The Stargazer (38 page)

Sebastian made a sound that was something between laughter and weeping as Ian helped him step across to the narrow platform. Miles had also been restored to safety when Tristan bounded through the door.

“You did it!” he announced triumphantly, moving aside so Crispin and Nilo could crowd in. “The Palace is still there!”

“I can’t quite believe it,” Miles said, his voice still shaky. “I can’t believe it’s over.”

“It’s not over,” Ian corrected him. “Not yet. We still have to get Bianca. I am not leaving here tonight without her.”

“Come on, Ian,” Crispin moved toward his brother. “She is safe for the night. Tomorrow we’ll go to the judges, and—”

“No! I will not leave her. I will not leave her anywhere that Mora can get to her. God alone knows what that witch had planned for her if this failed. With or without you, I am going to get her.”

“Me too!” Nilo joined in. “I won’t leave without her either.”

The other Arboretti exchanged pained looks.

“What are we waiting for, then?” Tristan asked, attempting to affect a jaunty tone. “Let’s go break her out of prison.”

“Just what I suggested in the first place,” Ian pointed out perversely as he led the way out of the clock and across the piazza toward the entrance to the Doge’s Palace. The sentinel on duty that night poked his head out of the guard shack, where Ian could see a small fire blazing.

“Halt!” he shouted to the bedraggled pack as they rushed up. “State your business.”

Ian was momentarily surprised when Tristan pushed him aside and began addressing the guard quickly and firmly, like one accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed. “Sergeant, we just heard bandits entering the clock tower. How many of you are on duty here tonight?”

“Four,” the sentinel responded promptly, pleased to have been mistaken for a solider of higher rank.

“You must take them all and pursue these bandits. They are in the tower now. Go at once.”

Tristan had no sooner spoken than the sentinel called together his peers and told them what had happened. He hurried the others on, then returned to address Tristan. “You all stay right here and wait for us to return.”

“Of course,” Tristan answered solemnly. “Might we use your fire?”

The sentinel considered for a moment, then nodded and ran off to follow his fellows across the piazza. The Arboretti ducked into the guard shack just long enough to ensure that the sentinels could no longer see them, then made haste toward the wing containing the prisons.

There was another guard posted there, this one larger, older, and smarter-looking than the first. Ian glanced at Tristan, who shrugged and shook his head. “This one is all yours,” Tristan offered helpfully, and stepped back to join Crispin, Miles, Sebastian, and Nilo.

Ian marched right up to the guard and announced himself. “I am Ian Foscari. I must see one of the prisoners. Right now.”

The guard, who was busily excavating his dinner from one of his rotting teeth, slowly raised his eyes. He gave Ian an appraising look from his sopping leggings and boots to his grimly determined jaw. “Can’t,” he said finally.

“I am afraid I do not understand. I cannot see the prisons?” Ian asked in a voice that suggested the guard might be speaking an Outer Mongolian dialect.

The guard, who had found a particularly enticing nugget in his tooth, nodded.

“Why not?” Ian demanded with feeling.

“Closed.”

“Well, open them!”

“Can’t,” the guard said laconically, crossing his arms on his chest.

“I think Tristan’s approach worked better,” Crispin said from behind his brother.

“What do you propose?” Ian turned toward Crispin, his eyes blazing.

“We could try a variation of the method we used on Mora’s giants,” Crispin offered. “They seemed to respond well to that.”

While they were speaking, all six of them moved closer to the guard. He stood stock-still, arms crossed over his chest, feigning nonchalance, but his eyes began to shift nervously.

“If you gentlemen are planning to harm me, I ought to warn you that there is an entire stable of guards in that warming house over there.” He pointed a nervous finger toward the now empty guard shack.

“I doubt it,” Tristan said coolly, not halting his approach. The guard found himself surrounded by a half-circle of very tall men and one small boy. He was about to protest, this time more loudly, when Sebastian brought the side of his hand down against the back of the man’s head, knocking him completely unconscious in one blow.

“Very neat!” Miles said with admiration. “You’ll have to teach me how to do that some time.”

“Just after you teach me how to stop unstoppable clocks,” Sebastian shot back as Tristan rifled through the unconscious guard’s pockets. In a moment he stood up holding two keys and handed them to Ian.

“Those should do it. Why don’t you and Crispin go get her, while the rest of us stay up here to make sure those guards aren’t too bored.”

