The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini (40 page)

“Yes,” Desdaio said.

As Federico and Blue advanced, Tycho glanced behind to see a squat man reach for his ankle. Kicking back, he broke the dwarf’s nose and heard a splash. Next time he risked a glance two boys were holding the dwarf underwater, while bubbles rippled the water’s dark surface.

“Look,” said Dee. “Fighting just makes it harder.”

“Depends how well you fight.” Whipping the blade from behind his back, Tycho slashed it across Blue’s throat, stabbed Federico in the guts and threw it at Dee in a single moment. Dee had a hand to his eye, already sinking to his knees, when Tycho stepped forward and drove the dagger home.

He wiped his blade on Dee’s face for effect, though he doubted many could see, the light being so bad. Hooking his toe under Dee’s body, he rolled it into the water. The other two he simply picked up and threw. Those in the shallowest water were obviously stronger or meaner than those behind. So they were his greatest threat. Letting them see his contempt was simple common sense.

“Anyone else want to fight?”

There were growls of anger and snarled insults, but no one stepped up to the challenge.

“Well?” Tycho said.

In the shallows the dwarf stopped struggling. An old man who’d tried to save him was being shuffled into deeper water, while the boys moved forward to take his place. “Wait till you’re hungry,” someone muttered.

Tycho looked for the voice.

“And then?”

“We’ll see how tough you are.”

A bear of a Mamluk with a matted beard and a belly that
jutted like a boat’s prow. He was chest deep in water, but only because he crouched down.

“Man’s got a knife.”

The Mamluk snorted. “He’s gotta sleep sometime. We’d all be tough if we had a knife.”

“He’s tough without, believe me.” A boy’s voice came from deep water. “You ain’t seen nothing like it. Moves like lightning. Kills just as fast.”

“You,” Tycho said. “Come here.”

“He’s just a kid,” a voice hissed.

“Like that ever stopped Dee and Blue,” someone else answered.

Hands bundled the boy towards the island. Where he stood naked, hands clenched into fists, his ribs thin as twigs. His eyes never left Tycho’s face in the half-darkness. “It’s you,” Tycho said.

Pietro nodded.

“I’m sorry…” Tycho made himself say it. “I’m sorry about your sister.”

“Not your fault,” Pietro said flatly.

Tycho wished he could agree with him. “Here,” he said. “Hold the knife for me.”

The small boy gaped, then grabbed the dagger by its hilt and stepped back. He swung the blade at the first man to grab for it.

“Anyone tries to take that from Pietro they answer to me.”

Heads turned to fix on Tycho in the darkness. He pointed to the barrel-chested Mamluk, gesturing him closer. “The island’s his if he can take it.”

The challenge was enough. The treadmill stopped. Only starting when people began shouting. “It’s time to change shifts,” whispered Pietro. “Only Dee’s dead. Maybe you’d better tell them?” He made the last part a question. In case Tycho grew angry.

“Change shifts,” Tycho ordered.

The wheel worked a pump that stopped the pit from drowning
its inhabitants. As long as people worked the wheel every hour of every day, the level stayed low. At least, low enough for the island to remain visible and the slopes to be shallow enough for most to stand and a few to kneel.

“Right,” Tycho said. “Want to try your luck?”

“I’ll be having that knife,” the Mamluk warned Pietro. “If you’ve got any sense you’ll give it up without fuss.”

Stepping forward, Tycho kicked the man in the balls.

There was nothing subtle about his move. He waited until the Mamluk was ashore, stepped forward and kicked hard. The shackle around his ankle crushed the man’s bollocks. Both of Tycho’s ankles ripping as the linking chain snapped tight. His curse was lost under the Mamluk’s scream.

Breaking the man’s neck with a twist, Tycho kicked his body into the shallows. “The knife,” someone begged. “Lend me your knife.”

“Why?”

“So I can fillet him quickly. Please. In this heat he’ll be rotting by tomorrow. Believe me, I know. I used to be a butcher.”

“How long?” Tycho asked.

