Masks

Chapter Nine

“Drop it, vampire,” a menacing voice said, as they dragged the packages into the kitchen door an hour or so later.

Mircea tensed and looked around, half expecting another threat.

But this time, there was no need. “I was just testing it for you,” Bezio said, looking innocent.

The cook’s beady eyes fixed on the decanter of dark red wine Bezio held in one beefy hand. “Test this,” she said, snatching it back, and shoving something else into his stomach.

“Peas?” Bezio said, looking down at the bowl he was now holding. “What do you want me to do with these?”

“Drink ’em,” she said sarcastically, and pointed at the door.

“I can’t even shell them inside?” he whined.

“Do you see any room inside? Especially now?” she demanded, glaring at Paulo’s group, who were trying to fit into the crowded space.

It wasn’t easy. Servants bustled everywhere, stirring pots over the fire, mixing sauces at the main prep table, shoving past Jerome to chuck carrot peelings into the canal. And placing food on very available surface—including Mircea, who had a basket of something pushed into his hands as he stood there.

He peered inside.

More peas.

“Out, all of you. Go do something useful!” the cook told them, brandishing a spoon menacingly.

“They are doing something useful. They’re helping me,” Paulo told her, fighting his way through the crush.

“About time you got back,” she told him. “Mistress wants you at table.”

“We’ve started already?”

“About to. I’m dishing up the soup now.”

“Christ!” He ran up the back stairs.

“Wait! What do we do with all this stuff?” Jerome called after him.

A blond head popped back over the railing. “Give everything to cook. She’ll know what to do with it.”

“And I know what to do with you lot, too,” she said, looking at them evilly.

Which is how they ended up shelling peas on the rickety bridge out back.

It was weathered wood, without railings or even posts to sit against. So they emulated the old men who regularly fished off the local bridges, and sat on the edge, dangling their feet over the side. And added pea shells to the stream of garbage flowing away with the tide.

Mircea watched one of his disemboweled offerings to Poseidon land right side up, like a little boat. And then valiantly ride the currents below, dodging cabbage leaf islands and carrot shoals, until it disappeared out of sight. Jerome laughed, and then leaned over the side of the bridge, a new vessel in hand.

“Race you!”

“No, no,” Bezio said, proffering a pod with a single pea still in place. “You need to leave one little guy in it, see? Like a captain.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Jerome told him.

“Want to bet?”

“It’s too heavy; it’ll sink.”

“Then take the bet.”

“What bet?”

Bezio looked at him soulfully. “I’m thirsty.”

Jerome glanced at the kitchen. “She’ll kill me.”

“Only if you lose.”

“And if I win?”

“You get bragging rights.”

“Bragging rights and your room,” Jerome said dryly.

“What do you need my room for?”

“It’s bigger than mine. I need the extra space.”

“I need the extra space. I won’t fit in yours.”

Jerome smiled, and sent his words back at him. “That’s only a problem if you lose.”

Bezio glanced at Mircea. “You’ll call it?”

Mircea nodded. And a moment later, two little makeshift vessels hit the water, almost simultaneously. And also simultaneously got into trouble when caught by an eddy in the tide.

“Oh, come on!” Bezio said. “To the left! To the left!”

“Are you talking to a pea, Bezio?” Jerome asked gently. “Is that who—”

“Shut up. To the left!”

The craft turned to the left, thereby missing a looming sea monster made out of onion skin.

Bezio grinned at Jerome. “You were saying?”

“Blind luck.”

“Like most of life, son.”

“Don’t ‘son’ me,” Jerome muttered, and glared at his tiny vessel, which had just hung up on some shrimp shells. “Damn it, move!”

A moment later, it did, when a tiny wave hit the flotsam, breaking it up and sending Jerome’s ship scooting forward.

And past Bezio’s.

“Yes, yes!” Jerome laughed.

Just before the wild movement of the tiny ripple proved too much for his ship, and it started taking on water.

“No, no,” Bezio mimicked, as his craft overtook it again.

“That’s—no. No, yours is the one that’s supposed to sink!”

“Sorry about that,” Bezio said, not looking the least bit sorry. Particularly when his boat vanished out of sight first, steered to victory by its tiny captain.

“I don’t believe this,” Jerome moaned.

“I like a robust red,” Bezio told him as Jerome got up, muttering something, and headed inside. And to Mircea’s surprise, was back in no time with an elegant decanter of red wine, and three chipped mugs.

Bezio raised both eyebrows. “Where did you get that?”

“Took it off a servant on the way into the dining room,” Jerome said, plopping back down.

“You were supposed to grab the cook’s swill, not the good stuff!” Bezio said, looking alarmed.

“After tonight, we deserve the good stuff,” Jerome told him, splashing it into cracked ceramic.

“What happened tonight?”

“Oh, just don’t,” Jerome said, and drank.

