The Painted War (10 page)

‘Why won't you
listen?
' The woman in the green cloak reached over and tried to snatch the painting out of his hands. The guard gripped it harder and gave the woman a shove that made her lose her footing in the mud and fall over. She landed on her back in the water.

Marco rushed to help her up, but Bianca braced herself to leap on the guard as he splashed a few steps closer to the burning pile of paintings.

‘Stop there,' said Captain Raphaeli. This time, the guard stopped. He looked up at the Captain approaching him across the courtyard and tried to snap a salute without letting go of the painting.

‘Sir!' he said.

‘Let me see that, Corporal.'

‘Sir, yes, sir.' The guard handed the painting to Raphaeli, who held it up and examined it in the light from the fire. He ran his hand around each edge and then turned back to the woman, who was standing, dripping mud and leaning gratefully on Marco's arm.

‘Please accept my deepest apologies, Mistress  … ?'

‘Mistress Frazetti,' said the woman.

‘Mistress Frazetti,' said Raphaeli. ‘I am so sorry. There has obviously been a mistake – this painting is not magical.' He handed it back to the woman, who clutched it with tears shining in her eyes. ‘You may keep it.'

‘Oh, thank you!' she said. She hurried away, as if wanting to get the painting home before the Captain changed his mind. Raphaeli turned to the guard with a glower.

‘As for you – we will have a talk about pushing old ladies around when all this is over. For the moment, I want you positioned at the end of the bridge, all night, checking each painting to make sure it's actually magical. If it's not leaking out water, and it doesn't have a magical door in it, it doesn't need to be burned. Don't let me hear any complaints that you've let any slip through.'

‘Yes, sir,' the guard mumbled.

‘What are you waiting for? Go!' Captain Raphaeli pointed, and the guard scurried off, stopping every other guard he passed to check their paintings for magical doorways.

‘Thank you, Captain,' said Bianca. She watched as one of the guards was checked, his painting was found to be leaking, and he walked up to throw it on the fire. ‘But, please – is there really no way we can save the magical paintings, too?'

‘What else can we do?' Captain Raphaeli sighed. ‘I cannot leave the paintings lying around the city, waiting for the Baron to march through with an army and catch us unawares.'

‘Put a guard on them,' Bianca said, without really believing it was an option – there were just too many, all over the city. Captain Raphaeli opened his mouth, probably to say just that, but then a bright spark of an idea hit Bianca. ‘Put a guard on them!' she repeated. ‘Gather all the paintings together and put them in the Museum of Art. We can lock the doors and guard the building, while we find a way to stop Oscurita from invading.'

‘That could take a long time,' Captain Raphaeli pointed out. ‘And what's more, we can't possibly save every painting. The museum doesn't have enough space, unless we pile them high – and with them leaking like this, that would damage them so badly we might as well have burned them.'

‘Then send for the artists in residence,' said Bianca, her face lighting up despite the pain in her heart. ‘Get them to identify the most valuable, the most important paintings, and send those to the museum, and  …  and  … '

‘And burn the rest,' said Marco quietly. ‘It could work!' Bianca gave him a grateful look, for finishing the sentence she couldn't bring herself to say.

‘We would save
something,
' she said.

‘All right, all right,' Raphaeli said. He stepped in front of the next guard who was approaching the fire, and held up his arm. ‘Take this back to the bridge and don't bring any more paintings into the palace. Tell the others to keep rounding up pictures from the city – Master Cosimo and Mistress Lucia will be examining the paintings and sending some to the museum. We'll build another fire in the museum courtyard so we can get this mud cleared out of the palace. You!' he shouted across the courtyard to the guard who'd pushed Mistress Frazetti down. ‘Run to the master artists' suite and rouse them.' The guard looked panicked for a moment, and then ran across the courtyard, slipping and sliding, towards the palace entrance.

‘Thank you,' Bianca said softly, watching the line of guards with paintings slowly begin to turn around and head back out of the palace gates. She looked up at Captain Raphaeli and then glanced behind him to Duchess Catriona, who was sitting on the flight of steps now, without much of a care for the state of her gown. She caught Bianca's eye and patted her heart twice, and mouthed
well done
.

‘We still have to paint over the murals and frescos that can't be moved,' said the Captain. ‘But we'll save as many as we can. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have much more work to do.'

Bianca was starting to feel the strain of spending her night running, shouting and falling in the water as she and Marco walked to the palace gate to watch a line of guards and volunteers carrying paintings come to a halt. The city's church bells rang out for one in the morning as they backed up along the bridge. Water still poured from most of the paintings, and soon both sides of the bridge looked like an endlessly cascading waterfall. A few minutes later, Cosimo and Lucia splashed through the mud, yawning. Bianca stifled a sympathy yawn as she watched them hurry up to the front of the line of paintings and instruct the first guard to hold his up.

