The Masked City

by Genevieve Cogman

‘An unfortunate by-product of your line of work,’ Vale said. ‘Winters, shall we go?’

  ‘I think not,’ Lord Guantes said, gripping her wrist even harder. ‘The lady will be remaining here.’

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you,’ Irene said. She’d regained her self-control now. ‘But if you could tell us where to find the Carceri, we would appreciate it.’

  Lord Guantes snorted. ‘You seriously think I’d tell you that?’

  ‘I must insist that you answer her question,’ Vale said. His voice was lethally cold.

  Lord Guantes shrugged. ‘Or?’ he said.

  ‘Or I will blow your brains out. I know that your kind have unusual capabilities, sir, but I don’t believe you can enchant both of us, or you would already have done so. And I think that a bullet in the head from ten feet away will seriously inconvenience you.’

  Lord Guantes paused, punctuated by a rattle of drums from the orchestra, which carried throughout the opera house. ‘At least tell me how you reached this place,’ he said. ‘If you are working for Silver, perhaps we can come to some arrangement.’ He wasn’t focusing on Irene any more, but on the more immediate threat of Vale. And was Vale beginning to frown in distraction, now that he had to fight against Lord Guantes’ will?

  Guantes is playing for time. And Kai was running out of time. ‘Chair arms, break,’ Irene murmured.

  The arms of both chairs shattered, wrecking what was probably a valuable pair of antiques. Lord Guantes fell forward, as Irene’s wrist swung loose and she dragged it free from his grip. She backed towards Vale, keeping her gun pointed at Lord Guantes throughout.

  His eyes widened and for a moment he hesitated. Then he rose from his chair and stepped back towards the edge of the box, raising both his hands as if in surrender.

  Irene spared a glance, and saw that Vale was standing near the door. One of the commoner black half-masks hid part of his face, and he was in a plain dark doublet and breeches. She wouldn’t have recognized him, or looked twice at him, under any other circumstances. He didn’t shift his attention from Lord Guantes. ‘See to the door, Winters,’ he said, as casual as ever.

  ‘It’s open,’ Irene replied. She reached out to test the handle and it shifted in her grasp. ‘We should get out of here.’

  The opera house was nearly silent. Tosca was singing. ‘Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore …’ Her voice, and the orchestra behind her, filled the air like light through stained glass.

  ‘You can’t possibly get away,’ Lord Guantes said softly. Power seemed to crystallize in the air around him, almost physical and solid, as he drew himself up to his full height. It wasn’t a threat. It was a prediction. They would not get away. They were lost. He had already won.

  I almost said yes to him … The brand across Irene’s back burned with her anger, as if etched in live acid. I almost betrayed the Library.

  Her finger tightened on the trigger.

  Lord Guantes caught the motion and took another step back, grasped the edge of the box with one hand and swung himself over. He dropped out of the line of fire and out of sight, into the audience below.

  His action shattered the spell that his power had cast. It was as if a brilliant light source had blinked out, leaving observers dazzled in the ordinary light of day. Irene glanced sideways to Vale and saw that he still had his gun pointed at where Lord Guantes had been standing, his grip so tight that she could see the bones of his hand taut beneath the skin. ‘Come on,’ she said urgently, shoving her own gun back into her skirts. ‘We have to get out of here.’

  Some inner tension snapped. Vale nodded, slid his own weapon back into his doublet and was pulling her outside and down the corridor almost before the echoes of her words had died away. Fortunately Sterrington had followed the orders to leave Lord Guantes alone and the corridor was empty.

  I should have shot him, Irene’s brain chattered feverishly. I should have shot him …

  ‘Move, Winters,’ Vale snapped, dragging her along. ‘I’m astonished that nobody’s reacted to a man dropping out of his opera box.’

  ‘Well, it was the middle of Vissi d’arte,’ Irene argued. ‘Nobody’s going to stir until that aria’s over—’

  A burst of shouting and commotion came from the main auditorium, echoing through the walls of the corridor as they scrambled down the stairs.

  ‘Of course, I could be wrong,’ she allowed. But a more important question presented itself. ‘How on earth are you here? Now?’

