The Chamber of Ten

There are several soldiers waiting in the boat, all of them heavily armed, each of them shifting nervously as they watch the approaching group.

Surrounding the droop-faced man are several more soldiers. They give him a wide berth, but their pikes are held horizontally, blocking any route through their ranks.

The tall man who owns this memory is chanting, and dark droplets spatter the cobbles behind him. In this pale, gloomy morning they have no color, but they splash like blood.

The canal beside them does have color. It is red.

They reach the waterfront and the soldiers in the boat stand to attention. They blink quickly, breath pluming from their mouths, and their fear is a palpable thing.

“So those cowards wouldn’t come to see me on my way, Volpe?” the droop-faced man asks.

“On my advice, Giardino Caravello.”

“You fear me.”

“No,” the tall Volpe says mildly, and Caravello’s confidence seems to fade.

“You have no right—” he begins, but Volpe intercedes.

“I have every right!” he roars. A flock of startled pigeons lifts off behind them, wings snapping at the air as they flee through the mist. “The safety of Venice is paramount in my mind and heart. You would seek to corrupt it. Tear it.”

“And you believe that you are incorruptible—”

“No! No more talking, Caravello. The Council of Ten has decreed that you be banished from the State of Venice forever, and if you return you will be executed.” He steps forward, passing between the line of soldiers until he is almost face-to-face with the other man. He smells garlic and wine on his breath. “Your death will be quiet and unobserved, in some dirty courtyard. Your body will be weighed down with rocks. Added to the foundations of the city.”

Caravello tries to smile, but his illness turns it into a sneer. “You cannot frighten me.”

“I have no wish to frighten you,” Volpe says. “Just to kill you. Give thanks to the Council that you suffer only banishment.”

He steps back and nods to the soldiers, and they move forward hesitantly, none of them catching Caravello’s eye as they herd him slowly toward the boat.

“Faster!” Volpe hisses. “The man is no longer Doge. He’s lower than you all, and I’m already sick of the stench of him.”

Caravello glares at each soldier as he boards the boat, and every one of them averts his eyes.

Volpe grins. “Enjoy your small victories. They will be your last.” Then he presses both hands together before him, chanting, shoulders tensing, and Caravello falls onto his back in the boat. He shouts, but his voice sounds muted and pained. A hazy redness surrounds his face.

“Go well,” Volpe says. He turns his back on the boat and walks toward the heart of the city, and as he passes by, the canal turns from red to black.

Geena snapped awake, gasping into her pillow, reaching for Nico but finding only cool sheets. She sat up and scanned the gloom of her bedroom, but he was not there.

I knew everything they were saying, she thought, but already the vision seemed to be fading. Like any vivid dream, it seemed to be built on air and mist, and waking cast the first eddies that would disperse it.

“That was no dream,” she said out loud, hoping to hear a reply. But her apartment was silent, empty of anyone but her. She sat there for a while, sore from the night before, wondering where Nico had gone and wishing for the safety of dawn.

IV

NICO STOOD on the tiled courtyard in front of the church of Madonna dell’Orto, watching the rising sun lighten the brick facade from brown to rose to a pale peach. The arched windows of the bell tower were steeped in shadows, as though the night had barricaded itself inside to try to outlast the sun. The white stonework of the arches and the various statues in the facade all seemed to be emerging from shadows themselves, and gleamed like ivory as the morning light revealed them.

The Madonna dell’Orto at sunrise was a sight to behold. But Nico would have been better able to appreciate it if he could have remembered precisely how he had come to be there.

He swayed a little, then regained his balance. His thoughts were muzzy and he tried to shake the feeling. The morning seemed to be burning off the shadows in his mind just as it did those that had cloaked the city.

Think. You kissed Geena while she slept, got out of bed and dressed, careful not to wake her, and left her place.

That much he did recall, along with the confusion that had roiled within him. His departure had been urgent and he had hurried through the maze of passages and bridges to the edge of the Grand Canal, with his pulse racing and the sense that some vital task must be accomplished. Paranoia made the small hairs stand up on the back of his neck and he had reached out with his thoughts, seeking the heightened emotions he could often sense. Fear had its own flavor. And malice. How many times had he escaped violence in a bar or club by departing just before things turned ugly?

But he had sensed no malice, no violent intentions, no one following him. Why he should think someone might be following him, Nico didn’t know. It made no sense, but he could not escape that suspicion and had hurried onward, more frantic than ever to reach his destination …

… only he didn’t know where he was going. Not at first. It felt to him as though some enormous hook had been set into his rib cage and was tugging him forward. He had hurried along the edge of the Grand Canal in vain hopes of discovering a water taxi running in the pre-dawn hours, knowing that crossing the water was the next step toward his destination.

His memory had holes in it. Blackouts, like some awful drunk.

He remembered sitting in a creaking traghetto, its small motor buzzing, echoing off black water below and black sky above. Somehow he had persuaded the man to take him across the Grand Canal from Guideca to San Marco. The fellow had looked exhausted; he’d probably been up all night ferrying revelers to various hotels and clubs. Nico had tried to pay him, but the man had gotten a pale, frightened look on his face and had shooed him away.

Only when he walked through the vast emptiness of St. Mark’s Square at half past three in the morning, and then into the labyrinth of alleys and bridges and canals beyond, did it occur to him where he was headed. The destination had popped into his head the way a song title might once he had given up trying to remember it.

He had nearly turned around then. Geena had been soft and warm and in need of reassurance. Yet the compulsion had been impossible to resist, sending him out to wander Venice in the small hours of the morning with only the sounds of scurrying rats and the water lapping the sides of the canals to keep him company.

Now he found himself here, gazing up at the beautiful face of this church, and he could recall only about half of that journey. Portions of his memory, even of the path he had taken to get here, were blacked out.

In their place, other memories rushed in—vivid recollections of the sounds of construction, the stink of men working, the hoisting of statues into place, sculptors at work.… His hands trembled as he stared at the church.

“Impossible,” he whispered, there in the light of the rising sun.

Yet if he closed his eyes he could practically see the workers constructing the church’s facade, placing the pilasters, laying the brickwork around the enormous circular rose window that lit up now with the dawn’s light.

“What the hell is happening to me?” he asked the sunrise.

A piece of paper skittered across the tiles in the breeze, eddied in a circle, then continued on its way. He ought to turn around and go back to Geena, spoon behind her and press his nose into her hair, breathing in the scent of her. That was what he wanted to do. But somehow the commands did not travel from his brain to his