The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Spinning round Atilo, Tycho stopped in front of Josh.

  “I had no choice,” Josh’s voice was desperate. “He made me.”

  And Bjornvin made me, Tycho thought; and look what it made me into. Grabbing the back of Josh’s head, he put his other hand to Josh’s chin and twisted savagely. A sudden shit stink rose from his falling body.

  “Impressive,” Atilo said.

  Tycho had the old man, his other hand reaching for his neck when Roderigo threw. Dodging cost Tycho his kill and almost his life. Because Atilo jabbed at Tycho’s throat. If he hadn’t ducked fast enough for the blow to pass through air he’d be dead.

  “You’re enjoying this,” Atilo growled. “Aren’t you?”

  Someone was.

  Tycho just wasn’t sure it was him.

  He had the sottoportego behind him now. Atilo still holding a dagger. Roderigo undecided. Temujin climbing to his feet. Of the other three players, Josh was dead, Pietro standing petrified in a puddle of his own piss, and Rosalyn…

  Moving.

  “She dies,” the old man said. “If you don’t surrender.”

  How had the old man identified her as his weakness? Was it even true…? Atilo looked cool now, almost amused as Temujin notched an arrow to his bow and aimed at the girl on the ground.

  “All it takes is my order.”

  What should Tycho do? Let her be killed? Let himself be captured? The triumph in the old man’s eyes decided him. Grabbing Atilo’s wrist, not to snap, but to freeze his dagger and put the old man in the way of Temujin’s bow, Tycho brought their foreheads so close he and Atilo touched.

  Kill Rosalyn, he thought. And I flay your woman.

  Shock and fear. The last quickly brought under control. Unease that Tycho might actually harm the soft-faced girl he’d sensed earlier. The one the old man had yet to bed. The inside of Atilo’s mind was a charnel house of whispering secrets. Bat’s wings and lion’s faces. A thousand corpses silhouetted in almost military neatness against a horizon that went back years.

  And three girls. Two dead, Tycho knew immediately.

  The other waiting at home, not knowing why he wouldn’t come to her. Didn’t simply marry her and take her to his bed as she expected the man who loved her to do.

  Ask the Mongol. He’s seen me do it already.

  The wind was in his face, the city’s scents intense and cloying, disgusting and exhilarating at the same time. Someone shouted in an attic below, but he was gone before they could open their shutters. A shadow among shadows, faster than thin clouds scudding across a night sky.

  He leapt without looking; laughing as he dropped two floors and rolled to his feet, his sinews stretching with the shock. His fever was gone, unless it was simply lost beneath his exhilaration. Jumping another canal, he landed at ground level, looked around him and decided he preferred the roofs. So he scrabbled the wall of a palace, leapt an alley and climbed higher. Until he stood on the very top of a bronze cupola, with Venice spread below him and an unclaimed night ahead.

  Atilo would come looking.

  As would Roderigo and his Mongol sergeant. They would not forget and they would not forgive. He held their secrets, and knew their failures. Maybe he should be worried. But worried about what? He was here, with the night creatures. They were down there in the dirt.

  28

  Everyone in the palace slept except the night guard, and those in beds not belonging to them, who’d creep back to the stillness and silence of pretend slumber before next morning. Alexa was alone, her bed unoccupied behind her. She was less cross than Atilo expected about being woken. Maybe it was the fact he couldn’t stop his hands shaking.

  “So, did you find him?”

  “We did, my lady.”

  Duchess Alexa put down her tea, pushing the tiny porcelain cup away from her. Sitting back, she said. “I’m not going to like this, am I?”

  “We lost him.”

  “You woke me to tell me this?” Amusement lightened her voice, as if the guard’s shock, and her lady-in-waiting’s outrage at his arrival, requesting an audience, was an elegant joke.

  “It’s the nature of our loss.”

