Knowledge Aforethought, page 10
“No. Ain’t happening,” I snapped. I lowered my hand and saw Life glaring at me again. I rounded on Death. “Seriously, this isn’t helping at all! Do you have any idea what I’m supposed to do now? You got me into this mess—”
“And I did say that I would do my best to remedy my mistake,” Death said, his normal solemn visage back in place. He stepped forwards until he stood beside Life. “But I tell you again, I do not know what it is that will bring my cousin here to return you to your normal time.”
“I know precisely what to do,” I said in a low voice. I turned to Charlotte and Machiavelli to help me out, but they stayed very far away from Life. Mary was still trembling. I saw Machiavelli try to look away and a slight green tinge touched his face. He was definitely feeling the effects of Life’s presence. If I didn’t want things to start going badly, I needed to get everyone away from here.
“You have said.” Death inclined his head. He turned towards his wife and explained. “Cal claims that Time sent him back to mend the faults in out relationship before they begin, so that in the future we will not be quite so at odds.”
Life snorted, then tossed back her head and laughed so that the sound echoed off the rock chamber. “Your cousin is a fool,” Life told Death. She wiped a tear from an eye and continued to grin. “He understands nothing.”
“Perhaps,” Death said. He held out his hand for Life. “But still, I think we should leave them to their affairs. Have you finished with your champion?”
Life turned away from Death’s hand and practically leaped towards Charlotte. The half-giantess drew her sword, taking several prudent steps back. Life clicked her tongue. “Tsk. I only wish to make my offer again. Are you so capricious as to turn me down? Do you care so little for Life?”
Charlotte shuffled her feet, getting into a deeper stance. “I care a whole lot for my life. You, on the other hand, are dangerous. You want me to fight you? Not going to happen.”
Life shrugged, the motion careless. I narrowed my eyes. Life was not one to give up so easily. She hated being refused almost as much as she enjoyed the struggle that all the living endured to try and eke out an existence. “Very well,” Life said, turning back to Death and sauntering towards him. “But know this, champion. I will be there when you try and wield that amulet. I will be there in every battle you face, in every decision you make to try and improve your lot. I am Life. If you wish to succeed, you will fight me. You may not know it, but you will.”
Charlotte swung her sword through the air so that it made a very noisy slice. She pointed the tip at Life, brandishing the massive blade as though it were a butter knife. “I live on my terms. Not yours.”
Life smiled languidly over her shoulder at Charlotte. Then, she sauntered back to her husband and kissed him noisily again. Before I could start complaining, she took Death’s hand and in a flash, the two were gone. Sometimes I thought accepting Death’s job offer was one of the dumbest things I had ever done. Most of the time, though, I just wanted to amend my contract.
I walked over to Charlotte and saw that she was worse off than I expected. Her face was pale and covered in a sheen of sweat. Her hands were shaking, barely able to keep the greatsword steady. She licked her lips nervously and looked at me. “Cal?” she asked, her voice low enough to prevent Mary and Machiavelli from hearing.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “But she is not one to give up so easily. You may think you can beat her, but Life is wilful, capricious, unfair, dangerous, and wild. She can be marvellous, wonderful, beautiful. But she is never what you expect.”
“And Death?” Charlotte asked in a hoarse whisper, lowering her sword. “Is he her opposite?”
“Death may seem steadier, but he is just as dangerous. He can be kind, yes, but he can be cruel. He doesn’t care whether you’re good or evil, whether you’ve accomplished everything or nothing. Everyone faces Death and no one wins.”
“Except you.” She looked at me with a dark expression, one I couldn’t decipher. I hoped, desperately—enough so that I could feel it penetrate that barrier that kept everything shrouded in emptiness—that it wasn’t fear. I took in a deep breath.
