Masks (29 page)

Damn it! Mircea had assumed there would be some fanfare, some announcement, some
something
to indicate that the event of the century was about to start. And to give him an idea of where to find the senator. But there was nothing, except the sudden hush of thousands of voices, and the abrupt stilling of an ocean of people.

Into utter silence.

It was so quiet that he could hear her footsteps, light as they were, over the scattered gravel. She looked a little different from the last time he’d seen her, when she’d been dressed in the height of Venetian fashion. Tonight she was a slim figure in white, wearing the elegant draperies of an earlier age. Her hair was in a hundred gold-tipped braids, more gold shown around her neck in a wide, antique collar, and still more glittered in bands on her lovely arms.

The modern Venetian lady was gone.

The ancient queen remained.

Her face was calm, composed. If she was worried at all, it didn’t show. Mircea felt his own anxiety level jump up, but it was already so high, he hardly noticed.

Because there was no way to reach her now.

Guards circled the arena and dotted the crowd, as well as occupying posts at the top corner of each of the walls, weapons at the ready. Mircea had no doubt what the penalty would be for anyone who dared to enter the ring besides the combatants. And while a senior master might survive having a few dozen wood-tipped crossbow bolts slammed into his body all at once, Mircea would not.

She was beyond his reach.

She was beyond his reach, so he had to come up with something else.

Now.

This would be the time for Plan B, if he had one. Unfortunately, he didn’t, and every one he tried to formulate hit the brick wall of his own obscurity. The story he had to tell was fantastic, but someone of power, of position, might have been believed. Or at least been indulged long enough for an investigation to be made.

Mircea would be lucky if he was just locked up—after the requisite beating, of course.

No one was going to listen to a slave. Not even the senator’s family, if he knew where to find them, which he didn’t, or if they weren’t too busy biting their nails to the quick to listen, which they surely were. And yet, what else was there?

“Don’t they need you back in the kitchen?” someone asked, and Mircea turned around to find one of the guards looking at him steadily.

Or maybe not a guard. The man was dressed in the same overall design, but his cape was dark blue, as was the plume on his helmet. And his breastplate, belt, and sword were of far higher quality than any Mircea had seen on the guards.

An officer, at a guess.

“I—yes, yes,
dòmino
,” Mircea bowed his head and bent at the waist, to the point that he was almost doubled. And then scurried down a couple of steps—until the man turned and headed up again, forgetting the bedraggled servant as soon as he was out of sight.

Down in the garden, the official who had been standing by the consul moved forward. “You have a petition, senator?” he asked pleasantly.

“No.”

“If you wish to ask forgiveness for the actions of your men, the consul will hear—” The man stopped. “No?” he repeated, as if the word had just registered.

“I come not to petition, but to rule. I hereby make formal challenge for the right to lead our people.”

The man appeared flustered, why, Mircea couldn’t imagine. Every damned person here had known that was coming. Unless he’d actually expected her to crawl.

He didn’t know her very well,
Mircea thought grimly.

“And what grounds do you bring for your challenge?” the man demanded.

The lovely eyes slid to the consul. “Madness.”

The collective crowd sucked in a breath, and even Mircea felt a bit shocked. He hadn’t expected her to just come right out with it like that.

Of course, he hadn’t expected to be grabbed by the arm, either. “Are you hard of hearing?”

It looked like the officer hadn’t forgotten his presence, after all. And wasn’t that just his luck? Everyone else in the whole damned place was focused on the drama down below, except for one man.

And, naturally, he would have to be the one who spotted Mircea.

“El me scuxa
,
dòmino.
Your pardon,” Mircea said, and tried groveling again.

But this time, it didn’t work.

“You’re very dirty for a servant,” the man said, taking a closer look at him. “And, yet, also too finely dressed.”

His fingers rubbed the nap of Mircea’s black outfit thoughtfully. It was a little worse for the wear even after the servants had dried it out and given it a good brushing. And it had some mud and grass stains here and there, from this night’s activities. But even with everything, the man was right—it wasn’t a servant’s attire.

“My lady, she likes to dress us well—”

“Your lady?”

“Lucilla, the wife of—”

“I know who she is.” The man’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t have the look of one of Lucilla’s men.”

“I’m new,
dòmino—
”

“And if you belong to Lucilla, why were you delivering drinks just now, like one of the house slaves?”

“She asked me to,
dòmino
. She wanted a drink for her husband—”

“Indeed?” The man stared into the distance for a moment, dark blue eyes narrowed. And then back at Mircea. “That is strange. She doesn’t seem to remember it.”

