The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

Atilo tried not to shiver.

  29

  Velvet soiled. How easily Giulietta never realised, not having had to wear any garment for more than one day at a time. Locked in a cold attic, she still wore the red houppelande gown and fine woollen chemise she’d worn the night she was abducted. Which was, it happened, what she’d worn that time with the boy in the cathedral.

  A tiny slit in the houppelande showed where she’d put the dagger to her chest, unwittingly ruining embroidery her mother had sewn. And she could still remember her trembling hands undoing mother-of-pearl buttons and slipping aside her chemise to put the point to her skin. Giulietta blushed.

  The memory of that silver-haired boy refused to leave her. It left her troubled, sleeping badly and waking early. Part of her had always believed he was searching for her. There had been other fondnesses, of course. Other crushes. No matter what her aunt and uncle thought. A lute player, chestnut-haired and slight, with soft brown eyes that captured everything in their gaze. His fingers held her shoulders as he kissed her lightly on the lips. A sweet sin that would have seen them both whipped had she told anyone. Which she hadn’t, except Eleanor, who could keep a secret.

  The eyes she thought of now were not soft. Their owner not slight… Wiry, maybe. She could imagine his fingers on her shoulders. Elsewhere too.

  A single look, and his memory burned.

  Giulietta shook herself crossly. Of all things to think about, a boy had to be the most stupid. So she thought of her mother instead. More stupid still, since her eyes backed up with tears, overflowed against her will and kept falling long, long after she willed them to stop. Her mother was even less able to help her than a stranger seen across a darkened nave.

  Wishes granted kill you. Her mother had whispered that.

  Curling up on the floor, Giulietta tried to sleep; but the memories of her mother were too strong. She’d been assassinated three days after that whisper, at the age of thirty-six. Her marriage to a Visconti had been unhappy.

  Her death a release.

  The old duchy included Venice itself, and the towns, villages and estates on the mainland inland for a day’s ride on a fast horse. The estates boasted fortified houses, built of brick and limed with stucco. Those towns not built with limestone-faced defensive walls had made good their lack in the last few generations.

  By accident, long before returning merchants brought Chinese cannon to Serenissima, the creators of the first town walls provided protection against not-yet invented weapons. The stone-faced walls split, but the compacted earth inside withstood the impact of a cannonball.

  The young woman curled on the attic floor—hips stiff, swelling breasts pressed against cold boards—owned two estates, three towns and more villages than she’d bothered to count. She could recall, if she tried, the names of the ones she’d ridden through as a child, when they still belonged to her mother.

  At dawn, she gave up trying to sleep and went as close as she dared to her only window. It was locked and shuttered and, from what she could see, looked out on broken roofs and a part of the city she didn’t recognise. A church tower in the distance looked ready to topple. The houses opposite were ruined, or near-ruined. None of them seemed occupied.

  Unbuttoning her gown, the girl weighed one breast as a cook might examine a plump capon. It was definitely bigger. This would have delighted her a year ago. Now she was simply scared. Her nipples, usually pale, were puppy-tongue pink and hurt to touch. She prodded one all the same.

  “You’re safe,” said the note she’d found on waking.

  She didn’t feel safe, and she didn’t understand the bit about not stepping outside the circle until she realised it meant an oval of salt trickled round the edges of the room. That amount of pure salt was expensive. So she obeyed, being as yet too afraid of what might happen if she broke the command.

  Her breasts ached, her flux had stopped its tides and her belly, she could swear it was swelling. Added to which, she’d worn the same gown for days. In a world where poor women wore rags that rotted with sweat under the arms, beneath the breasts or across their buttocks that would be unremarkable. But Giulietta changed her dress regularly, washed daily and bathed weekly.

  At least she had, until that night in the cathedral.

  Now she stank like a servant. And her food would disgrace an almshouse. Bread so stale it needed soaking. Rancid cheese that clogged her nails as she picked free the mites. Always served on a filthy pewter plate.

