The Empire of Glass - Andy Lane [19]
"Calm down. You did right: there's no sense worrying the poor chap unduly." Braxiatel turned towards the door, then turned back.
"Oh, and you may as well turn the hologuise projector off. We don't want to waste the batteries."
The man reached down to his hip and fiddled with something hidden. As Braxiatel watched, the man's body shimmered and faded away. Within seconds, a stick-thin alien with a rapier-like horn and mottled blue skin covered with bumps was standing before him.
"You weren't seen, were you?" Braxiatel said. "It would scupper our plans completely if anybody saw you in your true form."
"No," Szaratak snarled, "I wasn't seen."
Steven had never seen anything like Venice before. He walked its alleys as if he were in a dream, trying to forget the rotting body dangling from the pillar, letting his feet take him where they would.
The Doctor had assured him that it was impossible to get lost in the city. All one had to do was to ask any passer-by the way to St Mark's Square. He hoped that the Doctor was right. There were certainly enough people to ask. Crowds thronged the place, dressed in everything from rags to silk robes.
The haphazard arrangement of the alleys amazed him. They followed no plan or pattern, running in random directions and narrowing or widening for ho apparent reason, terminating in taverns, restaurants, houses or just dead ends. Sometimes they crossed dark, glittering canals that stank of sewage, sometimes they ran parallel to them. The canals seemed to form an alternate means of transportation: a second Venice that lived beside the first. Black gondolas with gilded prows floated along them, curtains fluttering at the windows of their cabins. They looked like chrysalises for coffins.
Steven marvelled at the bright colours and exotic smells as he walked along narrow thoroughfares, down winding streets and through leaning arches and across bridges made of wood or stone.
He ended up, out of breath, sitting on a flight of stone steps which had been smoothed into curves by generations of feet. He felt dazed by the labyrinthine geography, and he had lost all track of time. Venice didn't seem to sleep.
A cat sprawled on the steps above. Venetians and travellers from other countries ignored him as they walked past, as if he occupied a different but parallel universe to theirs, perhaps. He shook his head. All he needed was a good night's sleep in a soft bed, and he'd be as right as rain. This place was no more alien than the other places, times and planets he'd visited.
He patted the cat on the head, pulled himself to his feet and caught hold of the sleeve of a passing woman. "Excuse me," he said, "but which way is St Mark's Square?"
The woman pointed down a narrow and empty alley. "Merely straight ahead," she said, and pulled herself free of his grip. Within moments she had vanished into the crowd.
Steven shrugged, and pushed his way across the flow of pedestrians and into the alley. It was unlit. He wasn't sure about this. He wasn't sure at all. For a moment he considered turning back and following the tide of people, but then the Doctor's advice came back to him. Sighing, he headed on down the alley.
After five minutes the alley had narrowed to the point where he had to walk sideways. He was about to turn back in disgust when he was disgorged onto the bank of a canal washed white by the light of the moon. The mouth of the alley behind him was just a narrow slit in the wall, almost indistinguishable from the brick if he hadn't known what to look for. Across the canal rose a sheer cliff-face of houses, their windows shuttered against the night. To his left was a bridge over the canal, and to his right –
He caught his breath and glanced around. There was nobody in sight: the embankment on both sides of the canal was empty. He listened hard, but he could hear nothing. No talking, no movement, nothing apart from the sigh of the faint lap, lap, lap of water against stone and the moan of the wind getting lost in the canyon-like