The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

13





Hunger ate at his stomach. Simple hunger, the kind that wanted food not blood, ate at his gut and Tycho realised it was hours since he had eaten. He still wore the clothes he’d thrown on after he sent the forger’s daughter away, and a bleak hope had driven him to Leo’s nursery looking for certainty.

He found the kitchens lit red from the embers of the fire pit and almost tripped over a sleepy boy crouched beside a bread oven. He almost tripped over the boy because he was looking beyond the oven to where Duke Marco sat at a table scraping black off a burnt pastry he’d taken from a bin. Beside the duke rested a fishing net on a pole, the kind used by children to catch sprats.

“You were l-longer t-than I expected,” said Marco, pushing half the pastry across. Tycho was hungry enough to take it and eat.

“Giulietta wanted to talk, highness.”

The duke sat with his knees pulled up to his chin and the fingers of his left hand endlessly twisted his curls into tight knots. He was so sleepy his head kept dropping forward and jerking upright. “Of c-course she d-did. I imagine she w-wants you to s-stay here?”

How did he know that? Tycho had imagined Lady Giulietta would want him to fetch Leo back immediately. It had been a shock that she wanted her aunt to send someone else. Alexa said it was the poppy talking.

“You must leave n-now. Before you decide she’s right, and my mother agrees to send another in your place. Finish that and go.”

“It’s almost daylight, highness.”

“You’ll burst into f-flames without your ointment? Go up in a twist of s-smoke? Turn into a pillar of salt like Lot’s w-wife? You’ve never said w-what would happen.”

“I don’t know.”

“And y-you’re afraid to f-find out?” There was little amusement in the duke’s smile. “We’re alike, you and m-me. Trapped in our little p-prisons. There’s a barge waiting by the M-Molo. You’ll be protected from the s-sun.”

“Lady Giulietta . . .”

“Will wake to f-find you gone. She’ll be upset with the w-world and f-furious with you. This will exhaust her less than a couple of d-days spent b-begging you not to go. By the t-time you return the p-poppy will be done. She’ll b-be back to the young w-woman you love.”

“Yes, highness.”

“Take w-whatever you n-need from my t-treasury and stores.”

Horses? Weapons? Archers? Tycho ran through what he might need and arrived at an unexpected answer. “Give me Amelia.”

“She’s y-yours anyway.” As head of the Duke’s Blade, Tycho controlled the Assassini who enforced Venice’s will at home, killed her enemies abroad and slaughtered traitors wherever they could be found. That was the official description. Since their battle against the krieghund a couple of years before, which saw most of the Blade killed, the most fearsome thing about the Assassini was their name. A fact known only to those who needed to know which, thankfully, was very few.

“Take h-her,” said Marco. He hesitated. “Has m-my mother t-told her about . . .?”

Leo being abducted? “No, your highness.”

“Keep it that w-way for now. One f-final p-point.”

Tycho waited.

“Don’t come back if you fail.”

If I . . . Tycho felt his stomach tighten.

“My m-mother will be f-furious if you l-leave without her orders. But it’s J-Julie who will n-not forgive you.” Marco shrugged. “I know her, n-not the way you k-know her b-but well enough and I’ve k-known her longer. She’ll f-find it h-hard enough to f-forgive you for leaving. If you c-come b-back without Leo . . .”

Tycho nodded.

“We make b-bad enemies. And d-dangerous friends.”

Marco pushed himself up from the bench using his fishing net as a walking stick and stood unsteadily. He kissed Tycho on both cheeks and sighed. “I’ll walk you to the M-Molo, and then f-fetch Amelia. You m-must leave the m-moment she arrives . . . Now, what do you k-know of M-Montenegro?”

“Nothing yet, your highness.”

“It’s w-wild, cold in winter, filled with mountains and riddled with b-bandits. Those are its b-better points.” The duke shrugged. “No doubt m-most empires think their n-newest colonies barbaric. In Montenegro’s case it’s true. As for the Red Cathedral, it sits on an island in the c-centre of a demon-filled lake. You know I’m d-duke of M-Montenegro?” His smile was sour. “Duke of Venice, duke of M-Montenegro, duke of C-Corfu, and prince of Serenissima. Also k-king of Hungary . . .”

“Highness?”

“Oh, d-don”t worry. Sigismund says he’s d-duke of Venice.”

Life in Bjornvin had been simpler, Tycho told him. The Vikings hated the Skaelingar and killed them when possible. The Skaelingar tried to wipe the Viking settlements from the face of Vineland. With the fall of Bjornvin they managed it.

“S-sounds blissful,” Marco said.

