The fallen blade at-1

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  "What?"

  His two boats had drawn together in the swell, and Sergeant Temujin was gripping the sides of both to keep them steady. At his anger everyone froze. Now was the time Roderigo was meant to say some words. Choose who boarded first. Tell them what he expected to find.

  "Any special orders, chief?"

  He and Temujin had searched a hundred ships before. Everything from visiting Moorish galleys and trade ships from Byzantium to Rus boats and even a felucca that sailed all the way from the mouth of the Nile. Why should this one be any different? Roderigo felt he owed his sergeant some explanation.

  "A girl I know is getting married."

  "That's it?" Temujin looked disgusted.

  "There's red gold," Roderigo replied. As if his last words were unspoken. "Also Mamluk silver. They're on the manifest. Three leopard skins, sky stone for hardening steel and a box of rubies. All declared. It's what they're hiding that worries me. I mean, for a Mamluk not to try to barter…"

  "Chief, can I say something?"

  "I don't have to like it."

  "You won't. Whoever she is. Forget it. She's just a slit, pretty or not. You can't go into a possible battle moping. It's the quickest way to die."

  He hated it when Temujin was right.

  As the boats separated and one headed into the wind bound for the far side of the Quaja, which was the Mamluk vessel's name, Sergeant Temujin kept up a count as steady as the Watch's steps on Piazza San Marco at midnight.

  "Fifty," he said.

  Pulling a wide sash from his pocket, Roderigo draped it over his shoulder and adjusted the weight that kept it at his hip. A Venetian officer boarding a foreign vessel had to wear a city sash. It made an insult to the officer an insult to the city. An insult to the city was an insult to the duke.

  This simplified matters.

  "One hundred," Temujin said.

  "Take us in."

  A swirl of oars carried them close, the Quaja's side looming so large it threatened to crush their lugger in the swell. An anchor rope hummed with tension above them. That was where they would board.

  "I'll go first."

  "Chief…"

  "You heard me."

  Even Temujin, sworn to protect Roderigo, knew better than to query an order given in the field. When the captain reached deck, he found a man from his other lugger already standing over a dead Mamluk.

  "Sweetly done," Roderigo said.

  At his gesture, others climbed aboard.

  "Right," Temujin said, keeping his voice low. "You and you by that cargo hatch, and you by that door… And you, why isn't your crossbow loaded?" This last hiss because a string wasn't ratcheted back.

  "Give me a…"

  One second the sergeant was glaring, the next shock replaced anger in the hiss of an arrow from high overhead. Temujin stared at the shaft in his chest.

  "Rigging," Roderigo said.

  As Temujin fell to his knees, blood running between his fingers, the troop's newcomer planted his feet, raised his own half bow and hesitated.

  "Dead or alive?"

  "Kill him."

  The man put an arrow between crows nest's boards, through the Mamluk archer's foot and into his groin. The lookout fell with a thud. He should have fired the moment they appeared or held his element of surprise.

  "Alive was better." Temujin's words came from between blood-frothed lips. "So any bastards we leave living could kill him for being useless. Good job he was, though. We'd be fucked otherwise."

  "Help Temujin up."

  Two soldiers did as ordered. The arrow was a yard long, with its point exiting from Temujin's lower back. Sighing with relief, Roderigo confirmed the point was unpoisoned and snapped the feathered end without saying what he intended to do.

  "Bind the arrow in place," he told a guard.

  "Sir…"

  "Seen it." A door was opening. As half a dozen crossbows shifted in that direction, Roderigo said, "Wait on my order."

  Opening a little more, the door suddenly started closing and then stopped. The man behind must know it offered minimal protection. Steel-tipped quarrels would rip straight through.

  "In the name of Marco IV," Roderigo said. "Show yourself. We search for a missing glass-blower. And have reason to suspect he may have come aboard. Any attempt to hinder us will be regarded as an act of war."

  The door shut with a bang.

  "My God," one of the men muttered. "We've found him."

  It looked that way. Roderigo hoped it was true. Although the glass-blower would die horribly, his children and grandchildren-those left living-would be spared a similar fate.

