The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini (29 page)

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 for 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.

He stabbed the runner in the leg and twisted the blade. Not caring if the man’s yell brought the Watch. And then Tycho returned his attention to the stone thrower and knew suddenly why he should die.

“God’s name,” Iacopo said. “What happened to you…?”

Blood dripped from Tycho’s mouth. He was shaking, his whole body humming with energy, as if it was fighting itself. He had taken his reward for success and taken it without thought.

“I was attacked.”

“And your attacker?” demanded Atilo, his voice flat.

“Is dead.” Tycho shrugged. “And his friend. I was forced to bite out the first’s throat. And break the neck of the second.”

Having laughed, Amelia apologised.

Atilo waving her apology away as he told Tycho to clean his face. In the time it took the boy to swill lagoon water around his mouth and spit, his breathing steadied and the shakes subsided. So he knew what to say when he got back. Although first Atilo had to say what Atilo needed to say.

“You failed.” The words brought glee to Iacopo’s eyes.

“No,” Tycho said. “I didn’t.”

“You killed two when you should have killed one. And you didn’t even kill the one you should have killed. You had a one in five chance of getting it right by luck. And even taking two chances you failed.”

“You think it should have been the girl?”

Atilo’s face went still.

“Do you? Because of what she saw?”

“Who told you of that?” Atilo’s voice was dark and dangerous. Coming from a cold and distant place. And his own hands twitched towards his dagger before he brought his reactions under control.

“She doesn’t even understand what she saw.”

“You know this?”

“Yes,” Tycho said. “I know this.”

“And why did you kill the others instead?”

“Because they ordered the murder she saw. You said the Blade was justice in action. Where would be the justice in killing the innocent?”

The old man wondered if he was being mocked.

Looking up from her pillow, Lady Giulietta asked the question that had been troubling her for months. Certainly since Prince Leopold had moved her into a house on a small estate on the mainland. “Will you kill me when my baby’s born?”

Prince Leopold wiped sweat from her brow with a vinegar-soaked rag and wrinkled his nose at the smell. “Why would I do that?”

“That’s not an answer.”

Taking her hand, Prince Leopold waited until she looked him in the eyes. “I won’t,” he said. “I can’t believe you’d think I would.”

“You hate Venetians. Remember?”

He looked apologetic.

And then she swore. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit…”

“
I’ll get the midwife.
”

Face screwed in agony, her hands gripping her gut, Giulietta cursed as a second contraction hit. And then she drew breath, air rushing into her lungs as the muscles in her abdomen unlocked. It was an hour since Leopold had arrived. Five hours since this torture began.

“Answer my question first.”

Watching him look around her room, an upper chamber in a near-ruined farmhouse near Ravenna, she wondered what Leopold saw.

A sweating prisoner with distended stomach and swollen and aching breasts, screaming in pain? A young woman terrified of what came next? A child who’d already caused him endless problems?

She should never have sent for him.

In dismissing the midwife and demanding they let Leo in, she’d doubled the rumours. The guards below already said he was the father of her child. This would simply confirm it for them.

“My love,” said Leopold.

She felt tears fill her eyes, and was too exhausted to stop sadness spilling over and running down her cheeks. Instead, she turned away.

“What?” he said, turning her face back.

“You called me… You’ve never called me…”

As he stroked her face, she felt him scoop up a tear and trace it back to the corner of her eyelashes. He was smiling. “I never dared.”

She looked at him. “You’re scared of nothing.”

“I’m scared of losing you.”

“Why would that happen?”

“Because you love that boy you talk about.”

“
Leopold!
”

“It’s true,” he said. She was still crying when her maid, his doctor and the midwife returned.

In the hours that followed, the pain became so fierce that Giulietta barely stopped screaming. She had never imagined, had never dared imagine, such pain existed outside a torture chamber. Each contraction was fiercer than the one before. But the baby inside her showed no sign of being born. When she begged for the
shutters to be opened to cool her room they were for a while. Until the doctor ordered them shut again. Giulietta thought stuffiness was part of her treatment. Then she realised the shutters were kept closed to keep in her cries.

She pushed until she could push no more.

As the afternoon wore on the encouragements of the midwife and the platitudes of the doctor faltered and finally faded. When Leo’s doctor went to the door, shouted for Giulietta’s maid, and told her to find the master and tell him to come at once, Giulietta realised he thought she could no longer hear them. And inside the tight red swirl of her pain there were times when she couldn’t. Although this wasn’t one of them. And then it was, and she was lost in memories.

