Masks (15 page)

It had gotten soggy from the fighting and splashing and almost capsizing, but it didn’t matter. Not with the large amount of orange team members climbing up to join the crew on the covered area, and holding the banner out for all to see. It was a beautifully embroidered piece of orange silk, with fringe as long as a man’s forearm. The embroidery and the fringe were both gold and flashed blindingly bright in the sun, like the broad smiles on the victors’ faces.

And like something else, which suddenly gleamed in the sky overhead.

Mircea couldn’t see it clearly, couldn’t see much of anything, because the mirror abruptly whited out. As if the person guiding it had suddenly decided to stare straight into the sun. Which wasn’t far from the truth, he realized, when the image returned.

But with a very different scene.

The victorious barge was now gone. In its place was a gutted, smoking hull, still moving through momentum toward the flotilla of boats. Which were just sitting there, not even trying to get out of the way, the onlookers appearing frozen in place by shock.

They didn’t stay that way for long.

Some dots in the water surfaced, in some cases floating motionlessly on the waves, but in others screaming, pleading for help. Help which several of the ships made tentative motions toward giving. Until something gleamed against the clouds again, bright as a mirror in the heavens, or a diamond flashing in the sun.

And then a ripple of heat tore through the air, turning the nearest would-be rescue ship into a tower of flame.

The crowd in the room watched the gruesome events play out in complete silence. Unlike the crowd on the docks, who screamed, almost in unison, as everyone broke out of the frozen shock that had briefly rooted them in place. And started to run.

Suddenly, richly dressed people were jostling, fighting, and scrambling back down the dock, heedless to the damage to their fine attire. Or to their persons. Or to other persons who happened to be in the way.

Clothes were ripped, flesh was clawed, and fists connected to vulnerable noses. A number of the dainty sex were knocked to the ground in the confusion. Only to jump back up, snarling, because there’s no such thing as a dainty vampire. As they demonstrated by jerking their attackers, and anyone else they could reach, behind them. Or, in a few cases, knocking them off the side of the pier entirely. The person controlling the spell was one of the latter, who was sent flying by some woman’s elbow.

Luckily, he landed in the soft sand beside the dock.

Unluckily, he thereby demonstrated a faster exit to the increasingly panicked crowd.

The view juddered again and again as he was half trampled by a flood of people leaping in front, beside, and in a few cases, on top of him. And then it blanked entirely when his face was smashed into the sand by someone’s clumsy foot. For a minute, Mircea was afraid that they would see no more.

But then they were treated to an inverted, death mask impression of a face carved out of sand, and then to a grainy, up-close view of the panicked beach as the man raised his head. Mircea knew it was a man because a pair of male hands had become visible, grabbing the wet sand ahead of him. And then throwing it behind him, startling the crowd enough to give him a brief second of respite.

Mircea assumed he would use it to run like everyone else, and just hoped they would see a few glimpses of what was happening as he looked around. But he seemed more dedicated to his job than Mircea had expected. Instead of trying to flee, he dropped to the ground out of the main path of the escaping horde, and then rolled—under the dock.

It was low to the ground, leaving him with only a few feet of clearance above his head, even when lying down. And visibility was poor due to the lack of light, and the bodies jumping down on either side, blocking the view. But there were flashes between the running legs and swirling skirts, and bright sunlight that streamed down from tiny cracks in between the boards, striping his, and thus their, view. But it gave enough light to see by as his eyes adjusted.

After a moment, he began to crawl. Giving them first a view of overgrown weeds, then of waves hitting the beach, and then, finally, of the open ocean as he reached the end of the dock. Where a gap in some reeds showed a scene of utter chaos on the water.

Three of the ships packed with partygoers were now aflame, with the others in full flight. Or trying to be so. But like the people on the dock, many of whom could be heard still running and thumping around above the watcher’s head, they were all trying to leave at once. Resulting in almost as much damage as the strange sunbolts were doing.

Mircea watched as ships scraped the sides of each other’s hulls, ran into each other in mid-flight, and became tangled in one another’s anchor lines. People shouted commands and, in some cases, boarded other people’s ships to argue their point, where miniature versions of the official fights quickly broke out. And all of this amid a forest of oars that sprouted here and there, as rowers tried to push off from the surrounding vessels, only to find that there was nowhere to go.

Then a fourth ship went up like a candle.

