Masks

Chapter Thirteen

Mircea was getting more experience the next day, although not in any way he’d ever imagined.

He tried to force his thoughts off what he was feeling, and onto the battle taking place in the water below. It should have been easy. The rooftop terrace where he stood offered a breathtaking panorama of a lagoon, where two huge barges, each bigger than the one the Doges used, were battling for supremacy amid the cheers of thousands.

And battling for real, it seemed to him.

The participants, drawn by lot from the families of the leading senators, were fighting for the amusement of the consul seated on the brightly decorated pier below. And to impress visiting leaders of from the other senates, who occupied positions of honor around him. In other words, it was supposed to be a mock contest.

Only someone must have forgotten to mention that to the two sides.

Or else the excitement of crashing into each other a moment before, after a headlong race about the lagoon, had caused them to forget it. The brilliant peacock blue and fiery orange-red costumes were now mixed in opulent splendor as they swarmed each other’s decks. And engaged in an all out brawl to prove their and their master’s superiority in front of the font of all patronage.

Mircea, who had spent two years hiding in the shadows, would have laughed a short time ago, had anyone told him that such a spectacle could be staged in full view of the city. Even on La Guidecca, a spur of land to the south of Venice, where wealthy merchants had built garden homes to escape the bustle of the busy port. He didn’t know how they were doing it.

He also didn’t care.

He stood at the railing, in the black velvet finery the tailor’s apprentice had finally delivered, struggling to look like he fit in. Struggling to nod and smile and act as enthralled as the rest of the onlookers. Struggling to do anything but stare.

But not at the battle.

His hands gripped the stone railing in front of him, hard enough to impress the shape of his fingers as he fought to contain the emotion that threatened to swamp him. He swallowed, calling on everything he had, on all those years of his father’s training, to stay outwardly stoic, visibly calm. But a greater battle than anything happening below was taking place inside him as he stared at his hands.

And at the sunlight spilling over them like a flood of gold.

“Quite the spectacle, isn’t it?” the voice, smooth as silk, rich as red wine, came from behind him.

Mircea didn’t turn around.

It was appallingly rude, not to mention incredibly bad business, to ignore his client. But he couldn’t move. He didn’t know what would happen if he did. It felt like he might burst open at the seams, might start running or screaming or—he didn’t know.

He didn’t know.

So he stayed in place in their corner of the terrace, where white draperies had been stretched between columns to provide shade of a sort. It didn’t provide much. The wind was high, causing the panels to drift about like tethered clouds, splashing those below with bright morning sunlight every few moments. And making Mircea flinch despite the fact that he knew it couldn’t hurt him.

Not with his client providing shade of a different kind.

He didn’t know how she was doing it, either. He should have been burnt to a crisp by now, like the bodies found on the beach each morning by the Watch. Or transformed, like the remains of a vampire he’d seen at the condottiere’s house, stacked in a corner.

Most of the time, the Watch simply used the heavy boots they wore to crush such remains to powder, allowing them to float out with the tide. But this one must have burned brighter than most, or had landed on a patch of unusual sand. Because instead of disintegrating, it had fused into a strange conglomeration of rock and ash and pale green glass, glittering in the candlelight.

Mircea had stared at it for a long time while waiting to be questioned. In places, it had reminded him of a fossil he’d found as a boy: a ridge of bare, blackened ribs protruded from the rock on one side, a hand, still bone-pale, lifted as if in supplication on the other. But the rest was more like an opal, fresh dug from the dirt, with beauty gleaming through in odd places.

A perfectly preserved ear was encased in a bubble of natural glass. Splotches of what looked like gold leaf had adhered to the pitted surface, which Mircea had finally identified as the remains of a line of buttons. And then there was the face . . .

Like the ear, the features had been oddly preserved, although not by a bubble. They looked more like they had turned to glass themselves, not green but chiseled obsidian, darkened from the ash that had settled into them. As if the vampire, whoever he had been, had died lying face down, not even wanting to catch one last glimpse of the sun.

Mircea had been unable to understand that kind of passivity. Of lying there, waiting for a dawn you would never see to come and take you. Of letting them win, these forces that had stolen his life from him, and that now seemed determined to take what was left.

Or to use it, for their own purposes.

“Are you feeding from me?” he suddenly asked, voice harsh.

That was appalling, too, or it should have been. Mircea might be ignorant of much of vampire life, but he knew court etiquette. And one did not speak to a superior in such a way.

But if she was offended, it didn’t show.

“No.” The voice was calm.

