The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini

by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

  Tycho bowed.

  Without another word, Alexa crossed her study to take the shivering child from his arms. She stripped off its rags, turned it over and considered it carefully. Tycho knew what she was thinking. About the right age, about the right colouring; dress it in Maltese lace and give it an ivory teether and few would know the difference from a distance. Giulietta would, of course.

  He doubted she’d go near the child Alexa would put in Leo’s place.

  “She’s asleep,” Alexa said, answering his question before he could ask. Catching his expression, she added. “Poppy in brandy. It’s quick and will keep dulling her pain provided we don’t use it for too long.” Casually, she stripped off her shawl and wrapped it tightly around the grizzling child, considering the result. “I’m going to . . .” A knock at her door prevented Tycho from discovering what.

  “You’re back.” Tycho said, although it wasn’t his place to speak. The Nubian woman in the doorway nodded.

  “Obviously.”

  Tycho was grateful for the smile.

  “A job well done,” said Alexa, and it took Tycho a second to realise she meant Amelia’s job, which should be obvious. Little enough about tonight’s events was well done. “She killed the Valois king’s physician. Using her . . .” The duchess hesitated. “More unusual skills.” Amelia’s smile was cat-like. Praise given, Alexa switched subjects. “You’ve heard the palace rumours?

  Amelia shucked herself out of a snow-flecked coat. She wore daggers on both hips and her braids were frosted. “An attack?”

  “Yes,” Alexa held up Francesca’s child. “They almost got Leo.”

  Tycho glanced at the duchess and held his peace, waiting to discover how Alexa wanted this to unfold. He watched her walk the room with the changeling in her arms, tracing a path across a priceless Persian carpet. The restrained fury of her steps and the preciseness of her route reminded Tycho of one of the panthers in the duke’s zoo. In one corner of her room, curled around itself but watchful, was her winged lizard, a gift from the Chinese emperor.

  Tycho wondered how far Alexa had made it fly and in what conditions. She used the dragonet as her eyes. If Alexa was holding back from sending Assassini after Alonzo she had a reason.

  “You will guard this child,” Alexa told Amelia.

  The Nubian nodded.

  “And me,” Tycho demanded. “What do I do?”

  If Amelia was surprised he spoke so freely it was because the rumours that he was Giulietta’s lover hadn’t reached her. The fact he wore the duke’s ring, which had been relegated to a copy, since a copy had been declared the original, hadn’t escaped her, though. The duchess had noticed, too, and Tycho was impressed by her refusal to ask where the ring came from. “You wait for me to tell you.”

  “How long will Giulietta sleep?”

  Alexa’s face softened. “Until tomorrow. Do you want to see her?”

  “She’s not in her chamber?”

  “She’s in mine. And there she’ll stay until I’m happy she won’t harm herself.”

  “Yes,” she said, seeing Tycho’s shock. “She threatened to kill herself. First my husband, now my child. Why would I want to live?”

  Because I’m still alive? Wrenching his thoughts from the cut Alexa’s words inflicted, Tycho wondered if it was cowardice or common sense that made him change the subject to something safer. “What do you know about the nurse? Apart from the fact she came from the mainland . . .”

  “Walk with me,” Alexa said.

  The family chambers were on the floor below, with government offices on the ground floor below that. The civil service used the procuratie buildings along one side of Piazza San Marco, the customs had their own offices on the far side of the Grand Canal and the mint was in a small building next to the campanile. With the guards sent home, Ca’ Ducale felt as empty as a drum, their footsteps chiming on cold marble as Alexa led Tycho towards the main stairs.

  “The nurse,” Tycho reminded her gently.

  “I asked Giulietta when the poppy was just beginning its work. She said Francesca recommended her and she was Francesca’s cousin. My niece trusted Francesca and took her recommendation. Why wouldn’t she?”

  “Francesca thought the baby was to be abducted.”

  “Did she now?” The duchess considered that point. “No doubt her man was loyal to Alonzo. But she was Leo’s nurse so she was told Leo would be taken and he was killed instead. What worries you about her replacement?”

