Teo had been born in Venice. When her real family died in a mysterious shipwreck, only the infant Teo had survived, the Undrowned Child of an old Venetian Prophecy. The Mayor had not wanted journalists poking around, asking questions about why nine Venetian lives had been lost in the lagoon waters. For the Mayor, it would have been more convenient if the entire family had vanished without a trace. So he had the baby Teodora Gasperin sent away for adoption in a city in the south. For eleven years, Teo had lived in Naples without knowing who she really was.
Then the kind scientists who adopted Teo had brought her to a symposium in Venice. She had found The Key to the Secret City—or rather, the magical book had found her, by falling on her head. And Teo had gone “between-the-Linings,” becoming invisible to all but ghosts, magical beings and other children. The book had led her to Renzo, the Studious Son of the same prophecy that named her the Undrowned Child. Together, they’d befriended the Venetian mermaids, and the Incogniti, the Unknown Ones, a secret society that protected Venice from baddened magic. Teo’s real parents had been members. It had cost them their lives.
That baddened magic had been wielded by the spirit of Bajamonte Tiepolo, a noble Venetian who conspired to seize power in 1310. After his plot failed, he was secretly strangled by a state assassin. For nearly six hundred years, the restless spirit of Il Traditore—“the Traitor,” as he was known—had simmered hate and revenge. Finally, the summer before last, his ghost had grown strong enough to turn that hatred into deeds.
Had he but known it, the Mayor had every reason to be grateful to Teo and Renzo. The two of them had joined with the mermaids, raising an army of ghosts and good creatures against Bajamonte Tiepolo. Renzo had taken on Il Traditore’s own savage spirit in a fierce battle of wills. And finally, Teo, using ancient skills born into her family, had used his own Spell Almanac to curse Bajamonte Tiepolo back to death. A deep whirlpool in the lagoon had sucked him away.
That is, Teo had cursed him almost to death. To oblivion, anyway. There had been one last, unspeakably horrible imprecation that she’d not been able to force herself to utter.
Of course, the human population of Venice had remained entirely unaware of the true danger. Adults—including tender-hearted policemen and stupid, vain Mayors—simply could not see ghosts, mermaids or supernatural creatures.
The four-hundredth bucket came up with more ice than water.
Over the clatter of mop and bucket, Renzo did not hear Officer Gianni tapping at the open door. Nor did he see the stricken look on Gianni’s face as he took in the boy’s pitiful attempt at clean clothes, the chipped cups and saucers he had carefully washed and placed back on the dresser, his mother’s best dress rinsed and fluttering in the thin column of warm air above the brazier. Tears came to the policeman’s eyes when he saw the damp Christmas wrappings already carefully folded, the ruins of a cake lying in a bowl of mud, and a bunch of violets carved out of wood, Renzo’s last present to his mother. The purple paint had not yet dried.
“What a Christmas for the lad!” Officer Gianni thought. “What a Christmas for Venice!”
At that moment, Renzo was thinking about Teo. Where was she? Surely she would know that his mother was among the drowned: new lists were fixed hourly to every wall in town. He could hardly bear to walk down the street, forced on every corner to confront his mother’s name next to the word “dead.” And below it, he’d just seen the name Tommaso Antonello, his beloved and only uncle. Renzo’s classmate Augusto was also listed, next to “missing, presumed drowned,” like dozens of other boys and girls.
So why had Teo still not come? Wasn’t she supposed to be his best friend?
Renzo longed to see her, but he dreaded it as well. He had very bad news; the worst, in fact. There’d been another victim of the flood: his most precious possession, apart from the money-box. And it wasn’t even really his: technically, it was merely on loan from Teo. Now that Renzo had sluiced the entire house, he had to admit it was true: there was no trace of The Key to the Secret City. It must have floated out of the house along with all the other books in Renzo’s collection.
“Lorenzo Antonello?” The policeman’s voice was gentle.
Renzo spun around.
The officer repeated, “Lorenzo Antonello, I’m hereby ordered to conduct you to the Scilla, where you shall be apprenticed for a sailor.”
“My mother …” Renzo’s voice was as blank as his face. “She’s not buried yet.”
“That will be taken care of. The Mayor has already arranged it.”
