The Masked City (The Invisible Library #2)(75)
Vale grabbed Irene’s arm and towed her into the nearest alleyway, cutting across a narrow bridge and between a row of old houses. ‘We need to evade them,’ he said, and she wondered if retreating into the obvious was a habit of his.
‘So where was Kai last seen?’ Irene demanded.
‘The Piazza San Marco,’ Vale answered. He gave her a boost over a stone wall between two houses and into a private garden, then vaulted over himself. ‘The Campanile.’
‘Clearly the Ten believe in the principle of hiding in plain sight,’ Irene muttered. She kicked a free-range chicken out of the way in a squawk of feathers. ‘Excuse me,’ she added to an outraged householder who’d opened his back door to complain. Distraction, distraction - they needed a distraction. ‘Vale, if we were foreign spies, here with sabotage in mind, what would we target?’
‘The Ten themselves,’ Vale suggested, ‘or we’d want to assassinate the Doge, or blow up the Arsenal. But the Arsenal would be easiest, as both it and the Campanile are north-east of here. So can you make our pursuers think that’s our aim?’
‘I can try.’ But how, she wondered. She remembered the Venetian Arsenal now: a complex of shipyards and armouries, so huge and industrial that it had supplied images for Dante’s Inferno. And she had enough grasp of the city’s geography to know that it was directly on the water, looking out across the scattered islands to the open sea.
Running feet echoed in the distance behind them. And even if Vale had a semi-preternatural ability to find his way through a city’s back-alleys on only a day’s acquaintance, the Ten’s servants were still close behind and gaining.
She needed to make a nice obvious trail if this diversion was going to work. ‘We need to get to the waterside,’ she said briefly. ‘I’m going to need a boat, and we’ll need something to put in it.’
Vale tilted his head, then nodded. He changed direction, leading her down a street to the right, towards the larger noises of the sea front.
The two of them burst out onto a small quay, in between two rows of inns and shops, with half a dozen rowing boats tied up at the far end. Perfect. Though it was also a dead-end, with nowhere to go but the water. So this idea had better work.
‘Untie that one,’ Irene directed Vale, pointing at the closest boat. She dragged an oiled canvas cover from the one next to it and shoved it into the first boat, tossing her shawl in on top for good measure. From where they were standing, she could see the great curve of the Venetian lagoon and the open sea beyond. At this distance, the Train lay across the water on its protruding platform like a chain, but beyond it she could see the buildings on the other side of the curve, half a mile or more to their east. Now that she knew where to look, the Arsenal was obvious. Even at this time of night, it blazed with forge-fires, its silhouette irregular with flaring chimneys, high walls and ships’ masts, and smoke rose from it into the cloudless night.
Vale stood back with a grunt as the rope came free. ‘Can you control the boat remotely, if you’re directing it that far?’
‘I can start it going and leave them chasing it,’ Irene said, forcing confidence into her voice. Freezing and then shattering the canal had left her with a nagging headache and a sense of weakness. She wished she’d had a chance to eat supper. Or even lunch. Or possibly breakfast. She set her hand on the boat’s keel as it bobbed in the water. ‘Right, stand back … Boat that I am touching, move out to sea fast, go around the Fae Train and head towards the great shipyard to the east, not stopping until you reach it.’
Energy ran out of her like blood. But Vale caught her before she could topple into the water, as the boat surged forward, cutting through the waves and out to sea. With an arm round her waist, he pulled her towards a side alley between two fish shops, dragging her into the shadows.
They made it just before their pursuers arrived.
Irene pressed against the wall, grateful for the shabby old building’s irregular shadows. Together, she and Vale watched the masked men (most of them dripping from their dip in the canal) point at the now-distant boat, gauge its course and come to the obvious conclusion as it curved round towards the Arsenal.
It was a nerve-racking wait, once the Ten’s servants had gone. She needed to be sure they weren’t just waiting around the corner for her and Vale to come out of hiding. Irene imagined two clocks: one ticking down the seconds until she could be sure it was safe to emerge, and the other larger one counting down the minutes until Kai’s auction. It wasn’t a comforting image.
Once they were moving again, it was early evening and the streets were still busy, but nobody looked twice at them. Without the Ten’s servants lurking, there was enough noise to reassure Irene that nobody else was listening in on their conversation. And everyone was masked now. The light from the lanterns made eye-sockets into dark hollows and turned unornamented masks into skulls. The sound of wind instruments drifted from a house’s upstairs window, giving a somehow sinister cast to the approaching night. Vale bought a couple of pastries from a vendor, and passed one to Irene as they strolled.
They stopped at the edge of the square, and Irene looked across at their target. The Campanile tower stood alone in a corner of the square, a good three hundred feet tall. She could make out the pale marble belfry, the pyramidal spire at the top and the weathervane glinting in the starlight. A set of thin marble-framed windows marched up one side of the brick of the bell tower in a dotted line. It was far enough away from any of the surrounding buildings that she and Vale wouldn’t be able to get to it over the roofs. And, more importantly, a squad of eight guards stood by the only gate at the bottom. ‘Let’s hope they don’t have a shoot-on-sight policy,’ she concluded.