Masks

Chapter Thirty-Two

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?