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By Root 326 0

singing almost imperceptibly as they cooled. He looked around the cavernous space that had been his home for twenty years, cool now that the fires were dead. He checked that every last soul had gone and then lit a single candle. He turned to the door of a disused furnace that was set back into the wall. He opened the door and entered the gaping maw, his feet crunching on the detritus of old goblets and candlesticks that had been littered in here like damaged treasure, since the furnace had been stopped up many years ago. Corradino felt for the blackened brickwork at the back of the firehole, felt expertly for the metal hook and pulled. An inner door silently sprang open and he stepped inside.

Instantly he was at home. He lit from memory the candles on the many branched stick inside the door and the room that warmed into light resembled not a place of work but an attractive Venetian salon. A velvet chaise lounged in the corner. A firehole, dominating one wall, burned as merrily as a nobleman's hearth. And on the walls, reflecting heat and light, hung some of Corradino's most treasured pieces; the pieces that he knew would have to be released for sale one day, but not yet - not quite yet. Great mirrors spanned from floor to ceiling, making the room twice as large. Sconces, reaching out from the walls in a heartbreaking arabesque, rivalled the beauty of the flames they carried. Picture frames that held no image, but that would diminish any portrait in the world, no matter how celebrated the beauty of the subject. Only the centre of the room belied the appearance of a luxurious palazzo for here stood the tools of Corradino's trade - long water vats and silvering tanks, vials of multicoloured pigments and limbecs of evil-smelling chemicals.

This chamber is mine. Secret, safe, and the right place for the office which I carry tonight.

Corradino knew what was needed - a knife of his own design, called a dente, or tooth. It was well named; not slim and deadly like the assassin's knives that he was charged to make, and not designed to break off at the haft like them. Short but sturdy, made of dense dark glass and with a wicked point, the dente would do well for cutting and digging alike. He was still for a moment, surveying his benchful of powders and unguents, thinking of the type of glass that was needed. Then he knew.

Obsidian. The oldest glass in the world.

He stripped off his jerkin and went to work. The heat of his chamber was intense, as the firehole was large and the room - though sizeable enough for its purpose - heated quickly. Corradino thrust a handful of ash-like pumice from Stromboli into the fire instead of the customary sand. Then followed a handful of sulphur which burned his nose and made him tie a kerchief about his face. His task tonight was to recreate the hard black natural glass that spewed forth, time out of mind, from the volcanoes of the south. The kind of glass which set like stone. The kind of glass which had entombed the poor dead souls of Pompeii and Herculaneum, trapped like flies in amber - first liquid, then diamond hard. With a firehardened paddle he mixed the powders with a fiery blob of gather which had been heating in the fire all day like a sleeping salamander. He mixed and reheated the glowing orb, adding more pumice and a little pitch, until the glass was as dark and sluggish as treacle. Only then did he take his pontello and shape the knife, rolling the handle on the wood and leather scagno saddle which stood by the fire. When he was happy - for there must be no error tonight - he took the handle to the fire again and flamed the blade end for a long moment. When the dark handle glowed at the haft he brought it out and set it in a vice, blade end down, and watched as the rosy tip of the handle grew downwards with the force of gravity, and the molten glass dripped like a fiery stalactite into a wicked point. Corradino had invented this drip method, finding that it yielded a more perfect point than any amount of grinding or polishing after the fact. This way, the glass made its own edge.