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Thighbones, he realized from their size and straightness; human thighbones stacked atop each other like planks to craft a wall of death that arose into flickering shadow. At the very pitch he could just barely perceive a vaulted ceiling of further bones, ornamented with skulls.
Isola dei Cadaveri, his addled mind supplied as he stared up in horror. The island of corpses, where hundreds of years ago the city had dumped the victims of the first plague. Then just a hundred years afterward, as Gnaeus had detailed to Fiore in his peculiar pillow-talk history of Halcyon, the following prince had demanded them all excavated and rearranged in a more orderly fashion. Thus emerged the ossuary labyrinth of Halcyon’s catacombs, each chamber walled off as it filled with what bones wouldn’t fit in its walls. Some of these chambers, according to legend, remained accessible only at low tide and had been hollowed out for criminal purposes.
And one of those chambers, Fiore understood with deepening horror, must be where he lay now.
He willed his leaden limbs to move. His arms tangled with each other behind his back, making his shoulders burn. His knees he found bent double and locked in an uncomfortable yet disturbingly familiar position. An attempt to straighten them as he tried to bring his arms around the front revealed the dreaded truth; he was bound together hand-and-foot.
Just as the impresario had ordered for his failed emasculation.
Fiore’s heart leapt into his throat even as he willed himself not to panic.
He rolled his head across the stones—just stones, he lied to himself, ordinary paving stones and not the buried skulls of plague victims past—to see where the watery voices stemmed from. They’d continued murmuring amongst themselves throughout his awakening and subsequent brief examination of his circumstance.
His eyes fell first upon a hooded lantern set on the floor to cast its dim light throughout the cramped chamber. Then on the three legs of a simple stool not far off and the scuffed leather boots of the man who sat upon it. He followed these up to behold the self-same bulky brute who’d spirited him away from theKingfisher, hunched over in conversation with his companions. A man who resembled him enough to pass for his brother, if not his twin, sat on a similar stool beside him, supporting his heft with his hands braced against his splayed thighs. The major difference between him and the brute lay in his face; his nose was cocked to the left, as if someone had broken it flat against his cheek and then pulled it out again only halfway. A third identical stool stood abandoned. The man who ought to have occupied it—the very same mustachioed fellow who’d slipped Fiore the drugged drink—paced what few strides he could in their confined setting.
“We don’t need him alive for proof-of-life,” said broken-nose. “The duke won’t know the difference between a live ear and a dead one once it’s off.”
Both Fiore’s ears burned to hear it.
“The duke will know the difference,” the mustachioed fellow insisted, to Fiore’s relief. “He studied medicine at university.Actuallystudied, mind—not just flitting about to celebrate his own consequence. He’d be a chirurgeon himself by now if it weren’t for his dueling. He knows where the blood ought to be in a live-cut limb. He knows how long it takes a body to grow cold. He knows when the stiffness sets in and when it leaves off. Why d’you think the staff are so afraid of him? The duke loves a corpse.”
Broken-nose snorted and gestured to Fiore without looking at him. “He certainly loves a corpse now.”
“My point being,” the mustachioed fellow continued with a note of frustration, “we ought to keep him alive until we have the money in hand.”
“Fair enough,” broken-nose conceded.
This seemed to appease the mustachioed fellow. “The only question remaining, then, is which part to send as proof.”
“Whatever it is,” said broken-nose, “we should cut it off while he’s still asleep. Less of a struggle.”
“He’s awake already,” said the brute.
Both broken-nose and the mustachioed fellow appeared as surprised as Fiore felt to hear the brute speak. Their astonished glances quickly shifted from their compatriot to Fiore, who could do nothing but stare back at them in horror. The mustachioed fellow’s alarmed expression shifted hastily into a veneer of control. Broken-nose, meanwhile, simply let a slow smile creep across his lips—but it never reached his eyes.
“You’ll have as much money as you could ever wish for,” Fiore blurted. His first words emerged slurred, but by the end of it he had his tongue under his command. “So long as I’m returned alive.”
Broken-nose chuckled. “And I suppose you want a say in what we send off to your patron?”
Fiore didn’t want to admit the truth of that. He forced himself to nod nonetheless.
The brute spoke up again. “Perhaps we could get proof by finishing what the impresario started.”
Fiore’s heart ceased beating.
To his credit, the mustachioed fellow appeared disturbed by the suggestion, if the way he whipped his head ‘round to stare at the brute proved any indication. Broken-nose didn’t seem surprised in the least.
Fiore willed his voice not to tremble as he replied, “If you take that, the duke won’t want me returned—alive or otherwise.”
A stunned silence fell. Only the dripping and lapping of unseen water remained.
Broken-nose raised an eyebrow. “Is that what the duke values?”
Fiore put on his most nonchalant tone. “You’d be surprised.”
“Very well,” the mustachioed fellow cut in. “An ear, then. As we discussed before.”
“Would the duke know an ear?” the brute wondered aloud.
