Masks

Chapter Forty-Four

There was silence for a moment. Mircea didn’t know what she was thinking, but he was worried. About a whole list of things: the seeping blood from several of his deeper wounds, which was sapping his strength just when he needed it most. The sound of the wind from the garden, which had lessened enough that he had started to be able to hear the crowd through it. The fact that, if the officer hadn’t come by now, he probably wouldn’t. Although that might be just as well—for him.

Because Mircea had started to put things together.

Things like the fact that the senator’s symbol was not one cobra but three: a large one with two smaller ones flanking it on either side. Things like that story she’d told him on the day of the regatta: Had she been feeling something that sparked a long buried memory? Things like Marte’s quip about children and masters.

But mostly things about what he’d seen and heard the night before. All of which should have been impossible for him. It should have been impossible for anyone, except a member of the senator’s family.

Or someone who had recently ingested a large quantity of their blood.

Marte had been watching him, with a little smile. Now she tilted her head. “But then, why not suspect Auria?”

“Auria wasn’t the one cataloguing the remains of the storeroom. Auria wasn’t the one who interrupted Sanuito and me in the courtyard. Auria wasn’t even there. But you were. And he wouldn’t talk in front of you.”

“Mmm. True.”

“And then there was the fact of why you were there: to tell me to make sure that the senator bit me the next time we were together.”

“But Auria told you the same.”

“Because you reminded her to include it.”

Marte’s eyebrow raised. “Or perhaps she asked me to talk to you that night.”

“But that wouldn’t explain my reaction to your blood, would it?”

“Blood I gave you when I saved your life.”

“Yes, because you had to,” Mircea said viciously. “You couldn’t let your carrier die, not when it would be impossible to find another in time. I remember feeling positively drunk off your blood the next day, for several days. The low-level vampire you were pretending to be couldn’t have caused that sort of reaction. Even Auria—supposedly older than anyone else in the household—didn’t affect me like that. Didn’t come close. I felt perfectly normal after drinking from her.”

An eyebrow went up. “You call what happened at the senator’s last night normal?”

Mircea licked his lips, and came out with it. “No. But we both know why that was don’t we?”

“Do we?” The slight smile was back. “That day at the regatta, which was the day after I bit you, you saw nothing.”

“And you know that how?” he asked, before he could stop himself.

She laughed and leaned her head back against the wall.

“In any case, I wouldn’t have,” he said, wishing they could drop the pretense. “I hadn’t seen the sun for two years. It completely dazzled me. To the point that I barely noticed anything else.”

“But you were right next to the senator,” she murmured.

“Yes, so that she could shield me. I was inside her power from the time she woke me, just before the entertainment started. Of course I wouldn’t notice it—or anyone else’s through it. And I only started to notice auras last night after it began to be crowded. But I was on the roof at the regatta, where it was not at all crowded. . . .”

“And now? Are you still seeing them?”

The question was deceptively mild, but there was something in the tone. . . .

Or maybe Mircea was being paranoid. But considering the circumstances, he rather thought he’d err on the side of caution. And be very careful how he answered.

Or avoid it altogether.

“I’ve already answered some of your questions,” he said evenly. “You haven’t answered mine.”

Marte looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, but then smiled. “All right, then. After all, you’ve already heard one side. . . .

“I was like all the others: born into a slum in one of the richest cities in the world, which only made me feel poorer. Every day, fascinating people poured through the port of ports, come to trade, come to sightsee, come just to be able to say they’d seen it.”

“But not Venice,” Mircea said, and felt his mouth go dry.

Maybe he didn’t want his suspicions confirmed, after all.

“No, not Venice,” she said gently.

She leaned back against the wall, with a sigh. “So long ago, but I remember it so well, great Alexandria. Although to me, it was mostly just a beautiful slum. Without money or connections, its opportunities stayed well out of reach.

“Until one day, my father did a favor for some minor bureaucrat, and he returned it by getting me a job at the palace. Not a good job, mind you. Not a handmaiden’s job. But a job nonetheless. And being ambitious—ye gods, I was so ambitious in those days—I worked and schemed and flattered and cajoled, until I was assigned to the queen’s own apartments.

“I still cleaned floors and emptied chamber pots, but I did it for her.

“And, in time, I thought perhaps I would be given more responsibilities, a larger role, a good match. . . . I hoped for so many things. But there was war, and she went away. And when she came back, she was changed. Moody; mercurial. Laughing one minute and throwing things in anger the next. Letters were sent and received. I didn’t know what was in any of them, but I knew they displeased her, for her temper became . . . so much worse.

“She had a tomb made for herself, out in the desert. A lavish thing, more like a small palace. She moved us to it, me and Iras, her hairdresser, and Charmion, her handmaiden. And, for a while, she seemed happier. I thought things must be going well. The rumors that had been swirling around the city were bleak, but rumors lie. And she seemed so calm. . . .