“Months,” the man said. “Years, tens of years. How can one tell time in hell? Will you lend me your knife?”

“No,” Tycho said.

The man sighed, dragged the Mamluk towards the shallows, and collected Dee, Blue and Federico as well. He left the dwarf floating. “We’d better eat what we can then.”

Everyone fed.

The deck of the
bucintoro
remained in silence except for sails creaking, the hum of the hawsers and slap of the waves. Even Duke Marco stopped drumming his heels, mesmerised by the twisted expression on Atilo’s face.

Lords who hadn’t met her gaze in a year, their ladies, who’d spent time looking through her, stared openly at Desdaio. And
the young woman stood there, wide-faced and innocent, her body soft, her breasts heavy and her smile gentle. But there was steel in her eyes.

Duchess Alexa was impressed.

“Let me get this right.” The Regent’s grin was that of a cat that had got both the cream and the canary, and had just discovered seconds. His hatred of Atilo was well known. “You’re accusing your lover of treason?”

“He’s not my lover,” Desdaio snapped.

Atilo stared at his feet.

“Really?”

“We’re to be married. Sometime.” There was a world of bitterness in Desdaio’s last word and her eyes filled. Raising her chin, she ignored them. “Until then I remain a virgin. I swear it.”

The duchess smiled behind her veil. “If,” she said, “you’re accusing your beloved of treason I doubt there will be a wedding or a bedding.”

“I’m not, my lady.”

“That’s what it sounds like to me.”

“I’m not saying Lord Atilo is guilty. I’m saying his slave is innocent. Tycho wouldn’t commit treason any more than my lord would. There must be a mistake. What can he have done that is so bad?”

The nobles began looking at their wives.

Everyone knew patrician women sometimes had affairs with servants. Young wives with old husbands had to find comfort somewhere. As did women married to men more interested in men. Sometimes the wives were simply bored, or married to weak men who accepted it. A few women ended poisoned, returned to their fathers or locked in their rooms. Mostly, the servants were found floating with their throats cut.

But this young woman had just publicly sworn herself a virgin.

“
You
don’t believe he’s guilty, do you?”

Iacopo shuffled his feet, obviously stunned to be thrown so
publicly to the lions by Desdaio’s question. He was only there as Atilo’s bodyguard. It might be Easter, a day of peace and celebration, but nobles still took sensible precautions.

“My lady,” he said. “I’m hardly in a position…”

“Yes, you are.” Atilo’s voice deep and slow. He was, those who knew him realised, in battle mode. His face was stern, his eyes steady. “And I’m interested to know your answer. Tell me. Do you believe my slave guilty of any treason?”

Maybe Alexa imagined the stress on
any
.

“How can I…” Iacopo stumbled to a halt. “I’m a servant. If I say no the lords think I lie. If I say yes, the lords might think I lie anyway. These are matters far above…”

“Your highness.” Desdaio’s voice cut through the excuses. “May I have leave to talk privately with my lord Atilo?” It took Alexa a second to realise she was talking to the duke. Marco stopped looking at the seagulls.

“I don’t see why not,” he said.

Nicolò Dolphino gasped, and then flushed under Alexa’s glare. It didn’t matter that the duchess wore a veil, she was obviously glaring. And it didn’t matter that most days Duke Marco could barely string two words together. Everyone was to pretend he ruled. Expressing surprise that he’d managed two sentences in one day slighted that.

Desdaio walked Atilo to the stern of the
bucintoro
. Ahead of her, podgy wooden cherubim, painted gold rather than gilded, gambolled and rolled and exposed tiny genitals and even more unlikely wings. She dismissed a year of a master carver’s life with a single sniff.

“Do you love me?”

Hard eyes looked at her. She’d never seen his face so cold or severe. He wore his age and experience like armour. She felt stupidly young and not worthy of him.

“Answer me,” she demanded crossly.

He let his silence stretch to the point of cruelty.

“I love you,” she said, feeling her eyes fill. She was furious with herself, furious with him. Furious that fifty people who’d spent a year ignoring her were now openly staring. “I love you more than life.”

