The Red King

by Jenn Stark

  He reached again for his glass with a shaking hand.

  Chapter Twenty

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” I grumbled, pushing through the crowd.

  “I can’t tell if you’re frowning. Are you frowning? Because if so, knock it off. People are starting to stare.”

  Despite my foul mood, I managed a chuckle. Nikki and I were at Piazza San Marco, part of the roiling throng waiting for the opening parade of Carnevale to begin. We were dressed relatively circumspectly today, she in a long white cinched robe with a gold mask beneath a white feathered hat, and I in a black robe and silver plague doctor mask. We’d already seen Chiara and two other members of the magicians’ senate roaming around, looking suspiciously casual. Oddly, they wore the same garb they had the night before. It seemed to defeat the purpose of a mask, if you didn’t change your attire once you’d been identified. Then again, maybe they wanted to be known, at least to each other.

  “So we’ve got someone who’s riffing on the butcher of Venice but instead of hitting kids—as far as we know—he’s restrained himself to dropping off cookbooks of doom,” I said. “We’ve also got a theory that the original butcher was working on a recipe to nullify the magic of his opponents, but absolutely no verification that the recipe was successful. We know the butcher died under brutal circumstances and that he’d had some very bad things happen under his roof, but that’s about it.”

  “Bringing us up to now, where we’ve got three dead magicians, one of whom we know was poisoned, the other two…were probably poisoned, since they were also at the main dead guy’s house. But even if Greaves and Marrow were poisoned, they definitely didn’t hop into a couple of wine barrels or dump their own bodies into the water. Which, frankly, is a sticking point.” Nikki tapped her finger on the chin of her mask. “If you’re trying to make a big point about how magically intense you are, why leave the bodies hanging around, even stashed in wine barrels? Why not simply make them disappear?”

  “Because you need the bodies for some other reason. Has to be.” I scanned the crowd. There were several hundred people filling Piazza San Marco that I could see, and I suspected the actual count was well into the thousands. Nearly everyone was in costumes and masks, the adult-sized revelers decidedly more decked out than the children, but even the children were sporting colorful capes and face paint. How many kids actually lived in Venice? I suddenly wondered. Were there schools? Gondola bus stops?

  Oblivious to my thoughts, the knot of children that’d caught my eye raced through the crowd, laughing and shouting, and my gaze lifted briefly to the adults through whom they were weaving. Most of them paid no attention as the kids brushed by, of course, their eyes fixed on the parade route. I glanced back to the children. Quick, darting hands, fast-moving feet.

  Were the little scamps pickpockets? Not the easiest gambit when your marks were all wearing costumes, but—

  “Yo, dollface. Is that the Devil talking to Chiara?”

  Nikki’s intrigued question brought my attention back to the opposite side of the parade route. “Yup, that’s definitely Kreios.”

  Chiara stood with her head tilted back, her tricorn hat covered with a profusion of feathers and flowers, her attention fixed solely on the man in front of her. Kreios, for his part, had changed his costume slightly in that he no longer wore a lion’s mask. Instead, he wore a plain white bauta mask, and his hooded cape was knocked back to reveal his long, tawny locks.

  “Well, they’re looking a little chummy.” Nikki’s observation wasn’t at all jealous, merely astute. And I agreed with her. “I’d had it in my head that Kreios was at the powwow last night to keep an eye on us, but he is the official emissary to these guys, whatever that means. Do you suppose there’s business they’re conducting? Business we should know about, since we’re ass-deep in the senate’s problems right now?”

  “I…” I let the word trail off. My boasts to Valetti about the Arcana Council’s full support notwithstanding, I had no real idea what the political machinations of the Council were, and up to now, I hadn’t needed to know. “So far as I’ve ever been able to tell, the only time the Arcana Council has reached out to other people is when they’re looking to add to the ranks.”

  “Fair,” Nikki allowed, her gaze still pinned on Chiara. “And supposedly, these are the most powerful mortal magicians in all the world. Which means Venice right after a rift in the magical universe probably wouldn’t suck as a recruitment trip. When’s your next check-in with Armaeus?”

