The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  In the hour before midnight, while those preparing to fight were finding their courage in alcohol, and refuelling their anger with tales of how virtuous Maria had been, or how wicked it was to demand blood money falsely, Tycho reached a chimney on the roof of the Fontego dei Tedeschi north of the Rialto bridge. For company he had a dead pigeon and a live cat, the pigeon having died to keep the cat alive for another few days.

  Around him were a dozen chimneys, twice his height, and topped by fluted stone funnels from which warmth drifted. He’d been drawn here by a noise he’d heard on his first night in the city. A mechanical heartbeat.

  Unthreatening but steady, it drew him to the far edge of the fontego roof, on to icy tiles two floors below and into an alley where frozen mud cut his feet through a covering of snow. The heartbeat was loud as it echoed off the alley walls. Opening a door without thinking, he stepped through. The machine shop was in darkness, except for a candle in the far corner. A question came from behind the candle.

  The voice of the man asking was proud and old. He sounded not at all worried by the arrival of a stranger, where no stranger should be. Tycho knew later what he asked, regretting how he came to know.

  “My machine prints.”

  The book master had the belly of a man who ate well and walked little. His cheeks flapped, as if he’d once been larger, and his eyes were pale and watery. His hair was thick, though, for all it was grey.

  “The only printing press in Serenissima.”

  Tycho looked at him.

  “You don’t understand?”

  He didn’t. Although he would reconstruct the conversation in flashes and slivers, as he fled the building. But that came later.

  “The Chinese invented this. I changed it to harness water power.” The man indicated a moving belt that vanished through a slit in the floor and reappeared a pace later. It turned a wheel, which worked gears that shuttled sheets of paper under a falling square. This was what Tycho had heard outside.

  “The future. That’s what this is. We can print fifty pages of Asia Minor as the tide rises, change the plate and print fifty copies of China as it falls.”

  There was pride in his voice. A pride Tycho was to understand later, when the old man had no further use for it. Having explained what it was in Venetian, and seen how hard Tycho struggled to understand, the old man tried mainland Italian, German, Greek and Latin. Finally he shrugged and reverted to his original choice.

  “Engraved by a Frank, printed on a Chinese press, adapted by a Venetian. Based on the best facts of Portuguese, Venetian and Moorish navigators. I’m hoping Prince Alonzo will buy my first atlas.”

  Next to the press was a trestle holding a title page. A fish, that was what its picture looked like. A fish, with a canal’s northern opening as its mouth, the sweep of the canal, and the southern exit as its gills.

  “San Polo,” the man said, pointing to its head.

  Cannaregio was the spine.

  Dorsoduro, San Marco and Arzanale its belly. The island of San Pietro made its tail. It took Tycho a while to realise he was looking at this new world in which he found himself. And the hope flooded his heart and his face softened.

  “Bjornvin…?”

  Watery eyes examined Tycho. The book master made him repeat the name. Then, turning to the end of an atlas, where a dozen printed lists crossed the page like prison bars, the old man ran one finger down its list of tiny names…

  He shook his head.

  “Bjornvin.”

  “All right, all right…” Pulling down a book so old its cover flaked under his fingers, he ran down a different list, this one handwritten. The third book was no better. The fourth gave an answer.

  “A town in Vineland. It burnt a hundred years ago.”

  The man read the entry, read it again and shook his head. “There’s a record of finding ruins.” Shuffling across to a collection of manuscripts, he unrolled one. “Sir John Mandeville writes of meeting a merchant who saw them. That would be fifty years ago. It had been burnt to the ground.”

  His words meant nothing to Tycho.

  “Bjornvin.”

  The old man sucked his teeth. “Why would you be interested?” He stopped to examine Tycho, suddenly noticing how strange he looked. “Impossible. You’d have to be…? What, eighteen now? Plus a hundred.”

  For the first time he looked worried.

  “Buy yourself food,” he insisted. “Find somewhere to sleep out of the cold.” Digging in his pocket, he found small coins and folded them into Tycho’s hand, jumping back as Tycho hurled his offering to the floor.

