The Descent: Book Three of the Taker Trilogy

  He was brought to the anteroom outside the grand chamber. A flock of officials were clustered around the huge table, all in their long black robes. Old Zeno stood on the far side, his face as violent as Adair had ever seen it, frightening to behold. He could see why this man had come out on top of all the scheming and scrapping and battling among Venetian nobles and been made the doge, the ruler of the city. Bishop Rossi crouched at Zeno’s side.

  Adair dropped his cloak—which he had taken off and wrapped around the book to soften its edges into anonymity—and set his package onto a chair as he approached his guardian. He could see fury building in the old man’s eyes as he directed his words at the gathered crowd. “Leave us. I wish to speak to my ward alone. No, you stay, Rossi.” Zeno placed a hand on the bishop’s arm as he moved to join the others. The clerks gave Adair baleful looks as they shuffled out, as though they knew what fate was in store for him. He threw back his shoulders and held his head high: he would show them how a Magyar met his end.

  Zeno waited until the heavy door had been closed before he began thundering at him. “You! You are the very devil! Look at the mess you have brought to my doorstep!”

  Adair opened his mouth to defend himself, and then realized Zeno wasn’t looking for an explanation.

  “Your father warned me that you had an unhealthy interest in the occult. But he said those days were behind you and that you had given it all up to study medicine. If he had been up front with me about your . . . your obsession, I never would have agreed to take you in.” The Venetian almost spat the words at Adair. “You bring this occultist practically to my door. What am I to do? I am the doge, I cannot ignore your indiscretions. I cannot allow heretics to flourish inside our city walls! My enemies would jump upon such weakness and use it to topple me. Do you understand now, boy, what a foolish, dangerous thing you have done?”

  “Where is Cosimo?” Adair demanded, finally finding his tongue.

  Zeno looked affronted. “In the dungeon, of course, where he should be.”

  “He is a knight of Naples, you know. You will risk war with Naples if you do anything to him,” Adair cautioned.

  Zeno dismissed the idea with a wave of his hand. “He hasn’t been a knight of Naples for a very long time. I know the prince of Naples and the prince won’t care what happens to a wizard.”

  “What will you do to him?”

  “He’ll be tried and burned at the stake, of course.”

  Adair took a step toward the table. It was scattered with papers, and he thought he recognized a few from Cosimo’s study. “Let Cosimo go and I’ll do as you ask. I’ll go to Scolari’s lectures, I’ll be his best student.”

  Zeno stepped around the table until he stood in front of Adair, fixing him with a steely stare, no longer the comical little man in his nightcap. “Oh, you will do that anyway, if you wish to live. That was the bargain you struck with your father. You had your chance. I am not the only one whose patience you have exhausted. Believe me, if I sent word back to your father that you had met with an untimely—but not unexpected—end, he would understand. And perhaps be a little relieved, too. He always knew you were headed for trouble.

  “This mess you have made is salvageable, however. That lie you told my guards at the heretic’s house—they reported it back to me, of course. And that’s the story we will tell, that you agreed to be my spy and ferret out the Satanist living in our midst; that will be our explanation as to why you have been in the company of the heretic. Luckily, Moretti’s servants are already spreading that story all over the city. Venetians do love a good piece of gossip,” he said in an aside to the bishop.

  “You can’t do this to me,” Adair said, in despair.

  Zeno observed him coldly. “I can and I shall. It’s about time you grew up, my boy. Give up and give in. We all do. You’re not a child anymore; it’s time to put away your childish dreams. Take your place in society, as your family wishes. Or I will crush you, and end your family’s embarrassment.”

  “And what can I offer you in exchange for Cosimo’s life?”

  “There is nothing you can do for Cosimo. He must be sacrificed.”

  The bishop leaned over the table toward Zeno, raising a finger for the doge’s attention. “Wait, your grace. There is one thing he might do. . . . I could speak to the inquisitors on Moretti’s behalf if you”—he narrowed his eyes on Adair—“agree to marry Elena.”

