At last the animal’s sounds of pain ceased, and Da Silva looked up, alerted by some sixth sense. His eyes narrowed, and he stared suspiciously past the blazing banks of candles. Delia Quercia was still muttering in some kind of bastard Latin, but the quality of the darkness in the room’s corners seemed to have changed. The shadows were thick and clotted, like congealing blood; the candle flames themselves looked blurred, as if they had slowed. A peculiar deadness crept into the air, a heaviness that was the opposite of languor, for it bred a reflex of fear, a desire to flee. Da Silva wiped sweat from his face, and found his hand was shaking slightly. His mouth felt dry.
Delia Quercia finished his incantation, and held his hands up. His arms were streaked to the elbows with scarlet. For a bare instant, everything seemed to hold its breath, and then Da Silva smelled, rich and corrupt, the feral stink of rats.
In the centre of the figure Delia Quercia had drawn, where the bloody rags of flesh that were all that was left of the cat lay crucified, a form began to take shape. It coalesced, as far as Da Silva could see, out of the very air itself; and yet, as it grew, it seemed more substantial, more solidly real, than the increasingly shadowy image of the Venetian.
Da Silva had been leaning against the wall; now he tried to burrow into it. What he saw was not, as he had expected, a monstrous rat: it was worse than that. Though it had characteristics of rathood — something in its stance, a hint of fang, of disease in its yellow eye — it was manlike in form, down to its dangling genitals. The captain shuddered, and growled like a dog, yet he found himself unable to look away.
The creature dipped its horrid head to the butchered cat, and Da Silva heard an appalling sucking noise. He unsheathed his long knife, but gave serious thought to taking out his revolver too. Not for the rat-demon: he knew it would have no effect. For himself. It looked up then, and eyed him knowingly, drawing its lips back from long yellow teeth. There was far too much intelligence in that gaze, too much cunning.
From a long distance, he heard Delia Quercia’s voice, imperative in command although he could make out no words — he knew that tone well enough — and knew with terrible certainty that it would not work, that his employer could not compel this thing.
And then he realized what was wrong. For all that Delia Quercia was the one with arcane knowledge, despite his having told Da Silva what the amulet’s purpose was, he had not put it within his diagrams of protection.
He was wearing it around his own throat.
Though the traitorous thought went through Da Silva’s mind that letting this rat-thing kill Delia Quercia would solve all his problems, he let it slide by without considering it. As, within the barrier that he knew was useless, the creature flexed its corded muscles and prepared to pounce, Da Silva crossed the room in two strides and knocked the Venetian to the floor, reaching once again for the clasp of the amulet.
But he was too late, for the rat-demon was faster than any man could be. It flung him aside, a clawed hand slashing casually across his face, and he crashed into the wall six feet behind with an impact that turned the world black for a second.
When he came round, an instant later, his left eye was too full of blood to see out of, and the pain took his breath away; but with his other eye he saw the summoned thing, grown huge now, bend and suck at Delia Quercia as moments ago it had fed off the cat’s corpse. Which had, he noticed, vanished completely; though he did not think the rat-demon had, precisely, eaten it.
It drank and guzzled for only a short time before looking up and meeting Da Silva’s gaze again with that dreadful knowing expression. Then it licked its bloody lips with a pointed tongue that reminded him too much of Maria Alvares’s and slid, in a way he could neither comprehend nor describe, into the body of Arturo Delia Quercia.
Da Silva cursed weakly, tasting his own blood in his mouth. The offhanded way the rat-thing had thrown him against the wall made him doubt his capacity to fight it. But appalled, he knew he had to try.
He retrieved his knife and staggered to his feet, gasping at the pain in his face and his left eye. Perhaps the creature was still disoriented; perhaps it could not immediately coordinate the body it had seized.
And perhaps, again, Da Silva thought wearily as Delia Quercia lurched to his feet, this was just a novel way of committing suicide.
‘Threaten me, little man?’ It was Delia Quercia’s voice, but somehow distorted: the timbre hollower, louder, like a shout but with blurred edges.
‘Oh yes,’ Da Silva said, and lunged with his knife, opening Delia Quercia’s arm from elbow to shoulder. Blood followed the slash, but sluggishly. Da Silva would bleed to death quicker from his head wound. He ducked under a flailing blow and hit out again, catching Delia Quercia glancingly in the neck — on the amulet itself, he realized at the sudden spark, and tried to follow it up, to hook the point under the chain. But the other grabbed the blade of the knife and twisted the stroke aside with terrible strength.
Wincing at the very thought of grasping the knife — he knew how sharp it was — Da Silva fought just to keep hold of it. Sweat ran into his good eye, and he knuckled it away. He was close enough to the possessed man to attempt a knee in the crotch, but Delia Quercia caught the blow on his thigh and backhanded Da Silva across the face again. His fingers had to be nearly severed by now, but he seemed to feel no pain — unlike Da Silva, who was almost blinded by the anguish of the last blow.
They were so close now that he could smell rat-stink on Delia Quercia’s breath, and see the yellow that had crept into his eyes. He had only one chance now, and so he let go of the knife’s handle and used both hands to reach round the back of the Venetian’s neck and unfasten the amulet once more.
It slipped from his sweaty fingers, and both he and Delia Quercia went for it. But the moment it lost contact with the possessed man’s flesh, the Venetian collapsed to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Da Silva kicked the necklace across the room, out of reach, then doubled over, breathing heavily, his hand over his face, trying to relieve the pain flaring through his head.
Looking down, he saw brown suddenly bleed into the prone man’s eyes again, and Delia Quercia looked out of them for a final time, his mouth opening and closing, but no sound coming out.
Kneeling, Da Silva picked up his knife, drew back the man’s head by its hair, and cut his employer’s throat. The blade slid through the Venetian’s flesh as though it was cutting butter, but the blood trickled out so slowly that it reinforced the captain’s thought that Delia Quercia had been dead for at least a quarter of an hour. Neither was Da Silva surprised when the corpse crumbled into dust much as had that of Maria Alvares; although he was relieved that no body was left to be discovered on the top floor of the palazzo.
He still had to dispose of the amulet, though, tired to the bone and in pain as he was; and covered in his own blood as he was, he had no intention of touching the item. Getting to his feet made him dizzy and he staggered, a floorboard creaking as he trod on it. By the door, he recalled, there was a loose board: he had felt it move earlier. It came up easily with the point of his knife.
Some months later, the one-eyed captain, Luis Da Silva, left Venice for good, taking his wife and children to Lisbon aboard his ship, the Isabella.
In the walls of the Casa Delia Scala, the rat-demon waited.
III
Jo was in a place of Escher architecture, a place of more than four dimensions. Whether that was the reality, or she was seeing by metaphor, she had no idea.