The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Flesh was gone from his face, one eye pulped to egg white dripping down a cheek that was shiny with bone. His neck was a patchwork where needle-like teeth had ripped away his skin. Blood, and a thin clear liquid, dripped from his wounds until his body began its healing mechanisms. That experience as brutally painful as the battle that injured him.

  It was said – at least it was said by Giulietta’s priests – that your sins found you out. As Tycho left the ice and stepped on to the shore he wondered what he’d done to deserve that, and, thinking about what he had done, wondered if there was more pain to come or if he’d settled the score. He was too tired, too cold and too close to simply giving up to bother trying to hide his tracks. But at least his footsteps were no longer bloody as he stamped his way through the village and headed for the forest beyond. They’d come at him from all sides, the domovoi.

  Maybe he really did deserve this. Punishment for something he’d done, or, even worse, for something he was going to do. He tried not to think about either possibility. Although he couldn’t shake the feeling that this was somehow deserved. A price that had to be paid. When the walking turned to clambering over boulders, he clambered. When it turned to climbing, he climbed. One day became another.

  He knew where he was and wondered at himself for returning.

  Behind him, on the slopes leading up to the fort, pursuers hesitated and slowed, a few of them stopping, only to move again at a snapped order. With his own breath scalding his lungs and his heart hammering inside his ribs, Tycho knew only that he had to keep climbing. Much as he wanted to turn and fight, keeping Leo alive was more important. What was the point of any of this if he failed in that?

  Scrabbling over treacherous rocks, he climbed towards a door left open because he’d left it open. The squat walls of the fort reared above him, guarding whatever it was they guarded. Venetian bowmen fought from inside castles or improvised barricades of sharpened stakes. These were mounted archers, men who could ride into battle firing forward, fire sideways as they passed and twist round to fire behind them as they galloped away.

  Clambering over a boulder, Tycho found a dead wolf on the far side, too frozen to stink and too starved to count as food. He kept climbing, the scree beneath his feet glued in place by ice and sharp as running on razors. The fort would provide immediate protection. Longer term, something better would be needed.

  The fort had too many rooms and too many ways in for him to keep Leo safe from stray arrows, thrown knives and swinging swords. Because the responsibility of keeping Leo safe terrified him. He’d survived wounds that killed others. But Leo . . .? Only Leo’s whimpers told him the child was still alive.

  What you love makes you weak.

  He understood Atilo’s maxim now. Only people like Giulietta believed that what you loved made you strong. The thought almost stopped Tycho in his tracks before common sense and a stray arrow had him scrabbling the last few paces to throw himself through the fort door and barge it shut behind him, hinges screaming with ice and rust. Clumsily, he lifted an iron crossbar from the dirt, losing skin from his fingers to the frost as he dropped it into place.

  Roderigo’s men would have to force the door, scale the walls or clamber through an upper window, those being the only windows there were. Racing up the guard stairs, Tycho stepped on to the windswept battlements and took his first clear look at the men who’d been tracking him for two days. A hundred wild-haired archers, two renegade Crucifers and Lord Roderigo.

  Roderigo’s mount was struggling up the final slope, torn between fear of the icy scree under its hooves and its master’s flailing whip. His two lieutenants were having equal trouble. Only the archers moved fluidly. Streaming between boulders and flowing over the scree as if born from wolves and raised in the snow.

  “Up there,” Roderigo cried.

  Tycho had run at night and hidden in the day, and his pursuers had used the dead time to catch up, tracking him easily. A fresh fall of snow had sealed his fate. Even with the finest Assassini skills, it was impossible for a limping man to carry a child across virgin snow without leaving tracks. And the scree, the slope, and fear of hurting Leo, stopped him running as fast as he wanted.

  What you love makes you weaker.

  The previous night he doubled back to kill the man he thought their tracker, having left Leo under the shelter of a rock. He swirled out of the darkness in the seconds of safety offered by a cloud and sprayed blood across snow without even stopping to feed. He’d swerved, jinked and danced his way back to the treeline as arrows followed. It made no difference. Tonight, he woke to smell horses on the wind and hear the distant jangle of bridles.

