The Chamber of Ten

She answered no messages, but she did send one to Domenic. I’m fine, Dom. Thank you, and I’m sorry I ditched you. But I have to find Nico. She knew how worried he’d be at that, and seconds after she’d sent it she realized how unfair it was putting him in such a position. But she thought she owed him some contact. And she wasn’t about to lie.

She knew that Domenic would be looking, and he knew this city well. But she had the advantage of being truly lost.

Just after four o’clock, her wounded arm aching more now than ever before, she was sitting at a table toward the back of a great pizzeria she’d been to with Nico several times before. She had skipped lunch and needed to refuel. She’d eaten, and was making short work of a strong cup of coffee when someone passed by the window.

Many people had passed the restaurant window in the half hour she’d been inside, but something about this one had snagged her attention like a hook in her cheek. She felt drawn to it, standing and knocking her table so that coffee slopped over the lip of her cup. The figure was already gone.

Not for a moment did she think it was Nico. This person moved quickly, yet with a slight stoop, and there was nothing about the fleeting silhouette that she recognized. Yet she was drawn to the restaurant’s front door, opening it and staring after whoever had passed. The street was empty, the canal running alongside silent for now but for the gentle lap of water against stone.

Looking into the emptiness, she shivered and knocked her wounded arm against the doorjamb.

“Would you like the bill?” the little waitress who’d been serving her asked. She was standing at Geena’s elbow, perhaps afraid that Geena was about to leave without paying, or maybe just concerned.

“Yes, please,” Geena said, still peering out the door. “The city’s quiet today.”

“It’s a dreadful day,” the waitress said.

Geena let the door close, keeping the air-conditioning inside, and turned to look at the waitress. “What do you mean?”

The young woman’s eyes widened. “You haven’t heard? Terrible stuff. An old building collapsed in Dorsoduro, just fell into the canal. Seven people were killed. They’re saying there’s some kind of tomb underneath.”

“A tomb? What are you talking about?” Geena asked, more sharply than she’d intended.

The waitress shrugged. “All I know is what my customers tell me. I wish I could go home and watch the news.”

Geena stared at her for a few seconds before the waitress shrugged again and went to fetch her bill, leaving her to wonder. Her archaeologist’s mind went into overdrive. She wanted to know what building this was, how its foundations had been undermined enough for it to crumble into the canal, and—more than anything—if there really had been some kind of tomb revealed by its collapse. With her team busy at the Biblioteca, Tonio would send someone else on the university’s behalf. The city council would want someone from the department there, especially if there was some kind of archaeological value to the site. But if people had been killed, such concerns would hardly be the first things on anyone’s mind.

And they can’t be your concerns, she told herself. It has to be someone else’s job.

Unless it was related to the madness that had begun when Nico had shattered the stone jar at the center of the Chamber of Ten. Could it really be coincidence that an ancient tomb had been discovered buried beneath a building in Venice only days after they had found the Chamber of Ten and had its wall give way? She supposed it might be possible, but it didn’t seem likely.

But if it was all connected, then how?

It occurred to her that Nico might be responsible for the building collapse, but she forced the thought away. How could one man accomplish such a feat? She was letting her anxiety get the best of her. The only way to get the answers she wanted, to find the truth, was to track him down. Until she managed to do that, all of her questions would have to be put on hold, along with whatever crisis might be unfolding in Venice.

X

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