leading her through the kitchen.

  “Afraid?” Geena asked, both genuinely curious and taunting.

  At the thick metal door at the back of the kitchen, he spun to sneer at her. “Of what would happen to my city if they should catch me unprepared, if they should destroy me? Of course I am.”

  Volpe passed a hand in front of the lock and she heard it click as the deadbolt drew back. The man would never need a key to any door. He glanced out into the narrow space between the taverna and the darkened bookstore next door.

  “And so should you be,” he said, and then he slipped out.

  Geena followed, pulling the door quietly shut behind her. To the right, the canal ran by, but Volpe hurried along the alley to the left, pausing to make sure they weren’t being watched.

  “Why?” she whispered as she caught up to him. “Because you’re the lesser of two evils?”