To the hideousness of what Tycho could make himself become had been added the monstrousness of what he’d once been. He had speed, strength and courage. All of these came at a price. And Tycho knew, because he knew himself better now, it was a price he would pay.
This too he needed to tell her.
If Osman spoke the truth, Tycho had been almost animal when trapped by Tīmūrid mercenaries on the borders of the Mamluk empire. He’d been sold to the sultan’s vizier, in a trade that saw one old enemy deal with another on behalf of Venice, a third. The sultan’s mages had emptied Tycho’s head of nightmares, dreams and memories. They’d emptied it of everything except a need to carry out one single task. If he hadn’t drowned in Venice’s lagoon—or almost drowned, whichever it was—Bjornvin’s memories would never have crept back.
The bribes must have been huge and the promised rewards enormous. Prince Osman’s sister had held words of power. Words designed to bind Tycho to carry out her order. He was to kill Duchess Alexa. And the man who asked for this death, offering to deliver gold and territories to the Mamluks when he finally became duke, was Alexa’s brother-in-law, Lady Giulietta’s uncle, Prince Alonzo.
The Regent hadn’t know when it would be done. Simply that it would be. When Alonzo discovered the plan had failed, his revenge on the Mamluk fontego had been terrible. Had he succeeded in killing Alexa, Duke Marco IV would have been next. Prince Osman had little doubt about that. Quite possibly Lady Giulietta after that. Unless the Regent had other plans for her.
Kneeling up, Tycho stroked the sleeping girl’s face until she woke, looking puzzled and still sleepy. “You should return to your cabin,” he said. “But first there’s something I need to tell you…”
Acknowledgments
You know where you are with a publisher who drags you off to the Porterhouse pub in London’s Maiden Lane for a six hour editorial meeting—and waits with good grace while you go though the script page by page. So heads up to Darren Nash, lapsed Australian, Orbit UK editorial director and good friend…
And a big tip of the hat to Orbit supremo Tim Holman, who filled me with food and alcohol when I flew out to New York—running a temperature and fever—to pitch him The Fallen Blade. Having asked me to pass the one page synopsis to Devi Pillai, senior editor and Orbit US’s self-styled Eye of Sauron, he waited while she read it. Devi nodded significantly and that was it. We were in business on both sides of the Atlantic.
To my agent Mic Cheetham for doing the real work that made this happen. Joanna Kramer for keeping me sane during the copyedit process. Darren Nash and Devi Pillai again for thoughtful and occasionally stern editorial notes (that’s you, Devi).
As always the ex-lunchtime collective of, variously, Paul McAuley, Kim Newman, China Miéville, Chris Fowler, Barry Forshaw, Nick Harkaway, Pat Cadigan, for drinks, food, bitching sessions, general chat and sanity. If there was any justice, Rob Holdstock would still be on that list (and he is in spirit).
My son Jamie, who might have buggered off half way round the world but still calls regularly for all that he’s rubbish at answering emails. Hearing from you always makes my day.
And finally, Sam Baker. Seventeen years married. More than twenty years together. Pretty good for what was meant to be a quick drink. Thank you.
Look out for
Act Two of the Assassini:
THE OUTCAST BLADE
by Jon Courtenay Grimwood
extras
meet the author
Charlie Hopkinson
JON COURTENAY GRIMWOOD was born in Malta and christened in the upturned bell of a ship. He grew up in the Far East, Britain and Scandinavia. Apart from novels, he writes for magazines and newspapers. He travels extensively and undertakes a certain amount of consulting. Until recently he wrote a monthly review column for The Guardian.
Felaheen, the third of his novels featuring Asraf Bey, a half-Berber detective, won the BSFA Award for Best Novel. So did his book End of the World Blues, about a British sniper on the run from Iraq and running an Irish bar in Tokyo. He has just published The Fallen Blade, the first of three novels set in an alternate fifteenth-century Venice.
His work is published in French, German, Spanish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Finnish and American, among others.
He is married to the journalist and novelist Sam Baker, currently editor in chief of Red magazine. They divide their time between London and Winchester.
Find out more about the author at www.j-cg.co.uk.
interview
Vampire novels are all the rage now. Did this help to inspire you, or did you imagine a different kind of vampire from the beginning?
I’ve been reading fantasy my entire life. I’ve always had a thing for historical fiction, particularly the kind where the heroine or hero is running round with a couple of daggers and something very nasty is going on in the background. And I terrified myself for weeks as a small child with an adult vampire novel, so I’m surprised I didn’t write this sooner. But it took a while to nail the plot down.
Also, I wasn’t even sure Tycho was a vampire when he swirled his way into my head, dressed entirely in black leather and velvet and carrying his daggers. All I knew was he lived for the dark, feared the moon and had lost his memories. And to be honest I’m still not sure he is a vampire. At least not in the Twilight sense.
What I wanted to do was a vampire ur-myth.
A story that explained how what we call vampires reached Europe, where they came from and what they really are. That’s the backstory to Tycho’s personal history. He’s the first vampire in Europe. (The term wasn’t in use in English before the 1700s.)
