The fallen blade at-1

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  As if hearing his thought, Rosalyn said, "Josh is my boss. Pietro my brother. We're going to San Michele. You should come."

  "It's an island," Pietro added.

  "He knows that…"

  "How would he?" Josh demanded. "He's foreign. He doesn't know anything." Jerking his head at Tycho, he said, "I say we leave him."

  Tycho thought of telling them that crossing water made him feel sick. That even crossing bridges made him uneasy. But he didn't want them to know that. So he watched them go instead, seeing Josh snarl when Rosalyn looked back.

  The sacking of the sultan's fondak lasted until daybreak. A stranger would have thought one house on a canal was attacked by all the others. That was wrong. The area inside the walls was Mamluk. As foreign as France or Byzantium itself. Just easier to sack, with less distance to carry the spoils.

  Screaming told Tycho he was near.

  He could feel lightning in the air. Looking up, he expected thunderclouds, but found a sliver of moon that tugged at his mind.

  Hunger was the missing fact of his life.

  Around Tycho, Venetians slurped stolen pomegranates, licked their lips and looked satisfied. Beggars hunched over dried figs like misers over gold. Dogs fought for pastries looters had taken, half eaten and discarded as too strange for their tastes. It made Tycho certain something was missing in himself.

  He could no longer distinguish flavours. Eating or not eating made little difference to his happiness. It didn't even seem necessary to keep him alive. And yet, he'd lied to Rosalyn about not being hungry. He had a hunger no food could fill. A hunger he dragged after him like a shadow, always half seen and oblique to the world in which he lived.

  The dead were dead to him now. Either they'd abandoned him or he'd abandoned them. The empty city, below this one, he tried to avoid revisiting. It was too strange, too lonely, too much like him. The beasts roaming it terrified him. He was beyond being able to meet his fears in its distorting mirror.

  The empty city called him, of course.

  But not as fiercely as the women's screams from up ahead. He was almost at their source when a Nubian with silver-tipped braids stopped him. "So are you going to kiss me this time…?" She smiled. "I didn't think so."

  He flinched as she reached for him, scared of the silver thimbles glittering in the moonlight. "Don't reveal your weaknesses," she said. "Only your strengths. And if you don't yet know what those are, keep silent."

  Tycho tried to say he was silence's closest friend, but she hadn't finished. "Change is painful," she told him. "But not to change is…"

  "To die?"

  "You don't have that option. The longer you fight against who you are the harder your transformation will be. Believe me," she said. "We are different enough to be alike." The closer she stood the more scents Tycho recognised. Sweat and shit and garlic and cloves, and something else.

  The Nubian laughed softly. "What drives your hunger?"

  "I don't know."

  "Most boys want this." Slipping her hand under her skirt, she touched herself. Smearing her finger across his face, she laughed. "Trust you to be different."

  "I'm not," Tycho lied.

  "You want… What?" Looking up, she found the moon. "Not the Goddess exactly. Although your hunger grows as she does. But her blood tides are not the blood you need…" Her voice sounded as if it belonged to someone older. And there was a strangeness in her eyes that made him shiver.

  "You will feed," she said.

  "I've tried eating…"

  Her slap snapped his head sideways. "Listen to me," she hissed. "Twice I've helped you now. Once kindly, this time not. When we meet again it will be as strangers. Understand me?"

  Tycho didn't. "Where am I?"

  "Here," she said. "As opposed to there. Dust and ashes, dead and done with. Bjornvin spent what Bjornvin earned. You will never go back. No one does. No one can. There is nothing to go back to. Go now, feed."

  23

  Had there not been snow, and had the fontego been built around a proper courtyard it might have held out for longer. But the Canalasso side made it vulnerable to attack from water as well as land. And three luggers filled with Castellani bobbed offshore to make certain no Mamluk barges tried to escape. The barges were burning, and the screams from inside said their crews burnt too. The snows simply meant no one watching this happen worried about accidental fires starting elsewhere, since the embers from the barges landed in the water or sizzled out on slush.

