The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  “And the children?”

  “They’re dead already. Leave them.”

  “I can’t… We can’t…” She plucked at his sleeve. “Please.”

  “You want them saved?”

  “Yes,” she said, grateful. Thinking he’d changed his mind.

  “Then let them be. They stand a better chance of living if they hide now. Not much, admittedly. But staying with you will certainly get them killed.”

  Lady Giulietta looked sick.

  “It’s you our enemies want. Well, it is now.”

  Taking a stiletto from his hip, he reversed it fluidly, offering her its handle over the edge of his forearm. Sweet Lord, she thought. He’s serious. From the knot in her guts, her body was ahead of her brain. She was afraid the knot would let go and she’d disgrace herself in front of the old man.

  “Find a tanner’s pit,” Atilo snapped at Josh’s group. “Shouldn’t be hard round here. Squat in it up to your necks. Don’t move. Keep silent until morning.”

  “The demons hate water?”

  “They hunt by smell. You stink of piss already. Find a tanner’s pit and you might get lucky.” Atilo turned without further thought. They were gone already as far as he was concerned.

  “Stay close,” he told Giulietta.

  Atilo used a sottoportego, an underpass beneath a tenement building, to reach a tiny square. At its far edge, the square was prevented from crumbling into a narrow canal by oak stakes along its bank. Slicing a rope to a shabby gondola, Atilo kicked it away from the side to make a makeshift bridge. Once Lady Giulietta was over, he cut the remaining rope and jumped for safety as the boat drifted away.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I have a house,” he said.

  “Ca’ il Mauros?” Her heart sank. To reach there from here, they’d need to cross the Grand Canal by gondola twice, or walk round it, which would double the distance and take them down one of the most dangerous streets in Venice.

  “A different house,” he told her.

  When he reached for her hand, it was not to comfort her, but to grip her wrist and start dragging. He wanted her to walk faster.

  “Atilo, you’re…” Giulietta shut her mouth. The old man was trying to save her. He was furious, in a way she’d never seen, his face a battle mask, his eyes hard in the darkness.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He stopped, and Giulietta thought… For a second, she thought he’d forget himself and slap her. Then there was no time to think more of that, because a grotesque figure watched them from a square ahead.

  “This way.”

  A yank on her wrist hurled her towards an alley. Only that way out of the new square was blocked as well. As were the other two exits.

  “Kill yourself,” Atilo said.

  Giulietta gaped at him.

  “Not now, you little fool. If I’m dead, and they’re dead…” He pointed to silhouettes appearing in the shadows. Some stood near the grotesques who blocked the exits, others stood on rooftops or balconies. “Don’t let yourself be taken.”

  “They’ll rape me?”

  “You can survive that. What the Wolf Brothers do you don’t survive. Although you might be more use to them alive and unharmed. Which means you must definitely kill yourself.”

  “Self-murder is a sin.”

  “Letting yourself be captured is a worse one.”

  “To God?”

  “To Venice. Which is what matters.”

  Serenissima, the name poets gave to the Serene Republic of Venice, was an inaccurate term. Since the city was neither serene nor, these days, a republic.

  In Atilo’s opinion, it was most like a bubbling pot into which some celestial threw endless grains of rice. And though each morning began with the bodies of beggars against walls, new born infants in back canals, paupers dumped to avoid the inconvenience of burying them—those unwanted, even by the unwanted—the city remained as crowded, and as packed, and as expensive, as he remembered it ever having been.

  In summer the poor slept on roofs, on balconies or in the open air. When winter came, they crowded squalid tenements. They shat, copulated, fought and quarrelled in public, seen by other adults as well as by their own children. The stairwells of the tenements had a permanent odour of poverty. Unwashed, unloved, stinking of sewage, and a greasy misery that oiled the skin until it looked and smelt like wet leather.

  A dozen scholars had drawn maps of Venice. Including a Chinese cartographer sent by the Great Khan, who’d heard of this capital with canals where roads should be and wanted to know how much of it was true. None of the maps were accurate, however, and half the streets had more than one name anyway.

