“Oh, that?” said I. I sheathed my dagger. “Just having you on. We only had what I carried with me today. I have to go catch Antonio. Ta!”

Twenty-five: Arise! Black Vengeance!

TWENTY-FIVE

Arise! Black Vengeance!

I ran out the door, under the eye of many confused onlookers. I spotted Drool, towering above the fray near the canal, and Bassanio helping Antonio load the chest of gold into a gondola.

“Drool, stop them!” I cried, but the ninny took too long to see the target of my instruction. Bassanio was pushing the gondola away from the walkway, Portia pulling him back toward the court as the boat moved away. Antonio stood amidships, grinning at me.

I shouldered my way through the crowd, drawing a dagger and plunging the pommel into my purse as I moved. When I reached the edge of the water, clear of the crowd, I flung the dagger.

It whistled over the water and thunked into the wooden seat by Antonio’s feet.

“You missed,” he said.

“Yes,” said I. “Blast and damn. Toss that back, would you, mate?”

Antonio bent down and worked the dagger out of the wood. He smiled rather smugly as he stuck it in his belt, confident he was out of knife-throwing range, but then looked at his hand. “It’s sticky.”

“Yes it is, innit?” I called. “Ta!”

The wave moved in a chevron up the center of the Grand Canal’s chilly water.

“Wot’s that?” said one onlooker, pointing to the dark missile moving under the water at the apex of the wave.

The others gathered and watched. Antonio followed their gaze and saw the thing moving at him. He looked around, looked at the gondolier, realized there was nowhere to go.

I will give him credit, he wasn’t the nancy-boy coward I’d thought him to be. He drew my dagger from his belt, crouched, and faced the oncoming wave.

She was like a column of silky tar erupting from the water, her skin shining where the sun hit it. She took his knife arm at the shoulder in her jaws and rolled him over backward into the water, his bones audibly snapping and her front claws disemboweling him before they hit the water on the other side of the gondola and he was carried down in a blossoming red stain in the green water to be seen nevermore. There had been no pause, no break in her momentum; she went through him in the leap as if she might surface again a few yards away and take another merchant, then another, as fluid and natural and irresistible as the sea—an elegant terror—a beautiful monster.

The gondolier had dropped to a crouch on his platform as the gondola lurched sideways with the dragon’s impact, then righted itself. He stood and stared at the red stain in the water, like all of those on the shore, not believing what he had just seen.