The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Remembering Atilo’s silver whip, his warning of what would happen if Tycho was ever sent to a Venetian prison, and the Mamluk girl nailed to a tree in the fondak garden, Tycho kept his silence. On the way out, he suggested Desdaio lock him back in and not tell Atilo they’d talked. It would upset him.

  Tycho took back to his cellar the thought that Atilo now owed him two lives: Rosalyn’s, and the one he’d just refused to take.

  37

  There were a dozen pig shambles in Venice. The one Tycho was delivered to by Amelia on a hot summer night was on the city’s northern edge; ten minutes west of della Misericordia and almost opposite the island of San Michele. Like all slaughterhouses it was as far away from human habitation as possible. Which translated as far away as possible from anyone rich.

  So it stood on the lagoon’s edge, with a gently sloping floor that let the bricks be sluiced and the filth be washed into the sea. Although little was left after butchering. Outside, in a stinking pen, pigs milled and snuffled and slopped up to their knees in their own dirt, or the dirt of meat before them. They were jointed according to Guild rules; not to be sold within twenty-four hours of slaughter or longer than ten days after. Their blood, guts and viscera made sausages. The skin became leather, and the hooves and long bones, once split for their marrow, boiled down to glue.

  Even individual vertebra provided soup. The method used by Master Robusta involving two cuts, one either side of the backbone, instead of the more common single cut that split the spine down the middle.

  Most of the pork was salted and sold to ships moored in the Bacino di San Marco, since they needed to revictua for their journeys south. The better cuts ended up on stalls in the Rialto market, and pork sausages fed the poor across the city. Master Robusta’s place stank. It was a shambles after all. But it stank no worse than other slaughterhouses and smelt far better than the tanneries. And, unlike the iron foundries to the west, it was unlikely to kill you with air poison while you slept.

  “What brings you back here…?”

  Amelia jerked her thumb at Tycho, scowling as Master Robusta grinned at his silvery braids and white skin. “Don’t say it.”

  “You have a letter?”

  She gave him Atilo’s note, waiting while he broke its seal, read the contents and held the single sheet of paper over a flame, letting it burn to his fingers before letting go and watching embers dance away.

  “Every month?”

  Amelia shrugged. “I don’t read. Anyway, it wasn’t shown me.” Glancing at Master Robusta, she added, “I’ll be accompanying him.” Her tone said how much she liked that idea.

  “We kill, gut and joint every minute of every day, except those forbidden by the Church. These days we use cleavers. Your master has asked you be taught the old ways first.” Walking to the back, Master Robusta chose a knife from a rack. “Use this,” he said. “It’s too old to damage.”

  It might be old but it was sharp. The edge so honed it curved like a sickle moon. That upset the balance.

  “Good enough for you?” Master Roberto and Amelia were watching him. The butcher’s look was half amused. Amelia’s harder to read.

  “May I?” Tycho nodded to a sharpening wheel.

  “It’s sharp already.”

  That was when Tycho knew he was expected. The business with the sealed letter was play-acting. At least on the butcher’s part. Amelia had probably been told after Tycho, which was less than an hour before. Walking to the wheel, he set it spinning and ground wood and slivers of tang from the handle, until the knife balanced properly.

  “Where did you learn to do that?” The first words Amelia had spoken to him since they left Ca’ il Mauros. Since he could hardly say, Watching Lord Eric’s armourer, he shrugged her question away, watching her mouth tighten.

  “Through here,” Master Robusta said.

  A dozen men looked up but it was Amelia they watched as she moved among them like a black lynx jostling a herd of something too stupid to know just how dangerous the newcomer was.

  “Take a bench each.”

  Amelia shook her head. “I’m just here to watch.”

  The master butcher looked as if he might disagree. Instead he shrugged and told her to keep out of the way if she couldn’t be useful. Point made, he nodded to an oak frame hung with two pulleys. “I’ll show you once only.”

  A small boy dragged in a pig, which he trapped between his knees, before fixing two slipknots round its hind legs and yanking on a rope that ran between three pulleys. In no time at all he had his victim hanging upside down.

