Eric Flint - The Shadow of the Lion

Interesting thought. But he had neither the time nor the inclination to pursue it. Soon enough, Caesare had little doubt, he would have to look for another employer anyway. And, for the moment, the one he had paid well and?

He smiled across the table at Aleri. And keeps this one, and his cohorts, from peeling the hide off my back.

Aleri's chair scraped slightly on the floor as he pushed back from the table and rose to his feet. "You'd better keep one eye open from now on when you sleep," he growled. "Because the moment that your new patron finds you too expensive to support, is the moment when I finish the job I bungled."

Caesare continued to smile. "In that case, I needn't worry," he mocked. "You'll have a long, gray beard before that day comes."

Aleri stared down at him. "And did you tell your new woman your real history, Caesare?"

Caesare must have shown something in his face; he cursed himself silently as Aleri continued: "Of course there's a new woman. There always is, with beautiful golden Caesare. You betray everyone, women even quicker than men. Whoever the girl is?and I'll find out, soon enough?I pity her. But my pity won't keep me from killing her also. An example must be set for what happens to traitors and their whores."

The Milanese turned and stalked out.

Caesare continued to play with his wine, and wait for young Benito to saunter in as a signal that it was safe to leave the place. As he did so, his thoughts drifted over his new… associates.

Maria was invaluable for the moment, leaving aside the pleasure her fiercely enthusiastic lovemaking provided. Very unskilled enthusiasm, to be sure, and Caesare was beginning to get bored with it. But that problem was easy to solve, after all. Caesare gave it no further thought, beyond an idle moment of curiosity as to which of several Case Vecchie girls would be the first to climb into his bed and provide him with more expert entertainment. Alessandra, for one. He was quite certain the Montescue woman was eager to rekindle their old affair.

The boys, on the other hand?Benito in particular?were proving far more useful than he would have guessed. No one ever looked twice at a child, particularly not a canal-brat like Benito. Aleri and his ilk would be looking for a woman. That they'd discover Maria soon enough, Caesare didn't doubt for a moment. Any more than he doubted what would happen to the canal-girl once… the situation changed. But the Montagnards would never suspect Caesare of employing the boys as his aides. Particularly not those boys?given how their mother had died, and by whose hand.

But that, after all, was part of the dance, wasn't it? Caesare flexed his right hand, for a moment, remembering the feel of Lorendana's throat as Bespi slid the knife between her ribs. She had been quite shocked when she died, he remembered. Not so much with the knife as with the hand that kept her from crying out. She had always understood the risk of assassination, moving in the circles she did. What she hadn't expected was that her own lover would set up the killing?and time it for the moment she was most defenseless. Naked, in her own bed, right after they finished making love.

A stupid woman, in the end, for all her quick wits. She should have known that once she lost the favor of Carlo Sforza she was sure to receive the delayed vengeance of Filippo Visconti. Yet she'd been careless enough to accept a Milanese adventurer as a new bedmate.

Stupid. As stupid as Bespi, with his idiot ideals. Caesare's lips twisted in a little smile, remembering the look on Bespi's face as he killed Lorendana. The assassin's eyes had been on Caesare, not his victim. Eyes cold with loathing and disgust. Caesare had never been sure, but he suspected that killing had been the one which finally tipped Fortunato Bespi over the edge.

No matter. Caesare was not stupid. And he enjoyed the irony of having Lorendana's orphans as his new underlings. It was the best proof imaginable that his own view of the world corresponded to reality.

Caesare considered the wine, and sat back into the shadows. The wine was execrable; the shadows?ideal.

Erik shifted his feet in the antechamber before Abbot Sachs's door. He took a deep breath. Then, reluctantly, knocked on the thick oak.

He waited. He'd just knock again, and go. He could try later. He raised his hand…

"Enter," said a voice from within.

Erik walked in. The room was sybaritically appointed. His eyes were still drawn first to the deep-set glowering stare of the abbot, rather than the furnishings fit for a prince of the blood. Sachs sat behind one of these, an escritoire of dark wood inlaid with ivory.

"You wished to see me, Abbot?" asked Erik evenly. The air in the room was overly warm and full of an acerbic incense. And maybe just a hint of… perfume? Erik found himself wondering if Manfred's frequent witticisms about the relationship between Sachs and Sister Ursula might not have a basis of truth.

Whatever the scent's nature, it was making his nose itch and his eyes water.

The abbot's sour countenance twitched. Then, to Erik's amazement, his face did something the confrere knight had never seen it do before?the thin lips dragged themselves into a smile. "Ah. Hakkonsen. Yes. I have a task for you."

Erik wondered whether it was too late to bolt for the door. It was either bolt?or sneeze soon. If there were two things Erik was certain of, the first was that Abbot Sachs disliked him violently; the second was that this incense was driving him mad. But as a confrere Knight he was, by order of Bishop-Commander Von Schielbar, under the authority of the leader of the Servants of the Holy Trinity in Venice.

That remained true even if Erik had forcefully reminded the abbot, less than a fortnight ago, of the limits of his authority. The months they'd spent here in Venice had made their dislike mutual; the incident in the church over sanctuary had brought it into the open. In the two weeks that had gone by since, the abbot had spoken not a single word to Erik, prior to now.

The only official notice of the clash had been a summons to the quarters of Von Stublau, where the knight-commander began a stern lecture on the proper conduct of knights when dealing with abbots. It had been as brief as it was stern, because Erik had turned on his heel and left before Von Stublau finished his third sentence.

The Prussian had been outraged, no doubt. But not even Von Stublau was prepared to press the matter any further. Erik's conduct in the church had given him a reputation among all the other knights as a man to be dealt with very, very gingerly. The more so when the reaction of official Venice to the incident in the church made it as clear as crystal that Erik's behavior had been the only thing that had saved the Knights from what might very well have been a political disaster.

As Sachs had discovered two days later, not even the usually sympathetic Doge wanted to hear the abbot's side of the story. Canal-brats are canal-brats, you idiot, not "servants of Satan." Such had been the entirety of Foscari's opinion, before Sachs had been summarily dismissed.

And the Doge's reaction had been mild compared to that of Metropolitan Michael, who, by all accounts, had been livid when Father Ugo's story reached him. The prestige of the Pauline orders, always low with the Petrine patriarch, was now as low as it could possibly get. Rumor had it that the patriarch had only been dissuaded with difficulty from demanding the forcible eviction of the Servants and the Knights from Venice. And dissuaded, by his advisers, solely because they reminded the patriarch of his policy of trying to avoid clashes with Foscari.

Nor was there any doubt that if the Pauline orders lost the favor of the Doge, they could be expelled from the city?by force, if necessary. There were only a few hundred Knights in Venice. Leaving aside the actual military forces at the disposal of the Doge, which were much larger, the sixteen thousand workers in the Arsenal where Venice's great fleet was built were famous?or notorious?for their willingness to take up arms readily. They were also famous for their solidly Petrine allegiance in religious matters and for being a hotbed of Metropolitanism. Not even the Servants of the Holy Trinity were rash enough, or arrogant enough, to try to enforce their attitudes in the vicinity of the Arsenal or the quarters of the city where its workers lived.