Masks

  The monster reared back, whipping its head around, trying to dislodge the body, and Mircea’s vampire saw his chance. He jumped, not away, for there was nowhere to go, but straight at the muscled coil, landing and sinking his sword deep. Several of his men joined him, and for a moment, he thought perhaps they had a chance.

  Until his hand started burning, flesh and then bone dissolving away as bloodlike acid ate through sword, glove, and body with equal ease.

  He jerked back, stifling a scream, and pulled a crossbow with his good arm. But he didn’t fire. Because the great wound he’d just made, which had sunk half his arm in the thing’s red guts, closed as he watched, the skin rippling and churning as it had when the body was formed.

  And then stilling again, without even a scar.

  He looked up to see his men staring at him, both close and far, waiting for orders. For answers. For the way out he’d always found in the most impossible situations.

  But he didn’t have them; he didn’t have them.

  He saw when it registered, when they gripped their weapons tighter, because there was only one thing left to do, and it wasn’t to die like puling cowards, running away.

  “For the Lady,” he said silently, and heard it echoed around the garden.

  And then shouted when they charged as one man, almost drowning out the slithering, scraping hiss of the great body, turning lightning fast to meet them, still hampered by its gory prize.

  But the great tail wasn’t.

  Mircea’s vampire managed to loose his arrow into one of the thing’s eyes, just before what felt like a giant’s fist threw him back against the side of the house, along with the half dozen men who had been in its path. He tried to get up, but nothing worked; even armor couldn’t absorb that much force. And the blow had torn his last weapon away, sending it hurtling into the darkness, where he didn’t know.

  Not that it mattered now.

  He lay against the house like a broken doll, feeling his system trying to repair the damage, even as the cause loomed up over him. It had identified him as the leader, and so he would die first. He was vaguely grateful for that, for not having to see the rest of his men . . .

  The man’s thoughts trailed off as that dark hood swallowed the sky. Swallowed speech. Swallowed everything.

  Except the slight, spectral figure that stepped in between them, shedding a puddle of light over the ruined ground, and raising a hand.

  “No.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Bezio said, the next night. “The senator’s challenged the consul, the city is in an uproar, the fate of vampire kind lies in the balance, and what are we doing?”

  “Going to visit the mages,” Mircea said.

  Hopefully, he didn’t add.

  Luckily, he’d committed the directions the cook had given him to memory, because there was insufficient light to read by, even for a vampire’s eyes. There was insufficient everything else, too: air, garbage disposal, and a pen for the pigs that were running around freely in the crowded neighborhood, rooting in the residents’ leftovers. But the main thing they were short of was room.

  Since coming to Venice, Mircea had become used to narrow lanes, multistoried buildings, and streets that dead ended in odd places, requiring him to backtrack. Unable to expand unless they went through a lengthy and expensive process of reclaiming land from the sea, the Venetians had learned to use what they had to full advantage. Pedestrians were just expected to make do.

  But even by Venetian standards, this was ridiculous.

  The current lane was so narrow that he scraped his elbows against the walls unless he kept them tucked against his body. To make matters worse, local homeowners in search of more room had built their second and third floors out over the street, to the point that the roofline of the surrounding buildings almost met overhead. The result was something akin to a tiny, dark, enclosed tunnel.

  So much for a quick exit, if anything went wrong.

  “I don’t like this,” Jerome said, echoing Mircea’s thoughts. “I thought I was doomed last night, until those guards just up and left. I don’t want to push my luck.”

  “They didn’t just ‘up and leave’,” Mircea said, scowling in memory. “They were there to force the senator’s hand. With both her men and her guests in danger, she almost had to challenge.”

  “No, she didn’t,” Jerome argued. “And they weren’t her men. They belonged to one of her servants. She could have blamed everything on him and cut her losses—”

  “That’s cold,” Bezio said.

  “It’s practical. So, hurray, she saved some lives last night. But without her to curb the consul’s insanity, how many more are going to die?”

  “How do you know she can’t defeat him?” Bezio asked.

  Jerome made a disgusted sound. “If she could do that, why not challenge before this?”

  “Perhaps she didn’t want to risk it.”

  “And perhaps she knows it won’t work!”

  “Then why challenge at all? As you pointed out, she could have just walked away. It doesn’t make sense—”

  “It does when you recall that this is the second time they’ve come after her in two weeks,” Mircea said, as they paused to scramble over a pig. “Why wouldn’t they keep coming? Clearly, the consul views her as a threat—”

  “So she deals with that by giving him what he wants?” Jerome demanded.

  “What’s the alternative? Let him keep attacking her, whittling down her supporters until—”

  “No, but she could have . . . gone on the offensive. Ordered an assassination—”

  “Isn’t that what someone just tried?” Mircea asked.

  Jerome frowned. “I’m just pointing out that there must have been a better way.”

  Maybe there was, but Mircea didn’t see it. And, frankly, he agreed with the senator. If he was going to go out, it would be fighting.

  Not waiting around for an execution.

