Masks

Chapter Thirty-Six

The dining hall was abruptly replaced by another scene, one equally as familiar. The graceful lines of the consul’s mansion rose up in front of Mircea’s mental vision, framed by poplars and silhouetted against a star flung sky. It looked peaceful, but not static, jittering a little around the edges, like a painting someone had decided to shake.

Or like the field of vision of someone who was quivering, although whether from excitement or fear, Mircea didn’t know.

He realized that he was seeing through someone else’s eyes, as he had that night in Marte’s room. And like that night, he didn’t feel the watcher’s emotions. But in all other ways, it was far more real than that other experience—almost like being there.

He could see the man’s breath ghosting on the cold night air, feel the wind against his face as he darted across an open field, smell the night-flowering vine on a trellis on the side of the house as he started climbing, heading for the roof.

There were others with him, too. Mircea could see them, vaguely, out of the corners of his eyes, dark shapes in form-fitting attire, dim against the night and quiet as shadows. They were climbing with him. He could feel the trellis shake beneath him, and see others going up by fitting their fingers and toes into the shallow cracks between the stone blocks of the wall, agile as monkeys.

And far more deadly.

A sentinel or soldier on top of the flat roof peered over, alerted by some small noise, and a moment later came falling past, almost knocking Mircea off his makeshift ladder. The man hit the grass far below, almost silently and unmoving. And then Mircea was over the edge of the roof and running for the opposite side.

Like many in Venice, the palazzo was built around a large, central courtyard filled with fruit trees and flowering bushes. A central fountain caught the moonlight in silver flashes, the only light to be seen other than for a few dim candle flickers behind half closed shutters. But it was enough.

Their prey was seated at the edge of the water, as if enjoying the change from the arid desert heat. Having just seen the auras put off by the senator’s dinner guests, Mircea was surprised to find no similar glow surrounding the small figure. He was dark as a human, just a vague, star-limned shape, like the diamond-studded nets ladies sometimes wore over their hair.

But there was enough light for Mircea to see the man’s chin rise, and his neck turn slightly in their direction.

For a long moment, there was no other movement. The master vampires ringing the roof, several men deep, the small creature in the garden, the occupants of the house—were all so still that a late working bird fluttered back to its nest in between them, unconcerned. And then the consul slowly rose to his feet.

“Welcome,” he told them, in strangely accented Venetian. “I have been waiting for you.”

“Mircea, Mircea!” Jerome’s voice came to him, as if from far away. “We have to get out of here!”

“Good luck with that!” Paulo snarled, and lashed out at someone.

Mircea could see him, vaguely. He fought off the images of that starlit garden and tried to focus. But it didn’t help much.

A moment later, he realized why when the heavy Turkish carpet that had been cushioning the tabletop was pulled up. And a panicked-looking servant tried to crawl underneath, where Mircea was half-sitting, half-lying on the floor. Along with Jerome and Paulo and the lady with the pink aura he’d seen Jerome talking to earlier.

But the servant’s attempt to join them failed when Paulo, who had broken off one of the sturdy chair legs, promptly whacked the poor man upside the head with it.

“Paulo!” Mircea said, only to have the blond turn to stare at him out of slightly mad eyes.

He’d seen that look on new recruits’ faces a few times, when they were first exposed to battle. It usually came just before they panicked and did something stupid, like running straight for enemy lines. Mircea wasn’t clear on who the enemy was here, although apparently there was one.

At least, he assumed they were under the table for some reason.

The shouts, screams, sounds of running feet and breaking things would tend to bear this out. He grabbed Paulo’s arm in one hand, and cautiously lifted the tablecloth with the other. And saw a scene of pure pandemonium.

Finely dressed people were clustered at the doors to the atrium, pushing and shoving each other in their desperation to get out. Servants were standing around the dining area, holding platters of food and looking unsure what to do with it. The only ones eating were the dogs running underfoot, barking excitedly and cleaning up the fallen bounty from several knocked over tables.

And from the huge sugar sculpture of three rearing cobras that had been in the middle of the U of tables. But which was now on its side, with great chunks scattered over the floor and glittering in the candlelight. And sending the stench of burning sugar into the air, because a fallen candelabra had started to melt it into a sticky sugar sea.

“What happened?” Mircea asked thickly.

“They happened!” Paulo said, staring at the large number of people clustered around the senator’s table, in what looked like some sort of uniform.

Mircea couldn’t see much, but it was enough. There was only one group he knew who wore long crimson capes and gold helmets and caused this kind of panic. And since the senator was talking to them instead of trying to calm her guests, he assumed it was serious.

