The Exiled Blade (The Assassini)

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.

The crypt was below the altar, down a cold spiral of steps that magnified Tycho’s careful tread into giant’s footsteps as he descended into a darkness his eyes swallowed and turned to light. A thousand ghosts plucked at the shadows’ edge. Here princes and statesmen had lain before they were buried. Because the ground was frozen hard and the attack on Leo was a secret, here lay a small child and the nurse who’d been looking after him.

Ice slicked the wall in a pottery glaze that made the walls look natural, not something built by man. The sluggish water around the island city was gelid, the canals snaking through its heart colder still. Old women were insisting the canals might freeze. It had happened before when they were children. Touching his fingers to the wall, Tycho believed it could happen again.

In a year when the world turned colder, and canals froze in Venice, blizzards smothered a town beyond a huge ocean no dragonship had crossed for more than a hundred years . . .

Tycho muttered the words so softly they might have been a prayer for the two cloth-covered bodies on slabs in front of him. They came from a book by Sir John Mandeville’s squire; a man who travelled to the world’s strangest places, where the dead walked and dragons lived and serpents spoke. It was the story of Bjornvin’s fall. The last battle of the Far West Warriors, the Viking conquerors of Vineland, whom Tycho remembered as drunken scum. But he’d been their slave, from a people far older, so he was hardly likely to remember them fondly.

The blizzard almost buried the woman approaching the gates of the last Viking settlement in Vineland. She had walked an ice bridge from Asia. Not this winter. Not even the one before.

She was at Bjornvin’s walls before the gate slave saw her. His orders were to admit no one. He would have obeyed, too. But she raised an angelic face framed by black hair. Even at that distance he could see she had amber-flecked eyes.

Without intending, he descended the ladder from the walls, removed the crossbar from the gate and opened it . . .

It was the amber-flecked eyes that made Tycho suspect the woman was his mother. The gate slave who descended the walls was his foster-father. Tycho could remember Bjornvin falling. He was the reason the town fell. He’d not been called Tycho then. He had no idea what he’d been called.

Thorns and wild roses probably grew over its remains; at least he hoped they did. The caribou, foxes and hares would have returned. He doubted even Bjornvin’s red-painted enemy, the Skaelingar, remembered it had existed.

Leo’s nurse and the dead infant lay under grave sheets on marble slabs that looked like cuts of some fatty meat. He could smell corruption in the air, so faint a trace he doubted anyone else could do the same. It was the corruption he’d expect from a corpse an hour or so dead. Alexa must have had them carried down here quickly. The cold had done the rest.

Pulling back the sheet revealed the naked body of a woman in her middle twenties. Her limbs were frozen as if rigor had set and remained rather than eased as it did naturally. Her skin had the sheen of glass and her flesh the translucence of alabaster. But nothing could make pretty the cut that revealed an icy twist of gut. He found what he wanted below her left teat.

A dagger wound. The blow was perfect.

The blade had slid between ribs and ruptured her heart. A blow so neat and a gut wound so brutal? Bending closer, Tycho found a twist of thread in the stab wound and blew on frozen flesh to free it. Red wool from an overgown, bloodied flax from an undergown beneath. The rip to her gut had no threads and its edges were bloodless and too straight. The original blow had bled her out and eventually killed her. The second was for show. She was already mortally wounded before the second cut was made . . .

“That way madness lies.”

“Your highness . . .” Tycho hastily covered the corpse.

Thin as a stick insect and gangly as a spider, Duke Marco stood in the doorway dressed in black. In his hand was a church candle. His doublet could have been Tycho’s own. “P-pretty angel,” Marco said, sounding for a moment like his idiot self. “So alone. So b-bemused. So unlike the rest of us. It was cruel, you k-know. To d-disappear like that. She thought you were g-gone for ever.”

“Lady Giulietta?”

“Who else? She t-told me, you know. About h-how you grew wings of f-fire. And then d-disappeared. She c-cried.” Marco’s mouth twisted in self-mockery. “I c-cried.”

“I had to help Rosalyn . . .”

