The Shadow Master Read Online Free PDF Page A

“And heaven help you if you’re found in the household today,” she said. And so he was bustled down the stairs, carrying two slops buckets of turds, and pushed roughly out onto the streets.
    â€œThank you,” Lorenzo wanted to call back to her, but she had already turned her back on him and gone back inside the household. He stood there for some moments, feeling that he had left a part of himself behind, but having no further desire to attract the attention of the guards, he made his way quickly up the paved street. There were people hurrying along the walkways all around him, muttering or crying as the bells continued to toll. It was the signal that the city was under attack, but how could that be? Who could attack them? An army of plague victims? Or had they assembled around the city in such numbers that they were battering down the gates to get in?
    He tried to stop people on the streets and ask them what was happening, but each had a different story. “The ceiling of the cathedral has collapsed.” / “Cosimo Medici has been slain.” / “Hundreds are dead.” / “An invading army is inside the city.” He must see Galileo, he thought. If anyone knows what is happening, it will be him.
    The old man would ask him where he had been, but he doubted he could ever tell him. He had broken the old man’s trust and would be ashamed to tell him what he had done. But who else could explain to him what he had experienced? Galileo had taken him on as his apprentice when he was very young. An orphaned boy who had become a ward in the Medici household, in a manner nobody seemed to rightly remember. One more of many wards. But one whom the old man, Galileo, declared was possessed of a useful brain. That had led him to a different life than any of the other young boys of the household. No duties in the stables or kitchen or yards. No need to rise before daybreak in winter and cart water. No need to muck out horse dung from the stables. Instead he had grown up under Galileo’s kind but firm hand. He had taught him to read. To write and do mathematics. And to think for himself.
    Which he had found had become a two-edged sword. For as he grew he came to the belief that the old man was not letting him fully experience the wonders of their work. He was diligent and was industrious and loyal, but the old man forbade him from undertaking any science experiments of his own. It was not fair, he thought. He was the apprentice. He should be the one to trial the chronometer and magnifier, not those old sea captains. Had witnessed him perfecting other instruments. He had helped build them. He knew each device’s workings and perils. He had even designed many science objects himself. Galileo had told him they were promising. But still Galileo forbade him to use any of the devices they built. He had told him it was dangerous in the hands of a young person. Told him that there were consequences for its use that Lorenzo should be spared from.
    Galileo had been kind to him, but to deny him this was not right. He had a burning need to improve his position within the household. He was not one of the boys who lived on the lower floors of the palace, and was excluded from their games and comradeship. And he was not welcome on the upper floors. He was a boy in-between, with nobody to call a friend.
    But he had Lucia, who he would glimpse once a week at church, or at a city festival. His special friendship with her had sustained him through his adolescent years. Allowed him to play out in his head the long conversations they would have about life and how the world worked, and everything he had learned. But he would need to have a higher station for that to ever happen. He would need to be more than just an in-between-floors apprentice.
    And though Galileo might not appreciate that he used independent thinking to come to the decision, he had decided to steal the metal gloves and try them out. Use them to