You think so? What if the sbirri are waiting in the lagoon to intercept us? What if informants on the Terrafirma spot us on the road, and send word to the Council of Ten? What then?
If they intercept us, Crivano says with a sigh, we will kill them, just as we killed them last night. If they find us on the road, we’ll take another road. On the Terrafirma we can hide ourselves. On the sea we cannot.
Obizzo frowns. He takes up his file again. This is a new song for you, dottore, he says. I hope you’ve learned all the verses.
They sit wordless for a while, the file buzzing across the bolt’s corners. A pale ghost sweeps through the kitchen: the serving-girl affixing her backspread yellow veil. When it’s pinned, she opens a door and rushes down the steps without a glance. The food she’s prepared sits covered on the counter.
Curfew, Obizzo says. In the Ghetto by sundown, or she’ll have trouble. She’s bold to be working in a Christian house at all, isn’t she? If that’s what this is.
Crivano pushes back from the table, sags in his chair. It shifts and groans, but it holds together. Not unlike Crivano himself. Where’s Trist?o? he says.
With a flick of the bolt, the mirrormaker indicates a corridor to his right. In his workshop, he says. I think it’s a workshop. That heavy door at the end of the hall.
Crivano nods. Then he puts his palms on the chair-seat and forces himself up. His legs are stronger, but still unsteady. His hands no longer return automatically to the shapes of the walkingstick and the rapier-grip; he can almost straighten his fingers.
The door in the hallway is broad enough to permit the passage of a large handcart. A chaos of sharp smells seeps from behind it, most of them mysterious, some familiar from Bologna and the secret processes Crivano studied there: the sour tang of dissolution and separation, the acrid torment of materials sublimed and calcined, the unsettling sweetness of reductions and coagulates. He lifts his fist—the tendons in his forearm still disordered by the pistolshot—and raps the hard black wood. After a moment, he knocks again. Then he tries the latch.
The door opens easily, sucked forth by a gust of wind, to reveal an airy room. Windows line two walls, giving a view of the apse of Saint Jerome, the lagoon beyond, the snowcapped ridges of the distant Dolomites, the red sun over the edge of the world. The space before is crowded with apparatus: jars and bottles of colored and crystalline glass, tongs and long spoons, mortars and pestles, complex networks of alembics and cucurbits and retorts, a delicate many-bulbed pelican, low shelves crowded with books and herbs and phials of colored powders, clay crucibles and leather bellows like those in Serena’s factory. In the middle of the room, between a long reverberatory furnace and an iron brazier burning with a smokeless fire, is a cylindrical clay athanor of the traditional type. Behind it, propped on a wooden easel, is the glass-framed talisman that Serena crafted from Verzelin’s mirror. The dark room that the mirror shows moves whenever Crivano moves; after a few steps, his own white hands appear in the glass. Anxious, he looks away.
Trist?o is nowhere to be seen. Crivano stops, calls to him. Trist?o? he says.
From the corner opposite the windows, behind an inlaid-wood screen of which Crivano had taken no notice, a soft commotion arises, followed by Trist?o’s voice. Ah! it says. Forgive me my neglectful inattention, Vettor. Even now I emerge to greet you. And let me add that I am greatly relieved to be once more in your waking presence. I have been most concerned. Tell me, how do you feel?
Crivano is slow to answer, disinclined to converse with one he cannot see. I feel bad, he says. I’m slow and sore. Too old for fighting.
You battled admirably last night, the screen says. So Perina’s report informs me.
Perina, Crivano says. How is she? She took a hard blow from a sbirro’s cudgel.
Bruised. Not badly. She will soon recover. I am tending to her.
Crivano grunts, nods, looks at the screen. It’s open at the bottom; he can see Trist?o’s slippered feet. Trist?o, he says, what are you doing?
Trist?o doesn’t answer. After a moment, he steps into view. He’s attired casually in a belted tunic and hose; he looks well-rested, alert. In his outstretched hands he carries a large brass chamberpot, and as he crosses the room, Crivano catches the odor of feces. Oh, Crivano says. I see.
Perina and I bandaged your injuries, Trist?o says. She has, I believe, a genuine gift for the treatment of wounds. If you have been able to review our work, I hope you have found it to be adequate.