The Shadow Master (13 page)

Several of the shuttered and closed business, he noticed, had an odd symbol painted on the doors or walls, like a bowl with a flame in it. Some guild mark perhaps, or a symbol of the church or something. He didn't give it much more thought as around the next street corner he came upon a small tavern that was doing business as if nothing were amiss, and while it was not overly-busy, patrons were seated inside enjoying a drink and some gossip. Lorenzo suddenly felt hungry, thirsty and in need of some distraction, so he decided to join them, and entered the dim room and found a seat on a bench. A pretty young serving girl took his order. He found that the variety of food was notably less here than it was inside the Medici household and imagined that the rest of the city had been increasingly suffering shortages while they went from the best wine and fowl to the second best. Wealth always found a way to overcome adversity.

He watched the serving girl as she walked over to the counter, admiring the sway of her hips. Purely in the interests of perfecting the art of close observation, and analysis, he told himself. The restricted diet sat well on her thin body. Then a figure slid into the seat opposite him.

“
Bongiorno
, Lorenzo,” the man said. Lorenzo turned to look at him. It was the stranger. Still cloaked and hooded. It took Lorenzo a moment to collect himself. “I was looking for you,” Lorenzo said.

“You only had to look more carefully,” said the stranger. “I have been following you all morning.”

“Why?” asked Lorenzo.

“To see where you were going. And the answer is clearly nowhere.”

Lorenzo looked down at the table. “I have nowhere to go,” he mumbled.

“That's good,” said the stranger. “It means you might be more willing to consider my proposal to you.”

“What proposal is that?” asked Lorenzo.

“I have to ask you something. Consider it a test.”

Don't let it be a test of my skill at metaphors, Lorenzo thought. But the stranger then placed his hands on the table. Under one hand was the wicked curved knife with the ornate holes in the blade. In the other was a gold coin.

“Think of it as a matter of wife or death,” the stranger said.

“What?” asked Lorenzo.

The stranger sighed. “It is a play on words. You were meant to laugh. To lighten the gravity of the moment,” he said.

“I don't understand,” said Lorenzo.

The stranger hissed, “You might not like this test. Because if you get it wrong I might have to cut your throat.”

Lorenzo blinked rapidly. “I… What?” But the stranger only tapped the knife and gold coin on the table top. “What if I don't want to take the test?” asked Lorenzo.

“You no longer have a choice.” Lorenzo looked closely at the stranger, trying to see his eyes under the darkness of the hood. Why was he threatening him when he had just helped him. Or had he actually prevented him reaching Lucia?

“Then I'd have better odds of surviving if I agree to the test,” Lorenzo said.

“Good use of logic,” the stranger said. “I like logic.”

Lorenzo nodded his head. Slowly.

“Alright,” said the stranger. “Then I will test you to see if you are worthy. If you pass the test I will let you live.”

Another nod of Lorenzo's head.

“Are you ready?” the stranger asked.

Another nod of the head.

“What is your favourite number?” the stranger asked.

Lorenzo felt he must have misunderstood him. The stranger tapped the knife and the coin on the table top again. “Quickly now!” he said.

“Seven,” said Lorenzo.

“A good number,” said the stranger.

“And that's the test?” Lorenzo asked, wondering if the man might not be crazed.

“No. That was just a practice question,” the man said. “This is the real test. Listen carefully and then answer quickly. I have the power to grant you one wish. But not just anything. I'm going to give you a choice of two wishes. But first you need to know that the Medici have sent assassins to kill your beloved Lucia.”

Lorenzo's mouth dropped open. “No!” he said.

“Listen,” the stranger hissed. “This is very important. An assassin has seized her and thrown her from her chamber window and she has fallen to the streets below.”

Lorenzo understood now. It was a part of the test. “She is not dead,” the stranger said. “But she is seriously injured. She is, in fact, paralysed. The first wish I grant you is that you can live with her, take her for your bride, but she will be forever unable to hold you in her embrace or even speak more than gurgling sounds to you.”

