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his aid, but Marlowe twisted when one of them reached for Frizer’s blade. The playwright gripped the dagger and writhed violently, spurting blood all over the guardsmen. Skeres and Frizer stumbled backward while Poley braved the horror up close. “Hold him steady!” he shouted. “Marlowe! Can you speak?”
    The gored man tried to form words, but there was no breath left in his lungs. Only a sinister hiss seeping from the fleshy hole in his chest. And then, silence. The playwright’s lips parted and his body went limp as the last of his life faded from the one eyeball he had left.
    Christopher Marlowe was dead. Brutally murdered with a dagger. Frizer’s dagger.
    The three guards stared at one another in panic. Each one of them had Marlowe’s blood on his hands.
    At that moment, the wooden door behind the men was thrown open. A tall, hooded figure rushed into the room with a glowing lantern held high.
    â€œWho are you!” screamed Poley while accidentally cutting Frizer a second time. “Show yourself!”
    The dark figure pulled back his hood. The three agents recognized him immediately.
    â€œMaster Thomas!” gasped Frizer, who was now sporting two nasty wounds on his head.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” asked Poley while lowering his bloodied rapier.
    â€œMight I ask you the same?” replied Thomas Walsingham. “Marlowe was marked for assassination this evening, and you dullards are letting his killer escape!”
    â€œHe’s right.” Skeres nodded, albeit out of confusion.
    â€œI rode here as soon as I learned of the plot,” Thomas continued with urgency. “You must pursue this villain! Take my lantern! Ride with all haste!”
    â€œBut master…” stammered a blood-soaked Ingram Frizer as he backed away from Christopher Marlowe’s maimed corpse.
    â€œFear not. The queen’s coroner will absolve you. Just find the assassin! Fly, you fools! Fly!” Walsingham shooed the men out of the room and smacked Frizer on the backside with his sword, inadvertently giving him a third and final wound for the evening. The trio leaped onto their horses and galloped into the evening, not knowing which direction would lead them closer to their unknown assailant.
    As the three blood-covered riders scattered into the distance, Thomas closed the window above Marlowe and looked down at the deceased. The intelligence officer shook his head: the poor playwright was not even thirty. His right eye was horribly bloodied and more closely resembled a small liver. His other eye, agape and bloodshot, stared vacantly into the heavens. A single teardrop trickled from it. And then there was the knife sticking out of the foul-smelling wound in his chest: a deep cavity of red carnage that still gurgled with blood.
    Walsingham fell to one knee and whispered: “Alas, poor Marlowe.”
    The dead man said nothing.
    Walsingham furrowed his eyebrows and spoke louder. “I said: ‘Alas, poor Marlowe!’”
    Still no response.
    Walsingham’s eyes widened. He angrily twisted the dagger sticking out of the dead man’s chest.
    â€œOw!” Marlowe winced.
    â€œEnough with the theatrics.” Thomas scowled. “The show is over. There is no more audience.”
    Marlowe grinned with delight as he slipped the cat liver off his face. “I am sorry, my friend, but I never performed my own death before. I figured it should be the death of a lifetime!”
    â€œYou’ll have plenty of time to play dead where you’re going,” Thomas chided. He pulled his friend up by the hand so that the dead man could sit.
    â€œAh, Venice…” Marlowe sighed with the dagger still stuck in his chest. “Is the boat ready?”
    â€œYes, but we have to move quickly.”
    â€œVa bene.” The sprightly playwright bounced up from his deathbed and removed the blood-filled pig’s bladder hidden under his shirt.