The Outcast Blade (24 page)

“The usual rules apply,” Alonzo said. “You fight until one person begs for mercy. If neither does this ends in death…” He glanced at Iacopo, who nodded.

“Are we done?” Tycho asked.

“Yes,” Alonzo said. “I think we are.”

“Good…”

Tycho hurled his sword.

Dropping his new helm, Iacopo stumbled on broken brick as Tycho’s sword ricocheted off his breastplate. It spun away towards a Dogana guard, who had to jump out of the way. By then Tycho had already closed the gap to side-kick his boot into Iacopo’s sword hand. He moved so fast Iacopo had barely let out a yell before Tycho caught the falling weapon, flipped it round and prepared to strike.

“
Hold
,” Alonzo shouted. “That was cheating.”

“You said the talking was done.”

“
You will lower your sword
.”

“How long do you think he’ll last as your Blade?”

Anger and shame filled Iacopo’s face at the question, and Tycho realised Iacopo also doubted his own abilities. Doubt, vanity and pride. It was a dangerous mix. Iacopo was fingering the dent Tycho’s sword had put in his breastplate. His scowl said he would not be caught like that again.

“Step back from each other.”

Tycho tossed Iacopo’s sword contemptuously at his feet and collected his own, raising it high above his head as Atilo had taught him. The circle around them stilled and even Alexa held her breath.

“You may begin.”

This time Iacopo attacked first. A heavy-handed slash at Tycho’s hip.

Their blades met and shock radiated up Tycho’s arms. A brutal rally followed, with swords blocking vicious blows, the noise of steel echoing off the walls of the square around them. The blades were sweeps of light reflected in the flickering torches. Iacopo should have kept up his attack but retreated, gasping.

So Tycho pulled back his blade, slid his arm under it and lanced for Iacopo’s groin, the point of his sword grating against the edge of Iacopo’s breastplate. As Tycho half hoped he would, the fool glanced down.

When he looked back up, Tycho’s elbow found his throat. Alonzo’s howl of protest said he knew his man was beaten.

Iacopo stepped back with a hand to his neck, his breath coming in ragged gasps. His sword hung loose from his other hand. He was trying to say something.

“I can’t hear you.”

“He’s surrendering.”

Tycho ignored Roderigo. “You lied about Desdaio. You tricked Atilo into murder. You said Amelia was my whore and that boy my catamite. You stole the office you hold from a better man.”

Iacopo let his sword fall at his feet, and spread his hands in obvious surrender. Silent words formed on his lips.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Tycho…” Alexa said.

But Tycho was already moving. He spun once, adding speed to the weight of his blade and dragged its tip across Iacopo’s throat, looking away before blood even began to fountain.

I will not turn
.

“Arrest that man,” Alonzo shouted.

Lord Roderigo stepped forward, stopping when Tycho raised his sword. Tycho’s gaze locked on the man. Only Tycho knew he glared fiercely at Roderigo because the smell of Iacopo’s blood filled the air so richly he could barely control his desire to feed before Iacopo finished dying.

Hunger and indecision rooted him to the ground.

“Arrest his catamite, too.”

“
Alonzo
.”

“What?”

“That is not necessary.”

“The courts can decide.”

“Not on this.” Alexa’s voice was firm. “I’m taking the boy with me… He is protected,” she added, in case Alonzo needed help with what she was saying.

“Gods, woman…” Alonzo gripped his sword. Decided in that second to take his anger out on Roderigo instead. “Too afraid to arrest him?”

Roderigo stepped forward and hesitated.

And then Roderigo’s Mongol sergeant solved his captain’s problem by nodding to his men, who slotted steel-headed bolts into their ready-cocked crossbows and aimed them at Tycho.

“Your choice,” Temujin said.

When Tycho put down his sword, Roderigo looked relieved and Alonzo disappointed. “You will stand trial,” he said.

“For what?”

“Killing a man who was surrendering. It was clear this was a fight to the death or until either combatant demanded quarter.”

“I heard nothing.”

Alonzo flushed. “You murdered him.”

“A matter for the courts.” The duchess’s voice was calm.

“He is stripped of his knighthood and the house in San Aponal returns to the city.” Alonzo glared at his sister-in-law, daring her to object.

She nodded reluctantly.

“And you and I should ask ourselves,” Alonzo added, “if we really want this matter to reach the courts?” Tycho wondered if he was the only person to hear in those words an invitation to his murder. “In the meantime, Roderigo can arrange Sir Iacopo’s burial and that Mongol can take the slave back to prison.”