Lorenzo felt his Adam's apple bobbing up and down rapidly. Or had this actually happened? “Your second wish,” said the stranger, “is that the apothecaries have a treatment that they can give Lucia, but it must be given within the first half hour of her injury and it only has a fifty per cent success rate. If it does not cure her, it will kill her and the blood within her brain will leak out her ears and eyes and mouth and nose and she will die horribly.”

Lorenzo felt tears coming unbidden to his eyes. “No,” he wanted to say. He could not make that choice. But the stranger hissed, “Choose quickly now!”

He stammered a moment, but then said defiantly, regardless of the knife in the stranger's hand. “They are not wishes. They are curses. I reject your wishes. I will choose my own wish, that I was free to run to her house and stand beneath her window at the moment the assassin hurls her from it. I will catch her when she falls or I will be killed by the impact, but I will use my body to shield her, saving her.”

The stranger sat there for some moments, then slid both hands off the table. He brought them back, empty, arms open wide, like a long lost relative greeting him. “Well done, Lorenzo,” he said, “You were as cool and brave as a… as a …” He looked up the ceiling and walls around him as if searching for a word that had just been there before him and was now escaping up there out of sight. Finally he said, “As cool and brave as something that was both cool and brave.” He reached out one arm and punched Lorenzo's shoulder, and said, “God, I hate it when metaphors evade me. Now come.”

“Where are we going?” asked Lorenzo. “To save Lucia?”

The stranger rose and, taking out the gold coin again, flipped it into the air. It landed in the cup of wine that the serving girl was carrying across the room to Lorenzo. “Yes. To save her indeed,” he said. “But to do that we have to first save the city, and then we might as well save the future of civilisation while we're at it. Now come, and steel yourself, for to do this we must descend into the very underworld itself, like… well, like, like two men going into the underworld.”

Then he reached over and took a handful of flat breads off the counter and stuffed them in his pockets. “We'll need these too,” he said. “It can be hungry work saving the future.”

 

 

XXII

Lucia skipped rapidly down the stairs from her tower chamber, unaware that she was being watched closely. She was late for lunch. Again. The handmaiden had already called her twice and told her the Duke and Duchess would not be pleased if she did not hurry, but she was not in a mood to be nagged by the handmaiden. She had been wearing leather breeches and practicing climbing on the inside walls of her chamber with Lorenzo's metal gloves. She was amazed at how much strength they gave her. She had flexed her fingers and felt the strong metal bend easily. Then she tested them by thrusting the sharp ends into a gap in the stonework of her wall. It held fast and she lifted herself gently off the ground. Then she clamped on the feet claws and felt them become her feet. She flexed her toes and then thrust them into cracks in the stonework, too, and then carefully climbed the wall of her room to the ceiling. She could never have imagined having the strength to do this. It felt like magic, though she knew it to be science. She would ask Lorenzo to explain to her how it worked when she next saw him.

Perched on the wall, she had a sudden feeling of what Lorenzo had felt climbing up to her. A mix of fear and anticipation. It made her a little giddy and she lowered herself to the floor. She waited until the feeling had passed and then climbed the wall again, upwards and then sideways, wondering how much practice she would need to be able to climb all the way down her tower to the street below.

Then she had taken the gloves off and hidden them in a cupboard in her room. She fussed over her gown and hair, as if Lorenzo would be there at the evening meal to see her, while the handmaiden knocked on her door again. “I am coming, I am coming,” Lucia said. And now she was following the dull girl down the curve of the stairs, her feet stepping lightly over the well-trodden stones, one hand sliding around the centre pillar, as she hurried downwards, her long crimson skirts dancing around her feet.

