Rapture In Ruin

The Palazzo Morosini settled into evening the way old stone settles into water: slowly, and with a great many small sounds nobody troubled to notice any longer.

Below, along the canal, a gondolier called a warning to another boat rounding the bend, his voice thinning against the slap of water on marble steps; somewhere further off, the bells of a church Adriana could never quite place struck the hour, uneven and slightly out of time with themselves, as Venetian bells always seemed to be.

The air through her open window carried salt and lamp oil, and something colder beneath both: the mineral hush of the canal at low tide. She had lived in this palazzo three years and still could not have said, with any confidence, that a single room in it was truly hers.

Her husband was, as he was most nights that season, losing steadily at the tables of the Ridotto and would not return before dawn; her maid had gone for the night besides, and the palazzo belonged for the moment to no one but herself.

The last candle on the dressing table guttered in its silver stick, throwing her own reflection back at her in pieces across a mirror grown too old to hold a face whole. She drew the jewelled comb from her hair and set it, as she did every evening, in the little porcelain dish shaped like a shell; she unclasped the pearls at her throat and laid them beside it; she worked a little oil of almonds into hands gone dry from an evening spent at cards she had not wished to play. It was an evening exactly like every other evening of her marriage, down to the last candle she would blow out alone.

She crossed to the bedroom, pushed open the door, and stopped so suddenly that the candle in her hand threw a wild shadow up the wall before she caught it steady again.

A gasp left her, sharp and involuntary, swallowed almost before it had finished leaving her throat.

He sat on the deep stone ledge of her window with nonchalance: one leg drawn up and bent along the sill, the other planted flat on the floor, his weight settled back casually into the frame.

Her eyes went first to his mask — aged silver worked into something not quite man and not quite beast, small curling horns at the brow, hollow black sockets where eyes should have caught the candlelight and did not, tapering at last into a long, smooth point where a chin belonged, dark curling hair spilling loose past his shoulders beneath it.

Then to his height, unmissable even seated, the window behind him made small by the sheer scale of him.

Then to the coat: unrelieved black, closed to the throat with small silver buttons, a heavy inverted key at his chest catching what little light the room still held.

And last, to the pistol — his hand sheathed in black leather to the wrist, the weapon held loose, pointed at her without particular urgency.

For a long moment he simply watched her, still as the stone he leaned against, before he spoke.

“Good evening, signora.”

His voice reached her low and even, mild as any polite stranger’s. For the length of a breath she did not move. Then she took a step toward the bell pull beside the bed, her hand already lifting to reach for it.

He drew the pistol’s hammer back with his thumb, the small mechanical click filling the room louder than her own held breath.

“I am afraid I cannot allow you to ring that bell.”

Her step stopped mid-stride, her hand still raised, fingers curled uselessly around nothing; she stared at him and found she was breathing too hard to answer.

“Would you be so kind,” he continued, “as to close the door?”

He rose as he spoke, unfolding from the ledge in one long, economical movement that brought him fully upright, and only then did she understand quite how tall he stood, the pistol still raised and steady in his hand.

She crossed to the door on legs she did not entirely trust and shut it.

He inclined his head in silent approval, and lifted one gloved hand toward the chair beside her dressing table, the gesture as courteous as any she had received from a man asking her to dance.

“Please. Take a seat.”

She startled at the request, her throat working once before she managed to swallow, and she sat, because there did not seem, in that moment, to be any other direction her legs would carry her.

He waited until she had settled fully into the chair before bowing to her, low and correct.

“Pardon my intrusion, signora.” He straightened. “Allow me first to compliment you upon your palazzo. The Vittoria bust in your hallway is remarkable; I confess I very nearly stopped to admire it longer than my business here permitted.”

Her eyes moved over him in place of an answer. When she finally spoke, the words came thin and unsteady.

“Who ... who are you?”

He let out a small, weary sound, as though the question had arrived precisely on schedule and he had tired of hearing it long before he had ever entered her room.

“They call me a great many things, signora. Il Conte Senza Nome, to those who favour formality. The Devil of the Rialto, to those who favour gossip. I have, on one memorable occasion, been addressed as Lucifer himself, though I confess the comparison flattered neither of us. A name, I find, is a curious currency: worth precisely what the one spending it believes it worth, and not a scudo more. I have answered to a hundred of them in this city, and to none, and if you require something to call me tonight, ‘a guest who will not overstay his welcome’ will serve you well enough.”

She frowned at him, the words not quite closing into sense, her breath still coming too fast for real speech, and when the next question left her it left plainly, stripped of any ornament his own words had worn.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“That would be a terrible shame.” His head tilted, very slightly, considering her. “I do despise seeing such beauty and grace go to waste. Alas. It is sometimes how these things must go.”

She rose half out of the chair before the sentence had properly finished, and he crossed the space between them in a single step, the pistol lifted a fraction higher than courtesy had allowed it to sit until now.

