Masks

Chapter Twenty-Four

Sanuito let go, Bezio swore, and Mircea dove—too late. He missed him by inches, reaching the rail in time to see him hit the concrete below. And then tear off like a madman into the crowd, where the eagle-eyed Watch was sure to see him at any moment.

And second offenders rarely survived to offend again.

Mircea vaulted over the railing, Bezio close behind him, but they were almost immediately separated by the huge, jostling crowd. As one of the best on the parade route, their vantage point had been mobbed, with people from both sides pushing in to get the best possible view as the parade’s climax neared. And it didn’t help that half of them were also wearing the damned larve masks.

A sea of white faces looked back at Mircea as he stared around, the shiny surfaces running with reflected flame, the eyes pitch dark and frightening. But none were Sanuito. Foolish boy! This was not the time to run, not when they were so close—

“There!” Bezio’s roar came a second before a beefy hand grasped Mircea’s shoulder, and another pointed off to the right of where he had been looking.

Because to the right was in the water.

Or, to be more accurate, on a barge. One spewing wheels of sparks at a wild-eyed vampire who didn’t even look like he knew where he was. He’d ripped the mask off, or perhaps it had fallen when he did. But his face was almost as pale, and the eyes were darting everywhere in absolute panic.

He wasn’t going to get himself caught, Mircea realized, his stomach falling.

He was going to get himself killed.

“A Dio!” Bezio said, apparently coming to the same conclusion. He may have said more, but Mircea didn’t hear it. He was already moving, his eyes on Sanuito, his mind calculating the distance even as he jumped—

And landed on the very edge of the barge, wobbling after a leap of perhaps three boat lengths. The distance that would have been absurd for a human was nothing to his new body—except that he didn’t usually land on a platform that bobbed heavily up and down with his added weight. But he managed to fall forward, instead of back, catching himself on his hands and knees.

Only to have one of the cursed spinning wheels go off practically in his face.

He scrambled away from the rain of deadly fire, rubbing his sleeve frantically across the tiny burns on his skin, and repressing a strong desire to scream. Before he could recover, he was grabbed by one of the soot-covered men. A glance showed that another was reaching for the already seriously panicked Sanuito, and no, no, no—

Sure enough, before Mircea could react, the man went flying. And then so did Sanuito. Leaping to the next boat even as Bezio landed heavily on this one.

“What the hell is he doing?” Bezio roared, as they took off after the madly fleeing vampire.

Mircea didn’t answer. Both because he didn’t have any idea, and because it was taking all his concentration not to lose his footing on a pathway that was made up as much of wildly bobbing boats and too short docks and moving platforms as land. With screaming, laughing, or cursing people getting in the way, and fire raining down at unpredictable intervals.

But he somehow managed it, and so did Bezio. And they even began to gain slightly since Sanuito was dodging here, there, and everywhere, as if possessed, with no clear goal that Mircea could see. Until he suddenly threw a man into the canal and pushed off in his boat.

That would have been bad enough, since they didn’t have a boat of their own to use to catch him. But then Bezio gripped Mircea’s arm, hard enough to hurt. “Dio can!” he swore, employing one of the stronger local profanities.

“What?”

“The stern!”

Mircea didn’t know what he meant for a second, until his eyes managed to focus through the drifting clouds of smoke. And latched onto something small and unobtrusive, a dull brown next to all the color and dazzling light. Just a small barrel.

Like the ones the accompanying ships had been using to resupply the barges.

“Dio can!”

“I think I said that,” Bezio muttered, and then bent over to lift a couple of men out of a rowboat moored beside the pier.

They were young and burly, and looked like they planned to protest the theft robustly. Until they noticed that the creature under the devilish satyr mask was holding each of them off the ground by one hand. Bezio sat them carefully on the dock and he and Mircea quickly clambered into their boat.

The men quietly watched them leave.

Mircea had the absurd idea they might wave.

And then he forgot about them as Bezio grabbed the oars, sending them shooting across the surface of the water, like cannon shot.

“No,” he said, when Mircea tried to grab a paddle to help. “Grab him. You’re nimbler than I am.”

Perhaps, Mircea thought, but not nimble enough. Not for a leap from a standing position across twice as far a distance as last time. “Get me closer.”

