The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini (40 page)

He’d always intended to sacrifice himself to clear the throne for Giulietta, unless he’d simply wanted revenge. There would be time to ask him later. A whole lifetime of it, then another and another . . .

Bending his knees, Marco had pushed away from the edge of the drop and pulled Alonzo after him. And time had slowed as Tycho crossed the trampled circle, drew his dagger and launched himself over the edge. Marco hit the water just ahead of Alonzo, with Tycho tumbling after.

The weight of their armour took all three under.

Freezing water closed over Tycho as he fought the weight of his own breastplate, the drag of the sword he’d slung across his back. It was dark beneath the water. As dark and cold and unforgiving as for ever. Finding Marco, he’d followed him down into the slime, grit and rock of the waterfall’s floor. Where he slashed the strap fixing the axe in Marco’s chest to Alonzo’s wrist and kicked for the surface.

Alonzo he left there.

Tycho almost made it, although he had to scale the last few feet by clinging to rock and dragging Marco behind him, the weight of the duke increasing as they left the water. Rolling Marco on to a ledge, he looked down and saw the duke’s eyes flutter open. The spike axe still jutted from his chest.

“You have a choice,” Tycho said.

Marco shook his head. “I’m dying,” he whispered.

“I’m offering you life.”

The duke looked up and smiled. “My mother said you were a broken angel. Perhaps the last of your kind. You don’t look that angelic to me.”

Biting into his own wrist, Tycho held it out.

Marco’s eyes widened and he nodded, drinking with increasing urgency until Tycho judged him strong enough for what came next. He pulled the axe free, and drank from the wound, feeling cold steel against his lips. The night was dark and the pool deep in shadow. High above, Tycho could hear shouts and cries, orders and counter-orders. No one saw what happened in the darkness at the edge of the pool. At least no one who’d be telling.

As the third of the Tycho novels comes to an end, and his history ends on a high and a new beginning for him, and those involved in bringing the three acts of the Assassani to the page having been thanked already in previous books, it only remains to apologise to the ghosts of those historical figures whose lives I’ve stolen and dip my knee to the
Serensìma Respùblica de Venesia
herself.

I remain as convinced now as when I was a child that Venice is alive and deadly and beautiful and dangerous. She has outlived empires and kingdoms, republics and revolutions. I pray she outlives many more.