The Empire of Glass - Andy Lane [65]
"Is something wrong, my child?" Bellarmine asked, concerned.
"I don't know," she replied. "I really don't know."
"Let's go through this one more time," Sperone Speroni said wearily. "Starting from when the coach stopped."
The flickering torchlight emphasized the haggard face of the soldier sitting opposite him. The man's eyes were wide, as if he had been drugged, and a muscle in his cheek was twitching. He was gazing at a point somewhere over Speroni's shoulder. "angels of the Lord descended from on high and took Cardinal Bellarmine from us," he whispered. "They were beautiful, and the sound of their voices was like honey in my ears."
Speroni ran a hand across the stubble of his scalp, wishing he was back in the Arsenale, hammering planks of wood together and watching a ship's hull take form in front of him. Not sitting in a stuffy, torch-lit room, listening to the ravings of a madman. "Now how many of these angels did you say there were?"
The soldier's eyes flickered suspiciously toward him. "You don't believe me," he said. "You think I'm touched by the sun, or drunk!"
Speroni shrugged. "You say this happened last night? On your way to Venice?" The soldier nodded, and Speroni continued:
"Well, I don't know who you had in the coach, but Cardinal Bellarmine has been a guest of the Doge here in Venice for the past few days, and the only incident that he has been involved in to my knowledge has been an attempted abduction by Turkish spies."
The soldier's gaze had strayed to a point above Speroni's head, but from the vacant look in his eye Speroni guessed that he wasn't seeing the wall, but something else entirely.
"They were beautiful," the soldier said.
"Then they can't have been Turkish spies," Speroni said. "And, as far as I am aware, no heathen Turk has ever been described as having a voice like honey." He shook his head, and wished to God that he might wake up and find that, the past ten years had been a dream, and he was making warships in the Arsenale again.
Anything but this. Anything but this.
As the knife plunged toward Galileo's eyes, everything seemed to be happening slowly, as if he, the assassin, the Doctor and everybody else in the Tavern of Fists were moving through water, caught in weeds. He could see the way the light gleamed off the blade - the curiously pristine blade - and reflected on to the wine bottle, casting a red glow across the Doctor's face. He could see the way the assassin's face remained calm, and the way the shadows on his face didn't seem to match with the way the sunlight was streaming through the windows. Motes of dust spun slowly through the beams of sunlight, which themselves seemed almost solid enough to support the weight of the wall. Nothing mattered - time was as massive and as immobile as a cathedral.
And then time speeded up, and the knife was hurtling towards him, and there was nothing he could do but die.
The Doctor's arm suddenly lashed out. His cane thudded home into the assassin's stomach - deep into the assassin's stomach -
and the man bent double with a curiously high-pitched retching noise. Without conscious thought Galileo leaped to his feet, grabbed the wine bottle and brought it crashing down on the man's head. Shards of glass exploded across the table and surrounding floor and the assassin fell heavily along with them. The impact shook the boards of the floor. The patrons of the tavern moved back a few feet and, for a moment, the normal hubbub was stilled.
But only for a moment.
"Let's get out," Galileo said, "lest the Nicolottis send another of their paid men after me. They will never believe that I didn't poison that young cur. My life in Venice is not worth a holed florin now.
The Doge will never -"
"I think," the Doctor said, kneeling down beside the figure, "that this... man... was not sent by any human agency."
"What do you mean?" Galileo gazed wildly around. "Of course he was. The Nicolottis want revenge. It's as plain as the nose on your face."
The Doctor reached out to touch the stunned assassin's