Bezio looked from him to Mircea. “We saw the consul,” Mircea enlightened him.

“Well, it is convocation, after—”

“On an elefante.”

“On a what?”

“And then we were almost trampled—”

“Wait. Go back.”

“—before a party of senators showed up and—made it worse, actually.”

“They had to,” Jerome said. “You know the law. And this is one I happen to agree with.”

“Did you say elefante?” Bezio demanded.

“What law?” Mircea asked.

“The law that says it’s a very bad idea to let the humans know we exist?”

“They already know,” Mircea argued. “I grew up with the stories—”

“But did you believe them?”

“They seem to believe them around here,” Mircea said dryly. The city was rife with cures against vampires: salt placed over doorways, garlic buried with the dead, and amulets and vials of holy water sold in the marketplace. Mircea had been surprised to find that the stories he’d grown up with, and which he’d foolishly believed had been confined to his homeland, were even more pervasive here.

Of course, there were more vampires here, too, which he assumed had something to do with it.

“Some people will believe anything,” Jerome said.

“But in this case, they happen to be right.”

“Yes, but they don’t know they’re right. They just suspect. And a lot of other people dismiss the stories as just that—stories.”

“Will somebody tell me what the devil happened tonight?” Bezio demanded.

But no one did.

“Which is good for us considering how much we’re outnumbered,” Jerome added. “If more people started to believe the myths, we’d all be staked in a week.”

“We didn’t look outnumbered tonight,” Mircea said, thinking back on the mass of vampires clogging the street, and extending as far as he could see into the distance.

It still made him shiver. The stories of his youth had taught him that his kind were loners: dangerous, deformed, twisted creatures, unlike the men they had once been in every way. Except for their appetites, which drove them out of the hills and into the towns at night, to prey on unprepared villagers.

The truth had come as something of a surprise, but never more so than tonight.

“Because of convocation,” Jerome said. “And because it’s Venice. But we’re spread a lot thinner elsewhere, and keeping the rumors from becoming fact is one of the biggest laws we have. I had it pounded into my skull as soon as I awoke. If you’d had a family, they’d have done the same for you. And yet here’s the consul, doing something a regular vampire would have been killed for!”

“But he’s not a regular vampire,” Bezio put in.

“Which makes it worse. How can he uphold the law if he doesn’t even follow it himself?”

“What ruler follows the laws?” Bezio asked cynically. “They make them for us poor bastards. And if one of you doesn’t tell me what—”

“He was riding around on an elefante,” Mircea said impatiently. And sketched it out with his hands when Bezio just looked at him.

It didn’t seem to help. “He was doing what?”

“And throwing candy to the crowd,” Jerome added.

Bezio thought about that for a moment. “Why?”

“Paulo said he’s mad,” Mircea said. “And that he’s . . . very old.” He couldn’t make himself utter the preposterous age Paulo had claimed. Obviously, he’d been exaggerating.

“Well, he’d have to be, to be consul, wouldn’t he?”

“Mad or old?” Jerome asked.

“A little bit of both, from what I’ve heard. They all are, aren’t they?”

“Are they?” Mircea asked, lowering his voice.

Bezio narrowed his eyes.

“I thought about it on the way back,” Mircea said softly. “Perhaps the European consul is mad. But there have to be others, don’t there? In other parts of the world? Unless vampirism is restricted to Europe—”

“It isn’t,” Bezio said. “I’ve heard of others. Just rumors really, but . . . they say there’s a senate in Cairo. And another in Cathay—”

“Cairo?” Mircea frowned. “But I thought our consul lives in Egypt.”

“He does,” Jerome said. “At least, that’s what I heard.”

“Well, he ought to live in Paris,” Bezio said. “That’s where the senate meets.”

Jerome grinned. “Perhaps they’re glad to be rid of him.”

“Or perhaps the problems we’re having are due to our leadership,” Mircea put in.

“Or lack thereof,” Bezio added cynically.

“Yes. But maybe the other senates aren’t like ours—”

“And maybe the sun won’t burn us. They’re vampires.”

“That’s my point!” Mircea said. “Maybe all vampires don’t live like this. They might treat their people—” he stopped, because Jerome was shaking his head. “How do you know?” he demanded. “You’re younger than I am!”

“But I had a master, and a family, for a short time,” Jerome reminded him. “I had people to ask things. You need to ask things before you just assume stuff like that. No wonder you got in trouble.”

“No wonder—you were in that cell, too!”

“That was bad luck. Can happen to anyone. But I don’t intend to go back. Like would happen if I got caught running off to join some other senate, for instance.”

“It is hard to imagine how you’d get there, Mircea,” Bezio agreed.

Mircea watched a line of pods headed off to sea. Like some of the hundreds of ships that left Venice every year. And called at ports so distant, the very names sounded like fairy tales: Alexandretta, Farmagosa, Tunis.