At the mention of the Mayor’s name, Renzo scowled ferociously. “So you’re that foot-licker’s henchman? I’ll have nothing to do with you.”
“Boy has a cheek!” Officer Gianni marveled. He could not but sympathize, nevertheless. It was despicable to drag a grieving boy away from home without letting him attend to his dead mother.
“But orders is orders,” Gianni thought regretfully. He reminded himself that he was lucky to have a safe job in these hard times.
He said, “It’s out of your hands, son. You ain’t of legal age. You’re a ward of the state and you’ve got to go where the Mayor tells you. Come, put your things together, boy. The Scilla’s not bad. Not for an old warship, anyways. She’s a proper boat, lad, painted wood and canvas sails! Your family’s menfolk have been gondoliers and sailors for generations, haven’t they? Sea’s in your blood.”
“Lorenzo! Dearest chap! I just heard!” a melodious voice fluted from outside the door. A strikingly handsome man with piercing blue eyes hurried in. He gathered Renzo in a powerful hug that smelled of warm hay and lemons. “My precious boy, my poor, poor child. Are you hurt, yourself? How’s every rib in your dear body?”
Then he held Renzo away from him and peered at the boy’s pinched white face. “What, no tears? Are youse entrapolated in your grief still? But Lorenzo, you must cry, let us weep together for your sweet mother, and for Venice too.”
At this Sargano Alicamoussa burst into noisy sobs. “An adorable woman!” he wept. “Our incomparable city! And the darling dolphins too! My heart’s dropping off in lumps with the sorrow of it.”
“I carved some violets for my mother,” said Renzo dully. “With my penknife.”
“What a skill you have, dearest boy! Now, I am quite decided—youse shall come live with me and my wife, Mercer. We shall adopterate youse, yes.”
Unheard, the policeman murmured, “Err, sir …?”
Signor Alicamoussa looked deep into Renzo’s deadened eyes, whispering, “We Incogniti take care of our own.”
The policeman stepped forward, holding out the Mayor’s order. “Uncommon decent of you, sir, however the boy’s already signed over to the Scilla. The boat’s been notified. They’ll be expecting him aboard any minute.”
“Beg yours? The Scilla? Feather me, there’s a coincidence! Pearler! Wait till … But no, no, no, no, no, dear Lorenzo has no need to be an orphan sailor. He shall have a loving home! My charming lady wife to cherish him! Lions and wildebeest as his pets! Signed over, you say? Without so much as a ‘Do you fancy a naval career?’ to the boy himself? Says who? Upon my word, what outrageous outrage is this? I shall frankly not permit it.”
“It’s too late, sir. Look—the Mayor’s signature.”
“The Mayor? That dilapidated dog! Only my wife, who is Irish and has the gift of the gabble to an amazing extent, can curse the fellow to my full satisfactioning, and do so quicker than a laxative through a koala bear.
“But of course the Mayor wants to hide dear Lorenzo away from the world. This boy’s heroism is too glorious a mirror for his own jellyfish heart! And no doubt he’ll be ravening after our little Teodora next. With her parents kidnabbled—I just heard the news. Reckon it looks in the altogether poorly for them.”
Renzo turned to Signor Alicamoussa. For the first time, a spark flickered in his eyes. “Teo? What’s happened to her?”
Teo hadn’t even made it home after she saw the Vampire Eel. The policemen were waiting
for her on the shore. Dragging her through the ruined streets to the Mayor’s office, they had not wasted any tact when describing the state of Leonora and Alberto Stampara’s laboratory in the lagoon: the smashed pipettes, the crabs and shrimps left gasping in shattered tanks, the diagrams ripped off the walls. Of her adoptive parents there had been no sign at all, except a fragment of a silk dress and her father’s pipe, still fragrant and faintly warm.
Now a tearful Teo paced up and down the Town Hall’s grand vestibule. The two policemen had not been amused by the teeth-marks she’d left in their wrists. Their eyes followed her back and forth, their arms folded over their barrels of chests.
Despite being fully twelve and a half years old, Teo could not resist sticking out her tongue at her captors.
“After all,” she reasoned, “they work for that perditioned rat, the Mayor. What’s he up to in that office? Certainly nothing to help my parents. He’s making a boffle of everything again!”
Step by step, Teo paced her thoughts into order.
