Antony had the same look, that of a soldier going into a battle he knew he couldn’t win. But like Mircea’s men, he would sell his life dear. Perhaps he could save the woman he loved, because yes, he loved her. Looking at them now, there was no doubt of that. Perhaps he could help her to kill the creature they both detested. Perhaps he could keep his world from descending into war or something that might be worse, the rule of a savage heart with no curbs on its power.
No, he couldn’t win.
But he would fight anyway.
Mircea saw it on his face, and so did the monster masquerading as a toothless old man. Who suddenly smiled. “You were born together,” he whispered, in strangely accented Italian. “It is only fitting you should die the same way.”
“I—but,” the official blinked. “You will face them both, my lord?”
“Si.” It had the sibilance of the snake, but Mircea barely heard, because the crowd erupted.
And he’d been wrong—it hadn’t been loud before. The groundswell of noise following the announcement would have been deafening to a human’s ears; to a vampire’s, it was almost debilitating. And that was before they began stamping their collective feet.
The motion was hard enough to shake the building—and the hastily erected stairs. They started swaying underneath him, almost throwing Mircea off his feet. But it was the dais that partially collapsed, slumping onto the stairs and pitching him and his captor abruptly back into the crowd.
The fall wrenched the guard’s grip loose and half buried him under a pile of wood and a throng of screaming people.
And Mircea scrambled away into a sea of legs, looking around wildly.
The wall was right in front of him. He could be back over it in an instant. And as tense things were about to get, there was a good chance he could get away while the guards were distracted. Or he could disappear into the crowd, and then walk out when this was all over in the train of someone’s entourage. He could even hide somewhere in the palazzo, and wait until the next night, when convocation was over and nobody cared anymore. . . .
He could do a good many things, but he didn’t want to. To get away, yes, but not to leave, although he didn’t know what good he could do if he stayed. He couldn’t reach the senator, couldn’t communicate with her, couldn’t defeat the opponent she didn’t even know she had. He couldn’t do anything but land back in the cell where this whole thing had started.
The only smart thing to do was to escape.
But perhaps Bezio was right, and he wasn’t all that smart. Or perhaps it was as Auria had said: The Change didn’t really change you, not in the ways that mattered. Because he found that he couldn’t simply walk away.
It was ironic. Two weeks ago, he wouldn’t have thought twice about selling his life for a cause he believed in. Would have welcomed it as the best possible end to his current situation. But now . . . now he wanted to live.
But not at the price of everything that he had ever been.
Or still was.
Mircea stood there, vibrating in thought, for a moment. And then darted back through the crowd, to where the beleaguered guard was still half buried in shoddy construction. And grabbed his sword.
And then he headed for the nearest staircase going down.
Chapter Forty-Two
The ground level of the house appeared largely deserted, with wide, deep hallways devoid of guests, guards or anyone except for a few servants darting here and there with trays. None of whom seemed be paying any attention to Mircea. And that was despite the fact that he was lurking in the stairwell and holding a naked sword.
Vampires, he thought, and paused a moment to admire his new acquisition.
It was a beautiful weapon, gold chased and fine edged, the kind of sword he’d once owned, until he’d been forced to sell it once his money ran out. It had hurt his heart, but what did a vampire need with a sword? That was probably still true, but its weight nonetheless felt good in his palm.
Of course, it would feel a lot better if the officer came along to wield it.
Not that Mircea wasn’t competent with a sword. But as the servants were currently demonstrating, there was a different standard in place now. He could probably run at one of them, brandishing the weapon and screaming, and merely get a strange look.
Until he got close enough to be wadded into a ball.
In his old world, Mircea was a trained warrior and a fearsome threat. In his new one . . . well, he wasn’t even sure he counted as a nuisance. That was normally a problem, but now it was an absolute menace, since he didn’t know exactly what he was dealing with.
Who, yes. How, possibly. But the what was bothering him as he started down the long hallway.
Was he facing a trained assassin? Someone hired to give the consul an added edge? Hassani led a group of such people, and he might well have decided to have someone in place to hedge his bets.
At the very least, he might want to make sure that he wouldn’t have to deal with his longtime rival as the new senate leader. And at best . . . perhaps he meant to make a bid for the power himself, in the confusion. Mircea didn’t know.
But if he was facing a trained assassin, this was about to be a big waste of time.
Of course, he was hardly likely to fare better against a run of the mill vampire-with-a-vendetta. When a delicate courtesan could best him in a fight, the world really had turned upside down. But he was pragmatic enough to accept it, and to come up with a workaround.
At least, he was if his solution didn’t kill him first.
He hazarded a glance over his shoulder, but the officer was nowhere in sight.
Mircea frowned. If it was him, he’d damned well want his sword back. He just hoped the officer felt the same. And that, if he did show up, he could somehow convince him to—
A servant dropped a tray, in a clatter of metal and a tinkle of glass. It made Mircea jump. And then jump again when two others did the same, at almost the same moment. And then they added to the confusion by shrieking and bolting for cover.
Mircea looked around, sword raised, trying to locate the threat. But there was nothing. Just echoing, empty tiled floors, a long corridor with windows fronting the garden, and the usual scattered tables, tapestries, and knick knacks.
Some of the latter of which had started to chime.
Mircea watched a couple of figurines, a man and a woman dressed in festival finery, jitter down the length of a dark wood table. They almost looked as if they were dancing. Until they fell off the end, shattering on the hard glazed tiles in a puff of plaster.
No one had touched them.
But then, no one was touching the rest of the corridor, either. Yet it had also started to shake noticeably. Little siftings of plaster had begun falling from the ceiling. A brass platter on shelf followed the dancers, hitting the floor with a metallic clang, clang, clang that was swallowed up by a roar that came out of nowhere, louder than the screams of the crowd, louder than anything Mircea had heard outside the battlefield. And which seemed to be coming from all directions at once.
And then the multipaned windows whited out.
Mircea stared at it, seriously confused, because it looked like a winter storm had blown up in an instant. A violent one. The metal latch started jittering against the small glass panes, the window itself began knocking back and forth against its frame, and then a single, diamond-shaped pane suddenly popped out, and went skittering over the floor.
That was not so strange; perhaps it had been loose. But something had started blowing through the opening, something that didn’t look like snow. Something that scattered across the floor, pale against the dark tile and the darker tops of Mircea’s shoes.