All the Plagues of Hell

by Eric Flint

  He shrugged. “If I can retrieve my library, I will look for a way to do that. Otherwise, Orkise will ravage until it runs out of prey.”

  “Prey?” asked Benito.

  “Us,” replied Count Mindaug. “Humans. Any and all regardless of age, religion, goodness or otherwise. Needs must that we stand together, or we will all die separately.”

  The Doge of Venice sighed. “Very well. I need to consult with some people before I can made any decisions.” He made a vague gesture at one of the walls. Benito knew that the “some people” referred to by Dorma meant the Council of Ten. At least one of the men on the council would have been listening to this discussion.

  “Meet again tomorrow, then?” he asked.

  The Doge nodded. He looked very weary in that moment.

  * * *

  When she awoke, Violetta turned her head to see if Sforza was awake also. He was—in fact, he seemed to be studying her intently.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Yes, what?”

  “If you ask me again to marry you, Carlo Sforza, the answer is ‘yes.’” She frowned a little. “Of course, you’d have to figure out a way to have your current marriage annulled.”

  The grunt that came this time sounded exactly like a wolf’s. “That’s not much of a problem. Becoming a widower is a fine way to have a marriage annulled, I’m thinking.”

  The man could be scary sometimes. But…

  …Always interesting. That was what she’d been looking for, when it came to a husband, she realized. And had now found, after what could fairly be described as a true heroic quest.

  Chapter 52

  Venice

  “There’s nothing more I can do for the lad at the moment,” Francisco said to Emma and Klaus. The girl and the bombardier were hovering over the now heavily bandaged figure of Tamas, who was lying asleep in a bed in one of the rooms in the Doge’s palace. Turner was amused to see that despite Emma’s anxiety over the medical state of her new husband, she was almost equally anxious over the damage that might happen to the bedding. He was quite sure she’d never seen such a magnificent bed in her life—and the sheets! Silk, they were.

  “What should we do?” asked Klaus. “In case…I don’t know…something happens.”

  Francisco shook his head. “The boy is in generally good health, leaving aside his wounds of the moment.” Terrible wounds, he could have said, but there was no point in spreading pointless alarm. “I’ve stopped the loss of blood from his leg, which was the great danger to his life. As for the hand…”

  He shrugged. “There’s really nothing to be done for that. We’ll just have to hope the damage isn’t too bad. At least it’s his left hand.”

  “But what if something bad does happen?” asked Emma insistently.

  “Marco Valdosta will be coming by to examine Tamas sometime later this morning. In the unlikely event that anything happens before Marco arrives, send for me. I won’t be far away since the council I’ve been summoned to is right here in the palace.”

  Emma didn’t look very reassured. By her architectural standards, the Doge’s palace was enormous, not to mention labyrinthine.

  “Just ask someone for directions,” Francisco said, trying not to sound impatient—which he was. There really was nothing further he could do for the injured boy for the moment, and he needed to deal with other pressing matters, such as a patron still on the edge of death, a dukedom in the balance…oh, there were many things he had to deal with. Now.

  He turned and strode out of the chamber. Behind him, he heard Klaus’s comforting voice saying to Emma “Everything will be fine.”

  Which was most likely not true at all, of course.

  * * *

  Francisco himself got lost twice, trying to find his way through the palace. The main problem, in his case, was that he didn’t really know where to go in the first place.

  So, he asked one of the guards standing at the intersection of two corridors. The man was wearing an elaborate red and white uniform and was armed with the most absurdly designed halberd Francisco had ever seen. He was pretty sure that if anyone tried to kill a mouse with the weapon he’d do nothing more than wrench his own back.

  The guard leaned forward slightly, placing his weight on the halberd—so it was good for something after all—and pointed down the corridor to his left. “Sala del Maggior Consiglio,” he said.

  A minute or so thereafter, Francisco entered a huge chamber whose walls were covered by portraits of men whom Turner presumed to be the former doges of the city. The painting that hung on one wall, overlooking a great dais, was the largest Francisco had ever seen and seemed to depict Paradise—or, at least, someone’s conception of Paradise.