  “Sorry about that,” he told the infant.

  It snivelled and whimpered and he wondered how cold it could get without dying. The fact it was blue was a bad sign. Leo, he thought. Not it. Leo, Giulietta’s son. The reason he stood here while they scurried below. Without a ram or wood to start a fire the gate would hold them until Roderigo lost patience and ordered his men to scale the walls or climb the valley’s end and try to enter that way.

  But first, it seemed, Roderigo intended to try talking.

  A makeshift white flag was being raised and Roderigo spurred his mount forward under its protection, his lieutenants slightly behind and to either side like a double shadow. “Surrender the child,” Roderigo shouted.

  Tycho remained silent.

  “Princess Maria told us of your brutality.”

  I let her live, Tycho thought. She gagged Leo on the voyage and I let her live. Where was the brutality in that?

  “His highness offers you a fair trial in return for his son’s safe return.”

  The wind whipped and the white flag snapped, and Tycho used the seconds to count the archers and examine the killing ground in front of the fort.

  “Are you really such a monster?” Roderigo shouted.

  Depends how you look at it.

  Everything always depended on how you looked at it. Tycho didn’t doubt Alonzo thought himself the hero, and Roderigo thought himself the hero’s faithful captain. Leaving Roderigo standing there, Tycho carried Leo below and began putting together the two parts of his plan. “Do you like the idea? he asked the infant.

  It snivelled. That was pretty much its answer to everything.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. I don’t suppose you’d like to help me move this?”

  It simply looked at him, so he balanced it on the giant crossbow, which was still strung with its three dozen arrows in place. “Hold on,” he said and, pushing open the fort’s rear door, wondered if he had time to move the porcupine. Until trying to shift the crossbow told him the real question: had he the strength?

  Sinews popped as he tried to get the porcupine moving and he was close to accepting defeat when one wheel shifted and he found his grip and the porcupine began moving through the fort’s rear doors, until Tycho used its own momentum to swing it round to face the way it came. Stepping back, he looked at the parapet above the yard and realised the crossbow was far enough inside the arch’s tunnel to be hidden from anyone above. The tunnel was so deep a dozen soldiers could have stood on the iron grating of its murder holes and poured a river of boiling oil on to those below.

  “Had I a dozen men,” he told Leo. “And fire to heat the oil, or indeed any oil. What I do have though . . .” he carried the child into the armoury, “is mage powder. And that we need for the front.” The powder was inside a small barrel hidden inside a bigger barrel, sealed with a circular slug of pitch. Silvery specks glittered on its surface. These burnt to the touch the way silver did, except these hurt everyone.

  “You stay here,” Tycho said.

  He put the infant with its back to the crenellation and was grateful the wind was in the right direction for what he wanted to do. It howled from behind him as he looked down on a tangle of archers standing in front of the gate arguing. One barged it, another hissed at him. Lord Roderigo stood several paces away, looking increasingly impatient. None o
f them glanced up.

  Why would they?

  A fierce gust gave Tycho what he needed and carried the powder over the edge, into quieter air that dropped it gently on to those below. A man looked up as the first drifting grains rained down, and took a face full of stinging powder. It crusted his hair and coated his jacket like scurf.

  “Up there,” another shouted. An arrow hissed past Tycho and then the man who released it was clawing at his own face as falling powder filled his eyes. A second archer was doing the same.

  BURN, Tycho thought.

  It was over in a moment. Mage fire burnt to the bone and beyond. It burnt to the soul. Screaming men staggered back, frantically brushing at their jerkins, which simply glued burning phosphor to their hands. Once started, mage fire could not be put out with water. A man tried to dig beneath the snow for earth to quench the flames but the ground was frozen too hard to help him.

  A few of those who took the powder were still alive enough to scream when Tycho grabbed Leo and abandoned the battlements, spun his way down twisting stairs and exited into the guardroom where the porcupine once stood. Shutting the double doors with a slam that rattled the fort as if it was trying to awake, he jammed a rock under the middle to stop Roderigo’s men from forcing their way through.

