The Chamber of Ten hc-3 Read online

  She would not be able to impress him with the ingenuity of the hidden door, for it stood open. Geena always felt a bit melancholy at the idea that something that had been so secret and had remained sealed in silence for so long now hung perpetually open and exposed, but she consoled herself that they weren’t grave robbers. Their motives were pure.

  Lights had been strung through the open door and down the stairs into the chamber. Even from the alcove, she could hear the chatter of voices echoing up from below, where preservation efforts were still under way.

  And then the back of her neck prickled with a once-strange sensation that had now become quite familiar. Hello, sweetheart.

  Nico had felt her arrive, and now he reached out to touch her with his thoughts. From the moment they had first met, she had sensed something different about him, had felt a kind of intimacy that had seemed unlikely and inadvisable for her to share with one of her grad students. But only when they had made love for the first time and she sensed his thoughts in her head, shared what he felt and desired in a way she could never have imagined before, had she really understood.

  After that, of course, he could no longer hide it from her. It wasn’t telepathy, exactly—not mind-reading in the simple pop-culture sense—but Nico could touch the minds of others with his own and share images, memories, and thoughts. Such things were not concrete, but rather a sense of what she felt, an understanding of what she was thinking without a need for words.

  Like their relationship, his touch could not be hidden completely from others. He knew whenever anyone was about to enter the chamber—knew who it was—and the other members of their team often looked at him oddly. But, again like their relationship, Nico’s touch was treated with a respectful silence. And perhaps also with confusion. Their co-workers might gossip about them after hours, but such things went unspoken in their company.

  “Dr. Hodge?” Finch prompted. “Are we going down?”

  Geena smiled. “You didn’t come all the way to Venice to see an open door.”

  But as she started down the stone steps, she was distracted by a kind of giddiness that swept over her. She felt as though she might laugh out loud, and it took a moment to realize that the emotion flooding her belonged not to her, but to Nico. And it was not merely her arrival that had filled him with such joy.

  She felt the touch of his mind, her name in his thoughts, and she picked up her pace. Finch hurried to keep up, muttering about caution and the lack of a handrail, but Geena did not slow. Nico had found something major, but she had no idea what could have excited him so much.

  The stairs curved to the right and she trailed her hand across the cold, dry wall. They had yet to figure out exactly how the chamber’s architects had sealed it off so completely, making it airtight and moisture-free. Even with the door opened there was no humidity here, and no evidence of water past or present, despite the depth of the chamber and its proximity to the Grand Canal.

  At the bottom of the steps another old door stood open, and she stepped through into a warren of plastic sheeting illuminated by work lights and the glow of laptop screens. A preservation tent had been set up in the far corner of the large chamber, and members of her team carefully prepared manuscripts for transport to a room at Ca’Foscari University that had been specially built for the care of ancient documents.

  “Dr. Hodge?” Finch called behind her.

  But Geena was drawn through the anthill industriousness of the recovery team by the giddy urgency she felt in Nico’s mind. Several members of the team tried to speak with her as she passed, but she waved them off with a tight smile. This was not the way she had imagined Finch experiencing the size and delicacy and historical significance of the Biblioteca project, but she could not stop herself. Nico did not get this excited about just anything.

  Plastic curtains covered an archway that separated the two wings of the chamber. As Geena rushed forward, Nico pushed through, and she saw the smile that she’d felt in her mind. His olive skin shone in the glare of the work lights. Mischief and glee danced in his dark eyes.

  “Dr. Hodge!” Finch called from behind her.

  Geena stared at Nico. “What is it?” she said, the words almost a sigh.

  “We found another door,” he said, reaching for her hand. And then he was tugging her along in his wake, back through the plastic curtains, Howard Finch forgotten, and they were rushing into an area of the chamber they had barely begun to catalog.

  “You opened it?” she asked.

  “Of course!” Nico said, but she could feel the touch of his mind and knew he was toying with her.

  “You didn’t go in,” she said.

  He cast her a sidelong glance. “This is your project, Geena. We opened the door just a few minutes ago, but you should be the first to enter. I will spoil this much of the surprise, though. There are stairs, and they go deeper.”

  Geena swung the beam of the heavy-duty Maglite side to side, studying each step as she made her cautious descent. Nico came right behind her, shining his own industrial flashlight over her shoulder, illuminating the darkness ahead. What fascinated her most was how dry the air remained. A subterranean chamber beneath Venice ought to be seeping with ground water, but she saw no sign of weeping between the stones in the stairwell walls.

  The stairs curved to the left. If her sense of direction served her well, they were closer than ever to the canal. She ran her free hand along the wall as she took each step—eighteen, by the time they reached the door at the bottom—wondering the entire time why anyone would need a hidden room beneath a hidden room, and whether they would find yet another hidden room below that.

  Her imagination ran with that question as she swept the Maglite’s beam over the door. The wood looked petrified, the iron strapping across it dull but otherwise untouched by time. It had no lock, only a heavy metal latch. And at the center of the uppermost of the iron straps across the door, a large X had been engraved.

  X marks the spot, she thought, but knew that was foolishness.

