The fiends must be trying to deceive me.

The general ended his prayers and the demon reappeared where it had been before. The general sat back on his heels, his visitor walked across the carpet to him, looped a cord around his neck, and strangled him. The fiend jumped up and down with joy as the general thrashed in his death agonies. I may have cried out in horror, but if so no one noticed. I had asked to see a murder, hadn’t I? Putrid had shown me the wrong one, perhaps the murderer’s first murder, his initiation.

When the assassin was certain his victim was dead, he drew his sword. At that point, I admit, I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the corpse on the floor was headless and a blood-spattered turban lay empty and collapsed beside it. The visitor seemed neither upset nor especially pleased by his gruesome task, nor by the weighty leather bag he held. He was possessed, after all, and no doubt believed he was loyally carrying out his sultan’s orders. He probably was. Turning his back on his grisly work, he headed for the door-and his demon looked up and saw me.

I could not hear its shrieks of rage, but I could see them. The possessed turned again and returned to stand directly below my vantage point, but now his face was blank, his eyes lifeless. His passenger was dancing with fury, almost glowing with it, making clawing gestures at me and becoming larger, its spongy flesh swelling like dough, its eyes flaming redder. I was seized by a terrible, paralyzing, horror that it would leap out of the mirror at me.

I clapped my hands three times. The image blurred, steadied slightly, and then faded-all except those two red eyes. I yelled out the words of dismissal, but of course those were addressed to Putrid and I did not know the name of this other fiend, to which it had betrayed me. For a moment the mirror showed the two hate-filled red eyes superimposed on me and the atelier behind me. Then, mercifully, they disappeared.

10

S ummonings always leave me feeling sick and unclean. Even after I had replaced the furniture, wiped out the pentagram with my dustrag, and burned my notes in the fireplace, I was still shaking like a fatal case of palsy. I kept wondering whether a hateful little slug fiend was now perched on my shoulder, invisible and gloating as it planned the horrors it would make me perform.

Back in my room, I stripped and washed myself all over with cold water. Tired though I was, memories of the ordeal would keep me awake for a long time, and I had an invitation to call on a lady who thought nothing of playing all night and sleeping by day. I dressed in my shabby burglar clothes, doused the light, and prepared to go visiting. Of course I was disobeying the Maestro’s orders by leaving the house unarmed, but I could neither ask Bruno to accompany me on my tryst nor risk my death-defying leap while encumbered with a rapier. I stopped worrying about being murdered when I opened the window and discovered that the stormy weather had returned, blustering rain about, making roofs slippery, and plotting to throw acrobats off their timing. Very likely the Maestro had misinterpreted his bleeding eyes-and-legs vision and it had nothing to do with assault. I hesitated, but not for long. I needed Violetta too much just then, and not for lust. I needed comfort and understanding and her arms around me, her warmth and love.

So I scrambled out on the ledge and then went through the nasty contortions required to replace the bars, for I never leave the window unguarded in the night. That was not the easiest of maneuvers in such weather and the leap in darkness wrung a prayer out of me. Obviously I survived, although I banged my left knee on the tiles.

A light burned in her room, for she never sleeps in complete darkness-unless her current companion insists on it, I suppose-and I could see that she was alone. She stirred while I was undressing.

“Alfeo?” she murmured drowsily.

“Are you expecting someone else?” I asked, hoping the answer was No.

“No. The nobility are in mourning.”

I wasn’t. I slid between the sheets, into her arms, her warmth.

Jolted awake, she said, “ Eek! You are freezing!”

“Only on the outside. I love you. I need you.”

“I’m here, love. What’s wrong? You’re trembling!”

“Rough night. Just hold me.”

The night fled, the lamp burned out, and chinks of daylight came to smile through chinks in the drapes. My knee hurt. The rest of me felt much better.

“Time to go,” I whispered.

“Not yet.” Helen stirred sleepily. “I have something to tell you.”

“Speak, goddess.”

The Ten would start asking questions soon. Thanks to Putrid I knew the murderer must be either Alexius Karagounis or his Moorish servant, but finding admissible proof would take time.

Violetta sighed and rolled on her back. “I went and saw Bianca Orseolo yesterday.”

I heard Minerva in her voice. “You did what?”

“You heard me. Ca’ Orseolo is in mourning, so after you left I went calling in my nun costume, to offer comfort.”

“But she saw you at the-”

“She did not see me at the supper. She may have seen me, but she did not look at me, because she was busy tending her grandfather and I am a courtesan. Proper young girls ignore such women. She did not recognize me yesterday because I was a nun, completely different.”

“You think that costume you were wearing would fool-”

“Stop interrupting. There are nuns who wear habits like that. I got in to see her when nobody else would have done, except other family members, of which she has none. We had a long talk. Bianca had more opportunity to see the crime committed than anyone else did, because she was at her grandfather’s side all the time.”

“She also had the best opportunity,” I said. “All she had to do was hand him the wrong glass and he would never have questioned. Did she do it?”

“I don’t know.” Violetta rarely admits ignorance. As Minerva, she is much brainier than I am. As Aspasia, she is unsurpassed at judging people. “She is extremely upset by her grandfather’s death…almost too upset. She wept in my arms. So much sorrow may be a sign of guilt, either guilt because she killed him or guilt because she is glad he died, I don’t know yet. You and I are to go and see her later today.”

This needed a lot of rational analysis and rational analysis was hard to achieve while cuddling the finest courtesan in the Republic-which duty compelled me to do at that moment, of course, to keep this witness cooperative. It crossed my mind that few men enjoyed better working conditions.

I made an effort to concentrate. “You told her my name?”

“No. I said I knew a man who was investigating the possibility that her grandfather had been murdered, and asked if I might bring you to ask her a few questions. The funeral is this morning. We are to see her after that, around noon.”

I gulped. “You want me to pretend to be an agent of the Ten? I don’t know what the penalty for-”

“Hope you never find out,” Aspasia said coldly. “I made no such claim and the city is stuffed tight with the Three’s spies, as you well know. If Bianca assumes that you are one of them, her mistake is quite unrelated to anything I said.”

The doge had asked me to investigate the procurator’s death, but he would deny doing so if the Three asked him.

“Did Bianca have a motive?”

Helen’s dark eyes looked at me under divine eyelashes. “I don’t want to talk any more. Kiss me.”

The Maestro watched with disapproval as I laid a tray on my side of the desk. “Why are you limping?”

“I banged my knee on a tile.”

“What did you learn?”

“Have you eaten?” I bowled a hot roll across to him; he caught it before it went over the edge. “The murderer is a Muslim, presumably an agent of the sultan, and probably the servant who poured the wine. He could be the Greek or, more likely I should say the man posing as a Greek, the book dealer, Karagounis. How old is he?”