The Outcast Blade (17 page)

“You know she kills?”

“They don’t come back, do they?”

“Have you told the Watch?”

“My cousins were killed on the island and I found their bodies. The Watch didn’t want to know.”

“You said
her
. You’ve seen this creature?”

The sexton looked nervous. “I went out after the second barge didn’t return. I used my brother-in-law’s fishing boat and stopped offshore. She came down to the water’s edge to glare at me.”

“Describe her.”

“Naked, my lord.” That was the first time Giorgio had been polite. He’d probably just worked out that if his secret was known to those in authority it wasn’t his secret any more. “Moves on all fours like a dog.”

“You’ve seen her clearly?”

Giorgio nodded. “Stick-thin, my lord. With huge eyes and black hair. A scar runs from shoulder to her hip. Another scar…” He hesitated “It looks like she was stabbed in the heart.”

“She was.”

The sexton paled. “Say you’re joking, please.”

“I was there when she died. I will need your help.”

“To do what, my lord?”

“Kill her a second time.”

The sexton crossed himself.

“We’re off,” Giorgio shouted into the darkness of a tiny room behind him. An irritated grunt and the wail of a newborn child answered him.

“We meet your brother-in-law at the jetty?”

“Yes, sir. And he’s bringing his cousin.” Before Tycho could protest, the sexton added, “The man who owns the barge you wanted filled with earth. You do have his warrant for this trip?” Giorgio paled at his own bluntness.

“In my pocket,” Tycho lied.

Boats were forbidden to move on the lagoon after dark without a warrant from the office of the Dogana and proof of taxes paid. Boats did move, of course, smugglers and lovers, those disposing of bodies and those on their way to other dark deeds.

“The boat is over there, sir.”

A shit barge had been emptied and slopped down.

It still stank like a public latrine and had stains to make Tycho fear for his doublet. However, its usual cargo had been replaced with earth, freshly dug and still moist, with worms wriggling blindly on its surface.

“That’s my brother-in-law, Mario.”

A squat young man in a Castellano smock, his cap greasy with age, bowed clumsily in Tycho’s direction and busied himself with a rope.

“And that’s his cousin.”

The owner of the barge stank even at a distance. He stank with the vigour of a man who spent six days each week up to his waist in excrement. Venice had strict rules regarding both water and shit. Fresh water was drawn from one set of cisterns in the city, and shit deposited into another set. When the cisterns were full the shit was dug out and shipped to the mainland as night soil for the crops.

Freeing his sword, Tycho jabbed the earth at his feet.

His blade sank through dirt and touched the wooden hull two feet down, which was better than he’d demanded. Maybe even deep enough to stop his sickness over water. “It’ll do,” he said.

To the men’s surprise Tycho sat himself directly on the earth rather than the crate they’d provided. “Tell him,” Mario whispered.

“Later,” hissed another.

“Now’s better.”

“Tell me what?” Tycho demanded. “My hearing would embarrass an owl,” he added, when the three men turned in shock. “Talk more quietly or move away.” Truth was, he’d hear them even if they stood on the far side of the square. “Better still, say what you want to say.”

“Sometimes, my lord. We…”

Silence followed Mario’s words. Either side of Mario, his companions shuffled their feet. It turned out they robbed the dead of anything not taken by those who found them.

“The bodies arrive naked?”

Giorgio looked shocked. “No, my lord. They arrive in the rags they were wearing when found. Some bodies are fresh and others rotten, depending on the season and how long before someone reported them. We search all but the worst.”

“Their rags?”

“And their bodies.”

One of the others muttered something.

Actually
, thought Tycho,
I wouldn’t be surprised where you found things hidden
. The poor undoubtedly hid things in the same places slaves did; different for men and women, but not that different.

“That’s what you wanted to tell me?”

“There’s more. There are people who…”

Tycho knew he wouldn’t like what was coming. Although it turned out to be not what he thought. Mario didn’t want to talk about dark practices. Well, he did, but not the necrophiliac kind. Greed was behind their sins.

It took the three men halfway to the island to get to the heart of it.