  Not Turner’s, however. There was not a glass of beer to be seen.

  Other than that, and two guards standing beside a far entrance, the enormous room was completely empty.

  More enquiries produced directions from the two guards which Francisco followed meticulously that wound up bringing him to another chamber, considerably smaller than the Sala del Maggior Consiglio but even more elaborately decorated—and also completely empty.

  Fortunately, there was another guard in that chamber and the directions he provided Francisco took him to a chamber on the floor above where he found the people he was looking for. And a squad of guards—six of them, very alert and armed with lethal-looking weapons—who were a lot less willing to take Turner’s bona fides for granted. He wasn’t allowed to pass through into the chamber beyond until one of the Doge’s advisors came out and vouched for him.

  Finally, though, he found himself where he needed to be.

  The Doge was there, of course, reclining half erect on a chaise lounge, well-upholstered and colored a rich burgundy. Sitting to Petro Dorma’s right was a very big man Francisco had never met. He matched the description he’d gotten of Prince Manfred, the younger of Emperor Charles Fredrik’s two nephews—which placed him second in line to the Imperial throne, since the Emperor had no children of his own.

  Simple deduction would then make the tall but much slimmer man standing next to the prince his Icelandic friend and bodyguard, Erik Hakkonsen. But that hardly required any deduction at all, since the young woman standing next to him had to be the Mongolian princess Bortai; by now that story was well known in Venice. Probably in half of Italy, in fact.

  Francisco didn’t know the two Mongolian men standing just behind Erik and Bortai, but he assumed they were officers in the princess’s entourage.

  He paid them little mind, however, because the two men standing in the center of the chamber were the focus of attention for everyone there.

  By his distinctive uniform, the large man on the left had to be a Knight of the Holy Trinity. This would be the leader of the group of Knights who had come into Italy in search of Count Mindaug. If Francisco remembered correctly, his name was Klaus von Stebbens and he held the rank of archimandrite in the militant order.

  Obviously, the Knights had found Mindaug, for the small, somewhat elderly sorcerer was standing right next to Von Stebbens…and speaking.

  “…very worst thing you could do, as I said yesterday,” Mindaug was saying. “The Lucia woman is the only thing restraining Orkise at all.”

  Petro Dorma was frowning. “She hardly seems powerful enough to do that.”

  Mindaug shook his head. “Her control—call it her power, rather; no, a better word would be ‘influence’—over the great snake is because she is the one who summoned him.”

  “But how would she have done that?” demanded Von Stebbens. “Is she a sorceress herself?”

  “No, I doubt that very much. She would have roused Orkise…” Mindaug’s eyes narrowed a bit. “Some sort of great blood sacrifice. From the researches I had time to do before—”

  Here he gave the archimandrite a none-too-admiring glance. “Before I was interrupted.”

  Von Stebbens’s lips seemed to tighten. But he said nothing beyond: “Please go on.”


  “Lucia apparently had a younger sister who died some years ago of a mysterious disease. If my supposition is correct, Lucia would have fed her to Orkise. Perhaps unwittingly, but it hardly matters. Once the serpent was roused, it would have begun controlling her as well as being controlled by her. By now, the two of them are inseparably linked. If you kill Lucia, whatever restraint she has over the monster dies with her.”

  The big broad-shouldered prince shifted a little in his seat, and issued a skeptical sort of grunting noise. “Does she restrain the thing at all?”

  Mindaug nodded. “Oh, yes. I’m sure she does. Orkise is motivated by nothing beyond his lust for killing. But Lucia, for all that she is something of a monster herself, has broader and more subtle ambitions. She wants to rule Milan—perhaps more than Milan eventually. Killing almost everyone in Italy would hardly serve that purpose.”

  “So where do you think Orkise is now?” Dorma nodded toward the armored figure of Von Stebbens. “Given what the archimandrite has told us of the battle between the Knights and the great serpent at Val di Castellazzo, the monster was wounded but certainly not killed.”