The last thing the Mayor would want, she realized, was the publicity that would follow an announcement that a young girl called Teodora Gasperin had for the second time been left without parents, and under the most dramatic circumstances.
“He’s going to send me away again!” A bitter chill coursed down the back of Teo’s neck. “That’s what he’s going to do, the dismal cockroach!”
The Mayor’s voice now fussed from inside his office, “Blotting paper! My signature is smeared!”
As the Undrowned Child of the old Prophecy, Teo was the lucky—or sometimes unlucky—owner of a number of unusual gifts. One of these was that when people talked, she could see their words in their own handwriting in the air. The style of that handwriting revealed a great deal about them. As the Mayor’s voice boomed out of his office, Teo saw smug lettering with absurd flourishes in gushing purple ink floating down the corridor.
“All done!” the Mayor said with a triumphant smirk. “A good day’s work. Got the Antonello boy off my hands, and now we’ll not be troubled by that young lady again. Fortunately, there’s a shortage of children in Norway.”
“You potato-witted absurdity!” yelled Teo at the top of her voice. It should also be mentioned at this point that Teo, like Renzo, was a rabid bookworm and consequently endowed with a vocabulary that could sever a steel cable. The policemen tried in vain to suppress smiles.
The Mayor’s curled head appeared around the door, wafting perfumed pomade into the hall. Even though he’d stolen her life not just once, but twice, the Mayor, by careful calculation, had never actually laid eyes on Teo herself. Now their eyes—hers, an unusual sea-green and his, moist and puppy-brown—met for a single quivering second.
Teo couldn’t help it; the words leapt out of her mouth: “Poor Venice, stuck with a futile fop of a mayor! Your mustache has more brains than your head! Don’t you understand? You can’t send me away now! This is just when you and Venice need me the most.”
The Mayor took a step backward, as if someone had punched him on the nose. It was evident that in the flesh Teodora Gasperin was everything he’d been afraid she would be. His face grew greasy with an awkward emotion that jiggled between fear and shame.
Teo took the opportunity to crouch down and bolt between the legs of the policemen now doubled over in helpless mirth. Then she hurtled down the stairs, three at a time, as if she was flying.
Teo skidded through the muddy streets toward the one place where she’d surely find the answer to the question she could hardly bear to voice.
A sob tore from her throat. “It was him who sent the ice storm, wasn’t it? He kidnapped my parents, didn’t he?”
It was not the Mayor’s mustachioed face Teo carried in her mind as she virtually skated on her heels through Campo San Bartolomeo. The Mayor’s foolish vanity made him nothing more than an unwitting tool of the real enemy. That was how it had been last time: the Mayor putting all Venice at risk, without the least idea of what was really happening. No, as she pounded over the Ponte dell’Olio, what Teo was recalling was the pointed face shimmering like half-boiled egg white, the pale lizard eyes and the sharklike nose of Bajamonte Tiepolo, Il Traditore, staring down at her with a centuries-old hatred. She remembered him striking a sickening blow to Renzo’s cheek. Renzo! Surely he was thinking the same thing she was? Perhaps he was with the mermaids already?
Never had the House of the Spirits seemed so far: it felt as if someone had moved it two miles away from its original location at the Misericordia. A stitch clamped Teo’s side and she stumbled over a pile of sodden postcards. All the gaily colored photographs of Venice had turned black.
“Even the pictures of Venice—ruined!” she mourned breathlessly.
By San Felice she had shrugged off her heavy-footed pursuers, who were still forced to pause and laugh every so often, remembering what she’d shouted at the Mayor. Finally, Teo stopped, sniffed the air and looked around her.
“Strange,” she muttered. “It doesn’t feel as if …”
At the basin of the Misericordia, she threw herself into a boat, clambered over four more and then grabbed a drainpipe to lever herself on to an ornate gate. This she scaled with her customary lack of grace, dropping on all fours into the garden below. Teo galloped through the sodden grass and into a small chapel, where frescoes glowed above a pool of water. She reached down into the still wetness to grasp the handle of a door almost hidden by floating seaweed, lifting it with a grunt.
The water parted like a curtain and a mouth-tingling fume of curry wafted up from the light-filled staircase below. It was underlaid by a faint smell of squid ink from the Seldom Seen Press, the mermaids’ printing machine.
