Dave Duncan - The Alchemist's Apprentice

“You are ahead of me,” I said. “I was going to ask you the doctor’s name so I could find out what medicines he had prescribed, if any.”

“I am still ahead of you, but I feel unhappily close to betraying a colleague.” The gloom did not hide Isaia’s discomfort. “He is a good man, although he was a better one twenty years ago. He, too, asked my opinion of the case this afternoon.”

“Why consult you if he believed the death was natural?”

“He was having second thoughts about it, although foxglove had not occurred to him. When I suggested it, he admitted he had never prescribed it in his life or seen its symptoms. I advised him to take his suspicions to the Ten.”

“Will he?”

Isaia laughed. “What do you think?”

But now that Isaia had confirmed that there had been murder done, I had no excuse not to do so. I could feel thin ice cracking under my feet.

“I am very grateful and will tell my master. Also, I ask a more personal favor. There is an attorney named Ottone Imer.”

Isaia is much too quick-witted ever to hesitate. His pause was deliberate.

“I have heard of him.” The near-darkness emphasized how resonant and compelling his voice is. Usually it is soft, a comforting bedside voice, but now I heard the steel in it, warning me off.

I said, “I heard rumors that he is heavily in debt.”

Even in the Republic, which tends to listen to its purse more than its Pope, officially only Jews lend money, and moneylenders are as secretive as doctors or courtesans.

“This is important, Alfeo, or you would not ask?”

“It may turn murder into treason. That could not make the crime more serious, but it might save some innocent people from suspicion.”

Isaia sighed. “Then I agree that it is important. I will ask around. They will tell me if I say it is important, and I will let you know very soon.”

I thanked him, aware that the Ten’s spies might take many days to dig out what I was going to learn “very soon” and Isaia’s information might be better than anything they would gather.

“And now you should go, gentile,” Isaia said, “or you will be locked in with us unbelievers all night and have to eat my wife’s cooking and play chess with me and evict my children from their bed and worry your master.”

“You make it sound very tempting, doctor,” I said.

G iorgio was still at the quay, standing within a group of gondoliers and listening more than talking, as always. He strolled over to meet me.

“No boys?” I asked.

He gave me a blood-chilling look. “You didn’t give them money, did you?”

“You think I am an idiot? A half-witted softhearted troublemaker?”

“How much?”

I dodged the question. “Not enough to buy them any serious trouble. I expect they’ll be here shortly, I just have to visit the Ca’ della Naves and I can walk there from here. I won’t be long.” I fled the field.

Like almost any father, when his sons are old enough to earn money at odd jobs, Giorgio insists they turn it in as part of the family income. Corrado and Christoforo, for instance, had been working on and off at the building project on the other side of Rio San Remo. I felt he should let them keep at least some of their wages, else why should they bother? But it was none of my business and I must not meddle in his affairs.

The mysterious foreigners who had gate-crashed the book showing lived a few minutes’ walk away, so I might as well go and see them. Had I been offered my choice at that point, I would have spoken with the procurator’s granddaughter, the mysterious Bianca, who had probably had more opportunity than anyone to tamper with his wine, but the Orseolo family was in mourning and I had no authority to intrude.

As I hurried through the darkening calli of San Marcuola parish, I worried how much things had changed the moment Isaia confirmed that the procurator’s death was murder. I had a clear duty now to report that fact to the authorities. Of course an apprentice is bound to obey his master, so I might argue that I must report to the Maestro first, but I did not think that excuse would weigh very much with the Ten.

And what if the Maestro refused? If he still insisted on trying to find the killer by himself, he would be courting disaster. His efforts to unmask the murderer might well be seen as an attempt to bury evidence, not uncover it. Or we might scare the criminal into fleeing beyond the reach of justice. Then both of us would find ourselves where I had been that morning, in the Leads. If that shock didn’t kill the old man outright, the disgrace would ruin him. Sier Alvise Barbolano would evict him, his clients desert him.

But I hate to start something and not finish it. So does he. Half-done is do, he tells me often enough. He had occult tools that the Ten did not, or at least would never admit to using. Even I could invoke a fiend, and that might be less dangerous than what I was doing now, meddling in the Ten’s business.

And then there were the doge’s parting words: I will see his head roll across the Piazzetta. The doge did not trust the Council of Ten to see justice done. The Ten are politicians, all seventeen of them, and the other sixteen are eagerly planning promotion to higher office. They lust after votes in the Great Council, and if the murderer turned out to be a patrician, then the nobles of the Ten would be wary of antagonizing his relatives and friends.

I peered into the parish tavern, partly to see if the twins were there, which they were not, and also to inquire which apartment in the Ca’ della Naves was infested with heretics. The drinkers gave me the information I wanted plus some seriously disapproving looks.

As I started up the stairs in the big house, I began to have misgivings. The Republic’s attitude to foreigners is complicated. For centuries, pilgrims have passed through Venice on their way to the Holy Land, and there are state officials, tholomarii, stationed at San Marco to take care of them, to see that they find proper housing and transportation. The inns they use are carefully regulated and, although they do have to pay more for goods and services than residents do, they must not be cheated any more than the law allows. On the other hand, the senate is very wary of foreign politics. Contact between Venetian nobles and foreigners is strongly discouraged, and is actually illegal in the case of foreign ambassadors. A nobleman can be put to death just for meeting with a foreign ambassador in private. Feather was not an ambassador, but a procurator had been murdered. What I was about to do began to seem foolhardy.

I was very close to talking myself out of my mission when I heard voices just above me, one more flight up. Not just voices, but a woman shouting a barbaric guttural rant that I could barely recognize as French. I swallowed the bait and took the rest of the stairs at a trot.

Thus do the stars dictate our lives.

She was just inside the door. He was just outside it. She was one of the largest women I had ever seen, so much taller than I that at first glance I thought she must be wearing the stilt shoes of a courtesan. She was blonde, not just Violetta’s bleached reddish gold, but a Germanic ash-blonde displaying a complicated sculpture of silvery curls on which balanced a tiny bonnet. A high fan-shaped collar formed a backdrop, her neckline was surprisingly demure, yet her gown was a voluminous mass of purple brocade and gold lace that would have been denounced by the Venetian Senate as absurd extravagance. It was not, obviously, a local costume. Her eyes were the watery blue of sapphires and her cheeks were flushed with anger.

He was clutching a parcel with both arms and prepared to defend it to the death. She was speaking loudly and clearly, so his failure to understand her was pure perversity.