  Adair’s heart squeezed as though a hand closed over it. “I beg you not to ask this of me. She’ll not find happiness with me. You are sentencing us both to a lifetime of misery.”

  Rossi was unmoved. “You heard the doge—it’s time you grew up and took your medicine like everyone else. Do you think that every married couple lives in bliss? That only the well suited are allowed to wed? You make the best of it, that’s what you do,” Rossi said sagely as though he, an unmarried member of the clergy, had any experience in the matter.

  Zeno turned away from Adair, heading back to the table. “The matter is settled. You will be engaged to the bishop’s goddaughter. You will be revealed as one of my agents and responsible for the arrest of the heretic Moretti.”

  “You will spare Moretti?” Adair asked hopefully.

  “I will consider it,” Zeno answered through gritted teeth.

  It was the best he could hope for under the circumstances, with the arrest still fresh. Adair backed out of the room, retrieving his cloak at the door before shoving his way through the clerks waiting on the outside, to retreat to his chamber.

  He hid the book and his packet of spells with the utmost care, moving them to another room that he could access easily should he need to make a quick getaway. He didn’t think any corner of his room would be safe from search now. The next few days were spent attending Scolari’s lectures, where Adair’s mind wandered incessantly. How could he pay attention as the old physician droned on when Cosimo was languishing in prison? It was Adair’s fault, and what’s more, there seemed to be nothing he could do about it. He wondered, however, why the old Neapolitan couldn’t use magic to free himself. There must’ve been something in one of those dusty old books that would be helpful in this situation. Surely the old man knew a vanishing spell, or a way to charm the guard into unlocking the manacles. Or perhaps he could telepathically influence the inquisitors to find him innocent. There was so much he didn’t understand about magic and its reach.

  He had wanted to go see Cosimo right away but knew he had to bide his time or risk pushing Zeno over the edge. He also feared he might arrive too late, turning up at the dungeon one day to find that the inquisitors’ tortures had killed him. Too, Cosimo might’ve heard of the false rumor they’d spread about Adair being a spy and would want nothing to do with him. It pained Adair to think that Cosimo might die thinking Adair had betrayed him.

  Within a few weeks, Adair received a letter from his father informing him that he’d agreed to the marriage arrangements. He even wrote a few words about the benefits of an alliance with Elena’s Florentine family, but Adair knew it was all for show: with any luck, he would remain in Italy after the wedding and would, for all his family cared, cease to be their worry anymore.

  Finally, after a month had passed since the arrest and Adair could stand it no longer, he went down to the dungeons very late one night. He brought coin to bribe the guard into letting him see Cosimo. By then, the old man had been let out of his manacles and put in a cell, although it was so small that he couldn’t stand fully upright in it. The floor was covered with filthy straw that had probably never been changed, and the walls were damp, as though the lagoon were trying to reclaim the doge’s palazzo by stealth.

  Adair lifted the lantern to see the old man’s face turned up to him expectantly. Cosimo was in a terrible state. His royal robes were crusted with his own blood and gore and torn to give the torturers access to his vulnerable spots. All the parts of him Adair could see—his wrists, his bare feet, his throat—were raw with evidence of torture.

  Adair h
anded him a package of food, enough to last several days if the rats didn’t get to it, and a bottle each of wine and water. Cosimo looked suspiciously at the package even as he accepted it. “Why did you bring this? To assuage your guilt for being the one responsible for my arrest—”

  “I hope you know me well enough not to listen to that. It was a story I made up the night you were arrested to get entry to your house. I was trying to save the books . . .”

  Cosimo’s eyes glittered with life for the briefest instant. “And did you?”

  He shook his head. “I could carry only a few. I hid some in a square not far from your house but I fear they’ve since been discovered. There is a massive witch hunt going on.” He hung his head. “In the end, I was able to save only one, the blue book.”

