The Shadow Wars by Rod Rees

Author:Rod Rees
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

23

Venice

The Demi-Monde: 25th Day of Spring, 1005

COPY OF PIGEONGRAM MESSAGE SENT BY DOCTOR JEZEBEL ETHOBAAL ON 23RD DAY OF SPRING, 1005

Burlesque Bandstand sat sipping his glass of Solution on the veranda of the Café de Rialto, enjoying both the afternoon sunshine and the hustle and bustle of the area around the Bridge of Thighs. He liked Venice. It was by repute the wealthiest city in the whole of the Demi-Monde, and it wore its wealth on its sleeve. The buildings were fine and richly decorated, and Burlesque especially liked the way they were painted bright colors. It made a change from the dour and monochromatic Rookeries, where everything was colored a shade of off-turd.

And Venice was such a clean city. The streets were regularly swept and were, amazingly, free of the shit and refuse that befouled the streets of London. This he put down to the Venetians’ having all these funny canals running through the place: anything swept into them was eaten by exCreatures. Bloody convenient.

The Venetians seemed a well-made people too—there were no blood-starved indigents begging on the streets of Venice—and remarkably well dressed. Of course, the style of their clothes had taken Burlesque a little getting used to. The colors were a little too sharp for his taste, but he liked the masks and he most certainly approved of how provocatively the women dressed . . . or rather undressed. Venetian women were inclined to show a lot of flesh.

All in all, Burlesque had decided that Venice was his sort of town, being busy and vibrant and full of chattering crowds of people. Indeed the muddle of people swarming around the café was as fair a cross-section of the peoples of the Demi-Monde as he could imagine. There were NoirVillian sailors with monkeys on their shoulders, Chink NoNs mincing their way to the Bourse, gondoliers in their striped shirts taking shots of Solution and eyeing the crowd for customers, and even the occasional red-robed Visual Virgin en route to the convent.

Yeah, Burlesque liked Venice, and most of all he liked that he’d managed to get there with his SAE intact. Well, almost intact. The bullet wound in his arse was still giving him gyp.

After the set-to with Stan Shoreham, the three of them—Rivets, Odette and himself—had escaped under cover of night, making their getaway from Paris via steam charabanc. It had been a miserable journey, Burlesque having to endure the four hours that the steamer had taken to meander its way from Paris through Rome and Barcelona, while seated on a hard wooden bench surrounded by squabbling children, wicker cages packed with squawking chickens, and the very large women who were taking said chickens to market.

But these discomforts and the throbbing of his wounded arse were as nothing to the suffering inflicted on him by Odette. The girl seemed never to tire, and she had talked to him nonstop in her indefatigably chirpy manner—and in her heathen French—from the moment the charabanc had left the station. The other

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