Masks

Chapter Forty-Five

Marte slid sinuously off the table. Mircea moved back, but only to give himself more room. And he kept the sword up.

She smiled. “Aren’t your arms getting tired?”

“Vampire.”

“True. If only barely.”

“The same could be said of you,” he said, and watched it land.

“Be careful, Mircea.”

“Why? We both know you’re going to kill me—if you can. You have to, or you aren’t getting back down that hall.”

“If that was so important, I could have just stayed there.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You couldn’t. You’re not that powerful. In fact, since there is no possible way you didn’t hear me coming, I’d be willing to bet you only moved there right before I arrived.”

“Did you not hear what I just said? I’m fifteen hundred years old—”

“Yes, but still, not powerful. If you were, you’d have killed her before now. It doesn’t take fifteen centuries to get an opportunity. Unless, of course, your bite is all you have.”

“You had my blood! You felt my power—”

“But it manifests in odd ways, doesn’t it? In your bite; in your ability to hide your age. But not in raw power, Marte. Otherwise, why would you need me? Why would you need this whole farce? If you are as strong as that—” he gestured back at the still raging storm “—her guards wouldn’t matter!”

“But she would. I would have to get past them, and then take care of her—”

Mircea shook his head. “I don’t believe you. In a life as long as yours, you could amass a fortune—look at Martina! You could hire a mercenary army, if you had to, to take care of the guards. No, Marte. You haven’t gone after her because you couldn’t. Because your one great ability wouldn’t do you any good if you couldn’t touch her, and you knew you’d never get close.”

“I was close at her court! I could have taken her then—”

“Then why didn’t you?”

She didn’t say anything, but she moved, lightning fast, going for his throat.

And met a flash of steel that left a thin, bloody line across her cheek, before she jerked back.

“You know, I can see you at court,” he said, watching her dispassionately. “I can see you thinking it would be easy. Act the fool, tell them nothing, and wait for your time to strike. But it never came, did it? You could feel it, already, how fast she was gaining strength, how quickly she was outstripping you. You hated her, but you feared her, too. You could have risked it then. It might have worked, a full out assault when she wasn’t expecting it. But if it didn’t, you’d never get another chance.

“The same is true now.

“And while I may not be much of a vampire, you’ll find that I’m a damned good swordsman.”

“Noble blood will out,” Marte sneered. “But I don’t have to best you. You said it yourself; I only have to get close. And you’ve lost your protection, Mircea. Snakes are immune to their own bite, something in their blood assures it. And you had a great deal of mine. But that was a week ago. You aren’t immune any longer. Get out of the way, and I will let you live, since your miserable future seems so important to you. But she dies.”

“No.”

“No?” She laughed bitterly. “Ye gods! Always, some fool falls in love with her—”

“I’m not in love. Not with her.”

“There is another, then.”

“Yes.”

“Then why don’t you return to her? Go! Be with your lady—”

“I can’t be with her. I’ll never be with her, not now.”

“She’s human.”

“Yes.”

“Then gain strength enough to Change her, or bribe someone else to do it for you. There are ways—”

“And what do I have to offer her? A penniless, powerless vampire, with no future. Wasn’t that your assertion?”

“Then find someone else! Why die here defending a monster?”

“She isn’t a monster, and I have no intention of dying.”

“Isn’t a monster?” She gestured wildly. “What about the thousands who fell fighting for her ambition? Do you think everyone in those wars wanted to be there? Half of them were slaves, forced to fight—”

“I think that was a long time ago.”

“So it doesn’t count?”

“No. It counts. And it weighs—heavily. I’ve done things in war I’m not proud of, because I was told to do them, trained from a young age to do them, to think that that was how a prince behaved. Told that winning would benefit everyone, and that if lives had to be lost in the process, it was the price that had to be paid.

“But I learned differently. Before death, and especially after. I grew to regret what I had done. As she has.”

“Is that what she told you? Is that the story of the hour?” She laughed. “That’s what she does, Mircea! She finds men’s weaknesses, and exploits them. She wasn’t a child when she did what she did, she was a woman grown—selfish, ambitious, murderous. Remember what she did to me? She killed me, took everything from me, from one who had done nothing except to serve her faithfully! And why? She used me like a dog—”

“As you did Sanuito?”

The eyes flashed, genuine anger showing for the first time. “That wasn’t the same thing! I had a life—”

“And perhaps his life was worth as much to him as yours is to you! Perhaps he had dreams, too. And ambitions, and hopes, and loves. But we’ll never know, will we? Because you decided, as she once decided, that only your life mattered. That everyone else lives to serve you, and when they are of no more use, they can be discarded like trash. But we’re not trash, Marte—we’re men. Whatever may have happened to us, we’re people, just the same. And you murdered him—”

“I explained that!”

“—just as she murdered you.”

“Yet you would kill me to save her! Why?”