  Cosimo nodded. “Of all the books in my library, that was a good one to save. Take care of it. Don’t let the inquisitors get their hands on it. Save it for the ones who come after us.”

  “Don’t give up, Cosimo,” Adair said, trying to comfort him. “I’ve asked the doge to release you. I’ve even agreed to marry Bishop Rossi’s goddaughter in exchange for his support in the matter. Now it’s up to Zeno.”

  Cosimo shook his head. “My boy, there is no way for Zeno to pardon me. He’s made too much of a spectacle over my arrest. And now this witch hunt . . . The townspeople will see a Satanist behind every bush. It would be impossible for it to end any other way than with my death.” He said all this with an air of detachment, as though he were talking about someone else.

  Adair was shocked. “How can you say that? You mustn’t give up hope.”

  “It is impossible.”

  “Then . . .” Adair thought again about using magic to help Cosimo escape. If anyone would know how it could be done, he should. “Tell me how to use the spells to get you out of here. There must be a way for magic to help you escape.”

  The old man seemed resigned to his fate. “I don’t have the strength or the necessary equipment to do anything from inside the dungeon.”

  “Then tell me what to do, which spell to use . . .”

  “No. I will not have you put yourself at risk any further by trying to help me escape. I am very old and, given that I made my living for many years as a knight, should have been dead a long time ago. I’ve already had more years on this earth than I deserve. I’m ready to die.”

  “It’s my decision—”

  “No.” He squeezed Adair’s hand one last time. “It’s my decision. I want you to bide your time and then make your escape. I know you to be a headstrong boy, but this one time, young squire, listen to me.”

  Adair left the dungeon with his heart aching. He had to find a way to save Cosimo, even if the arsenal of recipes he had to choose from was much reduced. He stayed up as late as he could that night, poring over his loose pages and the blue book, trying to find a spell that could help Cosimo. But when Adair went downstairs in the morning, he was told that the old knight had taken his life last night in his cell. He’d broken one of the bottles Adair had brought and used the glass to slice his wrists and his throat.

  PRESENT DAY

  The light in the room in which Adair lay with Lanore had grown dim. Outside the window, a storm tossed violently, the kind that swept up on the island without warning and battered the rock mercilessly. Adair huddled closer to Lanny for warmth, fingering a lock of her hair absentmindedly while he listened to the wind rattle the glass panes.

  He was covered in sticky sweat from his recollections of Venice. He could remember those days in Zeno’s palazzo with precision: the damp of the streets, the moldering smell of his bedchamber, the bottle-green silk lining of his cloak, and the long pheasant feathers fixed to his cap.

  And yet he had other memories of Cosimo, impossible ones from another time, an earlier time. Of Cosimo not in Italy but in the Ceahlău Massif mountains where Adair had grown up, the stretch of land that had been traded over the years, back and forth, between Hungary and Romania. In these memories, Cosimo was dressed in a rough peasant’s shift and coarse woolen leggings, and was not the regal figure he’d known in Venice. Adair, a boy of seven or eight, stood in a mud cottage with a thatched roof, a primitive place with pigs running in and out of the house as though it were a barn. Adair was being restrained by his father as Cosimo was dragged out of the cottage by two of his father’s men. They were forcing Cosimo to kneel in the mud before the stump he used for splitting firewood, and next to the stump stood an executioner in his black leather hood, a massive broadsword in his hands.

  Adair shook his head to clear it but the image lingered. How could he have two memories of the exact same incident? He couldn’t have known two Cosimos; it was impossible. Just as his mind told him he was a boy in the wild, craggy mountains of Romania in the 1000s and a man of fifteen in Venice in 1262. It was impossible—and yet both memories were seared into his mind, unforgettable.

