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Authors: Michelle Lovric

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #General

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BOOK: The Mourning Emporium
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Then he held Renzo away from him and peered at the boy’s pinched white face. “What, no tears? Are youse entrapolated in your grief still? But Lorenzo, you must cry, let us weep together for your sweet mother, and for Venice too.”

At this Sargano Alicamoussa burst into noisy sobs. “An adorable woman!” he wept. “Our incomparable city! And the darling dolphins too! My heart’s dropping off in lumps with the sorrow of it.”

“I carved some violets for my mother,” said Renzo dully. “With my penknife.”

“What a skill you have, dearest boy! Now, I am quite decided—youse shall come live with me and my wife, Mercer. We shall adopterate youse, yes.”

Unheard, the policeman murmured, “Err, sir …?”

Signor Alicamoussa looked deep into Renzo’s deadened eyes, whispering, “We Incogniti take care of our own.”

The policeman stepped forward, holding out the Mayor’s order. “Uncommon decent of you, sir, however the boy’s already signed over to the Scilla. The boat’s been notified. They’ll be expecting him aboard any minute.”

“Beg yours? The Scilla? Feather me, there’s a coincidence! Pearler! Wait till … But no, no, no, no, no, dear Lorenzo has no need to be an orphan sailor. He shall have a loving home! My charming lady wife to cherish him! Lions and wildebeest as his pets! Signed over, you say? Without so much as a ‘Do you fancy a naval career?’ to the boy himself? Says who? Upon my word, what outrageous outrage is this? I shall frankly not permit it.”

“It’s too late, sir. Look—the Mayor’s signature.”

“The Mayor? That dilapidated dog! Only my wife, who is Irish and has the gift of the gabble to an amazing extent, can curse the fellow to my full satisfactioning, and do so quicker than a laxative through a koala bear.

“But of course the Mayor wants to hide dear Lorenzo away from the world. This boy’s heroism is too glorious a mirror for his own jellyfish heart! And no doubt he’ll be ravening after our little Teodora next. With her parents kidnabbled—I just heard the news. Reckon it looks in the altogether poorly for them.”

Renzo turned to Signor Alicamoussa. For the first time, a spark flickered in his eyes. “Teo? What’s happened to her?”

Teo hadn’t even made it home after she saw the Vampire Eel. The policemen were waiting for her on the shore. Dragging her through the ruined streets to the Mayor’s office, they had not wasted any tact when describing the state of Leonora and Alberto Stampara’s laboratory in the lagoon: the smashed pipettes, the crabs and shrimps left gasping in shattered tanks, the diagrams ripped off the walls. Of her adoptive parents there had been no sign at all, except a fragment of a silk dress and her father’s pipe, still fragrant and faintly warm.

Now a tearful Teo paced up and down the Town Hall’s grand vestibule. The two policemen had not been amused by the teeth-marks she’d left in their wrists. Their eyes followed her back and forth, their arms folded over their barrels of chests.

Despite being fully twelve and a half years old, Teo could not resist sticking out her tongue at her captors.

“After all,” she reasoned, “they work for that perditioned rat, the Mayor. What’s he up to in that office? Certainly nothing to help my parents. He’s making a boffle of everything again!”

Step by step, Teo paced her thoughts into order.

The last thing the Mayor would want, she realized, was the publicity that would follow an announcement that a young girl called Teodora Gasperin had for the second time been left without parents, and under the most dramatic circumstances.

“He’s going to send me away again!” A bitter chill coursed down the back of Teo’s neck. “That’s what he’s going to do, the dismal cockroach!”

The Mayor’s voice now fussed from inside his office, “Blotting paper! My signature is smeared!”

As the Undrowned Child of the old Prophecy, Teo was the lucky—or sometimes unlucky—owner of a number of unusual gifts. One of these was that when people talked, she could see their words in their own handwriting in the air. The style of that handwriting revealed a great deal about them. As the Mayor’s voice boomed out of his office, Teo saw smug lettering with absurd flourishes in gushing purple ink floating down the corridor.

“All done!” the Mayor said with a triumphant smirk. “A good day’s work. Got the Antonello boy off my hands, and now we’ll not be troubled by that young lady again. Fortunately, there’s a shortage of children in Norway.”

“You potato-witted absurdity!” yelled Teo at the top of her voice. It should also be mentioned at this point that Teo, like Renzo, was a rabid bookworm and consequently endowed with a vocabulary that could sever a steel cable. The policemen tried in vain to suppress smiles.

The Mayor’s curled head appeared around the door, wafting perfumed pomade into the hall. Even though he’d stolen her life not just once, but twice, the Mayor, by careful calculation, had never actually laid eyes on Teo herself. Now their eyes—hers, an unusual sea-green and his, moist and puppy-brown—met for a single quivering second.