  “Ten,” she said.

  “Ten what?” Nico asked.

  Geena traced the number with a finger. “Let’s find out.”

  Her breath caught in her throat, an almost sexual excitement filling her. The base of her brain buzzed with Nico’s anticipation; he felt it, too. These were the moments that they both lived for. Discovery. Dispersing the ghosts of the past like so many cobwebs and stepping back through time.

  She turned to grin up at him, and at the others gathered on the steps behind him. Silver-haired Domenic, their expert on ancient texts; tall, grimly beautiful Sabrina, camera recording it all; and Ramus, the Croatian grad student she had promoted to site manager only three days before. She put a hand up to block the worst of the glare from their flashlights and could see one final dark silhouette on the stairs above her. Howard Finch. He had asked to be a part of the initial foray and she had agreed, knowing that if they found anything of import, BBC funding would flow.

  “No one has been here in at least five hundred years,” Geena said. “It’s exciting, I know. My heart is pounding. But remember our purpose. Preservation of the site is important above all else.”

  This received a round of nods and murmurs of assent. Geena took a moment to run down a mental checklist. Plastic sheeting had been hung to cover the door they had used to access these stairs. A preservation team waited in Petrarch’s library for a signal, in case their entry into this new subterranean level caused rapid deterioration of anything they might discover. Sabrina was filming.

  She opened the door.

  Maglite beams illuminated the room beyond. Her heart thundered in her chest and her face felt flushed. With Nico so near she felt his excitement, and it added to her own in a manner not much different from the way they shared arousal during lovemaking.

  Yet as she scanned this new chamber with her torchlight, she could not help but feel a momentary disappointment. Aside from three thin marble columns at its center, it had no trace o
f architectural style, nor any visible art. Unless there were passages into connecting rooms, the chamber measured only forty feet or less in diameter. It had nothing of beauty or adornment about it, and reminded her more of a dungeon than of the intricate stonework of Petrarch’s library above them.

  “What is this place?” Nico asked.

  Geena led them in and the small exploratory group fanned out. A number of vertical stone obelisks were spaced at what appeared to be equal intervals around the chamber, which she now realized was round. That facet in itself was interesting. Why go to the trouble of building a perfectly circular room without making some effort toward aesthetics?

  “How many of these obelisks are there?” she called out.

  To her surprise, it was Finch who answered first. “Ten.”

  She shone her light at the nearest one and saw that the black stone was engraved with the same Roman numeral as they had encountered on the door to the chamber.

  “Do they all have the same number on them?” she asked, sweeping the light around, picking up glimpses of obelisks and the faces of her team. “Or are they different?”

  “This one is the same,” Domenic called from across the chamber.

  “Do you think—” Geena began.

  But Domenic beat her to it. “It could be some kind of secret meeting place for the Council of Ten.”

  Geena nodded, though she doubted anyone saw her. From the early 14th century, Venice had been primarily controlled by a secretive group of ten men, from whose number the next Doge would always be chosen. The group had been created to oversee the security of the Republic and protect the government from corruption or rebellion, but grew in power until, by the mid-15th century, the Council of Ten had total control over Venice.

  But there had been many members of the Ten over the centuries, and many of their burial places were well recorded. If these obelisks were the tombs of Council members, the obvious question was, why these ten?

  A ripple of sharp curiosity ran up the back of her neck, but it was not her own. Nico had found something. She turned, searching for him with her light. The others’ Maglite beams strobed the dark chamber.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Domenic said, his flashlight illuminating a section of the stone floor.

  As Geena approached, she saw what had made such an impact on him. In the space between two of the obelisks, an almost perfectly round disk of granite had been set into the stone floor. Whether by design or over the ages, it had sunk slightly so that it sat an inch or two below the level of the rest of the floor.

  “It’s almost like a cork,” Finch said, coming up behind her.

  “Precisely what I was thinking,” Domenic said.

  Geena glanced at them and then stared down at the granite disk, her mind racing. She knelt and ran her fingers along the edges of the stones surrounding it. They had been carefully hewn to create a circular space to fit the disk.

  “How did they accomplish it?” she muttered to herself.

  “What?” Finch asked.

  She looked up at him, then turned to Sabrina, who was filming just behind her. “I hope you’re getting this.” She stood and gestured around the room. “I have no idea how the architects of this room kept it dry, but that’s not the biggest mystery here.” She pointed at the granite disk. “It may turn out that this is nothing more than some kind of decoration, but it certainly looks like some sort of plug.”

  “To a drain, do you think?” Domenic asked.

  “Either that,” Geena said, glancing again at the camera, “or there’s yet another chamber beneath this one.”

  “Geena,” Nico said.

  For a moment she’d nearly forgotten him. Even the comforting touch of his mind seemed to have withdrawn. She turned and found him with the beam of her light.

  Nico stood halfway across the room, shining his Maglite between two of the central columns. They were too close together to have all been intended as support for the ceiling; some kind of artistic whim had been at work here. But whatever had piqued Nico’s curiosity was hidden amongst those columns.

  “Coming,” Geena said, although she needn’t have said it aloud.

