Finger? Call it a claw, a talon.
Who, for a start. Who was the nun with the dead eyes? If there was a vessel for that talon, it was surely her, but who was she? To what Order did she belong? The Servants of the Trinity? If that was so, then how could such a creature have gotten into the ranks of those most fully dedicated to fighting it at all costs? How could they possibly miss the signs of such evil?
What? What was the monster he had seen in the scrying-mirror, the thing that was surely a servant of the Great Evil if not another vessel for it—the monster that was killing in such a horrible manner, the monster that could seemingly reach anyone, anywhere?
Why? What was the ultimate plan here? Luciano was quite certain by now that the Great Evil lurking behind these machinations took the form of the Grand Duke of Lithuania. But why was the duke so interested in Venice? At a glance, there seemed no logic to it.
And, a very, very urgent question—when? There would be an attack on the city, of that Luciano was now also certain. So—when? Who would be the major players?
His vision had shown him some of those players: Lucrezia Brunelli and her brother Ricardo, the nun, another churchman who was certainly wearing the cassock of the Servants of the Trinity. Another question, just how many plots were there building to a climax, and how many of them were interwoven? What he had seen was—he thought—the sources of danger to Venice; which, since these things were of necessity biased towards the attitude of the seeker, meant Venice as he knew it. Now, Lucrezia and Ricardo could, together or separately, have plans for Venice involving alliances outside the borders of the city-state that would certainly destroy the fabric of the city as he knew it, but did that mean they were allied to the Great Evil? And if they were, did they know it? The Sots—
Well, the Sots and presumably the Knots, fanatical Paulines as they were, would be only too happy to purge the city with fire and the sword of anything that was not of their own rigidly defined Christian path. That would certainly destroy Venice, but that did not mean they were allied with the Great Evil.
Ah, but one did not need to be allied with or a part of something to serve it.
What could he do? Well, he could, at the least, move to protect a few people, who had no protections of their own. Little Kat, for instance. He had once held that Hypatian medal of hers in his own two hands, and that once was enough for him to invest it with far more power than the mere wardings it contained. Now that he knew the reality of . . . It . . . in his city, he could do something specific.
But first, his protections.
He moved his bits of furniture against the wall, picked up the rug—a sadly worn import from Persia—and flipped it over. No one but another mage would ever have guessed what he’d had bonded onto the back of this old rug.
A pentagram within a protective circle, formed of bitumen mixed with blessed salt—courtesy of Sister Evangelina—and the pulverized dust of pearls and gemstones, frankincense, myrrh-gum, ambergris, copal resin, and cinnabar. A coating of artist’s varnish sealed it and allowed it to be painted over with the appropriate symbols, then sealed again. Before he went to work, Luciano went over the entire diagram with his nose mere inches from the painted cloth, looking for cracks and flaws. Today there were none; had there been any, he would have immediately repaired them. Never mind that the energies were supposed to be able to flow across any such defects; in these circumstances, he dared not take any chances. Once he was done, he blew out all the lanterns in his room but one, set up his tiny altar in the middle of the pentacle, then blew out that final lamp before feeling his way to the altar.
He lit a single candle on the altar, with a spark of magic.