Frederick was sniffling and swallowing, and sounded so much like a young man trying to pull himself together she wanted to smile. Her aunt had called him that boy. But he was more than that. He was krieghund for a start. Having banished the tremors from his voice, Frederick began to tell her about his childhood in Austria, about meeting and marrying Annemarie. How proud he’d been she was having a child. They’d gone to bed the night before he rode out. His first campaign. She’d sat in the darkness above him, all soft curves and full of life. He’d never told anyone that but he could tell Giulietta because . . .
That produced another sob.
He’d ridden home so proud and found his father waiting at the edge of the estate. Frederick had known instantly something was wrong. The emperor’s presence said that. For weeks Frederick begged the plague to take him, too.
The finest marble, and the best sculptors worked on her tomb. His brother rode halfway across Austria to be with him. Leopold sat beside his bed at night to stop him harming himself. He helped interview Italian sculptors. Annemarie’s finished likeness was so perfect it could have been her sleeping. His daughter lay beside her, eyes closed and a smile on her tiny mouth. Angels guarded Annemarie’s head and stood at her feet. It was a work of art. Unlike any tomb before it.
Sounds beautiful, Giulietta thought.
“I took one look and never returned.”
It seemed the church still enjoyed Frederick’s patronage: he had masses said monthly for Annemarie’s soul and lilies placed on her tomb every year. The closest he came to returning was with his pack, when they left the high valley and their usual hunting grounds and descended to the edge of the churchyard one summer night. He was talking about his Wolf Brothers, Giulietta realised. She’d thought them war monsters. He made it sound as if they were really wolves.
“And then I met you . . .” His voice broke, like the newly bearded youth he was. “Leopold had written but I thought he exaggerated. He said I would love you and teased me that he’d got there first. Leopold could be cruel like that. It was unthinking cruelty. All his cruelty was unthinking.”
And his kindness . . .
You had to give Leopold that. His kindness was as instinctive as his cruelty. With her, though, he’d been thoughtful. Although Giulietta still didn’t understand what made him kind to her when he was so brutal to so many of Aunt Alexa’s ladies-in-waiting. He’d bedded more than half and treated them all disgustingly, while leaving her unbedded and being unfailingly kind. They were a strange family.
Mind you, who were the Millioni to talk?
35
“Where is he?”
Voices laughed in the warm darkness.
Tycho drew his sword. “Give me the child.”
“Or what, highness? You’ll slice the air to shreds?” The voice was mocking, slightly bitchy. Like one of the eunuchs in the palace of a Mamluk sultan. Had he ever been in the palace of a Mamluk sultan?
A creature came out of the cave’s darkness in a halo of sullen light. Its face was narrow and nose slightly hooked; weirdly narrow eyes were made stranger by slightly pointed ears. Chest hair gave way to goat fur at the hips, with the greying fur thickening towards the hooves. It was the testicles Tycho really noticed, grotesquely large, hanging like grapefruit beneath a child’s penis.
The creature sketched a mocking bow. “After all this time,” it said. “You finally deign to visit us . . .”
“You know me?”
“Highness, the whole world knows you . . .” It smirked. “Well, knows your mother. Although perhaps that should be knows her sire. Such a cruel decision to visit the sins of the fathers on the children, although I can see the attraction.”
Tycho had no idea what the creature was talking about.
Actually, he had no idea what it was or how it could have stepped out of darkness when he could see through darkness and all that lay beyond was rock at the end of the narrow cave. The creature made a show of looking around it.
“What are you after?”
“Just checking you haven’t split yourself into three, highness. Kept the best bit of yourself safe, given a lesser bit for sacrifice and slipped a sliver into some flying creature. Say a dove?” It shrugged. “No, of course, that’s taken. A bat, perhaps?”
Tycho raised his sword.
“Now now,” the creature said. “Let’s not be hasty.”
“Give me the child,” Tycho demanded.