The Fallen Blade takes place around 1407, twenty-five years before Dracula is born and fifty years before he ruled as prince of Walachia.
Obviously Tycho doesn’t know what he is; just as he doesn’t know yet what his powers are, or that he can transfer them to other people. He’s simply him and not at all happy about that. What he really is becomes clear later. Although there are clues in the first book.
What would you do if you were invisible for a day?
One of those great barroom what ifs. Most people say they’d rob a bank or empty the nearest jewelers, or hang out unseen in the dressing room of some incredibly hot Hollywood star, or go see what their friends and family really say about them when they’re not around…
But realistically, they’d probably panic.
I’d spend the entire day worried I’d turned into a ghost, or was locked in some weird limbo where no one could see me or hear me and I would never escape. By the time I suddenly became visible again I’d either be totally insane or getting used to it and getting ready to have some fun. At least that was my reasoning when making Tycho come to terms with his new powers.
If weird powers came with an instruction manual, that would be different. Then, I’d probably rob the bank, and become an unseen assassin. Actually, I’d probably do all of the above. I guess most people would.
You grew up in the Far East, Britain and Scandinavia. Where did the idea to set a vampire novel in Italy come from? Did you travel there a lot before you came up with the idea or afterward to do research?
As a child I went to Venice a few times on holiday. (It was about three days’ drive from where we lived in England, and my mother was born restless and liked museums.)
In my memory it’s always hot, the sun blinding as it reflects on the wide expanse of the Grand Canal, the water in the little canals behind the big buildings is stinking and often green. There’s also something creepy about the city. A really disconcerting feeling that I’m in one of the scariest places in the world…
And on a practical level I was certainly in one of the strangest.
Canals instead of streets. No cars; an entire city where everyone walks or takes boats. So layered with history that something has happened on every slab of every square. But it’s more than that. When the winter fog fills saltwater lagoon around Venice, you can bel
ieve it’s the only island in the world. The only city. That it is the world.
As a child—a strange one, admittedly—I decided that the water of the lagoon stopped the ghosts in Venice from escaping. That was why it felt so odd. In Venice ghosts had to outnumber the living by hundreds to one. When I walked through the city I was walking not just through history but ghosts everywhere.
I went back to Venice in my teens, and was shocked by how dark and tortured Venetian art was. At least the pictures in churches and the ducal palace. For every beautiful, redheaded Titian nude there were three paintings of saints being tortured, murdered, exiled… I began to see where the ghosts came from.
The Fallen Blade is not a ghost story. But that sheer sense of strangeness was in my head when I began thinking about Tycho. And there seemed only one place I could set his story.
Obviously, researching the series is fantastic fun.
So far I’ve made three trips in the past two years. Walking the backstreets, using waterbuses to navigate from one part of Venice to another. A lot of my time is spent sitting in cafés with a notebook, thinking, “Ah, so that’s what Lady Giulietta looks like,” or, “That house there is obviously where Lord Atilo lives.”
All of the locations are real.
I’m now halfway through writing the next part of Tycho’s story, The Outcast Blade, so I’ll be going back soon.
What do you do when you’re not writing?
I’m always writing, in my head if I can’t get to my laptop. Sometimes on my iPhone or on the nearest scrap of paper. I still have a novel outline I wrote on a restaurant napkin because it was the only thing I could find to write on.
I work in cafés and bars and on trains, in public parks and occasionally, if lucky, on planes and in airports. I’m writing this in a café in West London while waiting for a friend. When not at the keyboard I’m reading, walking or riding my motorbike. The bike’s a Triumph Bonneville that I’ve had made all black, and I use it to belt round the winding back roads near my house in Winchester.
There’s a certain purity and sanity that comes from riding a motorbike (at least there is for me). It locks you into a single moment. And you really know you’re in that moment when you feel the bike stay still and the world flow around you. I always write better after riding. This is the other reason I do it.
I suppose if I’m not writing, reading or riding then I’m probably travelling or cooking, which is something else that works for me. Food tends to play a large part in my books. One of Tycho’s great losses is nothing he eats tastes right to him.
Will the rest of the Assassini trilogy be set in Italy or will we be taken to other exciting locations?
The whole story arc is mostly set in Venice, which is a hundred or so little islands joined by bridges and divided by canals. When it’s not there it’s in one of the Venetian empire’s colonies like Cyprus, or on the mainland of Italy. (Apart from all of Tycho’s flashbacks to Bjornvin, which are set in North American in the last Viking stronghold, all that remains of the colonies of Vineland.)
It was said that the Venetians were more interested in lovers seen through a window of a palace on the Grand Canal than the murder of a prince five hundred miles away. (Even when they ordered the murder themselves.) Venice owned a huge empire, had one of the biggest and most powerful navies and the greatest shipyard in the world. But as long as the gold kept coming they kept looking inwards at themselves. Not for nothing is it a city of gilt and mirrors.
What film made you cry last?