  It looked like the servant’s gossip had been right, after all. A coup had been planned for this convocation. But it had been the consul behind it.

  He’d planned to take out a child who was growing over powerful, and given the statue Mircea had seen in her garden, possibly overproud. Or perhaps that had been her subtle way of hinting to her master: you have to follow the law, like everyone else, or there are forces that will make you. Perhaps she thought the warning would be enough, that he wouldn’t risk this.

  If so, she’d thought wrong.

  It was the clash of two titans: the consul refusing to be curbed by his own child, and steadily growing more and more erratic. The senator growing simultaneously more and more dissatisfied under his rule, chafing beneath the yoke of a tyrant. It had to come to a head sooner or later, and he had decided to act first.

  Mircea didn’t know if he’d planned that insult at the regatta, mentally controlling the man who had pulled down his banner, or if he’d taken advantage of a chance opportunity. But killing that many of any master’s family was virtually sure to provoke a reaction. He must have had people watching the masters involved, waiting for them to do something stupid.

  Which of course they had.

  Mircea felt like throttling both of them. How could they be so old, and not know how the game was played? This was politics, plain and simple. The same maneuvering, conniving, and backstabbing he’d grown up with and hated with a passion. And if he could read the signs, why couldn’t they?

  As it was, to avenge those they couldn’t bring back, they’d put their lady’s life in danger. Because Mircea agreed with Jerome: if she thought she could win, she would have challenged before now. She might have used the possibility of it for years, as a way of curbing some of his excesses, but he didn’t think she’d actually planned to do it. Not now; not yet.

  But thanks to th
e consul’s maneuvering—or his good friend Hassani’s more like—she now had no choice.

  He is going to kill her, Mircea thought, his fist clenching.

  And there wasn’t a goddamned thing anyone could do about it.

  “Well, I think she should have swallowed the insult,” Jerome said. “Challenging him only makes things worse.”

  “Maybe,” Bezio said. “But it doesn’t matter anyway—”

  “Doesn’t matter?” Jerome said incredulously. “How do you figure that?”

  “I meant, it doesn’t matter to us. This is high politics. It isn’t the sort of thing we have any business being concerned with.”

  “I’ll be concerned with what I like,” Jerome said. “And you should be, too. Do you want to have that creature in charge of us?”

  “It’s more likely to be Hassani in charge,” Mircea put in. “He seems to be running things already.”

  “My point stands,” Jerome said. “How much do you think Hassani will care what happens to us? He doesn’t have to live here. And you can be damned sure he’ll be more interested in using us to serve his needs than in proper governance.”

  “Proper governance,” Bezio scoffed. “There’s no such thing. There’s the bastards and then there’s us, and you try to keep your head down and hope they don’t notice you. It’s the same no matter who sits in the big chair. And it always will be.”

  Jerome opened his mouth to reply, but by then they’d arrived at the rundown tavern the cook had talked about. They paused outside the door, or what would have been the door if it had had one. A tattered curtain had to do the job instead, since there was no room to swing anything out into the tiny excuse for an alley.

  “Stinks like magic,” Bezio grumbled.

  If magic smelled like body odor, alcohol, lightning, and strange herbs burnt over a fire, Mircea agreed.

  “There’s still time to turn back,” Jerome said, eyeing the ominous emblem set into the bricks over the door.

  Most Venetian shops had symbols over or beside the entrance, as a way of identifying themselves to illiterate customers. They were usually cheerful things, designed to be attractive and easy to remember: sun, moon and stars; stylized mythological beasts; plants and animals. It was common to give directions by telling a servant to pick something up at the sign of the galloping gryphon, or beside the leaping lizard or near the merry maiden.

  This was none of the above. Just a jumble of intricate, foreign symbols that seemed to squirm and twist and change as Mircea looked at them. They felt less like a welcome than a warning, and made turning around even more tempting than it had already been.

  And it had been tempting enough.

  Mircea had an extremely limited acquaintance with magic, mostly involving the woman who had cursed him over one of his father’s peccadillos. Considering how well that had gone, he had made a habit to actively avoid it ever since. But tomorrow convocation ended and they were leaving Venice. If he wanted to find out what had happened to Sanuito this was his last chance.

  And he did want to know.

  Because Bezio was right. As much as he sympathized with the senator’s dilemma, Mircea couldn’t do much about the schemes and plots, treacheries and betrayals of the ruling class. But maybe he could do something to avenge Sanuito.

  Or at least he could try.

  “Come on,” he told them, and they went inside.

  Inside wasn’t much bigger than outside, just a small, dark, oddly-shaped room lit mainly by the red glow from a fireplace. The ceiling was low, and either it was sagging or it had been built slightly off kilter to begin with, because the part farthest away from the fire was a good two feet lower than the rest. Which probably explained why it boasted an open table.

  They took it, crowding together onto a single bench with the wall at their backs. Mircea stopped breathing, in order to help with the smell, but poor Jerome didn’t have that ability and was looking fairly revolted. And that was before a man came over carrying three tankards they hadn’t asked for, and that cost a small fortune Mircea didn’t have.

