This time Gontran was up and about before the bells rang. Purpose woke him. But his absorption in planning silenced and darkened the world, numbed his body, made it move as automatically as Talia’s. He had woken from sleep, yes, but by the time he woke from his thoughts, the memory of kissing Ra’isa goodbye that morning was floating like a glowing cloud in his mind, his hands reaching under her dress to hold her bare sides as he clutched her close, always wanting to take her wherever he was, needing to make up for all the years he had spent without even knowing about her existence.

Now he was searching the Arsenale for the armory. It must have been locked and hidden, but also vast, and packed with sharpened blades of every description—long, short, wide, thin, some for chopping, others for stabbing, still more for throwing or loosing from bows or crossbows. Perhaps even his pistol-sword was there. But the Loredani must have stolen it. No—this was a case of pearls before swine. Beauty and skill meant nothing to those men. They could have tossed the pistol-sword into the sea for all Gontran knew. He would need to return to Dongjing in Sera—quite a long haul—to get another one. No one west of the Oxus could even imagine such weapons.

He kept his rusted tools with him, his means of tetanus, but this time he also carried a note. There was no seal—he had been afraid to ask even the cheapest tinsmiths to make a fake official seal—but he was counting on the illiterate person’s natural fear of letters. In the old world, he had seen that one could similarly intimidate people using mathematics. Numbers and equations frightened people—the word “math” was frightening just by itself—and so like an incantation, you could chant it to move people out of the way. If they sensed that your understanding of math was strong, they would defer to you, as long as you spoke to them with confidence. He had made sure to scrawl the note—it said something about granting Gontran Koraki, loyal and reliable garzone, to do as he willed, in the name of Capitan Giustiniani Loredan, the Signoria of the Serenissima, Christ, the Father, the Holy Ghost, this, that, and the other thing, in the year of our lord MLXXXII, in the month of Aprile, a most delightful and endearing time of year, the beginning of spring, when the LORD rose from the dead that all of us might be redeemed and dwell in eternal splendor. It was all written in nearly illegible cursive. His Arabesque scrawl he had learned in the old world, where calligraphy had captivated him for a few weeks, and he had practiced writing his signature as elegantly as possible as a schoolgirl, one who wanted to know how her name would look if she married her crush at the time. The note was also wordy enough to fill an entire page. Few garzoni possessed anything like this. It almost glowed with its own golden light like a sacred text imbued with the mysteries of god.

As he was asking Bartolo to cover for him again, the man asked him what he was up to as he walked about the Arsenale. Gontran’s heart froze.

“Oh,” he said. “I just like to poke around.”

“For what purpose? You do not wish to steal the Serenissima’s industrial secrets, do you?”

Gontran opened his mouth to answer, but before he could speak, Bartolo had clapped him on the back and exploded with laughter.

“Solo un scherzo!” he said as nearby garzoni glared at him. “Go on, go on, you are free! Fly like a little butterfly! Fly!”

As Gontran left, he wondered why Bartolo was in such a good mood. Until now, the man had been barely verbal. Had he reported Gontran and earned a little extra money? Was he excited about finally having enough coin to start his own business? The Venetians were experts at spying. They could keep an eye on people without arousing suspicion. They might even have been watching Gontran now.

Have to get out of here, he thought.

Dozens of buildings were in the Arsenale, many made of brick, and—in typical Venetian style—the windows were boarded up, and the entrances were guarded by soldiers. Everything was a secret, everyone was a spy, and entering any of these buildings was risky, especially since their true purpose was beyond him. Even with his magic note, the guards might suspect him of spying for foreign powers. He began to wonder if an armory was even present here. One was probably close to the doge’s palace. But if a war started, wouldn’t you want your armory in the Arsenale, to equip ships while they were sailing into battle? Gontran didn’t know. Yet he needed to find the armory, wherever it was. The Paralos crew could never escape this place without weapons. The ship would almost certainly be boarded on their way out.

Taking a deep breath, and unsure of where to start, he approached a large open warehouse, telling the two guards before the entrance that he was here to examine the building for structural defects on behalf of the signoria. He then presented his note. Both guards examined it, narrowed their eyes, pretended to understand, nodded, then handed it back and allowed him to pass. Inside were incredible amounts of sails and ropes of all sizes—ropes that would bind the wrists of titans, along with vast white sails marked with red crosses—but no weapons. The ropes were coiled like giant prehistoric snakes, and the sails hung high in the air on hangars to keep them dry, and to make it easier to bat hungry moths away with long wooden flyswatters.

Thanking the soldiers out front, Gontran tried the next building. This turned out to be an office, not a warehouse, where black-robed Venetians were hunched over tables, drawing schematics for new ships. Other rooms contained prototypes of different sizes: some ship models they knocked up here were small enough to hold in your hand. Gontran peeked inside only briefly, since these men were literate and therefore dangerous. But they were too busy to notice him.