“Trying,” Bezio grunted, but it wasn’t easy. Mainly because of the smoke, which was worse out here, but also because they’d been spotted.

Fortunately, it was only by the human forces, namely the boats meant to keep anyone from doing what they were attempting. But they still had to swerve out of the way to avoid one and then swerve again to slip between two others, scraping the side of one as they came too close. And by the time they’d corrected—

“No,” Bezio said, eyes widening.

Mircea whipped his head around to see that Sanuito’s vessel had also come in contact with a boat. Or to be more precise, with two of them. A fake naval battle was taking place between two ships, which were shooting geysers of sparks out of their cannons instead of shot. They were far enough apart that they couldn’t harm each other, the embers falling harmlessly into the canal.

Until Sanuito sped right through the middle of them.

And emerged on the other side with half his boat on fire.

“Jump!” Mircea yelled at him, and Bezio seconded it in his deep baritone. Even if Sanuito couldn’t swim, the water wouldn’t kill him. But the flames would, especially since he didn’t appear to have the presence of mind to put them out.

“Jump! Jump!”

But between the exploding shells and the applauding crowd and the yells and curses from the ships around them, Sanuito didn’t hear. But he did panic, using vampire strength to propel his small craft through the water as if he thought he could outrun the flames. And thereby only made them flare up brighter.

Mircea cursed and grabbed an oar, after all, and he and Bezio put their backs into it, trying to catch up to the fleeing vampire before his boat burned up underneath him. But the rowboat was small, and not designed to be handled by two, and Sanuito had momentum they lacked. And then, just when they finally began to gain, Bezio dug his oar into the water, stopping them so abruptly that it swung the boat around.

“What are you doing?” Mircea demanded, as the older vampire grabbed the oar from him and started rowing backward.

He didn’t get an answer, but he didn’t need one. Because he’d just looked up, and seen Sanuito’s boat headed straight for a nondescript barge. The one that also happened to be launching all those rockets.

“No,” Mircea said, his heart in his throat, and grabbed for the oar again.

Only to have Bezio knock his hand away. “It’s too late!”

“He’s not going to die!”

“That’s not up to us!” Bezio said, getting an arm across Mircea’s chest. “Not anymore!”

“Like hell it isn’t!” Mircea threw off his friend’s hold and dove over the side of the boat.

The water was cold, but he barely felt it. The problem was more the skim of ash floating on top of the canal that got in his eyes when he surfaced, half blinding him. For a moment, there was only an insane blur of streaming lights and saturated color and frenzied motion.

And leaping people. The soot-covered men on the barge had spotted the burning boat headed straight at them. They apparently didn’t trust the authorities to stop it, because they were diving over the side, swimming away from their vessel even as Mircea closed in.

And he was closing fast. He kept forgetting his new abilities, so rarely did he use most of them. But he was faster in the water than out of it, vampire strength allowing him to cut through the waves quicker than any boat.

But not quickly enough.

His vision cleared just in time to see Sanuito’s craft plow into its target, the momentum carrying it up and over the side and onto the low platform, sending the paraphernalia the artificers had been using flying.

Mircea flinched, expecting the worst. But nothing happened. Except that the boat came to rest in the middle of the platform, still burning, but also still intact.

Mircea felt his spine relax slightly. Maybe they would be all right. Maybe there were some sort of safety precautions he didn’t know about. Maybe—

And then the world exploded.

The powder keg on Sanuito’s boat ignited in a fireball that sent burning wood half as high as the former shells, turning night into day. The larger explosion was quickly followed by a thousand smaller ones, when every shell on the ship ignited at once. Mircea dove, desperate to get away from the surface as a thousand flaming pieces, each far larger than the deadly sparks, went flying everywhere.

Debris pattered the water over his head, including a large piece of wood that speared the waves just where he’d been swimming. Mircea outran it, flailing backward, the roar of multiple explosions echoing in his ears. It would have been faster to turn around, but he was unable to look away, staring upwards at a world burning through ripples of water.

And at the silhouette of two boats, passing just overhead. Together, the hulls formed what looked like nothing so much as the dark eyes of a carnival mask made out of flame. Staring down at him as he sank into darkness.