The Shadow Master (4 page)

Galileo had been kind to him, but to deny him this was not right. He had a burning need to improve his position within the household. He was not one of the boys who lived on the lower floors of the palace, and was excluded from their games and comradeship. And he was not welcome on the upper floors. He was a boy in-between, with nobody to call a friend.

But he had Lucia, who he would glimpse once a week at church, or at a city festival. His special friendship with her had sustained him through his adolescent years. Allowed him to play out in his head the long conversations they would have about life and how the world worked, and everything he had learned. But he would need to have a higher station for that to ever happen. He would need to be more than just an in-between-floors apprentice.

And though Galileo might not appreciate that he used independent thinking to come to the decision, he had decided to steal the metal gloves and try them out. Use them to rise above his station. Use them to rise above the very city and climb Lucia's tower. Science would help him understand what it was that drew him to Lucia so. It was something he needed to understand, though even after having been with her now, he could never hope to explain it to another. Even Galileo. Now they had met. They had talked. They had touched. Something wonderful had happened between them. It was so powerful that he felt that he had emerged into a changed version of his city. As he felt changed himself. He could still feel where Lucia's skin had touched his. Could still feel the fluttering inside his chest where something had transformed. He was both frightened and awed by it. And an invasion of the city, or a battle, seemed minor by comparison. He placed one finger to his chest, where he had felt the flesh open. It was more amazing than watching the metal gloves and all their cogs and wires melding with his hands and feet when he put them on.

He suddenly stopped walking. The gloves! He had left them in Lucia's tower. He felt a sudden sense of dread. Heard the bells tolling disaster loudly. His feet felt very heavy as he made his way quickly back to Palazzo di Medici, walking past the streets where statues of the ancients stood on pillars, looking down sternly. It was as if they knew that he had been arrogant and stupid. He had betrayed all his years of teaching. There was a story he recalled about one of the ancients who stole fire from the gods to give to mankind so that they could develop civilisation and industry, and he was punished by being chained to a rock where a large eagle would come and feast on his liver, only to have it grow back each day for the eagle to rip open his flesh and eat again.

He knew it was really a metaphor, but it suddenly seemed to be no more unreal that having one's hands turn to metal claws. When he finally reached the Medici palace he found it ringed by soldiers. It took him some time to find one who recognised him and let him through. Inside the building there were more soldiers everywhere, arming themselves and searching through rooms as if looking for hidden enemies.

He found Galileo in his chambers, calmly making sketches of some new invention. He appeared a little older to Lorenzo's eyes than he had the day before. He was dressed in black, with a white collar, as usual, his aged figure sitting squatly on his wooden chair. His skin seemed a little greyer. His fingers and limbs moved a little slower. Even his nose seemed a little more swollen, to Lorenzo, and his beard a little greyer, also, and his hair had surely receded a little more. Or was it just that he had been up all night once again, working on some fabulous device? All around him were cogs and wheels and lenses that he could assemble the most amazing things out of, and then disassemble again so that no one else could ever copy them. Only Cosimo the Great himself had copies of the final machines, and he guarded them closely.

Galileo's latest interest was in reflecting light and images. He was convinced he could capture images in some way. Freeze time into a single moment. It was incredible, but so many of his ideas were incredible. As his apprentice, Lorenzo had learned more than he could ever have learned in fifty years at school. And the master used his young and steady hands, and good eyes, to manufacture and assemble many of his experiments. The old man's eyes were failing, as was his steady grip, which was as closely a guarded secret as his inventions themselves.

“Ah, there you are,” the old man said, glancing up at Lorenzo, which was his usual greeting to the boy.

Lorenzo could not say anything for some time and waited for the old man to ask about the missing metal gloves. But he did not. And he did not ask him where he had been. He was glad for being saved the need to lie. “What is happening?” Lorenzo asked Galileo. “The city is in an uproar! Have we been invaded?”

“Only by hysteria,” the old man said. “Which will prove a much harder foe to fight than any army.”

“Why?” Lorenzo asked. “What has happened?”

The old man put down his quill pen and looked at the young man. “There was an assassination attempt made upon Cosimo Medici in the cathedral this morning. His brother Giuliano is slain. Cosimo has been wounded, but not severely.”

Lorenzo's face showed his shock. Galileo watched his apprentice and then said, “So, what can we assume from this using logic?” Lorenzo stammered for a moment. “Well there will be vengeance on the assailants.”

“Of course,” said Galileo.

“And who is responsible?” asked Lorenzo.

“The Lorraines are being accused of the attacks,” said Galileo.

Again the shock showed on Lorenzo's face. “But… but… that means…”

“It means civil war. It means an end to the peace accords within the city walls.” Lorenzo nodded his head, but he was thinking of Lucia. He was feeling a hole slowly growing in his heart where the butterfly had been. She would now be separated by rows of armed soldiers that would proclaim him a mortal enemy. He could not expect to see her at service again and could not expect to be able to climb up her tower wall unseen again. He felt sick in his stomach. Perhaps she would be taken to a nunnery where he would never see her again.

“And where was the attack?” Galileo asked him.

“You said in the Grand Cathedral,” he replied.

“Which means?”

“I don't know. What?”

“Inside the sanctity of the Grand Cathedral,” Galileo said.

Lorenzo nodded his head, as if he knew what that meant, but Galileo could see that he didn't. “And that means the rules of order have been broken,” he told him. “
Daemonicus ex machine
. We are entering a time when we will be ruled by demons.”

 

 

V

“Break another finger,” Cosimo Medici said, staring fixedly at the man tied to the seat before him.

“They are all broken already,” the torturer said nervously. But still the man refused to speak. Or even scream. It was unnatural, he thought. The man was either drugged or insane. They were the only people in his experience who could tolerate the pain. But they all talked in the end.