  Running through what he thought of Venice, Atilo il Mauros wondered, in retrospect, why he felt reluctant to leave it and the life he’d made here. Was it simply that this was not the way he’d intended to die? In a squalid campo, near a ramshackle church, because every campo had one of those. Although not usually this run-down. A church, a broken wellhead, ruined brick houses…

  He’d hoped to die in his bed years from now.

  His wife, beautifully stricken, backlit by a gentle autumn sun; a boy at the bed’s foot, staring sorrowfully. To have this, of course, he’d need a wife. A wife, a son and heir, maybe a couple of daughters, if they weren’t too much trouble.

  After the siege of Tunis, Duke Marco III had offered him a deal. The duke would spare the city and Atilo would serve Venice as Admiral. If Atilo refused, every man, woman and child in the North African city would be slaughtered; including Atilo’s own family. The great pirate of the Barbary Coast could turn traitor to those he loved and save them, or stay loyal and condemn them to death.

  Bastard, Atilo thought with admiration.

  Even now, decades later, he could remember his awe at the brutality of Marco’s offer. In a single afternoon Atilo uttered the words that divorced his wife, renounced his children, converted his religion and bound him to Venice for life.

  In taking the title of Lord Admiral of the Middle Sea, he had saved those who would hate him for the rest of their lives. In public, he’d been Marco III’s adviser. In private he’d been the man’s chief assassin. The enemy, who became his master, ended as his friend. Atilo would die for that man’s niece.

  This was the biggest gathering of Wolf Brothers in Atilo’s lifetime—and he was shocked to discover so many in his city. Well, the city Atilo he’d come to love. Atilo knew what this battle meant. To fight krieghund in the open like this would destroy the Assassini, quite possibly leave him without an heir. Destroying the Assassini would leave Venice without protection.

  Was her life worth that much?

  He knew the girl behind him had caught the moment he wanted to slap her. Fifteen-year-old princesses were not meant to run away, unhappily betrothed or not. They were not meant to be able to run away. A savage whipping would await her if she lived; assuming Atilo told the truth about her flight. Alonzo would see to the whipping even if her aunt objected. For a woman so fond of poisoning her enemies Alexa could be very forgiving where her niece was concerned.

  “My lord…”

  A black-clad man appeared out of the darkness, sketched a quick bow and instinctively checked what weapons his chief was carrying. He relaxed slightly when he saw the little crossbow.

  “Silver-tipped, my lord?”

  “Obviously.”

  The man glanced at Giulietta, his eyes widening when he realised she carried Atilo’s dagger.

  “She has her orders,” Atilo said. “Yours are to die protecting her.”

  There were twenty-one in the Scuola di Assassini, including Atilo. In the early days he’d given his followers Greek letters as names, but he drew his apprentices from the poorest levels of the city and many had trouble with their own alphabet. These days he used numbers instead.

  The middle-aged man in front of him was No. 3.

  No. 2 was in prison in Cyprus on charges that couldn’t be proved; he would be released
or simply disappear. Knowing Janus it would be the latter. No. 4 was in Vienna to kill Emperor Sigismund. A task he would probably fail. No. 7 guarded their headquarters. No. 13 was in Constantinople. And No. 17 was in Paris trying to poison a Valois princeling. In theory, only one of them needed to survive to ensure the scuola, the Scuola di Assassini, continued unbroken.

  Sixteen Assassini against six enemies.

  With those odds victory should be certain. But Atilo knew what was out there: the emperor’s krieghund. His blades would die in reverse order. The most junior trying to exhaust the beasts so their seniors had a chance of success. Atilo was arbiter of what success entailed. Tonight it meant keeping Lady Giulietta out of enemy hands. “Go die,” he ordered his deputy.

  The man’s grin disappeared into the night.

  “Numerical,” Atilo heard him shout, and hell opened as a snarling, silver-furred beast stalked into the square, leaving a screaming, vaguely man-shaped lump of meat in an alley mouth behind.

  “What is it?” Giulietta asked, far too loudly.

