The Empire of Glass - Andy Lane [50]
His eyes glanced around the room, meeting the gaze of as many of the angels as possible. What did they want of him? What was he there for? Was this some form of judgement upon him?
For a few moments there was an expectant, tense silence, then, without stopping to consider his words, Bellarmine said: "I am unworthy to stand here before you. I am unworthy even to contemplate your faces, let alone dare to speak to you, and yet I am here. Let us begin."
There was no change in the attitudes of the angels but somehow Bellarmine knew that he had said the right thing.
The canal was narrow, and the single bridge was empty. The walls of the houses rose like sheer cliff faces on either side, their paint faded and peeling and their windows shuttered blankly. The sun caught the tips of the roofs, glinting here and there off a gilded ridge or weather vane. A rat ran along a ledge just above the canal on secret business of its own. A cat lay sunning itself on a projecting windowsill.
Steven braced himself between a striped gondola post and a crumbling brick wall and pulled himself out of the canal. A ledge running beneath a wooden door provided a convenient seat, and he rested for a moment, trying to ignore the smell that was rising from his sodden clothes. Algae crusted his hair, and he daren't even think about some of the things that had brushed against him in the water. Didn't these people have any sort of sewage system apart from the canal itself?
Still, at least the Nicolottis had left. If he was lucky then they would assume he had drowned, and they would stop bothering him. If he was unlucky then they had merely assumed that he had surfaced somewhere out of their sight, and they would be waiting for him to turn up elsewhere in Venice. Either way, he had more important things to do. Vicki was his first priority now, and that spacecraft, or whatever it was, that had dragged him along the canal and around the corner was almost certainly connected with her disappearance.
Either that or it was the biggest coincidence since he couldn't remember when.
He was fairly sure that the house he was sitting beside was the nearest one to the large opening from which the ship had emerged, and as he couldn't follow the ship, there was only one course left to pursue. Taking a deep breath, he slid back into the noisome water, letting it close above his head as his fingers explored the brickwork of its foundations. Little pieces broke off in his hands and drifted towards the bottom. He widened the area of his search, pulling himself along and quickly running his hands over the rough facade. Weed was slick beneath his fingers, and twined around them as if they were alive. His lungs were burning, and the cold water was numbing his skin, making it difficult to feel anything. Perhaps it was deeper. He laboriously pulled himself down further into the depths of the canal, jamming the toes of his boots into gaps in the brickwork to anchor himself, like mountain-climbing in reverse. His fingers scuttled across the building's hidden face, finding nothing but ever-more ancient layers of artifice.
And a hole.
Disbelievingly he ran his hands along the rim of what appeared to be a large, rectangular opening framed with metal. No time to think: his lungs were demanding air but he couldn't guarantee ever finding the right stretch of wall again. Pushing up against the metal rim he forced his legs down further into the water and then swung them into the opening. His body floated back up, buoyed by the air in his lungs, and he found himself flat against the smooth metal ceiling of a tunnel. Using his numbed hands, just lumps of dead flesh now, he pushed himself along the tunnel, scuttling crab-fashion until suddenly there was no metal above him and he bobbed back up to the surface.
When he had got his breath back, he looked around. He was floating in a pool of water in the middle of a white metal