Teo couldn’t help it; the words leapt out of her mouth: “Poor Venice, stuck with a futile fop of a mayor! Your mustache has more brains than your head! Don’t you understand? You can’t send me away now! This is just when you and Venice need me the most.”

The Mayor took a step backward, as if someone had punched him on the nose. It was evident that in the flesh Teodora Gasperin was everything he’d been afraid she would be. His face grew greasy with an awkward emotion that jiggled between fear and shame.

Teo took the opportunity to crouch down and bolt between the legs of the policemen now doubled over in helpless mirth. Then she hurtled down the stairs, three at a time, as if she was flying.

Teo skidded through the muddy streets toward the one place where she’d surely find the answer to the question she could hardly bear to voice.

A sob tore from her throat. “It was him who sent the ice storm, wasn’t it? He kidnapped my parents, didn’t he?”

It was not the Mayor’s mustachioed face Teo carried in her mind as she virtually skated on her heels through Campo San Bartolomeo. The Mayor’s foolish vanity made him nothing more than an unwitting tool of the real enemy. That was how it had been last time: the Mayor putting all Venice at risk, without the least idea of what was really happening. No, as she pounded over the Ponte dell’Olio, what Teo was recalling was the pointed face shimmering like half-boiled egg white, the pale lizard eyes and the sharklike nose of Bajamonte Tiepolo, Il Traditore, staring down at her with a centuries-old hatred. She remembered him striking a sickening blow to Renzo’s cheek. Renzo! Surely he was thinking the same thing she was? Perhaps he was with the mermaids already?

Never had the House of the Spirits seemed so far: it felt as if someone had moved it two miles away from its original location at the Misericordia. A stitch clamped Teo’s side and she stumbled over a pile of sodden postcards. All the gaily colored photographs of Venice had turned black.

“Even the pictures of Venice—ruined!” she mourned breathlessly.

By San Felice she had shrugged off her heavy-footed pursuers, who were still forced to pause and laugh every so often, remembering what she’d shouted at the Mayor. Finally, Teo stopped, sniffed the air and looked around her.

“Strange,” she muttered. “It doesn’t feel as if …”

At the basin of the Misericordia, she threw herself into a boat, clambered over four more and then grabbed a drainpipe to lever herself on to an ornate gate. This she scaled with her customary lack of grace, dropping on all fours into the garden below. Teo galloped through the sodden grass and into a small chapel, where frescoes glowed above a pool of water. She reached down into the still wetness to grasp the handle of a door almost hidden by floating seaweed, lifting it with a grunt.

The water parted like a curtain and a mouth-tingling fume of curry wafted up from the light-filled staircase below. It was underlaid by a faint smell of squid ink from the Seldom Seen Press, the mermaids’ printing machine.

“Eating, as usual!” An emptiness stirred in Teo’s own belly. All she’d managed since the flood was a bowl of lukewarm soup and a nibble at a rind of cold pumpkin. She took the stairs two at a time, finally tumbling through an archway to a gilded cavern in which nestled a deep pool of black water rimmed by a sturdy walkway. The first thing she saw was a tattered Christmas tree bedecked with silver seaweed and living fireflies in tiny filigree cages.

“I’d almost forgotten it was Christmas,” Teo thought, struggling to catch her breath. “Doesn’t much feel like it now. Renzo!” she puffed hopefully. “I’m … here!”

No answer came back. A prickle of worry nipped her spine. At the sight of Teo, the cavern filled with splashing and rough, sweet voices. A hundred blond and tousled mermaids greeted her affectionately. “Why, Teodora!” “ ’Tis the Undrowned Child!” “Give the little maid a bite o’ somefing hot and nicely greasy!”

The Seldom Seen Press stood silent, for the mermaids were presently gathered around floating banquet tables. Their faces showed distinct traces of enthusiastic dining. A flock of melon-sized icebergs eddied and bumped around their blue tails. Above the mermaids’ pretty heads, dozens of parrots in rainbow plumage craned their necks toward Teo.

The birds squawked, “Bite! Bite! Bite!”

Teo thought, “They won’t be so hungry when they hear what I’ve got to tell them.”

“Sweet maid’s all tuckered out! Timber-shiv’ring cold it is! Will ye not have a little sumpin’ to warm yer gizzard on this perishin’ day?” a mermaid in a chef’s hat offered. “There’s a lovely plunk o’ chicken-that-flew-stew just hottin’ up on the griddle. You ain’t tried this one yet.”

