Read Online The Alchemist's Apprentice by Dave Duncan - Free Book Online Page B

stuck my head out to tell one of Giorgio’s brood to warn him. When I returned, the Maestro was staring fixedly at the window and tugging his beard. I know better than to interrupt him when he is thinking on that scale. I took up my knife to sharpen my pen.
    Eventually he sighed and looked at me as if wondering where I had been. “A letter.”
    I took a sheet of rag from the drawer and dipped the quill.
    â€œAbout ten lines,” he said, so I would know how to place it on the sheet.
    â€œItalic, roman, or gothic?”
    â€œItalic, of course. ‘To the exalted chiefs of the noble Council of Ten. Usual bootlicking…It is with deep sorrow that I most humbly bring to Your Excellencies’ attention certain evidence pertaining to the despicable murder of…’”

4
    G iorgio was ready in his standard gondolier costume of red and black, so we trotted downstairs and embarked. He is a wiry man and not tall. Standing in the stern of the gondola he looks far too slight to move a thirty-foot boat at all, but he is as proficient with his oar as he is at making babies. We skimmed off along the Rio San Remo, sliding between the traffic. The sun was shining with as much enthusiasm as it ever musters in February; bridges and buildings had a well-washed look. Women on balconies were hanging out washing, peeling vegetables, shouting conversations across and along the canal, lowering baskets to vendors in boats or on footpaths below them. Often they were singing. So were the cage birds, which had been brought out to enjoy the morning and tantalize the cats. Seagulls flapped clumsily or just stared. Almost all the boatmen were singing, too, when not fluting the odd cries they use to warn on which side they intend to pass. They say we have ten thousand gondolas in Venice.
    â€œIs it true the Maestro was at the supper where the procurator died, Alfeo?”
    Mama does the talking in the Angeli family. Most of the time Giorgio says little, although his silences have an uncanny knack of prompting other people to tell him secrets. He would not question me unless he were seriously worried.
    I said, “He was taken ill at the supper. The Maestro went to help, as you would expect. The procurator died yesterday, at home, tended by his own doctor.”
    â€œOh.” Apart from returning hails from other gondoliers going by, Giorgio wielded his oar in silence for a while.
    â€œThe Maestro didn’t poison him.”
    â€œAlfeo! I never said that he did! That’s a terrible—”
    â€œThat’s the rumor. It’s a lie. Last night I was called in to the palace for a consultation. I was not arrested, not questioned. My arms are no longer now than they were before. Don’t worry about it.”
    A man who has to support a two-digit family must worry about his employer’s fate. Giorgio slid the gondola through a minuscule gap beside a farmer’s boat already on its way home for the day. He ducked as we shot under a bridge. Then he had time to speak again.
    â€œYou are not nearly as good a liar as the master, Alfeo. You are worried, so I am.”
    â€œThen I confess! I’m on my way to tell the Council of Ten I did it.”
    The whole boat shuddered. “Don’t make jokes like that, Alfeo!”
    It was less of a joke than he thought, although I had no intention of posting the incriminating letter I carried. “How was the wedding?”
    Family is one topic on which Giorgio will talk, and talk at length. His children are outnumbered only by his brothers and sisters; Mama has even more; add in aunts, uncles, nephews, and nieces and the wedding party must have outnumbered the Turkish army on campaign. Giovanni from Padua and Aldo from Vicenza and Jacopo and Giovanni from Murano…He was still reciting the guest list when we arrived at our destination.
    Ottone Imer shared chambers with several other attorneys in the maze of alleys in San Zulian, just north of the