The Seventh Sacrament Read Free

one?
    Fanciful thoughts from an overimaginative, headstrong child.
    He could hear his father repeating those words though they never slipped from his lips. Instead, Giorgio Bramante was saying something entirely different.
    “Alessio,” he complained, half ordering, half pleading. “We have to go. Now.”
    “Why?”
    What did it matter if you were late? School went on forever. What were a few lost minutes when you were peering through a knights’ keyhole searching for the dome of St. Peter’s, trying to work out who was right, the humans or the flies?
    “Because today’s not an ordinary day!”
    Alessio took his eyes away from the keyhole, then, carefully, unwound the flimsy glasses from his face, and stuffed them into the pocket of his trousers.
    “It isn’t?”
    His father snatched a glance at his watch, which seemed unnecessary. Giorgio Bramante always knew the time. The minutes and seconds seemed to tick by in his head, always making their mark.
    “There’s a meeting at the school. You can’t go in until ten thirty…”
    “But…”
    He could have stayed home and read and dreamed.
    “But nothing!”
    His father sounded a little tense and uncomfortable, with himself, not his son.
    “So what are we going to do?”
    Giorgio Bramante smiled. “Something new,” he said, smiling at a thought he had yet to share. “Something fun.”
    Alessio was quiet, waiting.
    “You do keep asking,” his father continued. “About the place I found.”
    The boy’s breathing stopped for a moment. This was a secret. Bigger than anything glimpsed through a keyhole. He’d heard his father speaking in a whispered voice on the phone, noticed how many visitors kept coming to the house, and the way he was sent from the room the moment the grown-up talk began.
    “Yes.” He paused, wondering what this all meant. “Please.”
    “Well.” Giorgio Bramante hesitated, with a casual shrug, laughing at him in the way they both knew and recognised. “I can’t tell you.”
    “Please!”
    “No.” He shook his head firmly. “It’s too…important to tell. You have to see!”
    Giorgio leaned down, grinning, tousling Alessio’s hair.
    “Really?” the boy asked, when he could get a word out of his mouth.
    “Really. And…”—he tapped his superfluous watch—“…now.”
    “Oh,” Alessio whispered. All thoughts of Piranesi and his undiscovered tricks fled.
    Giorgio Bramante leaned down farther and kissed him on the head, an unusual, unexpected gesture.
    “Is it still there?” he asked idly, not really looking for an answer, taking Alessio’s small, strong arm, a man in a hurry, his son could see that straightaway.
    “No,” he answered, not that his father was really listening anymore.
    It simply didn’t exist, not in any of the hundreds of tiny, changing worlds Alessio had seen that morning. Michelangelo’s dome was hiding, lost somewhere in the mist across the river.
             

    T HEY WERE FIFTY METRES BENEATH THE RED EARTH of the Aventino hill, slowly making their way along a narrow, meandering passageway cut into the soft rock almost twenty centuries before. The air was stale and noxious, heavy with damp and mould and the feral stink of unseen animals or birds. Even with their flashlights and the extra shoulder lanterns stolen from the storeroom, it was hard to see much ahead.
    Ludo Torchia trembled a little. That was, he knew, simply because it was cold, a good ten degrees or more chillier below the surface, where, on that same warm June day, unknown to him, Alessio Bramante and his father now stood at the gate of the mansion of the Cavalieri di Malta, not half a kilometre away through the rock and soil above them.
    Ludo should have expected the change in temperature. Dino Abati had. The young student from Turin wore the right clothes—a thick, waterproof, bright red industrial jumpsuit that clashed with his full head of curly ginger hair, heavy boots, ropes and equipment attached to his jacket—and