The fallen blade at-1

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  He smiled and shrugged. His smile was easy and the shrug elegant. "I have… a certain facility for reading situations. And you, being beautiful, caught my eye. A second glance and I knew…"

  "What?" she demanded.

  He pointed to the chaos of the quayside. The penned pigs and sullen slaves. The whores stumbling from doors and blinking at the sunlight. The Schiavoni, the Mamluks, the Greeks. "That you don't belong here. You belong in a palace."

  Maybe bursting into tears wasn't her wisest reaction. Alternatively, it was exactly what was needed. Either way, she found herself in his arms, held tightly until the crying fit passed.

  "Prince Leopold zum Bas Friedland," he said, introducing himself. "The German emperor's envoy to Serenissima."

  "Sigismund's…?"

  "Yes," he said. "The emperor's bastard." Leaning forward, he kissed her carefully on the brow and she felt herself shiver. A part of her did more than shiver. It began to melt.

  "I'm Lady Giulietta San Felice di Millioni."

  "I know," he said. "All things come to those who wait." It was later, walking north, through alleys that Giulietta barely knew existed but which Prince Leopold seemed to navigate as if he'd lived his entire life in the city rather than it being the other way round, that she vomited. She did it guiltily. Turning aside and spewing against a wall, kicking dirt over her mess.

  "Are you sick?" Prince Leopold asked.

  She shook her head, face miserable and mouth turned down. Tears began to back up behind her eyes and she turned away again, unable to stop their fall and not wanting him to see her cry twice.

  "What is it then?"

  Maybe he read the answer in her silence, because he stepped forward to put his hand softly on her lower gut, feeling Giulietta freeze at his touch. And then, she felt a flutter beneath his fingers and his face turned white.

  32

  Situated in Dorsoduro, between the Grand canal to the north and the wide expanse of the Giudecca Canal to the south, Atilo's palace occupied half of what was once a small mudflat before it was reclaimed from the lagoon. The ankle-deep channel between it and the next mudflat had been dug out to make a usable canal. The edges staked with oak pilings, lined with stone and turned into fondamente, those inland quays that ran along many canals. Although the house was brick it was faced in stone. Elegantly open galleries overlooked a red marble fountain dominating its central cortile, the private courtyard beloved by patrician families. Fretted boxwork balconies hid its public windows from the world.

  Marble columns, supporting arches carved with flowers and plants and animal faces, ran around the cortile. A narrower row supported the trefoil windows of the floor above. The whole effect was of an elegant lace knit from stone.

  There were two porte d'acqua. An ornate one on the Grand Canal and a slightly less grand, but more often used, one on Rio della Fornace. While the land door was close enough to Dogana to be walked in minutes. Of course, everywhere in the city was within walking distance of everywhere else.

  Since Atilo didn't trade, which made him rare in Venice, his colonnaded cortile was empty and his servants few. He entertained in the piano nobile, a wood-panelled first-floor reception room with alternating black and white tiles, huge fireplace and long windows stretching from floor to high ceiling. Furniture was sparse but the walls had Murano mirrors. And a painting of Atilo as a young admiral, by Gentile da Fabriano, held pride of place among round-faced madonnas and anguished saints.

  A huge Persian carpet covered much of the tiling.

  Directly above one corner of the piano nobile were the separate chambers where Atilo and Desdaio slept. A strongroom and chambers for guests took up the rest of that floor. In one of these, Desdaio's possessions waited to be unboxed.

  On the floor above was the kitchen, with an iron range venting to the sky. That floor also had servants' quarters, additional storage rooms and attic space never used by anything other than pigeons, mice and rats. When Atilo summoned labourers to dig a cellar in the weeks before Tycho joined his household, Desdaio was puzzled. No one had cellars. In a city like Venice they were an absurdity.

  But the labourers arrived towards the end of spring.

