There was a distance growing with every conversation he refused to have. Already he could see unhappiness in Desdaio’s eyes. This was why he’d long avoided remarriage, bedding only women he would never love. Now he had a lover who haunted his dreams, and a wife-to-be who haunted his daylight thoughts.
“My father used to lock me in the dark.”
He looked at her, wondering. All he remembered was how cosseted she’d been. How surrounded with servants and toys and nurses.
“He’s not who you think,” she said. “He’s vain and ambitious and a coward…”
A dangerous mixture. The fact she could say it made Atilo take another look at the young woman he’d asked to marry him. She was as clear-eyed, attentive and gentle as ever. But he couldn’t shake his feeling that her wits were sharper than he first thought.
“We live in dangerous times.”
As they stood in the piano nobile, looking down from an arched window on to the cortile, where the artisan who fitted the cellar door was packing his work tools, Desdaio nodded to show she was listening.
“Sometimes it’s necessary to make difficult alliances.”
She went very still and he watched her glance from the corner of her eye. Her hand shifted and one finger touched his as if by accident, remaining there. Although she gave no hint that she was aware of this. “Alliances you might not make in other circumstances?”
“Yes,” Atilo said.
“I see,” she said. “I think.”
Picking up a small wooden box, Atilo opened it. Watching as she shook out an ornate collar and held it up, letting the last rays of that day’s light play across overlapping scales of filigreed silver tied with twists of gold wire. At the bottom, a heavy pear-shaped pendant was set with rubies, pearls and squares of mutton-fat jade.
“Silver?” Desdaio sounded surprised.
“I have one too.” Atilo opened his cloak to show a new chain where his gold one usually hung. “I know silver’s for cittadini here but in my country it’s lucky. And it suits you better than gold. Silver sets off your eyes and hair.”
Desdaio smiled. “I’ll put my gold away.”
“No,” said Atilo. “Wear it. But wear this as well.”
When he looked, her eyes were bright and her chin trembled with unspilt tears and unexpressed emotion. Taking her hand, he kissed it. Seeing tears spill down her cheeks as she turned away from him. A rustle of silks, and the click of a door handle said she was returning to her chamber.
She did so in silence.
Unquestionably more intelligent than people supposed. She’d understood instantly his comment about alliances, and believed his answer about their being necessary. Whether he believed it was another matter.
33
The craft Atilo arrived home in that evening was larger than a vipera and smaller than a sandolino. It had been designed to Dr. Crow’s specifications and built in half a day by a master shipbuilder and his apprentices. The fact the shipbuilder had been given his orders by Duchess Alexa ensured the man worked hard and asked no questions.
The vessel featured a small cabin, no windows.
Atilo was uncertain what brief Dr. Crow had given the master of the Arzanale. As a member of the Ten he could find out. As head of the Assassini he should probably know already. To say Atilo lived between those two roles was simplistic. His fame as Venice’s old Lord Admiral, his new position with the Ten, and his duties as head of the Assassini were three strands of poison ivy strangling each other. How he could support a fourth as Duchess Alexa’s lover was beyond him.
“Ready that rope.”
The mage’s vessel powered itself. Although Dr. Crow claimed a dwarf hid in a compartment at the rear, turning a handle to drive infinitely complex gears that drove a screw that forced the craft through the waves.
Atilo thought that unlikely.
Twisting the rope back on itself, Iacopo dropped the noose he’d made over a bollard, holding the rope’s free end while the vessel’s forward momentum narrowed the gap and brought the strange craft to rest.
“Neatly done, Iacopo.”
Iacopo lost his smile as the cabin creaked open, revealing darkness.
Eyes shielded behind smoked glass peeked through a narrow gap and vanished just as quickly. Hightown Crow had told Tycho daylight was now safe for short periods. He obviously doubted it. Braided to snakes, even the boy’s hair was oiled against sunlight. His braids being all Atilo could see above the arms Tycho had crossed over his face to protect him from the day.
“It’s safe,” Atilo said gruffly. “Now hurry it up.”