  Whatever was in the cave frightened the wild archers beyond the walls. If they made their way into the fort – and they would – it would take them the coming day to search the building properly. By nightfall they should have found their courage to enter the yard. He hoped their fear of the cave would stop them coming further. The crude steps up to the slit in the rocks were treacherous with ice. The top step littered with offerings, from fox skulls and bloody rags to the bones of a raven. Tycho hesitated on the edge of entering, and then stepped inside to be met by a gust of rank air. “My lord of light,” it hissed. “Welcome home.”

  Tycho wrapped his arms round Leo.

  The air chuckled.

  32

  “Tell me it’s not true . . .”

  Lady Giulietta’s voice was shrill enough to make a guard turn. The man caught Prince Frederick’s eye and flushed. His stare when he looked straight ahead would have drilled walls. It was unwise to interfere in the quarrel of princes, especially when one was female and close to tears.

  “My lady . . .”

  “Either go. Or tell me it’s not true.”

  Standing, Frederick bowed clumsily. “I’d better take my leave.”

  “Don’t come back,” Giulietta shouted. “Never ever. You’re banished from this court. You too . . .” She pointed at the guard. “Not banished,” she said furiously, seeing his shock. “I mean, go. Now.”

  Having hesitated for the briefest moment, the guard trooped from the little corridor on the upper floor with its new tapestry and window seat over the Molo. Here was where she had once discovered her cousin Marco poisoned, that afternoon when Aunt Alexa was still alive. Now Marco was in prison.

  Except you didn’t put reigning dukes in prison, so he was secure in his chamber on her orders. That was what she’d decided. That he was to be secured. Even at his worst under Alexa he’d never been locked away for more than a few days, and now he was there until she decided differently. Two bolts and two guards made sure no one tried to let him out.

  She was lonely, scared and needed to talk to someone. The old patriarch would have done. Unfortunately, Theodore was dead and so was Aunt Alexa, and Marco was mad again, and Tycho wasn’t here and Frederick was a traitor.

  “Go,” she shouted.

  “Listen to me,” Frederick begged.

  “So you can tell me more lies? I bet all those things you said about Annemarie weren’t true either.”

  She’d never seen anyone go white with anger before. Frederick bowed again, and this time he meant it. She watched him walk backwards to the door. Since he was a prince in his own right this was unnecessary and she wondered if it was mockery, but his pale blue eyes showed only cold fury.

  “I never even liked you,” Giulietta said.

  He bit his lip. “You did,” he said. “That’s the problem.”

  Frederick shut the door carefully and she heard his footsteps in the corridor. They stopped when she opened the door and slammed it hard behind him. The loud silence that followed was broken by the sound of his heels on the stairs and, later still, a jangle of harness in the piazzetta.

  She should call the Council.

  Only then she’d have to admit to telling Frederick secrets and they trusted her little enough as it was. Her aunt they had mistrusted because she was Mongol, Giulietta they mistrusted because she was young. At least, they whispered that that was their reason. Their real reason was simpler. She was a woman in command of a council filled with old men.

  If she told them Frederick had tricked her into friendship, they’d remove her and replace her with Alonzo, who was a man, obviously. A famous general, which was even better. And he was probably going to win anyway. The Byzantine emperor had acknowledged Alonzo as rightful duke of Venice. That was what Frederick had arrived to tell her. But she’d been too furious to listen. He didn’t even deny it.

  His father had sent him.

  Sigismund had ordered Frederick to make friends. Every word he’d said to her was false. She couldn’t trust him any more than she’d been able to trust Tycho. Ca’ Ducale was freezing, its tapestries stiff with cold, the marble tiles of its open colonnades glazed with frost. Individual rooms were warm but ice had entered its fabric and its soul. She and the palace suited each other.

  Three thrones waited, with one larger than the others.