  “Krieghund,” Atilo snapped. “Speak again and I’ll gag you.” Sighting his crossbow, he fired. But the beast swatted aside the silver bolt and turned on an Assassino approaching from its blind side. The kill was quick and brutal. A claw caught the side of the boy’s skull, dragging him closer. A bite to the neck half removed his head.

  “I thought they were a myth,” Giulietta whispered, then clapped her hand over her mouth and backed away from Atilo.

  The Moor grinned sourly. She was learning. Give him the girl for a few months and he’d give her aunt and uncle something worth keeping, and not just keeping alive. But they didn’t want something to keep. They wanted something unbroken they could trade.

  In a miracle of luck and poor judgement the third most junior Assassino hurled himself at the creature in front of him, ducked under a claw and managed to stab his sword into the beast’s side before the krieghund struck. The young man died with his neck broken and his throat spraying blood.

  “Kill the beast,” Giulietta begged.

  “I don’t have arrows to waste.” Sweeping his gaze over the small, dark square, Atilo concluded fifty people must be watching from behind shutters. Houses this poor lacked glass. So they could hear as well.

  None would help. Why would they?

  “Look,” he told her, pointing at the krieghund on its knees. As she looked, the beast began to change, its face flattening and its shoulders becoming narrower. Giulietta took a second to understand what she was seeing. A wolfthing becoming a man, who stopped howling and started trying to shovel loops of gut back into his gaping stomach.

  “Now we kill him.”

  Out of the darkness came an Assassino, his sword already drawn back to take the dying man’s head. Blood pumped in a fountain and fell like rain. The battle was ferocious after that. Beasts and men hacking at each other. And then men lay dead in the dirt. Most in riveted mail, a few naked.

  “My lord…”

  Giulietta was finding her nerve, addressing him politely now. She still looked pale in the moonlight. They all looked pale to him. At least she’d stopped shivering and now held his dagger more confidently. There was an old-fashioned Millioni princess in there somewhere.

  “They’re advancing…”

  “I know,” he said, raising his bow.

  The officer who took orders originally glanced over, bowing slightly in reply to Atilo’s nod, to acknowledge whatever passed between them. He signalled to those of the Assassini who remained and they attacked as one.

  The last stages of the fight were brief and brutal.

  Swords slashing, daggers sliding under ribs, blood spraying. The stink was the stink of the abattoir; of shit and blood and open guts. The men died well, but they died, and, in the end, most corpses were clothed, a handful were naked and one furred half-corpse lurched towards Atilo, a dagger jutting from its ribs.

  “Kill it,” Giulietta begged.

  Sighting his crossbow, Atilo fired for the creature’s throat.

  The beast staggered, but kept coming. Straight into a second arrow. Hooking back his string, Atilo slotted a third, and would have fired had the krieghund not slashed the bow from his hand.

  Never thought I’d die like this.

  The thought came and went. There were worse ways to go than facing a creature from hell. But he had Marco III’s niece behind him and he couldn’t just… “Don’t,” he shouted. He was too late, however.

  Stepping out from behind him, Giulietta rammed her stiletto into the krieghund’s side, twisting hard. She went down when the creature cracked its elbow into her head. It was stooping for the kill, when a piece of night sky detached itself, dropping in a crackle of old leather and dry clicks. Atilo took the opening. Stabbing a throwing knife into the beast’s heart.

  “Alexa…?”

  The square of leather bumped into ground-floor shutters, crawled between rusting bars and hung itself upside down. Wings folding to a fraction of their previous size as golden eyes glared from a face disgusted with the world.

  “Giulietta’s still alive?”

  Kneeling, Atilo touched his fingers to the girl’s throat. “Yes, my lady.”

  “Good. We’ll need her now more than ever.” The bat through which Giulietta’s aunt had watched the battle turned its attention to the krieghund’s death agony. “You’ve upset him.” The words were thin. A whisper of wind forced from a throat not made for speech.

  “He’s dying.”

  “Not him, fool. His master. Leopold will try stealing her again.”