So easy to descend these stairs, she thought, but when each step depended on finding a firm grip between the stones it would be a different matter. If it were dark tonight, she would try it, though. She would wear her leather breeches and a dark shirt that made her look like a shadow. The guards would be on the lookout for anyone approaching the house, but not for anyone leaving it. She felt a rush of excitement fill her at just the idea of what she was going to do. She would then hurry to the Medici household and if she revealed her identity to the guards there, and told them that she had a message for Cosimo Medici, they would surely let her in. Or perhaps it would be better to ask for Galileo, for whom Lorenzo worked. That might be safer. It was going to be dangerous, but she had to try it.

A soft voice hissed behind her and she paused. She turned around, but there was nobody there. “Hello?” she said.

There was no answer. She took another step forward and then heard it again. “Lucia!” It sounded muffled. Could it be Lorenzo? He had found a way back into the house. She turned around and climbed three steps back up the tower. “Lorenzo?” she asked in a soft voice. “Is it you? I am here.”

There was no answer. She took three more steps back to the last landing she had passed and pressed one hand to her heart. She was certain she would be able to feel him if he were close to her. “Hello?” she said again.

“Lucia?” the muffled voice replied. It was coming from behind the wall. How could that be?

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I am here,” the muffled voice said.

“Where?” she asked. She paused and tried to feel the butterfly growing in her chest, but was too impatient to wait for it. There were hidden chambers all through the house, she knew, as there were in most of the larger houses of the Walled City. Lorenzo was clever enough to have found his way into the house through one of them. He must have been there for hours, peeping through one of the chinks onto the stairwell, waiting for her to pass alone. The brave boy. He would be cramped and cold and hungry. She would find a way to sneak him some food and drink. But she would find him first.

She placed her hands on the stone walls ahead of her, as if she might be able to feel his presence there. “Can you see me?” she asked. “I am right here.” There was no reply for a moment and she moved her hands further along the wall.

“Lucia?” the voice said again, further away.

“No. I'm here,” she said. “Don't go.”

“Lucia?” the voice said again, even further away.

“No,” she said. “I'm here.” She banged her fists on the wall, wanting to find a way through to the chamber inside. Wanting to find a way to reach him. “Lorenzo!” she called. She didn't hear the hidden door open slowly behind her and the dark figure step out. The gloved hand clamped around her mouth and pulled her backwards into the space between the walls, and she heard the door close with a soft click, and then there was only darkness.

 

 

 

XXIII

The door above today's chosen plague people closed with the dull thud of a prison door. The fortunate twelve – who were only eleven today – had been led into the city along back alleys and then down into a dark cellar and told to sit and wait. So they sat, and looked around the dim interior of the small room nervously. They had heard so many differing stories about what would become of them. Some said that there were wondrous cures for the plague and they would be better overnight. Others said that the apothecaries cut off their diseased body parts and limbs and sewed on the limbs of recently dead people from the city. Others said they had a magic fruit that you ate that stopped the plague, but you had to eat some every day or it would return.

The fat rogue who had traded two pigs, three chickens and four sacks of grain, who was named Frederigo, was the first to notice there was another door in the room. It was set so perfectly into the stone work that you might not otherwise have noticed it, but he was a survivor who had gotten this far by noticing small details and knowing when to act on them. His mother had known it in him early in his life and told family that he had a heart of gold – though she meant the metaphor to mean it was cold, yellow and hard to find.

He licked his lips and looked at the other ten plague people, calculating. If he sat right next to the door he would be the first one led through to whatever lay on the other side. But if it was not to his liking, he would rather not be first. But if they did have a cure and did not actually have enough for everyone, he would rather not be at the last one in. So he rose, as if stretching and strode across the room to sit himself anew between the others. Four people would go in front of him and six would go after him. That seemed a reasonably safe bet.

He looked at the others around him and thought to himself that if he had to take them all on at once he could do it. It was the first thing he thought when stuck with a group of people. Could he fight them all? Could he beat them? Who should he attack first? Who would face him and who would flee? It had been like that all the way from Naples up to the Walled City. The countryside was in chaos, with bands of plague outlaws preying on the weak. The irony of it was that the plague would be the ultimate victor over them all; no matter how strong or how cunning or how ruthless they were, the plague would get them all in the end.