Vito turned to the simpler question that had been waiting for him through two entire lifetimes.
What did he actually want?
Back in his previous life, his father had wanted a businessman made out of him. Don Rizzo had wanted a scapegoat, and got his wish sooner than either of them expected.
Even Vitale, in this era, had wanted three galleys badly enough to persuade his family’s acquaintances to pay for them, yet had never managed to explain why beyond the fact that he wanted them.
Nobody had ever thought to ask what Vito wanted.
That meant he would have to be the first.
Fine.
He would ask.
He began with what he knew for certain, because a man who intended to build a worthwhile life ought to know whether the ground under his feet was solid.
Massimo had shot him on an empty stretch of waterfront and called it business while his own eyes watered over what he was doing. Don Rizzo had looked at one problem and felt the solution was worth more than Vito alive.
Not once had either man bothered with the courtesy of warning him first.
"Not again."
Vito said aloud, addressing the ceiling, the painted saint upon it, and nobody else within hearing.
"Next time I die, I want it to be my own decision."
That part came easily enough.
It was like paying a debt after finally admitting you owed it.
The trouble was what lay beneath it.
The old life’s real crime against him went deeper than Massimo’s bullet. It was every excuse he had given his mother for staying away another month, every contact left untouched in a telephone he would never see again, and ten years spent as an invisible henchman moving cargo nobody was supposed to notice through ports nobody was supposed to remember.
Once, before business got its hands on everything he loved, he had loved the world simply because it was there.
He had spent an entire life reading about stories worth living and somehow never built one of his own.
He wanted to see it this time. Really see it, with his own name on it and all that old caution left behind on another life’s shore.
Cities he had known only from books, Alexandria and Acre among them, close enough now that he could actually stand in them, and people worth making the journey for.
A life that did not require him to stay small enough that nobody thought to look his way.
A Barozzi did not need to hide from anybody.
That had value all by itself.
The name was made to be seen now, while before it had been built for slipping through customs without attracting so much as a raised eyebrow.
Once he let himself want that much, the appetite grew.
Three galleys were a beginning and nothing more.
He wanted ports that answered to nobody but him, trade routes beyond the reach of the old houses, and ships fast and bold enough to make their old habits look embarrassing. Pepper, silk, and whatever else the Mediterranean had to offer would follow.
The master shipwright the voice had dangled in front of him was still waiting for a patron worth keeping.
And if the mood took him, perhaps a seat at whatever table the Republic’s politicians happened to be fighting over that week. Not because he loved politics, but because the game sounded considerably more entertaining than his old life had ever managed.
All of it sounded splendid while lying flat on his back in a massive church. He had to admit, though, that dreaming about it was not the same as doing it.
That was where his strangest advantage lay. He had spent an entire life fascinated by this exact era, reading everything he could find about it from a chair eight centuries removed from the people actually making history.
Now he had his own boots on that history.
The thought made his heart race more than the Emperor’s blade had managed earlier that day, which was saying something.
The trade empire could wait until it had a proper plan.
For tonight, he had a direction.
A direction was enough.
If Vito was going to build anything worth having, he needed somewhere to start.
Crete was the obvious choice.
Constantinople’s fall had started the game. The old empire would be carved up between men who had spent years waiting for exactly this opportunity, and the Aegean would become a scramble of competing claims.
Crete was different.
It was one prize, one claim, and worth having whole.
Vito already knew roughly how the next few years would unfold.
Boniface of Montferrat had that claim on paper and very little else, one piece of the larger division already agreed upon by the crusade’s leadership before the bastion of Christendom had even finished burning.
He would be passed over for the crown he actually want and sit on an island he had no practical way to hold. If Vito had judged history correctly, Boniface would be looking for a better offer before long.
Venice already understood that Crete mattered.
Vito’s advantage lay elsewhere.
He knew what sort of man was sitting on it, restless and available, the way a smuggler learns to read a seller who wants out before the seller has finished admitting it to himself.
What mattered was being close enough to act when Boniface felt inclined to barter.
Vito needed to be there during the dangerous early days, before some other patrician could arrive and claim credit for what somebody else had made possible.
The harder problem was much closer to home.
Getting near Dandolo meant clearing obstacles that Vito’s thin rank could not handle by itself.
The Doge’s oath barred him from private dealings without leave from his Council. He could not freely correspond with outsiders, much less leave the city without permission. Six Councillors, one from each sestiere, watched him for precisely that reason.
His correspondence was watched, his movements were accounted for.
Tonight, blind and somewhere inside a city that was still learning how to stop burning, Dandolo would be harder to reach than he was on an ordinary evening in the Republic.
Vito almost laughed.
Before, he’d had been a nobody trying to get close to the most powerful man in Venice. Now he had something the Doge could not afford to ignore.
He had killed an Emperor.
If that was not enough to buy a few minutes of a blind old Doge’s time, then Vito had no idea what would be.
Not bad for a man who still needed help getting to the chamber pot.
He liked his odds.
He always had.
The plan sat in his head, roughly built and entirely useless, because the man doing all this planning could not currently stand without help from a physician.
"Big talk from somebody who can’t walk to the door."
He closed his eyes and, for the first time, let himself to go under willingly, on his own terms.
The ache and the exhaustion everywhere had finally been given permission to have their say.