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various means a profit on the merchandise he has sent to us. The prestige of the Este, the oldest ruling family in Italy, has been purchased in dear coin by the far more recently arrived Sforza, who are desperate for it. O Cities of the Earth! What thunderbolt of Jovian rage shall be hurled down upon us when misbegotten children are bought and sold for the purpose of binding together the affairs of men. . . .
    . . . Benedetto, you must write to me immediately if you have details as to the French foundry techniques. I can only assume that they have arrived at a process for settling impurities out of the bronze, thereby overcoming the brittleness that has hitherto made heavy artillery too cumbersome for an army determined to rapidly encroach upon its foe. . . .
     
    “Careful where you step,” the Cardinal of Novara intimated, grasping his companion's elbow to help her negotiate the stuffed burlap bag lying on the wet stone floor. “Careful that you don't soil your cioppa.” The Cardinal gestured with his torch and sent shadows darting along the black walls of the narrow passage; they were beneath the level of the moat, in what had formerly been the dungeons of the Castello di Porta Giovia. Another bag blocked the way. “Salt,” offered the Cardinal as he and his guest crunched over the obstacle. “Except for a few rooms reserved for... unusual circumstances, that is all this is used for now. The storage of salt.” The sale of salt, which was monopolized by the state of Milan, was an important form of revenue; the exorbitant price included a substantial tax. The Cardinal made three rapid, shallow exhalations, his habitual expression of mirth. “The estimable, late, and not widely lamented Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza amused himself by bringing his subjects down here and nailing them into their coffins while they were still alive. He would then maintain a vigil until his guest was actually in need of a sarcophagus, listening to the desperate cries and the scratching, all the while describing in explicit detail how he had debauched the dying wretch's wife and sodomized his daughters. Then consider the late Duke's brother, our present Duke's regent, Il Moro, who has not executed anyone for a crime less than murder in five years but in that time has doubled the salt tax. I leave you to choose the greater tyrant.”
    “Only peasants and laborers pay the salt tax,” Caterina da Borromeo, lady-in-waiting to the Duchess of Milan, ventured without a hint of irony. She was sixteen years old, and her father was one of the wealthiest noblemen in Milan.
    “And no doubt the peasants and the laborers received their twelve coppers' worth of amusement at the joust this afternoon,” the Cardinal remarked agreeably. He almost slipped, and muttered, “And no doubt we have each consumed a gold ducat's worth of wine.” The Cardinal thrust his torch into an open doorway, plunging the dank stone passage into a terrifying blackness. He withdrew the torch. “Not what I was looking for.”
    After several more exploratory thrusts, the Cardinal found what he was looking for and pulled Caterina into a small room, barren except for a large circular wooden frame set in the center of the fungus-blackened floor. The Cardinal took two fresh tapers from his cloak, lit them with the torch, and set all three lights into the corroded iron rings nailed into the walls. The light revealed the Cardinal as a nearly bald man in his early thirties, with a swarthy complexion and a plump, indolent chin. He had been a cardinal for five years. The office had been purchased for him by his father, the leader of Novara's informal council of ruling nobility, in exchange for massive commercial concessions to Il Moro; the nobles had replaced the ceded revenues by raising their local taxes and had profited from their influence in Rome. The deal had been brokered by Il Moro's brother, Cardinal Ascanio Sforza.
    “The wheel,” the Cardinal said in a mocking tone that