He’d asked for this thing as his heir. Now he had to train it. Atilo’s job was to make sure Tycho didn’t disappoint. Be careful what you wish for. The old man’s guts twisted with doubts he couldn’t risk showing, least of all to Duchess Alexa.
Moonstruck poets were the mainstay of fable.
But a moonstruck assassin? One the duchess half believed a fallen angel? Assuming Atilo had the point of her wilfully oblique fairy story. Stepping on to dry land, Duchess Alexa’s protégé sniffed the air, his shoulders sagging a second later. Whatever scent he was after he’d failed to find it.
The boy was dressed in a flowing leather coat over a doublet of silk, both black and both oiled. His hose was also silk, also oiled. Boots and gloves matched. Cut from black Moroccan leather so fine it stretched like skin. He was undoubtedly the most expensively dressed slave in the city.
Hightown Crow’s choice.
From his belt hung a pocket. Inside it, a purple-glazed ceramic dragon curled around a pot of ointment mixed by Hightown Crow himself. Duchess Alexa defined what it should do. He chose the zinc-white, camphor, pounded silica and grape-seed oil needed to achieve that. The mixture stopped the sun from burning Tycho for up to an hour at a time. The alchemist was proud of this. Proud enough to tell Atilo twice what the mixture did. The leather coat and oiled silk might protect Tycho’s body, the gloves his hands.
But the ointment was Tycho’s mask.
“Shall I tell Lady Desdaio we have a new member of the family?” Iacopo asked, stepping back at a growl from Atilo.
“He’s a slave.”
Iacopo bowed deeply, and then turned to enter the porta d’acqua to Ca’ il Mauros, leaving his master with the newcomer still peering at the ghostlike sun hiding on the far side of drizzling clouds.
“I own you,” Atilo said. “Do you understand that? Whatever you are, wherever you come from doesn’t matter now. You live and die by my rules.”
Tycho shrugged.
“Do you understand?”
The boy’s shoulders straightened at Atilo’s tone. He’s taken orders before, Atilo thought. That’s good. Also bad. Most of those who passed through Ca’ il Mauros arrived young and unformed. Eleven or twelve, homeless, unprotected and hungry.
Their gratitude carried them through early weeks of brutal training. The girls, less likely to be vicious, let their gratitude overwhelm their scruples about violence. Dragged from the streets to the palace of a strange patrician, one obviously rich and powerful, most girls thought they knew what awaited them. That Atilo proved them wrong bound them tight. The boys had less awareness of their possible fate.
Atilo put that down to lack of imagination. “Well?” he said.
“I understand.” Something about the boy’s tone worried his new master.
“What do you understand?”
“That you believe what you say.”
Atilo stared at him. “Tomorrow we begin training,” he said. “It will be brutal. You will be punished if you fail.” The Moor kept his sentences simple, still not certain how much of what was said Tycho understood. He expected the boy to nod his agreement, to show some gratitude. Gratitude and respect. If needed, gratitude, respect and fear. Those bound an apprentice to his master.
Instead Tycho shook his head. “Tonight would be better.”
“What?”
Touching his glasses, the boy said, “I see best in th
e dark.” He weighed his words and obviously found them wanting, because he added, “Probably kill better too. If that’s what this is about.”
34
“He’s a strange one,” Desdaio said.
Taking another spoonful of venison from the pie in front of him, Atilo felt rather than saw her smile. She’d trimmed the meat herself, chopped root vegetables, ground Indian pepper and cut stale bread to serve as plates. He had a cook to do all that. Just as he had a serving woman to stand behind his chair and top up the glass Desdaio refilled from a jug.
He sat at the head of his long oak table in the piano nobile, with Desdaio at his right. Although light from a candelabrum made his glass sparkle, it barely reached the high-beamed ceiling overhead, and he sat with her in a puddle of brightness surrounded by shifting shadows. Both of them ate using forks. A habit Byzantium had adopted from the Saracens, its enemies. A princess brought the fashion to Venice two centuries before when she married the doge.
