Masks

Chapter Fourteen

The battle was still raging, although the blue barge had all but sunk from view. A few pairs were fighting on its overturned hull, but with apprehensive glances at the rising waves. Mircea felt a little like that as well, as if his ship had capsized and he couldn’t swim.

“Then why did you need me?” he demanded. “Unless you cannot feel?”

“That night was a gift to my ladies, who find few amusements here.”

“Then why did they need me?”

For a long moment, there was no answer. Not that he’d entirely expected one. She had been indulging him, he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps for the novelty of it; he had the impression that there were few who were daring enough, or foolish enough, to talk back to her. But there was sure to be a limit and he had likely reached it.

And then she surprised him again.

“It is not lack of feeling,” he was told slowly, as if she was searching for the words. “You feel as much as you ever did, possibly more. But where your emotion centers, what it focuses on, often changes.”

“To what?” he asked softly.

“To whatever was most important to you in life. Other things fade, not into insignificance, but they fade. Like colors after dark. But that one thing blooms . . . like the moon against the night sky.”

To his surprise, she joined him at the railing. He doubted it was for his own benefit; if she wished him to turn around, she had only to command it. Perhaps she wanted to see the battle’s finale, too.

“My master, for instance,” she told him. “Began life as a potter’s apprentice in a small village long reclaimed by the sands. Outside Abydos, if that means anything to you, before there was an Abydos. Before . . . there was much of anything.”

Her eyes came to rest on the consul, still sitting on his throne-like chair amid a throng of hangers-on. But despite that, it took Mircea a moment to realize what she meant. “The consul . . . is your master?”

“As he is known now,” she agreed. “He was called by another name then, meaning little. And that is how he was thought of—small, insignificant, valueless. He was born into a large family, the runt of the litter, you might say. But his father dutifully found him work with a potter when he was old enough. Where he broke as many items as he made, and constantly angered his master. Eventually, famine came to the area, and no one wished to feed a useless boy. He was driven out, to fend for himself or starve.

“He did neither, as it happened. For he met something else that wished to feed.”

“Some . . . thing?”

“I do not know to this day who bit him—or what. He always said it was a god, but who can say? He never heard a name. All he could tell me was what he remembered, blurred by time, so much time. Stumbling into the wastes, just as a great sandstorm was building. It would likely have been the last of him, leaving only a pile of bones to bleach under the desert sun, like so many before and since . . . if he hadn’t met something under the stars.”

Mircea looked at the little creature on the throne. He still couldn’t see him very well, just a slightly misshapen head unburdened by hair or hat or turban, dark as a nut. And a small, bent body, wrapped in a robe so ornate that it completely concealed the form within.

He could not for the life of him manage to see him as a god. In truth, he was having difficulty seeing him as a consul. But based on how everyone was treating him, he supposed it must be true.

“And thus he Changed,” she continued. “And grew, even without a master to teach him. But something else grew, too. The old desire never fulfilled in life, now become an obsession in death. The simplest of human needs: to be loved.”

“We all want that.”

The wind picked up, ruffling the long dark hair she hadn’t bothered to bind as the Venetians did. She brushed it back, her bracelets flashing in the sun, almost blinding. “Yes, we all want that. But he wanted more. All the love. All the adoration. He wanted to be worshipped like the god he believes himself to be. He lusted after it, demanded it—”

“And still does?” Mircea guessed, remembering that strange night in the Rialto.

“And still does.”

Mircea was silent for a moment, trying to process all she’d told him. He wasn’t sure if any of it helped. All he wanted to know was that this pain, this longing, this terrible guilt he felt every time he thought about the past, was going to lessen, perhaps one day to stop. All he wanted was a reason to go on.

“I can’t give you that,” she told him, somehow knowing his thoughts. “No one can. You have to find that for yourself.”

“And what did you find?” Mircea asked, wondering how anyone could find things to live for, over such a span of time.

Her eyelids closed, the heavy malachite dust on them like brushstrokes over honey. “Many things.”

“But the first?” He was pressing and he knew it, but he couldn’t seem to stop. Not like this. Not without an answer.

“The first . . . ,” she murmured. “Oh, yes. That . . . was a surprise.”

Mircea didn’t say anything. He was afraid to move, to so much as breathe. She hadn’t planned to discuss this, he would swear to it. And yet she was, for the moment at least. If nothing interfered . . .

A young couple approached, looking as if they might actually breech the sanctum, to have a word. But Mircea gave them such a glare that they hurried away again. His client laughed and opened her eyes.

“I will tell you, if you like,” she said. “But you may not find it particularly helpful.”

“I will. You said it was a surprise?”

She resumed her seat, leaning back on her elbows, looking up at him. “Yes, but not in the way you are probably thinking.”

A trumpet sounded, signifying a winner to the tournament. The other guests began to file down a nearby staircase, Mircea supposed for some sort of ceremony. He didn’t move.

Neither did his client, except to lay back against the cushions, and stretch her arms over her head. It was a deliberately sensual act, the slide of gold against honey dark skin, the deep emerald sheen over sooty lashes, the sensuous feline arch of her spine, stretching thin silk tight over full breasts.

He still didn’t move.

A smile teased her lips.

“It was a surprise in that it wasn’t about me,” she told him. “For a decade, I had been consumed by my lost ambitions, my old dreams, my pain. To the point that I couldn’t see anything else. Not even the people right in front of my face, who needed my help.

“And, frankly, the woman I had been wouldn’t have cared. Once, I wouldn’t have thought that a single life, even a rash of them, mattered in comparison to my ambitions. Once I thought that people lived to serve me, to worship me, to die for me. Once, I acted like the goddess I never was, not the queen I should have been.”

