1635 The Papal Stakes Read Online Free PDF

sweat. “ Merda ,” he breathed, “what now?”
    “Now,” said Tom, snapping up his pistol’s barrel assembly so that it closed upon the fresh cylinder he had loaded, “we run.”
    The small cardinal’s voice quavered: “Won’t that attract attention?”
    “Your Eminence,” Tom said through a patient smile while wondering if the cardinal could run, “we’ve fired almost ten shots. We are leaving four attackers dead in the street, and one unconscious in the crotto . I think we’ve probably attracted about as much attention as we possibly could. Speed is our only friend, now.”
    And setting his actions to match his words, Tom Simpson began running in the direction of the Mera River, trying to put aside the growing feeling that the pine-carpeted alpine peaks that soared up at every point of the compass—except due south—were closing in on, and even over, them.
    They stayed close alongside those buildings whose shadows were already long enough to start creeping up the opposite façades. Two blocks shy of reaching the river, Tom turned left, leading them into a small lane that paralleled the main road—the Viale Maloggia—which wound out of town to the northeast. It followed alongside the Mera, which, although merely a shallow gorge at present, had been a white-frothed flume only one month earlier, due to the spring Schmelzwasser that had come rushing down out of the swollen mountain cataracts.
    As the rest of the group caught up with him—Melissa wheezing almost as much as the cardinal—Tom looked downstream toward the town’s center: no reaction from there, yet. Good: with any luck, they might—
    “Tom.” Melissa’s voice was very calm, low-pitched. Which meant disaster on the hoof.
    “What is it?”
    She pointed down. “That.”
    Tom and the rest followed her finger: a dark, brown-red stain was collecting near his feet, dripping down from his traveling cloak. As a watch whistle shrilled back near the crotto , Rita stepped closer to her husband, her worried eyes scanning his body.
    Tom shook his head. “But I’m not hit.”
    Melissa nodded. “Of course you’re not. That’s not your blood; that’s your soup.”
    Soup? Tom stared at the stain, remembering the flurry of action—and wide spray of soup—that had immediately preceded their exit from the crotto . We’re going to be tracked—tracked and killed—because I chose to have the soup ? Had the situation not been so desperate, he would have laughed. His life—and the lives of his wife, his friends, and charges—now hung in the balance because he had chosen to have a bowl of soup.
    Tom looked up from the bloodlike spatter on the ground, glanced behind them and then toward the Viale Maloggia. He tore off his cloak and threw it aside: “We’ve got to run. Fast. Now.”
    “We just were running,” complained Melissa, her hand on her side, one corner of her mouth wrinkled in the attempt to suppress what Tom guessed was a wind-stitch.
    “We run or we fight.”
    “So what are we waiting for?” asked Melissa, stretching her long legs northward to run parallel to the bending course of the Mera.
    Four minutes of near-sprinting put the sound of the whistles a little farther behind them. As they panted to a halt in front of their taverna , the whistles of the town watch stopped abruptly.
    “They found the cloak,” panted James. “Figuring out where to search next.”
    “I will get Matthias—”
    “I am here,” said the young German from one of their windows on the second story. “I just reestablished contact with Padua, and am in the middle of sending an update to—”
    Tom shook his head. “Break down the radio, Matthias. Keep the up-time transmitter separate, in your pack. I’ll send Arco and the ladies up to help you load our—”
    “No need,” he assured them as he detached the wire he had hooked to a roof-tile as an antenna. “All our bags are packed. Trail gear only. Everything else I have left under the