It’s well-known men don’t cry. We choke up with emotion (yeah, right). The first ten or fifteen minutes of Up were devastating. And a really clever lesson in what you can do with any genre/form you like. The scene in Gladiator where the hero’s dying and he sees his dead child waiting in the distance as he comes towards them is a killer. And I’ve known the video for Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt” reduce seriously hard men to tears. (Simply because it’s impossible to watch without sensing the angel of Death hovering just off camera.) But what film made me cry last? A Studio Ghibli anime called Only Yesterday, right at the end, more or less after the credits, when a childhood version of the heroine appears in the train—like a cross between a ghost and a memory—and makes her adult self turn back to that place she’s leaving.
It taps into that sense of, “If I only knew back then when what I know now…” But it’s cleverer than that (it would be, it’s by the guy who directed Grave of the Fireflies), so it also taps into a sense of, “If only I knew now what I knew then…”
Childhood and old age make for great characters, and I try to have a mix so all ages have their part in the book.
Your novel features a unique combination of pirates, assassins, vampires and Italian dukes. If you could be any one, which would you choose?
Vampire… Because a vampire can happily be any of those or, indeed, all of those over the course of a vampire lifetime, but the others can’t necessarily be a vampire! The hook for me isn’t just immortality, or near as, damn it, it’s immortality with added powers and not that serious a trade-off. I’d happily function only at night if I could see in the dark and move faster than anything else around me!
I wonder sometimes if becoming a vampire isn’t like growing up. You think you’ll never be that age, you’ll never do those things. And then experience creeps up on us in much the same way that I suspect vampireness creeps up on the undead.
At first they think they’ll be just like humans but different; then discover that they’re less and less like humans as years turn into centuries. Obviously, Tycho’s right at the start of this. Well, he thinks he is.
Do you have a favorite character?
I like all the characters in The Fallen Blade—even the wicked ones. But Lady Giulietta, red-haired and stroppy, a pawn in her family’s power games, the original medieval poor little rich girl who decides to fight back and finds she’s simply made her life worse is right up there for me.
So, obviously enough, is Tycho.
He’s the most fun to write but also the hardest because he’s not quite human, and I have to keep that otherness in mind. There’s a strangeness to how he sees the world. And I have to remind myself—and the readers—that how he sees the world is not how the rest of us see it, for all he’s got human failing and emotions in the mix.
The other one I really like is Duchess Alexa. I think there’s a lot more going on with her than anyone around her realizes. How old is she? Why goes she always wear a veil? How come she looks so young? This is a woman who likes to watch the world through the eyes of a bat and poison her enemies. Yet is so devoted to her niece, Lady Giulietta, that she’ll do anything for her. That’s Alexa’s weakness, of course. And she has enemies who’d be willing to use that.
introducing
If you enjoyed
THE FALLEN BLADE,
look out for
BEST SERVED COLD
by Joe Abercrombie
Springtime in Styria. And that means war.
There have been nineteen years of blood. The ruthless Grand Duke Orso is locked in a vicious struggle with the squabbling League of Eight, and between them they have bled the land white. Armies march, heads roll and cities burn, while behind the scenes bankers, priests and older, darker powers play a deadly game to choose who will be king.
War may be hell but for Monza Murcatto, the Snake of Talins, the most feared and famous mercenary in Duke Orso’s employ, it’s a damn good way of making money too. Her victories have made her popular — a shade too popular for her employer’s taste. Betrayed and left for dead, Murcatto’s reward is a broken body and a burning hunger for vengeance. Whatever the cost, seven men must die.
Her allies include Styria’s least reliable drunkard, Styria’s most treacherous poisoner, a mass-murderer obsessed with numbers and a Northman who just wants to do the right thing. Her enemies number the better half of the nation. And that’s all before the most dangerous man in the world is dispatched to hunt her down
and finish the job Duke Orso started . . .
Springtime in Styria. And that means revenge.
Duke Orso’s private study was a marble hall the size of a market square. Lofty windows marched in bold procession along one side, standing open, a keen breeze washing through and making the vivid hangings twitch and rustle. Beyond them a long terrace seemed to hang in empty air, overlooking the steepest drop from the mountain’s summit.
The opposite wall was covered with towering panels, painted by the foremost artists of Styria, displaying the great battles of history. The victories of Stolicus, of Harod the Great, of Farans and Verturio, all preserved in sweeping oils. The message that Orso was the latest in a line of royal winners was hard to miss, even though his great-grandfather had been a usurper, and a common criminal besides.
The largest painting of them all faced the door, ten strides high at the least. Who else but Grand Duke Orso? He was seated upon a rearing charger, his shining sword raised high, his piercing eye fixed on the far horizon, urging his men to victory at the Battle of Etrea. The painter seemed to have been unaware that Orso hadn’t come within fifty miles of the fighting.
But then fine lies beat tedious truths every time, as he had often told her.
The Duke of Talins himself sat crabbed over a desk, wielding a pen rather than a sword. A tall, gaunt, hook-nosed man stood at his elbow, staring down as keenly as a vulture waiting for thirsty travellers to die. A great shape lurked near them, in the shadows against the wall. Gobba, Orso’s bodyguard, fat-necked as a great hog. Prince Ario, the duke’s eldest son and heir, lounged in a gilded chair nearer at hand. He had one leg crossed over the other, a wine glass dangling carelessly, a bland smile balanced on his blandly handsome face.
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