by Eric Flint
“We came from the Ticino River,” said Rhene, “and often venture down the big ditch they call the Naviglio Grande, to go and watch the humans.” She sniggered. “Especially the young men, swimming. Chloe says you seek to send a message to a one who runs, not just when he needs to flee or to chase. Does he look like this?” And with a long, sharp fingernail she traced the outline of a face with a little water on the slate paving around the edge of the water-chapel. She had an ability Marco’s artist friend Raphael could not rival for capturing the essence of a face shape in a few lines.
“Yes. This is my picture of him,” said Marco, taking out his attempt, feeling a little inadequate about his artistic skills.
“Ah. Yes, he runs nearly every day, along the path at the water’s edge. We like to watch him. In summer he will swim, and always he stops to wash. He is much cleaner than most of you humans.” She sniffed.
Marco was faintly affronted. Why, he bathed his hands often, and always between patients now, since his conversations with Francisco, and his whole body far more frequently than most. Sometimes even twice or three times in one month. There were many who only did so once a year.
But the nyx continued: “And then he will stop at the taverna that is called the Grosso Luccio, next to the water, near the Basilica of Sant’ Eustorgio. In fine weather he comes and dangles his feet in the water and drinks beer.” Rhene gave a wicked little laugh. “We talked of pulling him in.”
That seemed to confirm it to Marco. Francisco’s fondness for beer and running were notable. “I wouldn’t. I suspect he can be quite dangerous. But that is the man I need to send my message to. He is a healer, but a soldier, too. This is his book.” He held out the battered copy of Alkindus’s De Gradibus. “I don’t know if you also trace people like the tritons do?”
“Oh, yes. We know the taste and flavor of you humans,” said the nyx, taking it. Marco suppressed his immediate instinct to tell her to dry her hands first. This was more important, although it was hard to accept that. Books needed to be treated as the valuable things they were! She held it between her fingertips, sharp face intent, and then held it up to her little retroussé nose and sniffed, looking, despite the bare breasts, like a disapproving countess being asked for a charitable donation. Then she stuck out a long slim tongue and licked it.
“Yes. It is difficult to separate your flavor from that of the runner. But I think that is him. I would know the owner of the book if I tasted his essence.” She handed it back.
Marco hastily dried the book on his cotte. “So could you take this message to him? I have put it in a bottle so it will stay dry. Please?”
She shrugged. “For the Lion, and the licence he gives us to come into his waters, yes. We go north tomorrow, to the sweet water again. I will give it to the runner. I like watching human faces as we come up and show them our breasts.”
Some instinct made Marco say: “And then?”
“Then we drown them. We can’t leave them alive. They would hunt us down.” She paused, perhaps reading something in Marco’s expression. “Or sometimes we seduce them, draw them into the water for loving, and then drown them. Would that be better?”
“Er. Not really. I am sending him a message,” explained Marco, thinking that the nyx was proof that beauty and brain did not have to go together, and being lusciously curved didn’t mean that you couldn’t be a cold-blooded killer either. “What would be the use of my doing that, if you killed him before he could read it and act on it? Besides, he is my friend. I don’t want him drowned.”
“Oh. That’s difficult. We don’t show ourselves to humans otherwise. It’s not like here.”
“We have to be careful here, too, sister,” said Chloe. “Still, it is quite useful to have traffic with them sometimes.”
Rhene giggled and nudged Melisande. “Oh, yes. Remember that last fisherman, Meli.”
“They can be very virile,” said Melisande.
“Well, there are other uses,” said Chloe, gesturing at Marco. “This one is a healer and the Lion’s human.”
“So is Francisco,” said Marco. “A healer, anyway. And he will not betray or hunt you. And”—his voice burred to the deep-throated edge of a roar of the ancient and magical Lion within him—“you will not kill him. If you do, I will banish you and your kind from my water. Understood?”
The undine and nyxes, wide-eyed and silenced, nodded.