Teo panted, “I thought you … were vegetarians, Catalina?” She was one herself. “Wait! I have to … tell you … Do you know that … the Vamp—”

“Who’s disputin’ yer? Don’t ye git yourself in a blue tweak, Undrowned Child. ’Tis veritable vegetablish. Just chickpeas. Sartin ’twere a chickadoodle in da original recipe. But it flewed away. We added more chili, and you’d never notice da lack o’ poultry for da fire in your mouf.”

Catalina thrust a steaming spoonful between Teo’s cold lips before she could get out a single word about the Vampire Eel, Bajamonte Tiepolo or the Mayor. A spicy flame lit Teo’s tongue and throat. While she chewed the delicious mixture, Teo’s watering eyes searched out Lussa. A glint of gold alerted her to the Queen swimming forward. Since the day of the battle in the lagoon, the mermaid’s beautiful face had been lightly embossed with gilded lettering, for she carried on her body the Spell Almanac of Bajamonte Tiepolo. She was its guardian now.

Lussa exclaimed, “Teodora! ’Tis an exquisite Relief to see You.”

Her accent was refined, quite unlike those of her mermaid subjects, who had learned to speak human language by eavesdropping on uncouth sailors and pirates.

Now that she finally could get a word in, Teo was too distressed for pleasantries. “He’s back, isn’t he? Il Traditore. Bajamonte Tiepolo!”

“Say ye not his cursed name!” cried Flos, Lussa’s young second-in-command. “ ’Twould make a weasel weep to hear it!”

The parrots chanted dolefully, “Weasel weep, weasel weep, weasel …” For in last year’s struggle, the mermaids had been betrayed, and Vampire Eels, their only natural predator, had ambushed them at the sea-entrance to this very cavern, killing a dozen of their number.

“Yar, Teodora,” mourned Lussa, “I fear You are right. And now We must …”

Teo buried her head in her hands. “How many Venetians have died today, because I was too much of a coward to utter that one last curse when I had a chance to get rid of Il Traditore forever? And my parents … and where is Renzo?”

Lussa said, “We could not save your Adoptive Parents, dear Teodora, from Whomsoever Scoundrels & Miscreants abducted Them. We arrived too Late. But We saved as many Humanfolk from the Ice Water as We could. Under Cover of Dark, We carried Them to Land.”

“I dreamed you doing that,” Teo remembered.

“We brought Them warm Sustenance. We treated their Wounds with Venetian Treacle. Of course, when They wake up, They shall have no Recollection of Us.”

Venetian Treacle was a magical medicine made of sixty-four ingredients. Teo and Renzo had discovered a secret cache of it at an old apothecary called The Two Tousled Mermaids by the old gates to the Ghetto.

“But Renzo?” Teo’s voice wobbled. “Did you …? Is he …?”

Lussa hung her head. “The Victims were too Many, and We were too Few. We were also too Late for dear Lorenzo’s Mother. He is now as You are, Teodora, an Orphan Child.”

Teo wailed, “Not his mother!”

“Rendered Unconscious by an Iceberg & Smothered by the heartless Waves.”

“You mean murdered by Bajamonte Tiepolo! Poor Renzo, I must go to him.”

Tears leaking from the sides of her eyes, Teo ran toward the stairs.

“Teodora! Come back! You shall not find Lorenzo at Home. He’s been taken to the Scilla.”

“The floating orphanage?”

“The Human Mayor has signed Lorenzo yonside for a Sailor.”

At the words “Human Mayor,” a violent hubbub broke out among the mermaids: “Sufferin’ seahorses! He doan know Christmas from curried eel!” and “Busy as a cat buryin’—”

“Ladies!” interrupted Lussa in a scandalized tone. “Belay your Indecencies in front of the Undrowned Child! The Human Mayor is truly Destitute of the Bowels of Compassion, but He is hardly worth a Toothful of Scorn. Our True Enemy …”

“I hate him,” growled Teo.

“Indeed ’Tis your Trade to hate Him,” Lussa reminded her. “Whensoever & Whithersoever Il Traditore raises his Ugly Head, ’Tis Ordained that You shall be There to push It down, as the Undrowned Child of the Prophecy.”

“I failed before. You’ll have to get yourselves another heroine this time,” said Teo miserably. “I resign. Everyone dies or loses people around me.”

The parrots in their gilded cages took up her words, repeating “Everyone dies, everyone dies, everyone dies …” until the echoes of the grim words faded to silence.

“But,” mused Teo, “all the way to the cavern, I’ve been thinking. I don’t feel as if he’s actually here. Bajamonte Tiepolo, I mean. I don’t feel him. When his spirit was abroad in Venice before, there was a kind of crackle in the air, something frightening. I had a sense of him everywhere.”

BOOK: The Mourning Emporium
3.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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