  Strange words came from behind the door.

  Guttural and impassioned, the man speaking sounded young to captain a ship, never mind a vessel as large as the Quaja. When Roderigo didn't reply, the sentence was repeated, as far as Roderigo could tell word for word. Problem was, Roderigo had no idea if it was a question, a statement or a boast that the Quaja's crew would fight to the death. "Anyone understand that?"

  The newcomer nodded.

  "What are you called?"

  Bato sounded like a nickname.

  "Tell him I'm looking for a glass blower. We think he might have been smuggled aboard this ship."

  "They haven't got him," Bato said eventually.

  "What's the language?"

  "It's Turkic. Good Turkic. Formal. Very proper."

  "Tell him I'm Dogana chief and I will search his ship. If what he says is true, he can wait out his quarantine, or sail on tomorrow's tide. We will count his dead and my sergeant's injury as the cost of a misunderstanding."

  The answer when it came was calmer.

  No glass-blower was aboard the ship. The manifest of goods given to the Dogana was accurate. All the same, they would let the Venetians search where they liked. Since they had nothing to hide.

  "Tell him, if it was up to me I'd take his word and leave now."

  Untrue, of course, but any honeyed words that helped get this over with, and Temujin to Dr. Crow, were fine with Roderigo. As he watched, the door opened and a fine-featured Mamluk stood blinking in the moon's rays. His robe was rich with silver thread and a scarlet turban wrapped his skull.

  He looked little more than a boy.

  Identifying Roderigo by his sash, the Mamluk touched his hand to his heart, mouth and forehead in formal greeting and gestured the Dogana captain inside. The vessel's layout was like dozens of others he'd searched before. A captain's cabin at the stern and quarters for crew below deck. Half of that area being put aside for cargo. Below this was a crawl space where the hull curved towards the keel. Under that, a stinking slop hole filled with stones for ballast.

  Roderigo checked the lot. All the time carrying the weight of Desdaio's betrayal like stones in his own heart. Two of his troop were helping Sergeant Temujin towards the upper deck when Roderigo stopped. At a growled order, his men did likewise and a flicker of blind panic filled the Mamluk's face.

  The crawl space was twenty-one steps long. The cargo deck nineteen. Had it been reversed Roderigo could have dismissed the difference as loss for the curve of the prow. But that way round?

  "Tell the man we're going to break this down."

  Roderigo pointed at the bulkhead of the stern. A torrent of impassioned Turkic greeted this news. And the Mamluk went to stand in front of it.

  "He says his ship will sink and we'll die. It will be your fault and his country will go to war with Serenissima. A thousand ships will sail up the Adriatic sacking every Venetian colony on the way."

  "Tell him it's a risk I'll take."

  It took five minutes to find a large enough axe. In which time the Mamluk's crew gathered, silent ghosts watching uneasily. Only the loaded crossbows of Roderigo's men kept them from attacking.

  "Now," he ordered.

  Bato swung the axe.

  "And again."

  A second blow widened the crack.

  "No water yet," Temujin growled.

  The planks
were too thin to be the Quaja's outer skin and their timber too green. Venice's own shipwrights used wood from trees stored for at least two years before cutting planks that had to dry in their turn.

  "Hack the lot down."

  Planting his feet, Bato swung a blow to behead a horse. His next opened darkness. And a tanner's stink of shit and stale piss hissed through the gap. Not waiting for more orders, Bato gripped one edge of the planking and tugged. Wood split and a plank creaked free from battens behind.

  Another plank followed just as noisily.

  "Light," Roderigo demanded.

  Stepping between the wreckage of Bato's handiwork, he entered a fetid compartment behind the wall. A moment later, the Mamluk followed.

  Roderigo was thirty years old. He'd fought his first battle at fourteen and taken his first girl a year earlier. He'd lived through cities sacked, and seen a Florentine spy torn apart by wild horses. He expected the missing glass blower. He got…

  The captain crossed himself.

  A naked boy hung in chains, his wrists raw from fighting shackles. In life, the boy must have been about seventeen. Nineteen at the most. Long silver-grey hair half hid a face so beautiful it belonged to an angel. The corpse had the sheen of wet marble. Almost alabaster in its translucence.

