The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini (9 page)

The walls of a great hall, doubled skinned with logs filled with pounded dirt. A turf roof over crude beams. In winter, snow kept warmth in the hall. The snow in Venice was so thin Tycho barely recognised it.

How could his home be burnt for a hundred years? Bjornvin was there in his memory now. Not perfect, certainly not that, but real and recent.

After that…?

He could remember an axe cutting into a ship’s hull. His brief blindness as someone thrust a lamp into his prison. Until the light reached him he hadn’t known how his eyes had changed. And until he threw himself backwards off the little boat he hadn’t realised he moved faster than other people. Everyone here seemed to move clumsily, stumbling through dark alleys, barely seeing what was there.

At first, he’d wondered what was wrong with them. Who these clumsy people were. Now he had fragments of memory back, and Maître Thomas’s memories too, he was coming to wonder if he was
people
at all.

“Who goes there?”

Tycho fell into the darkness. He could feel it shimmer, and colonnades lighten as the darkness closed around him. Conical steel caps, straw-stuffed jerkins with scales of cheap steel. There were five guards, two of them carried daggers and two had pikes, their sergeant had a war hammer hanging from his belt. All wore boots studded with rivets against the ice underfoot.

“I saw someone.”

“Where?” The question was dismissive.

“Over there,” insisted a youth, pointing to where Tycho stood in the shadows. Their sergeant peered into the darkness.

“Boss?” one said.

“Nothing,” he replied. Cuffing the boy across the back of his head, the sergeant said, “Scared of his own shadow.”

Tycho trailed them around the expanse of a snow-skimmed square, moving silently and unseen behind them, and keeping his steps within the slush their boots churned from the virgin snow. He would have completed the circuit had he not looked up and seen horses.

Four of them.

Striking the air with their hooves as they leapt from the balcony of the Basilica San Marco. He knew the horses instantly. Because Maître Thomas had known them. How could he not? Looted from Byzantium, who stole them from Athens, where they’d decorated the original Hippodrome. He’d never seen a horse close to.

Thanking the masons who carved the basilica’s façade, Tycho used one foothold after another to scale a column and roll himself on to the balcony’s balustrade. Behind him he left stone angels with muddy toe prints on their heads. The four bronze horses he expected. The red-haired child sat beneath he didn’t.

Looking up, she grinned.

“Well,” she said. “What a surprise.”

The child huddled over a fire, which flickered in the night wind. Its flames were trapped in her cupped hands and burnt nothing, unless it was the empty air between them.

Her hair was greasy, her green eyes unreadable as he hesitated, half over the balustrade, one foot still on the halo of a stone angel. “Impressive, aren’t they?” She patted a stallion’s leg. “Stolen from Greece by the Romans, stolen from Rome by Romanised Greeks, stolen from them by us…”

“Us?” Tycho asked.

“Well, them really.” The girl looked at him, hanging half on and half off the balcony, and raised her eyebrows. “Afraid of witches?”

When Tycho scowled, her grin widened. So he rolled himself over the balustrade wishing he’d kept the printer’s knife.

“Strange city,” she said. “Strange hungers you didn’t know you had… You’re right to be scared. I don’t blame you.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Of course you’re not.”

Closing her hands to quench the flame, she pulled a scrap of bread from her smock, revealing ribs like twigs as her smock fell open. Eleven, he thought, maybe twelve if starved. “Take, eat,” she said, mockingly. “Or is it a different kind of salvation you’re after?”

He grabbed the bread, stuffing it into his mouth. Its crust was old leather, the middle sawdust. It tasted of ashes and coal.

She laughed. “Apparently so.”

Climbing to her feet, the girl scooped slush from the balcony floor and offered him that instead. He drank from her hands, wondering why. The slush was fresh, if gritty, but it didn’t change the taste in his mouth.

“You shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“Nor should you.”

She laughed. “You should go home.”

Tycho’s eyes filled with snow. Snow and fire and ashes.