  In one corner a bucket was hidden under her discarded chemise. She could wear the chemise and suffer the stink of her own shit. Or cover her bucket and freeze. From the scratches on the wall, she’d covered the bucket and been frozen for the best part of six weeks.

  “You’re a fool,” she told herself.

  It made a change from her uncle being the one to tell her. So many memories and so few of them good. “You have your health,” Giulietta snapped. Something her nurse used to say. It made little enough sense then. She had her health, and her life.

  Didn’t expect that, did you?

  She’d taken to talking to herself. There being no one else to talk to. This made her think of Lady Eleanor, her long-suffering lady-in-waiting…

  Well, Giulietta didn’t think she was long-suffering. But she’d heard it said, more than once, and been so offended she slapped Eleanor next time they met, and demanded to know what she’d been saying. The memory made her ashamed. At least, she assumed that was the feeling. It made a change from rage, and fear and despair. These being her usual responses to waking in this attic.

  She never saw who collected her bucket. She never saw who delivered her food. The one time she stayed awake to find out, her slop bucket went unemptied and her plate unfilled. No one arrived to clean the mess when she kicked her bucket over in fury. Only the memory of cleaning it herself stopped her from doing so again.

  Damn it…

  She could scream and shout for help. But what was the point? The last time she tried she screamed herself to a frog’s croak and damaged her throat so badly it hurt to swallow. Her nails not encrusted with rancid cheese she’d broken scraping mortar from around the door that kept her prisoner. Someone had thought about this. Her prison was filthy, its floor splattered with pigeon shit, its ceiling sticky with cobwebs, in which dead flies and desiccated spiders mixed equally.

  Only the door was new, its hinges freshly oiled. When she woke, still rolled in the carpet, it was the hinges she noticed after struggling free. Now she wondered if the carpet was more significant. Still here, looking rich and out of place.

  Like me, Giulietta thought.

  Except she and squalor were proving to be closer bedfellows than she liked. The dirt troubled her less than it did. Her bucket’s stink was bad, but she was close to choosing warmth over her sensibilities. And she was regarded as having delicate sensibilities indeed. She was changing, and that scared her too. Because the change that scared her most was the one she didn’t dare think about.

  A vicious wave of fear broke over her, tumbling her emotions in its wake, and then swept back, threatening to drown her al-together. What, she wondered, feeling tears fill her eyes again. What if it was even worse than she thought? People said Dr. Crow called up demons, captured djinn in bottles.

  What if she carried a monster?

  30

  Men were watching for Tycho’s return. A collection of restless Dogana guards, changing every few hours and all grateful to be relieved. Who knew what the captain told them? That they faced a demon, probably.

  On the wind was the scent he hunted.

  So slight and fragile he heard it as a perfect chord, a single bell-like note in the silence of his mind. He could not ignore its call. He could not stay away. Nothing in his life came close to how the scent made him feel. Hollowness and hunger ate away at him, bringing him to the edge of despair.

  Above him, the sky was piled high with cloud. The full moon a sullen circle behind this masking. A fact for which he felt grateful. The sun
light burnt him, but the full moon hurt in other ways. So he stood in the squalid cave of an upper room, staring at the campo floor through broken shutters, and tried to master his emotions as he sought the scent he was tracking.

  Red hair, blue eyes and a defiant glare. He could smell her, only too aware her scent might be in his head, with no right to compete with the stink of this world.

  Eyes glared from under rotting floorboards and Tycho glared back.

  The cat blinked first. Tycho wasn’t the only predator in these ruins, simply the largest. The tom was sandy, little more than skin over bone. An Egyptian desert cat, from a ship that abandoned it by accident. The home-grown Venetian ignored them both. The lesser animals stayed away. When mice scattered below him, Tycho knew people were coming.

  Few people were stupid enough to wander this way by accident. And fewer still came to ruined squares like this one by choice. So he knew the hesitant steps belonged to someone who had none.

  Sharpening his senses, Tycho let go the scent that brought him back here and concentrated instead on who was approaching. He did this from instinct. Unaware he had until the rotten doors and broken shutters of the square became so clear he could see beetles scurrying, and hear the nervous breath of a girl entering the square, loud as shingle on a beach.