  ‘I will be delighted to tell you, when we have the time.’ He steered her through a side door into the backstage passages. ‘If we can get out of here and into the crowd before they can cordon off the opera house, we may be safe.’

  Irene decided that was as good a definition of ‘safe’ as they were likely to get for the moment, and nodded. She grabbed someone’s discarded shawl as they ran past it, dropping her own. It might help camouflage her a little. Vale was already anonymous enough.

  ‘Act normally,’ Vale directed, slowing abruptly to a casual saunter and letting go of her arm. The buzz of voices came from ahead.

  ‘The sad thing is, this is all fairly normal for me,’ Irene said wryly. ‘It’s spending a few peaceful months in your world that was the unusual experience.’ She followed his lead, smoothing her skirt down. Then they turned a corner together, to find the corridor nearly blocked by a group of stagehands and chorus.

  ‘Do you know what’s going on?’ one of the chorus asked Vale. He was a young man, ready in uniform for the next act, his make-up fresh and lurid in the candlelight. ‘Someone said there had been a duel.’

  ‘No, I heard it was a murder,’ another man put in, one of the stagehands. He was blotting sweat from his forehead and neck with a dirty rag. ‘The way I heard it, he strangled her in her own box.’

  ‘Neither,’ Vale said. His Italian was clipped, a little slangy, but his body language had changed to the same absent-minded swagger as the men around them. ‘Someone was about to be arrested by the Doge’s guard. He jumped from his box to try to escape.’

  The group fell silent. Most of the men crossed themselves. ‘The guard is still back there?’ one of them asked.

  Vale shrugged. Irene shrugged as well, and tried not to look behind her to see if anyone was chasing them.

  ‘So why are you trying to get out the back way?’ another stagehand asked. ‘Got reasons to avoid the Doge’s guard, have you?’

  Before Vale could answer, Irene tugged at his sleeve imploringly. ‘Darling, we must hurry! If Giorgio catches us together, you know what he’ll do. These are honourable gentlemen, they won’t betray us to him …’

  Glances were exchanged between the men. ‘We didn’t see anything,’ one of them said, extending an empty palm.

  ‘Quite right,’ Vale said. He dipped into an inner pocket, brought out a purse and dropped a few coins into the meaningfully extended hand. ‘To drink the Doge’s health.’

  With a few more nods they were out through the backstage door, and a couple of minutes later Vale was handing Irene into a gondola. No frenzied mob of guards came after them, and Irene was beginning to think they might actually get away.

  ‘Round to the Doge’s Palace and then around a bit, so we can enjoy the scenery. And let’s have a song,’ Vale instructed, tossing the gondolier another coin. He helped Irene seat herself in the main area of the boat (she still didn’t know the right vocabulary for it, rather important for a Librarian), settling a cushion behind her, before folding his long body down next to her. The posture might have been casual enough - a man and a woman together in a gondola, his arm against her shoulders - but she could feel the tension in his body.

  ‘Thank you.’ Irene had to make herself say the words. To her disgust, she was shaking in the aftermath of her brush with Lord Guantes’ power. Tackling a Fae at his level was way above her pay grade, she told herself as she gritted her teeth. Vale was here. They were safe - for now. And they needed to talk.

  She looked up to meet Vale’s eyes
for a moment, and then she reached behind her head to untie the strings of her mask. Nobody was looking, and hopefully nobody even knew what to look for. She massaged her damaged wrist as Vale began to speak. He kept to English, his voice quiet.

  ‘I apologize for surprising you like that, Winters. When Lord Silver refused to allow me on the Train, I thought it best to make my own arrangements. I regret that this involved deceiving you as well as him, but there was no time to discuss the matter. By leaving as I did, I was able to assemble a disguise and join the Train among the minor Fae.’

  She jerked her head in a nod, remembering his hurtful words as he’d stormed out of Silver’s study. ‘I’m concerned about you becoming chaos-contaminated, just by being here,’ she said. ‘Silver wasn’t lying. It is a risk for humans visiting these worlds. You’ve exposed yourself—’

  ‘I’ve felt nothing odd thus far,’ Vale said briskly. ‘Perhaps I am already somewhat immunized? You’ve said before that my world is higher in chaos than in order. And I had no trouble dealing with the other Fae on the Train. The volume of strangers made it easy for me to pass myself off as one of them. But I assume that you’ve been pursuing your own investigations, Winters? What have you found out?’

