The Empire of Glass - Andy Lane [32]
"Have you heard about Galileo Galilei?" a voice said beside him.
The speaker was a woman: a maid perhaps, or a cook's helper. He froze, his attention distracted from the peppers.
"No," her companion said: a common strumpet by her look. "What has he done this time?"
"Poisoned a man in the Tavern of St Theodore and of the Crocodile, so they say. Tommaso Nicolotti is furious. Apparently Galileo was attacked in the Tavern of the Angel by Tomasso's other son, but escaped with his life intact, if not his dignity."
The women laughed as Galileo pondered. Poison a man in a tavern he may have done, if only by accident, but he was sure that he would have remembered being attacked by another Nicolotti, no matter how drunk he might have been. And he'd never been in the Tavern of the Angel, he was sure of it.
He smiled. Of course: Steven Taylor had left his house wearing his clothes! The poor man...
The stall-keeper handed over his peppers, and Galileo was so amused by the fact that Steven had been attacked in error that he completely forgot to check them until it was too late to return them.
And they were overripe: every single one of them.
"Doctor, isn't this wonderful?"
Vicki held the dress up against herself and pirouetted. The hem flared out as she spun, and the gold thread glittered in the candlelight, casting little points of light across the tapestries of their rooms.
"Hmm?" The Doctor looked over from where he was adjusting his cravat in the mirror. "Oh, yes my dear, I dare say it's very pretty.
Very pretty indeed."
"You're not going to Galileo"s house as you are?" she asked.
"Yes, of course. I see no need to change." He ran his thumb behind the lapel of his jacket. "I find that these clothes suffice for most occasions, planets and time periods."
Vicki was about to press the issue when the door to their room opened and Steven walked in. "Almost ready?" he asked. "We don't want to keep Galileo waiting."
"You seem to have recovered somewhat since this morning," the Doctor observed.
Steven flushed slightly. "I've been walking it off," he said.
"There are some fresh clothes in your bedroom," Vicki said. "If they're anything like the ones that were laid out for me, then you'll look almost human."
Steven sneered at her for a moment, then crossed over to the door that led to his bedroom. "I hope there's some hot water too," he said.
As he vanished, Vicki crossed over to the window and gazed out across St Mark's Square. "It's beautiful here," she said wistfully, gazing at the wavering reflection of the moon in the lagoon.
The Doctor murmured something noncommittal from the far side of the room.
Vicki's gaze moved across the crowds of the square to the brick bell tower that the Doctor had called the campanile. It seemed to be reaching up into the star-strewn sky, aiming for the heart of the moon. The air smelled of seawater and spice. Somewhere in the distance, someone was singing a pure, simple song.
Something moved on top of the campanile. Vicki glanced up, and caught a momentary glimpse of a pair of leathery wings stretching out from a hard, shiny body. She rubbed a hand across her eyes and looked again, but the campanile was empty.
"Sir?"
Irving Braxiatel looked up from the book he had been reading.
Outside the window the sun was setting in bands of crimson and gold. The light from the candelabra flickered over the bland face Cremonini, his manservant, in the doorway. "Yes?" Braxiatel said calmly. "What is it?"
"A visitor, sir."
Braxiatel closed the book. "Don't tell me: a special visitor."
"Indeed, sir."
Braxiatel nodded. "I'll be straight down." He sighed as he levered himself up out of the chair. The organization of this business was proving to be more problematic than he had expected when he had started out. It had seemed like such a simple idea, but putting it into practice had taken almost twenty human years. To his race that was a mere