Ian and Crispin made straight for the staircase behind the guard’s stool and went down. There were intermittent torches lighting their descent, but the darkness was still almost impenetrable. When they had taken no more than twenty steps, they heard and then saw the water lapping against the side of the staircase. Undaunted, they continued their descent, wading deeper and deeper into the cold water.

“This place is flooded,” Crispin stated needlessly to Ian’s back. “I am not sure,” he continued, seeing that Ian had not halted, “that we can go much farther.”

“
Um
, Ian—” Crispin ventured again.

“The gate must be just down here,” Ian shouted back with manic optimism as he rounded a corner. The water was now up to his collarbone, exactly the point the top of Bianca’s head came to on his chest, he remembered. The recollection brought a lump to his throat, which got larger with each further step down he took.

Two more steps brought the water to his ears. A third had it almost over his head. It was not until he was completely submerged that he reached the iron entrance door to the prison. Crispin was right. It was completely flooded, filled with water from the floor to the ceiling.

His mind suddenly became very calm and very rational. There was no way anyone could be alive down there, it told him. All that effort to get the keys from the guard had been a waste, he thought calmly. It was too bad, it reported, but Bianca was most assuredly dead.

“Well?” he asked as his brother neared, not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

“Bianca did not know how to swim,” Ian said calmly as he brushed by Crispin and continued his ascent. “I believe she is dead.”

Crispin watched with shocked horror as his brother proceeded on like an ultraefficient machine. Had he really heard him correctly? Did he really say that Bianca was dead?

“Ian!” he shouted, following up the stairs. “Ian! What did you just say?”

Ian paused at the top of the stairs and waited for Crispin to catch up to him. “I said that Bianca did not know how to swim and is most assuredly dead.”

Ian ignored Nilo’s small cry and the questions of the other Arboretti, proceeding instead with frightening coldness toward the reviving guard. He pulled the man up by the collar of his cape and shook him until his eyes opened and he began making noises.

“What happened to the prisoners who were in the basement cells?” he demanded.

The guard looked confusedly up at the soaking wet man gripping him by the neck, then remembered what had happened.

“I’ll see that you are charged with molesting the duke’s guards, I will,” he spluttered. “I’ll see you tried and hung! You’ll regret this, you—”

Ian interrupted the man’s babbling, his voice even and hard as the blade of a dagger. “What happened to the prisoners in the basement cells?”

“Nothing,” the guard responded, looking quizzically at the man above him. “They’re down there just as they ought to be, ain’t they? Hey, Signore Gianni, or whatever you said your name was, d’ you think you could let loose on my neck a little?”

Ian ignored him. “They were not moved? No one evacuated them?”

“An’ why would we do that?” the guard asked, suddenly surly.

“The cells are flooded. The water is almost up the staircase. No one could be alive down there.”

“Look, Signore Gianni, those prisoners were going to die soon anyway. Let’s put it that the water has just saved the executioner a trip from his bed. Let’s put it that way, shall we?”

“Are you saying,” Ian asked, tightening his hold on the man’s cloak and lifting him from the ground, “that the prisoners were just left to die in the flood?”

“This isn’t so funny anymore, Signore Gianni.”

“My name is not Gianni. Answer my question.”

“You put it about right.” The blood was draining quickly from the guard’s face. “They were just left there. If they died or not, that’s up to them and the Deity, ain’t it?”

Ian let go of the man’s cloak and let him fall to the ground. He turned, marched past his cousins and Nilo, and out into the piazza.

Pulling his soaking wet cape around him, Ian made for the boat landing where the gondoliers had finally managed to tie up the gondola. Roused by his approach, the boatmen were already in position by the time he reached the gondola and gave them the order for home. They had just pulled away from the dock when Crispin arrived and, with a running leap, jumped on.

“Are you all right?” he asked his brother lamely when he entered the cabin, panting from the exertion of catching up with him. As soon as the question was out of his mouth, he was sorry he had asked.

Ian pressed his lips together tightly and answered, in a voice that lacked even a semblance of emotion, “Of course. I am always fine.”

Crispin shuddered. Ian’s tone was dead enough, but his expression was even worse. Crispin would have given anything to see the slightest flicker of animation in his slate gray eyes.

“You can’t pretend she didn’t matter to you,” he began, hoping to at least antagonize Ian.

“I have said nothing like that.” Ian’s expression did not change, his tone did not waver.

“I think you were in love with her,” Crispin continued boldly, willing to try anything to coax an emotion out of his brother.

“I think you are right,” Ian replied in a voice that made it seem doubtful he even possessed a heart.

