Spavento could understand more Italian than he could three weeks ago. The mutual incomprehensions of the Spanish and papal empire's dialects was more a matter of ideology than familiarity. Even the troubadours of his small village knew songs from Sicily or Venice. It wasn't that learning the enemy's language was difficult, it just wasn't allowed. In the back of his mind, though, the foreign grammar had been moldering.
He knew, or thought he knew, that the desolate men and women behind the archbishop were his prisoners, the apparent laxity in his guarding of them testament to the thrall they were under, probably as a result of antecedent, invisible horrors.
It was fully dark by the time they got to the toppled up-root cellars, stars menaced by a bloody scythe of moon. The archbishop must have been nearly as exhausted as his prisoners, left unguarded in the mess hall by the stables, but seemed driven by a kind of madness to inspect the cache of legendary wine tonight, and be off with his charges before dawn.
The ascent would have been impossible for most people, running the makeshift grapples and pulleys that the Harlequin (whose kindness towards him he was finally beginning to be less suspicious of) had set up, from a hidden store of stage machinery. Lucrezia had her acrobatics to draw from, and Graziano, willowy as he was, had the advantage of knowing the territory, having played and worked with the aerial vinyards all his life. Still, the gravity shears had changed, shifting with the lifted ecologies collapsing, and several times he stumbled and flailed in the weight-reversing roots. He would have fallen, had the acrobat not caught him. The air was chill around them, the differential causing the outline of the cellar, a cone laid on its side, to shimmer like a mirage. Or as if they were trapped in a mirage.
Spavento himself had the war. He had been through enough flying battlefields to know the feel of telepathic drift, of a bleed of psychic transfers. He could tumble brawl with the best battalions of fanatical papists. He watched the archbishop wolfishly, his movements expressive of a brutal efficiency. From the acrobat and the merchant he could feel their minds, Lucrezia's alertness, Graziano's exhilerated nervousness. From the archbishop, nothing. He had met a few people like that in the past, immune to the empathic effects of apergy. They were always to be feared.
As the Spaniard helped the stranger over the edge or dead trellises and mortar, he stared at his features, less obscured by a neat goatee than Spavento's was by his dense mane of whiskers.
While Lucrezia and Graziano were experts by trade at orienting strangers along a vertical social axis ("upper" and "lower" classes, in a world where gravity can be expensively inverted, was often a literal description), Spavento's career as a mercenary had made him preternaturally sensitive to geographical, cultural, and ethnic distance. He had had to know, using very little clues, who was more likely to slit his throat.
Lucrezia could see he wasn't from the peninsula, but Spavento could tell he wasn't from Spanish territory, either. Certain mannerisms reminded him of a class of mercenaries he had known.
The floor was canted like the deck of a capsized ship, and they had to slide and jump over splintery shelves and shattered kegs and bottles. Everything had an over-ripe mustiness, the bruisings of wine stains of the dirt and wood making it feel like they were inside of a body, like that of a whale.
"Grapes don't grow well on the tops of skylands, as I'm sure your grace is aware, and my family's cultivars are one of the few that can grow hanging from the edges. The vines not only tolerate the tugging of gravitational shears, but the grapes themselves can survive the...blessings of apergenetic spirits."
The dragoon wasn't listening to the merchant's prattling in Italian, although he weirdly had a telepathic sense of the words.
Instead, as he ducked through a door, halfway up a wall which had become a floor, the Spaniard stole the archbishop's gun.