R. Garcia y Robertson: Fair Verona

Three horsemen appeared atop the rise, emerging silently from the trees along the road to stand silhouetted at the crest. They were dressed in carnival garb—a Saracen, a Jester, and a Plague Doctor. Parting ranks, they let Silvia pass between them. As she disappeared over the crest, they closed up, cutting Antonio off.

Damn. Another emergency call. This was more than Toni could take. He found his cyborg body right where he had left it, sitting on a mossy jungle trail beside a pile of baggage. Great vine-covered tree-ferns towered over him, their huge fronds shading the path.

He stood up, shooing off the forest imps that were climbing curiously over the baggage pile. “What is it? And it better be bad.”

“The worst.” That was Harpo.

“We lost the client.” Doc cut in.

Toni was up and trotting down the trail, leaving the baggage to the forest imps. “Wasn’t he radio-tagged?”

“Not lost like in misplaced. Lost like in dead. ”

“Torn to pieces,” Harpo explained.

“Wyvyrn got him,” Ali added.

They were nervous as hell, all talking at once. “Bullshit!” Toni retorted, giving his snap professional opinion.

“See for yourself,” Harpo suggested.

Toni got to see it all different ways. First in 3V, then through his own optical sensors. The kill site looked like some huge mowing machine had gone berserk. Shattered tree-ferns leaned at crazy angles. Big lycopods lay broken and uprooted. Even the mossy forest floor was gouged and furrowed. A great gaping hole ripped in the canopy overhead showed where the Wyvyrn had made its exit.

And there was blood all about. Big splotches of it stained the moss. Smaller drops speckled the torn fronds. In the center of the broken clearing sat a SuperChimp’s head, glaring at the mess.

Reviewing recordings was singularly unproductive. The Guide had gone on ahead to “flush” the Wyvyrn. Gracchus and his bodyguards had been waiting, armed with enough firepower to take out a platoon of light tanks—staring at the surrounding wall of cycads, fern fronds, hanging lianas, and vine covered trunks, all about as transparent as green-painted reactor shielding. Until you’ve been on a Wyvyrn hunt, you’ll never be able to imagine how hard it is to spot a hundred-meter flying monster in dense cover.

A faint rustle off to the right caught everyone’s attention. Then the Wyvyrn burst on them.

There was no time for a brain shot, heart shot, or even a frantic toe stab. Toni got to see the carnage from three different angles—from the point of view of Gracchus and his two Chimp bodyguards. One of the Chimps lasted the longest, but all he saw was his master being shredded before the Wyvyrn turned on him. So much for realtime adventure.

And the sickest part was that Dragon Hunt had set it all up, using the Wyvyrn’s control collar, electronically torturing a semi-intelligent omnivore until it turned killer. Some “sport.” Brutal, but real. Which was what Gracchus had paid for—at least he got his money’s worth.

Meticulous search of the area turned up a profusion of body parts, some of them human. But only one object of interest—a torn diamond neckpiece, and several loose stones. Toni recognized it as soon as Harpo showed it to him. “It’s Pandora’s slave collar.”

“She’s missing,” Harpo informed him.

Toni scoffed, “No shit.”

“The blood on the stones came from a Chimp,” Doc added. “She could still be alive.”

“Right.” Toni remembered her at the dock, cheerfully handing out stim pills—and a pair of earrings. “But for how long?” If the Wyvyrn carried her off, they were going to have a godawful time finding the body.

“Well, we’ve got to make the attempt.” That was Ali, always the optimist.

Toni could see an absolutely pointless search stretching out ahead of them. Of course they had to make the attempt. But Elysium covered thousands of square klicks, most of it as dense as the morass around them. Given time and patience, each square centimeter could be gone over for clues, until something turned up. But when they did find parts of Pandora, so what? Dragon Hunt was dead. They had just killed one of the richest men in the galaxy. No one was going to award them points for bringing back pieces of his most junior wife.

Antonio arrived in Venice by boat, one of the small lateen-rigged craft that ply the lagoon, with their strange hooked masts and old-fashioned side rudders. A crude, ungainly means of transport, utterly beneath his station—but the easiest way to enter the island republic, unless you had wings, or were willing to swim.

Braced against the curved prow, he watched “Byzantium’s Favorite Daughter” draw closer, seeming to rise up out of the low gleaming lagoon chop. At first, all he could see were roofs and upper floors, topped by bell towers, cupolas, oriental battlements, fancifully colored domes, and the lace-like stone facades that gave the city her Eastern cast. A vision built on mudflats. Then came the jumble of walkways, bridges, streets, canals, and the great mass of pilings that kept Venice from washing out to sea. Venice had no city gates, no rich or poor quarters. Lines of wash hung over side canals and small alleys. Ships’ masts moved among the steeples.

At the Cannaregio docks, Antonio sent Proteus prowling into the city for news of his quarry, while he changed to a black gondola, setting out down the “Canal Regio.” Cats prowled near the Campo San Giobbe—but the nearby church stood empty. Bells were gone from the church towers, packed away in straw. Venice lay under a papal interdict. A theological calamity that meant no masses, no communion, no Holy Mother Church to stand between the people of Venice and the fires of Hell. Worse yet, God-fearing merchants were free to renounce their debts to Venice and plunder her cargoes.

Uncorking a bottle of bardolino, Antonio offered it to the gondolier, asking what he thought of the ban. The man stopped poling, took a swig, and thought it through. He was a blunt broad-shouldered brute who made his living with his back, and clearly cared little for mainland nobility. He admitted in thick Venetian, “I miss the bells. But interdict also means no marriage and no confession. Twin blessings there!”

Antonio laughed and called him a scoundrel.

He took a second swig. “And no Holy Inquisition.”

Antonio ventured that Venice was coming out well ahead.

“So it would be, were it not for the dead.”

“Death undoes us all,” Antonio agreed, eyeing the houses piled one atop the other. No church burials badly burdened a city that saw deaths every day but lacked fields to take the bodies. Dig too deeply and they’d be burying folks at sea.

“What is your lordship’s religion?” the gondolier asked.

“I don’t speak French.” Antonio’s stock reply. It was what some Flemish burgher said to Robert of Artois, brother-in-law to King Philip of France, before braining the Count with a club at the battle of Courtrai.

The gondolier laughed, handed back the bottle, and began poling again. The French had managed to put religion to shame, beating one Pope to death and poisoning the next. Clement V was their creature, afraid to set foot in Rome, keeping the Papacy in Babylonian Captivity at Avignon—which the French claimed to be part of Italy since Avignon was a fief of the Two Sicilies, making a farce of both faith and geography. Clement V and Philip the Fair had gone on to commit the crime of the century, looting the treasury of the Knights Templars, burning and torturing innocent knights—including the aged Grand Master, who was godfather to Philip’s children. It was hard to fear a church that put faith and justice up for sale.