A few vampires managed to jump free of the exploding hulk in time to avoid being completely incinerated. But the sight of burning flesh and flying debris was enough to cause complete panic. All of a sudden, the ships were forgotten, with people abandoning them to jump into the water in all directions, not caring if they were facing land or not, just so they distanced themselves from what looked like the wrath of an angry god.

It wasn’t far from the truth, Mircea realized, as the watcher turned his eyes up. To where a small creature could just be seen through a knothole in the boards, still sitting on his throne. Alone except for a phalanx of bodyguards he clearly didn’t need.

His face was visible now, and it was nothing like the rest of him. His body was small, bent, unassuming. Other than for the fine robes he wore, Mircea might have mistaken him for one of the beggars that flocked to Venice in festival season. But the face . . .

“He’s something like five thousand years old,” Marte whispered, into Mircea’s ear.

“Five—” Mircea twisted his head to look at her. “Paulo said three.” Which had been hard enough to believe.

“Paulo is wrong. They say he was born before the pyramids, if you can believe it.”

Mircea thought about the senator’s comments on the reliability of the mysterious “they,” but didn’t voice them. Because he also remembered her saying something else. Something about her master existing “before there was much of anything.”

Mircea stared at the small creature, trying to wrap his head around that kind of age. It didn’t work. He’d never even thought in terms of such a stretch of years before. But if he had . . .

That face might have been what he’d have imagined.

It was the color of old mahogany, but burnished, like petrified wood. It had high cheekbones, a nose that would have done a pharaoh proud, a high, intelligent forehead, a square jaw, and a resolute chin. But none of those were what had Mircea’s skin feeling as though it would like to crawl off his body.

No, that was down to the eyes.

Huge and dark, they glittered under heavy brow ridges like black diamonds, flooded with power. Mircea wasn’t there anymore, and even if he had been, the events he was seeing were long over. He knew that, reminded himself of it strongly. And yet . . . he felt the power of that gaze.

Across space, across time, he still felt it. In the suddenly heavier air in the room, like a storm had blown in. In the nervous twinges that crawled up his spine, the ones that felt a lot like fear. In the pressure that seemed to be pinning him to the bed, holding him down.

He fought against it, forced his limbs to respond, but they were sluggish. As if they knew he couldn’t stand against something like that, even if he didn’t. The senators’ combined aura had been frightening, that night in the Rialto. But this . . .

“If he isn’t a god, he should be,” Mircea muttered.

“A vengeful god,” Bezio said, from behind him. “Look at him—he’s enjoying it!”

There was no denying it. The eyes might hold millennia of accumulated power, but they were full of something else, too. Excitement, joy, even glee as he watched the spectacle, one there was no doubt at all that he was causing. The same light that glittered in the heavens was reflected in those terrible eyes, and every time they flashed, the screams intensified.

Mircea was suddenly glad he couldn’t see what else was happening.

“They say he can magnify sunlight,” Marte told him unnecessarily. “Concentrate it in one area. Like a child holding a shard of glass over an anthill.”

“Yes, but we’re the ants!” Bezio said, as the chaos on the water finally reached the shore.

New screams broke out, and the view shifted as the watcher jerked his head around. And allowed them to see a dozen or more of the orange team struggling up on shore.
No,
Mircea thought, gripping the bed coverings,
not now.

“No, no, run!” one of the girls by Marte yelled. And then looked around, embarrassed, because of course they couldn’t hear.

“What the hell were they doing?” Bezio exploded. “Did they
want
to die?”

“They must have been the ones knocked clear before the catastrophe,” Paulo said, from near the headboard, his usually pink complexion pale.

“That doesn’t explain what the damned fools are doing there now!” Bezio said, as vampires waded or crawled out of the sea, onto wet sand. “They could stay under the waves, try to hide, at least!”

But they weren’t hiding. They were standing. Or kneeling in a few cases, looking about in confusion. As if wondering where their reception was. They’d just won, hadn’t they? They’d just defeated their rivals and won the acclaim of their peers, along with bragging rights for the next two years. Plus whatever gifts the consul had in store. Yet all they saw were fleeing people, expensive banners trodden in the grass, and an almost deserted pier.

Almost, but not quite.

“They couldn’t swim,” Mircea said, his lips numb, because he knew what was coming. “And with no air in their lungs, they wouldn’t float as easily as humans. They probably walked along the bottom.”