  They dug where Atilo ordered, and an intense young Sicilian with greasy hair, sucked his teeth and talked to himself, before sketching plans that he scrawled over and crossed out and scrawled over again. And though the men mocked his twitch and his accent behind his back, and sometimes to his face, they dug where he told them, dug as deep as he demanded, and built a double-skinned cellar without windows. The underfloor and the cavity between the first wall of brick and the second had to be filled with fiercely puddled clay to keep water from flooding the room.

  In the Griffin and the Winged Lion and the Whore's Thighs, which is what the labourers called the Aphrodite, men drank and squabbled and talked of the strange strongroom Atilo il Mauros was building. It was agreed it must be to house Lady Desdaio's fortune. Since he'd never bothered with such a room to protect his own treasure. Had they looked closely, they might have noticed the clay they puddled with bare feet contained finely powdered silver. Enough of it to pay them all several times over. And they left before a door was installed at the bottom of a short run of steps leading from the cortile. Its handles, hinges and locks were also silver.

  "Why keep him in a cellar?" Desdaio asked.

  "For his own good."

  "In the darkness?" she said. "Locked in."

  Atilo took a deep breath, wondering what reason would convince her. He could say his new slave was so dangerous it was for her own good. But then she'd want to know why he'd brought Tycho into his household.

  "It's only temporary. Until he gets over his fear of daylight."

  Desdaio looked doubtful. "You're not punishing him?"

  "I'm helping him," Atilo promised. And he was, in his way. The alternative to Atilo's training was death. Duchess Alexa had made her position clear. Atilo had wanted this boy, not just as his apprentice but as his heir. It was up to Atilo to make him fit for both positions.

  He had a year.

  Atilo suspected the time limit was arbitrary. A way of reminding him he might share her bed but she still held his life in her hands. With Alexa it was almost impossible to know. "What are you thinking," Desdaio suddenly demanded.

  "Nothing," Atilo assured her, wishing his thoughts had been about something else. She'd heard the rumours. The whole city had heard the rumours.

  There was a distance growing with every conversation he refused to have. Already he could see unhappiness in Desdaio's eyes. This was why he'd long avoided remarriage, bedding only women he would never love. Now he had a lover who haunted his dreams, and a wife-to-be who haunted his daylight thoughts.

  "My father used to lock me in the dark."

  He looked at her, wondering. All he remembered was how cosseted she'd been. How surrounded with servants and toys and nurses.

  "He's not who you think," she said. "He's vain and ambitious and a coward…"

  A dangerous mixture. The fact she could say it made Atilo take another look at the young woman he'd asked to marry him. She was as clear-eyed, attentive and gentle as ever. But he couldn't shake his feeling that her wits were sharper than he first thought.

  "We live in dangerous times."

  As they stood in the piano nobile, looking down from an arched window on to the cortile, where the artisan who fitted the cellar door was packing his work tools, Desdaio nodded to show she was listening.

  "Sometimes it's necessary to make difficult alliances."

  She went very still and he watched her glance from the corner of her eye. Her hand shifted and one finger touched his as if by accident, remaining there. Although she gave no hint that she was aware of this. "Alliances you might not make in other circumstances?"

  "Yes," Atilo said.

  "I see," she said. "I think."

  Picking up a small wooden box, Atilo opened it. Watching as she shook out an ornate collar and held it up, letting the
last rays of that day's light play across overlapping scales of filigreed silver tied with twists of gold wire. At the bottom, a heavy pear-shaped pendant was set with rubies, pearls and squares of mutton-fat jade.

  "Silver?" Desdaio sounded surprised.

  "I have one too." Atilo opened his cloak to show a new chain where his gold one usually hung. "I know silver's for cittadini here but in my country it's lucky. And it suits you better than gold. Silver sets off your eyes and hair."

  Desdaio smiled. "I'll put my gold away."

  "No," said Atilo. "Wear it. But wear this as well."

  When he looked, her eyes were bright and her chin trembled with unspilt tears and unexpressed emotion. Taking her hand, he kissed it. Seeing tears spill down her cheeks as she turned away from him. A rustle of silks, and the click of a door handle said she was returning to her chamber.

  She did so in silence.

  Unquestionably more intelligent than people supposed. She'd understood instantly his comment about alliances, and believed his answer about their being necessary. Whether he believed it was another matter.

