The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini (8 page)

Raising his head from the table, Roderigo watched a serving girl approach. Did she work the stalls? He decided he didn’t care. She’d come to his bed right enough. He was a patrician with a palace on the Grand Canal.

A small one, admittedly. A thin, three-storey building between two fat ones. But still a palace and still overlooking the Canalasso, that watery road Venice chose for its heart. There were times he didn’t like himself and this was one of them.

Last night had begun well enough, only turning sour when Temujin took an arrow. Turning sourer still with his discovery of that boy.

Who knew where he was now?

Drowned, with luck…

Early morning sun crinkled on the lagoon and the tide flowed as sluggishly as molten lead. Somehow, without Roderigo noticing, the room had emptied and his companion was gone.

“
Iacopo?
”

“A girl is murdered. Iaco went to look.”

In a city where passers-by stepped over bodies most mornings this sounded passing strange. “What makes this killing different?”

“The murderer. A boy was seen nearby. Naked, with silver-grey hair. The Watch believe he was her attacker.”

Tycho woke with his bladder full, his penis hard and his balls so tight they ached. And when he pissed against a wall his urine was so rank it shocked him into wondering if the stink was something else.

Until he realised everything smelt extreme.

The smoke from fires banked low for the night, the smell of pies and casseroles baking in the public ovens that dotted every other street. This new world was a mix of opulence and filth. And people, thousands of strangely dressed people, living their lives to rules denied him.

Here the horizon was flat, when it could be seen beyond the mist. Because there was always mist. So these might be the last islands in the world. Or the only islands in the world. Or perhaps all the world there was.

The roof above him leaked, and half of the warehouse where he slept was full of rubbish. The other half was piled with drying wood. A side canal, which once served its landing stage, was silted and stale. A bridge across its mouth, blocking entry, was old, the decaying warehouse older.

On the fourth night after Tycho found this hiding place—
the sixth night of the city’s rioting, and the first of the snows—he headed south, driven across the roofs by hunger, and a realisation he needed more than one bolt hole in this city.

He learnt to use the shadows, his breath never disturbing falling snow. Men, youths and older boys let him pass unseen. He was the dagger over their heads and the silence above. Girls, cats and old women were less easy, but everyone knew they saw things anyway.

The Nicoletti were at war with the Castellani.

If the ship-workers had guild pride, the Nicoletti prided themselves on being from San Nicolò dei Mendicoli, the toughest parish in the city. No one really knew what had started their hatred, but the street battles it spawned had simmered for four hundred years. And the dukes, while not actively approving, did not disapprove. Should parishes one side of the Canalasso rise, parishes the other side could be relied on to crush them.

The cause of tonight’s fight was real, for once.

The red-clad Castellani accused the Nicoletti of the slaughter of Maria, a cordwainer’s wife. The black-clad Nicoletti accused their enemy of trying to extract blood money they couldn’t afford and didn’t owe.

And so, at midnight, with snow falling so fast rioters lost sight of the canal edges, the battle resumed. At midnight, because that was tradition. And it began, as tradition also demanded, with the previous night’s champions meeting on a bridge, scraping away snow to reveal footprints carved into the bridge’s floor, and tossing a coin to chose who threw the first punch.

In the hour before midnight, while those preparing to fight were finding their courage in alcohol, and refuelling their anger with tales of how virtuous Maria had been, or how wicked it was to demand blood money falsely, Tycho reached a chimney on the roof of the Fontego dei Tedeschi north of the Rialto bridge. For company he had a dead pigeon and a live cat, the pigeon having died to keep the cat alive for another few days.

Around him were a dozen chimneys, twice his height, and topped by fluted stone funnels from which warmth drifted. He’d been drawn here by a noise he’d heard on his first night in the city. A mechanical heartbeat.

Unthreatening but steady, it drew him to the far edge of the
fontego
roof, on to icy tiles two floors below and into an alley where frozen mud cut his feet through a covering of snow. The heartbeat was loud as it echoed off the alley walls. Opening a door without thinking, he stepped through. The machine shop was in darkness, except for a candle in the far corner. A question came from behind the candle.

The voice of the man asking was proud and old. He sounded not at all worried by the arrival of a stranger, where no stranger should be. Tycho knew later what he asked, regretting how he came to know.

“My machine prints.”

The book master had the belly of a man who ate well and walked little. His cheeks flapped, as if he’d once been larger, and his eyes were pale and watery. His hair was thick, though, for all it was grey.

“The only printing press in Serenissima.”

Tycho looked at him.

“You don’t understand?”

He didn’t. Although he would reconstruct the conversation in flashes and slivers, as he fled the building. But that came later.

“The Chinese invented this. I changed it to harness water power.” The man indicated a moving belt that vanished through a slit in the floor and reappeared a pace later. It turned a wheel, which worked gears that shuttled sheets of paper under a falling square. This was what Tycho had heard outside.

“The future. That’s what this is. We can print fifty pages of Asia Minor as the tide rises, change the plate and print fifty copies of China as it falls.”

There was pride in his voice. A pride Tycho was to under
stand later, when the old man had no further use for it. Having explained what it was in Venetian, and seen how hard Tycho struggled to understand, the old man tried mainland Italian, German, Greek and Latin. Finally he shrugged and reverted to his original choice.

“Engraved by a Frank, printed on a Chinese press, adapted by a Venetian. Based on the best facts of Portuguese, Venetian and Moorish navigators. I’m hoping Prince Alonzo will buy my first atlas.”

Next to the press was a trestle holding a title page. A fish, that was what its picture looked like. A fish, with a canal’s northern opening as its mouth, the sweep of the canal, and the southern exit as its gills.

“San Polo,” the man said, pointing to its head.

Cannaregio was the spine.

