Michael Morley - The Venice conspiracy

Beneath the hooks are a series of smears and stains. Blood, sweat and tears. Most of it human. Most of it male.

But don't be fooled, Larth is certainly not opposed to hanging a woman if circumstances demand it.

A foreign whore who slighted a friend of his was recently strung naked from dawn to dusk. In the afternoon he spun her around, face to the wall, so some of the diseased and deformed men who slept rough by the cemetery could pleasure themselves.

The hooks have sharp ends and dig hungrily into the soft wall when a rope is wound around them and a body hung from them. Larth made them himself. Heated the metal white and pounded it until he had just the right angle. A labour of love.

He thinks of every beat of the hammer and flying white spark as he and his assistants make their way to what the locals call the Punishment Wall. He likes that they call it that. That they recognise its importance, its place in their lives.

Today's victim, a petty thief, is stripped bare. He's an old man known as Telthius. When he was a child, Larth was often left with him and his wife while his own mother and father worked. He thinks briefly of that now, and how he used to playfully pull the old man's long beard and hair. The memory stops as soon as his assistants have finished lifting Telthius on to the platform and stringing him up.

Back to the wall, he hangs from ropes around his wrists, his face already distorted with pain.

Larth feels his anger rise. The thief's suffering ignites something inside him. Something exciting. Something that makes him feel more powerful and complete than at any other time in his life.

Telthius disgusts him. His long beard is white. White hair sprouts from his nose, his ears, his armpits and even around his manhood. White is revolting. The old man is revolting. What he did was revolting. He was caught stealing from Pesna's silver mine where he labours. Now the magistrate has decreed that he must be publicly punished. Taught a lesson. One he'll never forget. One everyone will remember.

Larth puts out his hand and takes a flaming rag torch from one of his aides. 'Open your eyes! Open them, Thief!'

The kindly elder who once rocked him to sleep in the sticky afternoon heat squints towards his former charge.

Larth holds the flaming torch between the old man's legs and smiles.

The white pubic hair catches fire.

Larth laughs. A throaty roar that rolls across the gardens. Telthius jerks with pain.

The torturer's assistants can't bear to look. The air smells of burning skin and hair.

Larth sniffs at the aroma, like a maiden savouring the fragrance of a rose. 'You stole from your master. Betrayed his trust. Defiled his good name. For these crimes I justly punish you, so others will see the errors of your ways and respect the rights of good men.'

He rolls the flaming torch over the hair that covers the old man's chest and arms. Telthius screams in agony.

The torturer is careful not to go too far. He lets the fire burn only briefly. Enough to hurt, not to kill. There is no fun in setting fire to a dead body. Well, not nearly as much as setting fire to a living one.

Telthius is unconscious by the time Larth has scorched all his head and body hair. 'Cut him down,' he calls over his shoulder as he walks away. 'Give him to his bitch of a wife to cosset and mend.'

The assistants climb the platform. The younger one asks in a horrified voice, 'In the name of the gods, how much silver did this fool steal?

'Shush!' says his companion, fearing they'll be heard. 'Not silver. Not even a scraping from the mine. Telthius took only food. Stale bread that he thought no one would miss. And he only took that because his wife was too ill to bake.'

At the end of the wall Larth throws his torch into the dirt. He hurries away to find himself a whore upon whom he can vent the last of the delicious rage still burning inside him.

The Sacred Curte, Atmanta Tetia feels strangely nervous as she makes her way down the hillside to the groves near the settlement walls.

The sound of hammering spills from the temple in the adjoining curte. Squinting into the sun, she can see the silhouettes of slave workers moving like crabs along the roof as they pin tiles to timber frames.

She'd long anticipated the day when her husband would consecrate the completed temple in front of her family and all the other villagers. Now, for the first time, she has a sensation of dread.

Will Teucer be able to see by then? Will he ever see again? Will the elders and the nobles and the magistrates still want him as their netsvis?

She sees the sacred circle. Without Teucer, it doesn't seem sacred any more. She walks clockwise outside it, her thoughts trailing behind her like a long robe. The grass is all trodden down. The blaze that claimed her husband's sight is nothing but a blackened hole in the turf. The frenzied marks made by Teucer's lituus are still visible – as is the small but distinctive oblong he scraped in a clay patch in the west of the circle.

She senses something. Someone close to her. Behind her.

She wheels around.

Nothing.

No one there.

Her baby kicks as she crosses the line of the sacred circle, almost as though it remembers what occurred the last time they were here. Now she can clearly see the small patch of reddish clay where her husband made his knife marks. Tetia has brought her own sculpting blades to erase his impressions, but she can't resist letting her artist's eyes examine them.

They're stunning.

So precise, so detailed and intricate. She'd have never thought him capable of such beauty.

She drops to her knees and the baby makes her stomach groan.

'Incredible,' she says to herself. The snakes are so vivid she can almost picture them moving. The evil demon doesn't look that evil to her, in fact there's a certain majesty to him. She smiles, the netsvis even bears a passing resemblance to Teucer. She bends closer to examine the final revelation. It's magnificent. The couple look so peaceful, so happy. And the baby – surely he is everything she could hope for in a son.

Tetia feels happier than she's done for months. She runs her light, sculptress fingers over the indentations. They even feel pleasurable to touch.

She unwraps a cloth containing her work tools. Selects a broad knife. Takes a deep breath and meticulously begins.

Only she no longer intends destroying the markings. She's decided to keep them. Lift them from the ground and keep them for ever.

Tetia carries the slab of clay from the curte as though it's the most precious thing in her life. She goes straight to her work space at the back of her hut, rather than to Larthuza's where her husband is recovering. This clandestine and selfish act makes her feel guilty, but the emotion is forgotten when she looks again at the beautiful object in her hands, the carving of the Gates of Destiny.

Using water and her own fine picks and knives, she accentuates the rough cuts made by Teucer. Very quickly she becomes immersed in her task. Consumed by it. Possessed by it.

Time flashes by.

Her cuts are bold, broad, intricate, dashing, decisive. It's as though her hand is being guided. The clay begins to turn leather hard, no longer malleable. She drizzles water on to the surface to keep it workable, wipes tiny fragments of waste from her blade after every cut and polishes the sharp tip on her tunic.

Lost in her art, she is oblivious to the daylight fading. The grey ghosts of night start to gather.

First, a rustling noise. Then the sudden presence of a strange man's feet.

Tetia looks up.

'I am Kavie, noble colleague of Magistrate Pesna. We have come to see your husband, Teucer.'