The bells of Firenze tolled, loud and clear, in the emerging day. Their clear ringing resounded throughout the city and the peoples homes, startling the crows and pigeons into panicked flight. They spoke from church to church under the clear sunny skies. The light of the rising sun painted the rising spires and domes of the houses of God in a hard light this day. For the bells tolled of fear and suffering. Of betrayal and revenge.
In Il Duomo, the main cathedral of the city on the river, a youth stood over the coffin of his father, the head of the Auditore family, murdered not a week past. The straight-backed youth was unaware of the whispering all around him, of the false commiserations offered by the leading nobles of the city whose factionalism was a byword for treachery. He did not hear his mothers sobbing or his grandmothers words of comfort, hard as theyd be for that old lady was not sentimental in the least. She too was unbowed, showing no signs of her gr