  From the movement of Mindaug’s huge mustache, Francisco thought he must be grimacing. “No, no, they didn’t kill it. They couldn’t have, no matter how badly they injured the thing.”

  Von Stebbens seemed to bridle a bit. Mindaug gave him a glance that was half-apologetic and half-amused. “Please don’t take that as a criticism, Archimandrite. I doubt if anyone—or anything at all, short of direct divine intervention—could kill Orkise. The creature is something in the way of a divinity himself. A snake god who embodies the plague—probably all forms of death brought by disease. How can anyone kill disease? It’s one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Could you kill any of the other three—war, famine and death itself?”

  The little sorcerer shook his head. “No, Orkise can’t be slain. What we have to do is figure out a way to trap him. And do so in a trap that will hold the monster for centuries.”

  “Is that possible?” asked the Doge.

  Mindaug made a little gesture that could be taken as a shrug. Just a twitch of the shoulders.

  “I…think so.” He reached up and tugged at his mustache, but only briefly. Francisco had the impression that Mindaug grew suddenly worried that his mustache tugging might be somehow inappropriate. Or was there something about his teeth that he was disguising?

  “I can think of at least two possible ways it might be done,” said the Lithuanian sorcerer. “But I would need to study the matter carefully, and for that, I need my library.”

  Archimandrite von Stebbens’s face twisted into a grimace of skepticism. “There wouldn’t be anything left of it by now. Books are valuable. The duchess’s soldiers would have plundered the library. Or, if they were so ignorant they didn’t realize what the tomes were worth, they would have simply destroyed it.”

  Mindaug’s mustache wiggled in that manner that Francisco had come to recognize as a smile. “Oh, I doubt that, Archimandrite. Unless they had a very capable magician with them—very capable—they couldn’t have gotten past the seals and wards. And even if somehow they did manage that, they…ah…”

  For a moment, Francisco thought the elderly count looked downright shifty-eyed.

  Prince Manfred chuckled. “They’d be dead.”

  Yes, he did look shifty-eyed.

  “Not exactly,” said Mindaug. “They would no longer be in this world. And in the one they found themselves, well…let’s just say they would wish they were dead.” Now, the sorcerer from Lithuania looked downright malevolent. “I really dislike it when people meddle with my library.”

  Manfred chuckled again. “So it would seem.” His eyes moved to Von Stebbens. “Can he be trusted, Klaus?”

  The archimandrite’s expression became quite sour. “Well…”

  Before he could go any further, Mindaug shook his head and said: “Trust is not something I am very familiar with, Prince. There’s precious little of it—none at all, actually—in the circles in Lithuania I grew up in. That was true even before Jagiellon became possessed by Chernobog.”

  He puffed out his extravagant mustache with an exhalation. “What I can assure you is that you can rely on me. Well, probably. It depends on what you want. But if you can’t rely on me, I won’t lie about it. Why would I?”

  Here, he shrugged. “I have by now burned every bridge behind me in the lands to the east of your uncle’s empire. My only chance of survival is to reach an accommodation with someone of power here in Italy.” He glanced at Francisco. “My preference would be Milan, so long as Sforza is in control. But wherever it might be, I would hardly make myself welcome if I developed a reputation for being unreliable.”

  Manfred’s gaze had been on Mindaug throughout that little speech. Without shifting it, he said: “Klaus?”

  The archimandrite grunted. “I…will vouch for that much, Your Highness. My experience with Mindaug is that he keeps his word.”

  “Good enough.” Manfred now looked up at Erik. “Do you have any need for the Knights who came with us to Venice?”

  Erik shook his head. “I can’t see why I would. If anything comes up that requires military assistance”—he nodded toward Bortai and the other two Mongols—“I can call on them.”

  Manfred planted his hands on the armrests of his chair and pushed himself up to stand erect. The movement was quick, easy, even graceful. Despite his bulk, the big prince was obviously athletic.

  “Very well,” he said. “Klaus, your men still need to rest and recover. But the Knights we brought with us are well rested and they should be enough. Count Mindaug, let us be about the task of recovering your library.”