In the corridor, on their way to the Molo gate, the duke’s face suddenly twisted, his shoulders hunched and a nervous tic began to drag one corner of his mouth. He clung to his fishing net like a man drowning. For a second, Tycho thought Marco was having a fit and then he heard footsteps behind them.

“Your highness . . .”

“Ah, C-Captain W-Weimer. Out h-hunting b-baby bats? So s-sweet when d-dipped in h-honey. Did you f-find me any?

The crop-haired young officer hesitated. Bowing low, he glanced at Tycho, and then quickly looked away. “Your mother, highness . . .”

“D-drop in on m-me, d-did s-she?”

“I imagine so, your highness.”

“Y-y-y-y- . . .” Duke Marco stamped furiously at his inability to get out his words. “Y-you m-may tell her I’m h-hunting b-baby b-bats, lost l-lovers, and m-my f-father’s g-ghost.” He swept his pole through the air and looked mournfully at the empty net.

“His ghost, highness?”

“Y-you h-haven’t s-seen it anywhere?”

Captain Weimer crossed himself. Admitting that he had not, he bowed low and withdrew at a wave of Marco’s hand. Weimer was Alexa’s new appointment as captain of the palace guard. Alonzo’s man was gone.

“This is the p-plan,” the duke said.

The other Marco was back.

“Y-you defect to Alonzo . . . T-that’s the only way you’ll get close enough to get Leo back. My uncle will be expecting y-you. W-who else would my m-mother send? You know they were l-lovers?”

“Highness?”

“Alonzo p-poisoned me as a child, had my father m-murdered and b-bedded my m-mother. I’ve spent m-most of my life wanting him d-dead.” The duke smiled sourly. “But I want Giulietta happy more. If the c-choice is killing my uncle or saving Leo you s-save the child. Understand?”

Tycho nodded. “My page . . .”

“Pietro?”

Tycho was surprised Marco remembered the boy’s name. “Yes, highness, Pietro. Can I leave him in your care?”

“Of course.” Marco smiled. “I’ll give him to Giulietta to remind her of you. You can have him back when you return.”

He might have been talking about a pet.





PART 2



“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine . . .”

The Tempest, William Shakespeare





14





Montenegro





The big cat looked down the white slope from between two twisted fir trees and growled softly in the back of her throat at the sight of soldiers struggling through knee-deep snow. She was sand-coloured, with darker spots and ears that twitched to catch every sound. Her true home was far to the south, where the nights could be this cold but the days far hotter.

The man hunting her belonged to this pack.

She knew that with the certainty she knew many things. That she could outrun their hunter was the least of them. His feet broke the snow, where her paws barely troubled its crust and carried her across gravel streams without breaking thin ice. His arrows had been spent worthlessly and when he reached this spot she would be somewhere else.

For a second she considered attacking the men below. The thought put the smell of blood in her nostrils. Her hackles rose and she bared her teeth to show yellow canines. She could kill half, bowling through them in a flash of claws and ripping teeth, but those left would probably kill her. It was time to return to her lair.

Her path led up through twisted trees into snow-speckled scree above. Here brutal winds stopped the snow from settling. The ice patches were cold beneath her paws and the frozen scree colder, its sharpness lacerating the pads of her feet. They might be too numb to hurt now but they would bleed later.

Below her twisted a road the soldiers would use. Her own route had been more direct and led from a high pass where the air had been clear and so thin her ribs had hurt with every breath. Beyond the pass was a stone fort, larger than those she’d seen in the last few days. Built in the style of the early men – thick walls, heavy crenels, narrow windows – it protected the head of a valley that looked too bleak for anyone to bother protecting. Its walls still stood, for all half the roof had fallen in.

Her job had been to find it if she could.

It was hunger that drove her through the trees and down towards the valley floor on her return journey, until an arrow past her shoulder snapped her wide awake and changed the nature of her hunt. She’d caught a hare in its white winter coat, before staining its fur and the snow red with its blood. The mouthful it provided did little to assuage her hunger. Tomorrow she would have to go out again.

At the mouth of a tunnel dug into a snow bank she halted and hesitated before beginning her change. The air shimmered, making the slate roof of an almost buried shepherd’s hut beyond her look like rock seen through running water. There was none of the anguish of a krieghund change, no ripping flesh, shifting muscles and cracking bones. Amelia simply became something else. In place of a sandy-hued leopard stood a young Nubian woman, naked against the white of the snows behind her. Tycho had known she was other. Unless he was a fool, he’d known that from the first night they met, beside a frozen canal in the middle of a battle between Venice’s street gangs. But Amelia doubted he’d known what form her otherness took.

Climbing into her trews, she struggled into her jerkin and slid her daggers into her belt; her sword she slung over her shoulder, not bothering to buckle the baldric that held it, since she’d take it off again the moment she was inside. When Tycho woke she’d tell him about the soldiers.

