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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.
Geena 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—