Sometimes it really is easier not just to ask nicely, thought Marco, on his way home.
Chapter 6
Politics, places various
Rimini
Count Andrea Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, Forli, Cesena, Pesaro, Marquis of Ravenna, and Protector of Romagna was a nobleman’s nobleman. He traced his lineage back to Roman times and, as he said with pride, even his distant patrician ancestors had shown their breeding. They had, as he did, derived their wealth from rents or conquest. Venice and its new-baked “Longi” chaffered in trade like the commoners they really were, and as for the likes of Florence’s de’ Medici…banking. Ha. Usury. By rights, it should be restricted to Jews who could be executed if they got too insistent about repayment.
The problem for Count Malatesta was that the peasantry simply did not work hard enough. Rents were down again this year, land lying fallow. And war had become expensive. The last major territorial gains had been by his father, who had taken Faenza and the surrounds from the de’ Medici. They had failed, rather spectacularly, in their venture to recapture that, but while Andrea had enjoyed the victory, it had brought no territorial benefits, and little in the way of ransom. He had been a bit too hasty in making an example there. Urbino still held against him, and expansion to the south would be difficult, and not that rewarding. The Po Valley was where the money lay, but it had thrown him back.
This time, however, things would be different. He had a powerful ally in the fear that Carlo Sforza had spread among the nobility of the northern Italian states. He was entertaining some of them, right now. And they were eager, willing, greedy…and afraid.
Duke Umberto Da Corregio of Parma and Viscount Lippi Pagano of Imola listened as Malatesta read to them from a letter that gave him great pleasure. Pleasure great enough that he paced back and forth as he read it, gesturing all the while, as if he was an actor on a stage.
“We do not currently”—here he waved a hand in a dramatic circling gesture—“see any immediate possibility of such nuptials, and would suggest a longer term approach, and considerable caution…”
“Bah. What kind of man is Cosimo de’ Medici?” said Umberto, swilling back his wine. “A coward and a fool. To advise ‘caution’—with Sforza?”
“Nonetheless, it does tell us that the Butterball is not to marry Sforza,” said Lippi Pagano, who had a cool head and had drunk relatively little. That was all that Andrea Malatesta could find as redeeming qualities in the viscount. He had, de facto, allied himself with Ferrara, and Andrea Malatesta fully intended, at the appropriate time, to shorten the tall dour man of his head for that. A skirmish with Enrico Dell’este had not ended well for the protector of Romagna. But they would need Ferrara and Venice, to at least stay neutral in the war, and preferably to attack Sforza. That was why the count had invited Lippi: so that he could act as a messenger to Dell’este. One thing in Count Andrea’s favor, though: He might have fought a skirmish with Enrico Dell’este, but the man’s hatred of Sforza was legendary.
Venice…Venice would reach her own decisions, play things for her own unpredictable ends. If anything, Andrea disliked and distrusted La Serenissima even more than Ferrara. In his grandfather’s time, they had raided Rimini on the thin pretext that her vessels had been engaged in piracy against vessels of the Venetian Republic. But they too had little reason to love or trust Milan, or indeed, Carlo Sforza.
“We have torn up his letter, and sent it back to him with a suitable gift,” said Umberto. “The hand of his messenger and a piece of excrement, to show the depth of our disdain.”
“I wonder what Cosimo
will make of your actions,” said Viscount Lippi Pagano dryly.
“What does it matter? Cosimo is an old woman, more interested in money and art than war,” said Umberto. “He who hesitates will be left out. We have money and backing from at least half the states in Italy now.”
“I do gather Florence is mobilizing her reserves,” said Lippi.
“Cosimo does that without doing anything at least twice a year. It impresses no one anymore,” his host informed him. Indeed, getting rid of Viscount Pagano of Imola had risen in importance. Did the fool know no better than to cast doubts in Umberto’s path? There were certain protocols to be observed in assassination, and he had his value…for the moment.