“They don’t know,” Zaneta said shrilly. “My God, they don’t know! Why doesn’t somebody get them out of there?”

That’s why,
Mircea thought, as what looked like the breath of a dragon rippled through the air, from right above where the watcher was hidden. It flooded his view, giving the whole scene an ironic underwater quality for a moment. Ironic, because through the distortion, they saw the first survivor flare up like a Roman candle.

He burned with a brilliant fire, in a strangely beautiful column of incandescent light. But he didn’t burn for long. A moment later, what had been a living being guttered out in a flutter of ash, leaving nothing but an ugly mark on the sand.

Zaneta screamed, others gasped, a few cursed. But Mircea sat transfixed—horrified, but unable to look away. Even as columns of fire bloomed everywhere, catching the suddenly running vampires as they scattered across the sand.
Like ants under a shard of glass,
Mircea heard again, as one by one, they were picked off.

And so were the stragglers in the water. For a moment, the sky was filled with twinkling stars, and the air was filled with crisscrossing bands of deadly heat. And they didn’t seem to care what they caught in the search for their elusive goals.

Water boiled in spots, sending up vast geysers of steam into the sky. An olive tree, in between the consul and one of his victims, was bisected, the incinerated leaves falling around the burning trunk. The mast of one of the ships was likewise sliced clean in two, before falling over onto another ship, setting several of the passengers aflame in the process.

And then there was the palazzo.

Marte’s hand tightened on his shoulder, hard enough to hurt, as one of the enhanced sunrays suddenly sheared off from the rest and struck the building. Or no, Mircea realized a moment later, it struck something
on
the building. Specifically, on the terrace, where a dome of energy crackled and spit under the sudden attack.

Crackled and spit . . . but held.

And then the watcher, whoever he was, decided that dedication was one thing, but this was starting to look more like suicide. He looked around frantically, left and right, making his audience dizzy. And then he took off, scrambling like a crab underneath the dock as far as he could fit, and then crawling out the opposite side and sprinting for who knew where. Because the images blanked out briefly, before shifting back to the bird’s-eye view, likely the only one left.

But even the bird wasn’t sticking around. The group on the bed received one last skewed view of smoking ships, fleeing people, and crackling bursts of power. . . . And a lone senator standing at the terrace railing, dark hair flowing in the wind, staring expressionlessly down at her master.

And then the spell abruptly winked out.

A few minutes later, Mircea was lying on the slope of the roof, staring up at the vast array of stars overhead. Marte had broken out the wine as soon as the broadcast ended, and everyone else had seemed ready to hunker down for a good gossip. Or a good sketch in the case of some of the girls, who had wanted to get the dresses down while they were fresh in their minds.

“Life goes on,” Paulo had said cynically, watching them. Before he left with the cook, to inform the servants that they’d be dining alone tonight. It appeared that everyone else had lost their appetites.

And so had their clients, apparently. A few long-term patrons would be seen individually later on, but the majority of the clientele had found other things to do tonight. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps the next day, business would resume as usual. In fact, Marte had said that she expected a rush of people eager to reaffirm their status among the living in the most primal way possible. But for tonight, the house was as quiet as it ever became.

Although not nearly enough for Mircea.

He had declined the wine party, to cries of disappointment from people eager to pick his brain for juicy details. He didn’t have any details—they’d just seen more than he had—and he’d needed to get away. From the stuffy, too full room, from the babble of conversation that had immediately broken out, and from the questions that swirled in his mind.

Although the latter hadn’t proven possible.

He had a thousand questions, but not about the orange team’s blunder, which seemed to be what everyone else wanted to discuss. Despotism was apparently one of those things that outlived the grave, and while the attack had been shocking, it had not been all that surprising. At least, not to him.

Perhaps the victors had been caught up in the moment. Perhaps they hadn’t thought about how it would look. But ripping down the banner of a five-thousand-year-old madman with delusions of godhood in favor of your own was not a healthy choice, any way you looked at it.

No, it was other questions that were bothering Mircea. One in particular that wouldn’t leave him alone, even though there wasn’t a damned thing he could do about it. But his brain didn’t seem to know that.

And his brain wanted to know: Why had the consul gone after his own child?

