The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

7





Alexa’s party had won and Alonzo was going into exile. Duke Marco appeared less of an idiot every day, the Byzantine navy that blocked the lagoon, and the German army that had camped on its edge, had left . . . Tycho doubted Frederick’s army would have a good time of it in the snows. He didn’t envy the Byzantine fleet the storms that would buffet the last of their journey. But those were not his problems.

I have the girl, I have the title, I have the gold . . . Half the nobles in the city envy me. The others want me dead so they can take my place. Why had tightness gripped his chest the moment he entered the palace? Why this dread as he climbed the marble stairs to the Millioni chambers, passing sour-faced dukes staring from paintings, and tapestries exaggerating how great their victories had been? Tycho knew something was wrong the moment he reached the landing.

His jaw ached so fiercely the pain stopped him dead.

As walls and windows, tapestries and a guard outside Leo’s nursery fell into sharp focus, his dog teeth threatened to descend and Tycho recognised the smell of Millioni blood tainted with shit and the smell of fear. The guard stepped back as Tycho hurtled towards him.

“My lord . . .”

Leo’s nursery was locked.

“There’s a new woman tonight, my lord. I heard her lock the door behind her. Perhaps she’s embarrassed about feeding?”

“Leo’s weaned.” Anyway, it wasn’t a wet nurse’s job to be embarrassed about breastfeeding a baby; it was what she did, fed a child and kept it safe. “Stand back,” Tycho ordered. Twisting, he side-kicked the lock.

By the time a second guard came running the door hung on one hinge, Tycho having aimed for a point behind it. The stink of Millioni blood was overwhelming. At least, it was to him. “Get Duchess Alexa . . .”

The new guard froze. Tycho might be noble, Lady Giulietta’s lover and rumoured to have powers, but Alexa was sole Regent now Alonzo had sailed. She couldn’t simply be sent for.

“She’ll have your head if you don’t.” Yes, thought that would convince you. The man ran and the other guard tried to look past Tycho into the blood-splattered room beyond. “Stay back and stay out.”

“My lord . . .”

“This is blackest magic.”

The guard instantly averted his eyes.

Taking a deep breath, Tycho forced himself inside. Spilt blood, a discarded knife, open shutters to a window with the glass cut out, a grappling iron and a rope still hanging from the sill beyond. A single glance was all it took to know the world had changed. Tonight’s nurse had been ripped open and her guts bulged in coils through the edges of the cut. Leo’s cradle lay overturned on a carpet that was dark and sticky with blood. Not that. Anything but that.

Tycho upturned the cradle to reveal the dead child beneath.

Very small, very precious, and very broken. Sliced cloth and the pucker of a wound showed where Leo had been stabbed in the heart. Other wounds disfigured the tiny chest. His mouth was open in a silent cry. Tycho felt sick at the sight, raw with grief and riven with unfitting hunger.

Hunger? The thought brought him up short.

The child at his feet was dead, and yet hunger tightened his throat so viciously his teeth threatened to descend. One of them was still alive. Swinging round, Tycho dropped to a crouch beside the nurse. She was young, dark-skinned and on the very edge of death. “Look at me,” he ordered.

Dark eyes opened and struggled to focus.

At the far end of the corridor halberds crashed as guards came to attention. The nurse tried to speak but her throat was ruined. A flat-handed strike had been used to silence her. He could read the mute desperation in the woman’s eyes. She was desperate to say something. He could feed, of course, take her memories and use what he learnt to hunt down whoever did this. Because he would hunt them down. The cold fury where his heart should be guaranteed it.

Raising his head, Tycho let dog teeth descend, blood filling his throat from where they cut his gums, but he was too late. He felt rather than heard Alexa behind him. “Leo’s dead?” she demanded.

Tycho knew he looked strange, crouched over the nurse, his hand over his mouth as if to stop himself vomiting. Alexa had come alone.

“Tell me.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“I will crucify him between the pillars. I will cut down his bloody olives, destroy his precious villa and sew his land with salt. His name will be cut from public plaques and his portraits burnt.”

“Who, my lady?”

“Alonzo. Who else?” The duchess turned so swiftly Tycho had only just looked round when her dagger stabbed the original guard under his chin and pierced his brain. He tottered, dead without knowing it, staggered backwards as she withdrew her blade. Contemptuously, she tumbled his body into the room.

“My lady,” Tycho protested.