Crispin’s jaw hung open, stunned by his brother’s admission. “You mean, you admit it? You agree?”

Ian’s brows went up but his tone did not change. “Why shouldn’t I? You are right.”

“But, just like that? You sit there like some sort of talking statue coolly admitting that the woman you loved is dead?”

“I am sorry if my behavior is displeasing to you.”

“It’s not that it’s displeasing,” Crispin fumbled to explain. “It’s just that it’s, well, incredible.”

“
Ah
,” Ian replied, hoping that the single syllable conveyed enough understanding to make the conversation be over. He suddenly felt weary, very, very weary, as if his entire body were twice as heavy as normal. The wind had died down and the storm had reverted to a light rain that made a soothing noise against the cabin of the gondola. Perhaps if he just closed his eyes for a moment, just let himself slide into the sleep that beckoned so welcomingly.

Suddenly, the day became sunny and warm. Ian alighted from the gondola, not as expected, at his boat landing, but instead in the grassy park of a friend’s summer villa. At first he heard only the rustle of the leaves and saw no one, but soon the sounds of a pastoral melody wafted to him on the summer breeze. He followed it and found himself in a shady clearing, with a stream running on one side and soft, grassy benches all around. In the center, on a velvet blanket, lay Bianca. She had no clothes on but was completely covered with flowers, like some sort of woodland nymph come to life. As he admired her, she smiled at him and called his name.

“Come, Ian, come here,” she said warmly, extending one of her slim, graceful arms toward him.

“But you are dead,” he blurted, without realizing what he was saying.

She laughed and shook her head, the light of the sun catching magically on her fiery mane. “No, no. Not me. Come, Ian. I am here.”

Ian’s body filled with warmth when he understood what she was saying. She was not dead at all, she had been waiting for him in this idyllic spot the whole time. He smiled and started toward her, his heart filled with happiness.

“Come on, Ian,” she said again, her voice somehow deeper, more urgent, and less pleasant.

“Come on.” Crispin was shaking him harder. “We are here. We’re home.”

Ian awoke with a start. He turned his head about confusedly and blinked. “I was…dreaming?” he asked his brother, still dazed.

“I guess so.” Crispin looked concerned. “You were only asleep for a few minutes. The gondoliers made good time.”

“I was dreaming,” Ian repeated, this time to himself. “It was only a dream.”

With horror he discovered that all the emotions he thought he had left at the foot of the prison stairs had only been in hiding. Without warning, they welled up within him, spilling throughout his body and leaving him with a feeling of despair more acute than anything he had ever experienced. He needed to be alone. Immediately.

“I will be in the library if anyone needs me,” he told Crispin in a voice that wavered, then added, “Please see to it that they do not.”

Crispin watched his brother’s back disappear up the stairs, unsure whether to be relieved that his emotions seemed to have returned or terrified of what he might do to himself. Deciding that he was himself too exhausted and upset to make such a decision, he took a different set of stairs toward the kitchen, in search of some warm water and a much needed drink.

Ian had chosen the library because it was his favorite room, but as he neared the door he shied away from it. Memories of the time he had passed with Bianca there washed over him, first the delightful hours they had spent arguing and at each other’s throats, and then the even more delightful hours they had spent in each other’s arms. He remembered walking into the library that first night they made love and seeing her stretched out before the fire, her supple body golden in the light of the flames, her nipples taut, her back arched in pleasure as she gracefully stroked herself.

He closed his eyes when he opened the door and crossed the threshold, savoring the image of her there again. When he opened them, he nearly jumped out of his skin. The room was exactly as it had been that night, shadowy and dark but for the fire blazing in the hearth, and there was indeed a figure stretched out on the rug before it. But it was not Bianca, not even close. For one thing it was too small. For another, it was a rather grotesquely dressed man.

As Ian approached, it turned around and squinted at him. “You that lazy servant finally come to bring me some grappa?” the small man demanded.

“No, I am the servant’s master.” Ian’s voice was contemptuous. “Who might you be?”

The small man hurried to his feet and bowed deeply. “Beggin’ your pardon, but the way you’re dressed you don’t look much like a lord, Your Lordship.”

Ian was in no mood for either criticism or company. “I accept your apology, but you still have not answered my question. Who are you?”
And when are you leaving?
he added to himself in an undertone.

The last comment was interrupted by a knock at the door, followed by the entrance of one of Ian’s servingmen with the grappa decanter and a glass.