  She was naked. A black tangle of hair between her thighs.

  Rosalyn, shivering with fear. Her emotion so extreme fear barely began to describe it. Instantly he could taste her terror. Like the promise of rain before a thunderstorm.

  Up here, Tycho thought, stepping from the shadows.

  As she looked for him, something clattered from her fingers to the campo floor. Its loss dragging a swallowed sob from her throat. Falling to her knees, she scrabbled with her fingers, searching frantically.

  She’s blind in the dark.

  Of course she is. How could he forget that being blind in the dark was normal…? It had been normal for him too once. Now he had trouble knowing the normal from the passing strange.

  Let me help you.

  Dropping three flights, Tycho landed on heaped rubble, sliding the final stage to stop a dozen paces from the girl. She was sobbing openly now. Her shoulders quivering and her face twisted in misery.

  “I won’t hurt you.”

  You will. Tycho heard the words clearly in his head. He was trying to pin down how that worked when her fingers found the dagger and she stood, facing him as heavy clouds finally parted and moonbeams lanced down.

  “Don’t,” he said.

  But she did it anyway.

  Raising her blade, Rosalyn put its point to her shoulder. And before he could stop her, hacked diagonally across herself from collarbone to hip, the blade negotiating the valley of her breasts. Skin peeled, blood flowed.

  Hunger hit.

  So hard Tycho rocked on his heels.

  Narrowing his eyes against the moon’s flaring brightness he closed the gap in a blur, ending on his knees in front of her. All thoughts of being able to control his hunger forgotten. His dog teeth sharp as he bit into the wound and her body went rigid with shock. Grabbing her hips, he held her in place. She moaned and he fed, blood dripping down his face until the red mist faded and the ruined courtyard around them lost its hard edges and the sky paled to a watery pink.

  Lifting his head, Tycho took another look at Rosalyn and discovered her mouth wasn’t twisted in misery. It was sewn shut.

  Scrambling up, he slashed it open. His fingernail growing from nothing. The action leaving her lips untouched.

  “Behind you,” Rosalyn whispered.

  Every strand of the net burnt, searing his skin as silver weights fixed to its corners wrapped round his body, trapping him in its agonising embrace. His scream made rats scatter and sleeping pigeons swirl into the air from their roosts on the ledges. He fought the mesh, burning himself with every move he made, as he searched for the net’s edges and tried to free himself from pain. He might have made it too. So desperate he was to escape. But the blood in his mouth soured, and the pink sky swirled and he felt himself fall, wrapped in fire and still screaming.

  Within a minute his screams had turned to whimpers, turning to silence shortly afterwards. No Nicoletti came to see what was happening. The campo was ruined and unsafe, and no one they knew lived there. Some of them had seen a veiled chair being carried by guards from their windows. The rest simply had more sense.

  “Wash him well,” Duchess Alexa said.

  A’rial scowled.

  As the red-haired little witch broke the seal on a bottle and splashed purple liquid over weeping burns that stopped oozing and began healing before she had time to find a stopper, Duchess Alexa unwound a strand of horsehair and threaded a needle, the one she’d used to guarantee the beggar girl’s silence.

  “Stand up,” she barked crossly.

  The beggar girl continued to crouch, in blood and piss, swaying backwards and forwards, until the duchess grabbed her hair and dragged her up.

  “It’s not deep,” she said. “At least you got that right. But it’ll heal faster if you stand still yourself and we do this properly. What’s your name?”

  “Rosalyn, lady…”

  “Jewish?” Duchess Alexa sighed. “Not sure why I’d expect you to know. It’s like expecting you to know your age or your father’s name. Your mother’s too, probably.”

  “She was called Maria.”

  “Of course she was,” Alexa said. “Mother of God. The inviolate. Amazing how many whores have her name in this city.”

  “She wasn’t a whore.”

  A’rial looked round, grinning.

  Then hastily went back to dressing Tycho’s wounds when her mistress raised her veil to give her a look anyone watching would have thought mild.

