Burdens of the Dead

by Mercedes Lackey

  “What is it, Benito? I need to get down to Fondamenta Zattere Ponto Lungo. There are some sick children. They have been very crowded on the Eastern Fleet vessels, with everyone trying to get out of Constantinople and Trebizond. They left some at Negroponte and at Corfu, but they were still crowded.”

  Benito came straight to the point. “I need you and Brother Mascoli to take me down to the water chapel. Where you took me to meet the water-people.”

  Marco nodded, quite as if he had expected this. Perhaps he had; who knew what the Lion whispered in his thoughts? “This evening? I really must go right now. I’d rather treat sick children immediately than let them scatter into the city and spread diseases around far and wide. Bring your daughter with you. Her godmother should see her.”

  That, Benito had not expected. “I want to ask them for aid—again—in getting a fleet to Constantinople. Do you really think I should bring Alessia?”

  Marco nodded. “It will do no harm to remind them of the bond between you.”

  Benito pulled a face. “I don’t think they take very well to blackmail.”

  But none-the-less he had her and Maria with him that evening when they made their way down to the consecrated water-chapel below the chapel of St. Raphaella. The undine Juliette and the triton Androcles came, as they waited. Benito saw the raised eyebrows of Juliette the undine, as she saw him holding Alessia “I see she has found her father. We’d heard about that.” Then she saw Maria, who had stayed back a little. She bowed with profound respect, disturbing the hair that cloaked her ample bare breasts. “I could wish we met again in better times, Lady of the Dead.”

  * * *

  Maria had wanted to properly thank the mer-woman who had stood in for Umberto’s sister at the christening of her daughter. She still had some of the canal-woman’s fear of the below-water dwellers, but her time as an acolyte of the Mother Goddess had broadened her perspectives a little.

  But she still had not expected this non-human, so far away from little Corfu to know that much, or to call her by a title she did not really relish. “What? How—”

  “He follows you,” said Juliette. “We can see. He longs for you, and for your strength. He comes. Soon.”

  Maria felt the tears prick her eyelids, and fear gnaw at her belly. Fear of leaving her daughter. Fear of leaving the man she loved. Not fear for herself…but also fear because the last time she’d felt this sick she’d been pregnant. And she was just a little late. She hadn’t told Benito this small fact yet. He had enough to contend with.

  She looked at Benito. He was studying the merpeople in a way that she’d learned meant he was looking for an angle to use with them. And plainly not finding it as easy as he usually did. “I need help,” he finally said.

  A direct admission from Benito? He must be more worried than he’d let on.

  The mer-folks’ eyes narrowed, but not with dislike, more in the manner of a shrewd merchant about to bargain. The triton spoke, “Not something we give easily or for no reason. Or for free, fire-spirit.”

  Benito nodded. “I thought that would be the case. You remember the magical creature that tried to kill Marco. That attacked the ships.”

  “Lamprey. Magical. Something we’d rather stay away from,” said Androcles, sinking back down into the water.

  Benito spoke quickly, before he could move too far away. “I think more are coming. Or at least the monster’s master comes. He likes using the water for his servants.” That arrested the two merpeople, who had plainly been about to depart.

  Now their eyes narrowed again, but with slow anger. Not for Benito but…yes. He had them. “What do you want?” Juliette asked.

  “To destroy it for ever so that I can have a better world for my daughter,” said Benito, lightly. “That’s what I want, but it is not what I’ll get.”

  Androcles was amused now. “And what do you hope to get?

  “I need to take a fleet all the way to Constantinople. In the teeth of winter. That is neither wise nor easy. But I believe it must be done. So we will do it. But I could use some help with the weather.”

  Juliette snorted delicately. “Try gods.”

  Benito ignored the comment. “You are more weather wise than we humans are. And I have heard tell you can communicate over long distances.”

  Androcles wagged his head a bit. “It would be hard to be less weather wise than humans. And sound travels well underwater. We can hear sounds ten or twelve leagues away.”

