The week that followed passed in a blur.
The days folded into one another faster than Vito could count them, marked less by sunrise than by which wound had finally stopped complaining first.
Meanwhile, the city kept a different calendar. Three days of looting, wild enough to embarrass even the men leading it, gave way to something calmer and better organized. The slaughter was becoming business.
The partition of the Eastern Roman Empire was turning from ink into real claims, argued over one piece at a time. Inside the city, Venice’s patricians elected a man named Marino Zeno to speak for them. Soon they began issuing their own edicts, creating a government tucked inside another government and answering mostly to itself.
Zaccaria came by often enough, and Orso and Pellegrino came with him often enough, that neither man could honestly pretend he was merely checking in by accident. A patron flat on his back was still a patron whose decisions the company needed, and Vito gave them from a bed with the confidence he would have managed standing.
The three galleys had escaped the siege undamaged and sat at the docks. Nothing about that changed, no matter how much else in the city did.
What the company did with the rest of its time, Vito let happen with very little interference and considerably less peace of mind. The venture had never been his alone to run as he pleased.
Investors had put coin behind three galleys, and they expected that faith to repay more than just a story.
A patron who held his own crew back while every other company was carrying plunder home would earn himself a poverty-stricken reputation soon enough.
So it happened much as it always was going to happen, and Vito found it easier to stomach once he noticed how many of his own men had rediscovered their faith at exactly the right moment to justify walking out of a church with silver plate tucked under one arm.
What he did direct, from a bed he had no great hurry to leave, moved with less noise than any of that. He let word travel through his own men, the story of that stretch of wall was told and improved with every mouth it passed until it reached doors his own thin cadet rank could never have opened.
A good rumor did work no formal letter ever managed. It had legs, and none of them belonged to him.
By the end of the week, it had plainly gone exactly where he wanted it to go.
His physicians finally allowed him to stand under his own power when two invitations reached him within an hour of one another. One came from Boniface of Montferrat’s household. The other had Dandolo’s seal.
Vito took less time deciding between them than it took to get his boots on.
Boniface was already halfway out the door of his own claim on Crete, restless in a way the old Doge simply was not tonight.
The Dandolo invitation went into his coat, unopened but not forgotten.
Boniface went first.
He walked out of Santa Sofia with a small escort trailing behind him, three of his men more because they looked respectable than for any real use of the weapons.
"Try to look like men who’ve been paid well and recently."
Vito told them along the way, and got a laugh from two of the three. "Chins up, chests out. If anyone asks, I pay you obscenely and you love me for it."
"And if they ask about the limp, Barozzi?"
"Tell them it’s fashion. Every hero worth the name walks a little crooked afterward."
The city around them still had the marks of the sack. Shutters stood splintered and unreplaced, while a market square had half reopened around stalls that had not yet decided whether they trusted the peace.
His own leg reminded him on every second that a week was nowhere near long enough to heal. Even then, he held the pain at bay and walked normally.
The Boukoleon Palace sat where he had known it would, low against the sea wall on the Marmara, its marble and porphyry turned grey with age and neglect.
Some small harbor had once been carved with a bull and a lion, both worn nearly featureless by centuries of weather, and terraces looked out over water that had probably watched more emperors than the Hippodrome ever had.
Dozens of guards stood at the gate, red slashed across white, plainly Lombard, plainly Boniface’s men. They had no interest in whatever reputation had brought Vito this far.
The escort was left at the gate, where looking impressive was their entire remaining duty for the day, and he went inside alone.
Whoever was responsible for Boniface’s household left him waiting in an anteroom that still smelled faintly of incense.
Vito used the wait to find somebody worth talking to.
Nearby, a Greek woman folded linens. She was old enough to have kept the palace running under at least one previous set of masters, but young enough that his grin reached her before he had said a word.
"That looks like an awfully busy day."
Vito told her, using the mongrel scraps of language already passing for conversation all over the city, half a dozen tongues stitched together by people who badly wanted to understand one another.
"I reckon one week ago this was an Emperor’s house. Now it smells like laundry."
She continued to work.
"Emperor’s house. Marquess’s house. Linens still dirty."
"Fair."
He leaned against the wall, taking care with the leg.
"What’s your name?"
"Hm? Euphrosyne."
"Eu... fro... syne."
The poor attempt gained him a smile, enough that he surrendered altogether.
"Bella, then. It suits you better anyway."
"Bella," she repeated, trying the name for herself, plainly untroubled either way. "You. Barozzi?"
"You’ve heard of me?"
"Everyone hear of you."
She nodded toward the hall where he would eventually be taken.
"Marquess too. Not happy hearing."
"No?"
She glanced at the door before answering, as if she balanced the desire to gossip against the risk of getting caught.
"Crown still not given. He wanted it. Others deciding, deciding, deciding."
She rolled her eyes at the word and repeated it a fourth time, as though the word itself had personally offended her.
"He does not wait well."
Vito tucked that away with genuine pleasure, the kind of detail the voice herself would have charged him for.
Restless men made better hunting than ease ones.
"His family’s no stranger to this city either."
Vito continued, half to her and half to himself, the history in him rising before he could stop it. "His own brother served an Emperor here once, married into the family for it. Constantinople’s been picking Montferrat’s pocket, or Montferrat’s been picking it, for two generations now, depending on which chronicler you believe."
She snickered, more taken back by the lecture than interested on it.
"You know more than servants know."
"Ma va’. I read a great deal, in another life."
That earned him another smile, but before their little chat could continue, two of Boniface’s men arrived to walk him towards the office.
"Ciao, Bella,"
Vito called, already being escorted. "If the Marquess throws me out, save me some of that laundry work. I fold a decent shirt."
There was no reply, but she did not stop smiling either.
Vito felt that was a victory.
The room they brought him to still wore its old life underneath the new one, with faded mosaic saints looking down over maps pinned where some empress’s fresco had once hung, campaign clutter scattered across furniture built for a very different sort of court.
Boniface of Montferrat stood bent over one of those maps, a big man going grey at the temples and in the beard alike, built like someone who had spent thirty years on campaign and meant to spend thirty more if his body would only stop objecting.
When his eyes finally lifted from the map to Vito, they were tired, yet sharp.
He looked Vito over once, unhurried.
"So."
His voice came out lower than his size promised.
"You’re the one who dared to break down a throne into pieces."