Page 390 - The Grotesque Children's Book

“I posit that this picture is saying than an alchemist mixed up some fiendish potion, and is
about to feed it to the woman. And that if we could read what was on the papyrus in her hand,
we’d know her fate. One papyrus is pointing upwards, one’s pointing down. Will she live?
Will she die? The alchemist knows the answer. Someone’s been eavesdropping, Lorenzo!
Someone knows what we did. And that painter you were watching today, now he knows as well.
Find him, and kill him before he can tell someone what he knows.”

Lorenzo Pulveri suddenly no longer saw anything funny in this situation. “Got it. I’ll get
him.” He ran out of I Magistrati as quickly, stealthily, and lethally as he knew how.

Zaccario lingered in the hallway, staring up at the ceilings. Maybe he was over-reading
the symbols. Yes, he must have been over-reading the symbols. Because once he started
looking at the ceilings with such an accusatory viewpoint, the ceilings fairly screamed of guilt,
murder and evil alchemy from practically every corner.

Demons. Missing limbs. Transformation after transformation symbolizing lead into
gold, or simple mercury into sublimated mercury, death into life, ignorance into knowledge.
Goats representing jewels, goats representing poison. Birds and putti representing the fresco
painters; Medicis wherever you looked in figures, coats of arms (their heraldic five red balls),
seashells, condemnation of plutocracy, warnings about the burning of the proletariat to feed the
inexhaustible greed of the merchant guilds, and the rest of a nearly-infinite list.

The whole thing was one massive death sentence for Chimento Zaccario.
It was imperative now more than ever that it was Dr. Ludovico Valerius, and not
Chimento Zaccario who was accused of attempting to poison the Duchess.
And the maybe, just maybe, he would actually have to poison her after all.

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