The Stargazer (36 page)

When Mora’s voice penetrated his thoughts, it had a new tone. No longer the wronged innocent, she now spoke as the victorious conqueress harvesting the fruits of her labors. “You ruined all my plans two years ago, Ian Foscari, but you shall not do it again. You have tried repeatedly to destroy my life, and now, finally, I will destroy yours. It would have been simpler if that inconvenient whore of yours had not picked up the dagger that I’d had her brother commission in order to frame you for murder,” she paused considering, “but I find I like this outcome even better. It is more dramatic, and much more exciting. And I have had the passing pleasure of watching you suffer, to make up for all the suffering you caused me.” She turned to the two guards who had shackled and suspended the brothers. “Are the locks sturdy? Did you see to it that they won’t escape?” The giants each went over to inspect their captives, one of them enduring a halfhearted kick in the groin from Crispin without even twitching, and confirmed that the brothers were in no danger of liberating themselves.

“You three,” Mora motioned to the smaller of the five giant guards, “take Jenö and Roric back to my brother’s house and stay with them. I will take you two to help the oarsmen row through the storm,” she turned to Angelo, her hand now pressing hard against his codpiece, “and you, my little angel, to entertain me all the way to Zante.”

The brothers were still trapped, suspended from the wall of the room with no possible means of escape in sight, when the clock struck ten.

“Help!” Tristan, Miles, and Sebastian heard through the door of the library. “Help! Help! Someone come quickly!”

Nilo’s race up the stairs ended at Tristan’s chest, which he smacked into hard enough to knock the air out of both of them. He stepped back, blinked twice, and then yelled, “Help!” again at the top of his lungs.

“We will, we will, but you’ll have to tell us how.” Miles kneeled before the boy. “
Shhh
, it is all right.”

“No, it’s not all right!” The boy spoke loudly, sending droplets of rain flying from his hair as he vehemently shook his head. “No, no, no! She is going to explode Signorina Salva, and the others are tied up, and there are giants and—”

“Why don’t we move in here.” Tristan put a soothing hand on Nilo’s shoulder and propelled him toward the library and into a chair. “Sit down and take a deep breath and start at the beginning.”

“There’s no time for sitting, don’t you see?” Nilo moved his huge eyes from one face to the next. “We must go there now, before the clock strikes twelve.”

“Go where? To do what?” Sebastian asked.

Realizing that there was nothing for it but to explain, Nilo took a deep breath, concentrated for a moment, then began. “Master Ian and Master Crispin went to that woman’s house, the woman who came late to the party, the one everybody says is a witch.”

“Morgana da Gigio?” Tristan put in skeptically.

“Yes, her.” Nilo nodded. “They went there because that man, Signore Angelo, was there, and they tried to take him, but then the giants came and grabbed them from behind, and then—”

“Giants?” It was Miles’s turn to sound incredulous.

“They looked like giants. Anyway, there was a fight, and I couldn’t see what was happening, but then the lady, Signora da Gigio, ordered that they be chained up, and then she told them what she had done to my mistress.” He paused to take a breath, his melancholy eyes looking even more miserable than usual, and his chin quivering. “She said that when the clock in the piazza strikes twelve, the prison is going to explode and everyone will think you did it and you will all be traitors and there is nothing you can do to stop it. But you must stop it, you must! You have to! You can’t let my mistress die!”

Sebastian scowled at the boy. “Did Ian and Crispin take you with them?”

Nilo bit his lip. “No. I followed them, without them knowing it. I hid in the gondola, then I followed them up. I was afraid…” He hesitated, trying to pick the best way to say it. He tried again, “I didn’t think,” then blurted out, “After what he did today at the trial, I did not trust His Lordship to save my mistress. I thought maybe he was trying to hurt her, and I wanted to be sure. So I followed him.” Color rose in his cheeks and he began to speak faster. “I was wrong about that, but anyway, it was a good thing I was there because now you can save her. You must go at once!”

Giorgio, who had heard Nilo’s shouts from Marina’s room below stairs, came bounding into the library demanding, “What’s wrong? What is going on?”

“Nilo has just given us some disturbing news,” Sebastian told Giorgio, then returned his keen blue eyes to the boy. “You say that Ian and Crispin are tied up?”

“Chained up, yes, but that is not the important part.” Nilo, caught between despair and frustration, was gesturing wildly with his hands. “The important part is that you have to save Signorina Salva!”

“We will do our best,” Tristan said in a soothing and even voice, “but we need to know more. I have heard your mistress talk about your incredible memory. Do you think you could remember everything Morgana said.”

Giorgio had moved behind the boy and put an avuncular hand on his shoulder. “Just try your best, Nilo. Whatever you can remember.”