Captain Towler was older than he looked and younger than he felt. A tallish man, with broad shoulders and cropped hair, his skull was slightly misshapen from being crushed with a shovel during the siege of Belgrade. He’d been young then and his attacker a woman. His reluctance to kill her had almost cost him his life. It was the last time he let chivalry get in the way of self-preservation. At the sack of M’dina six months later, he grabbed the first woman to jab at him with a spear by the throat and tossed her off the city walls. That was the version he told in taverns, with a whore on his lap and his hand up the skirt of the nearest serving girl.

Naive young English recruit learns war’s lessons the hard way. The truth was more ordinary: he’d been clubbed round the head by a German sergeant after starting a bar fight he was too drunk to finish. Five people had known the true story and four were dead. The German he had killed himself weeks later. Of the others, one had died outside Paris, one of plague, the other drowned at sea.

Towler shrugged. His might not be much of a life but it was the only one he had and he wasn’t ready to throw it away. He’d been a corporal back then. One of Sir John Hawkwood’s finest, and carried two gold coins and five silver wrapped in a rag at his hip. Now he banked with a moneylender in Milan and counted his wealth in tens of gold, and hundreds of silver. If Prince Alonzo Millioni’s offer was good – and assuming the world wasn’t actually ending – he’d be counting his gold in hundreds and his silver in thousands before next year was out.

That thought made him happy. Well, if not happy then almost content, and if not content then at least willing to battle along a snow-covered dirt road through twisted firs towards a pass through the mountains above. Once he got above the treeline he’d be able to see where the hell he was and move his men out of this damn valley, and into the next most probably. His map was old but not cheap, and said nothing about this many mountains.

Above him the sky was high and clear, lacking the heavy cloud they’d come to expect since Towler’s Company landed in Montenegro. Still as cold as a whore’s heart, of course. As cold as a whore’s heart and unwelcoming as a nun’s arse. Of course it was. He’d met a Schiavoni merchant in Ragusa who said the canals in Venice were ice. A French merchant had topped that by saying the river through Paris was solid enough for the king’s coach to use it as a road when he fled the starving city. Hedge priests said the world was ending and snow now fell alike on rocks in the far north and southern pastures that had never seen it before. Wolves from Russia were crossing the frozen Baltic into Sweden. Wolves from Sweden were crossing the frozen sea to Denmark. Olive groves in Italy were dying in their thousands. The vines of France were brittle fingers that would never regrow. The world might as well end, because there’d be nothing to feed those left alive when the snows melted.

“Hurry it up,” he shouted.

The men-at-arms at the back looked at one another and increased their speed. In a day or so they’d look at one another, shrug and one would give up and the other join him. He’d hung the last two to do that. There was nothing like a good hanging for keeping soldiers cheerful. Obviously he’d hung the two least popular men in his troop. Why make trouble for himself by hanging men people liked?

Morgan and Lyle had been new. Survivors of a troop massacred outside Palermo. He’d hung them naked so his men could watch them dance their way to hell, and both had pumped their seed on to the trampled snow, which everyone knew was good luck. Also, hanging stragglers meant more food for the rest. Towler trusted Prince Alonzo would be grateful for all the hardened men he could get, and a more hardened group than this it would be difficult to find. They’d fought in Italy, Austria, Sicily and France. They’d fought for the Medici boy one year and against him the next. That was the way of free companies. Their kind kept the world safe, and he was proud of it. Captain Towler had no fear of God.

In all his life he’d never eaten meat on a Friday. He said his prayers daily, made confession monthly and gave gold to rebuild any churches he’d been forced to destroy. More than one bishop had assured him he’d be welcomed into heaven when the time came. Which he hoped, trusting in God’s mercy, would not be for some years yet.

“Pull them up,” he told a soldier squatting by a tree. “Or have your bollocks drop off from cold.”

“Like that would make a difference,” someone muttered.

Another laughed and the crouching boy blushed.

“Crap your pants if you must,” Towler said more gently, knowing the real answer was don’t crap or piss at all. But the boy was human in a wind-whipped wilderness that made no allowance for that. This is the way the world ends . . . He’d heard a ragged preacher in the town before last say that. Sinners brought this on the rest. God was turning his back on the world.

The preacher was selling misery as enthusiastically as a baker sells hot cakes. Someone called him a liar, someone else said it was true. Towler was glad when the local Watch arrived and his preaching ended in a grunt and a slumping body. Towler had bedded his first whore in weeks that night. Fat and greasy and stinking of garlic and smoke, she swore she wasn’t really in the trade. What she lacked in looks she made up for in willingness and he overtipped disgracefully in gratitude. She’d been so shocked she sucked him for free. Perhaps she’d be his last. If he died on these slopes would it be so bad?