“I’ll ask you again,” Atilo said. “Did you go to his room?”

“That’s what this is about? You’re accusing me of…” She glared at him. “What are you accusing me of?”

He just looked at her.

His answer was in his silence and the stillness of his stare. She knew he could outwait her. He’d done it before over lesser things. Things that didn’t matter. Not in the way this mattered. Although they’d felt important at the time.

“Well?” he said.

“No,” Desdaio said. “I didn’t.”

She saw doubt in his eyes, and grabbed his hand before it could grow greater. He was stronger than her, experienced in battle as well as the ways of the world. He could free himself easily. But she held his wrist so tight, and looked so frightened at where she found herself, he didn’t break her grasp.

Instead he waited for her to say more.

Desdaio breathed a sigh of relief. She couldn’t say why but he smiled slightly, and some of the warmth came back into his eyes. “A little guilt,” he said. “But only a little. I’ve judged people,” he added, as if she didn’t know. “People have hung on my assessment of their innocence or guilt.”

That she didn’t know.

She wanted to tell him the truth, and she wanted him to respect her. She couldn’t have both, and she was a coward. Desdaio knew that. To risk everything on a simple statement of the truth.
I went, nothing happened
. She lacked the courage, the certainty he loved her enough to believe and forgive. Her life was full of the little truths she’d never managed to say. How could she start with a truth so big?

Atilo was staring at her, she realised.

“Tell me what happened.”

“I entered his room. Nothing happened.”

Atilo’s gaze sharpened. “Why?” he demanded.

“I asked Amelia if you’d free him. She said maybe. Some you did. Others you sold. It depended on a test… No,” Desdaio said, seeing him frown. “She didn’t say what the test was. I asked, she refused.”

“We come back to,
Why?
”

“I like him.” Desdaio said, risking a little truth. Maybe she shouldn’t have said that. But Atilo simply nodded.

“Do you like Iacopo equally?”

“No.” Desdaio shook her head. “I don’t trust him,” she said. “Iacopo gives me the creeps. Always watching. Always so polite it feels like mockery. And he… he lusts after Amelia.” She blushed at her own words.

Then blushed again at what she saw in Atilo’s eyes.

He wanted to tell her everyone lusted after Amelia. With her long legs and narrow hips and black skin she was an exotic gazelle. Maybe even a tyger. As fierce as anything in the duke’s zoo. If Amelia was a tyger, Desdaio didn’t want to think what animal that made her.

“I swear on my life nothing happened.”

“Should I be worried that you like him?”

Desdaio hesitated. “I know what he is,” she said. “He’s never said. But I’ve worked it out. And it must be so sad…” Stepping close, she whispered in Atilo’s ear. Hearing his hiss of surprise.

“Desdaio.”

“What?” she asked. “Am I wrong?”

“A fallen angel exiled from hell… Because his enemies paint themselves red? And his house burnt down? And he fears daylight?”

“Don’t laugh at me.”

“I’m not.” Atilo cupped her chin in his hands and raised her face to smile at her. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Rarer than gold.
Far sweeter than honey. I’m sorry things have been,” he glanced towards Alexa, “complicated… We’ll marry this summer, I swear it.”

“You’ll save him then?”

Atilo’s smile faded slightly.

“You believe me? That I’m not wicked? That nothing happened. That I would never do that to you?”

“Yes,” Atilo said. “I think so.”

“Then prove it. Save Tycho.”

Atilo’s face set hard. It was the face of a general weighing his choices before battle. Considering what price he was prepared to pay for victory. And as Desdaio decided she’d asked too much, that she should take her words back, he nodded…

“This should be interesting,” Alexa said.

Steam from the heat of a hundred bodies sweated the dungeon’s stone walls and rose from the water’s filthy surface in a parody of lagoon mist. It swirled through rotting tread steps, disturbed by the wheel’s movement. Settling only when a shift changed, breaking into fresh flurries as soon as the wheel resumed turning.