Nilo creased his forehead and squinted his eyes, as he had seen adults do when trying to remember something, then recited Morgana’s entire description, word for word.

He had never had such an attentive audience before, and he was almost sorry that the retelling had to end, until he remembered there was work to be done.

“It sounds like she’s loaded that wing of the palace with our gunpowder,” Sebastian concluded. “But she must have left someone there to ignite it. If we can just find where they are standing and—”

“Not necessarily,” Miles broke in, brushing the hair from his forehead, his tone excited. “Let me see if I have this right.” He turned to Nilo. “She said, ‘The whole plan will go like clockwork,’ and then repeated, ‘Clock-work indeed!’?”

The boy’s expression was puzzled. “She did,” he conceded, “but that was just a joke. The important part is where she said that—”

Miles cut him off as well. “I think it was more than that. I have heard of people attaching fuses to clocks, so that when the clock strikes a certain time the fuse gets lit and causes an explosion. The fuse is almost impossible to detect, and it’s foolproof because no one need be in the vicinity to ignite it. I believe it’s more common in the Ottoman Empire than here.” He looked over at Sebastian, who nodded slowly. “I suspect that using her Ottoman connections, Mora has somehow connected a fuse to the clock in San Marco and rigged it so it will light when the clock strikes twelve.”

“Then all we have to do is disconnect it!” Tristan declared with enthusiasm.

“
Magari!
If only it were that simple!” Miles threw up his hands. “Connecting a fuse to a clock and also to a container of explosives the hundred-lengths distance to the east wing of the Palace is a very sophisticated undertaking. It requires a mechanism as complicated as a clock, and far more precise. Disconnecting the whole thing would take even the man who constructed it hours. It might take me days. Not to mention that one wrong move could ignite the fuse and explode the whole thing early.”

“Fantastic.” Sebastian’s tone was sharper than he meant it to be, and he softened it slightly as he went on. “What you are saying, then, is that it is completely impossible to disconnect it. But you can do it, can’t you?”

Miles was the only one of the Arboretti to underestimate his skills. He paused, his face a study of concentration, then sighed. “I can try. I’ve never actually seen a mechanism like this. I have only read about it in letters and travel accounts. But I would be willing to try it.”

Knowing Miles’s talents, Sebastian knew that meant the situation was not completely hopeless—only
almost
completely hopeless. “You and I will go to San Marco—”

“No, I will go alone,” Miles interjected, his voice deep and serious. “It is very dangerous. Practically like putting yourself at the center of an explosion. If I make a single mistake, the explosion will happen instantaneously. I don’t want to be responsible for risking anyone’s life but my own.”

Sebastian’s tone was equally serious. “It’s my decision to go, and I have made it, so technically I am risking my own life. Don’t bother trying to talk me out of it. You can’t expect to perform miracles on your own all the time.” He went on, his tone slightly lighter. “Besides, why should you get to have all the excitement?”

“I bet he’s still vying for Bianca’s hand.” Tristan’s dry observation brought a blush to Miles’s fair skin. “Undoubtedly saving her life while Ian is chained up in a dungeon will make a fine impression on her. But what about me? What am I to do? If I sit here quietly while you two become heroes, I’ll never be able to woo another woman in all of Christendom. ”

Sebastian ignored Tristan and spoke instead to Nilo. “You take Tristan to where you left Ian and Crispin. If anyone can free them, he can. He used to be a thief.”

Nilo moved to Tristan’s side and regarded him with wide-eyed admiration.

“Thanks for the recommendation,” Tristan said with an amused snort, already moving toward the door with Nilo at his heels. “We’ll meet you in San Marco within the hour.” He said that optimistically, but his voice had lost all hint amusement when he spoke his final words crossing the threshold. “That is, if there’s anything left of it.”

“How did you come up with that part about stabbing me in the bowels?” Crispin asked Ian over his shoulder. “That was the part that really made me shudder.”

“I think it was something about the way my stomach felt when I saw that man on the point of killing you,” Ian admitted with unusual candor.

The brothers hung there in silence for a moment; then Crispin spoke again. “I did not realize that Mora was so…insane.”

“Neither did I. When we were together, I thought she was capricious.
Ha!
” Ian grunted at himself. “Of course, I also thought Bianca was a murderess.”

There was a moment of silence, broken by the fierce pounding of the rain against the windows, then Crispin asked, “Do you think we will be able to hear the explosion from here?”

Ian exhaled deeply. “I would rather not think about that. I am enjoying concentrating on the pain in my wrists.”

“You can still feel your wrists?” Crispin asked incredulously. “I am numb almost to my knees.”

“Count yourself lucky,” Ian muttered back, gritting his teeth against the pain.

“I wonder if I will ever feel anything aga—”

“
Shhhhhh!
” Ian cut him off. “Listen.”

