There were advantages, Cardinal Bedmar reflected, to being persona non grata in Venice. Sourly, he studied the mob packed into the doge's palace. At least he'd been spared this unpleasantness since his arrival from the Spanish Netherlands a few weeks earlier. This was the first time he'd been invited to participate in one of the Venetians' beloved gala events, as one of the fish crammed into the barrel.

And why had he been invited at all? he wondered. Probably just because the Venetians enjoyed rubbing his nose in the fact that the ambassador from the infant "United States of Europe" enjoyed more status here than one of the representatives from the ancient and glorious Spanish Empire.

"My feet hurt," the cardinal announced.

"Yes, Your Eminence."

"And my back hurts," he went on.

"Yes, Your Eminence."

"And with all this insincere smiling, Sanchez, my God-damned face hurts."

Sanchez shifted from one foot to the other, a slight wince creasing his face. "Your Eminence bears his suffering well."

"Ruy Sanchez de Casador y Ortiz, did I not know you better I would swear you were being sarcastic." Cardinal Bedmar spoke the words in the low undertone that all diplomats learned for functions like the one they were attending, his face hardly moving from its practiced smile.

"Oh, no," Sanchez drawled, likewise. "For that would be a heretical proposition of disrespect to a prince of the Church, rather than simply suggesting-as one old man to another-that Your Eminence is not the only one who is too old for this."

Sanchez, like the cardinal himself, was two-faced in the service of his country. In theory, a cardinal's gentiluomo like Sanchez was simply his master's close-protection man, the last line of defense for a prince of the Church and the bearer of a sword where a cleric ought not to wield one in his own person. In practice, Sanchez ran errands for his master the one-time diplomat.

Sometimes downright odd errands, those were. There had been few enough of them, though, in past years. Bedmar had been in near-retirement on the Council of Flanders, and until the year before Flanders had been quiet. As quiet, at least, as the nearby presence of the pestiferous Protestants in the United Provinces allowed. But all that had changed since the arrival of the Americans in what had come to be known as "the Ring of Fire." Now these bizarre people said to come from the future and their Swedish ally had kicked over the ant-heap in Germany.

On the positive side, most of the Netherlands was back in Spanish hands since the Dutch fleet had been destroyed through treachery and Cardinal-Infante Don Fernando had led a daring seizure of Haarlem. There were new men all over the place, in the Spanish Netherlands, brought by the cardinal-infante. The old warhorse Cardinal Bedmar had been sent back to Venice after fifteen years away. Some genius had decided he was the man to come in and foil whatever plot the Americans were working toward here, despite Bedmar's notoriety in the Serene Republic.

And so, tonight, Bedmar and his trusted assistant Sanchez were in the Sala de Gran Consiglio of the doge's palace, paying more attention to the magnificent Tintoretto paintings on the walls and ceiling than any of the pomp and flummery the Venetians loved so much. Bedmar had spent the evening so far smiling at people whom he had, fifteen years earlier, tried to have killed, ruined, or subordinated to foreign conquest.

That was from the Venetian point of view, of course. From Bedmar's own perspective, it had been a great adventure in the service of his country, widening the empire and taking back some of what the Venetians had leeched from Spain one way or another over the years. Their defiance, captiousness, decadence, whoring and irreligion were a byword across Europe, and there were better uses for the wealth and strategic position of the great city.

But . . . it had ended in humiliation. For some reason these decadent, coin-counting Italians did not want a change of regime at the hands of the greatest power in Europe. The Venetians had caught every one of Bedmar's Venetian partisans. Labeled them "traitors," no less; then, hung them after breaking their legs in the time-honored Venetian tradition. There had been ugly scenes with mobs of Arsenalotti on the day Bedmar had left the Most Serene Republic in a not-very-serene hurry.

A week after that scramble of a day, though, a couple of Imperial ambassadors had been thrown out of a window in the now-famous "defenestration of Prague." Bohemia had risen in revolt under a Protestant king and everyone had forgotten about Italy and what Bedmar had done in Venice-until de Nevers and his claim to Mantua gave everyone another pretext for mayhem in the interest of extending influence in the Italies. That had only just finished when the Americans turned up, but things had now settled down over the border in Mantua. The troops had gone elsewhere, as well, and Italy looked like a relatively safe place for the first time in fifteen years.

Which meant that it wanted nothing but that someone should turn out singly and severally to make trouble. Bedmar wasn't objecting, really. Winter in Flanders was cold and ugly on his old bones; Venice was a good place to be until summer. In the meantime, he would achieve all he could-which was probably nothing. No one trusted him in this town, and never would. He would simply dump a good deal of money in Venice, report failure, and leave with the coming winter chill.

