The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

20





“My lord Tycho.”

Eat, keep the rest, and go . . . Those were the words he wanted to say as he looked at Captain Towler’s weather-beaten face and the rat-faced soldiers behind him. Amelia had returned from a run to say a stag and three hinds had come down to the valley floor from the higher slopes, and were scuffing at the snow looking for vegetation beneath. Tycho sent her out again to stampede the animals back up the slope towards the fort and had Towler’s archer position himself in the shadows of the entrance arch. The man was good with a bow for all he stank, had sly eyes and was Welsh. Tycho didn’t understand why the last of these mattered, but it was the point to which all of the man’s companions eventually returned.

The stag died from an arrow to the heart. The largest of the hinds took to her heels with two arrows in her neck and dropped within a quarter of a mile. The others escaped but Tycho doubted they’d live long without the stag to protect them. Amelia gutted one and he gutted the other, Towler’s men lining up to drink warm blood from a rusting bucket. And when they found their strength, Tycho sent them from room to room to collect whatever wood they could and began to smoke the meat. He imagined it would taste of the burnt chairs and broken beds they brought him and doubted they’d much care.

“Send my regards to Prince Alonzo.”

Looking up at Tycho’s words, Amelia busied herself with ripping slivers of meat from a bone boiling in a pot. Tycho scowled. Amelia didn’t understand why she and Tycho didn’t simply go with them. That was because he’d yet to give her his reasons.

“My lord, tomorrow. You’re quite sure you won’t . . .?”

“Thank you. We travel best on our own.”

“And you still have things to do here?” Captain Towler looked doubtfully round the kitchen of the fort. For a few hours the room had been friendly with hot food and the fug of bodies and the echo of laughter. Here was where most would sleep, filled with grilled venison and warmed by the fire. Tomorrow they would leave and take what remained of the food with them. That was what had Captain Towler thanking Tycho in the first place.

“I have a vigil . . .”

The captain nodded. Vigils were for nobles, like sacred vows and courtly love. He knew the argument was over. He and his men would be going on alone. If Tycho wanted to kneel in the darkness and pray to some saint . . .

Tycho smiled at the man’s careful expression, and knew the captain considered himself to have better things to do. “Three days, you reckon?”

Towler nodded.

“Well, I wish you joy of it.”

“We’ll see you later, my lord. I’m sure of it.”

Not if things work out as they should. Tycho clasped hands with the man, feeling calloused skin from a lifetime’s wielding a sword. He clapped the captain on the back and wished him a safe journey, which he meant, and promised to meet again in a week or so, which he didn’t. Buoyed up by food and the memory of warmth, they would find their way to the Red Cathedral in a few days. If they arrived in daylight, then Tycho would rely on the novelty of their arrival to distract Alonzo’s guards that night. And if they arrived at night, so much the better. He would use the distraction of their arrival to find his own way inside.

“Why do I come here?”

Amelia’s question had been abrupt, her voice brittle. She’d found him crouched by the rocky slit, as she’d found him the night before, and the night before that, considering its painted lips and the nub of a stone face at the top of the cleft. They both knew what the slit looked like although neither said. Amelia was watchful and her dagger unsheathed. “You’ve been here for hours.”

“Ten minutes at most.” Tycho glanced up and realised he lied. The moon’s silver sliver had shifted on the horizon. “You should have stayed inside.”

Amelia glared at him.

“And why the drawn knife?”

“Because I’m afraid.” She didn’t even look abashed. “Tycho. What’s so special about this cave?”

“Nothing. It’s simply a cave.” Small, narrow, damp and sour. The grit of its entrance as smooth as if raked, but with ochre drawings of twisted bison and fat-breasted women inside to say people had used it in darker times.

How could he possibly know that?

Amelia lifted the flaming torch she held. “You look . . .”

He imagined she was about to say pale, only that was ridiculous because to her he must always look pale. Anyway, anyone would be chilled by the wind that threatened the flames of her torch, especially if wearing his clothes. Amelia was wrapped in a rancid fur found in the fort, her face reduced to a strip of coal-dark skin and her strange violet eyes.

“Don’t leave tonight,” she said. “Go tomorrow.”

Tycho thought about it. For a second he considered saving his strength, but Captain Towler’s men would be arriving or might already have arrived at the Red Cathedral, and a warning on the wind was no real warning at all. “You didn’t hear anything?”

Amelia squinted, trying not to make it obvious . . .

“Well,” he said. “Did you?”

“Hear what? All I’ve heard is the wind.”

That was what Tycho had heard, too, his trouble being it spoke to him. “Stay or go,” it said, “you will be dead before morning.”

Rocky slopes plummeted away on both sides, treacherous with ice, the drop brutal and deadly; unless he really was unable to be killed, in which case he’d lie broken at the bottom until someone found him and tried to prove him wrong.

You’re happy, Tycho thought.

The self-mockery cheered him, even as a sudden gust of ice-cold wind almost swept him over the edge, and he had to drop beneath it and hold tight until the gust faded and he could stand again. Between the fort and where he needed to be was no more than a few hours for him, but the route he chose, the quickest one, was along the granite spine of a mountain, into the face of driving snow that stripped humanity from him, until he had no space for doubts, self-pity or self-mockery, and his thoughts became mechanical and remorseless. He was going to get Giulietta’s child.

