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.”