“Maybe three,” Atilo admitted.
Desdaio nodded to indicate she was listening.
The rest of Italy still ate with knives and their fingers and regarded Serenissima’s use of the two-pronged forks as proof the city was corrupted by its links with the Levant. As Gian Maria of Milan jeered, “What needs man with a fork when God gave him hands?” He would have been even less impressed to know the implement’s heathen origins.
“I have to go out later,” said Atilo, putting down his silver fork and wiping his mouth with his hand. Desdaio would be disappointed. She’d found a harpist from Brittany. On the run from something, Atilo imagined. He was to play for them that evening. It was meant to be a surprise.
“Can’t it wait?”
“Probably not,” Atilo said. “Council business.”
Desdaio’s face fell. Nothing came before the Ten. The daughter of a Venetian lord, the great-granddaughter of a rich cittadino, she understood that.
“You’re taking Iacopo?”
“Tycho,” Atilo said. “I’ll be taking Tycho.”
“He’s a strange one,” Desdaio said. As before, Atilo said nothing, simply waited for Desdaio to put her thoughts in some sort of order. People thought her beautiful but simple. She was not. She simply thought slowly. “He scares me,” she admitted finally.
“Why?” Atilo was interested.
“Something about him.” Desdaio bit her lip. She hesitated, considering her words. “He could be a prince,” she said finally. “When he’s not sulking in corners like a beggar. I’m not saying he is. Just sometimes, when he looks at us…”
“He seems… princely?”
“Don’t laugh at me. He eats castradina with his fingers, but stands up when I enter a room. And he watches always. I find him in rooms and don’t know how he got there. He’s like a shadow. Always there, except when he’s not.”
“And Iacopo doesn’t scare you?”
“That’s different.”
“In what way?”
Desdaio blushed, looking towards the fire as if shifting logs had suddenly caught her attention. All men looked at her, Atilo knew that was what she wanted to say. Iacopo was simply one of those.
“Should he scare me?” she asked instead.
He’s knifed a dozen men and cut a child’s throat without hesitation, simply because those were my orders. He uses his fists freely on whores, and more often than not takes them and forgets to pay. When he thinks I’m not looking, he leers at you as if he would deflower you on the spot if not for me.
And, God forbid I was to order it. But if I did, he would knife you now, weight the sack containing your body with stones and row it beyond the Giudecca himself, returning for breakfast with his appetite intact.
“That was just an example.”
“Something about Tycho is wrong.”
“He’s been living on the streets,” Atilo said. “We don’t know what’s been done to him.”
“It’s what he’s done to others that worries me. Oh, I don’t know he’s done anything. It’s just… The way he barely speaks.”
“Give me a month,” Atilo said. “If he still worries you the Black Crucifers can have him.” It was a lie, of course. He could no more give him to the Crucifers than he could tell Duchess Alexa he’d changed his mind and he no longer wanted the boy as his heir. And that would be a lie in its turn. He wanted the boy, just on his own terms.
“You’d let Crucifers torture him?”
“My dear,” Atilo began, and changed his mind. Let her think that was what he meant, rather than what he had meant. That Tycho could join the Order, being darker in temperament than even them.
She’d let him stay now. She’d probably have let him stay if the alternative was Tycho being accepted as an order acolyte. Desdaio hated the Black, not understanding the purpose they served. The White Order protected Cyprus and guarded caravans in the Middle East. The Black extracted every last sin with torture, before forgiving the lot. The Black Order’s purpose was to ensure no prisoner faced God with crimes on his conscience.
“Can you row?” Atilo asked, when he and Tycho stepped on to the landing beyond the watergate of Ca’ il Mauros.
No, of course I can’t… The boy shook his head.
“Then learn quickly,” Atilo growled, settling himself into a vipera and sitting back. The night was clear and full of stars, an old moon hung above the city, already tired in that way fading quarter moons are. “And when I ask you a question you answer. And you call me my lord. Understand?”
Tycho nodded, too nauseous to speak.