Now he was getting frustrated. It was like looking for David all over again. You achieve one goal, and then the next one is so much harder that you forget you even achieved the previous goal in the first place. That’s your reward. The treadmill, the dangling carrot of existence. Was he going to have to examine every structure in the Arsenale? What was he even doing here? It was all a waste of time. He would never get anywhere. The slaves would never go free. Venice was too powerful. And in the end, none of it really mattered regardless of whether he won or lost. All of this would one day turn to dust. The remains of everything and everyone Gontran loved would be swallowed up billions of years in the future when the sun went nova. One day, as the universe expanded faster than the speed of light, every star would go out. Even the black holes would evaporate, countless years in the future. All work—in the thermodynamic sense—would end. Time itself would cease, since atoms would be as distant from one another as galaxies. The temperature of the universe would be absolute zero.

Cold endless dark.

So why bother? Why not forget the world’s troubles, and instead indulge in sensual pleasures at everyone else’s expense?

He wondered for a moment if he was sick. Maybe some disease had infected him here, and was now weakening his soul. He would never be able to do anything ever again, he would be bedbound for the rest of his miserable life, everyone would need to take care of him, he would become a burden to the world and to himself, Ra’isa would tire of him and fall for another man, someone who made her laugh, someone who excited her so that she trembled with lust the first time they gave in to their desires, someone who provided for her and never caused any trouble.

Gontran would never accomplish anything, never achieve success, never break free. All his enemies would be right. He was so worthless they didn’t even waste their time thinking about him.

These emotions swirled within him, weighing him down like cement bricks encasing his feet, but he forced himself to continue, to plod onward through the storm.

At the next building, he was unsure of what he would discover inside. He almost expected to find men and women dressed in masks and lingerie engaging in a surreptitious mass orgy. One really could find these things sometimes just by opening random doors. But instead, with a burst of excitement, he realized that he had found the armory he was looking for. Wooden racks and shelves inside were loaded with weapons and armor. The blades were sharp enough to cut the dust motes whirling in sunlight shafts, and no rust could be seen.

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Exiting the building, he took his bearings, memorizing the nearby structures and ships, anything unique about his surroundings. He needed to be able to find this place at night—without torches, stars, or the moon—and to guide some crew members here so they could carry weapons to the others.

He returned just in time to Bartolo, went back to work, then walked home. There he was surprised to find that Ra’isa was not alone: she had brought back Zaynab and Zulaika al-Jariya, both of whom were sleeping soundly in the room’s only bed, their exhaustion evident in their stillness and silence. They could have been dead, save for the fact that their chests occasionally rose and fell.

“You freed them?” Gontran whispered.

“I bought them,” Ra’isa answered, hefting Gontran’s sack of stolen coins. Now it was almost empty.

He was tempted to make some kind of quip—you oppose society, yet you participate in it. This was a widespread belief in the old world among philosophers of all kinds—ranging from the aging owners of car dealerships who had not picked up a book since graduating high school to professors at famous universities—who believed that nothing could ever really change. They lived in houses that would have astounded their cavemen ancestors, they indulged in pleasures undreamt of only a few years ago, they learned of scientific discoveries that would have driven to madness the greatest thinkers from previous ages, the richest kings of Renaissance Europe would have salivated at the wonders inherent to being middle class in the year 2022, people in that time dwelled in a world that was far stranger than any work of fantasy or science fiction. But no. Many maintained that nothing could ever truly change. Whales were still land-dwelling creatures, after all. Nothing had changed.

The reality was that anything could change. To free slaves, sometimes it was simpler just to buy them—and then to feed them, clothe them, train them, and organize them so they could kill their masters later.

That night, Gontran and Ra’isa slept on the floor. She told him that Zaynab and Zulaika al-Jariya had experienced unspeakable things and needed time to recover.

“I was only with the Procuratore for a few hours,” she whispered. “They were with him for days.”

“You mean—”

“Yes. The man likes Muslim women. He buys them for almost any price. He always searches the city for them.”

Gontran shrugged. “Can’t say I blame him.”

Ra’isa punched him—hard—and he groaned.

“Wasn’t Pontius Pilate also a procurator?” Gontran later said, half to himself. “Procurators. Always bad news.”

“I do not know what you are talking about,” Ra’isa said. “And I do not care.”

The next day at the Arsenale, Gontran and Halevi discussed their plans. In two nights it would be moonless, and with a little luck, the clouds would sweep in and cover the stars. Gontran would sneak inside the Arsenale long after sundown, when the the guards were yawning and leaning on their spears in the pitch darkness. Perhaps they would even indulge in little naps, since no one would see.