  33

  The craft Atilo arrived home in that evening was larger than a vipera and smaller than a sandolino. It had been designed to Dr. Crow's specifications and built in half a day by a master shipbuilder and his apprentices. The fact the shipbuilder had been given his orders by Duchess Alexa ensured the man worked hard and asked no questions.

  The vessel featured a small cabin, no windows.

  Atilo was uncertain what brief Dr. Crow had given the master of the Arzanale. As a member of the Ten he could find out. As head of the Assassini he should probably know already. To say Atilo lived between those two roles was simplistic. His fame as Venice's old Lord Admiral, his new position with the Ten, and his duties as head of the Assassini were three strands of poison ivy strangling each other. How he could support a fourth as Duchess Alexa's lover was beyond him.

  "Ready that rope."

  The mage's vessel powered itself. Although Dr. Crow claimed a dwarf hid in a compartment at the rear, turning a handle to drive infinitely complex gears that drove a screw that forced the craft through the waves.

  Atilo thought that unlikely.

  Twisting the rope back on itself, Iacopo dropped the noose he'd made over a bollard, holding the rope's free end while the vessel's forward momentum narrowed the gap and brought the strange craft to rest.

  "Neatly done, Iacopo."

  Iacopo lost his smile as the cabin creaked open, revealing darkness.

  Eyes shielded behind smoked glass peeked through a narrow gap and vanished just as quickly. Hightown Crow had told Tycho daylight was now safe for short periods. He obviously doubted it. Braided to snakes, even the boy's hair was oiled against sunlight. His braids being all Atilo could see above the arms Tycho had crossed over his face to protect him from the day.

  "It's safe," Atilo said gruffly. "Now hurry it up."

  He'd asked for this thing as his heir. Now he had to train it. Atilo's job was to make sure Tycho didn't disappoint. Be careful what you wish for. The old man's guts twisted with doubts he couldn't risk showing, least of all to Duchess Alexa.

  Moonstruck poets were the mainstay of fable.

  But a moonstruck assassin? One the duchess half believed a fallen angel? Assuming Atilo had the point of her wilfully oblique fairy story. Stepping on to dry land, Duchess Alexa's protege sniffed the air, his shoulders sagging a second later. Whatever scent he was after he'd failed to find it.

  The boy was dressed in a flowing leather coat over a doublet of silk, both black and both oiled. His hose was also silk, also oiled. Boots and gloves matched. Cut from black Moroccan leather so fine it stretched like skin. He was undoubtedly the most expensively dressed slave in the city.

  Hightown Crow's choice.

  From his belt hung a pocket. Inside it, a purple-glazed ceramic dragon curled around a pot of ointment mixed by Hightown Crow himself. Duchess Alexa defined what it should do. He chose the zinc-white, camphor, pounded silica and grape-seed oil needed to achieve that. The mixture stopped the sun from burning Tycho for up to an hour at a time. The alchemist was proud of this. Proud enough to tell Atilo twice what the mixture did. The leather coat and oiled silk might protect Tycho's body, the gloves his hands.

  But the ointment was Tycho's mask.

  "Shall I tell Lady Desdaio we have a new member of the family?" Iacopo asked, stepping back at a growl from Atilo.

  "He's a slave."

  Iacopo bowed deeply, and then turned to enter the porta d'acqua to Ca' il Mauros, leaving his master with the newcomer still peering at the ghostlike sun hiding on the far side of drizzling clouds.

  "I own you," Atilo said. "Do you understand that? Whatever you are, wherever you come from doesn't matter now. You live and die by my rules."

  Tycho shrugged.

  "Do you understand?"

  The boy's shoulders straightened at Atilo's tone. He's taken orders before, Atilo thought. That's good. Also bad. Most of those who passed through Ca' il Mauros arrived young and unformed. Eleven or twelve, homeless, unprotected and hungry.