  Jerome paid, with his sour expression tipping into a scowl, and Mircea enquired after Hieronimo.

  The barman said something in a language none of them understood, or could even identify, and shuffled off. Leaving them looking at each other. And then at the expensive contents of their tankards.

  “I think it’s vinegar,” Jerome said, sniffing it. And then he put his tankard back down with the air of a man who did not intend to pick it up again.

  Bezio eyed it unhappily, but after a moment, he manned up and tried a small sip.

  “Well?” Mircea asked.

  “I . . . think I could actually taste that,” Bezio told him, in wonder.

  “How was it?”

  “I’m not sure. But I think I might have just found your poison.”

  They mostly sat and looked at their tankards after that.

  Long minutes went by.

  There was a creeping chill from the doorway that occasionally fluttered the curtain and painted a cold line right up Mircea’s spine. Or maybe that was something else. Like the fact that nobody had said a word since they came in.

  Or that one of the men seated directly opposite them was wearing a necklace of what looked a lot like human finger bones.

  Or that a man in a corner had taken one look at them and started muttering something to himself, and adding things from greasy pouches into a circle on the table in front of him.

  Bezio noticed him, too.

  “He’s just a nutter,” Mircea said, hopefully too low for human ears.

  “They’re mages. They’re all—” Bezio stopped himself in time.

  But he clearly wasn’t happy.

  Mircea wasn’t, either, and he was also starting to think that maybe they had the wrong bar. “If this Hieronimo doesn’t show up soon, we’ll go, all right?”

  “Define soon,” Bezio muttered.

  “How about now?” Mircea asked, tensing, as the nutter in the corner got up and came staggering over—

  Into a man seated at their table, who hadn’t been there a second ago.

  Bezio cursed and jumped up, only to hit his head on the low ceiling, causing him to curse some more. Mircea flinched, but remained seated. Jerome did, too, but he edged over slightly, since the stool the man was sitting on—which also hadn’t been there until it suddenly was—had ended up a little too close for comfort.

  The man held out a hand. “Give it to me,” he said dryly.

  It took Mircea a second to realize that he wasn’t talking to any of them.

  The nutter did some insane muttering.

  “Don’t make me ask again,” the man told him, and snapped his fingers.

  The creature, which had such long, filthy gray hair that any features were completely obscured, put out an equally filthy hand. It had long, thick, cracked, and yellowed nails. And held something that it dropped into the mage’s palm.

  Something that gave a little gasp and then curled up into ashes as it spontaneously combusted.

  Suddenly, Mircea really wanted to get out of there.

  “Banned for a month,” the mage said shortly.

  The creature gave a shocked cry and started arguing. Mircea didn’t catch much, but the gist seemed to be that there were three of them so there was plenty to go around. Bezio cursed and got up again, this time going around to the door.

  “If you leave, he’ll only ambush you in the alley,” the mage said, as the gray thing turned to look at Bezio with renewed interest.

  Bezio sat down.

  The gray creature finally shuffled out, still muttering, and the mage turned to look at them. “I was with another client. My apologies.”

  Mircea didn’t much like his tone, which belied his words, or the oily smile that went along with it. But at least he looked fa
irly normal. Just a man in his early forties, too pasty to be local, with a short trimmed brown beard and pale blue eyes.

  Mircea didn’t like them, either.

  But he needed information, and clearly this man was a mage. And if he was the right one, he knew his business. According to Cook, anyway.

  “You are Hieronimo?” Mircea asked—doubtfully, because the man didn’t look Italian.

  “Sometimes,” he said easily.

  “What kind of an answer is that?” Bezio demanded.

  “We take turns.”

  “What the—”

  “The pub—excuse me, tavern—was started by a man of that name, oh, two hundred years ago now,” the man told them. “When he died, he left it to his assistant, who kept using the name out of respect. The . . . association . . . that controls it now has kept up the tradition, but no one’s here all the time so we trade off. I’m Hieronimo for this evening.” He raised an eyebrow. “Is this what you came to ask?”

  “We came to ask about poison,” Mircea said, and the man suddenly beamed.

  “Oh, good. One of my fields of expertise. Who—or what—do you wish to kill?”

  “No one!”

  “Oh,” he looked slightly disappointed. “Then how can I help you?”

  “We want to know about poisons for vampires. Poisons that would work on vampires, that is.”

  “Most of them will work, if you can get them into the bugger,” the man said cheerfully.

  Bezio growled something under his breath.

  “I meant undetectable poisons,” Mircea said.

  “There aren’t any.”

  “None?”

  “Not for your kind. Not that we’ve ever found, in any case.” The man looked wistful.

  “There has to be,” Jerome said. “My old master was poisoned, and we never knew how.”

  “Oh, I never said it couldn’t be done,” the mage told him. “Simply that there are no poisons a vampire can’t detect if he’s paying attention. But there are always ways if you’re determined.”