Damn it, trust them to have the more intelligent guards inside,
Mircea thought furiously.

He tried to look both stupid and innocent, as well as cowed and servile and unthreatening. But judging from the man’s expression, he didn’t think it was working. But then the officer’s head jerked up, as a drawling voice rang out across the crowd.

“Don’t tell me I’m late.”

Mircea’s head turned along with everyone else’s, thousands of eyes searching and then focusing on a spot on the opposite wall.

Where Antony stood atop a broken cornice.

He was in ancient golden armor now instead of a toga, and holding a sword instead of a wineglass. But he somehow looked the same. Especially when he leapt over the side, falling three stories to land in a perfect crouch at the feet of his queen.

And then looked up, grinning. “
I
challenge!”

The official, who had been halfway through an explanation of the rules, looked annoyed. Although not nearly as much as the senator, whose lips tightened into a single grim line. But her inner voice was not affected, and it was scathing.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“What did I just say?”
Antony asked, getting to his feet.

“This is not your fight!”

“And yet I believe I’ve just made it mine.”

Mircea, who was willing to try anything at this point, tried a tentative mental message of his own. On the theory that if he could hear, perhaps he could also be heard. The senator had certainly seemed to be picking up on a few of his thoughts that day on the terrace.

But maybe that was simply the effects of fifteen centuries of observing people. Or maybe there was some trick to it. But if so, thinking really hard in her general direction did not seem to be it.

Because his message either wasn’t received, or was completely ignored.

“Don’t be a fool,”
she snapped.
“You cannot defeat him!”

“And you can?”
Antony demanded.

“I have a better chance than you. You have no offensive skills, not against an opponent of his level.”

“And yet I am supposed to be almost impossible to kill.”

“It’s the almost that concerns me!”

Mircea tried to focus his power on his message, since that had always expanded his sight and hearing considerably. But
it didn’t appear have the same effect here. Either that, or he didn’t have enough power left to help. Because neither party so much as twitched, even when he gave the mental equivalent of a scream.

“And are you concerned, my dearest?”
Antony asked.

“If you dare to make a joke of this”
—her mental voice shook with anger—
“I swear to you—”

“I assure you, I am not joking. And offensive skills do you little good if you don’t stay alive long enough to use them.”

“As you will not!”

“We shall see.”

“I hereby issue formal challenge,” Antony repeated aloud. “Will the lord honor me or no?”

The official’s bald head gleamed in the moonlight as he looked back and forth between the three of them. He didn’t appear to be getting any help. “I—that is—this is unprecedented—”

“Nonetheless, I challenge.” Antony looked straight at the consul when he spoke this time. And while his voice was unexceptional, the sneer on his face contained all the haughtiness of an empire.

And also something else.

Something that made Mircea pause, because he’d seen it before. He’d seen it on the faces of his men, the night before the Battle of Varna, the last chance to save once great Constantinople from the Turks. The Hungarian king had decided to stop them; his troops had known he never would.

And yet they’d fought anyway.

Not for victory, or for glory. Certainly not for a king they didn’t know or respect. But for their homes and families. Their crops and fields. Their religion, for those who believed in it. For all they thought might perish if the Turks took the last bastion of Roman might, and swept into Europe.

They had gone expecting to die, but hoping that they might thereby purchase something that mattered more to them. Mircea had sat with them around their campfires the night before the battle, had shared their wine and bread, had listened to the stories they wanted to tell. And he’d seen their faces.

Antony had the same look, that of a soldier going into a battle he knew he couldn’t win. But like Mircea’s men, he would sell his life dear. Perhaps he could save the woman he loved, because yes, he loved her. Looking at them now, there was no doubt of that. Perhaps he could help her to kill the creature they both detested. Perhaps he could keep his world from descending into war or something that might be worse, the rule of a savage heart with no curbs on its power.

No, he couldn’t win.

But he would fight anyway.

Mircea saw it on his face, and so did the monster masquerading as a toothless old man. Who suddenly smiled. “You were born together,” he whispered, in strangely accented Italian. “It is only fitting you should die the same way.”

“I—but,” the official blinked. “You will face them both, my lord?”

“Si.”
It had the sibilance of the snake, but Mircea barely heard, because the crowd erupted.

And he’d been wrong—it hadn’t been loud before. The groundswell of noise following the announcement would have been deafening to a human’s ears; to a vampire’s, it was almost debilitating. And that was before they began stamping their collective feet.