They took trinkets from bodies. Occasionally they took the bodies themselves. Mario said he didn’t dare say who bought the bodies. Which was fine, Tycho didn’t need telling. Only one man in Venice was likely to want a steady supply of cadavers. Hightown Crow.

Her uncle Alonzo was still out whoring, gambling or whatever he did with Sundays these days. Tycho was… Lady Giulietta didn’t care where he was. And Aunt Alexa was pouring tea, and radiating smugness at finally having Giulietta to herself.

“Come late afternoon,” her note said.

It arrived along with the duchess’s own red-lacquered palanquin. She’d even sent her best men to carry her through the streets. Lady Giulietta made them wait while she changed, and drew the curtains on the chair so no one could see inside. It was, she had to admit, a comfortable way to travel.

She’d come dressed as a grown-up.

Because I am a grown-up
.

She’d had her maid tie back her hair with barely a strand escaping, had put on a black gown of raw Chinese silk, shaved into complicated patterns. She’d half hidden her face behind cobweb lace, and hung a silver chain of overlapping scales across her bosom. It made no difference. Even dressed as a grown-up she’d walked straight into her aunt’s trap. This meeting was serious.

It had to be. Her aunt was so slow getting to the point.

For someone who prided herself on her ability to navigate the hidden rocks of court life, Giulietta had run aground on rather too many in recent years. Tycho appearing when she’d been about to kill herself was the start of it. She’d been begging the Virgin for help for days… And the Virgin sent him?

Then Leopold, elegant and slightly mocking on the Riva degli Schiavoni that first time they met.
Eggs have no business dancing with stones
. He’d known who she was. While pretending not to.
I know quality
.

She’d fallen for his line and his smile.

And he’d left her, left the world and left her mistress of everything he once owned. Lands, tithes, titles.

“Are you listening?”

“No,” Giulietta snapped. “I’m thinking.”

Nudging aside a copy of
Liber Igneum
, whose full title roughly translated as
A Book of Ways to Burn Enemies to Death
, Alexa reached for an ivory-handled jug. Her book contained a recipe for gunpowder that Giulietta had once learnt by heart. She’d been eleven and Uncle Marco had been dying, and Giulietta was going to blow a hole in the garden wall and escape.

For a month, she saved her piss to distil saltpetre, adding charcoal from the drawing box and crushed sulphur from the pills her nurse took for the flux. But the hidden urine stank so badly she finally tipped it into the privy and explained away the stink by complaining Lady Eleanor wet the bed. Eleanor was whipped, of course. She’d refused to talk to Giulietta for days.

“Why did you whip us as children?”

“Everyone’s whipped as a child.”

“As often as we were?”

“Let me tell you a story.” Taking a slow sip, Aunt Alexa appeared to vanish inside herself for a few seconds. “A girl of Eleanor’s age was discovered talking to a boy in a corridor after dark. Talking, nothing else. She was not whipped, she was strangled with a silken rope. The boy was not whipped, he was impaled on a steel spike
that had been heated to cauterise the wound. It took him two days to die. Her lady-in-waiting was not whipped. She was hung, being too common for a silken rope. The girl was my sister and I was whipped.”

“For not stopping her?”

“I wasn’t even in the same city. You think your uncle wouldn’t have had you strangled if he could? My son impaled if he could get away with it?”

Giulietta had never heard her speak like this.

“I kept you
alive
,” the duchess said. “I kept you both alive. If you leave Venice – and I’m told you want to – how will I protect you? Although maybe Tycho could help with that.”

“Tycho?”

“There are murmurs…”

“He means nothing to me.”

“So he won’t be going with you?”

Won’t be…?
Lady Giulietta shook her head fiercely.
How could her aunt even ask such a question?
“Of course not.”

“Then I doubt the Council will give you permission to retire to your mother’s mainland estates. Nor can you count on my support.”

“
My lady…
”

“You will remain in this city.”

They sat on opposite sides of a small table on scissor chairs with embroidered cushions that looked more comfortable than they felt. Alexa’s room was as Giulietta remembered. The one unchanging room in a palace that was forever being rebuilt, improved and redecorated. Although the table stank of turpentine, having been recently revarnished with amber dissolved in spirit. The only unusual thing in the room, which Giulietta glared round trying to regain her temper, was an iridescent lizard in one corner.

