The Empire of Glass - Andy Lane [4]
"Most extraordinary," he repeated, and proffered the card to Steven, who took it warily. Vicki had to pull his arm down to see.
The card was small and white. On it, in very small letters, were the words:
INVITATION
Formal dress required.
R.S.V.P.
"An invitation to what?" Steven asked.
"An invitation to a mystery," the Doctor replied, frowning and looking away.
Vicki took the card from Steven. "Who gave it to you?" she asked the Doctor.
"I don't... I don't remember," the old man admitted.
"It's a trap," Steven said firmly. Vicki watched with some amusement as he narrowed his eyes, squared his shoulders and generally tried to look heroic.
"Don't be stupid, Steven," she said, and placed the card carefully upon the top of the translucent cylinder in the centre of the control console. "How can it be a trap if it doesn't even tell us where to go?"
With a low hum, the collection of fragile objects in the centre of the translucent column, the things that had always reminded Vicki of a cross between a child's mobile and a butterfly collection, began to revolve around their central axis. The column itself began to rise and fall rhythmically, whilst lights flashed on the console and the deep vibration of the TARDIS in flight slowly spiralled down towards the grinding, clashing noise of landing.
"Well," the Doctor said, "it would appear that someone knows where we are going."
There was a rat on the stairs again.
Carlo Zeno came face to face with it as he rounded the corner. He was standing on the tiny landing that lay between his own rooms on the second floor and his tenant's rooms on the third. The rat was seven steps higher than he was, on a level with his face.
Bright afternoon sunlight streamed through the holes in the rotted window shutters, illuminating it: fat and fearless, its black hair matted and its tail coiled like a pink worm. Zeno could even see the avaricious, calculating gleam in its eye.
"Back to the Devil, you garbage-eating fiend," he snarled, and started up the stairs towards it, stamping his boots on the wood.
The rat watched for a moment, then calmly turned and scuttled towards a hole in the plaster-covered laths of the wall. As Zeno advanced past the stair, he thought he saw its whiskers twitching in the darkness. God and the Doge alone knew how many rats infested his house. Hundreds perhaps. The scrabbling of their claws kept him awake at night as they ran across the floor, scuttled behind the walls and scrabbled between the joists of the ceiling.
Rats were the bane of Venice. Rats and Turks.
The door to the top floor of the house was closed, and Carlo pounded on it. "I've come for the rent!" he shouted, but there was no sound from within. Perhaps his tenant had gone out for a walk, or to buy some food, although Carlo hadn't heard him on the stairs.
Perhaps he was asleep. Grimani the barkeeper said that the man drank until he could hardly stand up some nights, and the widow Carpaccio across the alley said she often saw his lamp shining until sunrise. Carlo hadn't asked what the widow Carpaccio was doing awake at that time: it was well known in the district of San Polo that she entertained gentlemen in order to pay her bills.
Carlo, on the other hand, was forced to depend on those temporary visitors to Venice who wanted more freedom than that offered by a hotel.
"The rent!" he shouted again, slamming the heel of his hand against the wood. "Do you hear, you lazy slugabed?"
The door was suddenly pulled open. The room was dark, and smelled of sour wine, old fruit and unwashed bedding. The scant light from the window down on the landing barely illuminated the sullen figure of Carlo's tenant. His shirt was undone, and his breeches were creased as if he had been sleeping in them.
"You fat oaf," he said in his haughty Florentine accent. "Unless you've come to tell me that the Doge has finally granted me an audience, or that the lagoon is flooding, I'll have your tongue for a garter."
Carlo stared blankly at his tenant's