“Ahh,” she said. “You remember that much.” She paused, and for the first time looked uncertain. “Alexa thinks you drowned. Should I tell her you didn’t?”

He didn’t know the answer. But then he didn’t really understand her question. Or how she’d moved from offering him water to standing there. All he knew was she moved as swiftly as he did. Maybe sunlight hurt her too.

“I’ve tamed death walkers.” Her words were bitter. “Seljuk mages,
krieghund
even. A skill much needed last autumn, I gather. But you…” Without hesitating, she bit her wrist deep enough to draw blood. Then she took a deep breath and held it out to him.

“Bind yourself.”

The world turned red.

Bronze horses leapt through scarlet mist. Hunger hollowed out his guts, his throat tightened at the taste of blood flowing from
broken gums where his dog teeth lengthened. As his senses heightened, Tycho rocked back on his heels. Stunned by the onslaught of what he suddenly saw, heard and smelt.

“You stop when I tell you. Or else.”

Tycho’s intuition said she doubted she could deliver on that threat. A hundred thousand rivers of blood flowed beneath her filthy skin and he could sense them all, for a second they were all he could see of her.

Grabbing her arm, he suckled at her wrist. A second later, he was spitting at the floor, scrubbing his lips with his hand. Curdled milk barely described the taste of her blood. Nothing he’d eaten came close. The red mist was gone, swept away by shock, and the night was dark around him. He felt like crying.

The girl sighed.

Blood ceased to well as she licked her wrist, scabs closing over bite marks. She dipped her chunk of stale bread into a puddle and tore half free, offering it to him. “Sometimes one magic doesn’t like another.”

Tycho nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

He was still chewing the last of the bread when she walked to the edge of the balcony, and stared over the darkened expanse of Piazza San Marco. “Dawn soon,” she said. “We should both go.”

“Tell me your name.”

She grinned. “I offer you my blood. You want my name as well? It’s A’rial, I’m Alexa’s
stregoi
. Her pet witch.”

Before he could answer A’rial was gone.

Patting his stallion’s neck, Tycho slid from its bronze back to stand at the balcony’s edge, with the wind in his face. Below him, a chair waited, its link men shuffling against the cold. In the distance, the Watch still scuffed their way round the piazza, while cutpurses slunk behind its colonnades, hidden by black cloaks and masks.

Out on the lagoon half-furled sails snapped in the wind. Five men approached the
piazzetta
in a low, lean
gondolino
, saw the Watch and changed their minds. The slight splash of their retreat muted by falling snow.

Tycho listened harder.

Concentrating, he caught a sound from within the basilica itself. A young woman crying, and, tied to her sobs, a scent so compelling it hooked him through the guts. He’d turned towards her before he realised. Desperate to make his way inside the building.

Ducking under a lintel, he found a locked door beyond. The door was solid and the lock firm. So, without thinking, he slid his fingers under the door and lifted it off its hinges. Leaving it against a wall, he entered an attic beyond.

Stones stairs were blocked by a wrought-iron gate, with a better lock and hinges. So he took a corridor that led to an internal balcony high above the basilica floor. A rat paused in its scavenging, only to resume when he moved on.

The balcony stank of dust, damp wood and sweet smoke from a censer hanging over the darkened nave. Below it, mosaics swirled away in patterns that mimicked a Persian carpet, unless it was the other way round.

Christ, his mother and apostles whose names Tycho struggled to place watched from the domed ceiling. Their faces stern, their noses aquiline and their resemblance to long dead Roman emperors unmistakable. Every one of them stared at a girl kneeling below.

Tycho understood why.

She was beautiful, her hair as red as her dress. The Virgin she knelt before stood silent, as stone virgins do, but the supplicant’s shoulders heaved with anguish, her sobs rising to heaven. From the desolation on her face she doubted the Virgin would help. It was a low, urgent and very one-sided conversation.

