Masks

Chapter Six

“We’re going to lose so much money,” Paulo groused, consulting his little notebook as he and Mircea hurried down the street.

“I thought . . . the idea . . . was to make money,” a newly golden-blond Jerome panted, coming up behind them.

He was pushing the cart they needed to bring home the load of items that were apparently necessary for running a quality establishment. It was empty at the moment, and therefore not remotely heavy, although that shouldn’t have made a difference. “You don’t actually have to breathe anymore,” Mircea reminded him.

“I know,” Jerome wheezed. “But every time . . . I try not to . . . I pass out.”

“You can’t pass out,” Paulo said, irritably. “You’re a vampire.”

“Yes, now,” Jerome said. “But a year ago I was human—”

“A year?” Mircea asked. For some reason, he’d assumed that he was the youngest of their group. Maybe because he didn’t see how a year-old vampire had survived three weeks in the tender care of the Watch.

But Jerome was nodding. “I was Changed shortly before my master died. It’s one reason I was . . . that is, nobody knew me all that well, and—”

“But you’re here now,” Paulo said, looking critically at the miniature version of himself, who was habited elegantly enough in a short mantle of rich brown brocade, but who, it had to be admitted, was ruining it with a fish-out-of-water expression. “You are representing our house. Stop that ridiculous puffing!”

“I told you—I’ve tried. But every time I do, I turn blue.”

“And I’ve told you, that isn’t possible!”

“Well, it’s actually more of a lavend—erp.” Jerome shut up abruptly, as his air passages were cut off by an irate vampire.

“Let’s test a theory, shall we?” Paulo asked sweetly.

Mircea leaned against the side of a wall to wait it out. The Ave Maria bell, which rang at sunset, had already sounded, supposedly signaling the close of the market day. Not that everyone always followed the official hours, particularly at this time of year, with so many eager purchasers roaming the streets. But the later it became, the worse their chances for filling their exhaustive list was going to be.

“The shops will close soon,” he said mildly.

“Not if you know who to see,” Paulo replied, as Jerome wriggled and flailed and kicked the air, because he was being held about a foot off the brick walkway. “Although it might be better for us if they did.”

“It’s that bad?”

Paulo flipped his notebook open one handed. “In the last week alone—and this is in addition to the usual expenses, mind you—we have spent: ten ducats for the fur lining to a cape, six more for six yards of Rhenish linen—highway robbery, that—eighteen ducats each for three turquoise gems, twenty ducats for a quantity of Spanish leather gloves and cedar oil for scenting them, the same for a taffeta coverlet lined with swan’s down that Marte simply had to have, and an utterly ridiculous eighty ducats for eight yards of iridescent Ormesine. And that doesn’t even count what we paid to that thief of a tailor to outfit you lot on the quick. I could have done it three times over for that price at auction—”

“But finding auctions takes time.”

“Which we don’t have, and he somehow knew it, the fiend. And we’re supposed to be the monsters!”

Jerome gurgled something.

“Oh, yes,” Paulo said. “And sixteen soldini for a quantity of perfumed toothpicks Auria insisted upon after a friend informed her they existed! This,” he waggled the small book under Mircea’s nose, “is why Venice very sensibly has men do the shopping!”

“Which we’re not currently doing,” Mircea pointed out.

“And why is that?”

“You were making a point?”

Paulo looked confused for a moment, his mind still obviously on ducats and how few of them they were about to have. But he finally noticed a bug-eyed Jerome still dangling from his raised fist. His eyes closed. Then his fingers opened and a gasping, heaving, and yes, slightly blue vampire hit the road.

And a moment later, so did they, hurrying to the Rialto before the last of the merchants packed up for the night.

“All right,” Paulo said, as they approached the biggest shopping area of Venice. “We need: white wax candles, salted cheese, a songbird because Zaneta’s died and she’s been impossible ever since, sugar, pepper, fifteen boxes of assorted sweets, three ginger pine nut cakes, two cakes with violet syrup—”

“Vampires don’t eat,” Mircea reminded him, wondering about all the foodstuffs.

Their condition made a lot of senses stronger, but taste wasn’t one of them. Vampire bodies prioritized the use of power, preferring the vital over the merely pleasant, and taste wasn’t a huge advantage. He’d heard that it returned for masters, who had energy to burn, but he didn’t think that most of the household fell into that category.

Nor that Martina was the type to feed her servants cake.

“But our human clients do,” Paulo reminded him. “As do newly minted masters. In fact, they’re the worst. Once they can taste food again, they want the best of everything. Despite the fact that half of them were peasants the last time they could taste anything and can’t tell the difference between a decent red and watered down vinegar!”