“What are they doing here?” he asked, but didn’t get an answer. Because a group of guests had decided to hell with the crush around the doors, and had come running back this way.

Mircea assumed they were headed for the small hall at the far end of the room, which the servants had been using to bring in the food. But if so, they never made it. In the bottleneck between several upturned tables, someone came a little too close to the burning sugar—with predictable results.

And if Mircea had thought it was pandemonium before, it was nothing next to a bunch of vampires with flaming hems trapped inside a room with no way out.

“Well . . . damn,” Jerome said, as a group of now genuinely out-of-control master vampires began screaming and running and falling and flailing—

And, in one case, sliding—right underneath the table.

“Aaaauggghh!” Paulo said, rearing back with his table leg.

“No, no, no!” Mircea said, wrestling with him, before he could bring it down on some master’s skull.

“Put it out! Put it out!” the pink lady screamed, because the flaming man had just set the tablecloth on fire.

And then the world fell away again.

Mircea felt himself falling, the explosion that had destroyed half the roof behind him having sent him flying. He landed after a three story drop in a roll that left him unhurt, and scattering along with the rest of his company. Until one of his men grabbed his arm.

“What’s happening?” A panicked whisper echoed in his mind.

“Residual power from the day—”

“Then we’re dead!”

Mircea’s man shook him off. “He can’t top it up at night! Scatter until he expends his reserve, then proceed as planned!”

The man nodded and flew off to the left, while Mircea’s man dimmed his power as much as possible, to make himself harder to see. And then flattened against the building, melding what was left with the energy being thrown off by someone inside. He waited for the inevitable rush of guards to come pouring into the courtyard in defense of their master.

And kept waiting, because none came.

Instead, the initial volley, which had carved a huge bite out of the top floor of the building, was soon joined by similar explosions around the perimeter. But despite that, and unlike the others, who made themselves targets by moving, Mircea’s man stayed where he was. Moving only enough to stay aligned with the actions of the servant inside.

And, slowly, the hits grew more erratic and less powerful. The crushing blows became severe, then serious, and finally glancing. And then stopped all together, allowing Mircea to see burning trees and a pockmarked building through drifting clouds of smoke.

“Get ready.”

Mircea’s man sent the thought around to his people, and received back flickers of acknowledgement from dozens of minds. Mircea felt the man’s hands clench, but he tamped down any and all physical signs of tension. His heart did not beat; his breath did not flow; his palms did not sweat. The only discernable sign of his intentions were the slowly bunching muscles in his calves, preparing to spring—

And then knotting painfully, when he suddenly stopped, and urgently sent hold, hold, hold, to his people.

They held. Mircea thought they might have anyway. Or, if they had been running, it would have been in the opposite direction.

Because something unholy was happening in the middle of the garden.

The small figure of the consul was small no longer, churning and twisting and swelling—exponentially. But not in any kind of understandable way. Mircea stared because he had to, because the man whose eyes he’d borrowed was doing so. But if it had been up to him, he’d have looked away.

Because whatever was in the garden wasn’t human any longer.

A coil of scale-covered strength pushed up and out, black even in the firelight that splashed it. It rose two, three, four stories into the air, higher than the walls around it, and simultaneously swelled up wider than five men could have reached around. And that was before a great serpentine hood spread out easily three times wider than that, blocking out the stars.

Mircea felt the vampire he was shadowing swallow, but then stiffen again, probably knowing that they had no choice but to attack. They had already committed treason; there was nothing behind them but death. And so they went forward, Mircea’s man leaping from the shadows with a mental scream: “Now!”

Mircea came back to himself in a sea of people. There was smoke, and screaming, and jostling; someone dug an elbow into his side; someone else stepped on toes that already felt mangled. And then someone yelled: “No, No! Grab him—grab him!”

And then he fell down some stairs.

It hurt, because he was still too disoriented to catch himself properly, but it was nonetheless an improvement. Because he fell out of the crowd surging down a large hall above, and into a small landing with an open window. An open window belching smoke, but still. He’d take what he could get.

Mircea concentrated on remembering how to move his own arms and legs, instead of someone else’s, and finally got it sorted out. He staggered to his feet just as three more people came tumbling down the stairs after him. Well, Paulo and Jerome had been running, until the pink lady lost her footing behind them, and knocked them down along with her and then into Mircea.

“Hello,” she said breathlessly, from atop his stomach.

Jerome pulled her off, but Mircea, who had hit his head and bruised his butt on impact, stayed down for a moment.