  “There are ports along the way, or at least sheltered anchorages we can use—if we are not caught too far from them. What I want is some kind of advance warning.”

  “It’s not wise to cheat the sea of its prey,” said Androcles, with the air of someone testing waters.

  Benito shrugged. “Please. This is me you are talking to. I’m not wise.”

  “He even cheated the Lord of the Dead of his bride,” Juliette reminded all of them. With cautious admiration.

  Benito squeezed Maria’s shoulder. “As much as I was able.”

  “More than most humans,” said Androcles, but he nodded. “Very well. Something can be arranged. But there is a price.”

  “If we can afford it, it is yours,” said Benito, sounding as if he was one of the best bargainers on the canals. He probably was, thought Maria, with an inward smile to herself. He’d started hard and young, no matter where he’d risen to.

  “Ah. Nothing you cannot afford. A drop of your blood on the water when you wish to call us, and a little something that Venice can afford. Besides the fact that we owe the healer, it seems wise to be on the right side of you,” said Androcles disarmingly.

  “And he is my god-daughter’s father,” said Juliette, coming forward to touch Alessia.

  “What is it that you want?” asked Benito.

  “A piece of water to call our own. A place where no-one fouls and no one fishes. A couple of acres here, within the Lion’s shelter, that we can call our own. If ill times are coming, we’ll need it.” By the sudden sober look on the triton’s face, this had been something the mer-folk had long desired. Maria understood. Sanctuary, under the shadow of the Lion…valuable. Worth, to them, more than pearls. If they could not be safe with the Lion to guard, they could not be safe anywhere.

  Benito nodded. Maria knew it would not be easy to police, although Doge Petro could make it legally so at the stroke of a pen. She was a canaler. You could hardly be that without knowing that the writ of the law as to fishing rights was often trespassed on, and the offenders were seldom caught. And she had a strong feeling these were not folk you could casually give your word to. So she said so.

  “We’ll tell you who breaks the bargain. There are always some who will go too far for fish.” Juliette looked pointedly at the triton

  He grinned, showing sharp teeth. “It will be up to you landfolk to punish them. We will know if you do not.”

  Benito nodded. “I will talk to Petro about it, but I think I can safely promise it. He knows the value of sanctuary—and allies.”

  Maria planned to take it a step further. She’d talk to the canalers about it. There’d be enough of them heading out with her Benito. It was not a deal to be turned down. The canal people were superstitious enough to keep each other out of the protected water, just in case.

  Marco, who still practiced most of his medicine among the Venice’s poor and probably knew them as well as Maria did, obviously thought likewise. “I will talk to the canalers. Keeping their loved ones safe from the ravages of the sea while on this voyage is a bargain they’ll find hard to refuse, I think. And if they agree…well, their word is good. With all respect to Petro, it would be of more value than any piece of pap…”

  They all felt it then. A cold that had nothing to do with temperature, the shiver down the spine, the touch at the back of the neck. And the power, oh yes, the power. The two merpeople vanished. Slipped away under the water like ghosts. Someone else had entered the water-chapel, although the door was still closed. They could all f
eel his cold presence behind them. Maria was chilled to the bone, and she held tightly onto Benito and her daughter.

  They turned, slowly, to face Aidoneus, lord of the cold halls of the dead. Once again, Maria was struck by his beauty. How could a thing that ruled the dead be so handsome?

  He inclined his head, unsmiling. “My bride,” he said.

  She had known this was coming. She just had hoped for more time. But he would come when he would come, by his own calendar—and by his calendar, winter was about to begin.

  Maria felt Benito tense. “For four months,” she said calmly, squeezing Benito’s shoulder. “That was our bargain. I honor my bargains. Benito will honor his.”

  Aidoneus nodded. “I will keep her safe. And keep my bargain.”

  Maria took a deep breath. “And him. Now…I need to bid them goodbye.”Her voice cracked slightly. She had meant to keep her self-control. But…four months. Four months of no Benito. No little ‘Lessi…Four months among the dead, four months being the sole living creature in those cold, silent halls…already she ached fiercely for them, and she had not said goodbye.

