“Look out!” Sacrificing any pretense of dignity, I scrambled up on a dainty little marble table. “Don’t let it bite you.”
Grazia screamed and jumped up on a chair. Faster than a striking snake, Vasco took a flying leap onto the bed. He drew his sword.
“What is it?” Grazia shrieked.
That was a very pertinent question. When I looked straight at it, I saw a primitive book, eighty or ninety pages of ancient, tattered paper sewn between soft kidskin covers, lying facedown as if some reader had just set it there for a moment, open at his place. If I looked at it out of the corner of my eye-a technique the Maestro taught me-it was much more like a huge gray spider, watching me, waiting for me to leave my perch. It certainly moved like a spider. They run so fast that the eye cannot see how their legs move, and the jinx was even faster. It must move its pages like legs.
“It is one of Zeno’s stupid tricks!” Vasco said, realizing how undignified he looked standing on the bed. He jumped down.
The jinx ran at him. Fortunately he had not sheathed his sword and he struck at it as I had, flipping it away. He was back on the bed by the time it hit the floor. A loose page fluttering free.
This time the jinx was not content to lie in wait. It darted over to the bed and tried to climb a golden pillar to get at him. He swiped at it again, only this time he missed, as if it was learning to avoid rapier strokes. The jinx rushed to try another pillar. He floundered and staggered across the soft down bedding to defend that corner.
“What is this thing?” he yelled.
“It’s the jinx,” I said. “Ancient, vintage evil, a curse that has grown and matured for centuries. Madonna, no!” I was just in time, for Grazia had filled her lungs and opened her mouth to scream. “If you summon help, the jinx will attack them.”
“Why don’t you exorcize it?” Vasco yelled. “You’re the one who summoned it.” I wish I had a good painting of him as he looked then; I would hang it in some conspicuous place.
“No, I just found it for you. Why don’t you apply the law? Arrest it.”
“Oh, this is ridiculous!” The vizio bounded off the bed and headed for the door as if all the demons of Hell were after him, instead of one tattered manuscript. Alas, Venetian doors dislike being bullied and that one chose that moment to stick. He swung around at bay, with the jinx already almost at his feet.
I jumped down also. It dodged Vasco’s sword stroke, but did not follow up its attack on him; instead it reversed course and came again for me, as if I were its preferred prey.
I extended my left arm and used the Word. Normally my pyrokinetic skills need a few seconds to obtain results, but that paper was centuries old and the horror exploded in a ball of fire. Smoke billowed upward. Grazia screamed. And so did the jinx, or at least I heard an impossibly shrill noise in my head, a sound that a tortured bat might emit in its death throes. I sheathed my sword. The floor was terrazzo, with no rugs or exposed wood to burn.
Vasco yelled, “Look out!”
The sheet of paper his sword had detached was fluttering across the floor in my direction, blown by a wind that disturbed nothing else in the room. I ignited it also and it vanished in a flash of sparks and ash.
The emergency was over. The jinx was gone, the house was not going to burn down, and all that remained were clouds of bitter-smelling smoke. Coughing and choking, Vasco and I threw open the casements. Grazia had her hands over her face, but I could see that she was pale as milk and gasping for breath. I lifted her down.
Vasco tried the door again and this time it opened sweetly, on its best behavior. We heard screaming coming from the piano nobile.
26
A unt Fortunata was having hysterics in her bedroom. The family had just run to see what was wrong when Grazia came tearing in and threw herself into her mother’s arms. There was much shouting and alarm as the stench of smoke wafted up from the mezzanine floor. The two fanti ran down to see. Vasco and I, following Grazia up, were accosted in the salone by Inquisitor Gritti demanding an explanation.
“Witchcraft!” Vasco said. “Zeno conjured some sort of paper animal out of a statue and it attacked us. Then he used more witchcraft to set it on fire.” The vizio had suffered a severe fright and showed it, but he also wore a savage grin of triumph. This time he truly had me, he thought; this time I would not escape.
I was inclined to agree with him. So was Gritti, for I had never seen a man so resemble a cat that can feel a mouse’s tail under its paw.
“Your Excellency, I located the jinx,” I said. “My dowsing rod found it for me. It was hiding in madonna Grazia’s room, although she did not know it was there. It did attack us, as Filiberto says. He took refuge on the bed, I climbed on a table, and the lady on a chair. Fortunately it burst into flames and-”
“Zeno burned it!” Vasco cried. “He pointed his hand at it like this and made gestures and spoke in a strange language and it went on fire instantly. And then a loose page attacked him and he did it again!”
“A loose piece of paper attacked him?” Gritti licked his lips.
“The vizio is a little upset,” I suggested. “His recollection of events is confused. I was, in fact, saying a prayer, and Our Lady took pity on us and saved us from the demon. Of course paper that old can be so dry that when it is exposed to the air…”
Then the Sanudos came flocking out of Aunt Fortunata’s room, demanding to know what was going on, and the six-way conversation became more than a little confused.
An hour or so later, the situation had been somewhat clarified. The jinx had been accepted as a reality and its destruction as good fortune. From that point of view, I was being hailed as a hero. Vasco insisted that I had used witchcraft to locate it and destroy it, and possibly to create it in the first place, although even Gritti seemed unwilling to accept that suggestion-he was reserving judgment on the rest. He had lots of time. I wasn’t going anywhere.
Aunt Fortunata looked and sounded several years younger and every few minutes would mumble how much better she was feeling.
Grazia was very quiet, staying close to her mother. I wanted to believe that her nose was less conspicuous than it had been, but perhaps that was just charitable thinking. Vasco and I had both testified that she had been as frightened of the jinx as either of us, had not known where it was hiding, and it had not been her familiar. She refused to discuss what had happened, neither confirming nor denying that I had used witchcraft.
Giro had disappeared into his room and shut the door on the world. Sier Zuanbattista had retreated behind the traditional gravitas of the Venetian aristocracy, watching everything and saying nothing. He certainly was not going to thank me for my actions until they had been cleared of the taint of sorcery, and he was too much a gentleman to denounce them when they had so obviously worked to his benefit.
About then we had all descended to Grazia’s room to reenact the encounter with the jinx, inspect the scorch mark on the floor where it had died, and peer into the base of the Neptune statue. I spotted Danese’s portmanteau again and decided that it might make a welcome diversion. I carried it over to the bed and prepared to tip out its contents.
“Stand back, Zeno!” Gritti barked. “I distrust those nimble hands of yours. Marco, Amedeo, search that bag and see if there is anything in there that should not be.”
A few minutes later we were all standing around the bed admiring sixty gold sequins and a gold and amber bracelet. In fact we were admiring two bracelets-the brass-and-glass one that Grazia had fetched from her jewel box, and the genuine one that had emerged from Danese’s underwear.