“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.