  Nico did not look up. She shone her beam on his face and a flicker of concern went through her. He looked almost mesmerized, and had turned strangely pale in spite of his dark complexion, as though he might be sick.

  When Geena reached the three marble columns, she expected to find something horrific hidden in the shadows in their midst—some ancient mummified corpse or torture device. Nico’s silence had spoken volumes. She tried to silence her own thoughts to see if he might be sending her some of his thoughts or impressions, but that familiar feeling, his touch, had left her.

  Careful not to touch the marble surface, she leaned between two of the columns and shone her Maglite into the space between them. A stone jar stood on a round table carved of the same marble as the columns around it. It had been sealed with thick red wax that remained intact but otherwise was as plain as the room that surrounded it. And given its place at the very center of the room, almost guarded by the columns, there seemed no doubt that the jar was the locus of the chamber.

  Ramus poked his head through the last remaining space between the columns, but then withdrew, his eyes replaced by Sabrina’s camera.

  “What do you make of it, Nico?” she asked.

  Nico did not reply. She flashed the beam of her Maglite up to his face and saw that his expression had gone slack. He seemed so entranced that when he spoke, it startled her.

  “Do you hear it?” he asked. “Like there’s electricity in the walls.”

  But Geena heard nothing of the kind.

  “What’s he talking about?” Finch said, appearing just behind Nico, rising up on his toes to try to get a look at what had drawn all of their attention.

  Nico slipped between the columns. Before Geena could speak, he reached out—eyes glazed with fascination—and lifted the jar off of the marble table.

  “What are you—” she began.

  He shook the jar like a child trying to figure out what a gift-wrapped present might contain. That alone might have destroyed whatever was inside.

  Sabrina swore.

  “Nico, no!” Geena cried, pushing between the columns.

  She reached for the jar with her free hand, but never laid a finger on it. Nico went suddenly rigid, eyes wide, and he began to shake as if in seizure. His hands spasmed and both the jar and his flashlight fell, crashing to the stone floor. The jar shattered, shards flying, and Geena caught a glimpse of something gray and damp spilling out.

  Nico’s mind touched hers. It began with that familiar prickle at the back of her neck, but then a spike of pain thrust into her head and she screamed, jerked back, and cracked her skull against a marble column.

  And she saw …

  This very chamber, illuminated by a ring of sconces high on the circular walls. A circle of heavy wooden chairs surrounds the three marble columns at the center of the room—ten, of course. Upon each chair sits a dark-robed man. They are not dressed identically; this is no cult. Some have jackets beneath their robes, checkered in combinations of black, red, tan, or green, while others appear far more severe, even monastic. The robes vary in length and cut, but they are all black, as are the hats the men wear, for none has a bare head.

  One of them speaks in an old Venetian dialect. This is …

  What is that final word? Something like “foolish.” No, not that. “Unwise.”

  She sees not through her own eyes, but the eyes of another. She—he—is standing in the midst of the three stone columns at the center of the chamber, in the shifting pattern that the intrusive candlelight pushes into the shadows around her. She can feel his body, tall and thin and male. Unlike the others, his robe is stylishly slit in various places to reveal crimson cloth beneath and he wears no hat to cover his thick hair. He fixes the man who had spoken with a withering stare.

  This is for Venice, he says. The Doge mus
t be banished. And if you think it unwise, consider your fate should he ever return.

  The one who had questioned his wisdom falls silent. Satisfied, he vanishes back into the shadows of the columns and begins to sing. His voice rises in what might be song, or chant, or ritual. Light begins to radiate from an empty space amongst the columns—in the exact center of the room. It is dim at the start but glows more and more brightly until it obviates the need for candlelight.

  At some signal amidst that song, the Ten draw small identical blades from within their robes. Glancing anxiously at one another, each makes a cut on the palm of his left hand, la sinestra, and then makes a fist, squeezing drops of blood onto the floor.

  The light emanating from within the columns is washed in pink, and then deepens to bloody scarlet.

  The chamber goes dark.

  Geena collapsed, spilling out from between two columns and onto the floor of the round chamber. She blinked away the vision that had filled her mind and the pain that accompanied it. Someone called her name. The light from Sabrina’s camera blinded her and she winced. Closing her eyes tightly, she felt a torrent of images sweep over her—Nico’s blank expression, the stone jar shattering on the floor, the dark-robed men slicing the flesh of their palms, drops of blood falling.

  Feedback, she thought. Nico’s touch made him what, in times gone by, some had referred to as a sensitive. He’d had some kind of psychic—no, “psychometric,” that’s the word—episode. And their rapport, the intimacy of their minds, had caused it to spill over to her.

  Christ, it had hurt.

  “Nico?” she said, starting to rise.

  She spotted her torch, frowning as her ears picked up a new sound in the circular chamber. A trickling of water. That made no sense. The room had been sealed for centuries, dry as a bone, despite the proximity of the Grand Canal and the spongelike foundations of the city.

  But as she reached for her Maglite, her eyes followed its beam to the chamber wall and she saw glistening tracks of water drizzling over the stone. It bubbled from pockets of ancient air.