“You left him here. Anything left here is mine. You know the rules. Ask them. They’ll tell you.” The creature scowled. “Few enough people leave us live presents any more.”
Out of the darkness came others. A centaur, once powerfully built but now sunken around the chest. A dryad with tired eyes and peeling skin, wilting ivy in her hair. A naiad, wearing pondweed and holding a double-handled jug with a broken side. A faun came last. In her arms was Giulietta’s son.
“Give me Leo . . .”
“So that’s his name. Thank you.” The creature turned to the faun and said, “His name’s Leo.” She nodded as if Tycho had never spoken and whispered in the infant’s ear. She began to raise Leo to her teat.
“No,” Tycho said.
“He’s ours. You left him.”
“I didn’t leave him with you.”
“Yes, you did. You just didn’t know it.”
“I will kill you.” Tycho’s voice was hard. “All of you.”
“This modern world is grey and old, and what remains to thee of us? If we could be killed don’t you think we’d already be dead?”
There were faces behind the faces he could see. Shadowy glares and even sympathy. A boy so graceful his beauty could light the night edged forward, only to be cuffed back by a thickset blacksmith. Lady Giulietta would have known who they were, these tired gods and fallen heroes.
“Where am I?”
“The womb of the world. Well, that’s what the polite ones call it. The new ones, the ones who came after. We’re in the world’s cunt. The slit of the elder goddess. A Sybil lived here for a thousand years. Always the same, always changing. Kings came, and princes, demigods and heroes. Always the questions, always the misunderstood answers. Ask us a question. Any question. I promise we will answer.”
“Who am I?”
The creature rubbed its hands. “Ah,” it said. “An oldie but a goodie. I like that. Who am I? So simple to ask. So easy to misunderstand the answer. Has it occurred to you that your fear of daylight is simply that, a fear? As false and unreal as your memories before Venice? That you are ordinary?”
“Are you saying that’s true?”
The creature stared at him. “In any situation the simplest answer is usually the right one.”
“Are you saying it’s true?”
“Not at all. I’m saying you should have considered it.”
Tycho caught a memory then and wondered if it was his.
“It might as well be. If not this you, then the yous that came before.”
Ahead of him was cold space and stars in different shapes in a darker deeper sky that contained swirling discs that trailed the fluorescent wakes of a million maybe worlds. He could feel wings, visible and invisible, spreading to catch particles of light that lifted him above the disc and carried him through a void of the earliest days of creation. He was a god. One of hundreds, one of thousands.
Split into warring camps and his faction was losing, had already lost to the larger, to the stronger, to the brighter. Most of his troop was falling through a rift into a different darkness beyond. His generals hurled from the high heavens, the others simply following blindly after.
He should go after them.
They were his, where they went was where he belonged. All the same, he hesitated on the edge of going, refusing to accept blind obedience was necessary. There were others who hovered on the edge of doubt. A few, a handful, condemned to fall and yet refusing. In the darkness of a coalescing outer rim there was suddenly light and a pinprick of a sun and half a dozen, depen
ding on how you counted them, worlds slung like beads around it.
It was a small sun.
A meagre and narrow collection of possible worlds. Small worlds around a small sun on the thin edge of a ring smaller and meaner than those around it. He accepted the choice all the same. Spreading wings to catch the light and stepping off into the darkness, he fell, but gently . . .
“Was that me?” Tycho demanded.
“Like enough to make no difference.”
“It makes a difference to me,” Tycho said crossly.
“The Sibyls were the same. Always protesting they were different. Always identical in every way . . .” The goat-heeled creature plucked at the air and pulled two fat candles into being. “If I light this from that is it the same flame?” He tossed away the fattest candle and produced a thinner one from the air. “And if I light this from that? And this, and this . . .?” The candles got smaller. The flame remained.
And in the light of the candle the cave walls faded and the space around them expanded until the walls were distant and growing ever more so as Tycho stared. Everything seemed to be rushing away from everything else and the darkness had a red tint that reminded him of embers.