  Black earth strewed the deck beneath him.

  Lurching past his commander, Sergeant Temujin lifted the boy's head to the light.

  Amber-flecked eyes snapped open.

  As the foreign captain shouted a warning, the sergeant drew his dagger, and turned to slash the Mamluk's throat, drenching himself in blood.

  "Temujin…"

  "Kill them all," Temujin shouted.

  Outside, his troop obeyed without question. Crossbows snapped, arrows flew, daggers found hearts. Fifteen seconds of hellish slaughter ended in the stink of blood, Mamluk corpses, and Bato leaving, bow in hand, to hunt down stragglers.

  "Burn this boat."

  Roderigo stared at his sergeant.

  "Chief… Steal what you need to keep the Regent and duchess sweet and burn everything else. Him included. Because I know what that is and it cannot be tamed. The Khan owned one in my grandfather's time. It killed him."

  "Sergeant."

  Temujin stopped talking.

  His eyes were bright with the onset of fever, and the crude bandage around his ribs dark with blood. Only willpower and his need to convince Roderigo kept him conscious.

  "You want to tell me why you killed that man?"

  It hurt Temujin, probably more than it hurt to drop to a crouch, but he did it anyway. Opening buttons at the dead Mamluk's neck he revealed the swell of breasts, and said, "She's got to be someone, chief. To command this ship and carry that."

  Temujin meant her prisoner.

  "We can't let anyone find her. And, believe me, you don't want anyone to find that. Kill it, fire this damn ship and get us out of here."

  "I wish it was that simple."

  "It is."

  Roderigo shook his head.

  Halfway across the lagoon, while the Dogana troop concentrated on getting their badly wounded sergeant to Dr. Crow for treatment, the boy made his move. He simply stood, and tipped backwards into the water with a splash.

  "Kill him," Roderigo shouted.

  Not a single man had his crossbow cocked.

  By the time Bato slotted an arrow, his target was being swept away by the cross-currents that made Venice's lagoon so unpredictable. Had the burning Mamluk ship been close enough to light the scene Bato might have had a better chance. He fired anyway.

  6

  The shock of an arrow striking blew breath from the boy's body. And the pain in his shoulder opened the boy's mind to a vision that swept in like smoke.

  In the smoke a veiled woman smiled, then scowled and began to protest as her image blew away, leaving him spitting water. When she reappeared, she was sitting on a squat throne with a thin young man in black clutching her knees.

  "Join us."

  "Where am I?" he asked.

  She looked puzzled, as if this was not what he was meant to say.

  But already he was thinking other things. Clutching at passing fragments of memory, he tried to recall why he'd been locked behind the false bulkhead of a ship. Fire and ice, earth and air. Fire started this. A blaze swept through some building. A man killed another. A sour-faced woman hated him worse than ever. He fought to remember who she was.

  Who he was.

  But the foul-tasting lagoon swallowed the boy before he could remember more than a single word: Bjornvin. The word made no more sense to him than his vision of the veiled woman. Since the men who hacked him free were heading in one direction, the boy let cross-currents sweep him in the other.

  He wondered what would happen. He'd die, he supposed. Perhaps he should stop swimming to see how sinking felt?

  Stopping kicking, the boy let his shackles pull him under.

  And, tasting salt, let himself sink further. Opaque above, darkness below. His toes squelched on soft mud in a channel. Minor canals in Venice were cleared every ten years, waterways and large canals whenever necessary. He knew nothing of this. He simply felt softness beneath his toes.

  Sinking deeper, he felt gravel.

  His lungs pulled life from the water rushing into them.

  Flickers of lightning twitched his limbs as fire lit behind his eyes and he felt his body fight itself, without understanding how it won the battle for life. Slamming into an ancient wreck, which crumbled as he snatched for it, he let a brutal undercurrent sweep him sideways before kicking for the surface.

  The burning ship was far behind and buildings lined the horizon ahead of him. Above, in gaps between the clouds, was a bowl of stars. More stars than any man could count. Should he be able to count beyond his fingers.

