The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

27





Horns blew and scared away any quarry not already gone to ground. The early morning hunting party that rode out from the Red Cathedral had gone in search of sport and food. The sport was all Alonzo’s men talked about, their voices warmed by pre-dawn goblets of hot wine mixed with honey and strong local brandy, but it was food they needed and only a fool would think the hunting had been good.

Luckily there were enough fools among Alonzo’s followers to make the silence of those who understood how desperate things were look like distemper or a hangover. From his vantage point, Tycho watched a dozen men ride out of the dark forest towards the village and frozen lake beyond.

Alonzo led them. But close behind, holding a flaming brand and grinning widely, was a thickset man, wrapped in a lavish fox fur that glowed smoky red in the light from the torch he held. A local princeling? Too neatly barbered and too well dressed. And unless that cloak’s curing was very good indeed the fur must stink enough to have told the prey they were coming. So either it was cured, or the man with the oiled beard was too important for Alonzo to offend. Tycho wondered if he’d seen the man before and decided not.

Lord Roderigo rode a horse’s length behind, looking unhappy to find himself relegated to a lesser place. As for those who followed, few were Venetian, most Montenegrin or renegade Crucifer. These last looked a little wilder, talked a little louder and had clearly drunk deeper than their companions. Their noise was such that the man with Alonzo looked back in irritation. His glare stilled them into silence.

Interesting, Tycho thought.

Standing, Tycho shook snow from his cloak and waited for one of them to see him. It was a local huntsman, who brought a life’s experience of looking for prey in the half-dark of dawns and twilights. The man spurred his horse forward, drew closer to Prince Alonzo and pointed . . .

“You’re back.”

“Obviously, my lord.”

The Regent flushed and Tycho cursed inwardly. He needed to learn to hold his tongue around this man. Without Alonzo’s blessing he would never find his way past the demons in the makeshift moat. “I’ve brought you gifts.” Unbuckling a satchel at his side, Tycho produced a cloth-wrapped parcel and revealed Alexa’s bowl.

“What is that meant to be?”

“The most valuable thing in Venice.”

Alonzo scowled, obviously wondering if Tycho was mocking him. He refused to take the bowl from Tycho’s hands. “And then there’s this.” Tycho held up a blood-stained knife. “Recognise it, my lord? And finally, this . . .” He dropped a ringed finger into the bowl, hearing it clink as metal hit stone. “I’m sure you recognise that.”

This time Alonzo took the bowl and held it carefully, his eyes drawn to the severed finger, although it was the dried blood on Alexa’s dagger that made him dismount and draw closer. “Tell me everything.”

“She died bravely once she realised she had to die.” That at least was true. Tycho hoped Alexa’s ghost would forgive him what followed. “She offered me gold, your highness. Gold, titles and Giulietta’s hand. A place on the Council of Ten, and a place on the throne beside Lady Giulietta when the time came.”

“What did you do?”

“Killed her anyway.”

The Regent glanced to where Lord Roderigo sat, watching intently. Then he looked at the fox-furred man, realised he looked amused, and scowled. “I don’t believe you,” he said. “It’s a trick.”

For the next two days, Tycho remained locked in a circular cell. His prison walls were wood, and curved out towards the waist and in at the top. The room stank of decay and bird shit, mould and something feral. Endless scratching like scrabbling fingers came from outside, and Tycho realised he was imprisoned in one of the dozen or more onion domes decorating the cathedral’s roof. The scrabbling had to be crows or other large carrion birds.

The space inside was big enough to hold ten, but he had it to himself. To make sure he remained secure the hatch had been nailed shut. A hundred wild-haired and high-cheeked tribesmen had watched Tycho enter with the Regent and his Byzantine companion. Because that’s who the fox-furred man turned out to be. A Byzantine duke called Tiresias who looked surprised and then impressed when told Tycho’s name. The Regent himself had led Tycho through crowds of renegade Crucifers, and up a twist of stairs, along a rotting gallery to a makeshift set of stairs to a landing made from planks nailed between two beams.

Smoke filled the air from a central fire as he was led to his cell. Braziers stood in a ring around the cathedral walls, with split logs and broken planks piled high to keep the fires burning. The air was stale from two hundred unwashed soldiers, their faces red from wine and made redder by the flicker of torches. It had been like passing through hell.

At the end of his second day, the nails were dragged from the lengths of wood fixing his trapdoor in place and Alonzo stood on the landing below. “We’re still waiting,” he said. “If you’re lying, you’ll die. If you’re not . . .” Alonzo shrugged. “We’ll unnail the hatch again.” A scuffle behind Alonzo only stopped when a naked woman was dragged forward, ordered to put her foot into the step a soldier made by joining his hands, and boosted through the hatch into his onion dome.

“Have some company,” Alonzo said.

It was the farmer’s daughter from the night Tycho was sent to kill Alexa. Her face was bruised so badly one eye was closed. She looked terrified and pissed herself when a guard slammed the hatch and began nailing it shut.

“Not in here,” she begged. “Not in here.”

As Tycho reached for her, she began to scream. Outside the door, the soldier with the hammer jeered when Tycho slammed his hand over her mouth and her yells were cut short. She was younger than he remembered, with small pink-tipped teats and wide hips. Although she’d been stripped, the guards had tossed her rags after her. “Dress,” Tycho ordered. Then he remembered she couldn’t see in the dark, so he reached for her skirt and put it in her hand. “Put that on and hurry.”

“You don’t want me?” Everyone else has taken me, her voice said. Half the men and all the knights had raped her, no doubt.