They were fully dressed, and Bianca remembered that they had been the very first to notice the paintings beginning to leak – the artists' suite in the palace was probably mostly underwater soon after, so they couldn't have had any sleep. Although at least, she thought, shivering against her sticky wet dress, they hadn't rushed off to be heroes and fallen into the canal.

She groaned as she saw Cosimo shake his head at the first guard, who shouldered his painting again and headed back across the bridge. ‘I wish I could be the one to choose what we could save.'

‘You should be glad you don't have to make those decisions,' Marco told her gently.

Bianca watched as Cosimo and Lucia debated the value of a rough, but definitely magical di Lombardi sketch of the palace versus a large landscape that showed a lapping seashore. Despite the watery theme, the only door in the painting was on a small boat in the distance – water dribbled from it, but only a few drops at a time.

‘Which of those is worth more?' Marco asked her. ‘Which will be most valuable to their grandchildren in a hundred years' time? Could you really choose, knowing the other one will be destroyed?'

Cosimo tapped the palace sketch and Bianca's heart instantly ached for the seashore painting.

‘You're right. I couldn't. All these paintings are precious to me. Every one. Even Filpepi's.'

Marco linked his arm through hers and gave it a squeeze. ‘Ew, you're still soggy!' he said, but he didn't let go.

Bianca smiled gratefully at him, and turned away from the terrible sight of the art of La Luminosa being studied, judged, and then sent away. A few lucky paintings would be hidden in the museum, tainted by the damp, but still existing. The rest  … 

She stared hard into the flames that still burned in the middle of the courtyard.

The rest would be consumed by flames.

‘So, you tried to get to Oscurita?' said the Duchess's voice behind them. Bianca turned to see Catriona walking across the courtyard, her fine skirts swishing through the mud. The burning pile of paintings was still aflame, hot and bright, but it must have destroyed the magic in most of them because there was only a thin cloud of steam trickling from the pile now, and even less coming from inside the palace.

‘I didn't even get through the door,' Bianca admitted. ‘I tried to get in through a mural down by the canal, and I got washed right off the path and into the water. I would've drowned if Marco hadn't come along in Master di Lombardi's underwater craft.'

‘A craft? That goes underwater?' Duchess Catriona's face lit up, and some colour returned to it for the first time since the paintings had started leaking. ‘That sounds fantastic!' She looked at Marco. ‘But what on earth were you doing in the canal in the middle of the night?'

‘Trying to find out what the Baron da Russo dropped into the canal,' said Marco. ‘It was the only suspicious thing we saw him do all day. I'm
sure
it must have something to do with the flooding. I couldn't find anything, though – and then Bianca fell in.'

‘Where's this craft now?' said Duchess Catriona.

‘We moored it up on the other side of the bridge,' said Bianca.

‘Oh really?' The Duchess's eyes sparkled, and she hitched up her skirts and strode out of the palace gate.

‘Duchess, wait!' Marco said, and he and Bianca exchanged slightly stunned looks before following her.

Duchess Catriona bustled past Cosimo and Lucia with a ‘Masters, thank you for this – carry on', and hopped over the sandbags. With the paintings in the palace burned and the city paintings lined up on the bridge, there was now more water on the far side of the bags, but the Duchess didn't even blink as she plunged her feet into the cold water. The guards holding their paintings hurriedly tried to bow to her. Bianca and Marco followed in the Duchess's wake as she swept across the bridge.

‘Duchess! What are you doing?' Captain Raphaeli ran up behind them. ‘You must not leave the palace until we have the paintings secured!'

‘I'm going to fix the leak,' Duchess Catriona called over her shoulder.

‘What are you up to now?' Raphaeli demanded of Bianca, as all four of them reached the steps down to the canal bank.

She's going for a ride in the underwater machine,
Bianca thought, with a small smile, but didn't say anything to Raphaeli.

Duchess Catriona gasped with pleasure and clapped her hands together at the sight of the underwater craft bobbing in the water, its glass and wood and brass surface still gleaming despite a coating of canal water.

‘How wonderful,' she said, and started down the steps. ‘Master di Lombardi was so clever!'

‘No, Your Highness!' Captain Raphaeli said, following her down. ‘I cannot allow you to get in that thing.'

‘
Allow
me?' Duchess Catriona said, turning so sharply Raphaeli almost ran into her. ‘I think you'll find I am still the ruler of this city.
I
shall allow
you
to accompany us if you must, but we're going to fix this, tonight.'

‘There really isn't room for four,' Marco said. ‘There's barely room for three.'

