Dave Duncan - The Alchemists pursuit

When I did appear, the Maestro poked and prodded me and claimed that he detected no sign of the wound fever that kills more victims than wounds do. I knew that it was still too early to tell.

We said nothing more. We did not make eye contact until well after noon. I had failed him. He had foreseen when and where the Strangler would strike again and I had failed to block the attack. That was failure, the bitterest of tastes. The Maestro, for his part, had almost had to sign a receipt for one dead apprentice, and that was not part of the agreement either. Small wonder we had little to say to each other.

Most of the morning I spent reading and trying to memorize some of Ovid's Metamorphoses so I could be more worthy of my lady. He sat in his red chair with a copy of Paracelsus's Paragranum, but I noticed that he wasn't turning pages. He appeared to be staring at the slate table, doing absolutely nothing, which was another end-of-an-epoch landmark.

At one point I lowered my book because the print was a blur.

"He wasn't tall enough," I said.

Silence.

"Bulky," I said, "but not tall. Domenico said that Zorzi was tall. The Honeycat I caught wasn't tall."

"Honeycat uses a rope, not a dagger."

"A cord isn't fast enough in a crowd. He was forced back to using a knife because there were too many witnesses."

My master snorted. "Or because he wasn't Honeycat."

"But then…" But then had the Maestro's clairvoyance been distracted by a pending murder involving a different murderer?

"But what?" he snarled.

I thought it out as he has taught me. "He was Honeycat," I said. "Don't ask me why I think that, because I have no rational reason to, but I am positive that the man I grabbed as I fell was Honeycat. I know that isn't logical."

"But it may still be correct," he growled. "Stop thinking about it and eventually you will understand, even if you have to dream it."

The news had reached the parish and was distributed in the campo after Mass. There would have been no use my heading over to San Zanipolo to ask the residents what had happened there the previous night. I was an outsider and if the Virgin herself had returned to earth there to bless Carnival, even that would still be none of my business. The Council of Ten would have heard from its local spies, though, and I was half expecting Missier Grande to coming a-knocking at our door, or even send his vizio for me, which would be much more humiliating. Fortunately the Ten hesitate to invade the privacy of a noble's house and sier Alvise Barbolano is as noble as they come.

The Maestro lacks the Ten's resources, but he does have Giorgio and Mama Angeli. Both belong to enormous families, and there is hardly a parish in Venice that does not include some relative of theirs. In this case, as Giorgio explained when they all returned from church, one of his cousins' husband's brother Andreo lived in San Zanipolo where another poor woman had been murdered.

"I need to talk with him," the Maestro said. "Fetch him. Bring an eyewitness, too, if he can find one for you. Bring his entire family and feed them here if you want."

"He is not married," Giorgio replied without a flicker of a smile. "But he will eat enough to make up for that."

Finding a bachelor on a day of rest could have been tricky, but we were fortunate. Within twenty minutes a young man in his Sunday best was standing in front of the Maestro's chair, answering questions. Andreo was an apprentice carpenter and a juvenile version of Giorgio himself-short, heavy shouldered, and given to thinking before he spoke. He was as much of an eyewitness as we were likely to find, having been right there in the Campo San Zanipolo when the terrible thing happened. He had spoken with people who had seen the fight.

"They say she was attacked by two men, one of them dressed as a friar and the other wearing a white cloak."

"Tell me about the woman," Nostradamus said.

Andreo made the sign of the cross. "Marina Bortholuzzi was her name, lustrissimo."

"Stabbed where?"

"In the, um, chest, lustrissimo."

"What sort of woman?"

"The women claim she was a prostitute," Andreo said, carefully distancing himself from such knowledge-no man in the parish would now admit ever having heard of Marina Bortholuzzi. "They say she was past her best. Used to be very high and mighty and lately hasn't been paying her rent on time. So the women were saying."

The man in the white cloak had shouted and run away, drawing the crowd off so his accomplice could escape in the darkness. So Andreo said, and no doubt that was the popular account. It did not worry me overmuch, because the gash on my ribs was evidence as to what had really happened.

The Maestro sighed and thanked him. "Alfeo, a ducat for him."

He had done well. I had not. Lucia, Ruosa, Caterina, and now Marina.

Failure.

Soon after that we went into dinner, Nostradamus walking with the aid of his canes, although Bruno hovered anxiously in the salone, eager to assist.

We ate without exchanging a single word, the Maestro and I. I did not speak because I had nothing useful to offer. Zorzi had been tall. The false friar I had assaulted on Campo San Zanipolo had not been tall. Zorzi was almost certainly dead, his brother had said, murdered by a bounty hunter. Our evidence for identifying the killer as Zorzi Michiel was looking flimsier by the hour, and yet something nibbled and nagged away at the back of my mind, some thought that I could not get hold of.

The Maestro's silence was ominous. I kept hoping he would decide to try another foreseeing, but he didn't. Judging by past experience, I feared that he had dreamed up something else, some maneuver so exotic and dangerous that he was trying to find an alternative.

After dinner, when we returned to the atelier, he was hardly into his chair before he said, "You must go and see Carlo Celsi again."

"Sunday afternoon. He'll be attending the Great Council." And Fulgentio Trau would be on duty, which explained why he had not come to see me.

"This evening will suffice. Now a contract with donna Alina Orio. Better do a draft first."

"What terms?" I asked, reaching for a sheet of paper.

"Three hundred ducats to prove that Gentile Michiel was stabbed by someone other than his son, Zorzi."

I selected a quill and inspected its tip carefully. "You believe that?"

"Yes, but as yet the evidence is merely indicative, not indisputable."

Evidence? What evidence? He waited for a moment, no doubt hoping I would ask him so he could tell me to work it out for myself. When I didn't, he continued.

"The primary objective remains to track down this killer of courtesans, and I still believe that the two cases are connected. I want you to question every soul in that house who may, in your opinion, have any useful knowledge of either matter. The old lady can impose that on them, can't she?"

"Possibly not on Bernardo or Domenico, but I fancy everyone else is sufficiently terrified of her."

"Mm. Make that just two hundred ducats. I don't want to frighten her into changing her mind. And I shall need a week. If I haven't caught Honeycat by then, we shall have to try something else."

If he wanted me to go back to Carlo Celsi, he must already have something else in mind. He would have to tell me eventually, so I wasn't about to ask. I set to work on a draft, trying out a Carolingian minuscule hand that I had been studying. I was close to finished when someone rapped on the front door.

I rose eagerly, despite an angry reprimand from my stitches, because I hoped that the caller would be Violetta returned from her house party. As always, I left the atelier door ajar so that the Maestro could listen. I opened one flap of the big outer doors.

Many odd people come calling on the Maestro, but probably no couple I have ever found waiting out there at the top of the stairs has surprised me more. The woman was swathed from the ground up in the habit of a Benedictine nun, with only her fingers visible to show that there was a woman inside that menacing pillar of black. The man at her side, gray robed and tonsured, was the third Michiel son, the former Timoteo. I bowed to his austere, Old Testament stare.