Now, it was a waiting game, waiting for Sforza to make a move—any move—against the allies, and then they’d have due cause for a war. They did not really need due cause since war was their plan anyway, but it would bring in the laggard and the reluctant.
Arona, Duchy of Milan
It was said that the first steps to hell were the easiest. They were wrong, reflected Lucia, walking down to the cellars, the heavy key hung on a ribbon around her neck and resting like a cold snake between her breasts. Asking the serpent, back the first time when they had not even seen it, to make her father love her…that had been terrifying, especially when she understood what the serpent and her father understood of “love.”
Now she was going down to the lowest cellar and the pit, again, with the tokens that would bring death to two women. And she felt nothing.
The great serpent had said to her: “You understand that it is far easier for me to destroy a city full of people than just one person. That is my power. That is what I can give you.”
“Nonetheless, for now I need two people to die. And they must die as if by natural causes.”
There had been a shaking of the scales. “All death is natural. Humans die, all that lives dies, and their dying and fear is my food. I hunger for the great feasting again.”
“I mean no daggers or obvious poisons.”
“I do not use daggers, and my poisons are subtle. You have paid my price, and will pay my price again, so I will do as you command. But you will need to provide a way I can find and identify those who must die.”
“Eleni Faranese, and Violetta de’ Medici. They are my rivals. There are lesser claims, but I do not need to kill them yet.”
“Names are important to mortals, but they mean nothing to me. For me to know them, I need their essences. I can derive that from hair, skin, nail clippings, sweat, blood or their body’s waste. Give me that and it will allow my minions to find them and work your will. Otherwise, you would have to point them out to me.”
That had given Lucia temporary pause. They were in Tuscany and thus far from her. But she had some wealth, and most things could be bought. It took a little bribery, and some intimidation. Some hair from the heads of those she’d sent out.
Her sendlings believed her to be a witch, one of the dark stregheria. She could get killed for that, despite the foolish Hypatians’ cries for tolerance. Her room was pointedly empty of the paraphernalia of magic. And if they found the key, and followed her path to the cellars…they’d never come back.
The two men she’d sent to do her work would be dead soon anyway. She would not leave them alive, just in case they brought trouble. That level of poisoning she could deal with herself. Assassination, like seduction, was an important skill for the line and the house, and she had worked hard to learn as much as possible about both. Fortunately, her father had agreed with her about the need for her to learn both. An old courtesan and a half-blind alchemist had been his gifts. She had liked neither, but learned as much as she could from both. The problem with poisons, of course, was that they could be traced, and showed signs.
Since her father’s death at the hand of Carlo Sforza, her mother had retreated further into herself, withdrawn into her chambers, and often did not leave them at all. That had started when her sister died, and Lucia had encouraged it, because she had more space and more power as a result. She’d become the de facto chatelaine of this place. No one would question her decision to go anywhere, not even the lower cellars. She still took great care to do it only late at night, and make sure she was not observed.
The cold rage at Carlo Sforza when she might still have done something foolish was long since burned out. Now all that was left was a bitter ash that would go on etching her mind and actions forever. She would have what was hers. What she had paid so much for. And in achieving it, take as few risks as possible.
In the darkness she put down the two oilcloth bags. “I have hair from Eleni Faranese, and a cloth marked with the sweat of Violetta de’ Medici. How soon will they die?”
There was a long silence. And then the serpent spoke in that cold sibilant voice that made her scalp prickle: “What is time to me? How long does it take a rat to scurry through the night, or the viper to slither thence? That is how long it will take, no longer and no less.”
And not all her questioning could get a more precise answer. It was only later that night, when she washed again to try and get rid of the rat stench that seemed to cling to her after she’d been to its lair, that it occurred to her that it might possibly have spoken the literal truth. She had assumed the death would be magically inflicted. But perhaps a snakebite…
That was quite a natural death, really. Hard to call assassination. She expected Milan and Carlo Sforza to be engaged in war, but at the time and place of Milan’s choosing, and once she was ensconced, not while she was still living in the borderlands.