‘You can take my place, Captain,' Bianca volunteered hopefully.

‘No, he can't,' Marco said. ‘We might need you if something goes wrong.'

Bianca deflated a little, but she didn't argue.

‘I won't let the three of you go off in this thing,' Raphaeli said. ‘Absolutely not.'

‘Captain Raphaeli, I am an adult, and I am Duchess, and I can take care of myself. This is a direct order.
Direct order
, Raphaeli.'

‘I  …  I  … ' Captain Raphaeli ground his teeth. ‘Yes, Your Highness. But
please
be careful, all of you.'

‘It's perfectly safe,' Marco said, opening the craft's hatch and sliding into the main driver's seat. ‘See?'

Raphaeli shook his head. ‘If you're not back in ten minutes, I'm coming in after you.' He peeled off his cloak, breastplate, greaves and heavy gloves and started to roll up his shirt sleeves.

‘You do that,' said Catriona, stepping into the craft and settling in the cargo section behind the seats.

Bianca gave the Captain an apologetic smile, then untied the rope from the mooring hook and very carefully eased herself into the second leather seat. Marco closed the hatch and started the bellows pumping. The craft sank slowly under the water.

Bianca turned to look at Duchess Catriona. Despite the nasty sinking feeling and the sight of the canal closing over their heads, she couldn't help smiling. That was much more like the Duchess she remembered!

‘Good thing Secretary Franco wasn't with us just then,' Bianca said. ‘He would have had an absolute fit!'

‘Oh, who cares what Franco thinks,' said Catriona, staring up in wonder at the dark water through the glass dome. ‘He's got a fantastic political brain, you know, but there isn't a grain of adventure in him.' She grinned at Bianca. ‘I can't always let you two have all the fun, can I?'

The water in the canal was getting darker and muddier. Marco steered them around in a semicircle, with his eyes firmly set on the dials and instruments in front of him, until they were heading back towards the Bridge of Cats.

‘What's
that?
' Duchess Catriona said. Bianca looked just in time to see something with more than four legs scuttle across the glass dome and leap off into the water.

‘I have no idea,' Bianca said. ‘I didn't know anything like that lived in the canals  … '

Marco flicked a couple of switches and the water just ahead of them lit up. ‘It's got an oil lamp in its nose,' Marco said. ‘This ought to help.'

Despite her misgivings, Bianca couldn't help but stare in wonder as the light shone through the swirling water. Something huge and stony loomed up in front of them and Marco had to scramble to turn them so they wouldn't run into it. As they passed, Bianca saw an enormous nose and deep black eyes in a face that lay sideways in the mud.

‘It's a statue of the old god of the sea,' said Catriona, her voice soft with wonder. ‘It used to be on the bank just here but it fell into the canal in a storm.'

Marco corrected their course and they chugged onwards towards the bridge.

‘This craft is so amazing,' the Duchess said. ‘What does this do?' Bianca heard a hiss and splash, and twisted in her seat, her heart in her mouth. ‘Oops!' Duchess Catriona hurriedly screwed a cap back onto a copper pipe, her face and hands dripping with water. ‘Sorry,' she said, when Bianca and Marco both stared at her. ‘I'll leave the engineering to you two.'

A minute or two later, Marco squinted at a dial in front of him. ‘I think we're by the Bridge of Cats now,' he said. ‘I'm going to take us all the way down to the bottom so we can see what's on the canal bed.'

Bianca's ears felt slightly odd as they dropped the last few feet to the very bottom of the canal.

‘Bianca, grab that handle and wind it a couple of times,' Marco said, pointing to a handle just beside Bianca's head. She took hold of it and gave it a couple of turns, until she saw something glinting in the water in front of them. It was like a metal hand on the end of a long metal arm.

‘That's the thing you grabbed me with,' Bianca said.

‘If you can pick something up with it, then we can suck it into the chamber,' said Marco. ‘The controls are in front of you.'

Bianca laid her hands on two levers. When she twitched the left one, the arm moved from left to right in front of her, and when she moved the right one the arm went up and down. She investigated the other buttons around the two levers and found that there was one with a neat label bolted just underneath it that said ‘
GRASP'
. She pushed it, and the finger parts curled in towards the flat metal palm.

‘Right!' she said. ‘Let's see what's down here.'

Manoeuvring the hand was extremely tricky at first – the controls were sensitive, and it seemed to Bianca that all she had to do was breathe on them for them to send the arm sweeping through the water, dropping whatever lumpy or shiny thing she'd been trying to pick up. But after a few tries, she got the hang of it and had even managed to learn when to hit the grasp button to hold her catch still so that the others could see it.