Dorsoduro, San Marco and Arzanale its belly. The island of San Pietro made its tail. It took Tycho a while to realise he was looking at this new world in which he found himself. And the hope flooded his heart and his face softened.

“
Bjornvin…?
”

Watery eyes examined Tycho. The book master made him repeat the name. Then, turning to the end of an atlas, where a dozen printed lists crossed the page like prison bars, the old man ran one finger down its list of tiny names…

He shook his head.

“
Bjornvin.
”

“All right, all right…” Pulling down a book so old its cover flaked under his fingers, he ran down a different list, this one handwritten. The third book was no better. The fourth gave an answer.

“A town in Vineland. It burnt a hundred years ago.”

The man read the entry, read it again and shook his head. “There’s a record of finding ruins.” Shuffling across to a collection of manuscripts, he unrolled one. “Sir John Mandeville writes
of meeting a merchant who saw them. That would be fifty years ago. It had been burnt to the ground.”

His words meant nothing to Tycho.

“
Bjornvin.
”

The old man sucked his teeth. “Why would you be interested?” He stopped to examine Tycho, suddenly noticing how strange he looked. “Impossible. You’d have to be…? What, eighteen now? Plus a hundred.”

For the first time he looked worried.

“Buy yourself food,” he insisted. “Find somewhere to sleep out of the cold.” Digging in his pocket, he found small coins and folded them into Tycho’s hand, jumping back as Tycho hurled his offering to the floor.

One had been silver.

As Tycho broke Maitre Thomas’s neck, the old man’s memories flowed into Tycho’s mind. And with them language, a sense of where Venice was, and knowledge of what had just happened, seen from the other side.

The snow along the
fondamenta
had the feel of marble polished by the feet of others and was so cold and hard it burnt Tycho’s bare toes.

He hardly noticed.

Maître Thomas’s memories filled his head. And the knife he’d grabbed escaping the print shop was forgotten in his hand. He found himself on the edge of a street fight by accident.

That night in January was the night Tycho met three women who’d change his life forever. If you could count an eleven-year-old, red-haired
stregoi
as a
woman
… At eighteen, the Nubian slave counted. So did the fifteen-year-old Giulietta di Millioni, but Tycho met her last and only briefly.

“No blades…” The voice was outraged.

A girl black as a moonless night, her braided hair ending in tiny silver thimbles, stood glaring. She had the eyes of a predator and the stare of one too. One hand rested on her hip, the other gripped a frosted tree on a
fondamenta
edging the canal. Nodding at the knife in Tycho’s hand made her silver-tipped braids dance some more. Blood oozed from above her eye.

“What?” she said. “Never seen a Nubian before?”

“No, never.”

Even though touching a silver-tipped braid would burn him, Tycho lifted his thumb to her eyebrow and touched the blood. A steel grip stopped his thumb from reaching his mouth. “Don’t,” she said.

Her braids swayed like poisoned weed in the canal, holding him back as her scent drew him in. He could smell wine, garlic and a stink rising from her. Despite her filthy feet, and a dress hacked to the knees, she looked dangerous and elegant. Mostly dangerous.

How old was she?

Old enough to be in a street brawl, obviously. Lifting the knife from his fingers she tossed it casually into the canal beside them.

“You know the law.”

He did, because Maître Thomas had known it. And the book master’s memories were now his, transferred in the moment he broke the man’s neck. Although many of them had already begun to fade. When Tycho glanced up he found the Nubian watching him, her eyes glittering in the starlight. She thought him Castellani because of his stolen tunic.

“Which is your parish?”

All and none. He lived everywhere and nowhere. Out of the way of strangers and the Watch and those who’d hurt him or needed hurting. Probably not the answer she was looking for. “What’s your name?” he asked instead.

“Amelia,” she said, grinning at his change of subject.

“And where do
you
live?”

“Near here. I’m a lady’s maid. Well, since Lady Desdaio moved in.” The girl didn’t look like a lady’s maid to either of them. Although Tycho only knew what one was because of fragmenting memories.

“Lady…?”

“Desdaio, my mistress.”

“What’s she like?”

Amelia gave a huge sigh. “Sweet,” she said, “with added honey, and an extra spoonful of sugar. I’d hate her, but that’s impossible.”

“Sounds hideous.”

“Should be,” Amelia said. “But she isn’t. Big eyes and big tits. I get scared for her. She’s also a walking mint. Although, obviously enough, men don’t simply want her money and body…”

“She’s rich?” Tycho interrupted.

Amelia rolled her eyes. “Of course she is. She’s old man Bribanzo’s heir. Boxes of jewellery, chests full of coins, endless velvet dresses, bolts of shot silk, paintings…”

“What else do the men want?”

“You know what happens to innocence?”

“It dies?”

“Someone kills it.”

“That what happened to you?”

“Shit,” she said. “What kind of question’s that?” Lifting her face, she grinned at him. Her eyes glittering in the light of a flaming brand fixed to an arch behind him. The pulse of blood in her neck clearly visible. “Kiss me then.”

He fled her. Outrage following him in shouted insults as he lost himself in a nest of serpentine backstreets, ducking through an underpass to find a wide alley beyond. As he fled, the night sky changed from the red it had suddenly become to a more normal blue-black, the houses lost their glittering edges and the tightness in his gut released slightly.

He had enough sense to know the anger and his hunger were interchangeable; different ways to describe what soured his mouth when the Nubian girl raised her head to expose her throat.

Statues, and frescoes and marble inlay.

The palaces lining the Canalasso were the grandest in the city. The buildings were rich, decorated with carvings and tiny squares of coloured glass. Many palaces painted. The carvings and the varied stones and the paintings like nothing he’d ever seen. In his fractured mind buildings were wood or earth.