“Eating, as usual!” An emptiness stirred in Teo’s own belly. All she’d managed since the flood was a bowl of lukewarm soup and a nibble at a rind of cold pumpkin. She took the stairs two at a time, finally tumbling through an archway to a gilded cavern in which nestled a deep pool of black water rimmed by a sturdy walkway. The first thing she saw was a tattered Christmas tree bedecked with silver seaweed and living fireflies in tiny filigree cages.
“I’d almost forgotten it was Christmas,” Teo thought, struggling to catch her breath. “Doesn’t much feel like it now. Renzo!” she puffed hopefully. “I’m … here!”
No answer came back. A prickle of worry nipped her spine. At the sight of Teo, the cavern filled with splashing and rough, sweet voices. A hundred blond and tousled mermaids greeted her affectionately. “Why, Teodora!” “ ’Tis the Undrowned Child!” “Give the little maid a bite o’ somefing hot and nicely greasy!”
The Seldom Seen Press stood silent, for the mermaids were presently gathered around floating banquet tables. Their faces showed distinct traces of enthusiastic dining. A flock of melon-sized icebergs eddied and bumped around their blue tails. Above the mermaids’ pretty heads, dozens of parrots in rainbow plumage craned their necks toward Teo.
The birds squawked, “Bite! Bite! Bite!”
Teo thought, “They won’t be so hungry when they hear what I’ve got to tell them.”
“Sweet maid’s all tuckered out! Timber-shiv’ring cold it is! Will ye not have a little sumpin’ to warm yer gizzard on this perishin’ day?” a mermaid in a chef’s hat offered. “There’s a lovely plunk o’ chicken-that-flew-stew just hottin’ up on the griddle. You ain’t tried this one yet.”
Teo panted, “I thought you … were vegetarians, Catalina?” She was one herself. “Wait! I have to … tell you … Do you know that … the Vamp—”
“Who’s disputin’ yer? Don’t ye git yourself in a blue tweak, Undrowned Child. ’Tis veritable vegetablish. Just chickpeas. Sartin ’twere a chickadoodle in da original recipe. But it flewed away. We added more chili, and you’d never notice da lack o’ poultry for da fire in your mouf.”
Catalina thrust a steaming spoonful between Teo’s cold lips before she could get out a single word about the Vampire Eel, Bajamonte Tiepolo or the Mayor. A spicy flame lit
Teo’s tongue and throat. While she chewed the delicious mixture, Teo’s watering eyes searched out Lussa. A glint of gold alerted her to the Queen swimming forward. Since the day of the battle in the lagoon, the mermaid’s beautiful face had been lightly embossed with gilded lettering, for she carried on her body the Spell Almanac of Bajamonte Tiepolo. She was its guardian now.
Lussa exclaimed, “Teodora! ’Tis an exquisite Relief to see You.”
Her accent was refined, quite unlike those of her mermaid subjects, who had learned to speak human language by eavesdropping on uncouth sailors and pirates.
Now that she finally could get a word in, Teo was too distressed for pleasantries. “He’s back, isn’t he? Il Traditore. Bajamonte Tiepolo!”
“Say ye not his cursed name!” cried Flos, Lussa’s young second-in-command. “ ’Twould make a weasel weep to hear it!”
The parrots chanted dolefully, “Weasel weep, weasel weep, weasel …” For in last year’s struggle, the mermaids had been betrayed, and Vampire Eels, their only natural predator, had ambushed them at the sea-entrance to this very cavern, killing a dozen of their number.
“Yar, Teodora,” mourned Lussa, “I fear You are right. And now We must …”
Teo buried her head in her hands. “How many Venetians have died today, because I was too much of a coward to utter that one last curse when I had a chance to get rid of Il Traditore forever? And my parents … and where is Renzo?”
Lussa said, “We could not save your Adoptive Parents, dear Teodora, from Whomsoever Scoundrels & Miscreants abducted Them. We arrived too Late. But We saved as many Humanfolk from the Ice Water as We could. Under Cover of Dark, We carried Them to Land.”
“I dreamed you doing that,” Teo remembered.
“We brought Them warm Sustenance. We treated their Wounds with Venetian Treacle. Of course, when They wake up, They shall have no Recollection of Us.”
The Mourning Emporium Page 3