Mircea wasn’t. His hands slid on the railing, leaving sweaty prints on the pale stone, despite the cool spring air. “They said . . . they said you can do so without me knowing. They said you can feel what I feel.”

“They say much.” The voice was clear, with no amusement that he could discern. Although right now, would he know?

“Is it true?” It was loud—too loud.

He couldn’t bring himself to care. Not standing in the sun that had so long turned its back on him. Not staring at everything he’d once taken for granted: the light dancing on the water, the iridescent flash of a hummingbird’s wings as it fed off a nearby vine, the clouds spreading over the sky like a lacy veil. The colors . . .

They made him catch his breath, so vivid as to be shocking, the shimmering underbelly of a cloud, the thousand colors of blue, green, and turquoise in the lagoon, the blush on a servant girl’s cheek. They never looked like this to him now, even after feeding. He almost wished she hadn’t brought him here. It seemed a cruel joke, to remind him, in beautiful, anguished clarity, of all he’d lost.

“There is beauty in the night, too,” the voice was softer, slightly sad.

“Not like this. Not like—” He stopped, his throat working.

“I do not need blood to feel your emotions,” she told him, after a moment. “You radiate them like the sun.”

“Then you’re getting your money’s worth,” he said, choking.

She sighed, and he heard her settle back against the pillows, the almost imperceptible slide of silk on silk, the soft chink of her bracelets. “You remind me so much of myself.”

He turned to see her stretched out on a divan piled high with white cushions. The bright sunlight behind her highlighted the faint crow’s feet she didn’t bother to hide, the honey-bronze skin that told of a mix of bloodlines, the rich emerald of the dress she wore. It wasn’t in the Venetian style, but in the more flowing, easier manner of an earlier century.

Much earlier.

He supposed it didn’t matter.

There was no one to fool here.

“We’re nothing alike,” he said, marveling that she should think so. An ancient queen and current senator, at the height of vampire society. And he . . .

Well, it would be harder to get any lower, wouldn’t it?

She smiled and made no gesture he could see, but the small boy holding the peacock feather fan behind her suddenly scurried off.

Mircea watched him go, confused. There were other people around, privileged guests strolling along the extensive terrace, the sun gleaming off their fine silks and flashing off their heavy rings as they raised glasses or gestured. As if it cost them nothing to stand in the day.

They stayed down the railing somewhat, as if sensing the sphere of his client’s power, and choosing to remain beyond it. Or perhaps it wasn’t a choice; Mircea wasn’t sure. But they were certainly not beyond the range of vampire hearing.

Yet she sent the human child away?

“No one can hear us,” she told him. “Not unless I permit it.”

“Why would you care?” he asked, still confused.

“I have a reputation to maintain,” she said lightly, and moved over slightly so he could sit.

He did so just as the crowd sent up a massive shout. They paused to look through the railings at a much deteriorated scene. The blue team’s barge was already on its side, and slowly flipped over as they watched, like a breeching whale. Not that it caused the blues to surrender. Half of them had been on the orange barge in any case, and now the rest were climbing or jumping on as well, heedless of the ruin of their fine clothes, determined to eke out a victory.

Mircea’s client lay back against the chaise and studied him for a moment, dark eyes unreadable.

“I was so angry,” she told him abruptly. “When I found out what had been done to me. Despite the fact that it had been my salvation, despite the fact that I was facing death or dishonor otherwise . . . still. So angry.”

“You didn’t choose?” For some reason, that surprised him.

“I wasn’t asked,” she said dryly. “And when I awoke, I didn’t feel saved. I felt . . . betrayed.”

She smiled lazily at his expression. “Oh, did you think you were the only one? To have hopes and dreams and plans, and to find them suddenly gone? The only one to tell yourself, ‘but I would be dead otherwise, they would be gone in any case?’ The only one not to care. To discover that being saved from the grave is a hollow victory when the circumstances conspire nonetheless to deprive you of life—the one you loved and hated, the one you cursed and adored, the one you sacrificed for, risked everything for, the one you were owed?”

He stared at her, unable to speak. Not because she was right; he hadn’t believed he was the only one. Not even before he talked to Bezio. He might have foolishly believed he’d lost more than some others, but he had never been so self-centered as to believe he was the only one in pain.

But because he’d never before heard it expressed quite so well.

Yes, that was exactly the way he’d felt, had been feeling for two years now. Betrayed. As if he’d won the battle and died anyway.