  One had been silver.

  As Tycho broke Maitre Thomas’s neck, the old man’s memories flowed into Tycho’s mind. And with them language, a sense of where Venice was, and knowledge of what had just happened, seen from the other side.

  11

  The snow along the fondamenta had the feel of marble polished by the feet of others and was so cold and hard it burnt Tycho’s bare toes.

  He hardly noticed.

  Maître Thomas’s memories filled his head. And the knife he’d grabbed escaping the print shop was forgotten in his hand. He found himself on the edge of a street fight by accident.

  That night in January was the night Tycho met three women who’d change his life forever. If you could count an eleven-year-old, red-haired stregoi as a woman… At eighteen, the Nubian slave counted. So did the fifteen-year-old Giulietta di Millioni, but Tycho met her last and only briefly.

  “No blades…” The voice was outraged.

  A girl black as a moonless night, her braided hair ending in tiny silver thimbles, stood glaring. She had the eyes of a predator and the stare of one too. One hand rested on her hip, the other gripped a frosted tree on a fondamenta edging the canal. Nodding at the knife in Tycho’s hand made her silver-tipped braids dance some more. Blood oozed from above her eye.

  “What?” she said. “Never seen a Nubian before?”

  “No, never.”

  Even though touching a silver-tipped braid would burn him, Tycho lifted his thumb to her eyebrow and touched the blood. A steel grip stopped his thumb from reaching his mouth. “Don’t,” she said.

  Her braids swayed like poisoned weed in the canal, holding him back as her scent drew him in. He could smell wine, garlic and a stink rising from her. Despite her filthy feet, and a dress hacked to the knees, she looked dangerous and elegant. Mostly dangerous.

  How old was she?

  Old enough to be in a street brawl, obviously. Lifting the knife from his fingers she tossed it casually into the canal beside them.

  “You know the law.”

  He did, because Maître Thomas had known it. And the book master’s memories were now his, transferred in the moment he broke the man’s neck. Although many of them had already begun to fade. When Tycho glanced up he found the Nubian watching him, her eyes glittering in the starlight. She thought him Castellani because of his stolen tunic.

  “Which is your parish?”

  All and none. He lived everywhere and nowhere. Out of the way of strangers and the Watch and those who’d hurt him or needed hurting. Probably not the answer she was looking for. “What’s your name?” he asked instead.

  “Amelia,” she said, grinning at his change of subject.

  “And where do you live?”

  “Near here. I’m a lady’s maid. Well, since Lady Desdaio moved in.” The girl didn’t look like a lady’s maid to either of them. Although Tycho only knew what one was because of fragmenting memories.

  “Lady…?”

  “Desdaio, my mistress.”

  “What’s she like?”

  Amelia gave a huge sigh. “Sweet,” she said, “with added honey, and an extra spoonful of sugar. I’d hate her, but that’s impossible.”

  “Sounds hideous.”

  “Should be,” Amelia said. “But she isn’t. Big eyes and big tits. I get scared for her. She’s also a walking mint. Although, obviously enough, men don’t simply want her money
and body…”

  “She’s rich?” Tycho interrupted.

  Amelia rolled her eyes. “Of course she is. She’s old man Bribanzo’s heir. Boxes of jewellery, chests full of coins, endless velvet dresses, bolts of shot silk, paintings…”

  “What else do the men want?”

  “You know what happens to innocence?”

  “It dies?”

  “Someone kills it.”

  “That what happened to you?”

  “Shit,” she said. “What kind of question’s that?” Lifting her face, she grinned at him. Her eyes glittering in the light of a flaming brand fixed to an arch behind him. The pulse of blood in her neck clearly visible. “Kiss me then.”

  He fled her. Outrage following him in shouted insults as he lost himself in a nest of serpentine backstreets, ducking through an underpass to find a wide alley beyond. As he fled, the night sky changed from the red it had suddenly become to a more normal blue-black, the houses lost their glittering edges and the tightness in his gut released slightly.

