The world didn’t go dark. It went violent.

  The poison—the Cantarella—wasn’t a blanket; it was a whetstone. Every candle flame in the Great Hall of Imola became a jagged sun, carving into my retinas. The Medici messenger’s voice wasn’t a whisper; it was the grinding of tectonic plates against my eardrum.

  “The ledger, Niccolò,” the agent hissed again, his hand hovering over the breast of my robes. “Piero’s interest is due. Give me the skin-bound book, or I’ll carve the entries out of your hide.”

  I tried to scream, but my tongue was a lead ingot. My heart wasn’t beating; it was vibrating at a frequency that made my teeth ache. I could feel the vibration—the Borgia sickness—pulsing through my marrow. Across the hall, Cesare was a blur of crimson and shadow, his hands locked around Dr. Arnault’s throat. The French physician’s face was turning the color of a bruised plum, his legs kicking rhythmically against the heavy oak table.

  “I… am… the Prince!” Cesare’s roar sounded like a storm trapped in a bell.

  The Medici agent reached into my cloak. His fingers brushed the cold, slightly oily texture of the ledger—the one bound in the skin of a traitor.

  With a surge of chemically-induced adrenaline, I did the only thing a scholar can do when his mind is a fractured mirror: I bit him.

  I sank my teeth into the agent’s wrist with the frantic strength of a cornered rat. He howled, pulling back, and in that moment of distraction, I rolled. The marble floor was an ice-slicked precipice. I tumbled away from the table, my robes tangling in the legs of a heavy candelabra.

  Clang.

  The silver stand fell, snuffing the candles. In the sudden gloom, the hallucinations blossomed. I saw the Istrian marble floor turn into a sea of dark wine. I saw the tapestries of the hunt come to life, the hounds leaping from the thread to tear at the air.

  “Seize them!” Cesare’s voice cracked. “The doctor! The messenger! All of them!”

  The room erupted. Armored sentries burst through the doors, their halberds glinting in the dying light. I felt hands grab my shoulders—not the slick, greedy hands of the Medici agent, but the iron grip of Cesare’s personal guard.

  “The Duke wants the Florentine alive,” a voice grunted.

  I was dragged across the floor, my heels sparking against the stone. As I was hauled toward the shadows, I saw Cesare drop Arnault’s limp body. The Duke turned toward me, his skin glowing with a sickly, iridescent sweat. He looked like a god made of fever.

  “Niccolò,” he wheezed, his eyes wide and vacant. “We are going to Rome. My father has found a new way to bleed the world. We need… we need more salt.”

  Then, the world finally splintered into a thousand jagged pieces, and the silence took me.

  Two Weeks Later: Rome, The Jubilee Year of 1500

  I awoke to the sound of coins. Not the gentle jingle of a merchant’s purse, but a rhythmic, industrial clatter—the sound of a city being disassembled and sold back to its inhabitants one copper denaro at a time.

  I was in a small, sweltering room in the Apostolic Palace. My fever had broken, but the Cantarella had left a permanent residue in my nerves. My hands shook with a fine, persistent tremor that no amount of wine could steady.

  I pushed myself up from the cot. My head throbbed. The skin-bound ledger was still there, tucked beneath my straw mattress. Piero’s agent had failed, but I knew the debt remained.

  I moved to the window. Outside, the Eternal City was a construction site of greed.

  The Jubilee Year had brought hundreds of thousands of pilgrims to Rome, seeking the remission of their sins. But Pope Alexander VI had realized that while salvation was free, access was a premium commodity.

  Below my window, the piazza was choked with pilgrims from every corner of Christendom—Germans in heavy wool, Spaniards with sun-darkened faces, and my own Florentine kinsmen, looking nervous in the shadow of the Borgia bull.

  But something was different. A wooden barricade had been erected around the newly unearthed classical statues that lined the approach to the Vatican. In the center stood the Laoco?n, the marble Trojan priest struggling against the sea serpents, his face a mask of eternal agony.

  A line of Swiss Guards stood at the entrance to the barricade. Beside them sat a papal clerk behind a heavy counting table.