From somewhere deep in the house Crispin could hear the baying of dogs. It started faintly but got louder as more and more animals joined in. Then, suddenly, it stopped.

“How many men do you know of who have that effect on animals?” Ian whispered over his shoulder.

“Only one, the prince of thieves. But how would Tristan have found us?” Crispin countered with his own question.

“I haven’t got the energy to guess. Let’s just hope we are right.”

The brothers lapsed into silence again, straining their ears in the darkness. At first they heard nothing except the omnipresent falling hard rain, but then came a creak, barely audible, then a scuffle, then another creak. Silence fell again for a moment, followed by the distinctive sound of rusty hinges opening.

They heard Nilo’s and Tristan’s soft footsteps before they saw their rescuers. The two figures were nearly in front of them before they could make out their outline in the dark.

“Ian! Crispin! Can you hear me?” Tristan asked in a hurried whisper as he approached the two dangling bodies. “Are you conscious?”

“Only of the pain in our arms,” Ian replied, also whispering.

“Not me, I can’t feel my arms,” Crispin added helpfully.

“
Grazie a Dio
!” Tristan exhaled sharply. “I was afraid I would be too late.”

“If it’s anywhere near eleven o’clock, you might be,” Ian answered grimly. “We must get to Piazza San Marco before the clock—”

“—strikes twelve,” Tristan interrupted. “I know, I know. Miles and Sebastian are already on their way there. Miles thinks he knows a good way to disconnect the fuse, or else to blow us all up. But first we need to get you down from there. I can’t see from here. What have they got holding you, Ian?”

“Manacles, like those from the slave galleys, and chains about that thick. The locks are new. They look like those Gianferuccio made for the prisons, the ones with the triangular keys and the two prongs.”

“I am pleased to see you still remember your lessons,” Tristan said, smiling to himself as he dug in the dark through the satchel he was carrying. When Ian had approached him years earlier and asked to be tutored in the fine art of lock picking, Tristan had initially thought he was being mocked for his seedy past life. But he soon found out that he had misjudged his quirky older cousin, that Ian was genuinely interested in what he called the “mysteries of thieving.”

“I won’t recall them for much longer if all my vital fluids keep moving from my head to my feet,” Ian replied in an anguished whisper.

“That will be the least of your problems if those damn dogs roused the household. I’m working as fast as I can.
Aha!
” Tristan took the ring of keys he had just found and set the satchel aside. “Nilo, is there a chair or stool or something I can stand on at hand?”

“You brought the boy along to help you?” Ian sounded surprised. “What good will he be? Beware Giorgio if he finds out you’ve brought him here.”

“Giorgio knows he is with me. But I wouldn’t be here and Sebastian and Miles would not be in San Marco if it weren’t for Nilo. He overheard everything Mora said and ran back to Palazzo Foscari to get help.” Tristan had climbed atop the stool that Nilo had dragged over and was fiddling expertly with the large lock that yoked the brothers together on the ring. “
Ah
. I think I have almost got it. Be ready to fall,” he warned the brothers, and the lock sprang open.

Ian and Crispin hit the floor with thuds and one scarcely concealed yelp of pain. “There’s no time to get the manacles off right now, we can get them in the boat.” Tristan climbed off the stool. “Can you walk, or better yet, run?” he asked hurriedly, replacing his tools in his satchel.

Ian nodded and allowed Nilo to help him up as Tristan did the same for Crispin. “Come on. This way,” Nilo said, tugging Ian’s cape hopefully in the direction of the door. He pulled so hard that he soon had the entire thing in his hand, empty of its occupant who was still standing motionless where Nilo had left him. Without telling Ian, someone had replaced his legs with immobile hot pincers that dug painfully into his body each time he tried to move one.

“You go ahead,” he whispered to Nilo. “I will catch up in a moment.”

“I’ll do that too,” Crispin whispered, wincing with the pain of standing.

Nothing Tristan or Nilo could have said would have convinced the brothers to move, but the sound of footsteps approaching the outside door was more than enough incentive. They leapt rather than walked to the small door with the rusty hinges that had admitted their saviors earlier, and had just closed it when the outer door burst open.

The six guards who entered the room and found it empty knew they would receive worse than dismissal from their demanding mistress if they let the two captives get out of the building. “Bar the doors! Close off the stairs! Let out the dogs!” the head household guard shouted, and the orders were executed almost before they were given.

At the foot of the stairs leading to the kennel, Tristan halted, and the others fell into line behind him. He motioned them to be silent, then opened the door a finger’s width and peered around. The dogs were barking ferociously at two bewildered-looking Moorish servingmen who had been given the task of letting them out. Putting on his most authoritative air, Tristan pushed open the door and emerged from the staircase, pulling Ian and Crispin behind him by their chained hands.