  “If you don’t want…” Benito began.

  Maria shook her head, fiercely. “A bargain is a bargain. I keep mine. And I’ll be back in the spring. I promise.”

  Benito took a deep breath. “Or I’ll be there to fetch you. And this time…” He left the threat unspoken.

  “I will keep my bargain too,” said Aidoneus to Benito, gravely, and with no sign of insult. “Not because that is my nature, but I would be foolish not to. She is not someone to anger, lightly. And I need her. She brings life to my lands. That is no small thing.”

  Benito grimaced, and being Benito, could not forbear but try for a joke of some kind. She understood why. The cold…it froze a man’s soul. No wonder Aidoneus wanted Maria’s fire. “And she throws plates. And anything else she can get her hands on. And she has a temper and a voice that will probably blow those mists of yours away. Very well. I accept it. But I don’t have to like it.”

  Benito turned to his wife and folded her in his arms, a stocky, short man, with muscles like rope, binding her. She could feel his anger and his sadness. And she could feel that he loved her, that if he could he would take her place, he would go again to the land of the dead to bring her out.

  “I’ve done it once,” he said quietly to her, confirming what she felt. “If need be I’ll do it twice.”

  She hugged him, unable to speak. She kissed and cried a little over her baby. And then she put her child in her father’s arms, and turned away and walked beside Aidoneus into the misty archway that had opened ahead of them. It was quite the hardest thing she’d ever done. If she’d turned back to see him and their daughter standing there beside the greenish water of the water-chapel…she knew she’d fail.

  But she had a bargain to keep.

  Chapter 21

  Milan

  Fillipo Maria was delighted with the new conduit of news coming out of Venice. Details of the 48 pounders ordered, and how they were being fitted—along with the Arsenal guild masters varied reactions to it. The coming spring campaign was enough to make him chortle to himself. Firstly because by spring he planned to be ready for a fairly bloody summer—with a lot of Venice’s soldiery away. And secondly because his engineers had laughed at the bombards. The duke of Milan had nothing but disdain for the emperor of Byzantium and his rapidly shrinking and collapsing empire. But he must send Alexis word somehow. The news that Venice and Genoa would be engaged in far away wars was a good thing. They had territory that would be lost by the time they got back. And it fitted so well with his plans for Sforza.

  * * *

  Carlo Sforza read the report carefully. It was not why he had put the man in place, but it was still extra information, and valuable. Not for the first time did he ponder his future. A great condottiere had to keep winning. Not only did his mercenary soldiers need the loot and the morale boost, but his employers tended to have strong ideas about what they were paying for. Many of his peers were good at playing the part. Sforza had been good at doing the deeds. Now…Now he knew his employer wanted him to challenge Venice again.

  And he did not wish to.

  Vilna

  Jagiellon sat on the throne, motionless. Someone more ignorant than the tongue-less slave that brought the message might have thought the Grand Duke deep in thought. But by now the slave knew better. Someone was going to die. His master used blood-rites in that chamber down in the dungeons. Blood rites and dark magics feared even here in pagan Lithuania.

  The slave was correct. “Fetch me Count Tcherkas.” So he did. The count, like many of the nobility here, dabbled in magic. He was not in the league of Count Mindaug—but then Count Mindaug had gone to great lengths merely to seem an ineffectual academic. But the rituals the Grand Duke and the demon Chernobog used needed participation. And needed terror—both from the victim and from the perpetrator. Jagiellon was too far gone to feel human emotions. Tcherkas felt fear, revulsion and…eagerness, in the blood sacrifice and skin eating. It helped to penetrate the veil—not to Venice, but to Milan, deep within the western lands.

  From there the news he could glean from Venice—where Chernobog dared not venture, not even in spirit—and other points of the Mediterranean was that the West was readying itself for a spring attack on Constantinople.

