The Venice Conspiracy by Sam Christer

walls.
    They’re rusty from being there so long. Ugly brown deposits stain the honey-coloured stone.
    No one ever asks what they’re for.
    Everyone knows.
    They know, because when they’re in use, the entire community lives in fear.
    The hooks belong to Larth. He hangs things from them.
    Living things.
    Once, he hung a villager’s dog by its hind legs. The animal had been stupid enough to run at him barking. Larth had almost broken its neck with his bare hands, but that wasn’t enough. He strung the mutt up from the hooks and made its owner and his six-year-old son sit beneath it until the dog died in the baking sun. The animalhad taken more than a day to give up its last yelp. Larth had warned the owner that if he so much as touched it, let alone comforted it or gave it water, then he’d be strung up as well. When the hound was dead, he made the child cut it down and bury it outside the walls.
    Beneath the hooks are a series of smears and stains. Blood, sweat and tears. Most of it human. Most of it male.
    But don’t be fooled, Larth is certainly not opposed to hanging a woman if circumstances demand it.
    A foreign whore who slighted a friend of his was recently strung naked from dawn to dusk. In the afternoon he spun her around, face to the wall, so some of the diseased and deformed men who slept rough by the cemetery could pleasure themselves.
    The hooks have sharp ends and dig hungrily into the soft wall when a rope is wound around them and a body hung from them. Larth made them himself. Heated the metal white and pounded it until he had just the right angle. A labour of love.
    He thinks of every beat of the hammer and flying white spark as he and his assistants make their way to what the locals call the Punishment Wall. He likes that they call it that. That they recognise its importance, its place in their lives.
    Today’s victim, a petty thief, is stripped bare. He’s an old man known as Telthius. When he was a child, Larth was often left with him and his wife while his own mother and father worked. He thinks briefly of that now, and how he used to playfully pull the old man’s long beard and hair. The memory stops as soon as his assistants have finished lifting Telthius on to the platform and stringing him up.
    Back to the wall, he hangs from ropes around his wrists, his face already distorted with pain.
    Larth feels his anger rise. The thief’s suffering ignites something inside him. Something exciting. Something that makes him feel more powerful and complete than at any other time in his life.
    Telthius disgusts him. His long beard is white. White hair sprouts from his nose, his ears, his armpits and even around his manhood. White is revolting. The old man is revolting. What he did was revolting. He was caught stealing from Pesna’s silver mine where he labours. Now the magistrate has decreed that he must be publicly punished. Taught a lesson. One he’ll never forget. One everyone will remember.
    Larth puts out his hand and takes a flaming rag torch from one of his aides. ‘Open your eyes! Open them, Thief!’
    The kindly elder who once rockedhim to sleep in the sticky afternoon heat squints towards his former charge.
    Larth holds the flaming torch between the old man’s legs and smiles.
    The white pubic hair catches fire.
    Larth laughs. A throaty roar that rolls across the gardens.
    Telthius jerks with pain.
    The torturer’s assistants can’t bear to look. The air smells of burning skin and hair.
    Larth sniffs at the aroma, like a maiden savouring the fragrance of a rose. ‘You stole from your master. Betrayed his trust. Defiled his good name. For these crimes I justly punish you, so others will see the errors of your ways and respect the rights of good men.’
    He rolls the flaming torch over the hair that covers the old man’s chest and arms. Telthius screams in agony.
    The torturer is careful not to go too far. He lets the fire burn only briefly. Enough to hurt, not to kill. There is no fun in