The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore

“God save me, thou pompous great prick!” (Did I say I had not been on speaking terms with God for some time? Only polite to acknowledge our mutual resentments, innit?) My bladder let go, and for the first time since I was a boy, I prayed. Something - a fin, perhaps - brushed my foot, and I resumed my scream, kicked at the thing, which enveloped my legs, holding me fast moving around an up my knees, thighs.

Some large aquatic creature is moving about below the surface, and Pocket doesn’t like that. Not only that, but, as he’s watched, one of them has taken the time to build a solid brick wall to enclose him in hidden space where he hangs in the soggy dark (the water level rises and falls with the tides), contorted in agony - and alone. And, now, having doped him with a spiked bottle of wine, they have strung him up by chains in a particularly awkward position on a wall over an open sewer in a deep subbasement of the home of one of the businessmen. Not only that, but, first, they feel compelled to tell him that, no, his lovely and beloved Cordelia didn’t die of a fever - they poisoned her. The diminutive and aptly named Pocket - court jester of the late lamented (and demented) King Lear of Britain and then consort to the (alas) also late Cordelia, Queen of France, England, Spain, etc., and her envoy to 13th-century Venice to block an effort to launch a Crusade to recapture Jerusalem and rain profits galore on greedy Venetian entrepreneurs - is having a bad day.Īfter has spent weeks of trying to kill himself, a cabal of three said entrepreneurs is trying to do that for him.

The Serpent of Venice by Christopher Moore