He had made some contacts . . . carefully, and a very few. Claudia and Valentina, a pair of Strega entertainers whose eyes and ears were always open and who had, in their turn, contacts everywhere. Itzaak ben Joseph, a Kabbalistic mage and goldsmith, whose clients ranged from the Casa Vecchie to a very recent arrival at Casa Louise, who--as Luciano alone knew, thanks to Itzaak--had up to that moment been a popular 'entertainer' at the House of the Red Cat. Sister Evangelina and Father Mascoli of the Order of Saint Hypatia, who had always been friendly to the Strega. Father Palladio, who taught anatomy to the students of medicine at the Accademia. He would very much have liked to have more trusted contacts among his fellow Strega. Sadly, though they were well intentioned they were often lamentably loose tongued.
That was probably why poor Despini had been found floating. He had, said old rumor, been alerted to something very evil coming to Venice; he had certainly made the attempt to fill in the gap in Strega leadership that Luciano's own disappearance had left.
But the first rumor--that Despini had learned of something very evil with its eye on the pearl that was Venice . . . Very evil. As evil as that which Marina had seen in his vision? If so, that evil had a name, and it was a thing that Luciano was not prepared to confront. Not yet.
The Lion was stirring, true, and no longer in slumber. But neither was it awake yet--and waking it was a major and very dangerous ceremony, which also required the presence of . . . certain persons. Without the Lion, Luciano could do very little against the black evil that threatened Venice.
He shivered. He hated even to think the name of that evil, for fear of attracting its attention.
He had not moved back into his former set of rooms in the complex of buildings that loosely comprised the Accademia. For one thing, they were already occupied by someone else; for another, moving back into them would be like issuing a challenge. Instead, Luciano Marina--using his true name, since he saw no reason not to, being as he was assumed to be dead--had taken this little furnished room. Comfortable enough, with the advantage of having a back door even the landlord didn't know about, a door that had been paneled over until Luciano divined its presence and surreptitiously restored it. It let out into a private courtyard, but if Luciano had to escape some night, he wasn't going to be too particular about whose sensibilities he offended at the time. This sort of arrangement of doors and windows being paneled over happened all the time, when men of wealth fell on hard times and had to sell or lease their former manors, which then were carved up into individual dwellings. It had even happened to Casa Vecchie families. Even Casa Longi.
Poor little Katerina. The fortunes of the Montescues had not prospered in the time he'd been gone, although there was a part of that which could be laid at the old man's door, wasting endless amounts of money on that stupid attempt to destroy Casa Valdosta, root and branch.
Old fool.
But Luciano, now huddled over his brazier as the evening mists crept in and the air grew cold and damp, did not have a great deal of time or pity to waste on his former pupil and her family. He was collecting information, and he needed as much of it as he could gather, as fast as he could bring it in.
He had questions, but there was one thing that he had no doubt of. The hand of true evil was stretched towards Venice, and it had at least one finger firmly planted within the city.
Finger? Call it a claw, a talon.
Who, for a start. Who was the nun with the dead eyes? If there was a vessel for that talon, it was surely her, but who was she? To what Order did she belong? The Servants of the Trinity? If that was so, then how could such a creature have gotten into the ranks of those most fully dedicated to fighting it at all costs? How could they possibly miss the signs of such evil?
What? What was the monster he had seen in the scrying-mirror, the thing that was surely a servant of the Great Evil if not another vessel for it--the monster that was killing in such a horrible manner, the monster that could seemingly reach anyone, anywhere?
Why? What was the ultimate plan here? Luciano was quite certain by now that the Great Evil lurking behind these machinations took the form of the Grand Duke of Lithuania. But why was the duke so interested in Venice? At a glance, there seemed no logic to it.
And, a very, very urgent question--when? There would be an attack on the city, of that Luciano was now also certain. So--when? Who would be the major players?
His vision had shown him some of those players: Lucrezia Brunelli and her brother Ricardo, the nun, another churchman who was certainly wearing the cassock of the Servants of the Trinity. Another question, just how many plots were there building to a climax, and how many of them were interwoven? What he had seen was--he thought--the sources of danger to Venice; which, since these things were of necessity biased towards the attitude of the seeker, meant Venice as he knew it. Now, Lucrezia and Ricardo could, together or separately, have plans for Venice involving alliances outside the borders of the city-state that would certainly destroy the fabric of the city as he knew it, but did that mean they were allied to the Great Evil? And if they were, did they know it? The Sots--
Well, the Sots and presumably the Knots, fanatical Paulines as they were, would be only too happy to purge the city with fire and the sword of anything that was not of their own rigidly defined Christian path. That would certainly destroy Venice, but that did not mean they were allied with the Great Evil.
Ah, but one did not need to be allied with or a part of something to serve it.
What could he do? Well, he could, at the least, move to protect a few people, who had no protections of their