And he had gone after her—there was no doubt of that. Perhaps he had intended to pass it off afterwards as a mistake, something done in the heat of the moment, a single bolt gone wild. But it hadn’t been a mistake. Not unless Mircea was supposed to believe that it just happened to take place in the instant when she was most distracted, in the one moment when anyone would be least likely to be on guard?

Not to mention that he’d seen the accuracy of the creature’s other blows. He’d picked off single vampires
under the water
a third of a mile away. He could control his gift with frightening precision.

And he had deliberately sent it against her.

But why? There had been no provocation on her part that Mircea had noticed. Even if her master’s overweening pride demanded that she be on hand to witness the ceremony, it hadn’t begun yet. And in the end, there had been no ceremony, had there?

By the time he was finished, there had been no victors left to crown.

In any case, if her presence was expected, Mircea doubted she would have been lingering on the terrace with him. They’d had all day for a dalliance. There had been no reason for it to take place then unless she assumed she was free to do as she liked.

No, she hadn’t provoked it. And there had been no fleeing orange team members on the rooftop. So why the attack?

The only time he had seen the two of them together had been at the Rialto, when she’d helped to curtail the consul’s idea of fun. But surely, he wouldn’t kill her for
that?
For chasing off a few street urchins?

Unless it wasn’t the first time. Unless she’d made a habit of trying to rein in his excesses. Unless . . .

Mircea shook his head in frustration. He didn’t have enough information to know. But he knew one thing: That attack hadn’t been meant as a warning. It had been meant to kill, and it had very nearly succeeded.

His hand crept up to his still burning face.

Very nearly.

The window beside him suddenly opened and Bezio’s curly head stuck out. They looked at each other for a moment, not saying anything. Then the older vamp sighed and climbed out.

He didn’t ask if Mircea wanted company. Or wine. He just set a decanter on the grimy old tiles, pulled the stopper, and filled one of the two glasses he carried, the delicate stems looking strange next to his work-callused hand.

Mircea took the wine. He told himself that it was because Bezio couldn’t pour his own until he’d passed over the other glass, but in truth, he wanted some. Useless, as far as taste went, and it certainly wouldn’t get him drunk. But tonight . . . tonight he needed a drink.

They sat in silence for a while, the quiet city becoming quieter as candles were snuffed out in more and more windows. But there was still plenty of light from the arc of stars blooming overhead, the Via Lactea as the Italians called it. Not that they relied on it to light their way.

Man-made lights softened the darkness in patches all along the horizon. As they would most of the night in some quarters. The Venetians stayed up later than his own people, who preferred to be indoors as soon as the sun went down.

He’d often wondered how vampires managed in the old country. Where could you go, after dark? There were scattered taverns, of course, and a few inns and bathhouses in the cities. But for the most part life stopped at dusk.

His people knew what walked in the night.

But he’d heard stories, even as a boy, of a different world. A world where night burned as bright as day. A world of wonders.

His hometown of
Sighisoara, and later his father’s capitol of
Târgoviste, were both important trading centers. And Venice was one of his country’s main trading partners, with an insatiable appetite for Wallachian grain and meat, honey and wax. In return, the fleet of ships they sent each year brought beautiful cloth, luxury goods, and the finest of weapons. One of his earliest gifts from his father had been a Venetian crossbow, made in the famous Arsenal shipyard.

And, of course, the sailors on the ships had talked, as sailors always do. And the merchants who dealt with them had carried their tales back to dull Sighisoara, with its high walls and looming fortress of dark gray stone. To enchant a little boy with tales of a
different kind of city.

A city with no walls, no guard towers, and no battlements. A city lying open and gleaming among the sapphire waves, like a glittering jewel. A city said to be the richest in all Europe yet protected only by the sea—and by its fantastic fleet of three thousand ships, a wooden wall stronger than anything built out of stone.

They spoke of a city so clean that it seemed to gleam in the sunlight, washed clear of the scents he was used to by the daily tide. A city of lacy pink stone palaces built in the Byzantine fashion, so light they appeared to float on the water, their arches picked out with real gold leaf. A city of warm winds and flowering vines and wealth beyond his wildest imaginings.

A city that never slept.

Wide-eyed, he’d listened to tales of masked balls taking place in brilliantly lit palazzos that shed ribbons of light onto dark water. Of gaily decorated barges and flotillas of smaller boats that ferried partygoers in between them. Of banquets to rival those of old Rome, with so many courses that the diners couldn’t possibly finish before midnight. Of firework displays that turned night into brilliant day.

