The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

16





In the hours that followed, Prince Frederick and his small court settled themselves at the Fontego dei Tedeschi, his father’s warehouse just below the Rialto Bridge. Rooms were cleared and stables found for the horses. The land on which the warehouse stood was German, according to the rules governing fondaci. The land was German and so were the laws applied inside. By the time night fell – which was early, this being the start of winter – Frederick had made the rounds of his men, checking they were housed properly and settled into their chambers.

The last thing Frederick did before retiring was send for one of his men and give him a message for his father. Frederick had let Alexa believe he was here without the emperor’s blessing. In fact, he had left court with permission. It was time to make his first report.

“Yes, highness . . .” The man bowed low.

Standing at the window a few minutes later, Frederick watched a young wolf skulk out on to the ice of the Canalasso and disappear into the night. The journey across the snows would be brutal, but his message would arrive. If anyone could clear the distance and arrive safely it was them. They were krieghund.

In the same hour, on the far side of the Adriatic Sea, which glittered with white crests on black waves, halfway into a range of mountains that rose for ever, the man named earlier as Lady Giulietta’s next husband scowled at the crude walls of that night’s shelter and thought about Venice not at all. Tycho was too cold and too hungry and too worried to think about anything other than the yard in which he stood.

The map Marco had provided was crude, but the fort was on it and had always been marked as one of their stops. Everything about the place felt wrong, starting with its shape, which was a quarter-circle of grey stone, built across the narrow head of the valley, with rising cliffs and a slit cave behind. At first Tycho thought the fort must protect a silver mine because what else in this godforsaken country would need protecting? Only the arrow slits faced in both directions, down the valley and into this tiny yard behind. No force big enough to trouble a fort could gather here so why did the arrow slits exist? The other reason the cave couldn’t be a silver mine was that the track marks where sleds had been dragged from underground were missing.

The heaviest wall was on this side rather than facing into the valley. The door on the valley side was thick, but the door to the yard thicker still and fat-hinged, with a steel plate set into it through which three dozen arrows could be fired simultaneously from a three-stringed porcupine.

The layout made so little sense that Tycho began to explore. Under the roof a dormitory full of abandoned bedrolls, saddles and curved sabres showed that cavalry had manned the fort until recently. At ground level the empty cupboards in the kitchen showed they’d taken any food with them. And they’d obviously left in a hurry because a half-cooked but now frozen deer carcase rested on an iron spit above a cold fire pit. In the yard someone had killed a horse and flensed its carcase, cutting all the flesh from its bones. Tycho could imagine how hungry cavalry would have to be before they ate their mounts.

A well in the cellar held water sealed with ice that clattered three seconds after Tycho dropped a stone. His second stone was larger, broke the ice and brought Amelia running . . . “Found anything?” she asked.

Tycho shook his head. “You?”

“Well, maybe . . .” she admitted. Amelia was wrapped in furs that stank even in the cold, unless the stink was her and that was possible. “There’s burnt-out mage powder on the armoury floor.”

That begged two questions. How Amelia recognised mage powder, because he didn’t think he would. And what the hell it was doing in a crumbling fort in the pits of nowhere. Mage powder was a mix made by alchemists that burnt so hot it cut steel and so fiercely water couldn’t put it out.

“How much?”

Pinching her finger and thumb together, Amelia looked cross when he snorted. “There’s also an empty barrel.”

The barrel was small, and had been stored inside a bigger one filled with sand. The sides of both were varnished and their bottoms and lids sealed with slugs of tar that took the imprint of Tycho’s thumb. Whoever stored the powder had been determined to stop air from getting in and setting it alight. It might take a minute or so before the grains of phosphor sparked, but once the mix was ignited it would be unstoppable. So why had it been opened and emptied?

Pushing open the rear door, Tycho stepped into the small, rocky yard formed by the fort closing off the very head of the valley. Icy slopes rose on both sides and where they joined the slit cave showed dark and daunting. Tycho knew instantly what the soldiers had used the powder for. Flame marks darkened the underside of a cracked ledge high above. Mage powder made a poor explosive, but they’d still tried, and failed, to close the cave.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s see what they intended to hide.”