“You disagree with my actions?”

The guard’s smile had been easy and his manner relaxed when Tycho first arrived. Too relaxed? Did Tycho now imagine an uncertainly around the eyes? A slight desperation? “We could have questioned him.”

“And learnt what?” Alexa’s voice was brutal.

“Whatever he knew, my lady . . .”

“Others will give us that information. Where is my niece?”

“Lighting candles for her mother.”

Duchess Alexa froze, and Tycho wondered if even here, even now, so many years after Lady Zoë’s murder, the woman who brought up Lady Giulietta could be jealous of the mother who’d never age, never be cross, never be anything other than perfect in her daughter’s eyes. “I’ll have guards detain her,” Alexa said.

“She’ll want to see Leo.”

“You’d show her this?” Alexa gestured at the window, the nurse bled out on the carpet, the cradle Tycho had righted. Alexa saved Leo’s blood-soaked body until last.

“She has a . . .”

“. . . right to be driven mad with grief?”

“My lady.”

“I lost a child,” Alexa said. “My first son. He died in his cot and I was the one who found him.” It was obvious from the flatness of her voice she stood in that room, not here in the doorway of this. “That was hard enough . . .” Nodding at the bloody scene, “This is more than even I could have borne.”

“I’ll go to her . . .”

“No. You have other work to do.”

Alexa will look after her. Walking away from Giulietta’s scream was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Not even falling through the circle of flames in Bjornvin or waking, chained naked to the bulkhead of a ship in the Venetian lagoon, with silver shackles burning his skin, came close.

I must keep walking.

In that second he was Giulietta and she him. The sound of her anguish echoed inside his head long after it stopped in the hall. He and Giulietta were tied in a way impossible to describe. In a way he wondered if Giulietta even understood. When the screaming was replaced by silence he knew she’d fainted, been drugged or magicked by Alexa into some false peace. By then he was striding towards Misericordia on the city’s northern shore . . .

The area was well named. A fierce wind blew into his face and the tramped earth beneath his feet felt slick with compacted snow. Ice crust cracked as he walked through street-wide puddles, and his boots were soaked and his feet numb by the time he reached a square of dark water. A monastery stood on the inlet’s far side, its walls black with soot from nearby foundries, which burnt all night with a sombre glow, their fires and furnaces never being allowed to cool. The guard Alexa killed had lived in a narrow tenement between the monastery’s wall and the side of a foundry. His wife, Francesca, lived there still.

Francesca was Leo’s usual nurse, and, between her falling sick and a new nurse arriving, she’d arranged for Leo to be looked after by the wife of one of the cooks. That Francesca then called a replacement from the mainland worried Alexa. In a city of a hundred thousand, twenty-five out of every thousand died each year and fifty were born; fifteen of which lost their mothers in birth, and twenty-five died within the year . . . The point was that in a city where five thousand gave birth annually there was no shortage of women able to act as wet nurses, nurses and childminders. So why summon one from the mainland?

Letting himself in through the tenement door nobody had bothered to lock, Tycho headed through a squalid hall greasy with the stink of cheap food and poverty, two smells he remembered well, and headed for a door at the back.

“Riccardo?” The voice sounded relieved.

Tycho tapped again. On the door’s far side, Francesca lifted a handle and slid the bolt back in its hoops. She’d been waiting anxiously for her man to return, and, since there’d been no sound of her crossing the room, she must have been waiting on the far side of the door. Tycho felt sick at what that told him. And even sicker at what he would do. Having shot the bolt, she began to open the door.

Tycho was inside before she realised, his hand over her mouth as he positioned himself behind her. At most, she’d have seen a white-clad figure flow ghostlike through the half-darkness. Blowing out the cheap candle she clutched, he felt bitter smoke fill his nostrils. When she stopped struggling, he took his hand from her mouth. “You know why I’m here.”

“Riccardo?”

“Is dead.”

“No . . .”

“You know it’s true.”

She did, too. It was in the slump of her shoulders and sag of her body. For a moment she tensed, glancing longingly at the door, then hope leached from her. “Will they torture me first?”

Had she been able to write she could have made no clearer confession. Although Tycho was uncertain what she confessed to. That she would help murder the baby she nursed felt wrong. “It will be a quick death.”

“Thank you . . .”

Such resignation. “How could you agree?”

