Masks

  He stared her down, and she sighed.

  “And then there are pastes designed to soften the hair, so that it just sloughs off.”

  “Sloughs off?” Mircea asked, perking up. Because he was next.

  “Mmmhmm. You paste it where you want the hair to fall out, leave it for a short time and then just wash it off.”

  “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

  Bezio didn’t look convinced. “And how does that kill me?” he demanded.

  “Well, they do use arsenic in the mix—”

  “Arsenic?”

  “—along with quicklime and rock alum, but it’s the arsenic that does the trick. Well, as long as you wash it off soon enough. Otherwise you can burn yourself there, too—”

  “Burn myself, hell!” He stared at her. “I can die! Are you trying to poison me, woman?”

  “You’re already dead,” Mircea pointed out.

  “And don’t want to get any deader!”

  “My point was that I don’t believe we can be poisoned.”

  “Oh, we can be, yes,” Marte said, nodding enough to make her curls bounce. “Although it’s really rare. You’d have to ingest a great deal.” She glanced at Bezio. “Of course, considering how much hair we’re talking about here—”

  “Just rip the damned stuff out,” Bezio said, scowling. “It may hurt, but at least I’ll survive the process!”

  “Well, that’s what I was doing,” she said, looking disappointed that he wasn’t as enthusiastic about her hobby as she was.

  “Why not just use a glamourie?” Mircea asked, talking about the spells that vampires, and some mages, used to change their appearance. “And dispense with all of this?”

  “Sure, why not?” Jerome asked, a little desperately.

  The slight-built blond currently had no fewer than three attendants hovering around him, probably because he was the closest of them all to the Venetian ideal. And the slender, youthful body and thin, boyish face didn’t appear to have plumped up much, even after feeding. Of course, it was hard to tell. Since it currently had cold cream slathered all over it, while some noxious smelling substance was being combed through his hair.

  “It’s only lye,” a severe-looking woman told him, when he protested.

  “B-but they washed me last night—”

  “And you’ll wash every night, from now on.”

  “Every—” he looked horrified. “My skin will come off!”

  “It’ll be another few layers before we hit skin.” The voice was dry.

  “This isn’t about getting you clean,” Auria told him. She was in charge of this operation, with Marte being there, Mircea had gathered, for her hirsute expertise. “It’s to take that awful color off, so we can replace it with something better.”

  “W-what color?” Jerome asked, a tentative hand going to his head, only to get it smacked by the attendant.

  Auria motioned to one of the other women, who had been mixing something in a small pot. “Let me see.” The pot of stuff was brought over for inspection. “More saffron,” she said determinedly. “It’s not like we can sit him in the sun until it bleaches properly.” Bright blue eyes narrowed on him. “And what about those teeth?”

  The blond put a hand up to cover his discolored front teeth, only to have it smacked again. “We’ve already tried tooth powder—twice,” one of the attendants told her. “But it’s not a stain; the teeth must have been going bad when he was Changed, and now the color’s fixed. We can try again, but—”

  “Enamel them,” Auria said firmly.

  “Why not use a glamourie?” Mircea asked again. He was currently having his hair trimmed, to bring it to the correct, slightly-below-shoulder-length style that suited current Venetian tastes. But Marte was already eyeing him as she denuded poor Bezio, whose watery eyes were making clear how much he was enjoying the process.

  “Because we have two types of clients,” Marte told him, ripping off another strip of hair. “The first is easy. Wealthy merchants or visiting pilgrims who come to us for a taste of the exotic. Or, sometimes, for cavaliers to help them entertain their wives, who are often decades younger.”

  Jerome frowned. “You . . . you mean, they want us to . . .”

  “They prefer to know who their wives are with,” Auria said briskly. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “No!”

  “You’re thinking of love matches. These aren’t,” Marte told him kindly.

