Masks (23 page)

The wait ended the next night.

Mircea awoke to the feel of something hitting his chest. And to Paulo’s voice saying: “Get up. She wants you.”

He blinked his eyes open to find himself clutching a large, linen wrapped package—for an instant. Until it was snatched from his grasp and torn open. And something softer than down, something like a cloud in cloth form, was spilling over the bed.

“Oh,” someone breathed, as Mircea’s eyes finally managed to focus.

He sat up, finding himself clasping a doublet of deep, midnight blue velvet. The pile was shot through with tiny threads of silver, and scattered along the threads were glittering objects that gleamed in the candlelight, like dark fire. He ran his fingers over them, and finally realized that he couldn’t see them well because they were the same color as the cloth—a blue so dark they were almost black.

As sapphires often are,
he thought dizzily.

And then Jerome—and it was Jerome, sitting on the bed, gray eyes huge—pulled out a length of snowy white linen—a shirt. It was massive, easily using as much material as a woman’s chemise. But it needed to be, to fit through the dozens of slashings on the doublet.

And then a matching suede and velvet
cioppa
appeared. And then a pair of hosen so fine and light that Mircea was concerned he might rip them just by holding them. But they stretched when he gave a tug, with a tensile strength he hadn’t expected.

There were other things, too—belt, shoes, gloves, even a hat. A velvet slouch with a jeweled buckle, the centerpiece a sapphire the size of his thumbnail. The whole together was an outfit a Doge might have envied—or a prince. And quite, quite illegal for someone of his current status to wear.

Fortunately, Venetians treated the sumptuary laws with the same respect they did the rest of the legal code.

“These are for me?” Mircea asked, looking up.

Paulo frowned at him. “Who else?”

“They’re from the senator?”

“Again, who else? Over there.” The last was directed at two maids who had just come in bearing hot water and towels, and making the tiny room exceedingly crowded.

Paulo looked at Jerome pointedly, but the smaller vampire didn’t budge.

“You said you didn’t ask for anything,” he said, looking covetously at the expensive pile on the bed.

“I didn’t.”

“You never said a word, and yet she sends you
this
?” Jerome clearly didn’t believe him.

That was all right; Mircea didn’t half believe it himself.

“She sent it because she wants him to look like he belongs at her table,” Paulo said, ducking his face into the basin.

Mircea finally noticed that the blond was only half dressed, and that his hair looked like birds had been nesting in it. He was also trying to shrug on clothes and make his ablutions even while bossing the two of them around. “Her table?” Mircea asked.

“We’re going to a party. Along with half the senators in town, apparently. So are you,” he added, scrubbing his face at Jerome. Who looked up, blinking.

“Me?
Me?
She asked for—”

“Don’t be absurd. She asked for him, and for two other courtiers to balance out her table. She’s having a banquet, and has too many women.”

“Senator . . . banquet . . . too many women . . .” Jerome’s eyes glazed.

It did not make Paulo happy.

“This could
make
us,” he said, snatching the other vampire up. “Or the opposite. If you can’t behave tonight—”

“Why would you assume that?” Jerome asked, affronted.

Paulo made a disgusted noise.

It was Jerome’s turn to scowl. “If you’re so concerned, why are you asking me?”

“You’re the only one left!” Paulo let go of Jerome to attack the rats nest on his head with a comb. “People of a certain station don’t trouble themselves with how much inconvenience they cause others. We were only just now informed, and the banquet starts in an hour! Danieli already left for an appointment, and there’s no way to fetch him back in time.”

“But I don’t have anything to wear—”

“You have two new suits!”

“—one of which needs mending and the other isn’t nearly fine enough for a senator’s table. But if I could borrow your green one—”

“The olive?”

“Don’t be silly, can you see my complexion in olive? The brocaded silver.”

“The hell you’re wearing the silver.”

“I need to send a note,” Mircea said, sitting up. And yawning.

“What? To who?”

“To a mage Cook knows—”

“A mage?” Paulo looked disgusted. “What do you want with one of them?”

“Nothing,” Jerome said, apparently seriously.

“And why is that?” Mircea asked.

“I met some of them, when we were investigating my master’s death. They’re . . . creepy.”

“We’re vampires.”

“Yes, but we’re not
weird
.”

Mircea stared at him.

“You know what I mean,” Jerome said crossly. “We’re humans with a disease. Like leprosy—”

“Speak for yourself,” Paulo said.

“—but we started out as normal people. They didn’t. And they only get worse with age.”