He’d heard their names as a boy, and more, many more, since coming to Venice. Where a merchant named Marco Polo had once set off on a journey that, they said, reached distant Cathay. He’d read Polo’s book as a child, and dreamed of one day seeing some of the same wonders. It had seemed like the ultimate adventure, to probe beyond the known world, to places so distant they didn’t yet have names. Not ones he could pronounce, at any rate.

But now . . .

“I could take a ship,” Mircea said, and felt something twist in his gut with the words.

He didn’t want to take a ship. Or no, that wasn’t true. He wanted to badly, worse than anything. But not to go away. Not to go even further from the world he’d lost.

He wanted to take a ship . . . home. Not as it was now, but as it had been, before his world had imploded. He wanted to go back—

“A ship, he says!” Jerome shook his head again.

“So you’re just going to give up?” Mircea asked harshly. “Stay here and be a whore, instead?”

“Please. Cortigiano,” Jerome corrected, rolling it around on his tongue, as if he liked the sound of it.

“And that doesn’t bother you? To sell yourself—”

“Depends on the price.”

“And to remain a slave while you do it? Subject to Martina’s whims? Sold off, possibly for far less pleasant work, if you happen to displease her?”

“I’m trying to avoid it,” Jerome said dryly. “But if she does give me something to do that I don’t like, I’ll just remember the alternative, which,” he said, raising his voice when Mircea tried to get a word in, “would be you. Huddled in the bottom of some leaky old ship, headed God knows where. Praying nobody finds you and drags you out into the sun for a better look. Or that your mind games with whoever you’re drinking from don’t backfire, and they end up staking you.”

“I made it here on a ship,” Mircea said defiantly. Although there had been differences then.

A shorter trip, for one, which had not required him to change ships or make connections overland. And Horatiu, for another. He had kept a close eye on his “cargo” in the hold, where Mircea had had to stay since the small cabin had been far too full of windows. The old man had also fed him in the longer stretches between ports.

He wouldn’t have that advantage now. Horatiu had already done more for him than he’d had any right to expect. He couldn’t ask him to risk going to the other side of the world, and possibly get stranded there if Mircea’s reception was less than warm.

He couldn’t ask him to exile himself, on Mircea’s behalf.

“Then you were lucky,” Jerome told him. “Most of us travel overland for a reason.”

“Perhaps I could make it overland,” Mircea said, although with even less enthusiasm. Overland meant going through a succession of vampire territories, and experience had shown that they were never happy to see him. He was viewed as a pest at best and a rival at worst, and either way, the response was always the same.

It was why he and Horatiu had headed for the port city of Constanta, to catch a ship for Venice, after one of the vampires hunting him for sport had happened to mention it. It had been a gamble, yes. But the alternative had been unthinkable.

As it was now.

“If it makes you feel any better, it wouldn’t have worked anyway,” Bezio said, watching his face. “I don’t know about the court in Cathay, but it doesn’t matter because you’d never make it that far. But the ones in Cairo and Delhi are said to be worse than here.”

“Worse?” Mircea really didn’t see how that was possible.

“I hear they don’t even have a city like Venice.”

“Then what do they do with people like us?”

Bezio shrugged. “Don’t know. But if I was going to guess—” He sliced a finger over his throat.

Mircea stared up at the moon, rising over the buildings on the other side of the canal. “Then we really are stuck here.”

He wanted to go back, but he couldn’t go back. The world he had left didn’t exist anymore. Yet, it seemed, he couldn’t go forward, either.

So what else was there?

“Life?” Bezio said, when he asked. “Good wine, good friends, a reason to get up every day and not kill yourself?”

“A reason not to die.”

“Yes.”

“What about a reason to live?”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

Mircea stared up at the moon, pale and beautiful, reflecting silvery light into the grubby canal. And making even the old bridge and floating trash look beautiful. “No.”

“You want too much, that’s your problem,” Bezio told him, and drank wine.

“Well, I like to look at this as an opportunity,” Jerome said.

“Of course you do.”

“Why not? I’ve seen some pretty amazing things already. Like tonight.” He grinned. “You should have been there, Bezio.”

“I’m glad I wasn’t. It could have blown up in your face!”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Jerome said. “Some senators put a stop to it. Including a woman . . .”

“A woman senator,” Bezio shook his head. “What’s the world coming to?”

“She was beautiful,” Jerome said dreamily.

“They all are, son. It’s called glamourie.”

“And you’re an old cynic.”

“I didn’t say I blame them. If they have the power to spare—”

Jerome laughed. “Oh, she had it.” He caught Mircea’s eye. “Scary, huh?”

Mircea didn’t answer. He couldn’t imagine what it must be like, having power like that. He’d found it unsettling, just that brief exposure.

Not that he was ever likely to experience it again.

“Don’t worry,” Bezio said, echoing his thoughts. “That’s the closest to a senator any of us is ever going to get!”