  The boy had reached the Grand Canal without knowing where it was, what it was or anything about it. As his eyes struggled to focus and his body shivered, and his guts retched filthy water, he accepted the embrace of an incoming tide. Then a spasm locked his stomach, and the sky became purple, the moon hurt his eyes, and bitterness filled his throat.

  "There you are…"

  The words were not his.

  They came uninvited into his mind. With them an image of the woman he'd seen in his head earlier, when he was drowning. An old woman with a young woman's smile. A young woman with an old woman's eyes. Thin wisps of smoke across her face like a veil, which blew away as he stared harder.

  "Alexa?" he said.

  "Who told you my name?"

  Having no answer, he felt her try to pull clues from his ruined memories. All she found were the names others had once called him.

  "White hair is descriptive. You is a pronoun. Tadsi is an Old Norse pun on shit, and Tychet means idiot. Here we've Latinised it to Tycho." She sounded darkly amused. "Keep the last. It suits you."

  Tycho forced her voice away.

  7

  Moonlight glimmered on the Canalasso, the elegant waterway bisecting the city to which the burning ship had delivered Tycho. It glimmered in blanket-sized scraps of silver leaf. And the reflection this glimmering created lit the walls of a fish market opposite. But the three children staring down the slimy steps at the edge of the Grand Canal saw none of this beauty.

  They were concentrating on a tidal area, beside the steps, where flotsam gathered. Tonight's catch was a drowned girl, long silver hair rippling in the gentle waves.

  "Get her then."

  Rosalyn guessed Josh meant her. Since she was the one he glared at. Hooking her smock to her hips, she stepped into the filthy water. "It's cold."

  "Just do it."

  Corpses could be sold, Josh said.

  Necromancers, probably. Rosalyn couldn't see who else might want one. She gasped as the water climbed her thighs, realised she still couldn't reach the floating girl and stepped down again, grabbing hair. "Give me a hand then," she protested.

  When Josh didn't move, her brother Pietro did, wading into
the canal to help her drag the body nearer the steps.

  "My God," Rosalyn said.

  Scowling, Josh came to take a look.

  A boy, his genitals flopping sideways, his chest entirely flat, his belly button an intricate coil. If not for the belly button, he could have been an angel with his wings cut off. She'd never seen anyone so beautiful.

  "He's been shot."

  "As if that matters."

  She yanked the arrow free anyway.

  "We can't sell that," Josh snapped. "What's round his wrist?"

  Rosalyn dropped to a crouch, seeing her moonlit reflection in the metal's surface. "A shackle, some of it's silver."

  "Don't be stupid. No one would…"

  Shuffling closer, Rosalyn snapped her knees shut. She didn't like the way Josh was leering at her. After a second, she knelt.

  His temper had never been good. After that night in Cannaregio, when they hid in a tanner's pit while demons fought, it was worse. He was less forgiving each day of what had happened to her with the Watch. Maybe, her gut relaxed slightly at the hope, this would keep him happy. The dead boy was pale and very dead, with a ring of ruined flesh where his shackle scraped bone.

  "What's so interesting?"

  Her guts locked again. "Look," she said. The blood trickling from his arrow wound was blackish, its exact colour hard to determine in the darkness.

  "So he's foreign." Turning to Pietro, Josh said, "Give her your knife… And you, stop pissing around and chop off his hand."

  This was a test, Rosalyn knew it was. Josh spent most of his time telling her she was too stupid to live on her wits like him. Her brother was coming to believe it too. "I'll cut off the shackle."

  There, she'd failed. As he expected her to.

  "Rosalyn…"

  Now was when he'd order her to remove it at the wrist, like they'd split a pig's knuckle they stole. Surprisingly, he just sucked his teeth in disgust. "Hurry it up."

  Bending the corpse's elbow, she gripped the shackle. It was hard wood, inlaid with bands of silver wire, and it was hinged, clasped and soldered, instead of locked, which was even stranger. In the end, she hacked at the solder wondering why he hadn't done that himself. Maybe he lacked a knife.

  Shouldn't be here, she told herself.