realize that she meant every word of it. It wasn’t a bluff. It was in her power to give him his life. Or take it away.
Trevini seemed to lose himself in the gaze of her snake’s eyes. Something in his face told her that, at that moment, his will was broken. All at once his humiliating arrogance had disappeared. She could smell vulnerability on his breath. Could pick up the scent of his fear like vapor from his pores.
Her lips, very narrow now, were only a handbreadth away from his face. He was sweating; his eyes were watering. Yet he didn’t blink. He stared at her like a rat driven into a corner.
“Did you know that Apollonio is my father?” she asked.
His lower jaw was shaking slightly, but he said nothing.
Rosa’s voice took on a sharper edge. “Did you know?”
“I…I don’t understand it myself,” he got out. “And that’s the truth. I saw him on the video, but I don’t understand the connection.”
“I’ll be able to tell if you’re lying.”
“I’ve told you that Apollonio was in touch with me after Costanza’s death,” he said hesitantly. “But I never met him in person. I don’t know why Davide is addressed as Apollonio on the video. Do you understand me, Rosa? I simply do not know.”
“Still, you didn’t warn me. Because you wanted me to come to you in a flood of tears, begging you to help me.”
“Di Santis foresaw that it might not turn out that way.”
Rosa’s tongue licked down to her chin. The split tip touched rough reptilian skin. She had to concentrate to halt the transformation at this stage, although she wasn’t sure whether she really wanted to.
“Who’s behind TABULA?”
“Don’t do it,” he said.
She frowned inquiringly, and felt scales trickle down over her nostrils.
“Don’t try to take on TABULA,” he said. “Your grandmother did the only right thing by allying herself with them.”
“Who is TABULA?”
He let out his breath heavily. “No one knows…I don’t know.”
“But you have an idea, don’t you? Costanza must have known. The only question is: Did she find out from you?”
“I have a few scraps, small pieces of the whole truth. No faces, no names. At first I tried to find out more, but then I realized that any answer I got could mean the end for me. TABULA knows its enemies. And TABULA shows no mercy.”
“Tell me what you did find out.”
He groaned in pain and tried to avoid her gaze.
“It all goes back many centuries,” he said helplessly. “Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis—I don’t suppose that means anything to you, does it?”
“Is it Latin?”
“Yes. And much more than that: words from the language of alchemy.”
She hissed quietly, and Trevini’s eyes almost imperceptibly widened. “Don’t try to fool me,” she said.
“You want connections. Very well, listen. This is not about strange hooded figures brewing bubbling potions over open fires. Alchemy is both a philosophy and a science. More of a science than anything else today. And the Tabula Smaragdina Hermetis is its beginning, its origin, the coded truth of the thrice great. The legendary emerald tablet of Hermes Trismegistos.”
Maybe she really ought to leave him to di Santis and put her mind to something more important.
“Alchemy is the mother of science,” he said, apparently mistaking the pool steps for a lecture hall. “When TABULA carries out experiments on Arcadians today, it is with reference to the father of alchemy—Hermes Trismegistos himself. No one knows who he really was. I have read a great deal about him, and his name unexpectedly turns up in the strangest sources. Some say that he occupied the throne of Thebes as its king. Others claim that he was a god of the shepherds of ancient Greece. Or the direct son of Adam. Then again, another opinion is that he never existed at all, and the name is only a pseudonym under which a whole group of scholars wrote their works. It’s said that Hermes Trismegistos penned more than thirty-five thousand books.”
“TABULA,” she whispered sharply. “That’s all that interests me.”
“You’ve even inherited your grandmother’s impatience.” Trevini managed a thin smile, but there was still terror in his eyes. “It seems that the emerald tablet of Hermes was discovered in a cave around the year 300 BC. It isn’t mentioned in writing until much later, and the first Latin translation comes from the Middle Ages. No one knows what language it was first written in—maybe Greek or Arabic.”
“What does it say?”
“Some say the texts are oracles; others describe them as instructions. There are