He hadn’t believed most of the stories, of course, assuming that they were being exaggerated to entertain him. Arsenal couldn’t produce a ship in a day—everyone knew that took months! And a few silt mounds at the mouth of the Po River couldn’t support a population of 150,000—only Paris had so many! And the peasants, was he really expected to believe that they ate beef, and sugared sweets, and had paintings decorating their houses?

It was absurd.

It had been a shock, then, to find out that not only were the stories true, but that he hadn’t been told the half of it. Venice was a city unlike any other in the world. And a vampire’s dream.

Or it should have been.

Mircea drank wine.

Along with the abundant nightlife, there was the plus of having a constant stream of people coming and going. Carnival lasted nearly six weeks, from the day after Christmas to Ash Wednesday, and other feasts and saints’ days dotted the calendar, well into the summer. And even in the “quiet” months, merchants and sightseers came and went, along with sailors from the thousands of ships that used the harbor each year.

There was no need to drink from the same person twice. No need to fear anyone suspecting you. Add to that the fact that Venice was the most diverse city in all of Europe, the most cultured, the most urbane . . .

If ever a city was designed for his kind, it was this one.

And yet what had he found when he finally arrived? Not a dream but a nightmare. And one that, apparently, never ended.

Mircea had spent two years believing that it was his weakness that kept him constantly wary, perpetually afraid. He had assumed that those of his kind who were able to gain enough wealth and power could insulate themselves from that sort of thing. He had clung to the hope that perhaps, if he somehow managed to survive long enough, he, too, might find some kind of peace.

Until tonight had shattered that last illusion, and left him reeling.

“No one person should have that much power,” Mircea said harshly, finally breaking the silence.

Bezio shot him a glance over his wineglass. “That’s something I didn’t expect to hear from you.”

Mircea frowned at him. “Why?”

“Didn’t your father have that much power? Don’t nobles in general? They make the wars; we fight ’em. It’s how the world works.”

“This wasn’t a war.”

“People died.” Bezio shrugged. “For one man’s whim. Call it what you will, it’s the same to those poor bastards on the shore—or what’s left of them.”

“It wasn’t a war,” Mircea insisted, more strongly. “You called it rightly—it was a whim. The jealous whim of a madman who wanted all the applause, all the adoration, for himself.”

Or one who wanted an excuse to remove a problem,
he thought darkly. Could the consul have killed all those people, dozens of them—people who had assembled to honor him no less—just as an excuse to attack one of his senators? He didn’t know, but he grimly decided it was possible.

In fact, knowing court politics, it was more than possible.

“And your point is?” Bezio asked.

“That no one should have that much power! Yes, people die in war, but at least it has to be debated, nobles have to be convinced, supplies assembled, negotiations made for safe passage for an army. . . . A hundred chances to turn back, to rethink—”

“Which no one ever does.”

“Some do. And even when they don’t—” Mircea shook his head. “At least there’s usually some point to it. That was slaughter today. Senseless, thoughtless, a useless waste of life! What will become of us if this is the best we can do?”

“What becomes of the humans?” Bezio asked cynically. “They slaughter each other all the time, yet they stumble on, year after year—”

“But don’t you want to do more than stumble?” Mircea turned to him abruptly, enough to make the old terra-cotta tiles underneath them shift dangerously. “To be more than what we were?”

“Careful, son,” Bezio said. “Or we’ll finish our drink in the drink.”

“I don’t want to be careful!” Mircea said passionately. “I’m tired of being careful! Of hiding in the dark, of waiting . . . for what? To continue in death the same patterns I knew in life? To see centuries come and go and the same stupidity repeat itself?”

“As opposed to?”

“Something new, something
better
! We have all eternity, and this is what we do with it? Refine our cruelty?”

“Seems to be a popular choice,” Bezio said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

Mircea didn’t smile back. “We should be better,” he insisted. “We could be better.”

“Not with that creature on the throne,” Bezio said, suddenly serious. And so softly that Mircea could barely hear him. Even right beside him, even with vampire hearing.

Because Bezio wasn’t stupid. And he was afraid. So was Mircea, and he was sick to death of it.

He just didn’t know what to do about it.