The Shadow of the Lion

by Mercedes Lackey

  He got a bit of satisfaction when this time he definitely saw Caesare wince. "Money's a bit tight."

  Benito shrugged. "I understand. Giaccomo's boys don't come cheap. But we're broke. So we either got to stay here, or hit the attics again. Happens the attics are no bad notion; you've got to get over the roofs to get in them—hard for folks to sneak up on you."

  Aldanto shook his head, closing his eyes for a moment.

  "Mercy—" he mumbled, "—what have I let myself in for this time?"

  He cast a glance behind Benito. "Maria—you've got some stake in this too—"

  Benito didn't look around, but heard Maria flop down in a chair behind him.

  "I think it's no bad idea," she said. "Let them stay here. Lots of comings and goings—maybe not all by doors—confuse the hell out of any watchers."

  Aldanto looked over at Benito again, and Benito had the peculiar feeling of seeing someone quite near his own age looking at him out of those adult eyes for one brief flash.

  "Hey, the attics ain't so bad," he gave a token protest. "I lived there two years. You get some heat from the house and if you keep quiet you don't get found out and have to move too often. Better than the marshes by a long way."

  Aldanto shook his head. "I'd rather you were where I could see you."

  Benito shrugged. "Well, if you let us stay, we stay. But we've got jobs. We'll kick in."

  "You'd better." That was Maria, behind him.

  Caesare shook his head again. Sighed. "Well then, Benito Valdosta, I think we may have a bargain even if my bones tell me it may well be a partnership made in Hell."

  Benito just grinned "Hey, not for you, m'lord. But for people acting unfriendly-like? Against a team like the three of us, you, me, and Maria, m'lord Caesare? They haven't a chance!"

  * * *

  Harrow had panicked at first, when he'd seen who was picking the boys up—he'd broken out of the knot of fighting loco he'd tipped into the water and struggled vainly to get to the gondola before it could carry the boys off. The treacherous bottom had betrayed him. By the time he'd hauled himself out of the washout the two boys were aboard the gondola and being sculled away, back into the shadowed bowels of the city.

  Then recollection came to him, and he edged past the brawl back into depths of the swamp, comforted by this new evidence of the Goddess's intervention. Aldanto was former Montagnard; a man with an assassin's knowledge, a snake's cunning, an eel's ways, a duelist's defenses. If the Montagnards were after the boys, what better protection could they have than that of the man who knew most about the ways the Visconti operated, from firsthand experience?

  But the Goddess had charged him with watching over them—and Aldanto was only one man; he couldn't be everywhere at once, and he couldn't spend all his time awake. So. That meant Harrow should return to the city—

  * * *

  Luciano was pleased with his convert's plans. Secretly. The man responded well to manipulation. It was necessary to rant at Harrow about the folly of them until he was hoarse—but Harrow simply held his peace until Luciano ran out of words and then repeated his intentions.

  "I'm going back in," he said simply. "The Goddess put it on me, the job's not done till She says so. She said to watch the boys, so I'm watching the boys."

  Luciano sighed, "Can't argue with Her, or you," he said glumly, concealing his triumph. "But you got any notion where you're going?"

  Harrow nodded, slowly. "Know where Aldanto lives; know lots of watchin' holes around Castello—"

  "You just go to the boy's friends if you run into trouble, hear me? Claudia—that's th' main one. Singer—"

  "—works out of Barducci's tavern, lives second floor. You told me that already." Harrow did not add what he was thinking—that he probably could teach this Strega more than a few things about covert work. He had little respect for female agents; most of them were damned little use out of bed. He was itching to get out and get moving—Luciano had given him some other drug that cleared his mind and fired his feeling of purpose to a near-obsession, and every moment spent dallying only made the urge to get into place stronger.

  "All right, get moving," Luciano growled. "I can see you've no more interest nor purpose out here."

  Harrow did not wait to hear anything more.

  Chapter 40

  Petro Dorma refolded the letter. And bestowed it and the bundle of poems . . . in his own desk. He ignored his sister's gasp of outrage. He'd had years of practice.

  "You . . . you give that back to me!" yelled Angelina, her face red. "I brought it here so you could deal with the little upstart. If you won't, I'll get someone who will!"

  Petro took a deep breath. "Angelina, you have been carrying on a clandestine correspondence with this . . . love-starved puppy. You know as well as I do that half the Case Vecchie would send an unmarried virgin off to a nunnery for that. Your fury seems to be entirely directed at this unfortunate and obviously besotted young Marco Felluci not because he wrote you some very inaccurate if flattering poems, but because you thought the poems came from someone else. Would you care to tell me who this 'Caesare' your young swain refers to is?"

  Angelina Dorma looked sullen. "Give me back my letters."