  Last night Irene had been utterly furious with him. But she grudgingly accepted his reasoning. Perhaps it was his casual assumption that he’d barely done anything that needed apologizing for that still galled her. She ran over with Vale the details of the midnight deadline, her bargain to escape on the Train, and Kai’s location within the Carceri - wherever they were.

  ‘Ah,’ Vale said with satisfaction. ‘That agrees with certain investigations of my own.’

  ‘I hope I haven’t been wasting my time too much,’ Irene said with some irritation.

  ‘Not at all, Winters.’ Vale relaxed further back into the cushions with her, lowering his voice to what might have been taken for a lover’s whisper. ‘It was simple enough. Venice is known as a hotbed of crime syndicates, secret societies and spies. The Veneziani, the Mala del Brenta, the ‘Ndrangheta, the Carbonari …’

  ‘I think the Carbonari were a couple of hundred years later than “now”,’ Irene said pedantically. Of course Vale would know about the criminal side of things. ‘You’ve probably noticed that the chronological period is different from your world.’

  Vale sighed. ‘The point remains, Winters, that people here are used to the concept of anonymous masked individuals asking questions and expecting to get answers. Once I’d grasped that this place is run by a mysterious group called the Ten, all I needed to do was masquerade as one of their agents. It was easy enough to trace the movements of Lord Guantes, once he’d arrived here - together with an unconscious man, who must be Strongrock. I have spent most of the day and last night criss-crossing the city, interviewing witnesses and—’

  ‘You’ve been pretending to be one of the Ten’s secret agents?’ Irene hissed in shock.

  ‘There are advantages to a city of masks,’ Vale said. Under his own mask, his mouth curled rather complacently in the moonlight.

  ‘I think you underestimate how efficient they are.’ She had to resist the urge to look over her shoulder. ‘They were following the Guantes as well last night, watching for suspicious behaviour. They nearly arrested me.’

  Vale nodded, with a casual acceptance of the fact that of course she’d managed to avoid arrest. It was, in its way, a compliment. ‘In any case, I know where Strongrock was last seen, right before he vanished. It must be the entry to these Carceri of yours - or at least incredibly close. What I can’t do is conveniently infiltrate the place. I’d been planning to kidnap Guantes or his wife and use them as hostages, but it’s possible that I might have overreached there.’

  ‘But, together, perhaps we might manage something …’ Irene suggested. It was like the swing of a pendulum, from near-certain failure to an actual possibility of success. There were still a few hours till midnight. There might still be time to save Kai.

  ‘If we didn’t know where to go, following Lord Guantes would be a logical next step.’ Vale shifted his weight, looking meditatively down the canal ahead of them, at the glowing lanterns and windows that lined the dark waterway.

  Their gondolier paused in his vocal rendition (the equivalent of June, moon, et cetera, in a pleasant if not opera-grade tenor) to call a greeting to a passing gondola. Irene eyed the boat nervously, but it held just another reclining couple, much like her and Vale. No soldiers. No inquisitors. No Lord Guantes.

  She tried to think through Vale’s statement, rather than just reject it flat out. Guantes was on a very short shortlist of people she never wanted to see again. ‘You think Lord Guantes will check on Kai, to make sure he’s safe, now that we’ve escaped him?’

  ‘This is very likely, Winters. He’s also likely to set a trap. And our own goal will be fairly obvious, unfortunately - to find Strongrock as soon as is practicable.’

  Irene frowned. ‘But won’t Lord Guantes expect us to follow him, as the only route to Kai? And be ready for us?’

  Vale looked thoughtful. ‘If setting traps is his game, he’ll need time to do that and time to double-back and display himself prominently, to tempt us to follow. All this leads to what we were trying to do anyway - reach these Carceri first, and hope we are in time to find him, before Strongrock’s taken for auction.’