  “Two grossi!” the clerk shouted, his voice echoing off the stone walls. “Two grossi for the sight of the Ancients! No foreigner passes without the Pilgrim’s Toll!”

  I watched as a group of exhausted pilgrims from Lyon reached the front of the line. Their leader, an old man with a staff, gestured wildly at the statue.

  “We have walked five hundred miles to see the holy relics!” he cried. “We have already paid the tithe at the gate! Why must we pay to look at a stone?”

  The clerk didn’t even look up. He tapped a freshly printed papal bull pinned to the table. “His Holiness has decreed it. The maintenance of the past is the burden of the present. Two grossi to stand within ten paces of the marble. Move on, or the guards will move you.”

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  I felt a presence behind me. I didn’t need to turn to know the scent: bitter almonds and expensive musk.

  “It’s a masterstroke, isn’t it, Niccolò?”

  Cesare Borgia stepped up to the window beside me. He looked thinner, his face sharper, the Chemically-enhanced madness replaced by a cold, vibrating focus. He was dressed in black velvet that seemed to swallow the Roman sun.

  “You call charging a starving man to look at a statue a ‘masterstroke’?” I asked, my voice still a jagged rasp.

  “I call it logistics,” Cesare said, leaning his elbows on the sill. “The war in the Romagna costs ten thousand ducats a month. My father’s ‘Inverse Medicine’ experiments cost another five. The Church is a bank that keeps its vaults in the clouds, Niccolò. But the mercenaries want their pay in silver, not prayers.”

  I looked down at the piazza. A guard shoved a woman aside because she couldn’t find the second coin in her bodice. “You are turning the city into a museum of greed. The people are already whispering. They call it the ‘Toll of the Dead.’ They say the Pope is selling the very air of Rome.”

  “Let them whisper,” Cesare smiled, a thin, predatory line. “As long as they pay. Do you know what my father says? He says that the unwashed masses erode the sanctity of the stone with their very breath. The fee isn’t a tax; it’s a ‘preservation levy.’ The more they pay, the more they value the sight.”

  He turned to me, his gold eyes locking onto mine.

  “The Pope wants to see you, Niccolò. He’s impressed you survived Arnault’s tincture. He says a man who can digest Borgia poison is a man who can digest Roman politics.”

  The Sala Regia was filled with the smell of incense and unwashed bodies. Pope Alexander VI sat upon his throne, his scarlet robes flowing like a river of blood across the dais. He looked older than he had in my memories, his face a map of high-stakes gambling and late-night prayers.

  Beside him stood a man I recognized from the darkest corners of the Imola ledger: Le Miroir, the French necromancer-financier who had replaced Arnault.

  “Master Machiavelli,” the Pope said, his voice a rich, seductive baritone that could make a death warrant sound like a blessing. “I am told you have a talent for bookkeeping. Tell me, what do you think of my new revenue stream?”

  I bowed, my knees trembling. “Your Holiness, it is… efficient. Though perhaps a bit provocative for a Jubilee year.”

  Alexander VI laughed, a deep, belly-shaking sound. “Provocative? My dear scholar, the world is a theatre. If you don’t charge for the best seats, the audience doesn’t respect the play. I have unearthed the glory of Rome—the statues of the giants. Why should the rabble of Europe enjoy them for free?”

  “The people are poor, Holy Father,” I said. “The two grossi you demand is a week’s bread for a family in the Suburra.”

  “Then they should stay in the Suburra,” the Pope snapped, his eyes flashing with a sudden, terrifying coldness. “Rome is not for the poor. Rome is for the pious. And piety, in this century, is measured in coin. I have a son who needs an empire, and empires are built on the ‘Toll of the Ancients.’”

  He leaned forward, the heavy scent of his perfume clashing with the metallic tang that seemed to follow the Borgias everywhere.

  “I need you to audit the collectors, Niccolò. My clerks are skimming. They see a sea of pilgrims and think I won’t notice a few bags of silver going missing. I want you to apply your ‘Inverse Mathematics’ to the piazza. Tell me exactly how many eyes look at the Laoco?n each day, and tell me why the ledger doesn’t match the crowd.”