“Bring another for His Lordship, won’t you?” Cecco ordered, and the man left hurriedly without even looking at his master. “That one’s good enough,” Cecco said, gesturing to where the servant had just been standing, “but slow on his feet. I’ve been a-waiting these twenty minutes for that grappa. I wouldn’t tolerate it if I was you.”

If Ian had not been immersed in deep despair and self-pity, he would have found the little tyrant’s remarks by turns amusing and annoying. As it was, he just wanted to know his name so he could kick him out in a personal manner.

“I am sorry that my staff does not meet your approval, Your Highness,” Ian said, crossing to a chair and sitting with his head in his hands.

“ ‘Highness,’ that’s funny, it is,” Cecco said with a smile, seating himself opposite Ian and taking a gulp of grappa that would have flattened a larger man. “You’re a funny one. My name’s Cecco, Cecco the Nano. The woman was right, we’ll get along fine.”

Ian raised his head. “What woman?”

The servingman reappeared, bearing a second glass and handed it to Ian. Cecco waited until it had been filled and motioned to Ian to take a sip before continuing.

“It looks like you could use a drink. That murderess who ain’t a murderess woman. Bianca. She ain’t told me her other name. But she told me you and she were a-fixing to get married and I should come an’ see you and tell you a story I told her, an’ also something else.” Cecco paused to drink back the rest of his glass and wipe his lips daintily with his sleeve.

Ian’s bloodshot eyes widened, and he moved forward on his chair. “Bianca? You saw Bianca? Where?”

“Where do you think? In those damn wet cells at the duke’s house. Where else would I have met a lady o’ that quality?” Cecco’s appreciation for Bianca had gone up markedly when he saw the style in which her friends lived, and he saw no reason not to pour on the flattery.

“You saw her in prison? When?” Ian was hovering on the edge of his seat, his despondency momentarily lifted.

“Oh, must have been a good five hours ago, I reckon. If them clocks of yours are right.”

Ian slid into his chair, settling back into his misery. Five hours ago was an eternity. “Was she still alive?”

“Must have been, mustn’t she, if she told me to come a-calling to tell you my story.”

Ian was confused. On her deathbed Bianca had sent a dwarf to entertain him with fairy tales? “What kind of story?”

Cecco gulped down more grappa and held out his glass for a refill. “She told me that you would be grateful to me when you heard it. I just want you to know that from the outset, in case you forget it in the middle and get some murderous idea into your head. Do you promise to let me finish the story?”

Ian nodded dejectedly, not thrilled by the prospect of company. He just wanted to be alone, to let his grief wash over him.

“An’ not do any badgering with questions?” Cecco went on.

As if he had the energy for questions. Or even for listening. Ian nodded again.

“All right, then. It’s a story of what happened two years ago. In Sicily. Outside Messina.” Cecco waited a moment, decided he had as much of Ian’s attention as he was likely to get, and went on. “I’m to tell you as how a witch-woman an’ her lover hired me an’ my partner to ambush you in Sicily and kill you. Now I had nothing against you, personally see, but that witch-woman, she went on and on about my adorable ears an’ there was nothing for it but to take the job.” Cecco studied Ian, who appeared to be only half listening. “Your ears aren’t any too bad either if you’d a-use ’em,” he observed, then went on. “Problem is, we made a mistake an’ we killed the wrong one. But it wasn’t really our fault, see, because there was only supposed to be one of you in the first place.”

Cecco stopped talking because he had lost his audience. A faraway look came into Ian’s eyes as he digested the half-heard words being spoken by the dwarf. So deeply was he consumed by misery, that it took him almost a minute to realize what Cecco was telling him. Mora and Christian together had hired an assassin to kill him. His best friend and his mistress. What kind of fool was he that he had never seen it, never even suspected it?

But even that horrible revelation could not hold his interest. His mind kept drifting to Bianca, to the blissful years they should have passed together, to the family they should have had, to the abysmal emptiness his life would be without her. The pain of his loss was so profound that he doubled over in his chair, his hands pressing hard against his skull, his lips squeezed shut to hold in his anguished cries. She was gone. She would never come back. He had lost her forever, lost the only person with whom he had ever known true happiness. For the first time in years, more than two years, he allowed first one, then a dozen slow tears to trickle down his face.

He had completely forgotten that there was anyone else in the room when, a quarter of an hour later, Cecco cleared his throat. “That’s not the end of the story. Then we dragged you to Mes—”

“I know how it ends,” Ian interrupted, not removing his head from his hands. “I know what happened afterward.”