  There was one other thing that confused him about Cosimo. The memories of those nights at the old knight’s palazzo, sitting by the fireplace as Cosimo mixed potions in the cauldron, taking a handful of this and a pinch of that from his many jars and bottles to fling into the pot . . . and of copying out recipes on scraps of paper and rolling them up to hide in his sleeve so he could bring them into the doge’s house undetected. . . . Did those stories not remind him of something else? Of the stories he told of the peasant boy whose body he’d stolen? The peasant boy who had sat at his hearth and watched him prepare potion after potion? Who had stolen his recipes and tried to escape, earning a horrific beating?

  The thought made Adair’s blood freeze in his veins. It was impossible to trust his mind anymore it seemed. Did this mean he was going mad, finally? It had always been his greatest fear. Man was not meant to have so many memories, the collected stories from a thousand years of existence. It was inevitable that one day the well of memory would overflow.

  These conflicting memories had been coming to him since he’d set foot on the island. It was as though whatever forces were alive on this piece of rock were demagnetizing his brain, and all the little bits and fragments of his past were lifting from the shoals where memories were kept. Lifting and becoming tangled, mixing and shifting before disappearing into the ether, clouded and then lost to him forever.

  He looked at the woman lying in his arms and wondered if the same thing would happen to his memories of her. Would he start to forget their time together or confuse her with someone else? As much as the possibility hurt him, there was one memory he would be happy to lose, that of her betrayal. As it was, he was doomed to live with the knowledge that she could brick him up in a wall and leave him there to face eternity, that she had it in her to be as cold-blooded as—well, he. Maybe he was a fool to love such a woman, but love her he did.

  Too, he wondered if—seeing that he had two memories of his childhood and of Cosimo—there were two versions of his life, and if in the other version he’d never hurt Lanore. Perhaps there was a version where he’d never abused or imprisoned her, never gave her a reason to doubt that she could trust him with her love. If that were the case, he’d do anything to lift the memories she did have of him and replace them with this other set. What he wouldn’t give to take away all her unhappy memories—her memories of that bastard Jonathan, too. He ran a hand over her brow with a heavy sigh: he would remake her entire life so that she never experienced one moment of sadness; he would make her the only human who had never been lonely or unhappy or afraid, the only one in the history of the world, if only he could.

  THIRTEEN

  I made some excuse to Sophia in order to take my leave, but I don’t remember what I said in my desperation to get away from her. As sad as I was for her and her baby, to be perfectly honest, I was horrified by what had become of her, horrified that a person could be made to endure such a merciless penance in the afterlife. Was the next plane of existence nothing more than a prison? If that was the case, that meant the queen might be its warden, making sure the offending souls
did not escape from their punishment. But if she was the warden, who was the judge who handed down the sentences? Who had put her in charge of hell?

  I ran out of my old childhood home and down the dirt wagon trail. I didn’t think to linger in town; no, I wanted to get out of there as soon as possible. Luckily, this St. Andrew was exactly like the St. Andrew of my past and not like a location in a dream, where a road suddenly grows twice its length, or where you take a turn only to find that you’ve ended up somewhere else entirely, a place you’d never seen before. This St. Andrew remained true to form and so I could find my way back to the spot in the forest where I’d entered. I found the door without too much difficulty, locating it in the middle of a big, old oak tree as though that was perfectly normal.

  Once on the other side, I leaned against the door huffing and puffing from exertion and fright, trying to force the vision of Sophia’s blue-faced baby from my mind. I was relieved to be in the quiet hall again and wondered if it would be possible to sit for a minute and collect my thoughts. Again, I listened for the heavy thump-thump I’d heard before, the sound I’d been sure was an indication of a demon. Nothing. Cautiously optimistic, I looked in both directions. The hall to the right seemed the shorter of the two. I could almost see the end of the hall, where it turned a corner. What waited down those other hallways? I wondered. Perhaps this hall was my hall, the doors representing different phases of my life, and the doors on those other halls led to someone else’s life, perhaps someone close to me. Perhaps they led to Jonathan’s life. It was a silly notion, undoubtedly, but I had to try to make sense of the fantastic world in which I found myself.