  “I don’t have one scheduled. Kreios said he was keeping a low profile on this job, which, if they’re looking to recruit new sorcerers to open seats on the Arcana Council, is an interesting approach.”

  Nikki nodded. “Let them get sucked in by the Devil and have them agree to terms before they meet the Magician and realize exactly how powerful he is. Seems sort of shifty, but that tracks with Armaeus. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how your job as Justice gets weirder with every new thing we learn about it. I also had Simon run down anything he could find on Mrs. French, as well as whatever information he could dig up on Abigail Strand before she ascended to Justice.”

  “You know his loyalty is first and foremost to Armaeus.” Even as I said the words, I winced. I knew I needed to trust Armaeus more, and I did. Mostly.

  “Yup. But the beauty with Simon is that when it comes to matters of the heart, he’s—pardon the pun—pretty simple. You and I may understand that the Magician keeps his cards close to the vest, but in Simon’s eyes, Armaeus loves you more than life itself. To him, there is no secret that two lovers of your caliber wouldn’t share.”

  I snorted. “I don’t think I was ever that young.”

  “Roger that, but it helps our cause until the Magician figures it out. Simon may tell Armaeus we’ve been snooping, but at least he isn’t shutting us out. And the intel he’s found is useful. Turns out, Mrs. French is a Revenant—not immortal, not a superhero, not even super Connected, just really long-lived.”

  “I wondered about that.” Currently spread all over the world in tiny communes and protected villages, Revenants were Connecteds with varying levels of psychic abilities, but their biggest claim to fame was their exceptionally long life spans. More than a few vampire tales had sprouted up over the reclusive race, which they leveraged when they needed but avoided as much as they could. “She’s legit old, then.”

  “Probably only about a hundred more years left in her, maybe less.” Nikki nodded. “Simon found nothing on the Lost Boys, but I think we can take Frenchie at her word on them. They healed quicker than they should’ve from the attack in the library and are now up and around, no worse for wear. All those boys were probably low-level Connecteds before the evil shrink got a hold of them. That kind of augmentation would go for a lot of dough on the arcane black market, if someone could figure out how it was done.”

  “Abigail knew.”

  “Maybe, maybe not.” Nikki shrugged. “What Simon was able to dig up on your predecessor is a little murky at best. She stayed in her position about three years before she iced herself, or was iced. During that time, she closed approximately fifty legitimate cases and an untold number of ad hoc inquiries.”

  “Fifty,” I repeated. “And her mind was well past fried by the end.”

  “No one knows for sure how far she was gone, but yeah, it doesn’t look good.”

  I recalled once again the horrified cry of the young librarian, begging me not to open Mak’rep’s box. “I don’t see how I can effectively do my job if my mind is going to crack with every new case I open. I definitely didn’t feel well after the first one, which doesn’t bode well for future job performance.”

  “You pulled out of that, though, pretty quickly.” It wasn’t a question. Again, Nikki couldn’t read my mind, but she could read my memories. And my memories were chock-full of obsessing over my bobbleheaded reaction to Mak’rep’s magic box.

  “I did. By the time we landed in Venic
e, I wasn’t even thinking about it anymore. Not much. But it certainly doesn’t make me want to jump on the next case that comes through ‘official channels.’ So, we’re going to have to fix that.”

  “Or take it as an occupational hazard, one that you’re far better equipped to handle than Abigail was. Simon was able to discover that while she hadn’t expressed any magical abilities of note prior to her work with the psychiatrist, her uncle had been fairly notorious during Regency England for his connection to itinerant tinkers, presumably members of the Romany caste. Uncle Strand apparently had a thriving trade system with them for tinctures, tonics, and cures.”

  “Old-time technoceuticals,” I said, turning to stare at her. “He was a dark practitioner?”