  “The nature of our loss.” She smiled. “You would have made a poet. They say the Maghreb is a land of poets. Of fountains and palaces, stark mountains and lush orange groves…”

  “And beggars,” said Atilo. “Braggarts, brothers who kiss publicly and hate in private. Much like everywhere else. Except,” he hesitated. “Maybe more beautiful.”

  “Why leave?”

  “I had no choice.” Atilo waited for her to nod before realising she didn’t know his early history. “I always assumed you…”

  “My husband was discreet. Sometimes I suspect no one in his council knew all there was to know. He arranged matters to make this so.”

  Their discussion about the escaped boy was suspended, apparently. Since Alexa did little from chance she would have her reasons. They would involve thwarting her brother-in-law or protecting her own son, which often turned out to be the same thing. And if not these directly, then increasing her own power or binding Atilo to her camp to balance Roderigo’s decision to support the Regent; a blow, since the Captain of the Dogana controlled the money coming into Venice, theoretically at least. Clearly, Atilo already belonged to her, since he was her choice for the Council. Whichever mix of these, it would boil down to the same thing. She would move heaven and earth to protect Marco, since the young duke could not protect himself.

  “What drove you out of your homeland?”

  Taking the tiny porcelain cup she offered him, Atilo sipped fermented leaves soaked in boiling water. The duchess drank the mixture several times a day, her cups so fine candlelight shone through them. They had been part of her dower. As had the first crate of fermented tea. When the crate was half empty, Marco III sent orders for another. This arrived the month the first crate ran out.

  Duchess Alexa cried at his kindness. So it was said, anyway.

  “Well? A love affair gone wrong? Gambling debts? A wish to explore the world? An overbearing wife…?”

  Giving up his battle to like tea, Atilo put his cup down carefully. “Those are very Venetian reasons,” he said lightly.

  “A matter of honour then?”

  Atilo smiled. Without saying it, the duchess was admitting non-Venetians thought Venice a city without morals. But then you didn’t become the Middle Sea’s richest city by behaving nicely. “My father remarried.”

  “You hated your stepmother?”

  “I liked the first. I mistrusted the second.”

  “The second?”

  “The first died shortly after the second arrived as her lady-in-waiting. We lived in glorious squalor while my father searched the heavens for new stars. Emirs came to ask their futures. Princes sent gifts from Frankish lands. It would have made more sense to send us food.”

  “He was a scholar?”

  “A hoarder of knowledge. Perhaps it’s the same.”

  The duchess greeted this with a nod. Candlelight softened her nightgown, and though its shadows shifted in the night wind, it couldn’t reveal her face behind the veil. Mostly, Atilo had to guess her thoughts from gestures. The fact her head was slightly to one side said she listened intently.

  “You were afraid?”

  Atilo considered denying it. “Yes,” he admitted finally. “I was thirteen. A bitter, unruly child. My half-brother eleven. The grain house rats started dying shortly after she became my new stepmother. The cats came next. Then my hunting dog. I fell ill that winter and she insisted on nursing me. I knew then it was time to leave. So I crawled from my bed, and hid in a culvert until night.”

  “Poison, cruelty, betrayal. Sounds pretty Venetian to me.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “So why did you wake me at this hour?”

  “You said you wanted to know about the Patriarch’s murderer. That you were to be the first to know if I captured him.” Did she tense suddenly, Atil
o wondered. As if sensing he’d lied? Or is that me?

  “But you didn’t capture him.”

  “No, my lady. I failed.”

  “Ahh…” The duchess clapped her hands to summon a girl with a silver jug of boiling water, and a squat iron teapot, already warmed. As Atilo watched, the duchess sprinkled leaves into the pot and added water. “You don’t like my tea?”

  “I’ve drunk it half a dozen times. Always in your company. I’m sure I’ll learn to appreciate it eventually.”

  “Bring Lord Atilo wine.”

  He nodded gratefully.

  “So,” she said, when they had the room to themselves again. “It is how he escaped that will interest me.”

  “My lady…”

  “I know you, Atilo. When they fail most men hide the fact. You drag me from my bed to tell me you failed. I should be cross. But something tells me you believe his escaping is more important than your failure. Am I right?”