“I’m not sure losing my soul counts as winning,” I said. I tried to smile, but the action felt forced. Once, when I had been at the top of my publicity and marketing game, smiling was second-nature. I felt every smile. I felt the confidence, the happiness. Now, I felt nothing. So I stopped smiling. I turned to find Mary whispering to Machiavelli. Both looked shaken, but generally whole.
“Shall we go?” Mary asked, letting Machiavelli’s arm rest on her shoulder. I wasn’t sure whether he was holding her up or she was supporting him. “I don’t want to be down here when that vampire gets back with reinforcements. And I really don’t want to explain why the essence of Life and Death is down here.”
“Yeah,” I said, holding out my hand to Charlotte. She straightened to her full height and ignored me, sheathing her sword and looking towards the exit. “Let’s go.”
“Agreed,” Machiavelli said, falling into step behind Charlotte. Mary let me take her position then jogged to run up to Charlotte, putting her hand on the bigger woman’s arm. “I have so many questions, for which I will demand answers, but that is for another time. This moment, I could sleep for a week.”
I opened my mouth to agree and realised that I didn’t feel tired. After having been up for nearly a whole day after a very brief rest and almost two days of no sleep, I should have been stumbling over my feet. I should have been starving. Desperate for water—or coffee. Instead, I felt nothing but a general weariness. An empty pit settled in the depths of my chest, perhaps the only manifestation of worry that this situation could allow.
The four of us marched back out of the Medici palazzo as though nothing had happened. We were all bloody, some of us injured, all of us ready to be away. This time, the servants were present, but they kept their heads low and their backs to the wall. I hoped that the rumours of this would be quelled by Alsatia or we were going to be hunted down by a whole lot of very dangerous beings. As we emerged into daylight, the city around us buzzed with movement and energy. The sun was almost at its peak. We must have been down in that dank basement for far longer than I realised.
“Cal and I are going back to my house,” Machiavelli said. Mary turned and nodded.
“We’ll meet up with you later. We need rest and then we’ll figure out what to do next. This evening, for dinner at—crap. Charlotte! We have a problem!” Mary tugged on Charlotte’s arm, looking like a teenager pulling at her mother’s dress. Charlotte, looking wearier than even Machiavelli, shuffled to see what Mary was looking at.
“Well, crap,” Charlotte said. She immediately held up her hands. Mary swallowed, then copied her. Machiavelli and I, slow on the uptake, did the same and then faced whatever was coming our direction. With that sort of reaction, I half expected a wild wyvern or something to be rampaging through the streets, headed straight for us. If Italy had wild wyverns. I wasn’t quite sure about the magical beings native to the region. Instead, we were faced with something rather different.
A man wearing bright red robes that went down to to his calves, with a pair of white stockings or hose or whatever you called it, leather shoes in a maroon that went really badly with his robes, a heavy and thick golden necklace hanging down to the middle of his chest with an intricate cross on it, a cap on his head in that same garish red, and a look of supreme smugness, was leading a group of city guards. The guards looked like poorly dressed cousins compared to the swagger of this man. He stopped before us and I saw that the gaudy necklace-and-cross combination was not the only jewellery he wore; there were rings on three of his fingers, with one of them being one of those signet rings. The insignia looked important.
“Who’re these guys?” I asked. Machiavelli made a sound in the back of his throat. Then, with a swift motion, he practically bowed at the waist to the man.
“Cardinal,” he said, voice deep with respect. “I did not expect such an honour.”
“And who are you?” the man asked. He waved away his question with a flick of his wrist. “Never mind. I have come to inform you that the respected Medici reported a theft from their personal vault this morning. Under Church and city law, you are to be placed under arrest. Guards.”
“Ah,” I said, nodding in understanding. “Not wyverns or goblins at all. Mortals. Indeed. Far more dangerous.”
The guards surged forwards and arrested us. We were smart enough not to resist.