  He had enough sense to know the anger and his hunger were interchangeable; different ways to describe what soured his mouth when the Nubian girl raised her head to expose her throat.

  Statues, and frescoes and marble inlay.

  The palaces lining the Canalasso were the grandest in the city. The buildings were rich, decorated with carvings and tiny squares of coloured glass. Many palaces painted. The carvings and the varied stones and the paintings like nothing he’d ever seen. In his fractured mind buildings were wood or earth.

  The walls of a great hall, doubled skinned with logs filled with pounded dirt. A turf roof over crude beams. In winter, snow kept warmth in the hall. The snow in Venice was so thin Tycho barely recognised it.

  How could his home be burnt for a hundred years? Bjornvin was there in his memory now. Not perfect, certainly not that, but real and recent.

  After that…?

  He could remember an axe cutting into a ship’s hull. His brief blindness as someone thrust a lamp into his prison. Until the light reached him he hadn’t known how his eyes had changed. And until he threw himself backwards off the little boat he hadn’t realised he moved faster than other people. Everyone here seemed to move clumsily, stumbling through dark alleys, barely seeing what was there.

  At first, he’d wondered what was wrong with them. Who these clumsy people were. Now he had fragments of memory back, and Maître Thomas’s memories too, he was coming to wonder if he was people at all.

  “Who goes there?”

  Tycho fell into the darkness. He could feel it shimmer, and colonnades lighten as the darkness closed around him. Conical steel caps, straw-stuffed jerkins with scales of cheap steel. There were five guards, two of them carried daggers and two had pikes, their sergeant had a war hammer hanging from his belt. All wore boots studded with rivets against the ice underfoot.

  “I saw someone.”

  “Where?” The question was dismissive.

  “Over there,” insisted a youth, pointing to where Tycho stood in the shadows. Their sergeant peered into the darkness.

  “Boss?” one said.

  “Nothing,” he replied. Cuffing the boy across the back of his head, the sergeant said, “Scared of his own shadow.”

  Tycho trailed them around the expanse of a snow-skimmed square, moving silently and unseen behind them, and keeping his steps within the slush their boots churned from the virgin snow. He would have completed the circuit had he not looked up and seen horses.

  Four of them.

  Striking the air with their hooves as they leapt from the balcony of the Basilica San Marco. He knew the horses instantly. Because Maître Thomas had known them. How could he not? Looted from Byzantium, who stole them from Athens, where they’d decorated the original Hippodrome. He’d never seen a horse close to.

  Thanking the masons who carved the basilica’s façade, Tycho used one foothold after another to scale a column and roll himself on to the balcony’s balustrade. Behind him he left stone angels with muddy toe prints on their heads. The four bronze horses he expected. The red-haired child sat beneath he didn’t.

  Looking up, she grinned.

  “Well,” she said. “What a surprise.”

  The child huddled over a fire, which flickered in the night wind. Its flames were trapped in her cupped hands and burnt nothing, unless it was the empty air between them.

  Her hair was greasy, her green eyes unreadable as he hesitated, half over the balustrade, one foot still on the halo of a stone angel. “Impressive, aren’t they?” She patted a stallion’s leg. “Stolen from Greece by the Romans, stolen from Rome by Romanised Greeks, stolen from them by us…”

  “Us?” Tycho asked.

  “Well, them really.” The girl looked at him, hanging half on and half off the balcony, and raised her eyebrows. “Afraid of witches?”

  When Tycho scowled, her grin widened. So he rolled himself over the balustrade wishing he’d kept the printer’s knife.

  “Strange city,” she said. “Strange hungers you didn’t know you had… You’re right to be scared. I don’t blame you.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  “Of course you’re not.”

  Closing her hands to quench the flame, she pulled a scrap of bread from her smock, revealing ribs like twigs as her smock fell open. Eleven, he thought, maybe twelve if starved. “Take, eat,” she said, mockingly. “Or is it a different kind of salvation you’re after?”

  He grabbed the bread, stuffing it into his mouth. Its crust was old leather, the middle sawdust. It tasted of ashes and coal.