  The building itself was intact. Sacked and savaged, shit-smeared and pissed in, but still standing and unburnt. It would be sold by the city to the highest bidder and the buyer could hire men to clean up what this night had done.

  In the central courtyard, overlooked by the colonnades of its three sides, a young woman was backlit by burning barges. She looked to Tycho the same age as the girl in the basilica, but there the likeness ended. This girl had dark skin, and hair cut from the night, perfectly black and waterfall straight. Where the earlier girl had been thin this one was not. Her hips were full, her breasts fuller. The anger in her eyes was as fierce as any Tycho had seen.

  "Little bitch," a man said. Wiping spittle from his cheek, he flicked it to the ground. "Have your men hold her, Roderigo. And make sure they bend her right over. We'll see how she likes this."

  Two guards grabbed the girl, who visibly flinched when the man with the steel breastplate began untying the laces to his codpiece.

  "Strip her, then."

  A squat man stepped forward.

  The same man who'd helped free Tycho from the ship, only to make him a prisoner again. Pulling down his cap, Tycho wrapped a filthy scarf around his neck and backed into the crowd.

  "Hurry it up…"

  Grabbing her collar, the squat man yanked so hard he pulled the young woman free from the two holding her. As the guards reached for her, she spun round and spat full into the face of the man in the breastplate. This time her spittle hit his lips and he didn't flick it nonchalantly away; he scrubbed his lips with the back of his hand instead. And Tycho watched the smoky evil he felt around him enter the man's eyes. Pointing at Roderigo, the man snarled, "Nail her to that tree. Flay her."

  "My lord?"

  "You heard me, Roderigo."

  "She's barely a child, my lord. And the building is yours. Cut her throat and be done with it. Take her first if you must."

  "Kindness is a weakness. Tell your man to flay her and do it fast. I'm due at prayers in an hour. You'll be coming with me."

  As one guard went to fetch nails and a hammer, another disappeared looking for a kitchen knife and steel. His face relaxed when Roderigo ordered him to give both to Sergeant Temujin. The sergeant swore.

  "What did he say?"

  Roderigo looked uneasy.

  "What did your man just mutter?"

  "If it takes a Mongol to do the job, my lord. He's happy to serve."

  Tycho doubted these were the exact words. So did Roderigo's master, from his scowl. Although the words obviously hit home, because he shot the sergeant a glare and stared round the mob-filled courtyard, his gaze alighting on Tycho. "You," he said. "Come here."

  The man behind pushed Tycho forward.

  "I'm Prince Alonzo, Regent of this city. You hear me?"

  Tycho nodded slowly.

  "Typical," the Regent muttered. "The village idiot. Give him the knife, explain what he's to do. And hurry it up."

  It had been dark in the boat and Tycho's face was now filthy, framed by a stolen cap and what showed of his hair was matted and greasy. All the same, the sergeant stood on the edge of recognition.

  "Buonasera," said Tycho, sounding like the Nicoletti's son the dead printer had been. Temujin shrugged.

  "Cut her a bit. Kill her soon after. Only not too soon…" Jerking his head towards Prince Alonzo, he added. "He needs to hear her scream. His type always does. Right, you two, wrap her arms around that tree."

  Temujin's knuckles were white as he put a nail to her wrist, drew
back his hammer and slammed it down so hard its crash almost drowned her cry. She howled again when the second nail went in. Thrashing as Tycho stepped up behind her with his knife.

  "Please," she begged. Her voice guttural, her Italian so thick he barely recognised the words. "Don't."

  She knew he was there to hurt her.

  Into Tycho's mind came memories of a flaying. Bloody Boot stripped the ankles, Red Gauntlets the hands and wrists. Raw Saddle flayed the…

  "Get on with it," Temujin hissed.

  Slicing fast, he outlined her spine, adding a second cut beside the first, slashing a third at the top and scooping under to give him something to grip. It was over in a second, maybe less. When he ripped, the young woman screamed so hard her voice broke. Behind Tycho someone vomited.

  "Please…" The word was in his head.

  A child's whisper behind her animal howl. Pain spread like angel's wings from her body, feathered and bright. Brighter than his eyes could stand.