“Where am I?”
“Look around you. Where do you think you are?”
There was water where there hadn’t been water. A wide and lapping expanse of dark water that began at his feet and stretched to a distant black bank. The air smelt of brimstone. When he looked there was another expanse of water behind him, equally wide and growing wider. Tycho now stood on an island between lakes of darkness. Looking closer, he saw the ripples were ghostly faces, more than he could count in a hundred years, open-mouthed and hollow-eyed. Faces that recanted their sins and begged forgiveness in never-ending pleas.
“Not my afterlife,” Tycho said. The lords of Bjornvin had believed in the eternal drinking halls where warriors feasted. The rest, the serfs and the slaves, feared reincarnation and hoped for nothing. A long endless nothing in which they rotted and were forgotten and became one with the earth. If not his afterlife, then whose?
“Leo is dying?”
“Half dead already.”
“Then give him to me and let me go.”
“No.” The female faun’s voice was high, jealous. She folded her arms tightly around Leo. “He’s mine. I want him. He promised.”
“He had no right.”
“I had every right. You left him with me.”
“You know that’s untrue.” Tycho glanced behind him, looking for a way out, but saw only dark water and ripples that swore never to sin again. The lake was viscid, slow-moving. He had no idea what would happen if he grabbed Leo and swam for safety, assuming there was any to be found, but he doubted Leo could survive much more ill treatment. Grinning, the creature said, “What will you give me in exchange?”
“What do you want?”
“That’s not the way it works. You offer me something.”
Tycho looked into the spiteful eyes of the tired creature in front of him. Its narrow face gave nothing away. It was passive, unmoving. As if any greatness its owner once possessed had faded centuries ago.
“I’ll give my life,” Tycho said. “Let me take the child to his mother and I’ll return when it is done. You have my word.”
“Predictable. But heartfelt.”
The faun holding Leo scowled and that gave Tycho hope. She obviously believed there was something Tycho could offer. But what?
“Killing you doesn’t interest me,” the creature said.
“My freedom . . .” He’d been a slave once and would be again if that were the price. The creature looked at him thoughtfully. Dark, inhuman eyes examined Tycho’s face as wisps of colour trickled into his mind, Giulietta in white, her face still as stone. A blond boy Tycho recognised as Frederick knelt beside her.
“But what if you could only save one? Which would it be?”
Tycho felt cold. “I don’t need to save Giulietta,” he said. “She doesn’t need saving. It’s Leo who needs saving. You said so yourself.”
“But suppose she did?”
“I’d save both.”
“Then the price would be even greater. We don’t know you can pay the first, never mind the second, or is it the other way round?” The slyness of its voice and the smirk on its face said the creature was playing to the ragbag of immortals around them. “What would you give to save her?”
“I’ll give up being me,” Tycho said. “I’ll give up my powers. My healing, my strength, my speed. All the things that make me other.”
The goat-heeled creature walked the edge of the river and dipped both of its hands into the water, the face of a child rippling to nothing as it trapped water between crooked fingers and lifted its hands free.
“Take,” it said. “Drink.”
Tycho dipped his head and sipped. It tasted as river water should taste. Neither sweet nor brackish, but fresh and familiar. “That’s it?” he said. “I’ve changed?”
The creature shook its head. “Did I agree that was the price? You looked thirsty so I offered you water.” It smirked. “I wanted to see if you were ready to negotiate.” And in doing so, you showed me that you were.
“Name your price,” Tycho said.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“It does this time,” Tycho said firmly. “That’s exactly how it’s going to work.” A hardening of the creature’s expression reminded Tycho of something Alexa once said. Those who’d once been powerful were more dangerous than those who still were. Being diminished by circumstance made you cling harder to what little you still had. The rule applied to people and cities, kingdoms and empires.
“First the mother, then.” The creature jerked its chin at Giulietta. “What do you expect me to take for her?”