  Kicking a tub into place, Master Robusta took the knife, yanked back the squealing pig’s head and slit its throat. He began cutting immediately, ripping down the animal’s belly to drop pulsing guts into the tub. They landed with a splash he ignored. The butchering was brief and brutal, two slashes down the spine, forelegs, shoulders, flanks, saddle… He stripped meat from bone and severed joints with a ruthless efficiency that spoke of thousands and thousands of animals before this one. When he looked up, he found Tycho watching with a fierce intensity.

  “Think you can do that?”

  Tycho nodded.

  “Then show me.”

  A boy dragged in a second pig and looped its legs, hoisting the shrieking beast into the air and wrapping its rope briskly around a hook. Then he vanished, one of a dozen junior apprentices, to do the same for another butcher.

  Gripping the animal’s snout, Tycho slashed.

  He expected red mist and shifting shadows. A fear his dog teeth would descend had travelled with him across the Rialto bridge to the doors of the shambles. He felt nothing. Without considering, he dipped his hand into the blood flowing from the animal’s slit throat and drank. It tasted mud-like and flat. The fierce flame that heightened every sense was missing.

  In the moments following he repeated Master Robusta’s movements exactly. Splashing viscera in the blood-filled tub, slashing parallel lines either side of the spine, and butchering the animal with cold efficiency that left him time to think about the slaughterhouse around him.

  Amelia was scowling. Master Robusta’s gaze was keen.

  Other butchers stopped to watch until Master Robusta’s glare returned them to their duties. Fresh pigs were dragged in and hoisted, gutted and killed, often in that order. The shrieking was hideous, sometimes unbearable. And the iron stink of blood, and the smell of shit, and the heat released from the butchered pigs, joined to that of the summer night outside, filled Tycho’s hairline with sweat.

  “You’ve done this before.”

  Tycho shook his head.

  “But you’ve killed?”

  “Wolves,” Tycho said. “People.” He looked at the one-sided battle around him, the slick of spilt blood and the twitching bodies. “Although killing pigs doesn’t seem that different.”

  38

  A roof tile slid beneath his feet, skating towards the roof’s lip, and Tycho followed it over the edge, pushing off from the overhang and catching it on the way down, to land silently in the tiny garden of an insignificant palace in San Polo.

  A scrap of black leather followed him.

  He ignored the scrap. Since magic was best ignored in his opinion.

  A leap for the garden wall, a roll over the top and he was in a private alley, with a wrought-iron gate at one end. Beyond the alley was an underpass. And since he couldn’t leap over the iron gate he lifted it off its hinges, as silently as rust and age allowed, then replaced it.

  Unless the palace’s owners looked carefully for prints in their overflowing flower bed they would never know he’d passed through there.

  Two down, three to go.

  He scrabbled to the top of the first church he found beyond the sottoportego and found the scrap of black leather already waiting. It stared at him with amber eyes. “Are you going to follow me all night?”

  It opened its mouth, displaying tiny needle-like teeth.

  So Tycho ignored it again, inhaled the wind, and searched
for the scent he was after. In there, like a missing note, was a gap where the scent he’d been hunting the night Duchess Alexa trapped him should be. He missed finding it, but ignored the hollowness this opened in his belly. The hardest lesson in a hard year of training. One that had seen spring turn to summer and leaves finally begin to fall.

  This test mattered, which was not to say others didn’t. Simply that Atilo placed a greater value on this one. He’d tried not to let Tycho know, but the youth had become expert at reading the emotional currents swirling through Ca’ il Mauros. So he breathed deep, filtering out bass notes of sewage and tanneries.

  Five prisoners from the pit released, one deserving to die. The others mere prisoners. Kill the right one and the others went free. Kill the wrong one and everyone died. That was meant to be his incentive. A call on his sympathy. But up here in the wind, on the tower of a San Polo church, Tycho had no sympathy for those sleeping below while the night crawled around them.

  He wanted to get it right because he wanted to get it right.