“But Cook says they deal in poisons, curses, that sort of thing,” Mircea said stubbornly. “And Sanuito wouldn’t have just gone off like—”

“Sanuito again,” Paulo rolled his eyes.

“—that for no reason. Not without so much as a note—”

“Are you sure he was literate?” Jerome asked.

“I don’t know what he was. But something set him off, made him crazed—”

“Well, it wasn’t poison.”

“He had an antidote!”

“Yes, so why didn’t he use it?”

“Who cares?” Paulo demanded. “Stop this nonsense and get dressed! The only place you’re going tonight is the senator’s table.”

“You may as well,” Jerome told him. “The mages won’t be any help.”

“How do you know? Cook says poison is one of their specialities,” Mircea said. “And there can’t be that many things that can kill one of us—”

“Well, of course there are,” Jerome said. “We still have a body, don’t we? It might not work the same way anymore—”

“That’s my point. We . . . we don’t need to breathe,” Mircea said, looking for an example. “Therefore anything that interferes with respiration—”

“Like cyanide.”

“Yes. It wouldn’t have an effect—”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Jerome leaned back against the bedpost. “Sure, we don’t have to worry about the same issues a human would. But just because it doesn’t affect us the same way doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful. Cyanide makes it harder for us to utilize the energy we get from blood. If a vampire takes enough of it, he’ll starve to death—unless his master can feed him what he needs until he recovers.”

“But Sanuito didn’t have a master.”

“He al’o din ‘tarve t’def,” Paulo said, around a mouth full of tooth polish.

“What?”

He spit into the water bowl. “He also didn’t starve to death. He went mad. Or something. And why aren’t you getting dressed?”

“Because I want to understand this!” Mircea said, frowning. “All right, are there any poisons that could drive a vampire mad?”

“Not that I know of,” Jerome said. “But that’s not really the question.”

“Then what is?”

“When we were trying to determine who killed my master, one of the questions we asked ourselves was how it was done. And we couldn’t figure it out. Take arsenic, for example. An amount the size of a pea will kill a human. And to them it’s colorless, tasteless, odorless—virtually undetectable. It’s why it’s so popular these days with cuckholded husbands and impatient heirs—”

“And your point?”

“That it’s tasteless
to humans
. Odorless
to humans
. We can detect it just fine, though, and in far smaller amounts than it would take to kill one of us.”

Paulo was nodding. “I heard about this duke—or prince or bishop, I don’t remember. But one evening at dinner, he picked up his wineglass and took a sip—and promptly went berserk. He jumped up and started screaming for an antidote, dancing around, claiming that somebody had poisoned him. His servant finally managed to calm him down by explaining that he’d cleaned the wine flask with vinegar earlier that day and forgotten to rinse it out, and that’s what he was tasting!”

He looked at them, smiling—until he noticed that they were just staring back. “What? It’s pertinent.”

“It is, in a way,” Jerome said. “Your duke, or whatever he was, was human, but a vampire would have reacted the same way to anyone trying to slip him something. Well, he’d have reacted that way and then slit their throat, but you get the idea. We had a group of our masters, the ones strong enough to resist minor poisoning, line up, and then we gave them wine that had miniscule amounts of various toxins in it, hoping to find out the smallest dose that could get through undetected.”

“And?” Mircea asked.

“We never did. We ran out of the ability to make the amounts any smaller before they ran out of the ability to taste them.”

“But Sanuito wasn’t a master. He couldn’t taste anything—”

“But he would have smelled it, Mircea—”

“—and your masters were expecting it. They were looking for it.”

Jerome shook his head. “We thought of that. So we tried it again a few weeks later, without telling them. And they had about the same reaction as your duke,” he told Paulo, who looked vindicated. “That’s why we finally decided it had to be magic.”

“And that’s why I need to see the mages.”

“You don’t need to see the mages,” Paulo said, irritably. “The bastards never tell anyone the truth. And, besides, nobody would have wanted to hex Sanuito! Any more than they would have wanted to poison him. You kill somebody you fear, somebody who’s a threat—”

“Yet he’s dead.”

“Yes. And you’re going to have to accept that, sooner or later—”

“Then what is your explanation?” Mircea asked stubbornly.

Paulo sighed. “Either that you’re wrong: he did want to kill himself, like the others who can’t adjust to this life. Or else the three weeks he spent starving in that damned cell turned his mind. It happens that way, for some.”

Mircea looked back and forth between the two of them, but Jerome was slowly nodding. “It makes the most sense, Mircea,” he said gently.