Wasting Time
I didn't know a whole lot about the Church in 1494, but I had a feeling that they weren't responsible for arresting people. Or at least, they shouldn't have been throwing us into a dungeon. And, instead of some barracks type building below the street level, this was a true dungeon. The walls were covered in damp, moss was growing quite freely, the floors were stone and freezing cold despite the fact that it was a very pleasant spring day outside, and the smell was something dreadful that got up your nose.
Mary and Charlotte were interned somewhere else to keep the men and women separate. Machiavelli and I, though, were fortunate enough to be able to share a cell. We had been stripped of our weapons, and my belt purse was searched thoroughly, taking all of the earnings I had made from my brief stint as a city guard, and leaving my cell phone. And my glasses. They hadn’t even seemed to notice that they were things that definitely did not belong in this time. I clutched my phone like a child’s safety blanket.
We were then thrown into a small room with a single bucket in the corner, a solid wooden door with bars in the window, and not much else. I settled against the wall, leaning my head on a nice cushion of moss, prepared to wait. Machiavelli paced a bit, muttering to himself before he finally calmed down enough to also sit.
"This is wrong," he said. I raised my eyebrows and pushed my glasses up my nose. Machiavelli gestured with his hands, curling his fingers into fists. "This is beyond wrong. The Medici have influence with the Church, yes, but they should not control them like this. They should not be able to influence the Church into taking people prisoner and arresting them. We should be brought before the Signori, not thrown into a dungeon by the Church!”
"Don't get me wrong, but why is the Church arresting people? Shouldn't the city guard, the law people, be doing that?" I asked, my voice sounding oddly detached even to me. I was running my phone through my fingers, feeling its familiar weight and wondering just what my social media accounts were doing. I don't imagine that time spent in the far past was a useful excuse for not managing my clients’ accounts. It occurred to me that I should have been more worried with the situation at hand, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. I was a man out of time and I had long ago given up on trying to adjust to this horrible world of mine. Even my marketing skills, the very things that had gotten me into this mess, were completely useless. I might not have had a soul, but I still felt that loss keenly. More than keenly; I was pissed.
My entire life had been taken from me by Death. Okay, yes, I had been shot when Death first hired me, but there was no certainty that I would die. And, yes, not being dead was a whole lot better than being dead, but I was a human. Fragile, mortal, non-magical human. And Death threw me into a world of magic that I had hardly believed existed. I had been killed (sort of) multiple times, sent on impossible tasks, meant to deal with people who hated my very existence, all when I was hired to be doing nothing more than marketing and public relations. I was a marketer! I wasn’t some hero to go about saving the world or repairing the relationship between Life and Death. I was jut Cal Thorpe and I wanted my life back. Death had stolen it from me and now he had gone and lost my soul. His wife was equally to blame for being reckless, cruel, enthralling and probably the source of all the problems between them.
Now here I was, stuck in a dungeon in 1494, a place where poor sanitation and plague was only a sneeze away. My allies were locked away. I had no access to the resources to which I was accustomed. And I couldn’t even feel properly angry because my soul was missing.
Machiavelli sighed. He tilted his head back and tightened his clothes around him as if to keep out of the cold which had already penetrated our bones. "Sometimes it is difficult to forget that you do not belong here. That you come from a world of magic and of beings that are nothing more than myth to many of us, blasphemy to the rest. Other times, it is hard to remember that you haven't always been here. To answer your question, the Church does not often take an active role in the prosecution of those who have broken the law, but on occasion, when there are special considerations that fall under Church provenance, the Church feels free to do whatever it wishes. It is a being of man, not of God. And it is men who are doing this to us now."
"Okay, so we fall under Church provenance, probably because of the magical connection,” I said. That didn't really help us at all, as we were still stuck in what amounted to an underground prison. We had no weapons, we had no magic, and I highly doubted that the Church would take I'm from the future and I'm here to help as a valid reason for robbing the Medici, vampires or not. They would probably just burn me at the stake; I didn’t really care to find out how that felt. “So how do we convince these men that we are not there enemies?"
