Changeling Read Free

of the Order. We have been commanded by Pope Nicholas V to explore the mysteries, the heresies and the sins, to explain them where possible, and defeat them where we can. We are making a map of the fears of the world, travelling outwards from Rome to the very ends of Christendom to discover what people are saying, what they are fearing, what they are fighting. We have to know where the Devil is walking through the world. The Holy Father knows that we are approaching the end of days.’
    ‘The end of days?’
    ‘When Christ comes again to judge the living, the dead, and the undead. You will have heard that the Ottomans have taken Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine empire, the centre of the Church in the east?’
    Luca crossed himself. The fall of the eastern capital of the Church to an unbeatable army of heretics and infidels was the most terrible thing that could have happened, an unimaginable disaster.
    ‘Next, the forces of darkness will come against Rome, and if Rome falls it will be the end of days – the end of the world. Our task is to defend Christendom, to defend Rome – in this world, and in the unseen world beyond.’
    ‘The unseen world?’
    ‘It is all around us,’ the man said flatly. ‘I see it, perhaps as clearly as you see numbers. And every year, every day, it presses more closely. People come to me with stories of showers of blood, of a dog that can smell out the plague, of witchcraft, of lights in the sky, of water that is wine. The end of days approaches and there are hundreds of manifestations of good and evil, miracles and heresies. A young man like you can perhaps tell me which of these are true, and which are false, which are the work of God and which of the Devil.’ He rose from his great wooden chair and pushed a fresh sheet of paper across the table to Luca. ‘See this?’
    Luca looked at the marks on the paper. It was the writing of heretics, the Moors’ way of numbering. Luca had been taught as a child that one stroke of the pen meant one: I, two strokes meant two: II, and so on. But these were strange rounded shapes. He had seen them before, but the merchants in his village and the almoner at the monastery stubbornly refused to use them, clinging to the old ways.
    ‘This means one: 1, this two: 2, and this three: 3,’ the man said, the black feather tip of his quill pointing to the marks. ‘Put the 1 here, in this column, it means one, but put it here and this blank beside it and it means ten, or put it here and two blanks beside it, it means one hundred.’
    Luca gaped. ‘The position of the number shows its value?’
    ‘Just so.’ The man pointed the plume of the black feather to the shape of the blank, like an elongated O, which filled the columns. His arm stretched from the sleeve of his robe and Luca looked from the O to the white skin of the man’s inner wrist. Tattooed on the inside of his arm, so that it almost appeared engraved on skin, Luca could just make out the head and twisted tail of a dragon, a design in red ink of a dragon coiled around on itself.
    ‘This is not just a blank, it is not just an O, it is what they call a zero. Look at the position of it – that means something. What if it meant something of itself?’
    ‘Does it mean a space?’ Luca said, looking at the paper again. ‘Does it mean: nothing?’
    ‘It is a number like any other,’ the man told him. ‘They have made a number from nothing. So they can calculate to nothing, and beyond.’
    ‘Beyond? Beyond nothing?’
    The man pointed to another number: –10. ‘That is beyond nothing. That is ten places beyond nothing, that is the numbering of absence,’ he said.
    Luca, with his mind whirling, reached out for the paper. But the man quietly drew it back towards him and placed his broad hand over it, keeping it from Luca like a prize he would have to win. The sleeve fell down over his wrist again, hiding the tattoo. ‘You know how they got to that sign, the number zero?’ he