  “As ever, my lady.”

  “Don’t try to flatter me.” Her voice was sharp, the atmosphere between them suddenly colder.

  “I’m not,” Atilo said simply. “And I need your advice.”

  “About this?”

  “Which would be easier to control? An angel fallen to earth? Or a demon escaped from hell? Because that boy isn’t human.”

  “Krieghund?”

  Atilo shook his head. “Not were, not a night walker.” Finishing his wine, he sat back in his seat, feeling every one of his years. “My lady, what else is there?”

  Duchess Alexa took longer than usual over her next sip. She considered her answer as carefully as Atilo had considered his. And this, he knew, as she knew, was answer enough.

  “You ask me why?”

  “Captain Roderigo of the Dogana di Mar has…” Atilo shrugged, apologetically. “A half-Mongol sergeant who was with us when the creature escaped. He fired an arrow…”

  “That fell magically to the ground?”

  “No, my lady. He plucked it from the air, flipped it round and threw it back.”

  “And this sergeant?”

  “Would be dead. If not for a boiled-leather tunic with buffalo-horn scales. The arrow hit his chest.”

  “My father had such a tunic,” said the duchess, sounding almost wistful. “He had another made for my brother. Although riveted mail was common by then. A tunic and a laminate bow. This sergeant, he uses a proper bow?”

  Atilo described Temujin’s weapon.

  “That’s the one,” she said. “So, this thing caught an arrow, and returned it hard enough to split horn scales. It did split the scales, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, my lady.”

  “Tell me more… No.” She shook her head crossly. “Tell me everything. Especially the things you don’t think important.”

  So Atilo did, from beginning to end, admitting finally that the boy, the creature, whatever this thing was, might not have killed the patriarch after all. He might simply have seen the murder. At which, Alexa said she could see how that might make Atilo want to find him. A point to which he had no answer.

  “And it killed the beggar who led you there?”

  “Broke his neck. Almost broke mine.”

  The duchess looked thoughtful. “To kill without spilling blood even when the moon is fat, while sparing the beggar’s girl and her brother. That shows…”

  “What, my lady?”

  “Self-control.”

  “It twisted the boy’s head half round.”

  “Believe me, it could easily have ripped his head right off.”

  “You know what it is…?” Stupid comment, Atilo told himself. Her words made it obvious she did.

  “It’s our answer to the krieghund.”

  Alexa laughed at Atilo’s shock.

  “We’ve been losing the secret war for too long. It’s about time we found a way to fight back. You think I didn’t notice when you changed killed Archbishop Theodore to might have witnessed his murder? You hate my brother-in-law… No, don’t bother denying it. Yet you let his captain help your search. Admittedly, Theodore was a friend of yours. But you’re not sentimental. Certainly not enough to hunt down this boy for him. I doubt you’re sentimental about anything. Except, perhaps, that little chit you plan to marry.”

  Atilo shivered, remembering the boy’s threats.

  “So why all this effort? The answer is you think this creature useful. Am I right?”

  “He’s my heir.”

  Duchess Alexa froze. “Everyone desires old magic. No one really knows what it will do when it arrives. Catch it, train it. We can talk about it being your heir later. Meanwhile, I’ll write to my nephew…” She meant Tmr, newly created Great Khan of Khans and conqueror of China.

  “I’ll ask what his librarians know of creatures like this. It will take a year for my request to arrive, be deciphered and his answer to return.”

  Duchess Alexa hesitated. Whatever doubts she had about what she wanted to say, they lasted long enough for Atilo to fill a glass of wine and empty it in slow sips, while looking around at her room. It was small, but its paintings, statues and tapestries would buy a city. He’d just realised every single thing here once belonged to her husband when Alexa leant forward, her decision made.

  “Once upon a time,” she said, “angels fought. They fought high up in the wastes of space, where the stars are. This was long ago. When the gods still walked the earth openly and the oldest of the old kings ruled. When power meets power terrible things happen. The gods died, the kings died, the angels died… Whole forests burnt in the blink of an eye.”