  Their gratitude carried them through early weeks of brutal training. The girls, less likely to be vicious, let their gratitude overwhelm their scruples about violence. Dragged from the streets to the palace of a strange patrician, one obviously rich and powerful, most girls thought they knew what awaited them. That Atilo proved them wrong bound them tight. The boys had less awareness of their possible fate.

  Atilo put that down to lack of imagination. "Well?" he said.

  "I understand." Something about the boy's tone worried his new master.

  "What do you understand?"

  "That you believe what you say."

  Atilo stared at him. "Tomorrow we begin training," he said. "It will be brutal. You will be punished if you fail." The Moor kept his sentences simple, still not certain how much of what was said Tycho understood. He expected the boy to nod his agreement, to show some gratitude. Gratitude and respect. If needed, gratitude, respect and fear. Those bound an apprentice to his master.

  Instead Tycho shook his head. "Tonight would be better."

  "What?"

  Touching his glasses, the boy said, "I see best in the dark." He weighed his words and obviously found them wanting, because he added, "Probably kill better too. If that's what this is about."

  34

  "He's a strange one," Desdaio said.

  Taking another spoonful of venison from the pie in front of him, Atilo felt rather than saw her smile. She'd trimmed the meat herself, chopped root vegetables, ground Indian pepper and cut stale bread to serve as plates. He had a cook to do all that. Just as he had a serving woman to stand behind his chair and top up the glass Desdaio refilled from a jug.

  He sat at the head of his long oak table in the piano nobile, with Desdaio at his right. Although light from a candelabrum made his glass sparkle, it barely reached the high-beamed ceiling overhead, and he sat with her in a puddle of brightness surrounded by shifting shadows. Both of them ate using forks. A habit Byzantium had adopted from the Saracens, its enemies. A princess brought the fashion to Venice two centuries before when she married the doge.

  "Maybe three," Atilo admitted.

  Desdaio nodded to indicate she was listening.

  The rest of Italy still ate with knives and their fingers and regarded Serenissima's use of the two-pronged forks as proof the city was corrupted by its links with the Levant. As Gian Maria of Milan jeered, "What needs man with a fork when God gave him hands?" He would have been even less impressed to know the implement's heathen origins.

  "I have to go out later," said Atilo, putting down his silver fork and wiping his mouth with his hand. Desdaio would be disappointed. She'd found a harpist from Brittany. On the run from something, Atilo imagined. He was to play for them that evening. It was meant to be a surprise.

  "Can't it wait?"

  "Probably not," Atilo said. "Council business."

  D
esdaio's face fell. Nothing came before the Ten. The daughter of a Venetian lord, the great-granddaughter of a rich cittadino, she understood that.

  "You're taking Iacopo?"

  "Tycho," Atilo said. "I'll be taking Tycho."

  "He's a strange one," Desdaio said. As before, Atilo said nothing, simply waited for Desdaio to put her thoughts in some sort of order. People thought her beautiful but simple. She was not. She simply thought slowly. "He scares me," she admitted finally.

  "Why?" Atilo was interested.

  "Something about him." Desdaio bit her lip. She hesitated, considering her words. "He could be a prince," she said finally. "When he's not sulking in corners like a beggar. I'm not saying he is. Just sometimes, when he looks at us…"

  "He seems… princely?"

  "Don't laugh at me. He eats castradina with his fingers, but stands up when I enter a room. And he watches always. I find him in rooms and don't know how he got there. He's like a shadow. Always there, except when he's not."

  "And Iacopo doesn't scare you?"

  "That's different."

  "In what way?"

  Desdaio blushed, looking towards the fire as if shifting logs had suddenly caught her attention. All men looked at her, Atilo knew that was what she wanted to say. Iacopo was simply one of those.

  "Should he scare me?" she asked instead.

  He's knifed a dozen men and cut a child's throat without hesitation, simply because those were my orders. He uses his fists freely on whores, and more often than not takes them and forgets to pay. When he thinks I'm not looking, he leers at you as if he would deflower you on the spot if not for me.

  And, God forbid I was to order it. But if I did, he would knife you now, weight the sack containing your body with stones and row it beyond the Giudecca himself, returning for breakfast with his appetite intact.