  Tycho tried to pin down his thoughts.

  “Tell me later,” Alexa said. “We’re here now.” She opened the door to her chamber and waved Tycho inside. There was a guard by the window. A sergeant whom Tycho recognised from his time in the palace. A hard-faced man with cropped hair who nodded abruptly and opened the inner door at Alexa’s command.

  “I’ll join you later,” Alexa told Tycho.

  The guard shut the door behind him. The clothes and rolls of cloth that had filled this tiny wardrobe were piled in one corner, and one of Alexa’s servants sat in a chair. She almost tripped as she scrambled to her feet. “My lord . . .”

  “Stay there.”

  Smoke thickened the air from herbs charring on a brazier. A silver goblet was sticky with residue, and Tycho dipped a finger into the tar. His skin sizzled slightly where it touched the silver. Opium . . . He knew the taste and the effects, which would last far longer on Giulietta than him. His body sublimated wine, opium and other drugs. The girl he loved was so deep in dreams he doubted she could find the door between worlds even if he called her. So he knelt by the bed, folding her fingers into his and wished he could do more. “Go,” said a voice behind him. It was Alexa dismissing the servant.

  “You love my niece, don’t you?”

  “Of course . . .”

  “There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” Alexa said cuttingly. “Most men want Giulietta for her lands, her fortune. Even the fools have worked out she’ll probably be Regent after I die. The clever ones have worked out she might be duchess.”

  “Marco’s dying?”

  “We’re all dying. Well, most of us.” Alexa’s voice was dry.

  Sometime in the last few months she’d decided she could talk to him freely. Perhaps she hadn’t had anyone to talk to since her husband had died – except there had been Lord Atilo, obviously. Tycho’s old master had been her lover. The fact she now felt free to talk to Tycho was a compliment. It was also dangerous.

  Alexa left a trail of dead. For all he admired the duchess and even in some strange way liked her, he’d be a fool not to fear her. They might be allies for the moment, but who knew how long that would last?

  “He’s made for another world.”

  Tycho knew she was talking about her son.

  “The black moods take him and . . .” Alexa shrugged. “Who will stop him harming himself when I’m gone?”

  “You will live for years yet . . .”

  “You think I’m immortal?”

  The thought had occurred to him. He knew the duchess was far older than she looked and wore her veil to hide her youth as much as in mourning for the late lamented Marco the Just. One of the few men for whom the words late and lamented always went together and were meant.

  “I have a year at most. Perhaps less.”

  “My lady . . .”

  “Magic, potions and self-control can only do so much.” Opening a small alabaster box, Alexa took a handful of herbs and scattered them on the brazier, letting sweet smoke fill the tiny room.

  Alta Mofacon . . .

  Tycho recognised the scent carried on the previous summer’s winds when he’d stayed at Lady Giulietta’s manor on the mainland. Lavender, hops and dog rose. Something medicinal hid under it.

  “Wherever she is I want my niece happy.”

  “How long will she be like this?”

  Duchess Alexa considered the question. “A week at most. Any more than this and I risk addicting her. Even that long may be too long.”

&nbs
p; “And me?” Tycho asked. “What do I do?”

  Alexa smiled bleakly. “Sharpen your daggers. You seem to enjoy doing that. Sharpen your daggers and prepare yourself for a trip to Montenegro. You’re to kill Alonzo . . . I should have had you do it sooner.”

  Tycho kept his silence.

  9

  This should have been when we were happy . . .

  The days were short and the nights long, giving him time to enjoy himself and her, had enjoyment been possible, and it should have been. Giulietta should have been laughing at his side as they kicked through the snows in the rose garden at the rear of Ca’ Ducale, Leo asleep in his cradle or carried in her arms.

  Instead, Tycho killed Alonzo a thousand times.

  And in between his moments of rage-crazed fantasy he sharpened his daggers until their edges glittered and their points could pierce boiled hide. Having sharpened them, he oiled them against rust and made sure they slid effortlessly from their sheaths. Then he sharpened them again, and again, until their edges cut almost before touching and the points could make the very air bleed.