Cosimo Medici took two steps towards the stairs up to the half-demolished tower above them, then turned and came back. He wanted to leave the man there, dead or half-dead, for the Lorraine men to find when they came back to resume their demolition of the Medici tower. The cost of losing a ship was the loss of a tower that the Lorraines would use the stones from to build their own tower somewhere in their own part of the city. It was like moving pieces around a chessboard, this continual tearing down and building of towers in the Walled City.

A servant fussed over Cosimo's bandage, insisting that it be changed, but Cosimo kept waving the man away. He wanted to be present when the assassin gave up the names of his employers. He wanted to hear him say the name, “Lorraine”.

The machine that they had him strapped to was a primitive thing, not like the wonderful torture cabinets made of metal cogs and sharp spikes that were in the basement of the Medici Palace, but this one would suffice. It was basically a wooden rack that had been roughly constructed to tie the man to. The art was going to be in the instruments used on him. Torture was a fine art, Cosimo the Great had long ago decided, and needed an experienced artisan to practice it. As one would only employ the best sculptors to extract the best sculpture from a block of marble, so one should only employ the best torturers to extract the best confession from a man. He had admired the Medici torturer's work for many years, watching the way he could extract a confession from a man without even touching him, just the thought of the pain that his instruments were going to bring could cause a strong man's will to desert him. But this assassin was something else.

He didn't curse them nor rant nor spit at the torturer. He kept his eyes shut and mumbled to himself over and over, like he was reciting a prayer. He had put himself into something like a trance, and they could not shake him out of it. When they touched the red hot poker to his arm pits and the smell of burning flesh filled the basement chamber, he had faltered in his mumbling and started shaking, but soon resumed it again as if nothing had happened.

“It's not natural,” the torturer said again, for about the dozenth time. Cosimo had heard that there were some diseases, like leprosy, that caused a man to lose sensation in his limbs, but this man did not appear to have any disease. He did not even have plague pustules, so he must have been an inhabitant of the Walled City, yet nobody knew him. He was a mystery in so many ways that on another day it might have warranted deeper investigation. But today Cosimo only needed to hear one word from him.

But still he refused to speak. Cosimo had already had the man stripped naked and his body searched for any tattoos or symbols that might give away his allegiance, but there was nothing on him of any note, bar some scars on his back, as if he had been flogged at some time in his life. That told them he was likely low born. And yet his hands were not the deeply calloused hands of a worker. They were soft, with well-shaped nails. Another mystery.

“Use the lover's finger,” Cosimo instructed. The torturer turned to his instruments and took up one, a long thin metal spike with a wooden handle. He looked across to Cosimo and made a questioning motion. Cosimo, waving the servant away from his bandaged wounds yet again, nodded his head in assent. The torturer in turn nodded to his two assistants. They knew what instrument he was holding and what effect it had on a man, and braced themselves either side of the assassin.

The torturer placed the long, thin end of the instrument into the coals of the brazier at his feet and let it sit there a moment to heat up. He looked up once more at Cosimo Medici to make sure he wasn't about to change his mind, but his face was set. The torturer sighed and took the instrument out of the coals. There were some tools that even he was reluctant to use.

“Hold him,” he said to his assistants. One man thrust a piece of leather into the mumbling man's mouth and the other took hold of his serpent of sin and held it up for the torturer. He stepped forward and deftly slid the hot metal spike a small way into the tip of it, hearing the sizzling of flesh. And this time the man did scream. He looked down as if suddenly aware of his surroundings and what was happening to him and screamed an ear-splitting shriek that filled the chamber.

The torturer withdrew the spike and the man stopped shrieking. His head lolled forward and he slumped against his bonds.

“Throw some water on him and see if he is willing to speak now,” Cosimo instructed.

The assistants threw cold water on the man until he revived and he started shaking against his bonds and crying. He was broken, Cosimo decided. Now he would talk.

He stepped away from the stairs and came towards the man. “Who sent you?” he demanded of him, as the torturer had been demanding all evening. But the man let his eyes roll back in his head and started mumbling again. “It's not…” began the torturer, but Cosimo cut him off. “I know it's not natural. But he's a man isn't he? He'll talk if you do your job properly.”

The torturer bowed his head and looked agitated, promising that he was doing the best he knew how, but this was beyond his substantial experience. Cosimo looked down at the man's bleeding, burned penis and turned away. He no longer wanted to know what the torturer did to the man. He could flay him bodily and make him eat his own skin if he wished, but he needed to hear him say the name.

“Get him ready again,” the torturer said to his two assistants and one took the leather bit that he had spat out when he screamed and tried to stuff it back into his mouth. “Open up, damn you,” he said and squeezed his fingers into the sides of his jaw, forcing the man's mouth open. Then the assistant turned to the torturer and said, “Master!” He twisted the man's head towards him. The torturer looked and shook his head. “No!” he said.

“What is it?” Cosimo demanded.

“He carries the wounds of a blasphemer,” the torturer said. “The man has no tongue and cannot speak.”

The assassin mumbled again and this time it sounded to Cosimo like mockery. Like he was telling him something the whole time that he could not understand. Telling him what a fool he was. The thought enraged Cosimo. Made the blood pump in his neck wound painfully. He was sure he'd opened it again and the servant would be in a panic about it. “Then make him write,” Cosimo demanded. “If he can't speak the name of his employers he can write it.”

“We have broken his hands,” the torturer said forlornly.

Cosimo could feel blood running down the inside of his shirt and he pulled his dagger and walked across to the man, pressing the sharp blade's edge against his neck, pressing it in deeply. “Nod your head if it was the Lorraines you did this for!” he demanded. “Nod your head.”