“Do you know, I had never really thought about death?” she asked. “Strange, being steeped in a culture that so focused on it. But my palace didn’t face the ancient tombs and their contents, far away in the desert wastes, but the sea. It was built on a spar of land, serene and beautiful. And in the distance, mighty Alexandria, huge and busy and overflowing with life.”

“A port city,” Mircea said, trying to keep up. “You . . . must feel at home in Venice.”

She sent him a look. “Not a port, the port—the greatest in the world, in its day. In any day. The port that made empires . . . and destroyed them.”

The liquid dark eyes looked casually around the beautiful palazzo. And suddenly, Mircea saw it as she did: small and shabby, with its statues poor copies of Greek originals, its mosaics childishly unsophisticated, its people draped in trinkets that they thought great jewels. And dwarfed, in utterly every way, by the palace that rose out of another sea, gleaming before his eyes like a great pearl.

He blinked in shock, but it only grew more vivid. Its marble columns so large four men could not have stretched their arms around them, its terraces larger than this house, their sweeping expanse overlooking a port dotted with hundreds of ships. And a towering lighthouse rising above it all, huge and gleaming white, rightfully deserving of its place among the world’s wonders.

And then, abruptly, the image was gone. Leaving Mircea reeling on the chaise, thankful that he was sitting down. And wondering if the sun had addled his brains as his client raised her head.

And looked at the elegant man that bowed to her from across the terrace.

He seemed like someone who would have fit better into that strange vision than here, Mircea thought dizzily. His skin was burnished dark by the desert sun, contrasting with his flowing white robes unadorned with jewels. He didn’t need them, not if the purpose of jewels is to draw the eye. He did that all on his own.

Mircea felt his spine tense as the eyes of a hawk swept over him. But the senator merely inclined her head. Mircea wondered for a moment how she saw the man.

He didn’t have to wonder long.

“The African consul,” she murmured. “Hassani, they call him. Hails from Persia, but spent his formative years in Cairo.”

“Cairo?” It kept coming up, although Mircea knew it only as a distant trading partner for Venice. It sent swarthy men in turbans to buy Parmesan cheeses, luxury textiles, and furs, paid for with spices, fine woolen carpets, and some of the delicate glass objects that had so influenced the artisans on Murano. But it had never been of concern to him, not being a part of the Turk’s growing empire.

“Established by a group of uncivilized Bedouin as an army base,” she told him. “It was mud brick and camel dung until they stripped the great pyramids of their facing stones, to give it some stolen beauty. But as it is in Egypt, Hassani thinks it gives us a bond.”

“And what do you think?”

Those dark eyes met his, and to Mircea’s surprise, they were brimming with amusement. “I think he matches his city!”

Mircea must have looked as bemused as he felt, for she actually laughed.

He didn’t. He couldn’t believe someone would speak about a consul in such a way, much less dare to say it a dozen yards from where he was standing. But she didn’t look worried. She also didn’t look interested, her eyes sliding off the arresting figure to the golden bracelet she wore, one of several, this one with the winged figure of a woman.

“I never thought about death,” she continued, returning to her earlier theme. “Why should I? I had been told all my life that I was a goddess descended from Isis, my conception divine. Propaganda, of course, for the common people. But when you hear a lie so often, even you come to half believe it. And while young . . . well. Do any of the young believe that they will die?”

“I didn’t,” Mircea said hoarsely. Even in the midst of battle, even with his side badly losing, he hadn’t really believed it. And he’d been proven right. He had lived, and his men with him, despite all the odds.

Only to return to die by treachery at home.

“And then I became immortal,” she said lightly. “I became Isis reborn, in truth instead of fiction. But I did not wake to the power of a goddess, did I? Nor even to that of my old self. I awoke a slave, starving, desperate, dependent.”

Mircea stared at her. Her voice hadn’t changed. It was light, with a tinge of the former amusement still threading through the words.

It was also a lie.

There was no lack of passion here, despite what he had been told. No more than there had been earlier, when she spoke of her Change. It was a fact he found frankly terrifying.

“They told me—” he began.

“They again. You must introduce me to these oracles.”

Mircea refused to be deterred. When would he have this chance again? And he had to know.

“I was told that the pain goes away in time. Not in so many words but . . . that those of us who live long enough, that we forget—”

“Perhaps I will not seek out these prophets, after all.”

“—that I will feel less,” he persisted doggedly. “That it will become easier—”

She laughed again, just as a finely dressed couple was passing by. The man looked startled, the woman actually jumped. They both hurried away.

Mircea ignored them. “Is it true?”

His client looked at him, not unkindly. But the answer was stark. “No.”

He got up abruptly and went back to the railing.