  “And you,” Alexa said. “Are you a whore?”

  Rosalyn shook her head indignantly.

  “So, little not-a-whore, what are you?”

  “I’m Rosalyn,” she said, trying not to cry as the duchess dug a needle into her shoulder, hooked it through flesh and tied off the knot with the ease of someone who’d done the job before. The pain from the stitching was worse than the pain when Rosalyn cut herself, unless one had simply caught up with the other.

  She looked to where the red-haired child had Tycho laid out like a corpse, stripped of his clothes as she finished wiping his face and moved on to cleaning the rest of his body. “He’s dead?” Rosalyn asked, her bottom lip quivering.

  A’rial grinned.

  “He’s drunk,” the duchess said. “On blood and opium, moonshine, a little antinomy, some henbane.” She sounded amused. “And mandrake, obviously. To muddle his wits. Not that his wits needed muddling. Sadly…”

  “Lady?”

  “You’re not the one.”

  “I’m not the one what?” asked Rosalyn, unconsciously mirroring the thoughtful tilt of Duchess Alexa’s head.

  Tying off the final knot, the duchess leant back to examine her handiwork. Her nod was satisfied. She was happy with the result. Pulling a tiny jar from her pocket, Duchess Alexa prised off its lid and stopper.

  Rosalyn was staring at it transfixed.

  “Would you like a look?”

  “Please, lady.”

  The duchess scooped up a little ointment, then replaced the lid and handed the jar to Rosalyn, while she smoothed the odd-smelling mix along the stitches. “Camphor,” she told Rosalyn. “That’s what you can smell.”

  But Rosalyn was turning the jar in her hand. Her fear, the pain and her stitches forgotten as she traced the path of a twisting, seven-toed dragon that chased itself around the rim. “It’s beautiful.”

  “From my grandfather’s grandfather’s days. It belonged to a Ming empress. And was found in the ruined gardens at Chang gan…”

  That was when Rosalyn realised she should know who this woman was. She was rich, obviously. Rich enough to be carried in a chair and have guards. Powerful enough to talk openly about her witch when witches were to be executed. And fore
ign enough to go veiled and talk with an accent Rosalyn didn’t recognise.

  “Lady. Who are you? Can I ask?”

  The woman smiled beneath her veil. “I am the weeds in the rubble. The bricks in that…” She nodded at a ruined warehouse. “The women bedded and children born in those broken tenements behind you. I am the hammering in Cannaregio’s forges. The sweat of artisans boiling hides for cheap armour.”

  “Lady?”

  “Call me my lady,” she said, almost kindly.

  The woman traced the stitching down Rosalyn’s chest and sighed. Then she pulled back her veil to show her face in the moonlight. “I am Alexa di Millioni, and my son should be those things, not me. Be faithful and my favour is yours. Betray me and you will wish you died here tonight.”

  Looking into her cold eyes, Rosalyn believed her.

  In the days when Venetians wore rags and Venice was a collection of fishermen’s huts on stilts in the middle of a muddy lagoon, where inhabitants worried more about staying alive than building palaces, invaders threatened and the last imperial fragments of Western Rome broke up around them, salt and fish were what they traded. Back then, salt was scraped from the rocks. Now the sprawl of low-walled tidal pools beyond Cannaregio produced salt for export in industrial quantities. Which was just as well, as a month’s production of a single pool seemed to have been used to redraw the oval around the edge of Giulietta’s attic.

  If she hadn’t been upset enough to kick it away to see what happened—the answer being nothing—she would never have seen tonight’s gruesome little moonlit masque. And her dull despair at imprisonment, and her fear of what might happen, if she stepped over the salt circle would never have been burnt away in her anger that the silver-haired boy had come so close to finding her. Only to be stopped by the very aunt who had promised to protect Giulietta after her mother died.

  It look Lady Giulietta forty minutes to climb down from the roof. And before she could do that, she had to cut her way through bottle glass. The house she was in was a ruin, but once it had been rich enough to have glazed windows.