  "Please," she begged. "Make it stop…"

  He did as she asked, taking the brightness into himself. Feeling her shock as her mind abandoned the bleeding meat nailed to the tree. She was two people now. One silent, inside him. The other loud and bestial.

  Such as it was her life lay open. The taste of food he'd never eaten, and memories of a rambling family home in Egypt, seen through her eyes as a child. Snatches of her language. Memories of a happy childhood turning sour as a father's love hardened to anxiety. And the fontego that had been her world became her prison.

  Tycho felt his dog teeth extend. The night was his. The night, the city, the world… Everything was his and he moved freely through it. The water under the bridges barely troubled him as he flowed through the city at impossible speeds, streets unravelling as he printed them on his memory. Giving names to places he knew, learning locations for which he'd only known names. Behind him he left a crowd shocked into silence. Stunned guards and a prince open-mouthed with horror.

  Tycho's body hummed with power, his hearing was so sharp he surprised a hunting tom before the cat was aware of him. Time stretched and twisted and became malleable. Eventually moving so slowly he owned the spaces between seconds as well as the seconds themselves. He knew the stars for tiny suns lighting a night sky to the brightness of day. Except this sky was red.

  As was the rest of his world.

  Red walls and water held within red canal banks. The underworld and the overworld and the world of the dead were finally one. To look at somewhere was to be there. He could kill, he could observe, he could touch. Drunken couples fucked in doorways, feet slipping on slush and snow. Masked thieves waited to rob elegant cittadini. Old men staggered halfway across the city with goods from the sacked building that they didn't really want anyway. And light to their darkness, children played marbles by candlelight on dusty floors. A boy stroked the face of a girl and ventured a kiss, feeling daring. Little knowing how long she'd been waiting for him to make this move. The air stank of sweetness. It smelt sweetly of dung. He was God and the Devil in one.

  It was close to dawn before his euphoria faded. Dangerously close.

  Too late to return to his lair, he found an empty attic above a goldsmith, with tiles new enough to keep out sunlight and settled himself into one corner, folding one arm under his head to make a pillow and folding his knees to steady himself.

  He felt stronger than before, no longer hungry. But he also remembered how he'd earned this God-like happiness. Opening his mouth, Tycho ran a finger across his teeth, finding them normal. The creature that moved so confidently through the night was gone. But memories of the creature's power, speed and glory remained. He'd thought his greatest challenge was to remember who he was. And had been wrong, almost childishly so. Who he was paled before tonight's slaughter. What he was… That was the real question.

  24

  The carved face of a lion between bat's wings decorated the keystone of an arch over an old palace door. On the left bank of the Canalasso, below la Volta, to the left of San Gregal, the palace was being restored. Its position almost opposite the sacked Mamluk warehouse was a coincidence.

  The bat-winged face was carved into a roundel.

  A patera, of which there were several thousand in Venice, featuring hundreds of separate insignia. Everyone in the city could identify the lion reading a book. The lion was Venice, the book Saint Mark's gospel. San Marco being their patron saint. So the patera was Venice, which was why it could be seen everywhere.

  It marked the Dogana di Mar, the Palazzo Reale on one side of Piazza San Marco, where the city authorities gathered, and the Orseolo Hospice opposite. It marked the Zecca, which minted ducats, and the campanile, which doubled as a lighthouse, and a place from which traitors' bodies could hang.

  It practically smothered the bucintoro, Marco IV's ceremonial barge. A vessel so impractical it could barely navigate the Grand Canal and so top heavy it could not survive open sea.

  Palaces sported the badges of their owners.

  The almshouses and guild schools had symbols of their own. As did the Arsenalotti, and even the Nicoletti and Castellani, whose patera became accepted simply through frequency of use. In a world where few could read, and churches used murals to tell improving tales, most Venetians could identify at least a dozen patera. Slightly fewer could identify two or three dozen. A handful of scholars could identify sixty or so without effort.