  "No." Petro looked at his sister. Almost twenty years younger than he and still a child when their father had died, she'd been pampered. His mother had needed someone to turn to and spoil and—well, so had he. She could be very taking, very sweet, even now. When she'd been younger he'd never had the heart to refuse her anything. He'd seen giving her whatever she'd desired as a way of making up for her missing out on having Papa. He'd always felt guilty about that. He'd been twenty-five, already making his own way in the world, marked and shaped by Ernesto Dorma's hand. She'd been six. Now he was beginning to realize that he and his mother had been the ones who'd missed Ernesto. Angelina had hardly known him. He'd been his father's shadow. Angelina, of course, had not been allowed to go to the dockyards and timberyards.

  "Angelina. That is Caesare Aldanto, isn't it?"

  Her out-thrust lower lip confirmed it.

  "He's a bad man, Angelina," Petro said gently. "An adventurer of the worst sort, not some kind of hero. The Signori di Notte have suspicions about at least two of those duels he's fought. Only Ricardo Brunelli's personal intervention has kept him out in the taverns. Keep away from him, little sister."

  She flounced out, angrily.

  Sighing, Petro sat back in his chair and looked at the stack of papers on his desk. These magical murders were generating more paperwork than answers. He still felt they were no closer to knowing just who was behind them. Problems generated by Angelina's wild behavior were something he didn't need on top of it. He knew she was—along with a crowd of the wealthy and spoiled of Venice—slipping off to various taverns. He'd done it himself once upon a time. There had always been a couple of Case Vecchie girls who were no better than they should be among the crowd. Looking for thrills, looking for excitement. Enjoying being the "wild ones" able to retreat under the family mantle when real trouble came around. It was something of a shock to realize that was what his sister had become. He'd have to do something about it. Perhaps her aunt . . . he sighed. Better to deal with the immediate problems she would be causing. He rang a bell. A footman came hastily. "Tell Bruno and Giampaulo I want to see them. Now."

  The two Dorma cousins came in, looking wary. Petro didn't summon people often.

  Petro looked them up and down. Both were dressed with some flamboyance. Both carried rapiers. "And to what do we owe this sartorial elegance, gentlemen?" he asked dryly.

  "We . . . we were just going out," said Bruno with attempted nonchalance.

  "To see some—a . . . friend," said Giampaulo uneasily.

  "Ah?" Petro tilted his head inquiringly. "Who?"

  "Oh . . . um . . . just a friend." Bruno said airily. "You, you wouldn't know him."

  "I see," said Petro affably. "With swords only, or were you planning to take a horsewhip along?"

 
; They looked uneasily at each other. Said nothing.

  Petro shook his head. "You will both forget about it."

  "He insulted our honor!" said Bruno hotly.

  Giampaulo was slightly more fulsome. "We can't tolerate some lowlife bringing shame on our house, Petro! This Felluci has made Casa Dorma—and your sister specifically!—the laughingstock of Venice!"

  Petro's brow lowered. "May I remind you both that she is my sister and that I am the head of Dorma. Not you. I'll decide what needs to be done—if anything needs to be done. And if either of you think of taking over my authority . . . you can try being a Dorma factor in Outremer this year. Or Negroponte may have need of hotheads. I don't. I specifically forbade any dueling. And I promise you if I find out you've disobeyed me—and I will find out, don't think I won't—I'll leave you to rot in the Doge's dungeons. Is that clear? Who else was involved in this?"

  Giampaulo and Bruno glanced at each other. Their shoulders slumped. "Bonaldo and Michael," muttered Bruno.

  "I suggest you waste no time in passing this on to them. The less we do the less scandal there will be. At the moment only Angelina and this boy . . . and you four are involved. By the time you were finished half of Venice would know all the details and my sister and my house would truly be a laughingstock. I won't have it. Is that clear?"

  Both of them looked sulky, wary. Nodded.

  "Don't even think of trying to circumvent me," said Petro quietly. "I may just have saved your foolish lives. I wonder if Angelina mentioned that this Felluci is the duelist Aldanto's messenger?"

  Petro had the satisfaction of seeing the two cousins go abruptly pale.

  Chapter 41

  Chiano brooded over the little fire while Sophia grilled fish he'd coaxed into his net for dinner. He thought about how Harrow had slipped away into the marsh so easily he might have been born here; the man made scarcely a rustle in the reeds. What he'd done to mold the creature that had come into his hands into the man now called Harrow had used a smidgeon of magic, a great deal of knowledge he'd gleaned from Sophia about the properties of the plants of the Jesolo, and all his manipulation.

  Face the facts, old man, you used him. To protect Marco, yes, but he'd made Harrow into a mere tool for that protection . . .

  He was a tool before you got him. He just didn't know it. You gave him that much; self-knowledge. There are those who'd give anything for that.

  And there were those who would—and did—give anything to have the luxury of denial, too. He hadn't given Harrow a choice.

  How many choices did I have? None, if he was to give Marco a protector. And Marco had to have a protector, if he was to grow into the power the Lion's Shadow promised for him. He was close now, close to accepting the Winged Mantle; Chiano had sensed it. But Marco had to live to grow into that power, and—

  And Venice is suddenly a world more dangerous than it was before. And you, old man, aren't there.

