Sulla let me sell him the dumbest stuff when I first came to him. Of course, I didn’t think it was dumb. I thought it was great. What did I know? What does any kid that age know? I’d found this little plastic box about the length of three cockroaches lined up end to end. It powered on by itself without magic and had words in a gray glass square that changed if you pressed buttons on the side. I thought it was treasure and had to be worth thousands of lire.
I brought it to Sulla. He gave me licorice.
I know now the box was mostly worthless. It didn’t do anything Venetians need done these days. I kept bringing him what I’d find, however, and after a while, I got better at picking the stuff he wanted. I thought they were worth money, but Sulla said no. He kept giving me treats, milk candy and mou, once a bombolone.
I never ate Sulla’s “payment” in front of him. I was too self-conscious, too worried about accidentally losing my carnival mask. I couldn’t let him see my face. I hadn’t told him my name. Sulla made me uncomfortable. He stood too close sometimes. I took my treats home. He seemed fine with that.
Then came the day he showed me the TV. I was so awed by it, I forgot the lessons I’d already learned from three years on the streets. Don’t trust anyone.
Throwing wide the curtain that separated the shop from his bedroom, he reached for a small, black box on a table next to the bed and held it out to me.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Take it. You’re not going to be electrocuted.”
At the time, I didn’t know what electrocuted meant, but I reluctantly took the box. It was narrow and lightweight and had lots of buttons.
He gave me instructions. “Now, point the box…no turn it around, you’ve got it going the wrong way. Yes. Like that. Point it at that big rectangle of glass on the wall over there and press the green button.”
I was so flustered I pressed a black button.
“No. The green one.”
Finally, I pressed the correct button, heard a soft pop, and the glass on the wall came to life with pictures that moved and made sounds. This wasn’t the first TV I’d come across in the ruins when searching for things to bring to Sulla to trade, but those others were usually broken. Until now, I hadn’t known what they were for.
“That’s a cartoon,” Sulla told me, nodding at the screen.
Cartoons were videos of colorful drawings of funny animals and people that laughed and did things no smart person would do and hurt each other and laughed more. The drawings talked in a foreign language I didn’t know. You didn’t really need words, though, to understand what was going on.
“That’s a dog,” Sulla said.
He pointed at one of the talking animals. It was brown and walked on two legs though it had four. Its ears were long and floppy.
“They used to be man’s best friend,” he said, “but they went bad. We had to kill them all.”
The dog chased another animal that reminded me of Whisper, only it was much smaller, had no silver in its fur, and wasn’t as pretty.
“And that’s a cat,” he said. “Have you ever seen the big ones we still have? The fae ruined them. Turned them into monsters.”
He was talking about Whisper. She wasn’t a monster!
I shook my head no.
Sulla opened his cooler and took out a brown bottle for himself. It had a long skinny neck.
“Want a cherry soda?” he said and offered me a red-colored drink.
I shook my head no. I’d never stayed this long before. Cartoons were fun to look at for a minute, but I wanted to go home to my bathroom.
He sat down on the edge of the bed with a heavy grunt.
“I’m lonely,” Sulla said. “Alice isn’t home.”
His wife, Alice, didn’t like me, but I didn’t like her either, so we were even.
I hadn’t yet stepped into their bedroom, still stood out in the shop area.
He patted a spot on the bed next to him.
“Keep me company while she’s away,” he said.
“I want to go now,” I said.
He didn’t twist off the bottle’s cap to take a drink. He patted the bed again.
“Come on. Just a few minutes,” he said. “We can watch a special movie I have.”
I didn’t know what a movie was, but I didn’t care. I backed away, turned toward the door. Everything I’d learned from surviving so far told me this was a trap. I just couldn’t figure out what kind of trap.
“That’s a shame,” he said, shaking his head side to side, lips sticking out in pouty frown.
“What’s a shame?” I asked.
“I was about to start paying you money.”
I didn’t reply.