  In the Street of Scribes, where Jewish letter writers mixed ink and sharpened quills and kept secret the letters they read in whispers for a single grosso, was a rabbi who could identify at least two hundred. But there were patera-flaking and rotted by wind, rain and sea salt-which remained obscure because the last scholar to know the answer was dust.

  The bat-winged mask was one of these, supposedly.

  The Moor who waited for his gondolino that Friday afternoon in January knew what it represented, and was glad others didn't. He'd purchased the palace, which was near the Dogana, because it amused him that the house now called Ca' il Mauros exhibited one of only two examples of the Assassini's patera. At least, examples that could be publicly seen. The Assassini master who'd had that patera carved was long dead, and his descendants had struggled down the generations, without knowing what it represented. Only selling up, reluctantly and with bad grace, when repairs became too expensive for their pocket.

  "You'll be safe?"

  "My dear…" Gathering his robes, Atilo kissed his beloved on both cheeks and smiled. "I'll be fine." When Desdaio raised her face, he let his lips touch hers before stepping back. "I'm going to the palace for a few hours. Nothing important."

  "You're Ten, now…"

  Atilo regarded his victory over the German fleet as far more important than anything that might come from talking with nine other men. But this was Venice. Although Duke Marco IV owned the Istrian coast from Austria to Byzantium, his court looked inwards instinctively, being interested in their own reflection. The briefest glimpse of lovers, seen through the window of a candlelit room overlooking the Grand Canal, carried more interest than princes murdered on Venetian orders miles away. The world outside existed only as a place from which the city could make money. If a deal was good, that was enough. The circumstances, Venice regarded with mild curiosity at best, maybe not even that.

  "I'll be back for Compline."

  "You'll eat then?"

  Atilo sighed. There would be food at Ca' Ducale should he be hungry, but Desdaio obviously wanted them to eat together. "Something light."

  "I'll make something."

  "Desdaio. We have a cook."

  "It's not the same…" Lord Bribanzo's daughter had discovered the joy of dressing herself, brushing her own hair, washing her face and preparing food. Chores that had plagued Atilo's mother, the unlucky bride of a star-gazing poet who wasted his money on instruments while his children ran wild and his estate ran to ruin.

  Atilo found it strange and oddly touching. "Eggs, then."

  Despite the January c
old she remained on the steps, splashed by spray, and with the occasional rough wave soaking her shoes, while Atilo settled back and Iacopo bowed low to Desdaio, his eyes sweeping her body. Then he grabbed his oar with a flourish, untied the ropes holding the gondolino steady, and pushed off into those tides that made steering difficult in the mouth of the Grand Canal. Those young man appeared to have focused on crossing the choppy water as swiftly as possible, but Desdaio couldn't shake the thought he was still watching her.

  If Iaco continued to make her uneasy, she'd ask Atilo to find him another job. Either that, or get rid of him altogether. Amelia, however, she liked. Not beautiful but striking. That black skin, lean figure and braided hair with silver thimbles. She wondered if Atilo had… Feeling her stomach knot, Desdaio refused to finish the thought. Her future husband was known to have lived like a monk before he courted her. Everyone said so. She was sure they were right. "Amelia, I need your help in the kitchen."

  "My lady?"

  "Chopping things."

  The young Nubian's eyes flicked to the window, where late afternoon had turned to early evening and the outlines of a dozen gondolini had blended so far into darkness as to become almost invisible. All she said was, "I thought you told me Lord Atilo wanted eggs, my lady."

  "I'll include eggs."

  "If you make me chop things…" The girl hesitated, and then turned away, deciding her words best left unspoken.

  They hadn't really talked, Desdaio realised. A few hellos, the occasional good morning, and pretence at a curtsy from Amelia. Desdaio had no idea where her slave was born. Not even if she was Christian.

  "Where are your parents?"

  Amelia's mouth shut with a snap. Muttering an apology, she turned away… And Desdaio grabbed her, feeling Amelia struggle, only to fall still when Desdaio pushed her cheek against the other girl's face and refused to let go.

  "Stupid," Desdaio said. "That's me. I'm sorry."

  Amelia laughed through her tears. "My lady. Iacopo and I… We're orphans. All of the Admiral's servants are."