“My life.”
It sighed. “We’ve been through this. I don’t want your life. What use would you be to us dead?”
“Make me a counter-offer then.”
“Your death, highness. We’ll take your death.”
Tycho looked at him. There was nothing human in the creature’s smile. It was old and cold, immortal enough to make him shiver. He knew he would hate what came next. The question was whether he’d accept it.
“I don’t understand.”
“Why should that matter to me? Still, because I’m feeling kind . . .” Behind him, the diminished smirked. “If I take your life, you die. If I take your death, you live . . .”
“For ever?” Tycho asked.
“What would be the point otherwise?”
He would become like them, diminished and unable to die. No matter where he found himself or what was done to him there would be no escape. No salvation either. The woman he loved would grow old. She talked of souls. The incorruptible part of being human, only freed when the body died. If he never died, his soul would never go free. If he had one and today he doubted it.
“I accept,” Tycho said.
“Of course you do.” The creature smiled wide enough to show yellowing teeth. “And the baby,” it said. “Do you want to make me an offer . . .? Or shall I just tell you an acceptable price for its life?”
Tycho nodded.
“You’ll like this one. Well, perhaps like’s the wrong word. But I’m sure you’ll appreciate the subtlety. The price for Leo living is you give up his mother for ever.”
It couldn’t possibly . . .
Eyes cold as ice watched Tycho battle himself. In a second, Tycho condemned Leo to death and saw Giulietta with another child, his child. All of them growing older together. Except Tycho wouldn’t grow older. In the next second he unravelled the decision. He thought of Giulietta, who lay corpse-like on a slab in his mind, and Leo gurgling in the arms of the faun. Tycho wanted to die but he’d given that away already. The knot in his chest tightened and tears scalded his eyes.
The goat-heeled god nodded. “You agree?”
“Yes,” said Tycho, but he was shaking his head.
&n
bsp; “Which is it?”
“Leo lives.” His words were a whisper, his throat so tight he could barely speak and so salt his tears tasted like blood. “I wish to speak to the child’s mother. Give me that at least.”
“Speak then, highness. She will hear you.”
“You have a fever,” Tycho said.
“Tycho?”
“Yes,” he said. “Me.”
“You abandoned me.” Her voice trembled.
“I’ve found Leo and he’s safe. I’m bringing him back to you.”
“Alexa,” Giulietta said suddenly. She sounded scared. “You murdered Alexa and changed sides. You’re lying to me about Leo.”
“She ordered me to kill her.”
“She what?”
“The Assassini kill when ordered. Alexa’s death was her final order. She was determined to make Alonzo believe I’d changed sides. She was dying, Giulietta. She chose it. I simply obeyed.”
“Leo’s really safe?”
“He’s safe and Roderigo’s dead. He came after me with wild soldiers but I killed him and half of them. Alonzo will be furious.”
“So much excitement,” the creature muttered.
“Who’s that?” asked Giulietta, suddenly sounding nervous.
“No one who matters,” Tycho said.
“Good . . . Where are you now?”
“Montenegro.”
“Where in Montenegro?”
“The cunt of the elder goddess.”
“Typical,” she said with a sniff.
As his sense of Giulietta faded, Tycho turned to find the faun in tears next to him, Leo clutched to her chest. Lifting the infant from her arms, he hugged Leo close, feeling the child snuffle against him. Where Leo had been pale he was now pink. The snot blocking his nose and the filth crusting his eyes were gone. “One question, highness,” the faun said shyly.
“I’m not a highness.”
She shrugged. “This form you took, this world to which you exiled yourself . . . What were you looking for that you became this?”
Tycho thought back to his memories of the beginning, which was not really his beginning, any more than he was the you she addressed. He thought of the warring gods and the battle for heaven, and had his answer. Some had fallen and some had not, and some had ended here. His mother had crossed half the world looking for it. Maybe her father had done the same, and his father, and so on.
The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini Page 21