“You’ve been getting better at finding things. Did I tell you that? You’re this close…” He pinched his thumb and index finger close together, almost touching. “…to finding things valuable enough that I can pay you money instead of treats.”
Did he mean that? Was I really learning how to scavenge?
“But now I guess I won’t be able to trade with you anymore.”
I gasped softly. He didn’t know, but though he’d been paying me in sweets, it was still food and some days I couldn’t find anything else to eat.
He saw my hesitation, patted the bed beside him again.
“Just for a few minutes. That’s all I need to keep from being lonely.”
Slowly, I slid one foot past the imaginary line separating the shop from the bedroom and—
Forget it. I’m not doing this. I thought I wanted to write it down, but I don’t. The pain. Me begging and him not listening. The blood on the sharp edges of the bottle cap.
Fuck this. I don’t have to write it down. I’m done.
Waxing Moon
(Luna crescente)
20
Sumptuously grotesque.
That’s how I would expect history to record the ritual of turning a public execution into a fête or party for the elite of Venice. Not surprisingly, I discovered once they yanked me out of my cell and I started the long walk to the gallows that I’d been held in the Palazzo Ducale—Doge’s Palace in Aril’s English—which was Donato Nazario’s official residence and the center of human government.
I didn’t remember being given the test for fae blood that Nazario had ordered, I was too far out of it, but since I’d performed the ritual myself years before, I already knew the results. One of the Gagliardi’s, the same woman who’d tranked me back in the alley, grinned at me as she stood watching me be stripped naked.
“I want your clothes,” she said, though they wouldn’t begin to fit her heavily muscled body. “You can’t own anything. They’re mine.”
I’m pretty sure she thought I was weeping in humiliation and terror. I could have told her it was the badly fitted green lenses in my eyes causing me to blink incessantly, my eyes awash in tears from the irritation. They’d slacked off on the drugs enough that I could hobble in my shackles on my own power, but not enough for me to dwell on the specifics of why I’d just lost my clothes or how this journey was fated to end.
I was stoned senseless and emotionally numb.
We traveled from the Piombi prison up under the eaves of the palazzo’s east side and through a doorway into a large, dim space.
“Ah, the Chamber of Torment.” Tomas Gagliardi paused the procession and sighed.
I didn’t want to, but he instructed the female guard to lift my face and make me look at the metal devices and restraints, wheels, cogs, spikes, knives, needles, ovens and furnaces, electrodes, wires, and cabinets full poisons and caustic liquids. My shivering turned to trembling, and yes, I’ll admit it, fear. A wall of clear boxes contained dozens of bizarre creatures I couldn’t identify that stung and lunged at the glass separating us from them, spit and drooled venom at any prey locked inside with them and either set that prey on fire or sent a flesh-eating blackness through the entire animal, killing it in seconds.
“So many choices,” Tomas said. “So many sensations for you to exper
ience. It’s hard to pick a favorite.”
My stomach renewed its dry heaves.
“As much as I’d enjoy designing a custom program for you in here, we’re on a tight schedule.”
We left the horrors behind, continuing to the first floor and a massive room I knew from my one and only trip to the Doge’s Palace, the Hall of the Great Council. You could have fit a small block of houses from Santa Croce into the chamber where every square centimeter was gilded, clad in frescoes, or covered in Renaissance masterpieces by Tintoretto and Veronese depicting the triumphs and holy virtues of Venice.
Instead of facing the human council ready to pass judgment on me, however, I shambled between rows of banquet tables thirty-meters long, drawing stares from workers and servants preparing the room for a feast.
“In honor of you, of course,” Tomas said.
Another great hall, though lesser in size, was in the midst of being readied for a ball. Again, people gawked at me passing through while they arranged flowers and decorations, set up musical instruments and portable bars.
Finally, we reached another staircase and descended to the ground floor landing where we were joined by a full escort of Gagliardi family soldiers and exited through the Porta del Carta with its age-stained statue of Justice crowning the arch.