“Please, signora. Be assured I do not jest when I say I will fire this pistol if you force me to it. Stay seated.”

She sank back down slowly, her hands pressed flat against her knees to keep them from shaking, though it did not entirely serve.

“What do you want?”

“A simple thing, really.” He lowered the pistol again, as though the last several seconds had not occurred at all. “The key to the iron coffer your husband keeps beneath his writing desk. Kept, I believe, beneath the very pillow you were not yet lying upon.”

Her mouth opened, closed again. “I ... I cannot. That would ruin him.”

He nodded slowly.

“Yes. I very much hope it will.” A pause, almost gentle. “But do not despair, signora. A lady with eyes such as yours will not long be in want of suitors.”

Her gaze went to the window, then the door, then back to him again, quick and useless, the room offering nothing that resembled an escape.

“Is there ... anything else ... I can offer you?” Her fingers hesitantly found the laces of her stays, and the words left her breathless, barely audible.

His head tilted the other way now, and something in the hollows of the mask suggested, without showing her anything at all, that he was amused.

“How forward, signora.” He said it simply, softly. “We have only just met. Surely you would wish to court me first.”

She said nothing. Could not. His face, what little of it the mask allowed the room to see, dipped toward her a moment, slow enough that she felt it before he lifted his eyes back to hers.

“It is a tempting offer, I will admit.” The gloved hand at the pistol shifted, no more than a tightening of the grip. “Regrettably, I am short on time.” His voice did not change, though he shifted his weight slightly, the first restless motion she had seen him make since he arrived. “And on patience.”

She nodded, a short, jerking breath escaping her.

“How do I know you will not dispose of me the moment I give it to you?”

He waited before answering, long enough that she wondered whether he intended to answer at all.

“That is a fair concern. I am afraid you will have to take my word for it. The word of a gentleman.”

She hesitated a moment longer.

“It pains me to say it, signora,” he said, one gloved hand already extended toward her, palm up, “but you do not appear to have much choice in the matter. I would advise you to obtemperate, and swiftly.”

She rose from the chair on legs still unsteady, crossed to the bed, and drew the key from beneath the pillow exactly where he had told her it would be; when she placed it in his palm his fingers closed over it, and over hers besides, for the length of a single held breath, before releasing her entirely.

He bowed again, shorter this time. “Very good.” The key vanished into some hidden fold of his coat. “I am very much obliged to you. I would tell you I hope our paths cross again, for I would not begrudge myself such a sight twice, but I suspect the feeling would not be returned.”

He turned toward the window, then paused, half-facing her still. “For what it is worth, my sincere apologies for the trouble.”

Something small and bright appeared between his gloved fingers, tossed once into the air and left to fall, landing with a thin, bright sound upon the boards at her feet. “And this is for you.”

She bent slowly and lifted the coin from the floor.

Engraved across its face, in letters worn smooth as though by many hands before her own: I MET IL CONTE AND SURVIVED.

She turned it once between her fingers, and when she looked up again her breath had steadied, her brow drawn now in something closer to puzzlement than terror.

“Why do you do this?” she asked, very softly.

He was already at the window, one leg swung over the sill, the pistol still trained on her from old habit more than any real need.

“Why,” he said. “Because I can.”

He fired the pistol once into the night air and was gone before the crack of it had finished rolling off the water below; Adriana’s cry followed a half second behind him, thin and useless against a window that had already swallowed him whole.

Two floors below, in a study smelling of leather and cold tallow, Corvus heard the shot and did not so much as flinch.

“That is our cue,” he said, in the flat, even register he used for everything from disaster to breakfast. “Faber. Any day now would be pleasant.”

Faber crouched over the iron bound coffer beneath the senator’s writing desk, a slim pick held delicately between two gloved fingers, muttering to it under his breath as if it were a nervous horse that needed calming.

Like the other three, he wore the crew’s black: a heavy, enveloping cloak of the same dark, leather trimmed cut, its hood thrown back now to leave his mask bare to the candlelight — a beaked, leather black face, long and pointed at the jaw, hollow eyed and faintly ghastly, like something stepped straight off a plague doctor’s woodcut and never quite returned.

An oversized silver key, plain where Il Conte’s bore its small red stone, hung inverted at his throat exactly as it did at each of theirs.

“The tumblers on this one are Genoese work,” Faber said, to no one who had asked. “Whoever forged this meant it for a hand that does not know what it is doing, which is, I will say, rather flattering, given that I clearly—”

“Faber.” Lupus’s voice came from the doorway, where he stood filling most of it, arms folded, still as stone, watching the corridor.

“Yes. Working.” Faber bent back to the lock.

Somewhere above them, footsteps had begun, quick, several sets, converging toward the stairs like water finding a drain.

“They heard that,” Corvus observed, not stirring from the window. “I imagine most of Venice did.” A beat, then, in the same flat register: “They will go to her first. We have perhaps a minute.”