  He grinned down at the sorcerer. “Mind you, I’m only offering to deal with whatever troops Duchess Lucia still has at your villa. The wards, the seals—those I’m not getting anywhere near. I like this world just fine.”

  Mindaug started to say something, but he was interrupted by a commotion at the door. Apparently, on the other side of the closed portal, the men standing guard were taking exception to something.

  Or someone.

  Francisco heard a male voice saying: “You can’t—”

  That was as far as he got. A rather piercing and very imperious female voice rode over him. “Just open the door, blast you! What? Do you think I’m going to assault the Doge in my condition, you ninny?”

  “Ah,” said Francisco, moving quickly toward the door. Over his shoulder he said: “That will be Violetta de’ Medici. I’d recommend letting her in, Doge. She’s clearly recovering and, ah, quite strong-willed.”

  * * *

  After Francisco opened the door, the first person to come through was Violetta de’ Medici, sitting in a wheelchair being pushed by Marco Valdosta. The next person to come into the chamber was Carlo Sforza, also in a wheelchair. His attendant was one of Marco’s assistants. Francisco couldn’t remember his name.

  Francisco gave Marco a quick, worried glance. Are they up for this? his eyes said.

  Marco understood the silent query. After bringing Violetta’s chair to a halt not far from the Doge, he turned to Francisco and shrugged. “They insisted—and to be honest, while they’re still both weak, I think some activity would be good for them.”

  Francisco himself had long held to the heretical opinion that physical activity was good for ill or injured people, within reason, so he could hardly object now. Besides, while he still looked weak, Carlo was obviously alert. Indeed, he seemed quite cheerful, judging from the expression on his face.

  “Some introductions are in order,” said Petro Dorma. He used a forefinger to point at people as he named them.

  “Prince Manfred, this is Carlo Sforza, the current ruler of Milan. The young lady next to him is Violetta de’ Medici, whose uncle is Duke Cosimo.” He didn’t bother to add “the ruler of Tuscany” since Manfred would know that already.

  Presuming on a personal acquaintance that didn’t exist—but neatly si
destepped the awkward issue of Sforza’s title—Petro now pointed at the prince and said, “Carlo, Violetta, this is Prince Manfred. His uncle is—”

  “Emperor Charles Fredrik, and Manfred is second in line to the throne,” Sforza finished for him. “Yes, I know.” He then added with a sly little smile: “You’re looking well, Petro”—presuming a personal acquaintance that didn’t exist. “I hear you were poisoned also.”

  “So I was.” Dorma’s finger pointed to Erik and Bortai. “This is Erik Hakkonsen and his wife Bortai. She is the sister of Kildai, Great Khan of the Golden Horde.” He hesitated for a moment. “I just realized that I don’t know what title Erik holds at the moment.”

  The tall blond shrugged. “For the moment, I’m still just Manfred’s bodyguard and…ah…”—he gave the prince a sly little smile of his own—“mentor, I guess you could say.”

  “And closest friend,” said Manfred, a bit gruffly.

  Sforza nodded politely at both people, but immediately turned his attention to Francisco. “What news?”

  “Duke Umberto seems to have recovered from his setback at Fidenza—or thinks he has, at any rate. He’s launched a new attack, approaching from the east.”

  “By way of Cremona. I thought he’d do that.” Grimly, Sforza added: “It’s time the duke of Parma learned his proper place in the world. I’ll have his head—one of his hands, too, the bastard—on a pike.”

  Dorma looked a bit startled. The fury in the voice of Milan’s new duke was unmistakable, for all that his tone was level and even.

  Seeing the expression on the Doge’s face, Francisco explained: “We sent an envoy to Duke Umberto. He had the poor man maimed—his hand cut off.”

  Throughout the discussion, as had been true the day before, Princess Bortai had been following the discussion intently—but also with obvious difficulty. She seemed to have enough familiarity with Italian to make broad sense of what was being said, but missed many of the specific details.