La Piazzetta San Marco shone softly under the light of a waxing moon. Thousands crowded the historic square dressed as if for Carnival in elaborate costumes and masks, chatting, flirting, dancing, but this was December, not January.
Any excuse to dress up.
Entering through the gate, a hush fell over the crowd so profound I could hear torch flames snapping in the breeze. Every masked face pivoted my way.
Tomas motioned to a phalanx of his guards, and they rushed ahead, clearing the colonnade along the palazzo for us alone to use. We began the long walk under the loggia, heading toward the Grand Canal.
My bare feet burned from the cold. My teeth chattered faintly, though I shivered less than I had up in the cell. Hypothermia was setting in. First one contact lens, then the other fell to the pavement, as uncontrolled blinking flicked them out of my eyes. I could see better.
Not a good thing. Gazing ahead to the end of the covered walk, I glanced to the right at the end of the plaza, and my loud gasp, when I spotted the gallows, startled the crowd. Human nature prompted faces to look where I looked, but they’d already seen the noose, of course. That’s why they were here, wasn’t it? Nervous laughter broke the silence in la piazzetta.
Despite the drugs, the fact I was about to be hanged finally hit me. I slowed my walk, extending the agonizing death march by as many seconds as I could gain for myself. This, too, was human nature. Every second more of life was another second more of life.
Guards prodded me from behind, pushing me to go faster. Rough hands on my biceps pulled me onward.
As I passed them, people leaned closer, eager to drink in every detail about me. I felt no guilt staring back.
My eyes focused on extravagant costumes designed by what must have been the priciest ateliers in the city. Most were based on dress ball attire from the eighteenth-century, yet far surpassed even that era’s love of decadence. Skirts and bodices and sleeves were draped with layer after layer of silk, satin, and damasks in the iridescent colors of a peacock’s tail, the soft pinks found inside a scallop’s shell, self-illuminating fae blues and rich blood-reds. Moorish patterns embroidered skirts in rose gold. Ice-white velvets glittered like drifts of snow. Beads, feathers, lace, and fur embellished the costumes, often all in a single ball grown, frock coat or mask. Nor did the excess stop there. Those who’d come to see the execution chose themes helped along with expensive magics, probably purchased from across the canal in fae shops in Luminosa or Mare Scuro. Hundreds of ever-live monarch butterflies stitched to one woman’s dress fluttered with the swirl of her skirt. Brocade was used everywhere, one that grew gold and emerald flowers that budded, bloomed, died, and revived in an unending succession of springs and summers, another that frothed with waves that continually rewove themselves as the tide sucked outwards and crashed to shore, again and again, using threads spun from pearls and moonstones.
That everyone watching was masked added to the surreal in this moment. They saw me naked while hiding themselves behind porcelain and gold faces of expressionless beauty. For sheer outlandishness, though, few topped the headpieces with live figures, a stag pursued by hunters, one of their arrows protruding from its bloody flank; the couple who wore hats in the form of matching, ornately carved Gothic era canopy beds where they had epic sex over and over; or the woman with a gallows for a hat, built to resemble the one I now approached. In the scene playing out, an executioner placed the noose over a female prisoner’s head, pulled a lever, and the tiny figure fell through a trap door. As I walked by, the corpse dangling by its neck automatically updated itself to look like me.
How could this be really happening? I was just a girl from Ashia Hollow’s slums, someone people ignored, didn’t want to know, cared nothing about. Secretly, I’d spent my life wishing I lived more than a precarious existence of hiding from gangs and depending on a rapist for a living, that someone, anyone would care about me.
Now I’d give anything to go back to that. I’d happily spend the rest of my life alone and unloved with nothing to show for myself until I was too old to scavenge the ruins and eventually starved, if only it meant escaping these next ten minutes.