Mircea didn’t know what to say to that. He hadn’t expected such blunt honesty. He supposed the fifteen hundred years she was rumored to have lived, which he hadn’t believed until today, would give a person a chance for self-reflection. He wondered what clarity it would give him.

And then he almost laughed; he’d be lucky to make it to thirty.

“Nothing really changed after death,” she continued. “I was too sunk in horror at what I had become to learn anything. And too angry to have managed it even had I not been. I was consumed by thoughts of revenge, on the enemies I had had in life, on the creature I was forced to call master, on anything and everyone. I was sinking into the depths of the angry madness that consumes so many of us, and there seemed nothing that could change that.”

“But something did.” It was out before Mircea could stop it, and he wished he could have bitten his tongue off as soon as the words left his mouth.

But she merely looked at him, amused, letting her eyes drift over his features. “A decade or so after my Change, a vampire was brought into court. Or dragged, I suppose I should say. She was filthy, ragged, half mad, but not a revenant. A Finder had brought her in, looking for a bounty. Nothing surprising there—until he made it clear that he expected to get it from me. I asked him why, for I had put no price on anyone’s head, much less a strange girl’s.

“He said he thought I would like my daughter back.”

“Daughter?” Mircea frowned. “But you said a decade . . .”

“That was my question. I wasn’t powerful enough to make a Child, was still one myself. I am not sure at the time that I even knew how. And I was furious with this pale reflection of life, as it seemed to me then. Why would I have tried to force it on another?”

“Then she was lying.”

“She did not appear to have enough mind left to lie. But we would have thought her mistaken—had she not borne the family mark.”

“The mark?”

Dark eyelashes fluttered, and her head fell back. “Dear gods, so young. I am going to pay for this.”

“My lady?”

She sighed and shook her head before lifting it to look at him again. “All vampire families have an . . . energy pattern . . . visible to us if we concentrate. It’s part of the blood bond. Our master’s blood animates us, therefore we bear some of his power. In time, as ours grows, our pattern differentiates from his, remaining similar, but not the same. When we make a Child, they gain our pattern, and eventually form their own from it. Likewise, the humans we take as servants, if they are important to us, are marked, so that everyone knows to which family they belong—and who will avenge them should they be harmed. Even a Child traded to another family will always bear a memory of our mark alongside his new master’s.”

Mircea blinked. “Do . . . I have a mark?”

“No. You are masterless. Cursed?” she guessed.

He nodded abruptly.

“Then there was no one to give you power, no one to mark you.” Her eyes narrowed on him. “There is no pattern I can see, but the color is pale flame. It may turn white in time. You are too young to tell, at this point.”

Again, she shook her head ruefully.

“But this girl had a mark?” Mircea persisted.

She waved a hand, making her bracelets clink. “It was indistinct, muddled, as it often is with the very young. But it was there. That is why the Finder who ran across her believed her story enough to make the trek all the way out to see us.”

“Then someone in the family had made her.”

“Someone, yes. But no one stepped forward to claim her.”

“But I thought the mark—”

“None of them matched.”

Mircea thought. “Then perhaps one who had died—”

“The family had lost no masters recently, not in more than fifty years. And the girl was clearly younger than that.”

Mircea wrinkled his forehead. He usually liked puzzles. But this one . . .

“But she also did not match your pattern?”

She shrugged. “I was young then, too. And my energy pattern was so weak, it was impossible to say if the girl’s matched it or no. But I assure you, as I did them, that even had I been able, I had made no Child.”

“So a mystery.”

She nodded.

“And the girl could tell you nothing?”

“We tried questioning her, but she was delusional, her ravings that of a madwoman. She just kept calling me master and saying that she had been looking for me. And screaming and trying to attack anyone who came near me. I nonetheless kept her at court, waiting for my master to return from a trip, in order to ask him about her. But it became increasingly difficult to control her. She ran away one night, fleeing into the desert after a fit.”

“And then?”

“I don’t know. I never saw her again.”

“Then . . . that’s it?” Mircea asked, confused.

She smiled. “Were you expecting something more dramatic? I am sorry to disappoint you. I could tell you stories that would be more so, but you wanted the first.”

“And . . . that helped you?” He didn’t see how.

But she nodded again.

“It did, yes. It was a brief interlude, but for the first time since the Change, I spent energy thinking about someone else. Worrying about her, even. Trying to help her. I failed, but the process reminded me of a time when I had lived in a whirlwind of action, instead of brooding about my room. It also forced me to speak with many people about court who I had never before bothered to meet. Individuals, in some cases, centuries older than I, with more knowledge than I had ever known existed. My search didn’t give me the answer to my question. But it made me think . . . that someday, I might perhaps find one.”

Mircea thought about that, and found it both useful and not. Useful, in that it highlighted something he’d already vaguely understood: that those who succeeded at this life had more than raw power. They had something to live for. Something so compelling that it made them willing to struggle on, despite whatever obstacles were placed in their way, rather than take that early morning walk along the beach.

And not useful, because he wasn’t sure that he had anything similar himself.

He looked up suddenly, to find her watching him. Her expression was unreadable, but he didn’t need it. She’d been more generous than he could possibly have expected, almost . . . kind . . . although he didn’t understand it.

“Why did you tell me this?” he asked, half in wonder.

“My ladies and I knew that you were young, but not so young. It is often hard to tell, with those newly Changed. We guessed . . . wrongly. And assumed you had reserves that you did not.”

“Then . . .” Mircea took a moment to get his head around the idea. “Then this is an apology?”

A fine eyebrow went up. “I never apologize.”

“Then why help me?”

“I am aware that perhaps sometimes I should do,” she laughed, and pulled him down to her.