  “It would appear. From everything Simon was able to find, Abigail herself didn’t practice. Then again, she apparently was the victim of sleepwalking even before her employer started experimenting on her. And who’s to say how Connected she was prior to those experiments, or how twisted? We’ve already begun to see how the nutcase gene seems to travel quite happily down the family line, if the case files in the library are any indication. If the Strand family had a history of mental instability, that’s something we can check. It’s possible that Abigail was dramatically more impacted by the mental slog of the casework than you will be.”

  “I hope you’re right,” I said. “But I’d like it better if there was a way we could know that for sure besides trial and terror.”

  She snorted. “Agreed. I’ll keep Simon on the job and see what he can find out about her earliest cases. Maybe something she encountered helped the crazy along.”

  I lifted my brows behind the mask. I hadn’t thought of that, but it made a lot of sense. Every time you opened a box in the library, or a pneumatic tube or a scroll case, you had no idea what lay inside. It was completely reasonable that those cases had been bespelled by Justices long since passed. I had no idea why anyone would want to do that, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t happened.

  “Speaking of, crazy at your six,” Nikki muttered, and I barely turned around in time to fend off the rushing attack of a short man in a jester’s costume, his pointy harlequin’s hat bobbing in alarm. The same jester from the senate’s meeting last night, I was almost certain. He hadn’t struck me as unusual last night, but now I could feel the energy rolling off him in waves.

  “What have you heard, what do you know?” he panted, and Nikki grabbed one of the jester’s flailing hands, dropping it as quickly as the man practically ripped his arm away.

  “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” he blurted. “Please, I beg you, don’t touch me.”

  “Okay, okay,” Nikki said, both of her hands going high, and though her face was a blank mask, I could hear the surprise in her voice.

  I flicked my third eye open and trained it on the jester, then forced myself not to flinch back as well. Dude was jacked. His electrical circuits were vibrating off the charts, and his biological processes were struggling to catch up—stomach churning, heart thudding, blood pulsing. But he still had us at a disadvantage, because I didn’t know who the hell he was.

  Nikki, fortunately, had gotten what she needed. “Signore Samuele Budin, Venice resident, midlevel magician—but not midlevel so much anymore.”

  “Not so loud!” Budin made an urgent gesture with his hand, and I looked around, surprised. The noise of the parade route had been abruptly and effectively muffled, as if someone had thrown a blanket over the crowd. Over the crowd—or over us.

  “Whoa,” Nikki said, though she resisted the urge to poke the cone of silence around us. “That’s pretty cool.”

  “Of course it is,” Budin said, finally relaxing a notch as he straightened to his full height of five foot five. “I have very recently become one of the strongest magicians in Venice, but does your precious Arcana Council realize it? No. Kreios spends his time sniffing around Chiara as if she can conjure more than regrets the next morning.”

  I stifled a snort, but instantly knew what must have happened to the magician. “You were affected by the recent shift in magic?”

  “I was transformed by it.” Budin revealed this with such candor, I was taken aback. “I was on holiday in the Diego Ramírez Islands.” When I didn’t react, he clarified. “Nothing much there but birds, but I like birds. And the islands are situated at the very bottom tip of Argentina.” He eyed me meaningfully.

  “Argentina,” I said weakly. “Oh.”

  The South Pole had been ground zero for the influx of magic that the war on magic had unleashed on the earth. If Budin had been getting his bird on below Argentina when the burst happened, that put him directly in the path of all that magic. I was surprised he wasn’t actually glowing at this point.

  “Yes. Oh. Whatever you and your people were fighting there, I was struck to the ground with it. When I woke up hours later, I was so sick, I could barely move. But by the next morning…” He waggled his fingers, and tiny sparks swirled around them, looking remarkably similar to my own blue spectral fire. “I came back to Venice immediately and have been working to control my abilities ever since. Control them and hide them, which is why you haven’t noticed me before.”

  I pressed my lips together. The only reason I noticed him now was because he was as annoying as a gnat, but he did raise a good point. What if other magicians in the senate were hiding from me? How would I know?