We came to the end of the colonnade. Crowds thronged around the base of the gallows. St. Marks was famed for its twin millennia-old granite columns guarding the entrance to the smaller of its two plazas. Erected between the columns, the scaffold faced the Grand Canal on one side and the square filled with people on the opposite side. Tomas Gagliardi’s soldiers forced back the crowd and cleared a route leading to the platform. The wood structure loomed over me. I could already feel the rope they would snug tight around my neck.
I stumbled on the first stair tread, unable to lift my foot high enough until the leg shackles—and their joined wrist cuffs—were removed.
I would have preferred to meet my death gazing out over the waters of the Grand Canal with the half moon in the southern sky lending me its calm and strength. The female guard forcibly turned me around to face the crowd instead. I swayed on my feet. My knees gave out as they maneuvered me onto the trap door, but I was hauled up straight to accept the noose. Coarse and itchy against my skin, the hangman caught some of my hair in the knot. I winced at the abrupt tug.
Where the hell was one of my dream fits now? They always struck when I was under stress. No drug should have been able to suppress my body’s anticipation of the terrifying moment to come. In vain, I tried forcing a dream spell on purpose, something I’d never wanted. If only I could recreate that feeling of losing control to the seizures, it might trigger the start of one.
Come on. Come on. How can I not have a dream now?
For the briefest second, I was sure the edges of my vision were turning blue and the platform lurching under my feet, but my heart beat sluggishly in my chest and, disappointed, I soon realized it wasn’t anything magical. It was me on the verge of succumbing to the cold.
Donato Nazario, in his griffon’s feather cape and a lion’s head mask, mounted the gallows. The crowd, which had begun to talk in whispers, quieted again. Stepping to the front right corner of the platform, Nazario held both hands out in front of him and then separated them, miming the act of unrolling something. A thin hologram of a scroll fritzed and glitched briefly in the air between his hands before stabilizing and becoming solid. He tossed it upward, and it grew multiple times in size, hanging above la piazzetta so that they could read the glowing letters of the decree.
Perhaps, finally, I would learn why I was here to die. A reason would have to be given, my crimes explained. Nazario’s voice droned with the first sentence of the decree, which was filled with political gibberish about Venice and its right to triumph over evil, to cast out the dark.
My concentration faltered, and my head nodded, my sagging chin exerting pressure against the rope. I heard myself choking, but the sound and the sensation felt distanced from me like they came from someone else.
A woman screamed.
My eyes jerked open. Thousands of masks were trained not on the gallows, but the water beyond it. People pointed, shouted.
Up on the platform, everyone there, too, turned toward the Grand Canal.
“What is that?” Tomas Gagliardi frowned at the water.
If the female guard holding me hadn’t twisted around to look and loosened her grip, I wouldn’t have seen it. I craned my head around as far as the rope allowed, which wasn’t much.
Beyond the boats moored along the quay, maybe fifty meters into the canal, black sea water mounded, churned, and bubbled. A wave pushed up and out from the mound toward shore. Remembering the black wave I’d raised back when I’d been cornered in the alley on Oasi, I held my breath.
Am I doing that? Is this one of my dreams?
If so, why hadn’t my sight turned blue? Why didn’t the plaza quake and dip, come apart in a tesseract of perpetually shifting paving stones and marble columns turning themselves inside out, or any of the hundreds of other ways my dreams dismantled reality?
Two more mounds bulged from the water, one on each side of the first. Seaweed, fish, and squid boiled alive around the base of each growing mound. Larger bubbles formed near the surface, shiny as Murano glass just cut from the glassmaker’s blowpipe. One of the bubbles popped, followed by another, and another, each emitting a wheezing hiss worthy of a punctured whale bladder. Hot, putrid gas rolled across the water and swamped the square. Revelers coughed and gagged but still didn’t retreat from the spectacle in the canal.
“Do sewer pipes extend that far out into the canal?” Nazario asked.
Wayward Moon: Dark Fae Hollow 6: (Dark Fae Hollows) Page 15
