Christopher Golden - The Chamber of Ten

Until some unthinking fool had replaced the bells.

All of these thoughts were racing through Nico’s mind. Spellcraft? Enchantment? He stared at the corner, where the bricks had deteriorated a little, sagging backward as though a void existed behind them—which he knew to be true. It seemed amazing that no one had noticed the way the wall had sunk in that corner, or attempted to fix it.

Not that long since the old bells were taken away, then , a voice whispered in Nico’s head.

“Stop,” he said, pounding his fists against his temples.

He wanted to know, wanted to see all of the pieces of history that lurked in his brain, but he did not want Volpe whispering in the back of his head in that archaic dialect. Until now, he hadn’t even realized that the thoughts were not in his own modern Italian, but here he was thinking in a language he shouldn’t even understand to begin with.

A century or less , Volpe thought.

“Stop!” Nico shouted.

But this time his hands didn’t go to his temples. Instead he reached out for the bricks, digging his fingers into the crumbling mortar around them, scraping and prodding furiously, so that the pads of his fingertips were raw. His breath came fast. Several times the blackness swept in at the corners of his mind, only to retreat. He wanted to know what was hidden behind the wall in that brick corner, but it was not Nico doing the digging. He knew he ought to stop, or at least be more careful, but still he worked his fingers in, breaking up mortar, pulling chips of it out, loosening several bricks.

He stopped, breathing raggedly. His fingers burned with pain. He thought he ought to look at them, but seemed unable to lift his hands. He looked down and saw tiny drops of blood falling from his fingertips. He had to bind them. Get somewhere he could disinfect and bandage them.

Instead he thrust his fingers between two loose bricks. One of them tumbled into a space between the inner and outer walls, and then he began to tear others loose, pulling them out to thunk on the floor at his feet.

Damnable bells , he thought. He could have hidden it in the wall of the nave or in a crypt beneath the church, but he had thought his use of the bells ingenious …

Nico blinked, swaying on his feet. He breathed evenly, fighting off the darkness. Not my thoughts. Those were not my thoughts. How can this just be psychic residue? It doesn’t feel like echoes anymore .

He paused to listen for anyone who might have been summoned by the sound of his excavation, but he heard no urgent footsteps, nor any cry of alarm. Perhaps the church had been locked and he had broken in. Or, if the doors had been open, perhaps the priest or caretaker who had unlocked them this morning lurked in some back room, thinking it too early for anyone to be in the building.

His hands pushed into the gap in the wall, reached down, and touched something solid. A smile spread across his face as his fingers clasped its edges and drew it out. A layer of grit silted off, showering to the floor. Gently he brushed dust from the cover, running his fingers over the leather, still impossibly supple after all these years, the pages stiff and yellow but not yet brittle. Five hundred years bricked up in a wall and the book looked little different than it had on the day he had placed it there, laying the last of the bricks himself.

The cover bore no letters in any language, no markings at all, but this was only right. The Frenchman from whom he had acquired the book had called it Le Livre de l’Inconnu—The Book of the Nameless . And rightly so, for it contained unspeakable things. It was the most important and most dangerous book that Petrarch had collected during the years of his voracious acquisition of knowledge, but possessing it had so troubled the poet that he had entrusted it to the abbot of a German monastery. In time, Volpe had managed to acquire it for himself, and return it to Venice. He had made good use of it, until his time had grown short and he had realized he had to hide it away so that it would not fall into the wrong hands.

Unable to control himself, Nico lifted the book and kissed the soft leather. But he did not open it, and would not do so in this holy place.

As he left the bell tower, hurrying down the steps, his thoughts strayed far ahead, already thinking about the next thing he would need to acquire if he was to restore the protections that had been shattered when he had dropped that jar … when his heart had been exposed to the air and the spell broken.

Nico froze two steps from the bottom.

His heart. The gray, withered thing in the urn had been the heart of Zanco Volpe.

Footsteps shuffled just ahead. His throat dry, his head aching, Nico looked up to see a priest with thinning white hair and a curved spine hobbling toward him. The old man stared at him.

“Who are you?” the priest asked, righteous ire reddening his face. “What do you think you’re doing up there?”

Nico did not know the answers. Before he had entered the bell tower, the line between himself and Volpe had been distinct—one alive and one dead, one real and one an echo, one modern and one ancient. Now the two seemed more blurred. He did not know where he ended and Volpe began, whose will controlled his hands, whose soul gazed out from behind his eyes. Insane, for Volpe had been dead for centuries. He was nothing more than the smoke that lingered after the fire had burned out.

“Who are you?” the priest demanded again.

Nico tucked the book under one arm and fled, racing past the priest, through the nave, down an aisle, and out the door, with the old man shouting hoarsely after him.

V

GEENA ARRIVED at the university just a few minutes before eight o’clock in the morning. She strode down a corridor lined with faculty offices, her footfalls echoing loudly. In the summertime, the university always felt abandoned to her. There were still students and teachers around, but far fewer, and the usually bustling main building seemed like some old haunted mansion.

She had stopped by Nico’s apartment on the way and used her key to let herself in. It would have given her peace of mind to find him asleep in his own bed, but she had known the moment she entered that the place was empty. Dust motes swirled in her wake as she passed through. He slept at her place nearly every night, and only retreated to his own when one of them had to focus on work that did not involve the other. Considering that they were both working on the Biblioteca project, that was rare.

If Nico needed to clear his head, Geena knew he was much more likely to go wandering around the city than to hide out in his apartment, but she had to check, just in case. There had been no sign he had ever come home after the incident two days before, not even to change his clothes. The shower was dry, no damp towels hung from the bathroom door, and the only dirty laundry was a sack that he had brought back from her place a few days earlier and not gotten around to doing yet.

Stalker, much? she thought.

But she knew she wasn’t being a stalker. As much as she loved him and depended on him, this wasn’t even about the security of their relationship. She was simply worried about him.

The university was her second stop. The Biblioteca project was her baby, and Dr. Schiavo would expect her to be on top of things. He had given her some breathing room the day before, and she appreciated that, especially because—officially—he had to pretend he did not know that she and Nico were sleeping together. But now, as far as anyone in the department knew, Nico was “back,” and no one had drowned. Tonio would want her to get down to business.

Her keys jangled as she took them out of her pocket. A loud, buzzing electric hum came along the corridor, the familiar sound of one of the janitors buffing the floor. It eased her mind to know that, contrary to appearances, she was not alone here.