“Then why not serve them the vinegar?”

He grimaced. “Because Martina won’t let me. She says some of them do know, and we’d damage our reputation—”

“What reputation?” Jerome asked, looking confused.

Paulo stopped mid-sentence to look at him.

“We’re a brothel,” Jerome added helpfully.

Mircea cleared his throat, but the hint failed to register.

“I thought we just gave them a bit of the old, you know,” Jerome elaborated by waggling his hips back and forth suggestively, causing Paulo to look like he wanted to recommence strangling.

“We are not a brothel!” he hissed, jerking the smaller vampire out of the road so that a cart full of farmers, who had been looking at them strangely, could pass.

“We get paid for a tumble, don’t we?” Jerome asked. “So do they.” He pointed at a nearby bawdy house, of the kind that always congregated close to markets. “What’s the difference?”

“The dif—” Paulo shut his eyes. “The difference is night and day! We are cortigianes, not puttana! We discuss art. And antiquities. And literature and music. We grace palazzos and mix perfectly with the owners and their guests. Auria writes poetry—”

“Auria?”

“—and Bianca paints. We entertain dignitaries, visiting sultans, even senators. Possibly even the consul himself!”

“Soooo, we’re a high class brothel,” Jerome reasoned.

“Gahhh!” Paulo tore a page out of his book and thrust it into Mircea’s hands. “You and Wheezer there get this half of the list; I’ll tend to the rest. We’ll meet back here after!”

He left at what would have been a run, if he hadn’t been upholding the dignity of the house. Leaving Mircea standing in the street, staring after him. And wondering what he was missing.

Jerome reached for the list. “Sugar, spices . . . two large, gilded marzipan cakes? At this hour?”

Mircea didn’t say anything. But his eyes swept the area, looking for the reason why a couple of newly purchased slaves had just been left to their own devices. And sure enough, he found it.

The Watch was everywhere.

Lounging beside a nearby barbershop, laughing at the bawdy story a local man was telling. Walking casually down the street, the light from a late-closing shop spangling their bright silver breastplates and green silks. Standing in solitary, apparently contemplative thought, at the end of a dock.

That alone wasn’t surprising. The hours after dark but before the wine bell sounded was the busiest time of day for his kind. At the moment, there were still hundreds of people in the streets, finishing their shopping, on their way to meet friends for dinner, or heading for the taverns after a hard day’s work. Nightfall seemingly meant nothing to the Venetians, who defied it with the torches affixed to buildings, the lamps on passing gondolas, and the firelight spilling out of doorways and across the faces of the vampires who were suddenly everywhere, mixing with the crowd, sizing up the population, making their choices.

The Watch was on hand to make sure they kept to the rules. Feed but don’t kill, wipe memories properly, take any duels somewhere they won’t be seen by impressionable humans. Who tended to remember things like people scaling the sides of buildings or healing almost instantaneously or somersaulting over their opponents’ heads.

But it seemed to Mircea that there were more of them than usual tonight.

A lot more.

Or maybe he was just noticing them more now. As a freeman, the Watch had been an irritation, quick to give him grief or to bleed him dry for drinking money. But now they felt more like jailors, hemming him in, making his skin tight, making him want to—

“Mircea? Are you coming?” He looked around to find Jerome standing in the road, one hand on the little cart and one on the list, looking at him impatiently. “We need to hurry if we’re going to get everything.”

Mircea nodded, belatedly noticing the signs of a rapidly closing street. A flower seller hurried past with a few wilted carnations in a basket. A secondhand shop with stained hosen flapping from the rafters and a huge display of carnival masks shut for the night, the heavy wooden shutters over the front making a thick thunk, thunk that echoed down the street. Even a lame beggar decided the day was done and got up, carting his rug and bowl off to the nearest tavern.

“We’re not going to get all this,” Mircea said, reading the list over Jerome’s shoulder.

“Sure we are,” Jerome said, ever the optimist. “An apothecary will have the sugar and the spices. And the candies and possibly the cakes. In fact, a decent apothecary ought to have most of this stuff.”

“How do you know?”

“I used to be one. Well, apprenticed anyway,” he amended, as they started off. “It’s how I met my master. He came in one day and I helped him. I guess I helped him too good, because the next night, he came back for me!”

Jerome kept talking, even raising his voice to be heard over the bump, bump, bump of cart wheels over brick pavers. But Mircea wasn’t listening. He was more interested in something else.

Like the fact that, the more he looked, the more members of the Watch he saw.