  Self-knowledge. . . .

  He'd had the luxury, not of denial, but of absence of that knowledge for a long time, courtesy of those who had ambushed him in the very corridors of the Accademia, coshed him, and dropped him into a canal. Him! Dottore Marina! And he hadn't even remembered that much until recently! All those experiments with drugs and hallucinations—he knew enough to be able to tell the difference between a real vision and a hallucination—hadn't been to gather the Word of the Goddess. It had been to jar loose his own memories from the confused mist the blow to the head had sent them into.

  At first, when he came here, all he'd known for certain was what old Sophia had told him—that the undines had brought him to her, that they had told her he was their friend and that they had rescued him when someone had tried to kill him. They didn't know who; the men had worn steel armor, and that had prevented their magic and his own from saving him. They knew he was a magician, a powerful magician, one who was the friend of water creatures in particular, but that was all they knew. That, and his name, which meant nothing to him as he was, and nothing to an old herb-witch living in the Jesolo.

  Sophia had decided—and told him—that he must have some powerful enemy in the city to have earned such treatment, and he had caught fear from her. For the longest time he hadn't wanted to know; it seemed safer when he didn't. And he particularly didn't want to use magic. Sophia had told him that magicians could tell where other magicians were using magic, and even who it was that was doing it—as if there would be any other magician in the Jesolo!

  But when nothing happened, and no one came seeking him, then he dared, a little at a time. He dared first a little magic, a very little magic, something that he remembered bits of, that Sophia knew bits of, to call the undines to him. And it worked; they came out of friendship more than anything else, but stayed because he could feed them tidbits of power out of his own stores. It was the undines who came often enough for his tidbits and stayed to chase fish into his traps. It was the undines, also, who frightened the locos sufficiently, with their clawed hands and shark-tooth smiles, that he and Sophia were left unmolested. They could even, at need, make dangerous locos like the late Big Gianni feel threatened enough that he could have made Big Gianni back off from Marco if he'd been there when it needed doing.

  And finally he tried getting those memories back of who, exactly, Dottore Marina was, and what he could do.

  "Here," Sophia said, nudging him. "Better eat."

  He accepted the piece of grilled fish from her and ate it mechanically.

  * * *

  It was a good thing that it was the memories of danger that came back first, and not the ones he had just gotten over the last few days, or his enemies would have surely found him. Someone had paid for very, very skilled bravos, dressed head-to-foot in fine chain mail, to ambush him within the Accademia itself. His defensive magics, the ones he could do without thinking, had all been of the sort to use against another mage or a creature of magic. When striking cold steel, they had fizzled and died, like a wet firework. That was all he remembered; the blow to his head that must have followed blanked out everything else.

  For a while at least.

  He had struggled since then, trying to put a face on the faceless enemy. Who could have hired these men? Obviously someone conversant enough with magic to know exactly how to disable a Magister Magus, a Grimas, a master of all three of the stregheria traditions. He had enemies, but none that virulent. Some were political; he was—had been—the spokesperson, not only for the Strega but also the rest of the non-Christian mages, the Jews and Moslems and that bizarre little fellow allegedly from the Qin empire. He had managed to get a single voice out of that chaos of conflicting personalities, even though for the most part it was like trying to herd cats and just as thankless a task. But the Strega were little more than an afterthought in the politics of Venice; he couldn't think of anyone who would consider him a political threat.

  What did that leave? A mystery, a faceless threat, and somehow that unnerved him, unmanned him, and left him determined to hide out here and depend on no more than the little dribs and drabs of magic it took to just stay alive.

  But then that poor child had shown up, running from faceless enemies himself, men who had killed his mother. And on him, guiding him—the Lion's Shadow, the sign that Chiano had not—then—recognized for what it was, because he himself was not aware that he was the wearer of the Winged Mantle. He only knew that Marco could be a magician if he chose, and through Marco, he himself could work the magic that would elevate life in the swamp above mere survival.

  Until now. Until now . . .

  Now he knew what he was—the force through which the Protector, the Soul of Venice could work, a Soul that went right back through the Romans and to the first Etruscan fishermen who had plied the Jesolo. The Soul that now took the shape of the Winged Lion of Saint Mark, but who was older than even Dottore Marina could guess. And the Shadow he had seen on young Marco was not just the shadow of potential power, it was the Shadow of the Lion, showing that Marco—if h
e lived, if he grew into and accepted his power—would be the next to wear the Winged Mantle. Marco might even—Chiano was not sure about this yet—be the first to assume the Lion's Crown as well, something which no one had done in centuries.

  Now he knew why he had lived—because the Shadow had dispersed his attackers with the brush of its wings that called up terror, and called the undines up the canal to rescue him before the assassins could complete their business. Because the Shadow had told the undines to take him to Sophia, deep into the Jesolo, where he could live and regain his memories.

  But there was no reason to follow Marco into the city, to go back. Was there? The boy had Harrow to protect him. He didn't need Chiano, nor did anyone else.