The motion was hard enough to shake the building—and the hastily erected stairs. They started swaying underneath him, almost throwing Mircea off his feet. But it was the dais that partially collapsed, slumping onto the stairs and pitching him and his captor abruptly back into the crowd.

The fall wrenched the guard’s grip loose and half buried him under a pile of wood and a throng of screaming people.

And Mircea scrambled away into a sea of legs, looking around wildly.

The wall was right in front of him. He could be back over it in an instant. And as tense things were about to get, there was a good chance he could get away while the guards were distracted. Or he could disappear into the crowd, and then walk out when this was all over in the train of someone’s entourage. He could even hide somewhere in the palazzo, and wait until the next night, when convocation was over and nobody cared anymore. . . .

He could do a good many things, but he didn’t want to. To get away, yes, but not to leave, although he didn’t know what good he could do if he stayed. He couldn’t reach the senator, couldn’t communicate with her, couldn’t defeat the opponent she didn’t even know she had. He couldn’t do anything but land back in the cell where this whole thing had started.

The only smart thing to do was to escape.

But perhaps Bezio was right, and he wasn’t all that smart. Or perhaps it was as Auria had said: The Change didn’t really change you, not in the ways that mattered. Because he found that he couldn’t simply walk away.

It was ironic. Two weeks ago, he wouldn’t have thought twice about selling his life for a cause he believed in. Would have welcomed it as the best possible end to his current situation. But now . . . now he wanted to live.

But not at the price of everything that he had ever been.

Or still was.

Mircea stood there, vibrating in thought, for a moment. And then darted back through the crowd, to where the beleaguered guard was still half buried in shoddy construction. And grabbed his sword.

And then he headed for the nearest staircase going down.

The ground level of the house appeared largely deserted, with wide, deep hallways devoid of guests, guards or anyone except for a few servants darting here and there with trays. None of whom seemed be paying any attention to Mircea. And that was despite the fact that he was lurking in the stairwell and holding a naked sword.

Vampires,
he thought, and paused a moment to admire his new acquisition.

It was a beautiful weapon, gold chased and fine edged, the kind of sword he’d once owned, until he’d been forced to sell it once his money ran out. It had hurt his heart, but what did a vampire need with a sword? That was probably still true, but its weight nonetheless felt good in his palm.

Of course, it would feel a lot better if the officer came along to wield it.

Not that Mircea wasn’t competent with a sword. But as the servants were currently demonstrating, there was a different standard in place now. He could probably run at one of them, brandishing the weapon and screaming, and merely get a strange look.

Until he got close enough to be wadded into a ball.

In his old world, Mircea was a trained warrior and a fearsome threat. In his new one . . . well, he wasn’t even sure he counted as a nuisance. That was normally a problem, but now it was an absolute menace, since he didn’t know exactly what he was dealing with.

Who, yes. How, possibly. But the what was bothering him as he started down the long hallway.

Was he facing a trained assassin? Someone hired to give the consul an added edge? Hassani led a group of such people, and he might well have decided to have someone in place to hedge his bets.

At the very least, he might want to make sure that he wouldn’t have to deal with his longtime rival as the new senate leader. And at best . . . perhaps he meant to make a bid for the power himself, in the confusion. Mircea didn’t know.

But if he
was
facing a trained assassin, this was about to be a big waste of time.

Of course, he was hardly likely to fare better against a run of the mill vampire-with-a-vendetta. When a delicate courtesan could best him in a fight, the world really had turned upside down. But he was pragmatic enough to accept it, and to come up with a workaround.

At least, he was if his solution didn’t kill him first.

He hazarded a glance over his shoulder, but the officer was nowhere in sight.

Mircea frowned. If it was him, he’d damned well want his sword back. He just hoped the officer felt the same. And that, if he did show up, he could somehow convince him to—

A servant dropped a tray, in a clatter of metal and a tinkle of glass. It made Mircea jump. And then jump again when two others did the same, at almost the same moment. And then they added to the confusion by shrieking and bolting for cover.

Mircea looked around, sword raised, trying to locate the threat. But there was nothing. Just echoing, empty tiled floors, a long corridor with windows fronting the garden, and the usual scattered tables, tapestries, and knick knacks.

Some of the latter of which had started to chime.

Mircea watched a couple of figurines, a man and a woman dressed in festival finery, jitter down the length of a dark wood table. They almost looked as if they were dancing. Until they fell off the end, shattering on the hard glazed tiles in a puff of plaster.

No one had touched them.

