marsh, rainwater collected--you could find it, if you knew where to look. Anyone who was friend to the undines could find it without difficulty at all.
It had rained last night. Chiano waded out onto a thread of a path that took him to a place among the hummocks where he had left a bowl to collect water. It would be fresh and sweet and pure--exactly what he needed for scrying, since he would use something other than the stregheria rite, which would surely pinpoint him to anyone who was looking for him.
Dottore Marina did not need to go through an elaborate ritual to invoke and erect a Circle of Power and Protection anymore; he just thought a few key words, and it sprang up around him. Invisible to most eyes, and only barely visible to those with the Inner Sight, it ringed him with the Inner Fires that would screen his probing from those watching for magic. Holding his hands over the bowl of pure water as he squatted beside it in the dying light of day, he breathed another invocation, and watched patiently. As the last of the sun vanished, and the first rays of the moon touched the surface, it misted over, then cleared, showing him the once-familiar canals and walkways of his city.
Show me the threat, he commanded silently. Show me the peril to my city.
He had hoped to see nothing. But the water misted and cleared immediately, and showed him, in rapid succession--a voluptuous woman with red-gold hair--
Lucrezia Brunelli--
--her brother, Ricardo--
--a sour-faced, fanatic-eyed man in a cassock with three crosses emblazoned on it--
An abbot of the Servants? But who? I don't recognize him--
A woman in the habit of a nun of the Servants.
Whose eyes were--lifeless. Then something looked out of them.
At him. And saw him. And knew him!
And last, before he could react to that flicker of malevolent recognition, the darkened canal, with something swimming below the surface.
He bent nearer, closer to the water, trying to make out what it was.
It was coming out.
It sent one clawed hand, then another, to fasten into the stones of the canalside. Then it heaved itself up out of the water faster than a striking adder, and it turned, and it looked at him!
He screamed, and involuntarily thrashed at the water, breaking the spell. Just in time.
One moment more, and it would have been through the water-mirror, meant only for scrying, and at his throat, feeding on his life.
And his soul.
Reflexively, Luciano called up all of his defenses until he lay, panting, within a cocoon of power. Oh, anyone looking would See him now--but it didn't matter. Not after that. They knew he was out here, and it wouldn't take long for them to find him. How many undines would die protecting him?
For a very long time he couldn't think, he could only sit and shiver with fear that turned his bowels to water. As the moon climbed higher in the sky, he sat, and shook, and even wept unashamedly.
Not to me! This can't come to me! I'm too old, too tired--
But on his shoulders rested the Winged Mantle. He felt it, though it was invisible. There was no one else. Marco was untrained and unaware and could not take the Mantle in any case until Chiano was dead. The Mantle had come to him on the death of his predecessor--irony of ironies, it had been a little Hypatian priest-mage, out of a bastard branch of one of the four Old Families, and not one of the Strega.
No, Chiano was the bearer, for the good of Venice. If there had been anyone in all of Venice fit to wear it, it would have gone to him, or her, the moment his body hit the water, senseless, and he would have died. Extraordinary measures had been taken to ensure that he did not. Marco no doubt had the Mark, even then, but he hadn't the training, had no one to train him, and in any case was too young for the weight. The weight of the Mantle, even, much less the Crown.
His denial turned to a plea. Please--not now. Please, not to me.