  “Spring. By then it should hold, until the fleet from Odessa reaches there, even if the Venetians have somehow managed to work out a way to fire massive forty-eight pound bombards from the decks of their vessels without sinking them.”

  Jagiellon turned to the count. “Send word. Alexis must be warned of this. The Byzantine emperor should concentrate his guns on the seaward walls, on the walls facing the Sea of Marmara as the great chain will keep the vessels out of the Golden Horn. That will keep them out of effective range.”

  The count, still gagging from his meal, nodded.

  Jagiellon went on as if he had not engaged in torturous blood rituals a scant hour before. “If Alexis can be kept from alternating between his depravities and total panic, he will hold the city. He is a weak reed, but at least that means that he is corruptible and malleable. I also want some men and weapons sent with the raider fleet to the coast of the sultanate of Pontus. The Baitini are squalling from Ilkhan lands.”

  The demon was somewhat more concerned about this leg of his plans. It appeared that the laissez faire methods of Mongol rule were changing in response to the Baitinis’ attempts to instill panic and terror. Not—as they dreamed—cracking and disintegrating. He might have to spare some troops there to take Mongol pressure off the borders with Alexis’s Themes in Asia Minor. They would read great things into a small landing somewhere, and redouble their efforts. The demon did not care if they won or lost. He wanted westward geographic expansion for reasons that were not earthly.

  Constantinople

  Antimo quietly locked the door. The first two sets of his maps and coded notes had already been dispatched. A good spy also had to be a good scribe, and a patient copyist. He could lose six month’s work by not making multiple copies. He could lose his life by traveling with them. None-the-less he had copies of his notes. Not hidden in the obvious places like the soles of his shoes or lining of his bag. The church might not be forgiving if they read the Latin text of some of the bible he carried. With luck, which had favored him in the past, they would never see it and neither would anyone else.

  Leaving at night was a risk—it meant getting over walls and bribing guards, and there was no need for that yet. It was, outside of the foreign quarters, still business as usual in Constantinople. Yes, trouble was coming as sure as sunrise, but not until springtime. A lifetime away. In the morning he’d be leaving quietly with a group of minor merchants going to a cattle sale some miles away. He wouldn’t be coming back with them. There were just a last few things to be arranged tonight.

  He was unsurprised to see Red-ears and his sister there, tails wagging. He’d met Ripper a
nd Ravener so often on his nightly walk-abouts that he’d taken to carrying a tit-bit or two with him. Dogs—they were always hungry. He’d been like that as boy himself. Maybe that was why boys and dogs had such an affinity. He hadn’t met their mistress again. Somehow he felt that was just as well.

  But she was there, standing in the shadow.

  * * *

  He was plainly leaving the city. Hekate had watched him obsessively, she had to admit, for the last while. He intrigued her, he brought her out of herself. For so many centuries, she’d been wrapped in her grief, mostly oblivious to the marchings of the mortal world. That grief had not left her, and it never would. But now that she had begun to shake free of the total absorption of it, she was aware of so much that had changed. She had been peripherally aware of it, of course. But she just hadn’t cared enough to pay any amount of attention to it all.

  The world had become a very strange place to her; she was forgotten as a goddess, and mentioned only obliquely. She had been so forgotten, in fact, that only the drink- and drug-addled and the mad could see her. And…those who still had magic, which were few, very few here. The only point of connection with this new world she’d found was the silent magic-user and his strange business.

  What was he doing? It puzzled her. There must be some form of magic involved, she had at first concluded, what with the pacing, the writing, the complex diagrams. She could not imagine what else it could be.

  But magic was something over which she had had some power, and which was a part of her, and she saw no trace of it in these workings of his.

  Had that too gone from her?

  No. Impossible. She still walked in the shadowed paths, she still, when she chose, could easily, trivially, work bits of sorcery that were beyond all but the most powerful of mortal magicians.

  Was he in the service of some other god or goddess unknown? Was that why he did what he did? Were these some strange rites she did not recognize?