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He’d landed facing the port, giving him a perfect view of the activity on shore. Not that he needed it. The stench would have been enough, all on its own.
It was a smell he was intimately familiar with, from both halves of his life. The metallic thickness of spilled blood from the battlefield, cloying and strangely sticky in the nostrils. And the unmistakable smell of burning human flesh, half roast pork and half something that made your skin ruffle and crawl and shudder, because it was wrong, it was wrong, it was wrong.
He’d smelled that often enough since coming to Venice, when plague visited the town or was suspected, and the authorities ordered burnings instead of proper burials. The people had complained so much that the government had started restricting the burnings to the small island of Lazzaretto, where plague victims were quarantined if found still alive. And yet, when the wind was right, you could still smell them, roasting in their own fat.
People tried to pretend the stench was from the local taverns’ cook fires, but they knew. They always knew. Like Mircea did, even before the clouds of smoke parted, and showed him a glimpse of the carnage on shore.
For a moment, he froze, not only his body but his mind, too, refusing to understand what he was seeing: piles of living corpses, strewn about here and there; other piles of dismembered yet still-living body parts, because vampires didn’t die just because you hacked them up; stacks of bones, gleaming pale in the moonlight; and the massive kettles they were piled beside, where the steam was rising, rising, rising . . .
Along with the silent screams of the damned as they were boiled alive.
And then it did register, oh, yes, it did, and the overwhelming flood of panic that came with it was wild enough to wash him off the pile, to send him scuttling like a wounded crab across the deck, to leave him with his head pushed through a railing, so desperate to get away that he forgot his shoulders wouldn’t fit, too.
That was partly the fault of the spell, still dragging at him, and partly his own. Every time he tried to focus on a limb, it stopped working, as if remembering that it wasn’t supposed to be doing that. He wouldn’t get away like this; he could barely even think! And, at any moment, the ship was going to dock, and the sailors would be back, and after that—
Mircea was a soldier. He’d faced death many times. But not like this. Not butchered like an animal, and sold like a piece of flesh in the market. He wanted to tear at his throat, to let in air he couldn’t use but suddenly, desperately, needed. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think—
And then a voice was in his ear, familiar, but bizarre in this damnable place.
“Hush. Be still.”
Chapter Forty-three
I resurfaced from the latest memory-related time-out, but this time it didn’t go so well. Instead of popping back into my right mind, whatever that meant anymore, it felt like I’d fallen into a kaleidoscope of fractured images. As if my brain was a giant jigsaw puzzle, where most of the pieces were missing.
And the ones that were left weren’t anything good.
* * *
* * *
Radu was on the floor to my right, covered in blood. The female vampire with the strange-colored hair was lying on my other side, her limbs splayed out like a broken doll’s. Neither was moving; they looked almost like unconscious humans. But they weren’t human, and a vampire doesn’t go down without catastrophic damage.
Strange; they didn’t appear to be hurt that badly, unlike one of the dark-haired master’s servants, who was lying a few yards in front of me. Or part of him was. The whole top half of his body was missing.
My own body was in pain, everywhere at once, a throbbing mass of injury. But that was easily ignored. The problem with my mind was less so. My head felt heavy, confused, almost . . . spelled.
And I suddenly understood why the vampires weren’t moving.
Stun spells didn’t usually work on their kind, since they lacked most of the bodily functions such spells targeted, but this one seemed to be different. It had also had an effect on me: I was awake, but my vampire abilities were not. A psychic scream, my own stun weapon, was impossible right now, as was trying to get inside anyone’s head. But that wasn’t why I lay where I’d fallen, while a battle raged around me.
No, that was due to shock.
Because we were losing.
I watched the impossible through my lashes: dozens of high-level vampires, any one of whom constituted an army all on his own, being batted aside by half as many mages. The way the spells were being flung was casual, almost as an afterthought. Yet I saw a vampire ripped in half, and another immolated while he leapt through the air, in a fireball that filled hal
f the room.
What was left of him rained down as ashes.
* * *
* * *
“We have to stop meeting like this.”
I blinked my eyes open to see a woman bending over me. Well, sort of. She was actually bending over the massive chandelier I seemed to be lying under, which was all I could see except for dust clouds and rubble. But I could hear—