And it did; Mircea knew that.

But he’d also seen Sanuito’s face the night he died. And the previous one, when he’d tried to talk to an idiot who was too caught up in his own problems to listen. And he hadn’t been suicidal. He’d been afraid.

The question was, who had been afraid of Sanuito?

“Auria was right,” Jerome complained, adjusting himself. “These hosen have saggy butt.”

“Don’t touch yourself,” Paulo hissed, slapping Jerome’s hand away.

“I wasn’t touching myself, I was trying to pull up these damned—”

“Don’t touch your clothing, either! Don’t touch anything!”

The gondolier, an African who looked like he’d been in Venice long enough to have heard it all, still grinned.

Mircea didn’t.

Now that he was awake, it had occurred to him that it was a damned strange time for a party. Not that convocation wasn’t usually filled with such things, by all accounts. To the point that Mircea had wondered how anyone managed to get any work done. But it seemed a little odd right now, with dozens newly dead and a rift between the consul and his senior child.

But what did he know? Perhaps it had already been planned, and would have been awkward to cancel. Or perhaps things weren’t as grim as he’d imagined. It certainly didn’t look like anyone was mourning the newly dead as they approached the house, which was festooned in flowers and had torches burning outside in welcome.

“Remember your manners,” Paulo hissed at Jerome, as they approached the dock.

“About what?” Jerome asked.

“About everything! Cut your meat into small pieces, not great gobbets—”

“What’s a gobbet?” Jerome asked, stripping off his gloves.

“Are your nails clean?” Paulo asked, snatching up the glove-free part in question.

“Yes.”

“See that they stay that way. And remember to cut your bread with your knife, instead of tearing it into messy hunks. And never put meat in the salt cellar—”

“Then how am I supposed to—”

“Take a little salt on the tip of your knife—your
clean
knife—and put it on your food. Never put spilled, dirty salt back in the cellar.”

“Do people do that?”

“You did that at dinner last night!”

“You must be mistaken.”

Paulo’s eyes narrowed.

There was a cluster of other boats ahead of them, requiring them to wait. They bobbed gently on the waves, watching gondola after gondola of richly dressed men and women getting out. But the guests’ fine clothes did not appear to impress the two guards at the entrance, or the six more positioned along the loggia at regular intervals.

Mircea couldn’t recall seeing them the first time he’d been here. But maybe they remembered him. Because unlike the scrutiny they’d given the other arrivals, his group barely received a glance.

Of course, they may have just been trained to look for threats, he thought cynically. And it would be hard to imagine any group less threatening than theirs. Especially with the conversation the other two still had going.

“Don’t slurp your soup,” Paulo was saying, as they finally made their exit. “Don’t throw your bones on the floor—”

“Then where do I—”

“The voiding bowl!”

“But what about the dogs—”

“Forget about the dogs! And if there are any cats, don’t scratch them at the table.”

“I wasn’t planning on it. They might have fleas,” Jerome said, absently scratching himself, until Paulo jerked his arm down.

“Don’t scratch yourself at table, either!”

Jerome sighed.

“Don’t rinse your mouth with wine and spit it out, in fact, don’t spit at all unless you’re going to do it properly—”

“There’s a proper way to spit?”

“Don’t stuff your mouth, pick your teeth, make rude noises, scratch yourself, blow on your food, spit in the washing basin, spit up food into your dish, talk with your mouth full, or fall asleep at the table.”

“I don’t do any of those things. Well, hardly ever. I know how to behave.”

“I’ve yet to see any sign of it,” Paulo said, as they entered the home’s beautiful atrium.

Unlike most of Venice’s houses, the ground floor wasn’t devoted to workrooms, tradesmen’s entrances, and unloading cargo. Or perhaps some part of it was, since the place was huge, with four wings built around an open courtyard. But here in front, the impressive display didn’t wait for someone to make a trip up the long staircase to the beautiful rooms above.

The awe started as soon as a guest’s foot touched inlaid marble.

“This. This is how you live,” Jerome whispered, appearing almost cross-eyed as he tried to take in everything at once.

Mircea had seen it the last time he was here, but he looked around now with new eyes. The seascape murals on the walls had seemed oddly bare to him before, just vast stretches of different shades of blue—sky, sea and distant horizon—with none of the heroically battling ships so preferred by the Venetians. But, in retrospect they made more sense, designed to mimic the views of another palace, seen through painted columns long lost to time.