  No matter how often he did this, in his head he killed Alonzo more.

  He gutted him, castrated him, cut his throat, pierced his heart. He burnt him alive, drowned him in a ditch, tossed him over a cliff. All he wanted was Alonzo dead and Giulietta freed from the drugs that kept her misery at bay but took the life from her eyes. Hatred of Alonzo consumed him.

  Others couldn’t see it but he could from the corner of his eye. A swirling darkness that isolated him in the cold corridors of Ca’ Ducale. Guards still came to attention; servitors dropped curtsies, footmen bowed . . . Gestures he barely noticed. No one knew his position any more. Until others stopped knowing he hardly gave having one a moment’s thought. He loved Giulietta and she loved him; that was all that mattered. Now he knew the court’s reluctant acceptance had been based on him being Giulietta’s lover.

  With Giulietta so ill, the balance changed.

  What worries you about Francesca’s replacement?

  Alexa’s question about the dead nurse troubled Tycho so deeply he stopped bothering to eat or reply to questions or even return the nods of those who still greeted him. What was it that he’d missed? Tycho stalked through the gaming rooms without noticing that silence fell the moment he entered. Courtiers, dozens of them, they all looked the same to him.

  When the answer came to him it came if not by accident then by chance. On the third night he returned before dawn to find a red-haired girl in his bed. Alexa had sent her. The duchess thought he needed company. Despite the young woman’s protests Tycho sent her away. She was back the next night to tell Tycho he could do anything he wanted with her. Alexa’s orders. It was obvious she had no idea what anything meant. Equally obvious, she didn’t need to know to be terrified of whatever it might turn out to be.

  “What did Alexa offer you?”

  “My father’s life.”

  The man was a forger. Since Venice’s trade depended on the purity of its coin, and a Venetian ducat was welcome anywhere in the Mediterranean, the city was brutal to those caught forging. Her father would be blinded and his hands cut off to stop him forging again. Tycho considered bedding her to still his fury, as Lady Giulietta had used him to still her grief the night her husband died.

  But he didn’t trust himself. More to the point, this wasn’t the woman he wanted – but if it was true her father would be blinded if Tycho rejected her then how could he reject her, or wasn’t that his concern? Alexa’s logic was cruel enough for Tycho to decide this was a test, but of what . . .? He was still wondering when he looked up and thought – for a moment – it was Giulietta in his bed.

  Tycho said, “Show yourself.”

  Her hips were a little wider, her buttocks slightly rounder, her teats a little more generous . . . But she was close enough in looks to be mistaken for Giulietta at a very quick glance, or would have been had her hair been natural. The long hair she’d untied was only dyed the red he loved so fiercely.

  Tycho shivered.

  He felt not elation but the first stirrings of recognition. He wondered briefly what he’d have done had Alexa sent him a natural redhead, a girl closer to Giulietta in looks. Bed her and be done with it? Lose what he’d just found?

  “Stand up,” he said.

  The girl stood naked while he walked around her. He touched her body hair and it was soft as silk where Giulietta’s was coarse and wiry. The hair on her head was too fine and smelt wrong. She smelt wrong. He stepped back.

  “You don’t want me, my lord?” The girl sounded worried.

  “Tell Duchess Alexa your debt is paid a dozen times.”

  She looked at him.

  “Go,” he said. “Go and talk to whoever you’re meant to report to. Be sure to say the debt is paid, and tell your father to find another job, one that doesn’t land you on your back in bed with a stranger. If such a thing exists.” Girls from her class ended up either married or in brothels, and he’d come to wonder if there was a difference. Giulietta would say not, but Giulietta’s anger at where she’d found herself was fierce.

  Something had been waiting beyond his shock at discovering Alexa was dying . . . Beyond his fury that the woman he loved lay drugged because the risk of addiction was less than the damage grief might do. Against all logic, Giulietta had adored the child Alonzo’s plot had forced on her. Take Leo away and all that was left was her uncle’s brutality. Alexa’s drugs were there to prevent Giulietta from realising this.