You’re going to get Giulietta’s child.

In his head the infant didn’t even have a name. It wasn’t that he was Leo, that this was Leopold’s child, that letting Alonzo claim him would clear his way to the throne of Venice. No, he was simply going to get Giulietta’s child.

The spine Tycho ran was the ridge between two high valleys in a row of mountains that climbed higher and higher, until finally the ridge began to descend and the wind became less threatening. On his left, the slope dropped to firs so far below they looked like child’s toys. A town in the valley bottom was a smudge of dirt on a white background. On his right a frozen lake lay trapped in a valley so steep at one end that only a mountain goat, and possibly Tycho, could climb it, and he’d rather leave it to the goat. The other end had a village on a silt plain that centuries of rain had pushed out into the lake. The closer he got the more miserable the village became; desolate as a beggar’s dog, huts crusted like fleas around its wooden church, shutters like scabs on a village hall, mud tracks dirty as ditches. Even from half a mile away, Tycho could sense misery clinging to it like the stink to a midden.

Rising from the lake was the midden itself.

Jagged rocks broke through marbled ice to make a small island occupied by three buildings that filled all the available space. The largest by far was the Red Cathedral, the others were a bell tower and a fortified hall. Originally red, all their walls had faded to ochre, and the sharp roof of the cathedral boasted a cascade of onion domes that looked as if they should have crescents on the top. Ragged patches of gold leaf clung like onion skin, but Tycho could see wood through the peeling primer beneath. Once it had been the high church of the local heresy. Now it was the Red Crucifers’ castle, and Prince Alonzo’s headquarters in his coming war with Alexa.

And on the ice between the island and the shore, Towler’s Company, heads down and shoulders hunched as they pushed themselves on. Undoubtedly, they knew they were watched from the cathedral. Tycho doubted they realised he was watching from up here. As they stumbled forward, the great doors of the cathedral opened . . . At least, a small side door in the great doors did, and a dozen wild-haired archers tumbled through the door into the snow beyond.

Mongols? Tycho wondered. Magyars?

They wore their hair in plaits and stood with the bow-legged gait of those born in the saddle and raised on mare’s milk. Something about their watchfulness reminded him of the Skaelingar, the wild warriors who had destroyed his home village. So, a rotting village and foreign mercenaries.

Tycho found comfort in this. If Alonzo felt strong he’d settle in the capital and live in luxury. He might claim to miss the life of a simple soldier, and claim it endlessly until fools believed him; but Tycho had seen the prince’s lavish feasts close up, drunk the wine Alonzo iced with snow brought down from the Altus. He doubted a rotting wooden cathedral would keep the man content for long. No matter how many barrels of Montenegrin brandy filled that storehouse and local maidens had been rounded up to warm his bed.

Whatever Towler said convinced the man who went out on to the ice to meet them. He nodded, Towler spoke to his company, and they followed him through the parting crowd of archers towards the cathedral door. The wild archers kept their bows bent and their arrows notched. Tycho doubted he expected any different.

Move, Tycho told himself. In the few minutes he’d been watching Towler’s arrival his body had chilled and his thoughts slowed. The cold took his strength, though far more subtly than water. Anyone would think you were afraid.

The ice spread in front of him, reflecting the moon so that the clouds were lit on both sides and glowed with a sullen fire. Above him were the now familiar constellations of this world. In front, the moonlit sharpness of the Red Cathedral with silhouetted onion domes. Beside that a separate bell tower and a squat hall beneath. As he watched, the hall doors opened and men and carts flooded out and spread around the rocky edge of the island, the night suddenly full of jangling harness and cartwheels squeaking.

Dropping to a crouch, Tycho hugged the ice as four oxen lumbered in his direction, stopping a dozen paces from the island shore. Men in stinking furs tumbled from the back of the wagons, grabbed pickaxes and spread out. In a line, standing a couple of paces apart, they took their orders from a gang boss and raised their pickaxes together, crashing the points into the ice. All around the island, other men did the same. Alonzo was making himself a moat.

Against me? Tycho rejected the idea as arrogance.

Yet what other reason was there? Captain Towler had probably been happy to boast of having met Tycho on his way here. This, it seemed, was Alonzo’s response. A hundred men smashing ice until dark water appeared. Within five minutes, fifteen foot of open water stood between the island and the rest of the lake. Job done, the men climbed into their carts and trundled on.

Maybe taunting Alonzo hadn’t been so clever . . .

How many cart teams were there? Was there an ice bridge somewhere? And could he find it and cross it unseen before Alonzo’s men turned it too to dark water and left him stranded on this side of the ice? He could overtake the carts and hope to find unbroken ice beyond them, or cross here. Neither option impressed him.

Not giving himself time to think, Tycho shrugged himself from his jacket and slipped into the dark moat, feeling bitter cold knock breath from his body. He swam hard, his lungs too tight to breathe, and reached the edge, dragging himself over it and grabbed a breath. He was almost clear of the water when something grabbed his ankle and he felt himself slide backwards, unable to get a grip on the smooth ice.