Paulo didn’t. He had spied the window, and he scrambled to his feet, running over to stick his blond head out. “I think we can get down this way!” he said excitedly. Which was good.

And loudly.

Which was not.

“Uh oh,” Jerome said. And then jerked himself and his lady friend out of the way, as the crowd in the bigger corridor upstairs paused, turned, and then came stampeding their way.

Mircea found that he could move, after all. And then he dove after Jerome, who was pulling his lady past an outraged-looking Paulo and down the rest of the stairs. And then into a hall, because bodies had flooded the landing and were surging after them, despite Paulo’s vociferous protests.

“In here,” Mircea said, and pulled them through a door down the hall that proved to be a pantry, and then into a kitchen. Which was deserted, the servants having already departed, probably through the open door on the other side of the room.

“Oh, thank God!” Paulo said, and then shut up abruptly, looking behind him. But the hall had branched in two ways, and it looked like most of the people had gone the other, because nobody was following them this time.

“What are we doing?” Mircea asked.

“Trying to find a way out, what does it look like?” Paulo demanded, striding across the room.

“Then why were we upstairs?”

Paulo said a very bad word, but Mircea didn’t think it was directed at him. He was staring at something outside, and in a moment, the rest of them were, too.

“Because of them,” Jerome said, looking at the ring of red caped guards that had now surrounded the huge palazzo, as far as they could see in both directions.

A group of partygoers, who had managed to make it as far as the street, were being corralled like cattle. And forced back against the house, despite the fact that part of it was still on fire. More red capes lined the canal, including the area in front of the small flight of stairs that was their only exit.

Paulo said that word again.

“What are we going to do? What are we going to do?” the pink lady asked, quivering.

“Nothing,” Jerome breathed. “They’re senatorial guards. Crossing a line they’ve formed is a death sentence.”

“But . . . but we didn’t do anything wrong,” she cried. “Why are they doing this?”

“This isn’t about us,” Mircea said, and Jerome nodded.

“It was a setup. They were here too fast.”

“A setup for what?” Paulo demanded, looking back and forth between the two of them.

“Not what,” Mircea said, as his world started to gray out again. “Who.”

There were bodies everywhere, some motionless, others writhing in agony. Mircea’s vampire landed hard on the graveled path right in front of one, and saw death, limned by fire, reflected in the corpse’s open eyes. Not yet, he thought savagely, and rolled, just as the great head struck down, the huge fangs piercing dirt, gravel, and the body of his fallen comrade, all at once.

The monster reared back, whipping its head around, trying to dislodge the body, and Mircea’s vampire saw his chance. He jumped, not away, for there was nowhere to go, but straight at the muscled coil, landing and sinking his sword deep. Several of his men joined him, and for a moment, he thought perhaps they had a chance.

Until his hand started burning, flesh and then bone dissolving away as bloodlike acid ate through sword, glove, and body with equal ease.

He jerked back, stifling a scream, and pulled a crossbow with his good arm. But he didn’t fire. Because the great wound he’d just made, which had sunk half his arm in the thing’s red guts, closed as he watched, the skin rippling and churning as it had when the body was formed.

And then stilling again, without even a scar.

He looked up to see his men staring at him, both close and far, waiting for orders. For answers. For the way out he’d always found in the most impossible situations.

But he didn’t have them; he didn’t have them.

He saw when it registered, when they gripped their weapons tighter, because there was only one thing left to do, and it wasn’t to die like puling cowards, running away.

“For the Lady,” he said silently, and heard it echoed around the garden.

And then shouted when they charged as one man, almost drowning out the slithering, scraping hiss of the great body, turning lightning fast to meet them, still hampered by its gory prize.

But the great tail wasn’t.

Mircea’s vampire managed to loose his arrow into one of the thing’s eyes, just before what felt like a giant’s fist threw him back against the side of the house, along with the half dozen men who had been in its path. He tried to get up, but nothing worked; even armor couldn’t absorb that much force. And the blow had torn his last weapon away, sending it hurtling into the darkness, where he didn’t know.

Not that it mattered now.

He lay against the house like a broken doll, feeling his system trying to repair the damage, even as the cause loomed up over him. It had identified him as the leader, and so he would die first. He was vaguely grateful for that, for not having to see the rest of his men . . .

The man’s thoughts trailed off as that dark hood swallowed the sky. Swallowed speech. Swallowed everything.

Except the slight, spectral figure that stepped in between them, shedding a puddle of light over the ruined ground, and raising a hand.

“No.”