After Gontran freed the prisoners, most would move the Paralos out of its tent and into the pool. In the darkness crowded with ships, they would then need someone with good eyesight to stay at the bowsprit with a torch. Just like when they had first arrived in Venice, the crew would need to relay messages to the pilot across the deck just by whispering. It would require discipline to keep from crashing into other ships on their way out. At the same time, Gontran would bring a group to the armory to liberate weapons and armor. Ra’isa would do her best to stock up on as much food and water as she could buy in the marketplace without arousing suspicion. They would store it in their apartment until the proper time, then all meet together at the Arsenale entrance. Once the entire crew and all their supplies were aboard the Paralos, they would flee the lagoon, and keep sailing until they reached Trebizond.

Gontran and Halevi discussed this while turned away from one another and murmuring. As Gontran spoke, he tried to examine every person he could see. Hundreds were busily laboring in almost every direction, and yet none seemed to be paying attention to them. No one even looked their way.

We are nothing. We are dirt. And yet the dirt can come alive and swallow you up.

“The next step is to just cross our fingers,” Gontran said. “To rub our lucky rabbit’s feet. To pray to as many gods as we can think of.”

“We will all of us pray together to our different gods,” Halevi whispered.

“One of them’s gotta be listening.” Then, as Gontran returned to Bartolo, he thought: if our luck changes.

He had wanted to clap Halevi on the back, to hug him and apologize for everything, but doing this in front of all the garzoni was impossible. It would have to wait for their success—when the Paralos was on the open sea in the morning, and the domes and campaniles of Venice were behind them with no ships in pursuit, the gap between the city and the Paralos growing with every second.

As Gontran worked in the lumber yard, he wondered how Herakleia would react once they returned to Trebizond. Would she be angry, disappointed, sad, apologetic? Anything could have happened back there, in the mean time. The Romans might have even sent another invasion army. Trebizond could have been destroyed—again. But he put this disturbing thought out of his head, telling himself to focus on what he could control. Then he wondered if it was even possible to control anything at all. Didn’t the existence of the unconscious negate the possibility of control? The idea of the individual was squeezed between society and unconsciousness—and squeezed tightly.

Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

When Gontran returned home, he found all three amazons awake in his room. They were washed, wearing clean clothes, and hauling sacks of bread and meat into the apartment, having told the curious prying merchants at the market that they were hoping to make a little money starting an import-export business. This statement had the unfortunate effect of arousing the suspicion of these merchants, since no business could be founded without the approval of a dozen different governing councils (not to mention the guilds), and foreigners were forbidden to have independent interests operating within the city. Thinking fast, Ra’isa told the merchants that they had a Venetian partner, and their application had just been approved—that must have been why no one in the market had heard about it—but the documents were still being finalized by various notaries. One fishmonger found this ridiculous. There were already plenty of merchants, he said. Profit margins were so narrow already, what with the competition, the need to maintain a just price in the eyes of God, and the growing cost of equipment and labor and the decreasing returns on farming and fishing. It was impossible to make any money these days. The soil was exhausted, the garzoni were forming sindacati, and the doge and his most trusted councilors were all corrupt and conspiring with the blood-drinking Saraceni against hardworking salt-of-the-earth types like himself. Taxes were out of control. The church gave away too much money to the poor—you could probably get as rich as Croesus just by begging! All kinds of beggars these days were hiding piles of money in underground vaults!

As this fishmonger continued babbling, Ra’isa nodded and pretended to listen, telling herself that it would only be a few more minutes at most before she had purchased the fish she needed. Then she could escape this unbearable man forever.

“While we escape,” she told Gontran, “we will burn this place to the ground.”

“It won’t be easy burning down an island crisscrossed by canals,” Gontran said.

“We must try.”

“But there are plenty of innocent people here,” Gontran said. “Women, children—”

“Would they wait to kill us? Enslave us? ‘Oh, we must stop, there are women and children’—would they think like this?”

Gontran shook his head. “No.”

“Whoever wants to win more will win. Whoever cares less about problems will win. It is all or nothing. And if we fail, at least we can take some of them with us.”

Gontran nodded, realizing as he did so that he was speaking with his katapan, and not with his girlfriend.

Some people say you can’t understand pleasure unless you also understand pain, he thought. That’s the answer to the problem of evil, how a good god could create a world with evil, since good itself cannot exist without it. The old cliché says that you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Then the rejoinder is: ‘I see the broken eggs, but where’s the omelette?’ If we manage to build paradise, does that mean all the horror and suffering before was worthwhile? If a workers’ uprising takes over the world and fulfills its promises, does that mean that all the holocausts and genocides in the past—all of which led inadvertently to the revolution—were necessary? No. It would have been better for all the pain and suffering to have never happened.

Gontran went through the motions of existence as he thought about these things. Then, at last, the day of escape dawned.