  Irene was beginning to nod in agreement when it struck her that the sounds of the canal were changing. There was an ambient hush, a silence like a physical thing drifting towards their gondola, swallowing up lesser noises in its wake. She sat upright, pulling out of Vale’s protective arm, to see half a dozen shadowy gondolas moving towards theirs. The approaching boatmen were muffled in black cloaks and moved with inhuman smoothness, their oars barely stirring the surface.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  ‘About turn,’ Vale said to the gondolier. ‘You’ll get a bonus, of course—’

  ‘There’s no bonus big enough to make it worth crossing the Ten,’ the gondolier said, his voice shaking. He brandished the oar at them threateningly. ‘You stay right where you are.’

  Pleading innocence was not going to help. The question was: how much disturbance was Irene prepared to make in order to get away safely.

  Quite a lot, she decided.

  She scrambled to her feet and took a deep breath. ‘Canal water, freeze deep and thick!’ she shouted at the top of her voice.

  Her words hung in the silence. Then their gondola came to an abrupt halt, throwing Irene to her knees. Vale grabbed her and pulled her upright again, steadying her. The silence was gone; the air was now full of the creaking of trapped wooden boats, and a bitter chill rose from the suddenly firm surface of the canal. The approaching gondolas were among the trapped boats, and the men in them seemed also briefly frozen in shock.

  ‘Will the ice hold us?’ Vale asked, getting to the point.

  ‘It’d better,’ Irene replied as she swung herself over the side of the boat: the ice groaned under her weight, but didn’t break. She hastily began shuffling towards the canal bank - the surface of the water had frozen in peaks and ripples, giving her feet some purchase. Besides nearly drowning, her boarding-school experiences had included dangerous adventures on semi-iced lakes, so it wasn’t the first time she’d done this. She steadied Vale as he nearly slipped. Crashes from the far gondolas suggested that their pursuers were finding it more difficult.

  Under normal circumstances, crowds of curious bystanders would have been mobbing the bank, but the presence of the Ten’s own secret police had cleared the area very effectively. Irene and Vale scrambled up off the ice without anyone getting in the way. They’d gained perhaps a minute, but not more. And the black-clad masquers were scrambling across the ice towards them with more confidence now.

  Time to slow them down a bit more. ‘Ice, break!’

  Interestingly, the ice didn’t all fracture in the same way. Some of it crumbled into tiny fragments, sinking into the water like dust, while
other pieces stayed in large chunks, miniature icebergs drifting downstream on the canal. The men on the ice dropped into the freezing water in eerie silence, but they were still struggling towards Irene and Vale.

  Vale grabbed Irene’s arm and towed her into the nearest alleyway, cutting across a narrow bridge and between a row of old houses. ‘We need to evade them,’ he said, and she wondered if retreating into the obvious was a habit of his.

  ‘So where was Kai last seen?’ Irene demanded.

  ‘The Piazza San Marco,’ Vale answered. He gave her a boost over a stone wall between two houses and into a private garden, then vaulted over himself. ‘The Campanile.’

  ‘Clearly the Ten believe in the principle of hiding in plain sight,’ Irene muttered. She kicked a free-range chicken out of the way in a squawk of feathers. ‘Excuse me,’ she added to an outraged householder who’d opened his back door to complain. Distraction, distraction - they needed a distraction. ‘Vale, if we were foreign spies, here with sabotage in mind, what would we target?’

  ‘The Ten themselves,’ Vale suggested, ‘or we’d want to assassinate the Doge, or blow up the Arsenal. But the Arsenal would be easiest, as both it and the Campanile are north-east of here. So can you make our pursuers think that’s our aim?’

  ‘I can try.’ But how, she wondered. She remembered the Venetian Arsenal now: a complex of shipyards and armouries, so huge and industrial that it had supplied images for Dante’s Inferno. And she had enough grasp of the city’s geography to know that it was directly on the water, looking out across the scattered islands to the open sea.

  Running feet echoed in the distance behind them. And even if Vale had a semi-preternatural ability to find his way through a city’s back-alleys on only a day’s acquaintance, the Ten’s servants were still close behind and gaining.

  She needed to make a nice obvious trail if this diversion was going to work. ‘We need to get to the waterside,’ she said briefly. ‘I’m going to need a boat, and we’ll need something to put in it.’