  She laughed. “Apparently so.”

  Climbing to her feet, the girl scooped slush from the balcony floor and offered him that instead. He drank from her hands, wondering why. The slush was fresh, if gritty, but it didn’t change the taste in his mouth.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “Nor should you.”

  She laughed. “You should go home.”

  Tycho’s eyes filled with snow. Snow and fire and ashes.

  “Ahh,” she said. “You remember that much.” She paused, and for the first time looked uncertain. “Alexa thinks you drowned. Should I tell her you didn’t?”

  He didn’t know the answer. But then he didn’t really understand her question. Or how she’d moved from offering him water to standing there. All he knew was she moved as swiftly as he did. Maybe sunlight hurt her too.

  “I’ve tamed death walkers.” Her words were bitter. “Seljuk mages, krieghund even. A skill much needed last autumn, I gather. But you…” Without hesitating, she bit her wrist deep enough to draw blood. Then she took a deep breath and held it out to him.

  “Bind yourself.”

  The world turned red.

  Bronze horses leapt through scarlet mist. Hunger hollowed out his guts, his throat tightened at the taste of blood flowing from broken gums where his dog teeth lengthened. As his senses heightened, Tycho rocked back on his heels. Stunned by the onslaught of what he suddenly saw, heard and smelt.

  “You stop when I tell you. Or else.”

  Tycho’s intuition said she doubted she could deliver on that threat. A hundred thousand rivers of blood flowed beneath her filthy skin and he could sense them all, for a second they were all he could see of her.

  Grabbing her arm, he suckled at her wrist. A second later, he was spitting at the floor, scrubbing his lips with his hand. Curdled milk barely described the taste of her blood. Nothing he’d eaten came close. The red mist was gone, swept away by shock, and the night was dark around him. He felt like crying.

  The girl sighed.

  Blood ceased to well as she licked her wrist, scabs closing over bite marks. She dipped her chunk of stale bread into a puddle and tore half free, offering it to him. “Sometimes one magic doesn’t like another.”

  Tycho nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

  He was still chewing the last of the bread when she walked to the edge of the balcony, and sta
red over the darkened expanse of Piazza San Marco. “Dawn soon,” she said. “We should both go.”

  “Tell me your name.”

  She grinned. “I offer you my blood. You want my name as well? It’s A’rial, I’m Alexa’s stregoi. Her pet witch.”

  Before he could answer A’rial was gone.

  12

  Patting his stallion’s neck, Tycho slid from its bronze back to stand at the balcony’s edge, with the wind in his face. Below him, a chair waited, its link men shuffling against the cold. In the distance, the Watch still scuffed their way round the piazza, while cutpurses slunk behind its colonnades, hidden by black cloaks and masks.

  Out on the lagoon half-furled sails snapped in the wind. Five men approached the piazzetta in a low, lean gondolino, saw the Watch and changed their minds. The slight splash of their retreat muted by falling snow.

  Tycho listened harder.

  Concentrating, he caught a sound from within the basilica itself. A young woman crying, and, tied to her sobs, a scent so compelling it hooked him through the guts. He’d turned towards her before he realised. Desperate to make his way inside the building.

  Ducking under a lintel, he found a locked door beyond. The door was solid and the lock firm. So, without thinking, he slid his fingers under the door and lifted it off its hinges. Leaving it against a wall, he entered an attic beyond.

  Stones stairs were blocked by a wrought-iron gate, with a better lock and hinges. So he took a corridor that led to an internal balcony high above the basilica floor. A rat paused in its scavenging, only to resume when he moved on.

  The balcony stank of dust, damp wood and sweet smoke from a censer hanging over the darkened nave. Below it, mosaics swirled away in patterns that mimicked a Persian carpet, unless it was the other way round.

  Christ, his mother and apostles whose names Tycho struggled to place watched from the domed ceiling. Their faces stern, their noses aquiline and their resemblance to long dead Roman emperors unmistakable. Every one of them stared at a girl kneeling below.