The cardinal thought that old Count Gondomar, back when he was still alive and Spain's ambassador to England, had been righter than he knew when he wrote his famous complaint before the war. He had written of the energy of the newly rising nations, especially the England whose ruin he had conspicuously failed to bring about, and of the waxing commercial power of the Dutch. By contrast, he had said, Spain was buying doubtful loyalties with the better part of every New World treasure fleet.

Bedmar had agreed with him but, alas, the king of Spain had not. Philip IV and his chief minister the Count-Duke of Olivares had opted for a different solution: war. If Spain was losing the peace, why, then, the truce was about to expire. Spain was apparently to rediscover her glory at the end of a pike.

The cardinal had been skeptical at the time, and the ensuing fifteen years of what future historians were said to call "the Thirty Years' War" had borne him out. The war had simply continued Spain's slide from the top of the pile, and added a mountain of dead and put half of Europe into near-anarchy to compound everyone's problems.

And here, once again, Bedmar was sent to disburse another portion of the last treasure fleet on loyalties that were not even strong enough to be called doubtful. The chances were good that all Bedmar would do would be to fund a few petty enemies.

He sighed. Spain would gain nothing here except perhaps a close look at a few more Americans than had been seen outside their new United States to date. And even that was late. The Venetians might be able to run a State Inquisition able to shut down a well-funded fifth column run by a professional spymaster, but they didn't seem to be able to make a convivial drinks reception run on time. At that, Bedmar couldn't fault their sense of priorities.

The majordomo was announcing something. "Did you hear that, Sanchez?" he asked, nudging his gentiluomo.

"Yes, Your Eminence," said Sanchez.

Bedmar turned to glare at him. The Catalan gentiluomo's sense of humor had irritated him for years. Why he put up with the hard-bitten old fool was a mystery to the cardinal. Probably because that same sense of humor amused him also. Most of the time.

Sanchez's mustaches twitched a little. "It is the American ambassador, Your Eminence. He just arrived."

The Sala di Gran Consiglio, the doge's main council chamber, was a working debating-hall without the kind of elevated entrance that permitted guests already arrived to see who was coming in, so they had to wait. In fact, the only raised part of the room was the presiding dais at one end, where the doge was stationed with his retinue of Senators. The middle of the floor was open to allow the new arrivals to parade up to greet the doge. As they passed, Sanchez was all business.

"The priest in front, Your Eminence, is Lawrence Mazzare, the ambassador from the United States of Europe. He speaks for their President-no, he's called the prime minister now-Michael Stearns. The fat priest with him is his curate and factotum, the Jesuit I told you of, Heinzerling. The other is Mazzare's second in the embassy, a Protestant cleric by the name of Jones. Behind them is the alchemist Stone and his wife. The young Moor is the daughter of the doctor, Nichols; she was also betrothed to the hero of the battle at Wismar last autumn. The one named Richter, who was killed."

Sanchez's voice grew a little distant as he spoke of the black woman. She was definitely worth looking at, although Bedmar didn't think she merited quite the stare that Sanchez, the old goat, was giving her.

Bedmar tried to drag his man back to the matter at hand. "I wonder how Stone will go down," he murmured, "since everyone is expecting the purest of rational natural philosophy from these Americans." Back home, there had been calls for the Inquisition to deal with alchemists as heretics or, at the very least, peddlers of superstition. The Inquisition, for the most part, insisted that fraud was a matter for the secular courts, although from time to time they proceeded against the more egregious examples.

"I wonder, too," Sanchez said, his mind still on the job despite evident distraction, "although I hear stories that this Stone makes it work."

"Really? And who is this behind, now?" That was a sight, if anything, even more remarkable than the prospect of base metal into gold. Well, not anywhere else in Venice, but here in the Gran Consiglio it was a bit much.

"These, I think, are Stone's sons. One of them-the eldest, it would look like-is accompanied by, ah-"

"Quite," Bedmar said. "And such a young and pretty one, too. I think we might have to be tactful about that." One of the American boys was accompanied by a young woman. A Venetian, obviously-and just as obviously a courtesan, even if she wasn't wearing the red shoes of her vocation and was pretending to be otherwise. Nobody else at such an event would be that young, that good-looking, and that awkward in her bearing and poise. A new courtesan, clearly, unsure of herself in high company. She wasn't even wearing a mask-not even a half-mask. Judging from the stares she was getting, she was completely unknown to the crowd.

That might cause a bit of a scandal. Not her status, but the attempt at disguising it. Several of the younger minor notables of Venice present at the reception were accompanied by courtesans, and no one was taking any real note of it. The Serene Republic was notorious for its moral laxity. On the other hand, all the other courtesans Bedmar could see were wearing the red shoes required by custom. Sin, Venetians tolerated; attempting to rise above one's station was another matter.

