Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

The side door opens. A man steps through it. He wears a rapier and the cloak of a sbirro. He and Crivano look at each other without expression for several long breaths. Then the man opens the door again, and steps outside.

Crivano’s tread is well-practiced; the soles of his boots are soft. He catches the door before it has fully closed. The sbirro is a few paces ahead, beckoning to his two fellows in the campo; he turns as the door opens, and Crivano drives the ferrule of his stick into the side of the sbirro’s head, just above the ear.

The two sbirri in the campo draw their rapiers and charge. Crivano steps over the fallen man, unsheathes his own blade, waits for them to close the distance. As he’s anticipated, they’re fierce and ruthless, but not skilled swordsmen. He stabs the first in the kidney, the second in the eye.

The second sbirro screams, throws down his sword, hides his face in his hands, and screams again. Then he bolts, runs headlong into the trunk of an old bay laurel, and collapses in mute convulsions. The kidney-hit sbirro sinks to the packed earth — slowly, like a sick drunk — and begins to weep and moan. Crivano kicks him twice at the base of his skull to silence him.

More shouts: someone has heard. Looking down the Street of the Dyers and the Ruga Bella, Crivano sees lanternlight in the distance, lending color to the brick walls, shaping buildings from the blackness. He falls back and rounds the church’s corner, passing the twin hemispheres of the apse, dashing through the Campiello of the Dead.

He’s about to follow Broad Street north — the Grand Canal two hundred yards away, not yet visible — when something draws his eye. Shadows on the base of the old belltower. Two silhouettes cast by a pair of torches, identical and overlapping, as though seen through crossed eyes. The torchlight emanates from a gap between buildings, a gap he hasn’t noticed till now. Crivano stares at the oscillating shadows until he sorts out details: the curve of a beak, the ellipse of a hat-brim, a long slim wand aslant a wrist.

He tiptoes to the gap, pressing his shoulder to the bricks, then circles wide as he turns the corner, his rapier at the ready, his stick high to ward off attack. But nothing’s there — no figure to block the light, no torches to cast it — only a dark and narrow street edged by modest shops, moonlit at its midpoint by the transit of a canal. The air over the tiny bridge swirls with rising mist. Crivano moves steadily forward, his sword’s blood-streaked tip an antenna in the dark.

On the other side of the canal, beyond the curtain of fog, the street changes. Quiet before, it’s now entirely silent: devoid of tittering rats, soft human snores, the lap of water. Here the storefronts seem implausibly perfect: no brick chipped, no wood rotten, every window tidily glazed. It seems like a backdrop for an elaborate intermedio, or some similar spectacle. As if it might topple backward at any slight touch.

The street bends left, then right, and terminates in a cramped campiello. One end leads to a private bridge and a bolted palace gate. The other end abuts the Saint John Beheaded Canal. Crivano is trapped. He has trapped himself.

He can hear the deliberate approach of the sbirri: they call to one another and stamp their booted feet. They must know where he is, and that he’s cornered; they hope he’ll hear them and rush forward again, racing them to the bridge. They want to catch him with the canal at his back, to overwhelm him with their superior numbers.

Crivano opts not to disappoint them. He hides the bright blade of his sword in its scabbard and creeps through the darker shadows on the street’s right side, hunched like a subhuman, inching toward the canal. The sbirri have left their lanterns behind; he can barely see them on the opposite side: two in the vanguard, at least two more behind those. Preparing nervously to cross. When the first pair reaches the bridge — squinting through the mist, their shapes edged by moonlight — he springs.

They fall back immediately, intent on drawing him forward — opening space to flank him, forcing him to engage three or four abreast — but Crivano keeps a foot planted at all times on the bridge’s wooden planks, and fends them off with deep lunges. He counts five here, more on the way: torches by the base of the distant belltower, sparking and guttering as their bearers charge forward. Crivano’s stick and rapier make slow theatrical sweeps, beating the blades of the sbirri, offering them a simulacrum of real battle. Then, after clumsy parries and a brief stumble, he retreats onto the bridge.

No! Fall back! shouts a stern voice from farther up the street, but the sbirri don’t listen: the first one lurches after him, the second queues behind, and the three others who’d been shuffling eagerly in the background press forward as well, sensing weakness, smelling blood, covetous of the chance to do harm. Crivano scrambles backward, gasping in feigned distress, until three of the five have followed him onto the bridge, and he feels pavement beneath his heels again.

Then he starts killing them. The first man becomes an impromptu barricade, crumpled on the planks with wounded knees and punctured lungs; the second loses his footing as he steps over his comrade, falls into the canal when Crivano’s blade finds his femoral artery. The third jumps back in a panicked rout, collides with the man behind him, plunges uninjured into the water. The last two retreat to await their fellows’ arrival.

The clangor of clapped steel echoes in Crivano’s ears, but for a moment the air is still: he hears only the quick rough breathing of his adversaries, the gurgling wheeze of the dying man at his feet, the splashes of the fallen sbirro as he swims east in search of a quay, the approaching footfalls of the next wave. It has been a long time since Crivano last fought for his life. He is no longer young. Cold sweat soaks his shirt and streaks his face. The tibialis anterior of his right leg aches and burns from lunging.

Five more sbirri appear at the opposite end of the bridge. The clever one from the White Eagle, Lunardo, is among them. He dismisses two of the others immediately, sending them for reinforcements. Good evening, dottore! he calls, raising an arm. I’ve worn my gloves, you see! Just as you asked. Now, come across the bridge!

Lunardo wears a rapier and an offhand dagger, and two of his men — one is the scar-faced ruffian — wield cudgels. A defense against such variety will be difficult to maintain. Crivano floods his lungs with air, shakes out his legs. His wrists are trembling.

I should tell you, Lunardo shouts, that many more of us are on the way. Some will come on boats, and will moor in the campiello behind you, thus to envelop you. These men will not kill you, dottore. They will be armed with clubs, and they will beat you, and break your hands and feet, and they will deliver you to the Council of Ten. The Council will have you tortured, and strangled, and put in the lagoon. Much as you put that mirrormaker in the lagoon, isn’t that so? Hardly a death a man would choose, dottore. But you have other choices, don’t you? I think you do. So, then. Shall we wait? Or shall we pass the time by killing one another? Come across the bridge, dottore.

Crivano doesn’t reply. He measures the space he stands in, pacing the width of the planks between the smooth wooden cart-curbs, the distance from the fallen man to the pavement. The light dims suddenly in the west, then turns orange: a boat is passing the canal’s terminus, eclipsing the reflection of the moon on the water; someone aboard bears a blazing torch. After a moment the boat slips from view, and the light is as it was.

Lunardo squats on his haunches at the canal’s edge, smiling, bobbing to stretch his legs. Crivano cleans the gore from his blade, then steps onto the bridge, over the dying sbirro. He will go no farther. Lunardo salutes as he comes forward, but Crivano doesn’t reciprocate. Beneath their feet, the planks are daubed with dark medallions.