The fallen blade at-1

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  "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 Maitre 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.

  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 Maitre 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 Maitre 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 facade, 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 dra
nk 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.

  12

  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 inste
ad. "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.

  Behind him, a door began to open.

  "Go," Giulietta begged.

  He went, taking the scent of roses, the memory of her heart-shaped face and the taste of her blood with him.

  13

  When she looked the boy was gone. Despite herself, Lady Giulietta glanced at a huge marble pillar, seeing movement where it met a balcony. But the light in Basilica San Marco came from candles or oil lamps, and she couldn't be sure it wasn't just shadows shifting.

  "My lady…"

  Captain Roderigo looked tired, and worried at how he found her. Since his scars said his courage wasn't in question, she assumed he hung back to give her time to pull up her dress. He said nothing as she fixed her cloak and bent for the dagger, sliding it into a secret hiding place.

  "What?" she demanded.

  "I have a message for you."

  Lady Giulietta sighed. "So?" she said flatly, and watched the captain's eyes tighten at her rudeness. As if she'd care.

  "The Regent is asking where you are."

  "What did my aunt tell him?"