But then, no one was touching the rest of the corridor, either. Yet it had also started to shake noticeably. Little siftings of plaster had begun falling from the ceiling. A brass platter on shelf followed the dancers, hitting the floor with a metallic
clang, clang, clang
that was swallowed up by a roar that came out of nowhere, louder than the screams of the crowd, louder than anything Mircea had heard outside the battlefield. And which seemed to be coming from all directions at once.

And then the multipaned windows whited out.

Mircea stared at it, seriously confused, because it looked like a winter storm had blown up in an instant. A violent one. The metal latch started jittering against the small glass panes, the window itself began knocking back and forth against its frame, and then a single, diamond-shaped pane suddenly popped out, and went skittering over the floor.

That was not so strange; perhaps it had been loose. But something had started blowing through the opening, something that didn’t look like snow. Something that scattered across the floor, pale against the dark tile and the darker tops of Mircea’s shoes.

He knelt down, feeling something hard and gritty under his fingertips for an instant. Before he jerked his hand back, startled and confused. Because the tiny grains were also burning hot, like desert sand that had baked all day under a merciless sun.

But this was nighttime. And
Italy
. And it had just been raining fit to float Noah’s—

The lights went out.

Mircea’s head jerked up to see that all the windows were now black, the light from above having been blotted out by the growing storm. It left the corridor lit only by flickering torchlight and ominous, leaping shadows. And a vampire who suddenly decided that he could live with a bit of mystery.

He got back to his feet and started to run—

And then hit the floor again when the window abruptly blew out.

Glass panes went flying, glittering diamond bright in the torchlight, and a flood of something shot through the opening with the force of cannon shot.

It
was
sand, he realized, as a river of the stuff blasted over his head, overthrew the table, and exploded against the wall. And sent a burning, stinging rain spewing everywhere, including down onto the floor. Where Mircea lay in horrified disbelief for an instant, before starting to crawl—fast.

Until he was suddenly jerked backward.

“I’ll have that back, if you don’t mind,” someone told him.

Mircea looked around wildly and saw a hand on his ankle. A sapphire plume. A golden helmet running with reflected fire—

A fist in his face.

He felt his cheekbone shatter, and his lip split. Making him lisp slightly when he snarled, “You’re early.”

And then he flipped and kicked out—and smashed his foot into the officer’s face, hard enough to break that patrician nose.

Trust him to show up in the middle of a desert sandstorm, or whatever the hell the combatants in the garden thought they were doing. Mircea preferred to deal with one crisis at a time, but the man seemed to have a different idea. Although he didn’t appear to have expected the servile creature he’d met above to put up much of a fight.

Because the maneuver had worked.

The guard let go, cursing, blood spurting from the wound, and Mircea scrambled away.

Straight into a mass of overheated sand.

It had piled up in the short time the struggle had taken, already coating the ground an inch thick. He felt his hands start to burn, along with the knees of his hosen, and the panic of a vampire confronted with excessive heat start to rise. He ruthlessly suppressed it. And scurried ahead, half blind and deaf from the howling winds, flesh burning, hands searching. And finding—

Not a way out, but something almost as good.

His palm encountered wood, a good three inches thick, still cool and solid despite the conditions. The tabletop, he realized, old and black and carved—and ruined, when he ruthlessly snapped off the heavy legs. He left the crossed supports under the bottom for a grip, not knowing if they’d be needed, since the slab was almost as long as him and built of Spanish hardwood. It would have taken at least four men to lift it.

Or one desperate vampire,
he thought, getting back to his feet and staggering a bit under the weight.

But it was still a blessed relief, cutting off much of the stinging sand and allowing him to see a way forward. Or it would have, if the torches hadn’t guttered in the wind. But he found his way by the direction the sand was blowing, and finally lurched into one of the relatively quiet areas between the windows.

Only to find the same thing happening everywhere.

Plaster was pouring down now, from a fissure that had opened in the ceiling. The whole corridor was shaking. And rivers of sand were spewing in from half a dozen windows.

Dim moonlight spilled across the scene from a distant window to the outside, lending the rivers a silvery quality, like water flooding through the portholes of a sinking ship. Only this ship would have already sunk by now. Even the walls between the windows were riddled with sharp-edged debris, their jagged ends glinting palely in the low light.

Mircea stared at them, wondering at the force it took to stab a piece of tile through a solid wall. Probably about the same as it would take to do it to a tabletop. And while most of the shards were stone or tile, some of them were wood.

The remains of the garden’s few trees, he supposed.