  Atilo considered pointing out that the German prince hadn’t stolen her this time. Lady Giulietta had stolen herself.

  “Then we hunt Leopold down and kill him.”

  “He has protection,” whispered the bat. “He will be more cautious now. He will move more carefully. And he will rebuild his Wolf Brothers. And then all this will start again. Slaughtered children and the Night Watch too scared to do their job. Until we grow tired and beg for the truce he keeps offering us.”

  “This is our city.”

  “Yes,” said the bat. “But he’s the German emperor’s bastard.”

  The second time someone didn’t come when he knocked, Atilo kicked the door off its hinges and entered with a throwing dagger in his hand.

  “Boil water,” he ordered. “And fetch me thread.”

  A combination of the blade he carried, his air of command and his absolute certainty he would be obeyed was enough to make the householder put down an iron bar, bow low and order his wife into the kitchen at the back.

  “Who sleeps above?” Atilo pointed over his head.

  “My daughter…”

  “Bring her down.”

  “My lord.”

  Atilo caught fear in his voice. “I don’t want your damn daughter,” he said brusquely. “I want her bed, and privacy. Leave hot water, a needle and thread outside her door.”

  “Thread, sir?”

  The Moor sighed. “Find a horsehair, boil it in the water, and the needle while you’re at it. Knock when they’re ready.” Disappearing into the night, he returned carrying Giulietta, her legs hanging over his arms, her head thrown back to reveal blood in her hair.

  “You know who I am?”

  The man, the woman and their newly arrived daughter shook their heads. The daughter was about twelve, wrapped in a blanket, and flinched when he turned his attention to her. “Did you see the battle?”

  “No one here saw anything, my lord.”

  “Right answer,” said Atilo, pushing past towards the stairs.

  3

  New Year 1407

  In the days then weeks and finally months that followed that autumn’s pitched battle between the Assassini and the Wolf Brothers—a battle known only to a few—plans went forward for the marriage of Lady Giulietta to Janus, King of Cyprus.

  As the year dragged towards its end and another was born, on 25 December, the same day as the Christian Lord, Atilo il
Mauros—who wasn’t quite sure which god he acknowledged—licked his wounds and wondered how to keep the destruction of his Assassini secret.

  The girl they’d died protecting simply waited to meet her new husband. Although she should have realised he wouldn’t come himself. Instead, he sent an Englishman, Sir Richard Glanville, as his envoy.

  Arriving in mid-December, the envoy spent Christmas at the ducal palace, while terms were negotiated and arrangements made for Lady Giulietta’s departure. When these were agreed, Sir Richard celebrated by offering a hundred gold coins as the prize for a gondola race. A foreign noble’s traditional way of ingratiating himself with the Venetian public.

  However, his generosity failed to impress Lady Giulietta, who resented having to leave her warm quarters for the chill wind of a winter afternoon, and made little attempt to hide it. She had no idea that Monday 3 January would change her life. As far as she was concerned, it was the day sleet frizzed her hair as she turned out to watch the end of another stupid race.

  “They say Crucifers prefer men.”

  Sir Richard’s simple breastplate was half hidden by the cloak of his order. His only jewellery was a ring marrying him to his priory. By contrast, the captain of Giulietta’s escort wore red hose, scarlet shoes and a brocade doublet short enough to show his codpiece. Both men were watching a merchant’s wife.

  “My lady. Are you sure about that?”

  “Eleanor…” Giulietta started to reprimand her lady-in-waiting and then shrugged. “Perhaps Sir Richard’s the exception.”

  “Perhaps the rumour is wrong.”

  “You like him!”

  “My lady.”

  “You do!”

  Eleanor was thirteen and Giulietta’s cousin. She had the dark eyes, black hair and olive skin of those who mix northern blood with blood from the south. She was loyal but quite capable of answering back. “He’s a White Crucifer.”

  “So?” Giulietta demanded.

  “Crucifers are celibate.”

  “Supposedly.”

  “What do you think they’re discussing?” Eleanor asked, trying to change the subject. Although all that happened was that Giulietta’s scowl deepened.