“Who loved you so f-fiercely she couldn’t bear to s-stay in Venice? You learn so m-much as an idiot. People t-talk in front of you. They s-scheme, p-plan, p-plot and lust. After a while you become invisible. But no, I d-didn’t learn about her f-from g-gossip. Julie t-told me.”

“She gave Rosalyn an estate.”

“I know,” Marco said simply. “I signed the d-decree . . . Just write your name here as neatly as you can. Big letters will do.” His mimicry of his mother was exact. “It’s amazing h-how easy it is to w-write M-MARCO for the thousandth t-time if someone is holding your h-hand to h-help you. Did you love her?”

“No,” Tycho said firmly. “Only Giulietta.”

“Are you s-sure?”

“We were too alike . . .”

Marco nodded at that. “What b-brings you here?”

“This,” Tycho said, lifting the woman’s cloth. He scraped his nail along the edge of her stab wound, collecting blood that had begun to dry before it was frozen. Without allowing himself to hesitate he tasted it.

Vomit rose in his throat.

He spat at the foulness of its taste and scrubbed the back of his hand against his mouth. When he’d finished spitting, Marco held up his candle and stared at him, fierce intelligence in his eyes. “Well?”

“She has Millioni blood.”

“My mother would say that’s impossible.”

“Highness. I can taste it. She and Giulietta share . . .”

Marco’s nod was abrupt and Tycho realised that being told the intricacies of Tycho’s and Giulietta’s relationship by Giulietta was one thing; having it confirmed by Tycho was another. The duke took a moment to find his thoughts. “There’s no doubt?”

“None, highness.”

“Well,” he said. “She’s not Alonzo’s. He’d never be able to keep a daughter hidden from my mother. She’s obviously not mine. Which makes her my father’s . . . You realise this means Alonzo knows more about you than you thought?”

Yes, Tycho did.

“The n-night you found Leo dead. What h-happened?”

That was the question. He’d run into the nursery, smelt Millioni blood and known Leo was dead. Only, what if he wasn’t? What if an imposter, a changeling, was dead in Leo’s place? Everything suddenly made sense. The Regent’s sudden marriage and willingness to accept exile, his almost perverse enthusiasm for the tasks the Council had set him. How long would Alonzo need to stay away?

Three years, four . . .?

Would anyone really notice if Maria Dolphini’s son looked a little more grown up than he should? At five he would be precocious. At nine less so. At thirteen . . . Who would notice? Alonzo could pass Leo off as his son.

A new heir for Venice.

The twisted brilliance was that Leo was Alonzo’s son. He was Alonzo’s son because Alonzo had his niece impregnated with his seed using a goose quill. The late Dr Crow had ensured the seed quickened into a boy.

“Fiendish, isn’t it?” Marco said.

Tycho nodded.

“My uncle k-kills my half-sister to make you think he’d k-killed my nephew. What a f-family.” The duke sounded like he meant it. “We’d b-better look at the other h-half of his t-trick.”

Across the infant’s chest was a short, slightly ragged scar that had healed at both ends. It was newer than Leo’s scar, it had to be. Leo and Giulietta had returned to Venice over six months before and Leo was just over a year old. Was this Dr Crow’s work? Tycho wondered. The scar on the imposter was so precise someone had to have examined Leo closely and made drawings.

This was not a new plan.

By now Tycho knew the dead infant was a stranger’s child but he still tasted its blood, knowing how vile it would be. Once again he spat, gagged and wiped his mouth. Then pulled up the grave sheet and stood while Marco recited a prayer. “Someone’s d-daughter. Someone’s s-son,” Marco finished, when his prayer was done. “You must tell Giulietta and my mother. Leave me being here out of it.”

“Highness?”

“I am my father’s ghost. Far less visible than my uncle’s ambition or my mother’s guilt . . . Like you, I am here and not here. Like you, I live for the shadows.” With that, he was gone. A swirl of black cloak, a toss of his head and Marco, duke of Venice and prince of Serenissima, blew out his candle and disappeared into the dark twist of stairs beyond. Tycho suspected he was being mocked.