  Quickly, in the early days he’d reached a point where he judged himself only against what Atilo could do. Even Amelia, better than Iacopo, couldn’t move as silently as Tycho could. And a handful of months after that, he’d stopped judging himself against Atilo and started judging himself only against himself.

  He was his own competition. The only person he was interested in beating was himself. It made the world a private place and most of Tycho’s life was lived inside his head. This, he suspected, suited everyone just fine.

  Atilo, he knew, expected him to try to escape. That he didn’t worried the old man far more than Tycho trying to escape would have done. Another reason he kept his own company, retired to his cellar and sat out the full moons to keep his hunger manageable. Rosalyn’s murder was walled around with ice; Afrior’s death; his other fragments of memory from Bjornvin. He could consider his losses. Examine them without feeling the hurt that should go with them. His was a life of stale pig’s blood, and an iron control that filed each new skill he learnt as he waited for Atilo to admit what Tycho already knew.

  He was the old man’s heir.

  A slave would become the duke’s Blade. Chances were, he’d be freed first, but even that wasn’t necessary. The Seljuks had generals who were born and died slaves, the property of their sultan. It made no difference to him. Maybe he could, as Desdaio once suggested, escape the city. But why would he bother?

  When the only life he wanted was closed to him?

  Venice was as good as anywhere in this world. Maybe better. Since it sat in the middle of its richest trade routes. And a job was waiting for which he was suited. For which his nature could have been…

  He caught it then.

  A scent of fear, an echo of feet as they left dirt and hit herringbone brick in a street three blocks beyond. He caught it, and he followed it. If he was those he hunted he’d use canals, take to the water and rely on it to hide his stink. They’d been ordered to keep to dry land. One reason to do the opposite.

  A skinny whore of fifteen, maybe younger. Dressed in rags and with a desperate look in her haunted eyes. Even beggars had more sense than to push through a late-night crowd around the Rialto bridge. A cittadino turned on her, expecting a clumsy pickpocket. And met fear and a gabble of prayers.

  The Rialto bridge was not yet closed for the night.

  On the bank she’d abandoned, porters sluiced the floor of the covered fish market and the guard changed shift outside the state prison. On the one she wanted, stevedores emptied ore from Tedeschi barges along the Riva del Ferro, despite the lateness of the hour. The ore was loaded on to carts headed for the foundries.

  Tycho let her begin to cross. Watching from his fish market roof.

  Only to beat her to the other side. Having run fleet-footed over the bridge’s wooden roof, jumped the gap where drawbridges raised to let masts through, and leapt from the bridge beyond into the mouth of a passageway she entered, thinking it empty. Her scream died beneath his fingers as he brought his forehead close to hers.

  A theft, a little whoring, a murder not reported. Her sins were minor in a city where most people like her would have regarded that as innocence. He could see her face but not the skull beneath.

  “Make it to the end,” Tycho said. “Stay safe.”

  The whore gaped at him. “I’m not the one?” she asked. He knew then she knew the rules but not the reasons.

  “Go. Before I change my mind.”

  It was enough. She vanished into the darkness.

  A hired thug; a discarded catamite; a little part-time whore, who did no more or less than half the patrician women he’d come across in his year in the city, but paid a price no one demanded of them. In the Corte Seconda Millioni, Tycho stopped to gaze at the house where Marco Polo was born. It was grand, but not that grand. If it had belonged to a cittadino he wouldn’t have been surprised. No one lived there now, although the Millioni still owned it. Marco III brought his mistress there. Duchess Alexa accepting a duke must have mistresses, while refusing to have them in the palace.

  Its walls were old, mortar crumbling beneath Tycho’s fingers as he climbed. In the distance, beyond the dry docks, walkways and factories of Arzanale, was the squat cathedral tower of San Pietro di Castello. It was here the prisoners must reach.

  Two more to go.

  He ran the roofs, barely entering Sestiere di San Marco before leaving it for Sestiere di Castello, avoiding loose tiles, skirting campi and jumping canals rather than cross bridges at ground level, which, more often than not, were guarded by informal militias or taxed by local thieves who regarded whichever parish as their own. Only once did he hesitate.

