Antonio paced his apartments while Iago sat calmly at his table, cleaning his fingernails with his dagger. They’d let him out of irons after only two days at sea. The sailors whose job it was to keep him had been persuaded that their prisoner might, indeed, become their new commander. With Othello and Desdemona dead, and Cassio burdened with his duties in Corsica, no one could even figure out how the council could prosecute the charges. By the time they’d reached Venice, he’d walked off the ship with his weapons restored, and only the promise that he would appear before the council on the appointed date.

“I don’t believe it. Calm yourself, Antonio, I control the orbit of the spheres of fate. With Othello dead, we may yet see your protégé as senator and our plan will go forward.”

Antonio had always been frightened of Iago, his rough certainty and willingness to violence was out of place in the genteel world of commerce, where battles were metaphors and triumphs measured in profits, but now, after his time in Corsica, Antonio also feared the soldier had gone quite mad.

“They found pieces of Salarino and Gratiano in the canals today,” said the merchant. “Pieces of them. And the note came due the day after they were to remove Shylock. I have to answer Shylock’s suit before the council tomorrow. He’s going to cut out a pound of my flesh.”

“Gentle Antonio, the Council of Venice will never allow the Jew to collect his bond. A Jew? No more than they would prosecute me for actions against the Moor. We are Venetians, they are outsiders. Justice favors the favored sons. If it comes to it, I have a plan for your trial that will play for both our interests. You cannot imagine the force that has come to my aid, the creature conjured into being by my hatred for the Moor.”

“Yes, yes, so you’ve said.” Antonio had, without intent, been moving away from the soldier the entire time they had been talking, until he was nearly standing with his back at his own door, the stairwell being the only way to find further distance, short of leaping out a window. “But you said, too, that Brabantio had been eaten as if by some creature, and this—thing—this thing of darkness, it killed your friend Rodrigo. You saw it.”

“I was going to kill Rodrigo anyway. My hatred simply anticipated my desires. Ah, perhaps it was such with Brabantio as well—the imp of my ire anticipating the need to have the old man out of the way before I even knew it myself.”