“No.” Amelia grabbed his arm, letting go when he swung round to face her. He expected her to step back but she stood there shaking her head. The woman was Assassini trained, as fast as him and almost as deadly. He thought for a moment that she might be joking, her humour being somewhat strange, but she seemed serious.

“We have no business here.”

What has that to do with anything? By definition the Assassini went where they had no business. The shadows embraced them and in turn the Assassini embraced the shadows. He was simply the logical conclusion to that. A man so in love with darkness he couldn’t stand the light. Tycho stopped, shocked by the unexpected insight. Where had that come from?

“Gods,” he said. “I’ll search it myself later.”

If he read the fallen rubble right the vanished soldiers had tried to cause a rockslide that would bury the slit cave, but failed. They’d risked handling mage powder, but been too frightened or in too great a hurry to try again and had abandoned a second barrel inside the rear door. The fort’s layout finally made sense to him. It was built to protect the valley from whatever was in the cave, not the other way round. Whatever was in there probably knew Tycho and Amelia were here. All the same, he saw no point in attracting attention.

“No fires,” he said.

Amelia glared at him. “We’ll freeze.”

It was so cold they ended up huddled in a bed they found in a small room beyond a dormitory full of soldiers’ cots. Both rooms were bleak and made the fort look like a punishment posting. Tycho wondered what the men had done to be sent here. For the captain to live so close to his soldiers also seemed odd until Tycho realised the men would have to be dead before an enemy could reach the inner room.

Dragging a rancid bear’s pelt from the bed, Amelia dropped it on the floor in disgust, tied back flyblown bed curtains and looked round for something to replace the stinking bear skin. Two chests were empty but a third contained blankets so cold one cracked when she shook it. Amelia’s breath came in smoky gasps as she laid five blankets over a stained horsehair mattress. “You could have helped.”

Tycho put his whetstone back in his pocket and his dagger back in its sheath. “You could have gone into the cave . . .”

Amelia didn’t reply. Instead, she shrugged off her cloak and dragged at her boots, which she tossed to the floor. Her sword she put upright against the wall, her daggers on the chest where the blanket had been. She climbed into bed in silence and watched him put aside his own weapons and climb in beside her.

“Against the cold,” he said.

“Like it would be anything else.”

Lord Atilo had bedded her, whether when she was his slave or his apprentice Tycho was unsure. He imagined she’d kill any man who now tried to take her against her will, but the bonds of ownership or duty had kept his old master safe. She lay stiff as a board beside him for so long he thought she’d fallen to sleep; until finally she sighed, rolled in against him, tightened her arm across his chest, folded her leg over his hip to hold him in place and said sourly, “Now let me sleep. And you do whatever you call whatever you do . . .” A few minutes later, she spoke again in a voice smoky with darkness and age-old mystery. Wherever Tycho was, she was somewhere else.

“I am the moon . . . I am the mistress . . .”

Her words were a whisper in the silence of the snowscape beyond the fort walls. She was saying a prayer, he realised. A prayer addressed to a goddess unknown to him. He remembered that other night, on the edge of a cold fondamenta in Venice, when she’d talked of the moon, her mistress; and before he could unpick the memories of their first meeting, darkness took him. He woke to find her still in his arms, her body rigid as wood, one hand jabbing his side.

“Wake up.” Her voice was tight.

It couldn’t be the next night already? But the colour of the sky beyond a broken shutter was still just this side of midnight rather than early the next, and he’d lost more than an hour to dreamless sleep. Amelia jabbed her hand at him harder. “All right,” he said.

He was rising on to his elbow when a sword point touched his throat and he opened his eyes. The man with the blade was filthy, crop-haired and half drunk with exhaustion. “What have we got here, boys?” Behind him soldiers clustered closer and one lifted a freshly lit torch that still smoked and spluttered.

“Pretty boys,” the man said. “Pretty boys in bed together.” He looked back at his men, gauging their reaction. “You know what that is, don’t you? It’s a hanging offence.”