The Venetian Contract by Marina Fiorato

was intact, but already loose at her wasted midriff. Feyra blinked twice and turned her aching head – her hair was a thick salty rope slithering between her shoulder blades as she twisted to see behind her. The impression of her body was pressed into the sacks beneath, dark with sweat where she had lain. There was an ugly black stain where the bubo in her armpit had burst and bled its dark matter out into the canvas; her gown, when she lifted her left arm, was likewise stained. She could not think what this might mean, for her attention was snatched, in that instant, by a voice.
    She must still be trapped in her delirium.
    The voice called again, hoarse as a crow’s caw.
    Her skin chilled at once, for at the third time of repeating she recognized the word it uttered; a word that meant she was discovered. Feyra waited, tensed, for the sacks andbarrels to be thrust aside and for her sorry self to be discovered. But the raptor’s croak continued, that one syllable repeated.
    Feyra herself thrust at the sacks with arms as weak as twine, and with a supreme effort freed herself from her prison. Once she could see all before her she noted with puzzlement that the hatch to the deck above was closed, and she was alone in the hold. She stood, unsteady as a toddling babe, and walked forth, her progress hampered by the weakness in her legs and the roll of the ship. She walked slowly, as if through sand, one foot in front of the other, like the callipers, marking the space between her and the curtain.
    Halfway across; beyond.
    She reached out to the white fabric, and with a sense of dread, drew it back. As she did so, the ship slipped silently through the dark archipelago of a thousand islands known as the Peloponnese, where a sea captain had once carried off a Venetian princess.
    The point of no return.
    Feyra looked down at the casket and she knew she was right – the voice had been coming from the box. Suddenly weak, she could stand no longer. Her knees buckled and bent and her legs collapsed beneath her. She knelt before the sarcophagus as she had once knelt before a Sultan encased in a coffin of ice.
    ‘Girl?’ it said again.
    ‘Yes, Box?’

Chapter 8
    F eyra spoke again, her mouth as dry as tinder. ‘Who are you?’
    ‘I am Death.’
    She choked, thinking then that the fever had killed her after all, that she was in some otherworld.
    ‘What do you want of me?’
    ‘Another soul.’
    Dumb with horror, Feyra stared at the sarcophagus that spoke, trying to understand. Now she was close to the casket, she knew that she had seen the like before. It was wrought of pewter as she had thought and beautifully chased in jewel-coloured enamel. Geometric interlaced patterning in the Ottoman style twined with the gilded decorative calligraphy of
Diwani
script. She had seen a coffin just like this when the Sultan Selim had been laid in state in the Sophia, directly underneath the great dome where his mournful subjects lined past to look their last on him.
    Here in this dank hold it was different. To contrast with the glory of the box there was a dreadful, underlying smell of human waste, and pomades of myrtle were tied at intervals from the silver rivets, a herb which she recognized for its power to contain evil miasmas. In the Sophia the deadSultan’s face had been clearly visible through a panel of crystal – here the glass had been smashed away and replaced by a panel of opaque muslin, a weave broad enough to let air pass freely. The muslin drew in and out, periodically, vibrating slightly like the skin of a drum.
    Something still breathed.
    The thing within, despite his name, was alive.
    A sigh emanated from the sarcophagus, and the muslin puffed and bellied like a sail. ‘I did not mean to frighten you. I meant only that I wanted a friend, a companion. Four days now I have been enclosed. I am lonely.’ The voice was male, and deep, it carried the rasp of someone who was wedded to his pipe, like her father. She began to be less