She held up several ordinary shells and one enormous one the size of her head, enough copper coins to pay for an apple cake from the stall on the Piazza del Fiero, and a strange ball that bounced and floated whenever she moved the metal arm. They stared at it for several minutes, wondering if it was magic, before it turned over and Bianca spotted the faint, faded remains of a clumsily painted string of daisies on the side.

‘It's just a child's ball,' she said.

‘I didn't realise there was so much rubbish under the bridges,' Duchess Catriona muttered. ‘As soon as things get back to normal, I'm definitely going to have the canals cleaned.'

‘Wait, what's that?' Marco pointed at an odd, lumpy shape half buried under the silt.

Bianca narrowed her eyes and pushed the arm forward, hooking two of the metal fingers around the thing. She lifted it up.

‘It's a shoe,' she said, and dropped it again.

‘Oh,' said Marco.

‘We can't give up,' said the Duchess, an edge of sadness creeping into her voice. ‘We've got to fix this!'

‘Well, we'll have to resurface soon to let in some fresh air anyway,' said Marco.

Bianca stared down at the canal bed. She opened her mouth to agree – perhaps it would be better to wait until morning, or  … 

‘Wait,' she whispered.

‘The other shoe?' Duchess Catriona asked.

Bianca didn't answer, irrationally afraid to breathe too hard in case it disturbed the silt at the bottom of the canal. There was something there, something odd. She knew she'd seen it. Now she just needed to see it again.

‘There!' She pointed. ‘Did you see that? Some of that pile of mud just  …  vanished!' She grabbed the arm's controls and slid its fingers into the mud and then up and out with a smooth motion. The particles of mud poured off the hand, leaving behind something round and dull, about the size of a large orange, flattened out.

Marco and the Duchess leaned forward as Bianca punched the grasp button and then pumped the suction lever as hard as she could. The round object was dragged out of the hand and Catriona jumped as they heard it rattle into the compartment underneath her.

‘Closing the suction pipe,' said Marco. There was a clang and a gurgling noise, and then a pop. Marco twisted in his chair. ‘You can open the hatch now. Let's see what we've got.'

Duchess Catriona tugged open the trapdoor and reached down into the little space Bianca had climbed out of. She pulled the disc out and wiped the mud off it on the edge of her dress.

‘It's  …  odd,' she said. ‘It's an engraving.'

Bianca took it from the Duchess and peered at it. The engraving was a picture of an open door in a brick wall covered in intricate trailing ivy, with a stone passage visible on the other side. She held it in her hands, listening to the way it seemed to speak to her – not with sound, but with a tingling, pulling feeling that she'd only felt a few times before.

‘This is from Oscurita,' she said. ‘I'm sure of it. I can feel it.' She touched the open door, half expecting her fingers to go right through. If the water was pouring into the passages through this magic engraving, she should've been able to reach inside the passages through the same opening. But they stopped at the surface.

‘Let's get it back to the palace.'

‘Going up,' said Marco, and he released a catch, pumped the bellows, and the underwater craft started to rise to the surface.

Bianca frowned at the disc in her hands as the water bubbled and churned around them. ‘It's magic, definitely – but what kind?'

Secretary Franco leaned over the table, peering down at the disc. It had a hole right through it, just above the carving of the door, as if it was meant to be worn as a medallion.

‘But the water is still coming,' said Captain Raphaeli.

Secretary Franco, Captain Raphaeli and an impressively large number of guards had met them when they'd moored the craft by the Bridge of Cats and marched them swiftly back inside the palace. Now they were in the Duchess's rooms, and Secretary Franco was casting sceptical glances between the medallion and the mural in the room, which hadn't been painted over yet and was still spilling water forth at the same steady rate as before. A servant with a mop was standing by it, emptying the water into a series of buckets that another servant took away to empty every few minutes. It was a literally endless job, and Bianca was incredibly grateful it wasn't hers.

Duchess Catriona was sitting on her couch beside the low table, Marco beside her, staring at the medallion with a seething dislike. But that hadn't stopped the flooding either.

‘That just means it's not directly connected to the passages,' Bianca said. ‘But I'm sure it's magic, and we saw the Baron drop it in the water just before the flood started.'

‘What about your magic key?' Marco asked.

Bianca shrugged, took out the paintbrush and whispered the magic words. She saw Secretary Franco stare, wide-eyed, as the key unfolded from the paintbrush handle, but then he looked away and tried to pretend not to be interested. Several of the guards stared openly as she held up the medallion and tried to find a way to fit the key into it.

‘The door's too small to shut, and anyway it doesn't move,' she said. ‘It's an engraving, not a painting, so I don't think I could get it to move with an
animare
.'