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Not an ounce of pity shone behind her eyes.
“Who do you work for?” Enzo demanded. Even if he knew in his heart it was the Delfini, he needed to hear it for himself.
Arlotto flinched. “Nascimbene!”
Enzo balked. “The impresario?”
“Yes,” Arlotto replied, the words tumbling from his tongue as his eyes flicked between Portia and Enzo. “He said the musico knew too much of him and needed to be silenced.”
Enzo arched his brow.
“We looked into the matter,” Arlotto continued. “Trailed the musico. Saw and heard how he had your favor.”
“And you supposed you could be paid twice for the same job,” Enzo concluded.
At first, Arlotto appeared relieved to be understood. His faint smile faded into fear beneath Enzo’s gaze.
“Where is he now?” Enzo asked.
“They’re keeping him beneath Isola dei Cadaveri.” Arlotto’s words fell over each other in his haste to answer a violent duke . “There’s only one left to mind him.” Inspiration gleamed in his eyes. “I could guide you to them.”
The glimmer of hope dimmed into darkness as Enzo replied, “You will.”
~
The chirurgeons cleaned, stitched, and bandaged Arlotto’s hand. Which no doubt was more than Arlotto had done for Fiore. Enzo didn’t stay to supervise their work. Instead he saw to it that Vittorio was fed and a sandolo readied for the journey. Vittorio, Ferruzzi, Zanetta, and Canello would once again accompany them. Carlotta watched him throughout. She would tell Lucrezia all that had passed, of course, but evidently not before Enzo had gone on his way, for which she had his eternal gratitude.
Soon enough, though not half so quick as Enzo would’ve liked, they were off. The sandolo slipped silently through the city’s canals until it left them behind altogether to traverse the open lagoon.
And then Isola dei Cadaveri loomed out of the fog. A hill of bones centuries in the making, with an ossuary temple marking its peak. The sacred flame ever-burning in its dome guided the sandolo towards its banks of bone. But Enzo’s heart lay buried far deeper in the island’s sepulchral entrails.
Arlotto sat at the bow of the boat, just ahead of Enzo, with his ankles shackled together and his hands bound behind his back with rope. His mouth remained free, which Enzo accepted as a necessary evil. At least he still had his dagger against the brigand’s throat.
“There,” Arlotto murmured, lifting his chin towards a particular dark hollow amidst the island’s shadowed banks.
At Enzo’s signal, Zanetta drew back her lantern’s hood to shine its light over the island. The low tide revealed the banks tinged green and worn away by the waves. Legend claimed even this part of the island was bones, ground up into a paste for concrete. It had worn away uneven with many nooks and crannies. One of these, however, just visible at low tide’s waterline, seemed to hold darker and deeper shadows than the rest. And it was towards this that Canello steered the sandolo, at Arlotto’s direction.
They found themselves in a tunnel. The hooded lantern’s rays showed pale walls worn smoothest at the waterline and rusticated at the crest of the arch overhead. A second glance showed the rumors were true; they sailed through a cavern built of skeletal remains, with limbs like timber held together with bone-meal mortar.
Enzo, who had examined more than his fair share of human skeletons in his university career, cared not. The dead were dead and would remain so. His Fiore, however, must yet be alive.
And so the sandolo rowed on.
The tunnel did not stay straightforward for long. The lantern’s beam revealed a fork ahead. Both paths plunged into identical darkness.
Ferruzzi braced an arm against the skeletal tunnel wall to halt the sandolo. They hung in suspended silence.
“Which way,” Enzo growled into Arlotto’s ear.
Arlotto hesitated.
Enzo had no patience. “Tell me or lose another finger.”
“The right-hand path,” Arlotto hissed.
Ferruzzi pushed off from the wall. The sandolo slipped to the right.
“Musico!”