“Please, my lady,” she begged. “If you don’t…”

A heart-shaped face looked up, blue eyes fixing on heaven. Tycho had no idea what she looked for, but he saw a desperate girl pull a knife from her cloak. Gripping its handle, she folded her fingers over the pommel as if this was something she’d been taught and put the point to her chest.

When she lowered the knife, Tycho felt his heart restart.

Only to stop again when she undid a gilded clasp on her cloak and let the garment slide from her shoulders. Next she undid her dress, exposing a white shift beneath. A bow at the neck undid this. Regaining her knife, she slid the dress and shift from one shoulder to reveal a breast.

He didn’t know whether to watch the blade or the girl as she put the knife to her heart. He saw her hesitate, watched her wince as she jabbed slightly, blood tricking down her ribs.

“Sweet God,” she whispered.

And Tycho’s senses exploded, hunger overflowing desire as his world narrowed to the half-naked girl, and her alone. The night-time nave was daylight bright, the smell of incense viciously cloying. Meltwater dripping overhead was loud enough to startle. The gap between him and the censer vanished in a single leap, its chain swinging wildly, until he dropped and its swing ended.

Only when he reached the censer did the girl look up.

Some fifth sense where Tycho now had a dozen. One hand rose to hide her breast and she opened her mouth to scream. Before she could, Tycho dropped, closing the gap between them. Grabbing her knife, he tossed it away.

“
Don’t
,” he snarled.

He wanted… her, but how?

His dog teeth ached, sweetness flooded his mouth. Her neck was freckled and perfect, her exposed nipple pale and pink, the breast it tipped small but ripe. She wore rose petal scent.
That
was what hooked him.

Not just her nakedness. Not just her beauty.

The combination of roses and blue eyes reminded him of… Who? Because they reminded him of someone. Shuddering, he traced one finger up the trickle of blood on her ribs, only stopping when he reached the underside of her breast.

“Do you know who I am?” she demanded.

How would he?
All he knew was that sucking her blood from his finger sent shivers up his spine. Blood must be what he wanted. Blood must be what he hadn’t allowed himself since arriving in this strange city.

“Well…? Do you?”

Furious eyes glared from a heart-shaped face as she freed her wrist, and Tycho let it happen. As he watched, dumbstruck, she raised her shift to hide her breast, blood blossoming in a run of roses across its surface.

“Do you know what my uncle will do to you?”

No, and he didn’t care either. He caught her wrist before she could slap him for lowering her shift again. He wanted to hurt and protect her. Strip her naked, take her screaming on the cold floor. And die keeping her from harm. Just looking at the trickle of her blood made him drunk.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“What’s your name?”

She glared, convinced he was mocking her. But he wasn’t. He wanted to know her name. Needed to know it more than anything he’d ever needed to know.

“I’m Lady Giulietta di Millioni.”

“Giulietta?”

“My uncle will flay you.”

“I don’t care…” That was the truth. He didn’t.

Outside, guards stamped their feet against the cold, and an oxcart rumbled and creaked over melting snow. Daybreak was near, and Tycho needed to hide. But he stayed instead. “I saw a man flayed once,” he said, remembering.

Lady Giulietta scowled ferociously.

“I mean it. He’ll have you nailed to a door. Or boiled in oil.” She glared at Tycho. “Maybe you’ve seen a man boiled in oil?”

“No,” he said. “Does it last long?”

She hissed in fury. “How would I know? I haven’t seen a man flayed either. I’m barely allowed out of the palace.” She caught herself. “This is ridiculous. I don’t know why I’m even talking to you.”

“Because you can’t help it.”

“That’s…”

“True,” Tycho said. He let her raise her shift again.

Blood still seeped from her slight wound, darkening cloth where it trickled down to her red velvet dress. Giulietta did nothing when he touched the largest stain, though she froze as he lifted her breast, finding the source beneath her shift with his thumb. Carrying her blood to his mouth, he sucked until the ball of his
thumb was clean. Then he brushed his thumb across the stain again, and watched in surprise as the trickle lessened and stopped.