Atilo hissed in irritation.
Their trip across the mouth of the Grand Canal was a vomit-inducing nightmare. One that took five times longer than necessary according to Atilo. Glowering at his master, Tycho wondered if he knew the only thing standing between him and drowning was Tycho’s fear of being left alone on the water. Although he had been told what would happen if he rebelled. He would be given to the Black Crucifers. An order so fearful Desdaio crossed herself when he asked what they did.
Jumping from the vipera, Tycho slipped and fell, hitting his face on the slippery boards of the new jetty. Dark water taunted him through its gaps. So he rolled sideways a couple of times to reach land, lying there gasping, while stars left trails in a spinning sky.
Having tied the boat for himself, Atilo stamped over to Tycho and kicked him. “You’re afraid of water?” Tycho’s reply that water made him sick earned another kick. “This is ridiculous.”
“Not at all.” Stepping out of the shadows, Hightown Crow yanked Tycho upright before swinging round to face Atilo. “Did I or did I not fashion boots he was to wear? And did I or did I not ship him to you in a cabin floored with earth?”
The fat little man with his absurd beard and wire spectacles glared at the Moor who towered over him like a wooden carving of a hard eyed god. And all the while Tycho knelt by the jetty, hands pressed to the dirt as he willed the sky to stop spinning. A dozen late-night revellers staggered by, ignoring the little tableau as if such things happened every night.
“We train in bare feet.”
“He wears what I provide. Unless you want this to happen every time you take him across the lagoon? God knows, he gets sick simply crossing the Rialto bridge. How can you be so stupid?”
Atilo glowered. “Why are you here?”
“To watch him train.”
Atilo wanted to say no one watched. But since the only other person to know where Tycho trained tonight was Alexa, Dr. Crow’s presence meant she’d sent him. Which meant he stayed. Atilo was wise enough not push the point.
They woke a cobbler at random in a tiny alley to the west of Piazzetta San Marco, a stone’s throw before la Volta. Once he recovered from his fright, and realised he’d been selected not for his sins, such as they were, but because his was the first sign they’d seen, he vanished into his shop and returned with second-hand boots and shoes. Many were simply heels designed to be sewn to leggings. More than a few were designed for women. It
looked as if the man had simply obeyed Dr. Crow and brought every piece of footwear in his shop.
“Try these ones,” Dr. Crow suggested.
Having selected the softest and most worn pair, these being the ones least likely to rub, Dr. Crow ordered the cobbler to rip free their soles and heels. Then he went into a nearby campo’s church, unlocked the crypt by passing his hand over the key plate and scraped dirt from the lid of an old coffin.
The cobbler was ordered to trim a new sole from the best leather he had, cut away its centre and sew what remained to the boot. He was to fill the cutaway space with the dirt before fixing the original sole over it.
“My lord…”
Taking the shoes, Dr. Crow gave them to Tycho, saying, “These will also make it easier to cross bridges.” To the cobbler, he said. “This never happened. Understand?”
“I understand, my lord.”
“Good,” said Dr. Crow, tossing him silver.
They were fifty paces beyond the shop when Atilo vanished. A few minutes later he caught them up again, tossing the alchemist his coins. “There are better ways to buy silence,” he said, wiping his blade on a scrap of leather.
35
Tycho recognised the place immediately. The Patriarch’s little gardens, adjoining the gardens of the ducal palace. Ca’ Ducale showed lights. The Patriarch’s palace, however, was in darkness. According to Atilo, Gregory XII, the new Pope in Rome, was too busy trying to negotiate a union of the two papacies with his rival, anti-Pope Benedict XIII, to appoint a new Venetian archbishop, and, besides, he didn’t like the Venetians, few people on the mainland did, so he felt they could wait…
A very slight wind rustled the branches of the poplars; bushes looked uncared for. But staff had taken the trouble to scatter earth across any stains that might remain from Archbishop Theodore’s murder. Unless that was simply the rain, sleet and snow that had filled the last few weeks.
The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini Page 18
