The Serpent of Venice Read Free Page B

sooty slave reaching beyond his station.”
    “Nobility and courage being frightening and foreign qualities to you—you piss-ant merchant, twat.” The senator was sensitive about his nobility, or lack thereof. Venice was the only city-state in Italy, nay, the only state on the continent where there were no landed nobles, largely because there was no land. Venice was a republic, all authorities duly elected, and it rankled him. Only in the last few months had he convinced the doge and the council to allow senate seats to be inherited. And because he had no sons, Brabantio’s seat would go to the husband of his eldest daughter. Yes, the Moor.
    “Strictly speaking, he didn’t really ruin her. I mean, she’s married to a general who will someday be a senator of Venice, so really, a step up from her bloodline, which I think you’d have to agree is as common as cat piss.”
    He growled and flung another brick through the portal. This one took me on the front of one thigh, which should have been more painful than it was. Considering it, I suppose I should have been more concerned for my fate. Perhaps the Oriental powder had made me giddy.
    “That’s going to leave a mark, Montressor.”
    “Damn you, fool. I will silence you.” He went back to his masonry with a fury that was making him breathless. Soon he was down to the last brick, just a square of yellow light from the port.
    “Beg for mercy, fool,” he said.
    “I will not.”
    “You won’t be able to drown yourself, I’ve made certain of that. You shall suffer, as you have made me suffer.”
    “I care not. I care for nothing. Finish your bloody business and be off. I’m tired of listening to your whingeing. Give me my oblivion so I may join my heart, my love, my queen.” I bowed my head, closed my eyes, waited for the dark and what dreams may come. I don’t suppose it occurred to me that I could be both heartbroken and dead.
    “Your queen did not die of fever, fool,” said Brabantio, a whisper now in the dark.
    “What?”
    “Poison, Fortunato. Formulated by one of Rome’s best apothecaries to mimic a fever, slow and deadly. Put into place soon after you arrived as emissary and spoke your queen’s strong opposition to our Crusade. Sent to Normandy on one of Antonio’s ships, and delivered by a spy recruited from her guard by Iago. We may not have landed nobles, but he who rules the sea, rules trade, and he who rules trade, rules the world.”
    “No,” said I, the truth of it burning through the haze of the potion and grief like a fire across my soul. Hate had awakened me. “No, Montressor!”
    “Oh, yes. Go join your queen, Fortunato, and when you see her, tell her ’twas your words that killed her.” He scraped the trowel around the opening, then fit the last brick and tamped it into place, plunging me into darkness as the water rose around my knees.
    “For the love of God, Montressor! For the love of God!”
    But the tapping had ceased and my last call on the senator’s conscience was drowned by his laughter, which faded, and was gone.

THREE
    A Spot of Bother
    A spot of bother, innit: walled up and chained in the lightless, lonesome cold, seawater rising to my ribs, silence except for my own breath and a steady drip somewhere above my head. Then a slight scraping from the other side of the new wall. Perhaps Brabantio gathering his tools.
    “Brabantio, thou treacherous coal-souled wank-weasel!” said I.
    Was that cackling I heard beyond the wall, or just the fading echo of my own voice? The chamber had to be connected to the lagoon, somehow, but I could not hear even a distant lapping of waves. The darkness was so complete that I could see only the phantoms that populate the back of the eyelid, like oil on black water—“cracks in the soul,” Mother Basil used to tell me before she would lock me in the cupboard at the abbey at Dog Snogging, where I was raised. “In the dark may you contemplate the cracks in your soul wherein leaks