  Alexa was dead, and Alonzo banished and Marco confined to his room on her orders for murdering a councillor in cold blood; for all the city had been told Bribanzo died in a street stabbing. Half that city thought she had no right to be Regent anyway. What if Uncle Alonzo simply decided to return? Would the palace guard obey her if she ordered them to defend her? Would the militia bands flock to her banner or line up along the Riva degli Schiavoni to cheer Alonzo’s barge as it drew alongside?

  Slouched in Marco’s seat, Giulietta stared at the shields on the panelled walls and wondered how different life would have been if she were a boy. Or if she’d been someone else entirely. Someone other than a Millioni. Marco the Just had sat where she sat. The thought of Aunt Alexa’s husband made her sit straighter.

  Il Millioni himself had sat here the day he claimed the throne and abolished five centuries of elected rule. She’d wanted to return to the Republic and that would never happen now. She’d wanted many things, from a happy childhood to marriage to Tycho, and the first hadn’t happened and the second never would . . . Tycho had betrayed her, too. His love was ambition.

  It was the only reason for what he’d done. He’d been the first to worm his way into her heart; made her want him and offered to protect her and become a father to Leo. And then what happened? He left when she begged him to stay, offering his loyalty to the man who . . . She couldn’t even bear to finish that thought.

  Even worse than this he had returned to kill Aunt Alexa. And now Frederick – who was meant to be her friend – had not only tricked her into friendship, but also destroyed what little hope she had left. Lord Bribanzo had died with two scrolls in his belt. One said Frederick was here on the orders of his father. The other that Maria Dolphini had given birth to a child. Alonzo had a son, an heir to take his name and follow after him. Bribanzo was to challenge Giulietta on whether she believed the child was Alonzo’s . . .

  Of course it was. He’d stolen Leo and was passing him off as Maria’s child. The second part of Alonzo’s challenge was more brutal still. He stated his belief that the boy in the nursery upstairs, where she could hardly bear to go, was an impostor, which he was. And that a dead infant answering Leo’s description was hidden in the crypt of the basilica, which it was. He challenged her, on oath, to say that he lied.

  Her uncle had won.

  When the Council heard the news they would replace
her and Alonzo would sail home with Tycho at his side. Frederick would abandon her. Not that he’d ever really loved her. She’d be back to who she always was. Someone’s cousin, someone’s niece, someone’s plaything. A thought so horrific occurred to her that she nearly pissed herself. What if Alonzo had promised her to Tycho? What if she got the marriage she’d once wanted to a man who betrayed her at the command of a man who’d done worse? She would never forgive what her uncle had done the night an abbess and a hedge witch held her down so Dr Crow could impregnate her on his orders.

  She loved Leo, but the nature of his getting tortured her.

  Walking to the door, Lady Giulietta shouted for a messenger and sent him for the new master of the Assassini, an anonymous man who’d returned a month earlier from Vienna to find his city changed. He was master because Giulietta had stripped Tycho of that title. She waited impatiently for his arrival.

  “My lady?”

  “Find a hedge witch called Mistress Scarlet and the Abbess of San Loyola, kill them both before nightfall, bring me proof . . .”

  He risked a glance and bowed.

  The door shut behind him with a whisper and it was done. She’d condemned two people to death. Lady Giulietta would have made it three but doubted he’d obey. Asking the master of the Assassini to add her to his list might be an order too far.

  Aunt Alexa’s poisons chest sat beside Giulietta’s desk, as it had sat beside that desk from the time Alexa first arrived in the city as a child and asked for a room of her own. No servant had dared move it or even dust it. A thin film covered its surface, except for two patches where Giulietta had taken to using it as a footstool.

  The saddest thing about the study for Giulietta was not that Aunt Alexa had died here, it was her aunt’s dead pots of flowers and withered bushes. Alexa grew them to provide fruit for her giant bat, Nero, which would eat nothing else, coming from Egypt where that was what bats ate. After Nero died, Alexa kept the plants alive anyway, having braziers brought in day and night to keep them warm when the snows came. With her death the braziers stopped being brought and the plants died. There was probably a lesson in that somewhere.