  Budin leaned toward me now, fairly bouncing. “You haven’t noticed me, right? Of course you haven’t. I haven’t done anything to merit the censure of Justice. But the Devil should have, last night. I mean, yes, I was taking care not to show my cards, but he’s the Devil. He should know that I at least have the cards.”

  “I thought you guys were a bunch of academics,” Nikki objected. “I totally missed any steaming cauldron at your little committee meeting last night.”

  “Ordinarily, yes. But all that is changing now. Magicians are stepping out of the shadows, ready to do real work. And with the butcher and his recipe booklets returned? All these whispers of Nul Magis and what it can do to the truly gifted? I know I’m the next target. And I’m not going to let him get to me, you hear?”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, lifting my hands to ward off another round of Budin hand flailing. “We’re looking for the guy now, and I appreciate the information that you’ve been augmented. It helps. Has anyone else, that you know of?”

  “Not Chiara,” Budin sniffed.

  “Besides her. The prelate? Valetti?” I frowned. “I honestly don’t know who else was in the room yesterday.”

  “Most of them are posers, but has that stopped Kreios from talking to them—them, not me? No. No, it has not.”

  “Well, by your own admission, you were kind of working not to be noticed.”

  “But he is the Devil of the Arcana Council,” Budin said again, more petulantly this time. “He should know.”

  I was beginning to suspect that the Devil knew more than he was letting on, no doubt for his own nefarious reasons. “Well, you’re not wrong. But who else is amped up?”

  “I have no idea,” Budin said with a huff. “At first I thought Valetti was brighter, stronger than usual, but he downplays himself so well, I have lost the ability to see what is real and what is an act. The prelate hasn’t offered a display of his abilities since he rose to his position, so he’s worthless. Marrow and Greaves had amped up, but they’re dead now. Dead.”

  “Amped up how? How do you know?”

  “They told me. And before you ask, I was with my family yesterday before the meeting at Ca Daria. I didn’t kill them. Why would I kill them? They were only in the city for Carnevale. It was their bad luck that they went to visit Balestri and not me.”

  “Any reason why they would do that? Was Balestri amped at all?”

  “He wasn’t—but he was pure-blooded, and he felt his time was finally coming to step into the full light of the senate. He knew—knew that he’d been targeted, but given h
is relative paucity of skills, he had no idea why. He was planning to leave the city.”

  “You know this how?” Nikki asked levelly. “Are you taking Black Elixir too?”

  “Don’t think I haven’t considered it,” Budin spat. “It’s no good for general premonitions, though, only personal ones. And I’ve been careful. Everyone thinks I’m a fool.” He reached up and meaningfully batted one of the floppy ends of his harlequin hat. “It’s time for that to change.”

  “In your opinion, where should we look, then?”

  “Everywhere but at me,” he said. “And in a hurry. The senate of magicians isn’t like most organizations. Our biggest events aren’t at the end of Carnevale, it’s over the next three days. First there’s tomorrow’s Spectacle, then there’s the Magicians’ Ball two nights later.”

  Nikki tilted her head. “You mean everyone comes into town and it’s over in a few short days? Who planned that party?”

  “It’s not over, but it can’t begin until the alliances are struck. The rest of Carnevale is spent executing against everything decided on by the alliances, which happen at the beginning. Otherwise, the big party takes place, everyone leaves and…it all dissipates.”

  “That…does make sense.” As Budin talked, however, I noticed that the kids were back at the fringe of the crowd. And they weren’t alone this time. A trio of tall and lanky costumed figures trailed the jumble of elbows and knees, keeping a careful distance. There was something about their attention on the children I didn’t like. Kids weren’t my total focus anymore, but old habits died hard.

  “It also cuts down our timeline pretty significantly,” Nikki observed. “And so far, we don’t have a lot to go on.”

  “You have more than you think,” Budin said. “Balestri may not have taken Black Elixir, but Marrow and Greaves had, and they knew what was planned for them. They called me from their hotel rooms, left a message for me—but I was with my family.”