The beetles encased the boy in seconds, filling his mouth, clogging his throat and choking his voice. He swallowed some and spat out the rest in sticky clumps. Shaking as many off as he could manage, he twisted his robe up over his head, knotting it off like a hood. He mustered a rondo, a repeating phrase he’d learned years ago from his father before he died in a hunting accident, the melody rushing from his imagination.
But the beetles and his exhaustion were winning. The mist and its effects were beginning to dissipate. And Don Grigori was stirring. The boy collapsed to his knees, his voice faltering. Groaning, the castrato reached for his mummified master.
With an explosive splintering of wood the chamber doors burst open and a tall, brown-skinned soldier crashed into the room, wielding a sword in each hand. His breeches were tucked inside black riding boots, knives sheathed on their silver buckles, and his head was wrapped in a low yellow turban. Opals pierced his ears and a fist-sized golden tablet etched with peculiar glyphs rested at the glistening V of his open tunic.
Two of the Grand Inquisitor’s household guards leaped into the chamber after him. The soldier pivoted, lunged at the guard to his left, piercing his neck. Before the first guard fell, the soldier feigned a counter-parry, cross-stepped, and lunged at the second guard, stabbing through the hatch in his armour and piercing his heart. The second guard dropped instantly. Smelling fresh blood, a horde of beetles abandoned the boy’s head and flocked to the guards instead.
The soldier sheathed his swords. He quickly took measure of the mummified Grand Inquisitor and the stunned castrato before striding to the boy he’d rescued from the slave blocks at Cadiz two months since.
‘Damn you, Moor,’ croaked Don Grigori.
‘I was delayed, child,’ said the soldier, soothing the boy with his mind as he spoke in a mash-up of Spanish and Swahili. ‘I regret it most bitterly.’
Pulling down his makeshift hood, the boy threw himself into the Moor’s arms and pressed his face against the leather bands that criss-crossed the soldier’s loose white tunic.
Don Grigori suddenly lunged for the Grand Inquisitor’s pipe on the floor.
The Moor put the boy aside, pulled a blade from his boot and, with a brutal swiftness, chopped off the long fingers on the castrato’s right hand. Don Grigori flew backwards, howling, his blood spraying the velvet-papered walls.
Fat with the flesh of the slaughtered guards and Don Grigori’s severed hand, the beetles swarmed once more around the boy’s head and mouth, insatiable in their bloodlust. The Moor pivoted back to the child, calming his small, trembling body and settling his terror as the beetles flew about them both in thick bloody clouds.
Through a gap in the swarm, the Moor’s dark eyes caught Don Grigori struggling to lift the enchanted ivory pipe to his own thin lips.
‘Boy!’ The Moor hissed. ‘Sing again, before it is too late!’
But Don Grigori blew on the pipe at exactly the same moment as the boy opened his mouth and struck a perfect high C. Their conjuring rose up in two great dissonant waves of sound, colliding in a blinding white explosion of music and marble.