Machiavelli let out a dry laugh, shaking his head. "You don't understand. The Church may not be considered kings, but they have the unequivocal rule of the people in this time. And when they choose to act, they are not often seen as wrong. They are very dangerous people to get on the wrong side of. And somehow, the Medici have convinced them that we are very dangerous people. You won't be able to just charm your way out of this. And we won't be able to fight our way out either."
"So what would you suggest we do?" I asked. Part of me had rather hoped that fighting our way out would be a valid option. The Church would learn that I couldn't be killed, would probably denounce me as demonic, and would probably try to exorcise me, but at least we would have done something. I realised though that that wasn't really a valid option. For me, perhaps, it would work. But I was not alone. Niccolo Machiavelli was interned here also, and he still had a role to play in history. If the church ostracised him, then he would be, to put it politely, snookered.
"I fear we are going to have to lie our way out," Machiavelli said. I turned to look at him, nearly dropping my phone in shock.
"I thought you said we couldn't charm our way out," I said. I pointed at him accusingly. "Lying is certainly part of that."
He shook his head, laughing dryly again, this time with a slight tinge of enjoyment in the gesture. "Charm implies faith in what you're saying. It implies that you are worth more than their time and they should just let you go. It implies that men find you likeable, trustworthy. I hate to break it to you, Cal, but that is not the case. You are bumbling. Endearing. Even capable. But I would not say that you are likeable or trustworthy."
"Gee, thanks," I said flatly. Truth was, I wasn't all that offended. Machiavelli had only known me barely a day before I had lost my soul, and things had gone rather downhill from there. I wasn't sure I even liked myself anymore, though I couldn't quite figure out if that was just a result of the lack of emotion or if it was something more.
Machiavelli held up a finger. "Lying, on the other hand, is spinning something into existence that does not require them to trust us, only believe us. It is conforming ourselves to their world view."
That was a little creepy, but then I considered the source. Some years from now he would be more than famous for writing a treatise in which he basically discussed the fact that the end justified the means and that manipulation was necessary. He was a political cynic and a person possessed of cunning and the ability to manipulate, to charm easily. Or he would be very shortly in the future. Based on those words, he was well on his way.
"I am all ears," I said, leaning my head back against the rock. "What would you suggest?"
"We simply have to discover what it is that these people, the Cardinal in particular, are afraid of."
"We could just tell him that the Medici offered us the amulet in exchange for killing someone,” I suggested. Machiavelli winced, banging his head on the mossy wall behind him. He rubbed the spot and frowned.
"I doubt that would make them wish to release us," Machiavelli said. "No, we need to provide them with something that is so threatening that they feel it is safer to help us out into the world than it is to have us locked up. We need to find someone who is influential enough to cause problems should the Church be known to be holding us prisoner."
I considered, trying to remember all of the things that Machiavelli had told me and all of the things I remembered about this particular time in history. "What about the French?"
"The French?" Machiavelli asked, brows rising as he tried to process my answer. "Why would the French be threatening?"
"You said it yourself," I said. "You said the French were invading, and heading this direction. Surely that is a threat to the Church."
"The French king is known to be friendly towards the Church. Especially Rome. I doubt very much that they would care whether or not…Wait a minute. It is possible that…Do you remember what I said about Savonarola?"
"He is some sort of preacher?" I rubbed my forehead, feeling the start of a headache. It probably didn't help that I hadn't eaten or drunk anything since many hours earlier, and had since been killed once and argued with Life and Death. I didn't know what my physical limits were without a soul, but I was feeling a little tired. Not as tired as Machiavelli looked, but a little tired.
"Savonarola is a man who does not believe in the worldly possessions that the Medici, and by association, Florence, have acquired. He believes that the best way to grow close with God—as should be everyone's first objective—is to decry the wealth and temptations of this world. He believes that the Medici are corrupting people's souls and should therefore be stopped." Machiavelli looked at me as though I should understand the significance of this. All I saw was some religious figure who was against the Medici…
