A flat crack comes across the water, and a white cloud rises from a sandolo off the bow: a pair of hunters shooting diving ducks. A second plume appears in the farther distance, at the marshy edge of San Cristofero della Pace, and the sound of the shot arrives a heartbeat later. Off starboard a crew of shouting laborers is clustered around a barge, now stranded by low tide; they’re driving piles in the muck, turning shallow water into solid earth, extending the city outward.
The batela angles north again, aimed at the mouth of the Glassmakers’ Canal, a smudge of furnace smoke on the vacant sky. Crivano can make out a green shadow at the island’s edge: the stand of holly-oaks where he crushed Verzelin’s throat. He wonders in passing whether the mirrormaker’s absence has been widely noted or commented upon, but this speculation fails to hold his interest, and he turns his eyes toward the city again. The boatmen’s oars slash the water, the pale willows of the nearby islands slide across the unearthly obelisk of San Francesco della Vigna, and Crivano feels a rush of astonishment, a sudden recollection of what it was like to see the city for the first time. Two days ago on the Molo it eluded him: clear in his mind but lifeless, a picture of itself. He’s able to reach it now only by way of a memory from years later: he was traveling the King’s Highway in the caravan of an adventurous young vizier, and they made a detour to al-Bitrā, the ruined capital of the Nabataeans, south of the Dead Sea. As he walked among the empty temples, rosy monoliths carved into the canyon walls, he could think of nothing but the moment when he and the Lark first glimpsed the Basilica’s domes: built on nothing solid, every constituent substance estranged from its origin. The impossible city of their ancestors, precipitated from the mist.
The gondoliers moor their boat in a vacant berth next to another batela, this one riding quite low, filled to the gunwales with split alder. The fragrant fresh-cut wood is a garish orange in the sun. As the boatmen lash their lines to a palina and ready an oar to lift the strongbox, Crivano springs to the quay and enters a door bearing the device of the siren—a stained-glass chimera with shapely bare breasts and the claws of a raptor—hung in a frame of dark wood. The shop’s shelves are crowded with the output of the attached factory: great crystal pitchers in the shapes of sailing ships, wide shallow goblets for red wine, carafes so thin and so clear as to be visible only by their filigree, interspersed with urns and plates and dishes of calcedonio glass in odd and startling hues. The shop-girl behind the counter listens meekly to a plump woman in an elegant saffron zimarra; as Crivano enters, they both turn and curtsy. The older woman’s eyes flash when she notes his black physician’s robes; her mouth tightens. Serena’s wife. She knows who he is, why he’s here. Good day, Crivano says. I’m looking for Maestro Serena.
As he speaks, the thin goblets along the walls shiver with the sound of his voice; their high chime gilds its roughness, rings into the stillness that follows. The woman’s reply is a low murmur to which the glass does not react. Yes, dottore, she says. You will find four men here who answer to that name.
Crivano smiles. This is good: the woman knows who he’s looking for, but she’s clever enough not to give that fact away. She’ll be no trouble in the escape: an asset, even. Narkis has nothing to fear. My business is with Boetio Serena, Crivano says. I have payment for him, and I would like to collect an item that he has crafted for me.
Mona Serena turns to the girl. Show the dottore to the workroom, she says.
The girl leads him through a side door, down a hallway, and then asks him to wait. She tugs open a thick portal banded with iron—heat billows through the gap, along with the smell of scorched air—and vanishes to the other side. In a moment she returns with young Alexandro in tow, the boy whom Crivano met at the Salamander. Ash dusts Alexandro’s face and hair, paints the edge of his jaw where sweat has smeared it. He wipes his hands on a linen rag with the air of a man eager to get back to his business. Dottore Crivano, he says with a bow. Your visit honors us.
Crivano returns the greeting. Young maestro, he says, I need to have a word with your father.
He’s mixing the batch now, but he’ll be done soon. I can show you to our parlor if you’d like to wait there. Or may I address your concern?
The look on the boy’s face makes it evident that his question is no question: his purview extends to all that occurs here. Crivano assesses his cool eyes and easy bearing—so like the Lark’s—and realizes that this is why Serena chose to join Crivano’s conspiracy, to remove his family from Murano. The glassmaker, he recalls, has two elder brothers; those brothers have many sons of their own. Alexandro practices his family trade not only as if he’s studied it diligently, which no doubt he has, but as if he has an inborn genius for it. Yet he will not run this shop in his lifetime.