What the f*ck was that?

He kicked hard, connecting with flesh. The grip on his ankle tightened and yanked harder. A moment later, Tycho splashed into the water, slid under and turned to discover what he faced. His attacker was frog-eyed and broad-cheeked, its wide mouth filled with needle-like teeth. Gills frilled both sides of its neck like wounds.

Tycho kicked for its hand and the thing grinned, letting go of Tycho’s ankle and boosting his foot upwards with webbed fingers. When Tycho’s head smashed into the ice above the world went black, sickness sweeping through him. As the creature hung mockingly out of reach, a subtle change came over its face, and its grin became scarily human. Tycho drew his knife.

The blow to his head left a hangover of giddiness. Smoke-like darkness ate the edges of his vision as the air burnt up in his chest, narrowing the aquarium dark of the world under the ice to a tight circle of light in front of him. He desperately wanted to draw a breath and knew he shouldn’t.

Come closer, he thought. Fight me.

Tycho goaded the creature with his knife, jabbing as his strength drained and the chill reached his bones. The face in front of him was familiar now, its cheekbones high and nose strong, wolf-grey braids framing a face as white as alabaster. One monster was gone and another had taken its place. Tycho was looking at himself.

Darting forward, the creature grabbed Tycho’s knife hand and twisted savagely. It had all of Tycho’s speed and strength, which was more than he had. Think, Tycho urged himself. But all he could think was, this is me, as he watched his dagger begin to spin towards the bottom. He was drowning.

The creature blew out its breath and Tycho felt them both sink after the dagger, following it towards the gravel below. The air in his own lungs was gone. He should be dead or already dying but all he felt was numb.

A numbness as bad as that he’d felt the night rip tides caught him in the Venetian lagoon and dragged him under. Finally depositing him on the stone steps at Rialto for a young street rat called Rosalyn to find. She’d thought him already dead and maybe she was right. Who would find him this time? Always assuming this winter ended and the ice melted, and this wasn’t the end of the world as more than half the people in Europe claimed. Feeling the creature wrap its arms more tightly around him, Tycho watched it smile as if reading his thoughts.

The lake was darker here but the water warmer, as if some of the last summer’s heat had survived. Maybe there was simply a warm spring venting somewhere near, or perhaps he imagined it. The water felt warmer the deeper he was dragged. A normal person would be dead by now, drowned when the last of his breath went skyward in tiny bubbles. Only he wasn’t normal, was he? And here was his proof. He was alive when he should be dead.

Fed up with waiting, the creature dragged him close and tried to squeeze air from his lungs. A splatter of bubbles was all Tycho had left. The thing looked worried now, its face less obviously Tycho’s own. In dragging Tycho close, it had given him the opening he’d lacked.

My turn, Tycho decided.

Opening his mouth, he bit into the creature’s neck and ripped, sour blood mixing with lake water in his mouth. He clung on, gripping tight with the last of his strength as the creature tried to push free, and bit again, spitting flesh into the water. All the while it bled and struggled, and bled some more, until finally it stopped struggling. Tycho held it until it stopped shuddering and then he released it and watched its corpse float gently away, carried by the rising thermal of the hot spring. In death it reverted to its natural form, looking as Tycho first saw it, like a cross between a frog and a dwarf, with needle teeth and webs between its fingers.

The world was roofed in ice. Thick and dark. As strangely jagged and cruel on the underside as it had been marble-smooth on top. If this was the way the world ended, here was where he would remain, locked on the wrong side of an ice wall.

I’ve failed Giulietta. It was a bad thought to carry for eternity.

Gripping the underside of the ice, Tycho dragged himself in one direction, ice slicing his fingers, until he decided he should have reached the makeshift moat by now if he was going to reach it at all, and began pulling himself in the opposite direction. Except how did he know which was right? The strength the creature’s blood had given him was going, leaching away into the water. And he faced a deeper fear. What would happen when the sun came up?

All that light through the ice. Would it burn him?

He suspected it might. He’d failed Giulietta, and the sun would fry him through the ice if he didn’t free himself soon. Kicking off from the ice, Tycho hit the bottom and crawled on his hands and knees until he reached an incline. The island had to be up ahead, which meant somewhere above was a circle of fine ice or dark water that made up Alonzo’s makeshift moat.

He found it eventually, a crackle of ice thin as leaves and brittle as the skim on a puddle, so inconsequential he barely noticed it as he broke through and gasped air, feeling his lungs fill and his heart restart. Above him the sky was high and clear, and the moon bright enough to show him he was back at the moat’s outer edge.

Fingers clawing ice, he fought for a grip, found one and dragged himself on to its surface, only for something to grab his ankle before he could fight free of the water. Two things happened at once. Long webbed fingers tightened their grip and began to drag him back, and what he’d thought was a mound of snow reared up, hurtled across open ice and raised a spear, hurling it into his captor.

“Have you any idea how idiotic that was?” Amelia demanded, as she ripped her spear free and bent to drag Tycho to safety. He wanted to answer but the darkness took him before he could reply.