“And then, one night, she asked for me. I hurried into my clothes, ran to her room, not knowing what to expect. Had there been news? Were we going back to the city? Had her charms ensnared yet another general, brought yet another Roman to his knees?”

“No,” Mircea said, remembering his history.

“No,” Marte agreed. “Not this time.

“This time, great Cleopatra had gambled and lost. Both her bid to lead the world, and her navy, at Actium. Our fleet had been routed, and Octavian, Caesar’s heir and the victor on the day, had offered her only her life. Not her kingdom, which was to become a province of Rome. Not her lover, who was condemned for treason to the new lord of Rome. Not even the son she’d had with old Julius, who was too much of a threat to Octavian’s ambitions. But her life.

“In exchange for walking in chains through the streets of Rome, humbled before the city she had once hoped to rule. Just another prisoner in his triumphal parade.”

“She refused.”

“Of course she refused. As Octavian had known she would. Had she accepted, she would have been assassinated at the first opportunity anyway, as her son would later be. She wouldn’t give him that satisfaction. She would die by her own hand, she had decided, but how to do it?”

“An asp,” Mircea said. “Or so the stories say.”

“The stories are wrong. It was poison she planned to take. I can attest to it personally, for what did the great queen want with me? Why, to test it, of course. To make sure the concoction she’d come up with was as painless as she thought.

“There were three of us there that night. The legends say two, because that’s all they found the next day, but there were three. And three different brews that she administered herself, in cups of wine. I don’t know if the others knew what was in them, but I didn’t. I had no idea.

“Until we started to die.

“I was the last. I don’t know what she gave me—I never knew. But it wasn’t painless. It felt like fire in my veins and it took a long time to finish the job. The others died, she prepared her own cup, and still I lingered. And thus saw the creature who came for her, in the darkest hours of the night, the one who had determined to cheat great Caesar of his prize.

“I heard what he whispered to her, as she lay dying from his bite. What he promised. Life, and power, and riches, all the things I’d ever wanted. Why do you suppose they think only queens are ambitious? Or that only queens want to live. . . .

“He Changed her, as I lay dying. Changed her, but never once looked at me. She was a prize, a jewel, a feather in his cap. And what was I?

“Nothing. But still I lived.

“And I lived after he was gone.

“I lived when all was still and morning was hours away and there was no one there to tell me to keep to my place. Not anymore. Not ever again.

“And so I dragged myself over to her. And I found the puncture wounds, the ones all the ancient stories mention, the ones that made them assume she was bitten by an asp. She wasn’t so stupid—asp bites are painful. She meant to die by gentler means.

“I meant not to die at all.

“And so I took it from her, the blood he’d given. I closed my mouth over the wound and I sucked it out, like the wine she’d given me. I drank it down until I could drink no more, until my head was spinning and my body was so light that it felt like I might fly away.

“I’m not sure what happened then. I remember thinking I had to get away, some instinct telling me to get underground, quickly. I only know that I woke days later, buried in the desert sand, alone and confused. And so very, very hungry.”

“You really did make yourself,” Mircea said, in disbelief.

“Yes, but in my ignorance, I had botched it. She had been Changed correctly, by a being who had done it a thousand times before. I had . . . improvised. It wouldn’t have worked at all with anyone else. It’s against every law we know. But his blood was so old, so rich, even then, even fifteen hundred years ago . . .”

“But she told me that she was your master—”

“She is nothing to me!” Marte snapped, face flushing. “Just as I was nothing to her! Merely someone to be used. But her blood had mixed with his; it was impossible to separate them. I took in both.”

“But you went to find her—”

“I went to kill her! By then I had found out the truth of what I was—and what I wasn’t. What I would never be. Vampires are nothing without family. But I could never have one. My bite was poison, even to my own kind. Something to do with the poison in my system when I was created, or an attribute I acquired from my Sire, or how I was made—I didn’t know.

“All I knew was that I would never be able to make children, or bind ones that others had made. And a vampire without a family is nothing. All those things he promised—power, riches, position—they only come with family. Alone, we are weak, poor, nothing. All my ambitions, all my hopes, everything came crashing down around me. I had eternity, yes. But an eternity of the same thing I’d known in life. And more than that, an eternity of being hunted, once the fine elders she took me to see realized what I was.”

“They knew?”

“Oh, yes,” Marte said fiercely. “She hadn’t recognized me. It had been less than a decade since she’d killed me, but she didn’t know who I was—or what I could do. I wasn’t important enough to remember, just some servant child. But they knew. My little ability had cropped up once or twice before, you see, when the master Changed someone, and his decision had always been the same.”

“They planned to kill you.”

She nodded. “I heard two of them speaking of it. How they had communicated with him, how he had ordered it. Mine is a rare gift, and a rare danger. He wouldn’t risk anyone around him with the power to hurt him.”

“So you ran.”

“Yes. And I’ve been running ever since.”

“Until you came to Venice.”

“Until I came to Venice. And gave my blood to a young man who has been seeing very strange things ever since. But who, I suspect, isn’t seeing them anymore.”