Leopold’s words hurt.

His sadness that she had loved someone before him, and better. She wanted to say… If she lived through this, she would say, it was untrue. And it was, she told herself, even as she knew it wasn’t. The fierce-faced boy in the basilica had set his hooks in her flesh with a single touch and his was the scowl she now saw.

Silver-grey hair. Amber-flecked eyes that looked right through her. Shivering, Lady Giulietta felt a little warmth leave her body.

“She’s going,” the midwife said.

“Why hasn’t someone found the prince yet!”

“He’s outside, sir.”

“Gods, woman. Ask him to come in.”

“I was riding,” Prince Leopold said, shutting the door behind him. “I couldn’t stand…” His voice was a whisper that Giulietta heard from miles away. The rustle of wind through the grass. She was beyond pain now. Floating in a red warmth far removed from her body.

“You have a choice,” the doctor said.

“What choice?” Leopold said.

“I can try to save my lady but you will lose her child for certain. Or I can save her child, and you will lose her. If it’s a
boy, God willing he will live. My lady’s ability to live is less certain…” To Giulietta, it sounded as if the doctor had already made his own choice.

“Save both,” Prince Leopold said.

“Your highness. That’s not possible.”

“You don’t have the skill?”

“No, sir. No one could…”

“Then find someone who can,” Leopold said, not letting the man finish his protest. “
And do it now.
I will not accept the death of either.” His voice held an anger that threatened bloodshed if he was disobeyed. Even Giulietta, cocooned in her red warmth, and wondering if it wouldn’t simply be best to let sleep take her, flinched at his fury.

“Highness,” the doctor said, his voice tight from the fear of being asked to do the impossible. “I beg you to…”

“There’s a man in the next town,” the midwife interrupted. “He cut a baby from a slave, and a pup from a hunting dog. All lived.”

“He’s a heathen.” The doctor sounded outraged.

“Yes,” she said. “A heathen who dislikes losing his slaves.”

“The man’s a Jew?” Prince Leopold asked.

“Calls himself a Saracen, my lord.” The midwife sound scared to be addressing the prince directly.

“Send for him.”

“Your highness, consider…”

“You know who this is?” Prince Leopold asked the doctor.

“No, my lord. They said she was…”

“My woman?”

The doctor nodded.

“God willing she’ll be my wife. If she dies I will have you hanged.”

The Saracen was sent for.

Having cleared the little room of people, he opened the shutters and announced that if the screams of a birthing woman were
bad luck then people should go elsewhere. Since it was the nature of women in childbirth to scream. Even Christians should be able to accept that.

Water was brought.

Cold water for drinking. Warm water for washing. And boiling water for cleaning his implements. And having sharpened his knives, and knelt at Lady Giulietta’s side and whispered his apologies, the doctor removed her sweat-soaked sheet and washed between her legs before feeling for the child.

“As I thought,” he said. “The baby has turned.”

Since she hovered on the edge of the red darkness, and the room was empty apart from the two of them, he had to be talking to himself.

“It cannot be turned back. So it is best if you sleep. Either you will wake or you will not. Mostly that is in God’s hands. And a little bit in mine.”

Opening a wooden box, he found black paste wrapped in oiled silk, and unstoppered a small bottle of spirits, the only spirits he ever let himself touch. Mixing the paste with the spirits he dribbled the mixture between Lady Giulietta’s lips and waited for her to settle. Once she had, he began to cut open her abdomen.

The newborn boy issued his first cry ten minutes later.

Although it was a day and a half before Lady Giulietta was awake enough to realise she lived and her child already suckled for milk, his face against the ring she kept on a chain between her breasts. By then, Prince Leopold had named the boy Leo, claiming him as a son.

“If an angel can fall a demon can rise…”

Nothing in the books Desdaio used to teach Tycho to read suggested this was true. But she said it the evening he told her about the Skaelingar attack, Bjornvin burning and Withered Arm ordering him to make a fire circle. An evening when the waxing moon above Venice was near enough full to fire his hunger.

He’d told her about elk horns over the great doors. About red-painted naked Skaelingar flinging themselves on to sharpened palisades so that those behind could climb over. Red bodies and red weapons and a red world. Everything the Skaelingar owned was painted with ochre and oil, even their canoes.