"The rest I don't know, Your Eminence," Sanchez was saying. He had moved behind Bedmar now and was murmuring over his shoulder. Around the room, other diplomats were being briefed in like manner. "The stocky soldier is the head of their embassy guard, I think. A Scotsman named Lennox. Until last year he was a cavalryman in the Swede's army."

"Guard?" Bedmar murmured back, as the implications suddenly assembled themselves in his mind. It was vanishingly rare that an ambassador had a formal guard while attending a foreign prince. A small crew of professional soldiers, perhaps, to protect him en route and keep the embassy safe from burglars and such. But a formal liveried guard was either outrageous ostentation or very pointed distrust.

Alas, Spanish intelligence in Venice was at best mediocre since the unfortunate business fifteen years before. It didn't help matters any that the regular ambassador from Madrid was a dim-witted and fussy man, who'd made it quite clear that he resented Bedmar's arrival here as a "special ambassador from the Spanish Netherlands" and had refused to be cooperative beyond the bare minimum required by protocol. Bedmar would have given a very great deal indeed to get a reliable account of the negotiations that had let that burly Scot soldier into Venice as a formal guard for the American embassy.

Part of it was probably genuine concern, Bedmar conceded, as he contemplated the possibility of protesting to the doge at this unseemly favoritism. After all, the diplomatic mission from the United States to England was immured in the Tower of London, and another was trapped by the cardinal-infante's Spanish army in the siege of Amsterdam. Not to mention that, by now, all Europe had heard the rumors of how Richelieu had attempted to have that embassy ambushed on their way from Paris to The Hague-an embassy led by the very wife of the U.S. President, to boot.

Richelieu hadn't admitted a thing, of course, nor would he ever. But anyone who did not believe that those pirates had attacked Rebecca Abrabanel's ship on French orders was either a purblind idiot or believed that the indefatigable propaganda mills of the Protestant Germanies were lying. Again.

Bedmar watched with interest as the priest Mazzare formally presented his credentials to the doge. It was, as always in Venice, a highly stylized business: the credentials handed over in a fat leather wallet fringed with all manner of tassels and pendant seals. The formal words were spoken aloud, and then a few words of mutual esteem and friendship.

Not many, though. That was either a good sign or a bad one. If they meant to let it all keep for a serious bargaining session upstairs on the morrow, then it was good for the Americans. If the doge was actually treating Mazzare the way he had treated Spain's ambassador extraordinary . . .

Ha! Bedmar had had to hand over his own credentials in private after a four-flight climb up the Scala d'Oro, and the doge had all but cut him, he had been that curt.

But, no, he saw that the doge was smiling. For a wonder, the Consiglio had permitted him that much expression. True, Don Erizzo, the current doge, was rumored to be a ferocious character next to the usual run of Venetian dukes. So perhaps his "advisers" were a bit intimidated by him. Whatever, it looked good for the United States, this week in Venice.

The Spanish cardinal cared little, either way. He was an old and tired man sent here on a mission he considered barely short of insane. What could the count-duke of Olivares have been thinking, to select Bedmar for this mission? One would almost think the boot-faced bastard meant for it to be a failure, and was simply relying on Bedmar to come out of it with as little humiliation as possible.

On the other hand . . .

From long habit, Bedmar considered all the possibilities. As the chief minister of the king of Spain, Olivares had a finger in every pot-which meant he could get his fingers easily burned. There was that interesting circle who had started gathering around the king's younger brother, the cardinal-infante Don Fernando. Most people saw only the martial glory covering the young prince, since his dazzling success in the Netherlands after so many decades of Spanish frustration. In a few short weeks, the cardinal-infante had accomplished what neither the duke of Alva nor Spinola had managed-driven the stubborn Dutchmen to their knees, if not yet to outright surrender.

But the cardinal was starting to wonder. For all his youth-Don Fernando was still in his early twenties-Bedmar was beginning to think he might be playing a very deep game and trying some remarkably complicated steps in the diplomatic gavotte. Bedmar knew that the cardinal-infante had at least two men in his circle-quite close, as well-who were running on very, very long leashes indeed. Bedmar had been asked, by way of several hints so oblique as to make the usual finaglings of protocol look like a barrage of siege artillery, to open up friendly overtures with the Americans on the tenuous authority of Spanish Flanders. Acting on those requests was technically a betrayal of Bedmar's official principal, who was, after all, the king of Spain, not the prince of the Netherlands. On the other hand, his official principal appeared not to care what happened in Venice. Indeed-

"Your Eminence?" Sanchez was nudging him.