Christopher Golden - The Chamber of Ten

Also by Christopher Golden and Tim Lebbon

The Map of Moments

Mind the Gap

Also by Christopher Golden

The Lost Ones: Book Three of the Veil

The Borderkind: Book Two of the Veil

The Myth Hunters: Book One of the Veil

Wildwood Road

The Boys Are Back in Town

The Ferryman

Straight on ‘Til Morning

Strangewood

The Shadow Saga

Of Saints and Shadows

Angel Souls and Devil Hearts

Of Masques and Martyrs

The Gathering Dark With Mike Mignola

Baltimore, or, The Steadfast

Tin Soldier and the Vampire

Also by Tim Lebbon

Novels

The Island

Fallen

30 Days of Night

Dawn

The Everlasting

Dusk

Hellboy: Unnatural Selection

Mesmer

The Nature of Balance

Hush (with Gavin Williams)

Face

Until She Sleeps

Desolation

Berserk

Bar None

Novellas

A Whisper of Southern Lights

White

Naming of Parts

Changing of Faces

Exorcising Angels (with Simon Clark)

Dead Man’s Hand

Pieces of Hate

The Reach of Children

Collections

Last Exit for the Lost

Faith in the Flesh

As the Sun Goes Down

White and Other Tales of Ruin

Fears Unnamed

After the War

In memory of Bonnie Moore

Therefore I tell my sorrows to the stones;

Who, though they cannot answer my distress,

Yet in some sort they are better than the tribunes,

For that they will not intercept my tale:

When I do weep, they humbly at my feet

Receive my tears and seem to weep with me.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,

Titus Andronicus , Act 3, Scene 1

I

GEENA HODGE stood on the bow of the water taxi as it chugged toward San Marco, the colors of the Doge’s Palace brought to life by the sun, and wondered how much longer Venice would survive before it crumbled into the sea. Though the Italian government had committed to a seven-billion-dollar project to install a complex system of flood gates to hold back storm surges and seasonal high tides, it was already over budget and behind schedule. Sometimes it seemed hopeless.

But even the most optimistic Venetians were fooling themselves. The city had been built on top of wooden pilings sunk into a salt marsh, with sediment and clay beneath that, which was little better than raising palaces on top of a sponge. Venice bore down, squeezing a little more water out of its foundations every year, and sinking just a bit farther. Between that and the rising global sea level, Venice was screwed. Maybe the new tidal gate system, MOSE, would work well enough—fouling up the Venetian lagoon’s ecosystem in the meantime—and maybe it wouldn’t. Even with the best-case scenario, they would only manage to buy themselves a century.

La Serenissima , they called it—the most serene—and Venice remained a city of serenity and beauty. She was still Queen of the Adriatic, steeped in history and scholarship and art, unique in all the world. There was nowhere like it, and the world would never see its like again. But much of the population had fled the routine flooding and the absurd tourism-driven cost of living in the city, and those who remained were like the curators of a living museum.

Geena’s own project, approved by the Italian and Venetian authorities, was evidence that some people in the city understood that ruin could be slowed but not prevented.

“As lovely as ever,” said the man beside her. “She’s a gem, Venice.” Howard Finch, a television producer from the BBC, had come to her in search of a story. And though she had one to give him—as extraordinary a story of archaeology and history as he was ever likely to encounter—she wished he would go away. Reporters were bad enough, always armed with just enough research to get the story wrong. But producers could be much worse. They didn’t even try to convince you they weren’t full of shit.

“Haven’t been here in nearly twenty years,” Finch continued. “Hard to believe some of the things I’ve heard.”

“Such as?” Geena asked, and immediately regretted it.

He puffed himself up in that way that was universal among the very pompous and very rich in every culture. Geena had been born and raised in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York. She had met plenty of arrogant men in her thirty-six years, but as bad as Americans could be, the Brits had had much more time to perfect the art of pompousness. Pomposity. Whatever.

“Talked to a bloke last week who said nobody lives on the ground floor at all anymore. Got all the windows bricked up, just letting it go to ruin. Surrendering. And those walkways in the Piazza San Marco—”

“Passarelle.”

“They’re out all the time now, so people can get through when the canal water floods in.”

The water taxi’s engine shifted from a purr to a groan as it began to slow, gliding toward a dock not far from the trees of the Giardini ex Reali. They still had an excellent view of the Doge’s Palace, but behind his façade Finch seemed uninterested in anything except the sound of his own voice.

Geena smiled at him. She had pulled her hair back in a neat blond ponytail and had actually put on makeup this morning, asked pleadingly by Tonio Schiavo, the head of the archaeology department at Ca’Foscari University, to “come smart.” The smile had been part of her marching orders as well. Usually Geena did not have to be told to smile—most days she loved her life—but she wanted to be working, getting her hands dirty, not playing tour guide.

“Mr. Finch, not too long ago the low-lying areas of the city flooded maybe eight or ten times in a year. Now that number averages closer to one hundred. A third of the time, the Piazza San Marco is full of water from the canals, which includes raw sewage, among other unpleasant things. Everyone has Wellington boots in Venice, or they wrap plastic around their shoes, even to use the walkways put out for just that purpose.”

Finch nodded in fascination. “Christ, it’s like something out of one of those crap sci-fi apocalypse films, isn’t it?” he asked, without looking to her for confirmation. “But they’ve really abandoned the ground floors?”

“Sadly, yes. The bricks are wearing away on the outside. On the inside—what would you do if your first floor was flooded four months out of the year? They’re sealed off, left to the water.”

“And then what? It keeps rising, they move up another floor?”

“I’ve wondered the same thing myself,” she admitted, but didn’t dare comment further. Nothing negative , Tonio had instructed, and Geena had no wish to jeopardize her stewardship of this project.

Besides, they had other things to talk about.

Finch had come to Venice on a scouting trip to find out if the Biblioteca project might be worth some air time on the BBC, or if the whole thing would amount to as much hot air as Geraldo Rivera opening Al Capone’s vault. Geena didn’t mind the idea of a film crew coming in to do a short documentary on the Biblioteca, especially if it would mean some attention would be paid to the broader aspects of her project.

As Venice sank, history was being sucked down into the lagoon. Even the oldest buildings in the city were built on top of the foundations of more ancient structures. The sinking was nothing new. Once upon a time, Venetians had simply raised the ground floors of their buildings every so often to combat the rising water. But with every inch that the weight of Venice dragged it down, and every inch that the sea level rose, more of that ancient architecture was being lost forever.