Francesca opened her mouth and shut it. She had typically Venetian features, wide-cheeked and dark-eyed, with a strong nose. In another life the woman might have been pretty; in this she was cheaply dressed and heavy dugged from years of giving milk to other people’s children. Her husband had died quickly. He had no way of knowing his wife would be offered that luxury and had risked her life anyway. “You didn’t think you’d be discovered?”

“My husband was always Prince Alonzo’s man.”

So Alexa had been right. “But you fell ill because your husband told you to? And he changed his shift at Alonzo’s orders?”

She shrugged. “My man came and went.”

And how would I know which guard shift he pulled? Tycho could read the question in the flatness of her tone. He had a question of his own. “You knew Prince Leo was to be murdered?”

“What?”

“Stabbed through the heart,” Tycho said. “Your replacement gutted. The nursery looks like an abattoir and stinks like a mortuary. I found the child you fed lying dead beneath his upturned cot.”

Twisting free, she put her hands over her ears, refusing to hear any more.

“No,” she whispered. “No, no.”

Pulling her hands away, Tycho said. “That wasn’t meant to happen?”

“Of course not.” Francesca shook her head fiercely. “Prince Alonzo wanted the child with him so that Mongol bitch couldn’t corrupt the boy. That’s what my husband told me. The Regent wanted to keep Leo safe . . . He’s really dead?”

“I saw the body.”

“What will happen to my child?”

A slaughter for a slaughter? There were undoubtedly cities and rulers who worked like this. Alexa was more complex and her responses less simple. “He will be looked after. A new family will be found.”

It was a half-truth. Leo’s body would be buried quietly. The slaughtered nurse would simply disappear. A new room would become Leo’s nursery and a new nurse found for the new Leo, who would remain Giulietta’s child for as long as it took Alexa to decide what should be done.

“Where is your child?”

“Sleeping.” Francesca indicated the darkness behind.

Wooden internal walls, tar paper across the windows, a cheap pine table and two stools. A pile of hay in one corner for a goat brought in from a tiny yard outside. The building would burn readily enough.

“He will be safe,” Tycho promised.

“And me . . .?

She was not the cause, Tycho reminded himself. Reaching up, he put his hand to her cheek and turned her face until she faced him. “Look into my eyes,” he said. “Look into my eyes and don’t look away.” Her pupils grew huge and fell out of focus. Her eyelids fluttered as she reached the edge of sleep and he felt her body begin to slump. She would have fallen but he caught her, his dog teeth descending as he bit into the nape of her neck.

As always, the world fell into sharp focus. Had he gone outside the sky would have been blood-red, the stars hard and distant worlds he could freeze into his memory in a single glance. And he would have seen the stars, because they would have been points of heat through the cold of the clouds.

He was Fallen. The reality of that fact he only remembered now. At other times, he knew it in an abstract way. Here and now, with blood in his throat and flames flaring from him in colours the human eye couldn’t capture he understood what it meant. This world was not his world. These people were not his people. Except for him, he doubted his people still existed; although he’d made – by simple accident of blood exchanged – one other who acted like him and had his speed and hungers. Dismissing Rosalyn from his memories, Tycho concentrated on Francesca.

It was a small life but dear.

A childhood on the edge of the Arzanale, with her father a ropemaker and her mother a servant to Lord Roderigo’s father. A marriage at thirteen to a man who hardly ever beat her and used brothels only rarely. She had three children still living. A daughter of fourteen, already with child, a twelve-year-old boy apprenticed to the Rope Walk, and the infant still sleeping. Those born in the years between were dead of hunger, illness or bad luck. Her life was familiar in shape. A thousand women within a mile of where she lived would recognise it.

Tycho found no taste of treason.

There was little sense she’d lied to him and the lies she told herself were no more significant than those she told her husband, sins of omission at the most. A small life – now lost through someone else’s greed. Lowering her to the ground, Tycho put his fingers to her throat and felt nothing. She’d died because her man betrayed her and a man sent by Alexa killed her. It was a small debt and a high return, and he doubted if what had just happened was fair or even just.

The tenement burnt easily. A jug of the cheapest fish oil tipped on to the straw let him start the flames, and the stool and battered table he stood over the straw caught soon enough. Take the child, Alexa said. On his way out, Francesca’s infant in his arms, Tycho stood in the hall of the tenement and shouted, Fire . . . The one word guaranteed to have Venetians tumbling from their beds.