Along with the murals, statuary he was now certain was genuine stood in niches, people in togas and ancient gowns looking down on him, and his civilization, with barely concealed disdain. Two impressive clusters of delicate cesendello lamps hung overhead instead of ancient braziers, and the long expanse of marble underfoot was of Venetian design. But otherwise, it almost felt as if they had just stepped back in time.

And that was only the architecture.

The people were no less fascinating. Paulo continued his whispered instructions to Jerome, but Mircea doubted the young vampire heard. He was too busy staring slack-jawed at ladies in thick Chinese silk, in diaphanous Grecian robes that would have gotten them arrested on the street, in costumes Mircea couldn’t name from times he didn’t know. At men in the turbans and the flowing robes of the east, or ancient armor, or glittering costumes in the Byzantine style, with high necks and opulent embroidery. At both sexes in more common Venetian styles, if you could call outfits a Doge might envy common.

And all of them wearing enough jewels to buy another palazzo.

“Jerome,” Paulo said suddenly, through his teeth.

“What?”

Paulo looked pointedly at the servant standing in front of them, proffering a bowl of water.

“No, thank you,” Jerome said politely.

The man stood there, blinking at him.

“Wash. Your. Hands,” Paulo hissed.

“But I already washed at home.”

“Just
do it
.”

Jerome did it, perfunctorily, and then so did Paulo and Mircea. Afterward, the crowd opened up a little and they slipped through to a slightly less crowded area, where more servants were passing around trays of candied fruit covered with gold leaves. And a caper, truffle, and raisin salad in bite-sized pastries. And slivers of fine Friuli ham on slices of melon. And tiny pies of baby eel and octopus. And fried dough shaped like pine cones and smothered with honey. All washed down with a fine white trebbiano from the hills of Romagna served in delicate painted glasses.

“They’re making us eat standing up?” Jerome asked, looking confused.

“The first course is often served standing,” Paulo informed him, as a tray of the candied fruit was offered to them by a tunic-clad servant.

“I’m eating gold,” Jerome told Mircea a moment later, with an air of wonder. And then opened his mouth to prove it.

Mircea stifled a smile, while Paulo blanched and jerked them behind a statue.

That turned out to be fortunate, because it appeared that they had just beaten the rush. The room began to fill up over the next few minutes, as a long line of boats emptied their contents into what was no longer feeling like a large space. In fact, it was quickly becoming too hot, too close. Almost stifling.

And not just from the press of bodies.

Power shimmered in the air, so thick that Mircea could almost feel it. He
could
taste it, dense and cloying on the back of his tongue, threatening to suffocate him. Had there been this much at the consul’s house, when he was there? If so, the sun must have addled his brains, because he didn’t remember it.

He didn’t remember it from the last time he was here, either. Of course, he’d been a little too overwhelmed by his personal battle to have been paying close attention, but he thought he’d recall the feeling of raw power like a haze in the air. Or a fog that he took in with every breath, and that seeped in through his pores like a caustic lotion, threatening to burn him just from the overflow.

It made him itchy, restless, and nervous as hell. Like a rabbit in a field of foxes.
Hungry ones,
he thought, noticing the bared-teeth smiles between several guests, two predators meeting and acknowledging one another, before moving on. And sending currents swirling through the room as they passed, like sharks scattering schools of fish.

It was less than reassuring when he was fairly sure he didn’t even qualify as a minnow. There was a distinct feel of another world coexisting with this one, but just out of reach. A world composed of brief touches, half heard whispers, and colors that seemed to stay in the air when people moved, blurring behind them in lines that didn’t go away, no matter how hard he blinked.

He was increasingly sure that what he could see was only half of what was happening, and not the more important part.

A trumpet sounded nearby, glaringly loud, and Mircea jumped. His hand went automatically to his hip where a sword should have rested, but found only the softness of his hosen. He swallowed, and looked around to find Paulo glaring at him.

“Not you, too,” the blond hissed.

Mircea straightened up, and noticed that the guests were now filing toward the banquet room. Including Jerome, until Paulo jerked him back. “Guests are seated according to precedence.”

“I knew that.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full!” Paulo whispered furiously.

“I was just—”

“And don’t fill it so full that your cheeks swell out! And don’t drool onto your shirt! And don’t—”

Paulo cut off abruptly, staring at something on the exquisitely set tables in the room just ahead. And looking stricken. “Oh, no.”

“What is it?”

He grabbed Mircea’s sleeve. “Oh, God.”

“What?”

“Forks.”