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 believe 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 cafes 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 cafes and bars and on trains, in public parks and occasionally, if lucky, on planes and in airports. I'm writing this in a cafe 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 nev
er 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.
"I found these beggars wandering the grounds," called Foscar, "and thought I'd commend them to your charity, Father!"
"Charity?" Orso's sharp voice echoed around the cavernous room. "I am not a great admirer of the stuff. Make yourselves comfortable, my friends, I will be with you shortly."
"If it isn't the Butcher of Caprile," murmured Ario, "and her little Benna too."
"Your Highness. You look well." Monza thought he looked an indolent cock, but kept it to herself.
"You too, as ever. If all soldiers looked as you did, I might even be tempted to go on campaign myself. A new bauble?" Ario waved his own jewel-encrusted hand limply towards the ruby on Monza's finger.
"Just what was to hand when I was dressing."
"I wish I'd been there. Wine?"
"Just after dawn?"
He glanced heavy-lidded towards the windows. "Still last night as far as I'm concerned." As if staying up late was a heroic achievement.
"I will." Benna was already pouring himself a glass, never to be outdone as far as showing off went. Most likely he'd be drunk within the hour and embarrass himself, but Monza was tired of playing his mother. She strolled past the monumental fireplace held up by carven figures of Juvens and Kanedias, and towards Orso's desk.
"Sign here, and here, and here," the gaunt man was saying, one bony finger hovering over the documents.
"You know Mauthis, do you?" Orso gave a sour glance in his direction. "My leash-holder."
"Always your humble servant, your Excellency. The Banking House of Valint and Balk agrees to this further loan for the period of one year, after which they regret they must charge interest."
Orso snorted. "As the plague regrets the dead, I'll be bound." He scratched out a parting swirl on the last signature and tossed down his pen. "Everyone must kneel to someone, eh? Make sure you extend to your superiors my infinite gratitude for their indulgence."
"I shall do so." Mauthis collected up the documents. "That concludes our business, your Excellency. I must leave at once if I mean to catch the evening tide for Westport-"
"No. Stay a while longer. We have one other matter to discuss."
Mauthis' dead eyes moved towards Monza, then back to Orso. "As your Excellency desires."
The duke rose smoothly from his desk. "To happier business, then. You do bring happy news, eh, Monzcarro?"
"I do, your Excellency."
"Ah, whatever would I do without you?" There was a trace of iron grey in his black hair since she'd seen him last, perhaps some deeper lines at the corners of his eyes, but his air of complete command was impressive as ever. He leaned forwards and kissed her on both cheeks, then whispered in her ear, "Ganmark can lead soldiers well enough, but for a man who sucks cocks he hasn't the slightest sense of humour. Come, tell me of your victories in the open air." He left one arm draped around her shoulders and guided her, past the sneering Prince Ario, through the open windows onto the high terrace.
The sun was climbing now, and the bright world was full of colour. The blood had drained from the sky and left it a vivid blue, white clouds crawling high above. Below, at the very bottom of a dizzy drop, the river wound through the wooded valley, autumn leaves pale green, burned orange, faded yellow, angry red, light glinting silver on fast-flowing water. To the east, the forest crumbled away into a patchwork of fields-squares of fallow green, rich black earth, golden crop. Further still and the river met the grey sea, branching out in a wide delta choked with islands. Monza could just make out the suggestion of tiny towers there, buildings, bridges, walls. Great Talins, no bigger than her thumbnail.
She narrowed her eyes against the stiff breeze, pushed some stray hair out of her face. "I never tire of this view."
"How could you? It's why I
built this damn place. Here I can keep one eye always on my subjects, as a watchful parent should upon his children. Just to make sure they don't hurt themselves while they play, you understand."
"Your people are lucky to have such a just and caring father," she lied smoothly.
"Just and caring." Orso frowned thoughtfully towards the distant sea. "Do you think that is how history will remember me?"
Monza thought it incredibly unlikely. "What did Bialoveld say? 'History is written by the victors.' "
The duke squeezed her shoulder. "All this, and well read into the bargain. Ario is ambitious enough, but he has no insight. I'd be surprised if he could read to the end of a signpost in one sitting. All he cares about is whoring. And shoes. My daughter Terez, meanwhile, weeps most bitterly because I married her to a king. I swear, if I had offered great Euz as the groom she would have whined for a husband better fitting her station." He gave a heavy sigh. "None of my children understand me. My great-grandfather was a mercenary, you know. A fact I do not like to advertise." Though he told her every other time they met. "A man who never shed a tear in his life, and wore on his feet whatever was to hand. A low-born fighting man, who seized power in Talins by the sharpness of his mind and sword together." More by blunt ruthlessness and brutality, the way Monza had heard the tale. "We are from the same stock, you and I. We have made ourselves, out of nothing."
Orso had been born to the wealthiest dukedom in Styria and never done a hard day's work in his life, but Monza bit her tongue. "You do me too much honour, your Excellency."
"Less than you deserve. Now tell me of Borletta."
"You heard about the battle on the High Bank?"
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