  Auria agreed. “Most of the men are as bored with the wives they married for money or family alliances as the wives are with them. They’re happy to find lovers to keep the little minxes out of trouble, rather than have them come up with their own—and in the process possibly ruin the family name.”

  Marte nodded. “Better to choose someone for them, someone discreet, someone professional, who can be paid to go away if the relationship becomes a problem. Or who can help persuade the wives of something the husbands wish them to do.”

  “Danieli managed to convince one she didn’t want a summer home in Este just the other day,” Auria added. “Winning himself a sizeable reward from the grateful husband. He hasn’t stopped crowing about it yet.”

  “Of course, you need training for that sort of thing. And for how to squire the young women about town, and how to dance properly, and how to bow—”

  “Bow?” Jerome looked lost.

  “Oh, yes! It’s an art, really: how deeply and for which person and on what occasion—”

  “And the newly rich never get it right,” Auria laughed. “Some of our gentlemen callers actually end up paying more for lessons than they do for companionship!”

  “Paulo’s a bowing master,” Marte nodded. “He has a number of young men who come to him for instruction.”

  “In how to bow,” Jerome said, as if he still didn’t believe it.

  “Yes, and you’ll have to learn, too,” Auria told him. “You’ll be expected to accompany ladies to social events and not embarrass them—or us! And to shop for them in the Rialto, and to bargain for them with merchants . . .”

  “I understand that some things have to be learned,” Mircea said, as Marte finished torturing Bezio’s chest. “But we were talking about looks, and a glamourie would surely be—”

  “Too expensive,” Auria said decisively. “Illusion can smooth out small problems, yes, but the more a face or figure must be altered, the more costly it is. Particularly on an ongoing basis. Not to mention—”

  But Mircea didn’t get to hear the rest of her comment, because Marte had just slapped Bezio’s thigh. “Good job. Now drop the towel and bend over.”

  “What?” Bezio looked understandably confused. And then scandalized, as her meaning set in. He started backing away when she reached for his towel.

  “It’s no good,” she told him, following. “You can’t go about like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “With thighs that hairy, there’s no way it doesn’t extend all the way up.” She motioned for a couple of male attendants when Bezio dodged another grab for his towel.

  “It doesn’t!” he declared, clutching it in a panic.

  “Then show me.”

  “No! No, damn it! Get away from me!”

  “You can’t be a proper courtesan with a hairy bum,” Marte grinned, as the attendants fanned out, blocking his only avenue of escape.

  “Then I’ll be an improper one!”

  “At least you get to stay mostly natural in front,” she wheedled. “We women are expected to lose it all, or be considered as common as a market girl.”

  “Yes, but . . . but that’s not the same thing!”

  “How so?”

  “You’re women.”

  Mircea winced, and Marte’s eyes narrowed. “And?”

  “And I won’t be made to look like a woman!”

  Au
ria snorted, looking over his muscular, stocky frame. “No chance there.”

  “Women, men—it doesn’t matter now,” Marte told him. “You’re a vampire. The only thing that matters is power.” The smile returned as the attendants pounced. “Or lack of it.”

  A lot of yelling, thumping, and cursing followed, none of which daunted a determined Marte and her little spatula. Mircea looked away in deference to his companion’s discomfort. And met Auria’s smirking face instead.

  “Not to mention?” he prompted.

  “As Marte said, we have two types of clients,” she told him. “For humans, glamouries are fine, if expensive. But most vampires won’t permit them, not even for minor imperfections.”

  Marte nodded, setting her earrings to chiming as she slathered up poor Bezio. “Too many times, some assassin has hidden under a glamourie, and then when they have someone in a vulnerable position . . .” She drew a pretend line across her neck, and then promptly ruined it by laughing at Mircea’s expression. “It doesn’t happen anymore,” she told him.

  “It would if anyone thought they could get away with it,” Auria said. “But the vamps around here are too careful for that, these days. They want to know who they’re getting. And that means no glamouries.”