The smell just didn’t seem to wash out. She used more perfume.
Mainz, the Holy Roman Empire
Moving slowly, as men do who are afflicted with arthritis, the old man eased himself into his chair. The piece of furniture was expensive and well upholstered, although not as large as the throne in the main audience hall. But it was considerably more comfortable than the throne and the small chamber could be kept quite warm.
“Nothing,” he said peevishly, “is ever simple, is it?” Which might have seemed like a grumpy complaint from almost any man of advanced years, but this particular old man had the lives of millions balanced on his decisions and actions. And he took that very seriously, not delegating the responsibility as much as he could have—and should have, in the opinion of most of his advisors. He spent much of each day reading reports, hearing from his emissaries and ambassadors, and writing personal instructions himself, despite an army of scribes, in a crabby handwriting that had no doubt caused chaos and quite possibly war by being both illegible and enormously important.
“Don’t answer that, Hans,” he said, waving a large hand which was still sinewy despite its little tremor. “I am glad to see you back, even if you doubtless bring me more complications.’
“My efforts in Aquitaine have not been crowned with great success. The more I tried to change anything, the more irrelevancies they put in my way, my liege,” admitted Hans Trolliger.
“Perhaps for the best,” said Emperor Charles Fredrik tiredly. “The more we try to fix, the more new things break. Anyway, I called for your return because I need men I can trust. Things look…awkward. There are too many thunderheads piling up.”
Baron Trolliger blinked. He had heard a certain amount of news if, obviously, not as much as the Emperor. It had seemed good to him. “I had thought the last communiques from Manfred had been full of good news. Or so I had been led to believe.”
“Oh, they were. We have protected access by sea from Jagiellon’s armies to the underbelly of Europe, secured the goodwill of the Ilkhan and the Golden Horde, and acquired a powerful new ally in Prince Vlad of Transylvania. Unfortunately, that has left a power vacuum and chaos where two less-than-competent leaders have been deposed. Emeric of Hungary and the Emperor Alexius were foes or, at best, untrustworthy allies. But they kept control over their territory. The breakdown of power in Hungary and its territories, and to a lesser extent Greece, opens the po
tential doorway to an invasion into Slovakia by the forces of the Grand Duke of Lithuania, or the new proxies and allies for our foes—right on our border. Hungary under Emeric was at least a buffer state, as much an enemy to Jagiellon as to us, meaning we only faced the monster of the East directly in Polish lands. Now…we stand on the edge of a possible precipice. Of course, there are upstarts and pretenders to the thrones of various nations that Emeric had overthrown. Some we will support, some are as bad or maybe worse. It all depends what happens to the crown of Hungary.”
“Emeric of Hungary did not leave any heirs, I know. But who stands in the succession? Is there someone we should favor?” asked Trolliger.
“As with everything Emeric touched, it is a mess. He, or that aunt of his, had gone out of their way to kill off any obvious claimants or rivals. There was no heir named, and not even a living bastard child, although he fathered a few. At the moment, my informants say the principal rival claimants are John of Simony and Christopher of Somolyo.”
“Ah.” Trolliger knew something of both men, as was inevitable in diplomacy and the small pool of noble houses. Neither were of such a reputation that he could be enthusiastic. That was probably why they had been allowed to survive.
“And then there is Lazlo de Hunyad.”
Baron Trolliger sucked his teeth. “I thought he was living in Moravia.”
“He made his return within days of the news of Emeric’s death. He obviously had it planned. He is not in the direct descent, but he’s a good general and popular with the minor nobility and commons.”
“And a very strong-willed man,” said the baron, who had once had the misfortune of having to deliver a message from Charles Fredrik to him. Of course, the former Ban of the Puszta was no longer young.
