It was late in the night. A shaft of crimson light from the moon Ceres entered through a porthole. Cosimo’s freckled maid had lit more of the alchemical lanterns, which cast a golden pall on the room.

Supper was served, and they ate mostly in silence. Baked trout, sweetbread, cinnamon apples, and (for Cosimo’s Qirini tastes) honey-roasted centipedes, among other things. Nico poked at his serving of trout with a fork, only nibbling on small pieces. He and Leo shared the same affliction: whenever they were on a Quest, they had almost no appetite. Gianna, however, was scarfing down everything set before her. It was a wonder the girl always stayed rail-thin.

“If that painting is anywhere,” Nico said to his compatriots, “it’s in the Musea di Ortiva’s vault. We need to find the vault — and find a way inside it.”

“What do you mean, if it’s anywhere?” Max said. He was feasting on a tray of cucumber finger sandwiches, daintily using a skewer to avoid sullying his hands. “Of course it’s somewhere. After all, it exists. Or so you say.”

“No,” Nico said, “not if someone beat us to it. Not if they abided Cosimo’s stratagem and burned the bridge behind them. It is entirely possible, perhaps probable, that the painting was already stolen or destroyed. It might explain why a replica was placed in the gallery.”

“But you said that there was an alteration to the replica.”

“Not an alteration — an omission.”

Cosimo shrugged, teeth crunching on a centipede. “A distinction without a difference, is it not?”

“It’s not. An alteration could be accidental, the result of a flawed forgery. An omission of this magnitude implies a deliberate act. Either way, our priority is getting inside the Musea’s vault. With any luck, the answer is somewhere in these documents.”

After supper Nico went around the table, passing out portions of the intelligence he’d plundered from the Pathfinders guildhouse. They labored for several hours in silence, occasionally commenting upon some interesting fact in the reference material. It was Danieli, reading files on the Musea’s architecture, who found that the vault was located somewhere below the museum. Only the curator could access it. There was no key, and if the curator was coaxed under duress to open the vault, it would not yield.

“So I guess we have no option but to befriend the curator,” Leo said, only half-joking. “Win him over to our righteous cause.”

“Unless we pull rank on him,” Nico said.

Cosimo narrowed his eyes. “How do you mean?”

“There’s one man every person in the Myriad Isles fears. A man no one dare doubt, question, or gainsay. Duke Ferdinand II.”

Leo clapped his hands together so loudly that several people in the room flinched. “YES!” he shouted. “Yes, I love it. Nico, you sound a bit mad yourself — but you wear it well. You’re going to wear his face, aren’t you?”

Max rolled his eyes. “Disguising yourself as the Mad Duke? Sounds like a suicide mission.”

“Leo and I have made a flourishing career out of suicide missions.”

Leo gave a hearty chuckle, nodding. “It’s true. Very true.”

“The disguise does needn’t be immaculate,” Nico said. “The Duke is a recluse and notorious for bizarre behavior. Has been for years. No one, save his majordomo and his closest courtiers, would be able to detect a decent disguise.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“Wait,” Leo said. He pushed back his chair, stood up, and paced the room. “On the rare occasions when the Duke does travel to Verona his visit is always accompanied by royal pomp and ceremony. Won’t somebody notice that something is awry if he makes a sudden unannounced visit?”

“Probably. We’ll need to seed rumors in the local pubs and taverns. A few choice words in the right ears and… well by midday the whole city will be buzzing about it.”

“I volunteer as tribute,” Max said, chuckling awkwardly at his own joke. “Gods know it has been entirely too long since I last tasted a drop of liquor.”

“Still,” Leo said, ignoring Max’s quip, “his ship won’t be in Mercado’s Marina. Surely someone will notice that… right?”

“Then we engineer a diversion,” said Gianna. “Or we block the marina entirely. It’s secluded. There’s only one road going in. ”

“A sign,” Nico said. “That’s all it takes. A sign saying ‘no entry by order of the Duke’ or something. That should be enough to dissuade just about anyone — even the Black Cabal. At least for a while. We just need to buy ourselves some time.” It was not a great plan, even by Nico’s own reckoning, but it was the best they could manage on such short notice.

“And if our time elapses? What then?” Cosimo asked.

“Then,” Leo said wryly, “perhaps we can all be cell-mates in the Oculus.” He smiled, but then his tone turned grave. “Any Veronan, any Paladisian will tell you that death is a preferable fate to being captured by the Black Cabal. That means one thing.”

He looked around the room at the assembled faces, staring at each person in turn.

“No surrender.”

***

It was getting late, but they continued poring over the files. Cosimo toyed with the notion of putting the Mint out to sea, but rejected it under the presumption that it would only draw more attention to his vessel. Doubtless the noose was drawing tighter around his own neck. The Empress and the Black Cabal might be wary of provoking him, but their patience would not last forever.

"Well,” Gianna said, very late into the night, after dinner had been cleared away and gelato had been served. “This is pretty gruesome and cruel,” She held up one of the files and read from it. “It says here that upon construction of the Musea, and before any art was installed, Xeno held a lavish party within the Musea’s halls to celebrate its completion. He invited the stonemasons, bricklayers, architects, engineers, everyone. And then once the party began, he triggered a lockdown, trapping everybody inside. A noxious gas was released, killing everyone, including Xeno himself.”

“Why would he do that?” Leo said.

“To protect the Musea’s architectural secrets,” Nico said. “It’s a fairly common practice.” There were a handful of trapwrights who employed the same devious technique to guard their secrets. Needless to say, those trapwrights had a dark reputation among laborers. Some of them met their own demise at the hands of an engineer’s distraught wife or son.

“Fairly common but altogether false in this case,” Cosimo said. “Your intelligence is wrong.”

Gianna gave him an incredulous look. “The file says that hundreds of bodies were later recovered.”

“Surely they were, but not Xeno’s body. Xeno is Qirini. I know my people. And I have it on good authority that he later relocated to his homeland and lived a long, healthy life and died at a ripe old age.”

“How could you know that for certain?” Nico asked.

In answer to Nico’s question, Cosimo posed his own question. “How old would Xeno have been when he completed the construction?”

“18. 19 maybe. He was known to be a prodigy. He began when he was only 13.”

“I know for a fact Xeno later had a granddaughter named Lollys, a Qirini socialite who married a man named Verxes Medea. Xeno of Citium is my great-great-grandfather. So yes, I am quite sure he survived his sojourn in Verona.”

“Then he must have escaped somehow, despite the lockdown…” Max said. “You said this practice was used to protect architectural secrets. What sort of secrets?”

“Proprietary secrets, secret passages…” An idea occurred to Nico as he spoke. “There has to be some way the museum’s staff moves valuable artwork in and out. That may have been the secret Xeno sought to protect.”

Cosimo rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Interesting. Is it worth pursuing? It might be a means of ingress.”

Nico shook his head. “No. With my disguise it won’t be necessary. We go in the front door. We go out the front door. Pompous and bombastic, just like the Duke’s style. We maintain the disguise through the end.” He looked across the table at his companions. “We are all marked men, with a narrow window of opportunity. Tomorrow we stage a heist on the Musea’s vault.”