But he was going to have to risk it, nonetheless.

For more than one reason,
he thought, as an old battlefield instinct kicked in. And alerted him a bare instant before a fist crashed into the shield he swung around. And then through it, to punch the air in front of Mircea’s wide eyes.

The fist became hung up there, as the table held and the jagged shards around the officer’s arm bit into his flesh when he tried to pull it out.

He wrenched Mircea’s makeshift shield around, staring at him over the slanted top. Then grabbed for his throat, before Mircea jerked back, swinging them around again. They suddenly reminded him of the dancing figurines; he only hoped this wasn’t going to end the same way.

But it was beginning to look like it, he thought, as he was suddenly jerked far too close to a bloody face and a fanged-filled mouth.

But despite everything, Mircea decided this was the best chance he was likely to get.

“I’m here to help the senator—” he began, right before the maniac jerked on his shirt again, slamming their heads together with a crack.

“That’s interesting,” the man said, looking with satisfaction at Mircea’s bloody face. “I foolishly thought you were here to steal my sword.”

“That was—I need it—”

“What a coincidence. So do I.” The man twisted them around and started pushing.

“No, you don’t understand. Someone is trying to—gaaah!” Mircea’s breath went out with a
whoosh
, when the man shoved him heavily into the wall.

And then backed up and did it again.

Mircea snarled and stabbed out with the sword he still held before the bastard could try for number three.

He had a limited range of movement thanks to the table, and he couldn’t see what he was doing. But he could feel it when the blade sank through the thick leather of the man’s boots, into the vulnerable flesh below. And hear it when he cursed and fell back—too far.

And since he didn’t let go, Mircea and the tabletop went with him.

That gave Mircea a captive audience, for the moment, and he used it.

“Someone is trying to interfere with the contest!” Mircea said quickly, as the man thrashed and bucked and growled beneath him. “I’m not sure of the plan, but I think the idea is to—”

The trapped fist closed around Mircea’s throat.

“To attack her . . . when she’s vulnerable . . . after—
urk
.”

He found himself once again jerked close to narrowed blue eyes. “And a little sneak thief like you is going to stop them.”

“I’m not a thief!” They both looked at the sword he still held. “Usually.”

“You’re not going to be anything in a moment, boy.”

“No,
listen to me
—”

But the officer didn’t appear to be in a listening mood. Perhaps he should have tried diplomacy before breaking his nose, Mircea thought wildly, as the man gave a roar, and flipped them over, table and all. He then jumped back to his feet, in a display of strength that would have been impressive if he hadn’t followed it up by jerking his bloody arm out of the wood. And then used it to land a blow on Mircea’s jawline hard enough to send him staggering.

Mircea stumbled back, directly into the path of one of the last intact windows.

Right before it blew out.

He was blown off his feet and sent hurtling backward, smashing hard into the opposite wall. Where he stayed, pinned by the force of a raging torrent of stinging sand. He was trapped between the wall and his makeshift shield, which appeared to be trying to crush him to death.

But as it was also keeping him from burning up on the spot, he didn’t like to complain.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t able to do the same for everything else. As demonstrated by the tapestry hanging on the wall behind him. Which promptly burst into flames around the protective barrier of the door, surrounding him in a choking ring of fire.

And then he was grabbed by an even more irresistible force and sent hurtling down the hallway.

Mircea hit the ground hard, panting in pain, watching the officer casually walk through the burning stream toward him. No shield, no concern for the blast of heated sand, nor even for the knife-like shards of flooring, rubble ,and garden tiles that lay hidden in the mix.

Without a shield, Mircea would have been scoured to the bone in seconds.

The officer didn’t even look like he noticed.

Mircea swallowed. Good. Great. That’s . . . what he’d wanted.

Now all he had to do was stay alive long enough to lead his champion to his target.

He spat out a mouthful of sand, grabbed the burned and pitted top of his shield, and ran.

The windows and wall areas were almost equally spaced, giving him brief respites in between the hell.

They didn’t come often enough.

Blood spurted across his vision as something cut his forehead, sand scoured more skin off his ankles and legs, and then a shard of something ricocheted off a wall and tore through the muscle on his left knee, cutting it almost to the bone.

Mircea staggered into the wall, hamstrung. But he started forward again anyway, hobbling as fast as he could—until he saw what lay just ahead. Something, which he vaguely recognized as the remains of the fountain, had been thrown through the side of the house,leaving a massive hole through which a shrieking, slashing, deadly storm was scouring the opposite wall.