  “Then what about Sanuito?” Jerome asked. “Without a glamourie . . .” He didn’t finish the thought, but the point was made. Between the heavily pockmarked skin and the buckteeth and the unprepossessing features, only a glamourie could help Sanuito.

  “Oh, him.” Auria looked up from mixing something in a bowl to roll her eyes.

  “The mistress is going to use him as her assistant,” Marte said, more charitably.

  “Her assistant . . . for what?” Jerome asked, looking faintly envious.

  Marte laughed. “Cosmetic making, silly! She makes most of the ones we use here.”

  “She has terribly dry skin,” Auria added, with some satisfaction. “None of the stuff in the shops worked for her.”

  “So she decided to make her own, and now it’s branched out into all sorts of things,” Marte enthused.

  “Luckily,” Auria said dryly. “Paulo would have a fit if we had to buy all the stuff we use.”

  “Why would Paulo care?” Mircea asked, eyeing Auria, who had finished her concoction and was now approaching.

  “He’s Martina’s spenditore. He keeps the accounts around here,” she told him. “And tries to keep us in the black.”

  “Like that ever works!” Marte laughed, doing something that made Bezio howl.

  “She’ll keep Sanuito busy,” Auria added, slathering some of her noxious brew onto a long strip of cloth.

  “But doesn’t that sort of thing take a long time to learn?” Jerome asked, looking envious. Maybe because Sanuito had just gotten a pass out of the rose-scented torture chamber.

  “Not all of it. He was grinding some mother-of-pearl for eye shadow last time I saw him. But he won’t make much doing that.”

  “And do we make much?” Jerome asked, suddenly more interested.

  “Depends on how good you are!” Auria told him. She slapped the gooey length of cloth onto the middle of Mircea’s chest.

  He closed his eyes.

  “And whether you get a wealthy patron or two,” Marte added. “That’s what you want to work toward. Individual clients are all well and good, but real wealth comes from repeat customers. They get attached and, well, with the senate in town—”

  “We’re going to make so much money!” Auria said gleefully. And ripped half of Mircea’s chest hair off.

  Chapter Six

  “We’re going to lose so much money,” Paulo groused, consulting his little notebook as he and Mircea hurried down the street.

  “I thought . . . the idea . . . was to make money,” a newly golden-blond Jerome panted, coming up behind them.

  He was pushing the cart they needed to bring home the load of items that were apparently necessary for running a quality establishment. It was empty at the moment, and therefore not remotely heavy, although that shouldn’t have made a difference. “You don’t actually have to breathe anymore,” Mircea reminded him.

  “I know,” Jerome wheezed. “But every time . . . I try not to . . . I pass out.”

  “You can’t pass out,” Paulo said, irritably. “You’re a vampire.”

  “Yes, now,” Jerome said. “But a year ago I was human—”

  “A year?” Mircea asked. For some reason, he’d assumed that he was the youngest of their group. Maybe because he didn’t see how a year-old vampire had survived three weeks in the tender care of the Watch.

  But Jerome was nodding. “I was Changed shortly before my master died. It’s one reason I was . . . that is, nobody knew me all that well, and—”

  “But you’re here now,” Paulo said, looking critically at the miniature version of himself, who was habited elegantly enough in a short mantle of rich brown brocade, but who, it had to be admitted, was ruining it with a fish-out-of-water expression. “You are representing our house. Stop that ridiculous puffing!”

  “I told you—I’ve tried. But every time I do, I turn blue.”

  “And I’ve told you, that isn’t possible!”

  “Well, it’s actually more of a lavend—erp.” Jerome shut up abruptly, as his air passages were cut off by an irate vampire.

  “Let’s test a theory, shall we?” Paulo asked sweetly.

  Mircea leaned against the side of a wall to wait it out. The Ave Maria bell, which rang at sunset, had already sounded, supposedly signaling the close of the market day. Not that everyone always followed the official hours, particularly at this time of year, with so many eager purchasers roaming the streets. But the later it became, the worse their chances for filling their exhaustive list was going to be.