  Atilo stared at her.

  “This is a tale from my childhood. How the gods became the sky god, who watches everything but interferes little. A handful of angels escaped to wander, bitter and alone, in the wilderness. They moved like lightning. Killed without thought. Regarding us as we regard the animals.”

  “As food?”

  “Among other things. But the last of them died in the year Kublai Khan was born. My nephew’s librarians will know if it is otherwise. That’s why I will write to him. You have the year it takes.”

  “To capture this creature?”

  “No, Lord Atilo. To capture it, break its spirit, and make it our answer to the krieghund. If that can’t be done, kill it. However, I would regard that as failure.”

  Discovering her water jug was empty, the duchess reached for a bell to summon a servant, then changed her mind. “Marco, my husband, believed talking of demons brought bad luck. That evil comes at the sound of its own name. He was wrong. It enters when invited. So, the real question is… Who invited it?”

  Atilo had never heard her talk like this.

  He had never heard her refer to the late duke by his first name or call him simply my husband. And he had never, in the times they’d met in public or private, heard her talk about her childhood, about being Mongol, about being foreign in how she thought. It made him uneasy.

  “Come here,” she said, patting her seat.

  He could obey, or find a reason to leave. The first might make her an enemy, eventually. The second would make her one now. When Duchess Alexa lifted her veil she was smiling. And, Atilo couldn’t answer anyway. Her face’s beauty stole his breath away. Words for a poet, he told himself crossly. I’m not one of those. But it was the face of a girl a quarter her real age. Bright-eyed and innocent, knowing and inviting. Atilo shivered.

  “Come on,” she ordered.

  He did.

  If her face was flawless and her eyes undimmed, her body belonged to the daughter she never had, if not that daughter’s daughter. Alexa di Millioni’s skin was the yellow of fresh velum and soft as Moroccan leather. With her head thrown back and her face safely veiled she rode him to some place he could never reach. And Atilo realised there were more things in heaven and earth than dreamt of in anyone’s philosophy, and he was looking at one of them. “Your turn,” she said.

  Feeling every ache in his spine, Atilo wrapped one arm about her wa
ist and twisted them both round, so she lay flat and he rested above.

  “You’ve done that before.”

  “My lady, I’m sixty-five. I’ve done everything before.”

  “I’d tell you my age,” she said lightly, “but you wouldn’t believe it. And I’d tell you what I’ve done. But it’s best you don’t believe that either.”

  Then she said nothing much, because Atilo shifted his position and she gasped and grabbed his hips, forcing herself against him savagely. He ploughed her with an intensity that surprised him, collapsing on top of her when it was over. But felt his pleasure was more ordinary, less unknown.

  “I take it you haven’t bedded that chit of yours yet.”

  Raising himself on to his elbows, Atilo glared at the woman sprawled naked beneath him. Her voice was mocking enough to make him grab her upper arms. He rode her harder this time. Knocking gasps from her body. Until he collapsed breathless across her, his forehead pressed into the pillow.

  “I guess not,” she said.

  In the early hours, after a maid arrived to take that day’s orders, replace the tea and trim the wick, without once appearing to notice anyone else slept in her mistress’s bed, Alexa woke Atilo with the sound of pissing in a pot.

  “Have you met my stregoi?” she asked, dropping her gown.

  He shook his head groggily. Alexa had a stregoi?

  A wild witch child…

  “You should,” Duchess Alexa said. “In fact, you must. Send word to Desdaio that you’ve been detained by Council matters. And order your household to continue as normal. It’s time we came up with a plan.”

  “For tonight?”

  “No,” said Duchess Alexa, kissing Atilo’s cheek lightly. “We have a month to lay our trap. Requisition silver from the treasury and have it made into wire. Send the wire to the rope walk at Arzanale. I’ll give orders that it be woven into a net. You can leave the rest to me.”