“Because last night, I saw that murderous woman save a group of men she didn’t have to save. Because, for the last two weeks, I’ve had people who know a great deal more about this world than I do, telling me that she’s long been the only curb on her Sire’s behavior, the only one upholding the law he would flout, and doing it at the risk of her life. Because she’s here today, fighting him—”

“For her own sake! She wants the power, can’t you see that?”

“Perhaps she does. I’m more concerned with what she’ll do with it. And I think there’s a good chance she’ll be a better ruler, this time around.”

“Why? Because she fucked you?”

“No. Because she’s out there, facing him according to our laws, when she didn’t have to be. If you can order an assassination, so could she. And I doubt she’d have made the ham job of it her servant did. But if she did that, she’d be no better than the consul is, using the law when it suits her and flouting it when it does not.

“I wouldn’t serve a queen like that. But I will serve her.”

“You won’t,” Marte sneered. “You’ll just be another in a long line of idiots—”

Mircea spun and clashed swords with someone behind him.

“—who died for her!”

Mircea had to spin out of the clash quickly, because Marte went for him again at the same time. And was almost decapitated by the other sword in the process, which came down onto the tabletop hard enough to rend it in two. “Get out of the way!” the officer told her. “I’ll deal with this.”

Marte got out of the way.

“You’re late,” she told him, circling around to the side.

“Sorry about that.” The officer smiled at Mircea. “Had to get another sword.”

No wonder Marte had been so willing to talk, Mircea thought, furious. They’d both been waiting for the same man . . .

Who attacked again, using his much greater strength to his advantage. Or trying to. But Mircea hadn’t been bragging earlier; he’d practically been born with a sword in his hand, his father had seen to that. And the battlefield hones even sharp reflexes to a knife-edged sheen.

At least it does if you want to survive.

So half the hammer blows didn’t land, and most of the rest were repelled. But a few got through, because a few always get through: nicks on Mircea’s shoulder and hand; a more serious cut on his thigh; torn muscles from countering the sheer power of those blows. Whereas his best efforts in return involved a ripped shirt and a small wound to the man’s left arm, which healed almost before he’d finished cutting it.

And Mircea was getting tired.

He hadn’t fed before he left the house, not expecting to have to fight, and desperate to get here before the battle began. But that, combined with the blood loss from his earlier wounds, had already sapped him. He wasn’t going to be able to keep this up for long.

Just as bad was the fact that the battle in the courtyard was winding down. He could tell it in the sounds of the crowd, now clearly audible again. He could tell it from the house, which had quieted, with no more shuddering blows. He could tell it from Marte’s face, glimpsed in instances between ducks and dodges: excited, eager, savage.

The senator was running out of time, and so was Mircea.

And then the officer grabbed one of the torches.

He must have noticed Mircea’s vulnerability to fire in the corridor earlier. Or maybe it was his fear he wanted. Because he laughed when Mircea stumbled back, closer to the cleaved table.

“Worried, infant?” He swung the torch in a wide arc, causing sparks to rain down onto the stones around him. “You should be. I’d sooner see you burn than put any more nicks in that sword.”

Mircea didn’t have an answer for that, and had frankly never seen the point of witty comments in battle anyway. He didn’t want to impress the man; he wanted to kill him, before he tired of this game and just drained Mircea where he stood. Or where he stumbled back, having almost tripped over something.

Something that cracked slightly under his heel.

He didn’t look down. He didn’t have to. There was only one thing capable of cracking in the entire room, other than his bones. An example of exquisite workmanship that might do him no good at all, since the officer had seemed pretty impervious before.

But there was only one way to find out.

Another deliberate stagger, a toe under a delicate glass lantern, an upward fling, just as the man made another of those fiery slashes—

And, no, it seemed that older vampires weren’t impervious to fire, after all.

The cesendello hit the officer dead center of the chest, exploding in a burst of expensive glass and gleaming oil, and the sparks he was slinging around did the rest. That and vampire flammability. The whole top half of the man’s body went up like a human torch, in an audible whoosh that had the hair on the back of Mircea’s neck raising in horror, and his feet stumbling back.

He’d seen men burning on the battlefield, and found it a disturbing sight. But it had been nothing like this. A man on fire had time to put it out. To drop to the ground, to roll in the sand, to possibly save himself.

A vampire did not.

At least, one caught off guard did not, and once he was aflame, the instinctive panic of their kind gripped him, too hard for rational thought. But fury isn’t rational. And the officer rushed at Mircea, body suffused with running flames, face set in a snarl that was mostly bones and gaping fangs, because the skin and flesh had already burnt away, hands reaching—

And then Mircea threw a chair, the only defense he had to keep from touching the creature, and jumped back.

And thereby missed the explosion when it connected.

Burning, crisping, already-turning-to-ash-as-they-fell body parts exploded everywhere, in a gory rain that Mircea thought he would remember as long as he lived.

Which wouldn’t be long, he realized, as he was knocked to the floor by a smaller, but no less deadly, opponent.