“What’s that called again?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

Lady Giulietta’s chin went up. “I think it’s time for me to go.”

“We should finish our conversation first.”

Why should we?
Giulietta thought. But obedience had been beaten into her, for all that obstinacy had never been beaten out. Her aunt’s assurance she would be obeyed undid Giulietta’s resolve.

“All right then…
Who
said something about me?”

“There are murmurs.”

“About Lady Desdaio,” Giulietta said viciously. “Not about me. Why would there be rumours about me? It’s Desdaio who practically lives there. Every time Atilo leaves for a council meeting she sneaks out to see his ex-slave.”

“You’re jealous.”

“
I’m not jealous
.” Giulietta dug her nails into her hand hard. All the same, she felt her eyes brim. She would
not
cry in front of Aunt Alexa.

The lizard thing looked up as Giulietta came closer. It eyed her warily as she knelt beside it, her back turned to her aunt. Lady Giulietta’s voice was steady by the time she trusted herself to speak. “What is it?”

“A dragonet.”

“Never heard of them.”

“They’re common in China. My nephew sent it with his last letter. He thought it would remind me of home.”

“Does it?” Giulietta asked, hoping to be cruel in her turn.

Alexa nodded. “My dear,” she said. “We must talk about Tycho. Reports say the two of you were close on the ship.”

It was half question, half statement.

Lady Giulietta didn’t bother to deny it. “After the battle I was tired and distressed. Leopold had died and…”

“A man can laugh a woman into bed but sadness will take her there quicker. Be careful. With creatures like that you become responsible for what you tame.”

Giulietta was pretty sure they weren’t talking about the dragonet. “We didn’t…”

“But it was close?”

Blushing, she tried to shrug aside the question.

“I need you to tell me… Believe it or not, this has become a matter of state.” Perhaps it was coincidence Aunt Alexa moved to stand between the door and where her niece crouched by the dragonet, although Giulietta doubted it. Her aunt retained her ability to make Giulietta feel twelve.

She could lie or tell the truth. She’d always despised people who lied. “Leopold was dead. And I,” Giulietta shrugged, “was desperate, alone, scared. There’s something about Tycho…”

“And there’s something about being sixteen. I have two questions, both important.”

Giulietta waited.

“Is that child Leopold’s? Were you lovers? Because his tastes usually ran in a different direction. And, did you really love him? Or is this dressing up in widow’s clothes play-acting?”

“That’s three.”

Alexa scowled.

“No, no, yes.” Giulietta got her answers over quickly. So quickly she barely gave herself time to think. “And it’s not acting. Leopold was a friend and kind to me when I needed…” She hesitated. “Help.”

“So who is Leo’s real father?”

Giulietta was up and running for the door.

She couldn’t even remember deciding to leave. Only Aunt Alexa’s shockingly strong grip on her wrist prevented her turning the handle. She was younger and should be stronger. When she couldn’t free herself tears came.

“Was it Tycho?”

“
No, it wasn’t
.”

Putting her other hand to the fingers that gripped her, Giulietta contemptuously peeled them off her wrist. Alexa let it happen.

“This is the last time I visit you,” Lady Giulietta said tightly. “If you wish to contact me you may write. I don’t guarantee to reply.”

Alexa stepped back and Giulietta opened the door.

“Keep in mind,” Alexa said. “We’ve told the envoy you and Tycho are lovers. That you cling to him in your grief. I suggest you act in public as if that is true.”

“I’d rather die.”

“Gods,” said Alexa. “He really has got to you, hasn’t he?”

Giulietta gripped her silver chain tightly. She also slammed the door on her way out.

The first trip to the island produced little. The sexton, his brother-in-law and cousin being too terrified to put ashore. Since all Tycho could see were wild roses, thorn bushes and grave mounds, and all he could hear was the wind through wild grass, and all he could feel was an eerie emptiness, he allowed them their cowardice.

They put ashore the next night and found three dead Castellani bravoes in straw-stuffed leather jerkins with rusting pot helms and boar spears. There was no sign of the demon.