He was entirely unprepared, however, for the sight that met him in the cellar. For though the floor was of hard-trodden dirt, a magnificent table sat in the centre of the room, and on it was a coffin. No, the word was sarcophagus: the great, ornate, glass-sided casket reminded him of nothing so much as the tomb of St Francis Xavier — which held the saint’s uncorrupted mortal remains — in the city of Old Goa.
Da Silva was not a particularly religious man, nor even as superstitious as most sailors, but he crossed himself before thought caught up with instinct, and muttered ‘Mary, Mother of God,’ under his breath without even realizing he had done so.
Beside him, Delia Quercia breathed out in triumph. ‘Maria Alvares,’ he whispered.
God gave the Portuguese a tiny country as their cradle, but all the world as their grave, thought Da Silva sourly. The words were Antonio Vieira’s but the sentiment was pretty accurate.
‘So, with whom do I have to haggle for your charm, Signore?’ he asked with as much asperity as he ever dared to use with Delia Quercia.
‘With her,’ the other replied, gesturing at the coffin. Da Silva felt his jaw drop. ‘With Maria Alvares, the necromancer, who stole it from my great-grandfather.’
‘I —’, began Da Silva, rendered momentarily speechless. ‘How?’
‘Open it,’ Delia Quercia said. ‘Open the casket.’
The captain looked round, but the Chinese woman had vanished; so he found the catches that secured the carved lid in place and snapped them open, then heaved at the lid. It was so heavy that he was half afraid its weight would drag out of his grasp and smash the glass side. But it opened smoothly enough, and rested solidly back on its hinges when he lowered it carefully down.
Instead of the foul miasma he had expected, the breath from the coffin smelled faintly of roses. He let out the lungful of air he hadn’t realized he was hanging on to, and looked down at the woman in the casket. A trickle of sweat ran down his face: he wiped it absently with his hand.
‘The amulet keeps her uncorrupted,’ said Delia Quercia quietly; but uncorrupted did not meanunchanged, for the corpse thus revealed was exactly that: a corpse. Maria Alvares, whoever she had been, had mummified in her coffin: the flesh had shrunk off her bones, her skin had dried and tanned to leather that had moulded itself to the shape of her skull, the contours of the skeleton. Her hair still lay black as the night before moonrise, glossy and thick, but her eyeballs were desiccated in their sockets and her lips were drawn back from her teeth.
She wore her funeral finery, a dress of black silk, and around her hollow throat was the amulet: a necklace of pale jade and opals with fiery depths that took Da Silva’s breath away.
‘It’s beautiful,’ he said softly.
‘Take it,’ said Delia Quercia. The captain hesitated. What was the catch? ‘Do it, Da Silva.’
Grimacing, the captain reached behind the mummy’s neck to unclasp the jewel, forcing out of his mind the memory of living women around whose necks he had fastened trinkets of far less value. But the contact was too intimate and too similar to forget entirely.
Then the shrivelled eyes rolled round in their sockets, and a wizened hand gripped his wrist before he had time to react, the nails digging into his flesh like talons. The skull snapped upward, leaving the mass of shining hair behind like a pillow, and the dead jaw moved.
‘And who, pray tell, are you?’ rasped the corpse.
For a long moment the captain was quite incapable of speech. Then, shaking with horror, he managed to croak, ‘Luis Da Silva.’ He tried to pull away from her iron grip, but without success; then she sat up and seized the back of his neck with her other hand. The bones, in their glove of skin, clutched him like a vice and drew his face close to hers.
‘Of what city, Luis Da Silva?’ Her voice put him in mind of stones clashing together.
‘Lisbon,’ he whispered.
‘At last,’ replied Maria Alvares, and he fancied he saw a topaz glint in her shrivelled eyes. Then, knowing it had to be done but dreading it with all his soul, he asked the question Delia Quercia had brought him here to put to her.
‘What price do you want for this necklace?’
Maria Alvares seemed to exhale a breath of roses; she seemed to smile. ‘A kiss,’ she said, and pulled his head down.
Da Silva’s mind wanted to go away somewhere, the way the body fights the agony of dreadful wounds by shutting down. But, quite to the contrary, everything was terribly clear: her dried lips, her leathern tongue, her coated teeth, and worst of all, his own desire that rose treacherously despite the fact that he was being kissed by a corpse and that he could feel blood trickling down the back of his neck from the sharp grip of her claws. With his free hand he fumbled for the clasp of the necklace, and managed to unfasten it; the amulet came away and Maria Alvares fell back into her coffin in sudden decay, the scent of roses turning mephitic in an instant.
He sank to the floor, his legs unable to support him, the opal-and-jade necklace clutched in his hand.
Delia Quercia had never seen naked horror so clear on anyone’s face before, but the matter was only of academic interest to him: the Portuguese had retrieved the amulet from his long-dead countrywoman, and now it could return to its rightful place — and its rightful use.
Bending to retrieve it, he saw that Da Silva’s eyes were still open, though the captain was surely unconscious; he shook him roughly by the shoulder. At length Da Silva drew a shuddering breath, and sat up.
The edges of the jade circles had drawn blood from his hand, but the several little cuts from Maria Alvares’s fingernails hurt more. There were five blue crescents on his wrist and a further selection on his neck where they had dug into him. But that was not, would never be, the worst of it; for physical wounds always heal.
Da Silva had, without realizing it, closed his eyes at the recollection; now he opened them to find that Delia Quercia had finished his floorboard calligraphy. He ran his fingers over the faint scars on his wrist, and sighed, shifting his weight. A loose board rocked under his foot.
‘Bring the cat here,’ his employer instructed him, and Da Silva walked over to the cage and picked it up, his jaw rigid with distaste. Like most sailors, he liked cats: they killed rats, which were such a vile pest on every ship that ever put to sea. But that, Delia Quercia had told him, was precisely why a cat had to be sacrificed here; and why he had done away with the little bridge that had connected the house to that curious tower behind it, although Da Silva was still not entirely sure he comprehended the reason for that. He did not know why it had been called the cat tower, nor of the architect Scimone’s philosophies.
However, he understood that it was some kind of rat demon that Delia Quercia needed the cat’s death to summon, because that, apparently, was the purpose of the amulet. The necklace was its lodestone and blood its magnet; and, according to Delia Quercia, demons could be compelled to reveal the whereabouts of hidden treasure.
Nineteen years before, Da Silva had killed a man whom he had caught in the act of rape — killed him with his long knife; yet the thought of cold-bloodedly slaughtering a cat made him squeamish. He did not regret his earlier action, since he was still married to the woman he had helped that day; indeed he knew he would do the same thing again. Unfortunately, though, the man he had killed had been named Aldo Delia Quercia, and his elder brother had witnessed the entire incident. His revenge had been nothing so subtle as the Bible recommended: Da Silva’s sentence had been life, not death.
So he did not watch what the Venetian did to the cat. The poor beast’s yowls were bad enough, and the iron stench of its blood.