“That’s the cold talking,” Towler muttered. Seeing a man look across, he scowled back. For miles the cold had been telling them to sleep. All any of them had to do was lie down on its white feather bed and the cold would welcome them home. He couldn’t remember a winter like it. No one could. Even the old – who usually claimed that what happened to them was bigger, better or worth more – shook their heads at his question. Towler wanted to know. What others had survived could be survived again and lessons learnt earlier used this time, too.

In the last town the priest said a witch was to blame, and the old women said it was the priest’s fault for forcing people to abandon the old religion. On the day they marched out, Towler’s Company passed the manse burnt out and roofless. An accidental fire, the mayor said. So it might have been, if the priest’s front door hadn’t been nailed shut, with bars of charred oak still bolted across to stop him from escaping.

In five days they’d reach the Red Cathedral. He’d told his men three for obvious reasons. They had food enough for two and imagined themselves able to do the last day hungry. Tell them they had to survive three days without food and they’d realise they weren’t going to arrive at all. Since Towler was refusing to admit that possibility to himself he was hardly going to share it with them. There were days he hated his job, and this was one of them. He should have been at home with his wife and children.

But then, of course, he’d need a wife and children in the first place. Instead he had bastards – because what man didn’t – and two or three women who probably considered themselves his wives. Sir John Hawkwood, his first captain, had let his troops travel with camp followers. In the end a much younger Towler had summoned the courage to ask why, since they slowed the troop down, caused fights and stole the stores. If the worst comes to the worst you can always eat them. He still didn’t know if Sir John had been joking. It was possible he meant every word. Will we end up eating human flesh? Captain Towler considered the question and decided it depended on how hungry they got.

“All right, Captain?”

Towler scowled at his sergeant.

“You sighed like you meant it.”

He’d been wishing he had a priest along to tell him how much forgiveness of a sin like that would cost. “We need to make camp soon.”

His sergeant flicked a glance at the darkening sky. The snow would reflect tonight’s full moon, making it light enough for any bandits to find them. The lack of cloud cover also meant it would be colder than ever; what little warmth the world still possessed stolen by eternity. “We’ll need a fire.”

“Then send men to find wood. Is Evans back yet?”

Evans was their archer, disliked by the sergeant but useful all the same. He could outshoot most men, and a longbow in a forest like this was the difference between life and death for all of them. The last animal Evans killed was a wolf, more bones and sores than ribs. It tasted like week-dead carrion but they ate it all the same and cracked its thicker bones for the marrow. The captain hoped Alonzo had food enough. He’d have a mutiny on his hands if not.

“He’s over there, Captain . . .”

The archer looked flustered and scared as he slid and slipped his way downhill towards the road. His long face was red and puffy, his overfull lips taut as he gasped down gulps of air. “Bandits?” Towler demanded.

Evans shook his head and the captain relaxed slightly. The stragglers in his troop had arrived by the time Evans finally caught his breath enough to tell them he’d seen hunting. But, first, the sergeant got his usual insults in.

“Sod seen, you Welsh bastard. Did you catch anything?”

When Evans shook his head the sergeant turned away to spit and almost missed the corporal’s words. “Saw a cat though . . .”

Wild cats might live this close to the treeline, Captain Towler thought. You could eat cat, he’d done that more than once. Better than rat, certainly better than wolf. Although even wolf was better than nothing. If there was one cat up here, maybe there were more. Maybe it had a mate and kittens.

“This big.” Evans held his hand waist-high.

Towler steered him away from the others, nodding to the sergeant to say he could follow. Evans looked sober enough, and where would he have found spirits this far into a march? The hill villages were deserted and the towns in the valleys where they’d billeted so poor that to find thin beer was a treat. “This big?” The sergeant’s voice was a mocking echo of his own.

Evans held his gaze and nodded. “Yellowy with spots,” he said. “Ripped a hare right open with a single bite and ran faster than a galloping horse. It dodged my bloody arrow as if it was a feather falling.”

“If it was really that big,” Towler said, “you’re lucky to be alive.”

Evans nodded soberly. “Do you think . . .?”

“No, I don’t, and nor do you, understand?” Captain Towler watched his Welsh archer join the others, glance nervously back at the captain and begin talking anyway. They were superstitious fools and the last thing Towler needed was his men getting spooked by reports of were-beasts and worse.

It he didn’t find them food soon he’d have to give them another hanging. He’d like to start with Evans but the Welshman was too valuable so it would have to be the last recruit. A dark-faced Sicilian who swore his family had never been heathen. No one believed him or much liked him either.