“I want you dressed.”

“Domovoi,” she said, voice flat. “Domovoi . . .”

“No,” Tycho said. “I’m not a monster.”

“You don’t understand. Up here is where the domovoi live. Hundreds of them . . .” She looked round, as if expecting to see demons in the darkness. All Tycho could see was rotting wood and stained walls. Telling her that did little to put her mind at ease. After a few minutes she subsided into mutters and the occasional sob, and shortly after that Tycho forgot that she was there at all.

How long had Alexa known she was dying? That was the question Tycho wanted to unpick, although why it should matter was another question altogether. Was Alexa heroic or cowardly to make Tycho end her life?

Sinking back against a strangely sloping wall, he pulled up his knees, wrapped his arms around them and rested his chin on his knees as he examined every memory he’d taken from her. She’d been five when her husband came to his throne, a small girl in another country, unaware Venice even existed. She’d been eleven when the marriage was arranged, twelve when it was consummated, fifteen when she had her first child and not from lack of trying. It died, as did the one after, and the one after that, and the one after that.

It took Marco sending his brother on a year-long campaign in the south for a child of hers to live. She was twenty-three and pathetically grateful his subjects no longer had barrenness or dead babies as a reason to hate her. She studied poisons in the years that followed, although she learnt antidotes first. Simple magic after that, deeper magic later.

Hugging his knees, Tycho considered what this new knowledge brought him. Little he hadn’t worked out for himself. Most of Venice’s policy had been made on the fly, actions and reactions, strategies born of disaster, tactics shaped by mistakes. Much of what looked intentional was simply accident, only inevitable in hindsight. After a while, Tycho realised the farmer’s daughter had come to crouch beside him. She froze when he reached for her, but shuffled closer and after a while he felt her settle against his shoulder.

“Sleep now,” Tycho ordered.

But she wanted to say something. Tycho waited while she opened her mouth half a dozen times and swallowed her words before sitting back defeated. Now she was cross with herself. “You can tell me,” he promised. Part of it was cynical: he wanted news of Amelia. A farmer’s daughter, passed from soldier to soldier, would have heard more than those abusing her realised.

She said, “Domovoi.”

Sighing, Tycho asked his question anyway. The black woman was somewhere. The answers drew another sigh and a fresh order that she should sleep. It was an hour before exhaustion took her and she slumped against his shoulder. Another hour and a dead arm before he let her slip sideways, cradling her head and stroking her hair as he might stroke a cat.

As her breathing slowed, and she lost herself to dreamless sleep, he bent for her wrist and bit tenderly, warm blood filling his mouth. He warmed his bones with a single gulp, just enough to clear his mind of Alexa. Having fed, he gave the girl a drop of his blood in return. Not enough to turn her, as Rosalyn turned, but enough to lend her strength and help her heal. A second drop he smoothed across the worst of the bruising on her face, touching her one place else before he woke her. “What’s your name?”

“What is it to you?”

Tycho grinned. That was more like it.

“I’m Tycho,” he said. “I live in Venice with a girl called Giulietta.”

“You’re not Romaioi?” She scowled like someone tricked. “They said that a . . .”

“I saw him when I arrived. He’s older and has an oiled beard. They called him Tiresias and his cloak stinks. It’s fox fur. You didn’t see him?”

She shook her head.

The Romaioi were Byzantine aristocrats who traced their descent from the Romans and ruled the Greeks and Seljuks who peopled an empire that still styled itself as Eastern Roman, for all the Rome-based half of the empire had fallen a thousand years before. “So,” Tycho repeated. “What’s your name?”

Melina was fifteen, and her father had owned the only mill in the valley, which had belonged to his father and his father before that. She sobbed when she mentioned her mother. This told Tycho all he needed to know and he let her cry herself out against his shoulder. She talked and he listened for the rest of that day, her chatter broken only when bodily need won over modesty and Melina vanished to the far side of the dome to pee on bare boards. An hour later, to great embarrassment, she returned there to empty her bowels.

We’re animals, Tycho thought. A day into darkness and already she was returning to her spore. Well, she was an animal, though one with a soul if her priests were to be believed. What he was, was an altogether more difficult question.

The second day was stranger. Scratching from beyond the wooden walls woke him from death-like sleep. The roof beyond sounded alive with scuttling and scurrying, scratching and clawing, as whatever was out there fought to find a way in. Melina huddled at his side, hands over her ears.

“Rats,” Tycho told her.

“Domovoi,” she insisted.

Melina did what wounded animals did and curled around her misery and fear, dozing fitfully until real sleep took her. On the third day, things changed.

“Wake,” he told Melina.

“What’s happening?”

“They’re about to open the trapdoor.”

She scrambled to her feet and stood behind him as a claw hammer was forced under nail heads and wood screamed as the nail withdrew. Alonzo stood below, with Roderigo beside him, holding a burning torch.

“You’ve been banished,” Alonzo announced. “All good Venetians are to kill you on sight. The Council have offered five thousand gold ducats for your head. You are stripped of your titles and your name has been struck from the books. The Pope has been asked to excommunicate you.” He handed up a goblet of wine. “You really did it,” he said. “You killed the Mongol bitch.”

Lord Roderigo’s face was unreadable.

Taking the goblet, Tycho stared at the liquid in the bowl. He put it down without tasting. “What are domovoi?” he demanded.

Alonzo turned to a renegade Crucifer behind him. The man muttered something in broken Latin. Roderigo answered first. “He says monsters, like you.”