Sophia’d had the gift of healing that he lacked, though he had the knowledge. Together, they’d formed the only source for medicine the swamp folk knew, and he’d done his best to follow the healing path among the crazed and the impoverished losers who lived here.
And now . . . well, perhaps she who was Hecate, Artemis, and Ishtar needed him back. There was a yearning to go back. His position both in the Accademia and Marciana Library had brought prestige, and power. But most of all he yearned for the books.
And—he had learned a great deal. Humility, for one. But also, the need for greater stringency in the service of the Goddess. The Dottore Marina he remembered had been too vain; yet, also, not proud enough. Too peacock soft.
His mind turned to the boy. The boy did not even begin to realize he bore the mark of the winged lion, which had been obvious to Luciano’s Strega-trained eye from the moment the boy had stumbled into their lives. Well, the guardian of the lagoons and marshes who had welcomed the gentle Saint Mark was ever so in its choices. They were good vessels. He had to admit that he, Luciano Marina, was a flawed vessel. Still . . . The boy had come back here, and he carried with him the feeling of danger. Danger and darkness far greater than could be linked to one life or death. But Luciano also felt the potential for something else.
* * *
Luciano approached the islet cautiously through the mist, making no sound in the water; he’d left Harrow trancing-out on the mushrooms he’d fed to him.
His caution was needless; Harrow was deaf and blind to everything around him. Except Luciano’s voice, and magic.
* * *
Harrow was having another vision. This one was, like the others, beginning with a face; a woman’s face. She started out young, then flickered from girl to woman to crone and back again. It was the Goddess, of course. She had come to instruct him again. Harrow felt both exalted and humbled; and excited, with the kind of near-sexual excitement he’d felt only when he’d completed an assignment for Duke Visconti. But he wasn’t supposed to be thinking of that. He was supposed to be making himself worthy to be the vessel of the Goddess.
“Harrow—” said the Goddess, her hollow, echoing voice riveting his attention upon her. “You have much to atone for. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” replied Harrow thinly, bowing his head as her eyes became too bright to look upon. Those eyes—they seemed to see right into the core of him.
“So let it be.”
There was a sound like a great wind, and Harrow was alone in the dark.
Or was he? No—no, there was someone coming. Or forming rather, out of the dark and the mist. Another woman.
For a moment he thought it might be another avatar of the Goddess. Then with a chill of real fear he recognized her. Lorendana Valdosta—once a Montagnard agent herself and dead at the hands of the Visconti’s assassins these five years gone. He knew she was dead, and for a certainty. He’d been there when Aleri had given the order; and Bespi himself had slid in the blade while Lorendana’s new lover Aldanto held her silent and immobile.
She had been the key Montagnard information-drop in Venice, but she had also been loose-tongued and incredibly reckless. Never less so, Bespi had realized later, than when she’d personally insulted Duke Filippo Visconti by spurning his advances. That knowledge had been the thing, more than any other, which had finally crystallized Bespi’s growing disillusionment with the Milanese. He had uncaringly killed a woman for being—so he’d been told—a danger to the cause. The knowledge that he’d actually killed her for no more reason than the duke’s personal disgruntlement, when it finally came to him, had been . . . unbearable. He’d realized then that he’d been as gullible as the woman he’d murdered.
She didn’t look too gullible now—
“Bespi,” a voice said . . . seemingly inside his head. “I see you—”
He blocked his ears, but it did no good. The ghostly voice cut right through him; the almond eyes did the same. She was stark-naked, her well-formed ivory flesh floating in a cloud of smoke and fog and midnight-black hair, obliquely slanted black eyes cold as the grave—she aroused no desire with her weird nudity; he’d never wanted a woman less.