Order of Darkness Read online

  Her ladyship paused at the bottom of the well of the stair and looked back up at them – Isolde with her blonde hair tumbling down where her ladyship had pulled it, her right cheek scratched and bleeding, Brother Peter utterly stunned.

  ‘And who are you, anyway?’ Carintha demanded, suddenly swinging from rage to cunning. ‘For you are like no family that I have ever met before. And why do you keep your brother as closely guarded as a priest? What sister gambles for time with her brother? What game are you playing? Who knows you? What business do you have? Where does your money come from? You’ll have to answer to me!’

  ‘Oh! No game! I assure you, your ladyship . . .’ Brother Peter started down the stairs after her but she turned and was gone, and then they heard her shouting for her gondolier, and the sound of the canal door opening as her gondola went quickly away.

  In the sudden silence, Brother Peter turned and looked at Isolde. ‘What on earth is this all about?’ he asked. ‘What were you doing fighting with her like a street urchin? Lady Isolde! Look at you! What were you thinking of?’

  Isolde, tried for one sentence, tried for another, and then could say nothing but: ‘I hate her! And I hate Luca too!’ and ran into her room and slammed the door.

  Luca, Freize and Ishraq waited at the quayside outside the alchemist’s house until the bell for Nones rang and they saw Drago Nacari and Jacinta coming towards them from the direction of the Rialto Bridge.

  Freize went forwards to greet the girl and to bow to her father, and then they came towards the front door, Jacinta producing a giant key from the purse under her outer robe.

  ‘This is a surprise and a pleasure,’ the alchemist said warily.

  Luca nodded. ‘I wanted to return to you the page of manuscript. I can’t see how to make any progress with it. I was hoping that there would be a code that I could understand, but whatever I try, it doesn’t come out.’

  The man nodded. ‘Would you discover more if you had the entire book?’

  ‘I might,’ Luca said cautiously. ‘But I couldn’t be sure of it. The more words you had to compare, the more likely to discover their meaning. And some might recur which would tell you they were commonly used words, but I couldn’t promise it. I’ve made no headway, I don’t have enough skill—’ He broke off as the alchemist opened the door and ushered them inside.

  ‘Come into my study.’ The alchemist showed them into the large room where the table was heaped with papers. Quickly, Jacinta closed the big double doors to the storeroom, but the guests could smell the strange sweet smell of rotting vegetation, and, beneath the smell of decay, something more foul like excrement.

  ‘That’s the smell of dark matter,’ the alchemist said, matter-of-factly. ‘We get used to it; but for strangers it’s a disturbing scent.’

  ‘You refine dark matter?’ Luca asked.

  The man nodded. ‘I have the recipe for refining . . .’ He paused. ‘To the ultimate point. I am guessing that is why you have really come today? You could have sent the page back by a messenger. I am assuming that really, you wanted to see our work.’

  The girl stood with her back to the storeroom door as if she would bar them from entering, she looked at her father as if she would stop him speaking. The alchemist glanced at her and smiled, returning his attention to Luca. ‘Jacinta is anxious for me, for our safety,’ he said. ‘But I too have had a dream about you, and it prompts me to trust you. Shall I tell you what it was?’

  Luca nodded. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘I dreamed that you were a babe in arms. You were somehow shining. Your mother brought you to me, and told me that she had found you. You were not a child born of man,’ he said quietly. ‘Does that make any sense to you?’

  Ishraq drew a quick breath and glanced at Freize. Luca’s unhappy childhood, when his whole village had called him a changeling, was known only to Freize, and the travelling companions, but they would never speak of it outside the group.

  ‘I have spent my life denying that I was a changeling,’ Luca said with quiet honesty. ‘My mother told me that it was only ignorant frightened people who would say such a thing, and that I should deny it. I have always denied it. I will always deny it, for her sake, for her honour as well as my own.’

  ‘Your mother would have her reasons,’ Drago Nacari said gently. ‘But in my dream you were faerie-born, and to be faerie-born is a great privilege.’

  Jacinta stepped forwards from the door and put her hand on Luca’s arm. ‘I knew that you could see the cups move,’ she said gently. ‘Then you told me that you could calculate where they would stop. No ordinary man can see them move, it’s too fast. And nobody could calculate the odds of them stopping in one place or another. You are gifted. Perhaps you are gifted in a way that is not of this world. Dr Nacari too is a gifted seer. He is speaking a truth from his dream. Perhaps even a truth that cannot be understood in this world.’

  ‘Doctor?’ Ishraq asked.

  Jacinta turned to her. ‘This is not my real father,’ she said. ‘We are partners in this venture. He is a great alchemist, I am his equal. In the world we pass as father and daughter because the world likes to place women in the care of a man, and the world likes a woman to have an owner. But in the real world, the world beyond this one, we are equal seekers after truth, and we have come together to work together.’

  ‘Not his daughter?’ Freize said bluntly, grasping the one fact he could be certain of, in this talk of one world and another.

  She smiled at him. ‘And not a young woman either,’ she said. ‘I am sorry to have deceived you. Dr Nacari and I have worked together for many many years, and we have discovered many things together. Among them, an elixir which prolongs life itself. I am an old, old soul in a young body. You, Freize, make this heart beat faster; but it’s only fair that I should tell you, that it is a very old heart. I’m an old woman behind this young face.’

  Freize glanced at Luca and raised his shoulders. ‘This is beyond me, Sparrow,’ he said. ‘Someone is mad here, it might be me or them.’

  But it was Ishraq who spoke next. ‘It’s about the gold,’ she said frankly. ‘We have come about the gold. We have come to warn you.’

  The alchemist smiled. ‘Was it you that broke into our house, Daughter?’

  Freize shook his head in instant denial, but Ishraq met the older man’s eyes fearlessly, and nodded. ‘I am sorry. We are commanded to find the source of the gold nobles. Our master demanded that we pretend to be a wealthy young family and investigate. We followed Israel the money changer and he came to your door. So we knew you had a store of gold nobles.’

  ‘We knew as soon as we came home, that someone had been into the inner room. And the things . . . the dark matter, the mouse in the jar, the coins in the fire, they were all disturbed, just a little, by your presence. Things are not the same when they are watched. Something changes when it has been seen.’

  ‘You knew we had been in the room?’ Freize asked sceptically.

  Luca stirred at the suggestion that an object might sense an observer; but Ishraq simply answered: ‘Yes, I thought you might know. And we took a print of the Duke of Bedford’s seal and a piece of glass from the writing table.’

  ‘The rainbow glass,’ Luca said. ‘The glass that makes a rainbow when the light falls on it. I have been interested in rainbows since I saw the mosaic at Ravenna. Do you know how they are made in the sky? How does the glass do it on the earth?’

  ‘The glass splits the light into its true colours,’ the alchemist told Luca, understanding his longing for knowledge. ‘Everyone thinks that light is the colour of sunshine. But it is not. It is made of many colours. You can see this when it goes through the glass.’

  ‘Is it always the same colours?’ Luca asked him. ‘I saw a mosaic of a rainbow, an ancient mosaic, centuries old, and it was the same colours that we see today. The ancients must have somehow known that light made a rainbow.’

  ‘Always the same colours,’ Jacinta confirmed. ‘And always following the