A shadow crossed the window and was gone before it had properly arrived; a gloved hand followed it, a key held between two fingers.

“You could simply use the stairs, you know,” Faber said to the Count, without looking up from the lock, “like men of ordinary constitution.”

“I have never yet found a staircase worth the story it leaves behind.” The key dropped into Faber’s waiting palm before he had properly reached for it. “There is a packet of letters beneath the rest of it, wrapped in oilskin. See that it reaches me untouched.” A pause, dry as dust. “I have business yet this evening. Try not to burn the house down before you rejoin me.”

He was gone before anyone thought to answer him, the window left empty and swinging faintly on its hinge.

Faber took the key with both hands as though it were something sacred, turned it once in the separate lock beneath the coffer’s main latch, and the lid gave way with a small, satisfied sigh of old hinges. Inside: a shallow bed of velvet, a scatter of loose gems that caught what candlelight remained, a heavy purse of coin, a slim gold reliquary that had plainly never held anything holier than its own weight in metal, and, tucked beneath all of it in a flat oilskin wrapping, a slim packet of letters bound with cord.

Faber set the letters aside first, exactly as he had been told, tucking them into his coat before his fingers found their way toward the reliquary instead, twitching with open want; Lupus’s hand closed over his wrist and steered it toward the door with no room for debate.

The footsteps on the stairs had become voices now, sharp and alarmed, and a door somewhere close by rattled against a latch already straining to hold.

“Gentlemen,” Corvus said, still at the window, in the same flat register he had used for the shot, “I would suggest we conclude our business.”

They went out the way Il Conte had gone, one after another, along a ledge no wider than a man’s boot and onto the flat lead roof of the loggia beside it; Lupus went last, the coffer slung over one shoulder as though it weighed nothing at all, though the tiles shifting faintly beneath his boots suggested otherwise.

Below, in the courtyard, a dog had not stopped barking since the shadow crossed the garden wall, and a manservant, drawn out by the noise, was asking the upstairs maid what exactly had set it off. She swore to him she had seen nothing, truly nothing, though she would not, she added, mind his company all the same, walking the wall together just to be certain. Her tone hovered somewhere between annoyance and a laugh she was trying hard to swallow.

“Vulpes,” Corvus said, not breaking stride, as they crossed the roof toward the gap where a second man in identical black already waited, “you were meant to watch the gate, not court it.”

Vulpes swung up beside them, his masked head tilting at an angle that somehow suggested, quite absurdly, a grin nobody could actually see beneath it. “I improvised. She very nearly raised the house before I caught her in the passage — a hand over her mouth first, and rather better manners after, once she stopped trying to bite me. By the time I let her go she had entirely forgotten to be afraid.”

“Lucky she only heard you,” Lupus said. It was, as far as anyone present could recall, the longest sentence he had spoken all evening.

“She heard quite enough of it, and seemed pleased regardless,” Vulpes shot back, and led the way across the gap.

They crossed three more rooftops before dropping down into the calli proper, the last stretch by a rope Faber had already anchored on the way in — “always leave yourself a door,” he said, to nobody, coiling it back over his shoulder as he landed — and from there the city closed around them as it always did once a job was done, narrow and dark. Behind them, faint across the water, a second shot cracked the night open, someone’s alarm rather than any signal of theirs; none of them stopped to determine whose.

They did not run, exactly. They moved fast and low and without a wasted step, Corvus half a pace ahead at every turn, his steps as sure and unbroken in the dark as they were anywhere else.

Somewhere in the second calle Vulpes began recounting, entirely without prompting, exactly how charming he had been to the maid, and precisely how little credit he felt he was receiving for it, until Corvus told him to be quiet before he charmed the entire watch down upon them as well.

“You wound me,” Vulpes said.

“I would like to,” Corvus replied, “if it would improve your aim with a lock half as much as it improves your tongue.”

They were perhaps four calli from home, from the water gate and the palazzo behind it that all of Venice believed had stood empty for years, when Corvus, last through the turn, stopped so abruptly that Faber very nearly walked into his back.

Ahead of them, pressed flat into the shadow of a doorway not ten paces off, stood a young woman.

She had frozen entirely still, one hand braced against the old stone at her back and the other pressed over her own mouth as though she might otherwise have made a sound.

She was slight and slender, wrapped in a plain, unremarkable cloak, the sort any working woman might throw on after dark.

Her hair, pale gold shading into copper wherever the moonlight caught it, spilled loose and uncontained well past her shoulder.

Even frozen still against a stranger’s doorway, there was no mistaking that she was lovely,

Her eyes met the black hollows of Corvus’s mask, wide and dark and entirely aware of exactly what she was looking at.

Corvus did not move, did not call out, did not so much as breathe for the length of one long, terrible moment, before he said, very quietly, to the three men still behind him.

“We have a witness.”