“This is different,” Streak insisted. “Blood magic. It’s like, I don’t know, it’s like biological weapons. Below the belt, right? Good clean firefight, that we like. Biokillers stink. Combat mages, they treat blood magic like its bio.”
“I get the picture,” Serrin said. “So let’s go eat”
The hours before midnight passed easily. They ate well, and avoided drink, but the throng of customers packed around them drank themselves silly, Everyone was resplendent in the costumes of the carnival, with silk and satin and velvet and gold threading, masks of silver and gold and bronze, cowls and capes and cloaks, everything whirl of color and texture and the mystery of it all, with everyone masked and few who they appealed to be. “Just don’t chat up the women, Michael,” Streak advised him: “Half of ‘em will be transvestites with a sausage surprise you don’t want to get your teeth into, know what I mean?” he leered.
“It hadn’t occurred to me to do so,” Michael replied evenly.
“You should have come out with me this afternoon,” elf said cheerfully.
“Perhaps not,” Michael said.
“God, you’re a joyless bugger sometimes,” Streak groaned.
“I enjoy myself in different ways,” Michael informed him.
“You’re about the only person you will enjoy,” the elf said tartly.
“It’s ten before twelve. Let’s go,” Juan told them. “What are our positions?”
“I’ll cover left, you behind, Xavier goes right,” Streak said. He leant over to Kristen and lowered his voice. “Now, little lady, go powder your nose and put your hard on,”
Kristen disappeared into the ladies’ room and returned three minutes later, looking distinctly large-headed.
“I don’t think it’s going to make the runways of Paris this season, but it'll do the job. Come on, everybody, I’m dying to see what our man has arranged for us at midnight,” Michael said. They pushed their way slowly out into the crowd.
Trumpets were already giving periodic fanfares to announce the imminent arrival of the Doge and his wife as they stood among the multitudes. Their watches showed five minutes to midnight.
At four minutes to the hour, as the crowd began to hush slightly in expectation, a slim and lithe, dark-haired South American man and half a dozen servitors idled toward the basilica from the south, pushing past indignant people in the piazzetta to get where they wanted to go. Xavier, his line of sight partly blocked by the campanile, did not see them. They had covering magic anyway.
At three minutes to midnight from east of the basilica half a dozen Spanish men in costumed attire pushed their way forward in like manner. Streak saw them first. He didn’t know who they were, but he knew they weren’t coming to enquire why he hadn’t posted tax returns for the past five years. He coughed to alert Juan and rubbed the nose of his mask to direct the ork’s attention in front of him. The ork saw the men and began to edge forward. Their attention locked on the men from the east, they too did not see the imminent arrivals from the piazzetta.
At two minutes to the hour the Doge’s Council began to troop through the central doorways of the basilica. The crowd cheered, realizing the Doge himself would soon appear.
The Jesuits from the east had no clear line of fire. Neither did Streak or Juan, and neither did the men to the south, but that didn’t bother them. They’d have been perfectly ready to kill everyone between themselves and their target if necessary. But it wasn’t. All they needed for their blood magic was to kill one person, and that victim had already had his throat slashed.
Serrin got an instant shiver of warning and knew instantly that a magical assault was upon them. He threw up the barrier just as the thing began to shimmer into form among them.
The materializing spirit stank of decay and rotting entrails, and it had only a partial form, vaguely humanoid in shape. It was composed of semi-coagulated blood, or at least it appeared to be. From the center of the thing, fountain of purulent gore squirted hotly at their faces.
Serrin’s barrier barely held it, The liquid corroded the mana barrier like acid dissolving metal, hissing and releasing a reeking cloud of toxic gas. People on either side of them began to panic and scream, some fainting, others being trampled down.
The men to the east pushed forward and drew their guns.
Streak and Juan did their damndest to get a line of sight on them, not realizing the direction of the real bleat. Xavier had, at last, done so, seeing the bloodied victim of the Aztechnology mage’s sacrifice. His SMG was already beginning to chatter.
Streak saw the gun barrels ahead of him and thought, Oh frag, I can’t stop them in time. No, not head shots. Come on, you sods, aim low, aim low. You’re going down.
He reached for a grenade. Above his head, one was already arcing toward its target. But it wasn’t the guns that mattered. They were mostly for self-defense and they weren’t being used yet. One among the crowd of Spanish arrivals unleashed a streak of blue fire that raced south and exploded among the Aztechnology crew.
When it hit the ground, it burst like a nuclear cloud, rising up and around the heads of the men like a gaseous, electrified halo. The brilliant fire burned the flesh from their heads down to the bone, and incinerated the upper halves of their bodies, smashing through the mana barrier of the Azzie mage like it wasn’t even there.
Serrin, reeling back from the blood spirit even as it sputtered out of existence with the death of its summoner, saw the devastation left behind by the Jesuit mage’s spell. He didn’t even want to think about what would happen if the mage’s next target was them.
Then the grenade burst among the Jesuits, paralyzant gas surrounding them. But they didn’t stop moving.
The bastards have internalized respirators, internal air tanks, nose filters something, Streak thought, his combat-hardened brain assessing the situation coolly. Okay, frag you, guys. Here comes the acid. If it isn’t too late.
Of course, it was.
Serrin could see the mage clearly, impossibly. The man was, after all, shrouded in gas. And yet somehow he could see him. The mage was saying, quite clearly. “And now you die, heretic.”
The spell was one-tenth of a second away from doing to him what it had done to the Aztechnology samurai and mage.
And then everything stopped. Stopped dead, and everyone was absolutely still. Everyone was seized by an emotion somehow unknown to them, and their heads were turned to the doorways of the basilica as if gripped by hands they could not resist.
A figure moved forward through the doorways. Whether it was a real person, or a spirit, or an illusion, was not obvious at first. It walked in midair, perhaps three meters above them, shining slightly. It was a woman, and Serrin saw her at once as the Magdalene. In her hands she held out to the crowd, on a gold platter, the severed, bleeding head of John the Baptist. A terrible cry of lamentation went up all around, a soul-scouring wail as if from hell itself, and it was all they could do to stay upright. Geraint managed to put his hands to his ears as if to try and force out the agonizing sound.
In a panic the Jesuits looked as if the devil himself had just appeared among them. They were utterly unable to move or act. They were virtually catatonic.
Streak recovered his senses first and pushed through a crowd of fainting and screaming people and grabbed Serrin.
“For frag’s sake, let’s get out of here!” he screamed. Serrin grabbed Kristen and began to run. Geraint had to be half-dragged away by the elf, Juan moving in to help him, Xavier getting to Michael. The Jesuits were still standing utterly stunned. They looked as if they were going to be completely beyond the help of the best psychiatrists money could buy for a very long time.
Despite the urgent need to flee. Serrin couldn’t resist the urge to turn and look back. He still couldn’t identify the image as real or illusion or spirit, but he was astonished to find an intense feeling of grief welling up inside him, as if some terrible wrong had been done, and the woman was there to face everyone with the tragedy and awfulness of that wrong. And although he did not know what that was, the grief was painfully real to him and he did not want to run away from her, to abandon her. But his wife was in his care and people had tried to kill her twice today, and he turned away to Streak.