  “You want me to be a tax collector?” I asked, the irony tasting like ash.

  “I want you to be my eyes,” the Pope whispered. “Because you know what happens to those who try to steal from the Borgia bull.”

  He gestured to the window. Outside, the crowd in the piazza had grown silent. A platform had been raised near the barricade. A man—one of the papal clerks—was being led up the steps, his hands bound.

  “That man thought a one-grosso fee was enough for the Pope, provided the second grosso went into his sleeve,” Alexander said smoothly.

  As the executioner raised the axe, the Pope turned back to me, a fatherly smile on his lips.

  “The fee is two grossi, Niccolò. Not one. Not one and a half. Two. For the sake of the stone. For the sake of the Church. And for the sake of your own neck.”

  I spent the evening in the shadow of the Laoco?n.

  The statue was beautiful, even in the flickering torchlight. The priest’s muscles were strained to the breaking point, his sons dying in the coils of the serpents. It was an image of absolute, inescapable entrapment.

  I stood just outside the barricade, watching the pilgrims shuffle past. They were silent now, the fear of the executioner’s axe hanging over the piazza like a fog. Each one dropped their coins into the heavy iron box with a look of dull, simmering resentment.

  “Mathematics of the soul, Niccolò.”

  I turned. Piero de’ Medici stood in the shadows of the colonnade, his midnight-blue cloak blending into the darkness. He looked like a ghost that had wandered out of a banking house.

  “Piero,” I whispered, my hand instinctively going to the ledger hidden in my robes. “Your messenger in Imola… I didn’t mean to—”

  “The messenger was a clumsy fool,” Piero dismissed with a wave of his hand. “But his failure doesn’t erase your debt. You see what the Pope is doing? He is monetizing the very history of this city to fund your student’s bloodbath.”

  “I am aware,” I said, looking back at the iron box. “He calls it preservation.”

  “It is decay,” Piero countered, stepping closer. “When you put a price on the past, you surrender the future. The people won’t stand for it, Niccolò. A fee to enter a piazza? A toll to see a fountain? It is the logic of a mercenary, not a shepherd.”

  “The Pope is a mercenary of the spirit,” I murmured, the dark satire of the thought catching in my throat. “He knows that people will pay anything to feel close to greatness, even if that greatness is made of cold marble.”

  “The Medici want the ledger, Niccolò,” Piero said, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous hum. “The Borgias are overextending. This ‘Pilgrim’s Toll’ is an act of desperation. They are out of gold, and soon they will be out of friends. When the riot starts—and it will start—whose side will you be on?”

  Suddenly, a cry went up from the front of the line.

  A group of pilgrims—sturdy-looking men with the calloused hands of laborers—had refused to pay. They weren’t pleading; they were shouting.

  “No more!” one of them yelled, pointing at the Laoco?n. “The stones belong to God! The city belongs to the people! Down with the Borgia tax!”

  The Swiss Guards leveled their halberds. The crowd, sensing the shift in the air, began to press forward. The “two grossi” fee had been the final spark in a city already parched by tyranny.

  I looked at Piero. He was smiling.

  “The interest is due, Niccolò,” he said, fading back into the shadows. “And the collectors are at the gates.”

  A stone sailed through the air, striking the iron counting table with a resounding thud. Then came another. And another.

  The pilgrims weren’t looking at the statues anymore. They were looking at the guards.

  I felt the tremor in my hands worsen. The poison in my blood seemed to hum in sympathy with the rising roar of the mob. I reached for the ledger, my fingers gripping the skin-bound cover.

  The Laoco?n stood silent in the center of the chaos, the stone priest still struggling, still trapped, while the city around him began to burn.

  A full-scale riot erupts in the Vatican piazza over the new “Pilgrim’s Toll.” Niccolò is trapped between the charging Swiss Guards and the furious mob, while Piero de’ Medici prepares to use the chaos to seize the Borgia ledgers.