  Anger at the unfairness of it all had stopped him finding the answer. Stopping for a moment had let his thoughts settle like water filtering through sand. But first he needed to check that what he suspected was possible.

  Leo’s former chamber was locked but the key rested in the door. A guard hesitated at the end of the corridor, and, knowing the next door led to Giulietta’s original chamber, turned and strode back the way he’d come with the steady steps of someone convincing himself he’d done the right thing. He turned in surprise when Tycho followed him. “Has Leo’s room been visited recently?”

  “My lord, I wouldn’t know.”

  “Of course you would.”

  The palace guards knew everything and said nothing. They saw what never happened, heard words that were never spoken. “I believe, my lord, orders are no one visit this corridor. Except us, of course . . .”

  “Of course . . .” The palace guard walked every step of every corridor and colonnade every hour. Ca’ Ducale might be a confectioner’s delight, made from pillars as fine as spun sugar, and every canal and the whole lagoon act as its moat, but that didn’t mean the Millioni took risks. They were protected against everything, except, it seemed, themselves.

  The nursery was in darkness. It stank of death and dried blood. The carpet had been removed for cleaning or destruction; cleaning, probably. It had been Persian and valuable. The duchess was practical about such things. Little else had been touched. A broken crib, a burnt-out fire, evidence of emptied bowels . . . The tiles had been mopped but dirt stained the mortar between them.

  Glass from the window lay in a heap.

  In the richer Venetian houses windows were made from small circles of greenish bottle glass fixed into a lattice with lead, rather than oiled paper. The local pebbles could be ground to almost pure silica; the city had a monopoly on soda ash shipped from the Levant, and the glass was justly famous.

  Pulling aside a drape and opening the shutters, Tycho let in fresher air. Shards of glass jutted in like the teeth of a lamprey. A neighbouring pane was cracked and Tycho looked more closely. Two chips revealed the bottle glass had been hit from outside. A single chip showed it had been hit from inside as well.

  Several things were wrong with that. The first was that the sound of a window breaking would have startled Leo’s nurse. Why didn’t you call for help? The second was obvious. Who had reason to hit the glass from inside? No one, unless that’s where you already were, and you hit that pane first, found
it too tough to crack and tried another instead. Should have let me have the guard.

  He wished Alexa hadn’t simply stabbed the man.

  The rope the killers were supposed to have used was still tied to its grappling hook and lay coiled in one corner. Rust flecked on to Tycho’s fingers as he hooked the grapple over the window. Slipping out of the window, he lowered himself over the edge and gripped the rope, planning to climb down.

  A split second later he was falling.

  He kicked off from the wall and turned in mid-air to land knee-deep in snow. The grappling hook remained in place but most of the rope lay coiled in front of him. It was as rotten as the hook was rusted. While most of Venice watched Alonzo’s ship sail for Montenegro the killer had entered the nursery by the door. Tycho doubted the nurse killed the child. He didn’t discount it but he doubted it. A hundred women in the city would be desperate enough to kill a child if the money was right. The nurse had been brought from the Italian mainland for another reason.

  Tycho intended to find out what that was.

  10

  That thought took him through the palace garden, over a lowish wall and into the garden of the patriarch’s little palace next door. Most young men his age probably linked places in the city to kisses taken and kisses given, knee-tremblers in darkened doorways and perhaps the occasional street fight. He remembered places for people he’d killed or deaths he’d seen or overheard.

  Here was where Lord Atilo slit the throat of the last patriarch, and Tycho watched before dodging the dagger Atilo threw after him. Tonight Tycho moved swiftly through the snow-covered garden and over a second wall into an alley beyond. And then, as if a man returning from a tavern, sauntered into St Mark’s Square and let himself discreetly through a door into the basilica. He nodded to the stone mother with her halo of glass stars, and stole a candle from a box, lighting it from a wall lamp and gluing it with a blob of wax to the floor at the Virgin’s feet.