  “The shops will close soon,” he said mildly.

  “Not if you know who to see,” Paulo replied, as Jerome wriggled and flailed and kicked the air, because he was being held about a foot off the brick walkway. “Although it might be better for us if they did.”

  “It’s that bad?”

  Paulo flipped his notebook open one handed. “In the last week alone—and this is in addition to the usual expenses, mind you—we have spent: ten ducats for the fur lining to a cape, six more for six yards of Rhenish linen—highway robbery, that—eighteen ducats each for three turquoise gems, twenty ducats for a quantity of Spanish leather gloves and cedar oil for scenting them, the same for a taffeta coverlet lined with swan’s down that Marte simply had to have, and an utterly ridiculous eighty ducats for eight yards of iridescent Ormesine. And that doesn’t even count what we paid to that thief of a tailor to outfit you lot on the quick. I could have done it three times over for that price at auction—”

  “But finding auctions takes time.”

  “Which we don’t have, and he somehow knew it, the fiend. And we’re supposed to be the monsters!”

  Jerome gurgled something.

  “Oh, yes,” Paulo said. “And sixteen soldini for a quantity of perfumed toothpicks Auria insisted upon after a friend informed her they existed! This,” he waggled the small book under Mircea’s nose, “is why Venice very sensibly has men do the shopping!”

  “Which we’re not currently doing,” Mircea pointed out.

  “And why is that?”

  “You were making a point?”

  Paulo looked confused for a moment, his mind still obviously on ducats and how few of them they were about to have. But he finally noticed a bug-eyed Jerome still dangling from his raised fist. His eyes closed. Then his fingers opened and a gasping, heaving, and yes, slightly blue vampire hit the road.

  And a moment later, so did they, hurrying to the Rialto before the last of the merchants packed up for the night.

  “All right,” Paulo said, as they approached the biggest shopping area of Venice. “W
e need: white wax candles, salted cheese, a songbird because Zaneta’s died and she’s been impossible ever since, sugar, pepper, fifteen boxes of assorted sweets, three ginger pine nut cakes, two cakes with violet syrup—”

  “Vampires don’t eat,” Mircea reminded him, wondering about all the foodstuffs.

  Their condition made a lot of senses stronger, but taste wasn’t one of them. Vampire bodies prioritized the use of power, preferring the vital over the merely pleasant, and taste wasn’t a huge advantage. He’d heard that it returned for masters, who had energy to burn, but he didn’t think that most of the household fell into that category.

  Nor that Martina was the type to feed her servants cake.

  “But our human clients do,” Paulo reminded him. “As do newly minted masters. In fact, they’re the worst. Once they can taste food again, they want the best of everything. Despite the fact that half of them were peasants the last time they could taste anything and can’t tell the difference between a decent red and watered down vinegar!”

  “Then why not serve them the vinegar?”

  He grimaced. “Because Martina won’t let me. She says some of them do know, and we’d damage our reputation—”

  “What reputation?” Jerome asked, looking confused.

  Paulo stopped mid-sentence to look at him.

  “We’re a brothel,” Jerome added helpfully.

  Mircea cleared his throat, but the hint failed to register.

  “I thought we just gave them a bit of the old, you know,” Jerome elaborated by waggling his hips back and forth suggestively, causing Paulo to look like he wanted to recommence strangling.

  “We are not a brothel!” he hissed, jerking the smaller vampire out of the road so that a cart full of farmers, who had been looking at them strangely, could pass.

  “We get paid for a tumble, don’t we?” Jerome asked. “So do they.” He pointed at a nearby bawdy house, of the kind that always congregated close to markets. “What’s the difference?”

  “The dif—” Paulo shut his eyes. “The difference is night and day! We are cortigianes, not puttana! We discuss art. And antiquities. And literature and music. We grace palazzos and mix perfectly with the owners and their guests. Auria writes poetry—”