  On a roof in Santa Maria dei Miracoli a clawed and shaggy figure was changing against the half-moon. As Tycho approached, the creature twisted, moaning softly as its limbs straightened, joints shifted and flesh remade itself, leaving a naked man in the creature’s place. He turned to watch Tycho approach, dipping to wrench free lead piping at his feet. Nothing in his expression suggested he intended to offer a reason for being there.

  Tycho hesitated. Shocked to find this creature from the silent city so at home in the noisy one above. Tycho had settled into this world, the one around him. Although it made sense the dead should seem real on his arrival and fade first. And the silent city fade next. At least, he supposed it did.

  “Think you can take me?” The man’s accent was strange.

  Tycho nodded.

  “Then do it.”

  Atilo’s orders were firm. Tycho must kill his target before the first prisoner reached San Pietro di Castello. “I don’t have time.”

  He watched the man’s eyes narrow. The mouth that had been mocking settled to a thin line and his stance became less easy. Anger was always a waste of emotion unless converted to something useful. Maybe he intended to fight. Tycho couldn’t afford time to find out.

  “Later,” he promised.

  The krieghund followed, his breath animal and rasping. And then Tycho was gone, in a leap that crossed both the Fondamenta di San Lorenzo and the rio beyond, landing him on the flagstones of Corte Maltese, where a crumbling palazzo slipped by beneath his fingers as easily as if someone had fixed handles to its walls.

  The meeting with the krieghund sharpened his senses.

  So when Tycho stopped, a few minutes later, to check the krieghund wasn’t following, he’d found both his targets by the time he spotted the naked man watching from inside a bell tower three or four minutes away.

  Two prisoners, one little more than a youth.

  Both better fed and healthier-looking than the others. This suggested families rich enough to bribe prison guards or have food sent in. Maybe even money enough to guarantee a daylight cell. Since it hadn’t been one of the first three, his target had to be one of these. Tycho wondered how apprentices without his abilities made the call. By seeing who panicked? By who blustered or begged?

  Atilo had taught him to read men’s faces f
or lies. How to listen for telltale weakness in their words. How to count the pulsing of blood in a guilty man’s temple, wrist or throat. He hardly needed to tell Tycho to watch for this. There were times when he found it hard to watch anything else.

  To go through Arzanale would be stupidity for the prisoners.

  The great dockyard worked day and night and was guarded by Arsenalotti militias who assumed, probably rightly, that anyone found in the dockyard who didn’t belong was a thief. The prisoners he chased would go south of Arzanale’s walls. This meant navigating a strip barely three houses deep, between the dockyard walls and the lagoon’s edge.

  Tycho let the first three through the strip without stopping them.

  They skulked so obviously when they were forced briefly on to the open quayside of Riva Ca’ di Dio that lookouts on ships half a mile away would have been able to spot them. Should the lookouts be able to see in the dark.

  The last two came together.

  They had a dagger, at least one did. Since it looked new and lacked a sheath they must have robbed a drunk. Weapons were forbidden, like entering the water. But the smugness on their faces said rules were not for them.

  “Stop,” he said, dropping from a window ledge. A scrap of black leather remained behind. The two men looked at each other, then rushed him at once. Their blade flashed and Tycho dropped under it, his movement a blur as he grabbed the knifeman’s wrist and twisted, breaking half a dozen bones.

  Tycho caught the knife before it hit brick. His victim would have screamed but the dagger to his throat persuaded him otherwise. Abandoning his friend, the other man made a run for San Pietro di Castello, hoping for sanctuary. Not knowing Atilo, Iacopo and Amelia waited at the church door. So accurate was Tycho’s throw that it cut the tendon in the running man’s heel.

  “I’ll give you money,” he promised. “More than you can imagine. You name it, I’ll give it to you.” His voice was raw, his fear real. But his eyes betrayed him as they focused beyond Tycho, who ducked as a stone hissed past where his skull had been.