They were everywhere: on rooftops, crouching low against chimneys; in boats in the water, half hidden under the gondolas’ awnings; on porticoes, almost invisible in the shadows. And many of them were wearing blackened breastplates, instead of the usual highly polished silver, to better blend in with the night. He would have taken them for thieves scouting the area, but for the distinctive Medusa-head design stamped in relief on the front.

Mircea swallowed. Half the guards in the city had to be here tonight. But why?

Nothing unusual was happening that he could see. He spied a probably unlicensed prostitute negotiating with a customer, a cutpurse trailing a gawking tourist, and a shop selling imported carpets that remained open in defiance of the law, because the local militia could be bribed to look the other way this time of year. But nothing to attract the interest of the Watch.

They didn’t concern themselves with petty human affairs. They were there for the vampires. Who also seemed to be congregating in greater and greater numbers—

“Are you listening to me?”

Mircea looked down to find Jerome frowning at him. “Of course.”

“You looked like you were thinking about something else.”

“I was just . . . wondering what a vampire needed with an apothecary.”

The smaller vampire brightened. “I was just coming to that. He wanted a poison remedy, actually. Theriac.”

“Theriac?”

“You know, Venice treacle?”

Mircea didn’t know, a fact that seemed to shock Jerome. “Oh, come on! It’s only the most famous antidote in the history of . . . well, antidotes. They say the king who invented it took so much of the stuff while he was experimenting, that when he actually tried to kill himself years later, he couldn’t find a poison that would do the trick! Had to have some soldier run him through.”

Mircea frowned. “Are you talking about Mithridatum?”

“Yes! Well, sort of,” Jerome amended. “Mithridates king of Pontus came up with the first recipe, which was later discovered by Pompey and carried to Rome. But we’ve been improving on it ever since. Apothecaries, I mean. Venice has its own version with more than sixty ingredients. It’s very

expensive—”

“So is the cure hawked by the Spaniard down by the pier,” Mircea pointed out. “But he’ll cut you a deal if you linger until closing.”

“He—” Jerome puffed up. “That’s not the same thing! That man is a charlatan!”

“Really?” Mircea asked, going back to his pastime of watching the Watchers.

“Yes! He gets up on his stupid table, has his assistant drum up a crowd, and then he sticks his hand in a vat of boiling oil—”

“A good trick.”

“A trick is exactly what it is. I always had my suspicions, but after I became a vampire, I went back to see his little show again. With our sense of smell, it was obvious how he did it.”

“Oh?”

Jerome nodded vigorously. “He squeezes the juice of a lemon into a pan and then pours oil on top. Since oil is lighter than lemon juice, it stays there—and insures that nobody notices the deception. Then he puts the pan on the fire and bubbles from the lemon juice start coming through the oil, making it look like the oil is boiling like crazy.”

“Ingenious.”

“So he can stick his finger or even his whole hand into the pan, with no problem. And if anybody doubts him, well, he just argues with them for a minute or so, until the lemon has all evaporated. And then he invites them up—to stick their hand in a now genuinely boiling pan of hot oil! And once everyone’s convinced, he proceeds to sell them written prayers for protection from burns. And this—this is where it gets good. If they come back to complain that the darned things don’t work, because of course they don’t, he just implies that they must lack faith!”

“The cad.”

Jerome’s gray eyes narrowed. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No. But you must admit, there’s no difference between a fraud being perpetrated by a charlatan in the square and one being sold out of an apothecary shop.”

“Except that Theriac isn’t a fraud. It really works—”

“And did it work for your master?”

Jerome scowled. “No. But that isn’t—that was different.”

“How so?”

“Theriac works best as a preventative—you’re supposed to take some everyday. Or at the least, shortly after you’re poisoned. But my master was on a trip, away from most of the family. And by the time he admitted he was in trouble . . . well, he came to me too late, is all. I did everything I could, but strong as he was, it just took him right out.”

“I’m sorry,” Mircea said, because Jerome looked genuinely upset.

“It’s fine,” the younger vampire turned away slightly. “I don’t know why I’m so—that is, I barely knew him. And he left me like this,” he gestured around, Mircea assumed at some abstract concept of vampireness. “But it isn’t like I had much to leave behind, and you know how it is with masters . . .”

“No. I don’t.” At Jerome’s look, Mircea elaborated—briefly. “I was cursed.”

“You were—oh,” his eyes went round. “You’re like the mistress then.”

“Martina?”

Jerome nodded. “We were talking about masters the other day, and Auria said something weird. But I guess that’s what she meant, huh?”

“What she meant?”

“Yes. She said Martina made herself.”