Tycho looked Sergeant Temujin in the eye and saw the desert wastes and snow-capped mountains the sergeant barely knew he hungered for. He saw Temujin’s fear, far back and hidden, at finding himself face to face with a monster.

“You know what I am?”

Temujin nodded reluctantly.

“You were right,” said Tycho. “That night on the boat… Roderigo should have killed me. Remember what you said? The Khan owned something like me and it killed him. You were right and Roderigo was wrong.”

The ruined square was empty.

Alonzo, Alexa and the others were gone.

Knowing his hatred of water and fearing he’d escape if taken through the back alleys, the Regent had ordered Tycho be shipped along the northern shore and delivered to the Pit via the canals. It was slightly longer than walking but carried him over water almost the entire way.

Ropes bound Tycho’s hands behind his back.

Sergeant Temujin had found a sack once used for dry fish to go over his head. The sergeant was taking no chances. The lugger
he’d commandeered floated squat on the edge of a
fondamenta
lining the city’s eastern edge.

“Fill the sack with earth instead,” Tycho suggested. “If you want to stop me turning into a demon seat me on dry dirt.”

“Why would you help me?”

“It hurts,” said Tycho, meaning it. “Changing to a demon hurts. My bones crack, my flesh rips, muscles tear…”

Around him Dogana guards crossed themselves.

“Fill that with earth,” Temujin ordered. “And find me another sack for his head.”

“There isn’t another one.”

“Find one.”

“Took long enough to find that.”

The man disappeared muttering into a couple of ruined houses around the square where Tycho’s duel had been fought and returned empty-handed, protesting the area was too poor to waste anything that valuable by discarding it.

“He escapes, I’m holding you responsible.”

Only once did the black waves along the city’s northern edge threaten to swamp the lugger and Tycho turned his back to the spray, feeling it splash across his shoulders as Temujin’s men cursed and steered their boat into the wind.

When they turned it was for a wide canal that separated the district of Castello from Cannaregio. At a sharp-prowed house that stood where the canal divided, they took the wider of the two canals on offer and came ashore a few minutes later.

“Follow me,” Temujin said. Had the last guard been watching properly he would have seen Tycho test the rope round his wrists and nod thoughtfully.

Could be worse…

Luckily the hemp was wet, his wrists thin and the guard who tied the knot was in a hurry. All three helped. It helped too that the pre-dawn crowd on the landing stage swelled as pie sellers
and women with grilled fish on skewers decided Temujin’s men needed breakfast.

“Boss, let’s…”

“No,” Temujin said. “We’ll eat later.”

The alley he chose was narrow enough for Tycho to have touched both sides if his hands hadn’t been bound behind his back. So Tycho counted paces to steady himself and take his mind from the pain of twisting one wrist against another.

After a hundred paces, the alley turned right abruptly, ran for another fifty and then opened into a narrow courtyard, where bricked-in windows stared blindly down at them from high walls. Even at noon the courtyard must look gloomy. Right now it was ink-black.

Fear crawled up Tycho’s spine as he opened his senses.

Bitter misery coated the flagstones under his feet like slime, and pain like mould varnished the thick brick walls that climbed blindly around them. In a city of ghosts, where he’d grown used to being watched by what could not be seen, he knew even the ghosts were afraid to haunt this place.

How could he not be afraid? He’d been here before. Although that time they brought him blindfold. This time Tycho
knew
where he was. Silently, he fought the ropes as fiercely as he fought his fear.

Once a day Venice’s high tide flowed down culverts into the Pit, raising its level until those on a small central island crowded tight, and those in the fetid shallows crept closer, and those already up to their necks at the edges of the circular prison knew that the oldest, tiredest and weakest would drown.

It was hell with added water.

Luck and ruthlessness carried him through last time. This time?
I’m not sure I’m even the same person
.

“Let me talk to Alexa.”

Sergeant Temujin growled at him to remain silent. Stepping up to the heavy black-painted door, he prepared to knock.

Don’t let him knock
, Tycho told himself.

He twisted his wrists so hard rope scraped flesh from bone, and he buckled at the pain, toppling sideways to black out as the world exploded against the side of his head. He woke a second later to a kick in his gut.

“Stand him up.”

Hands gripped him. Tycho felt himself being lifted as a guard struggled to obey Temujin’s order.

Do it now
.

Time slowed as Tycho’s wrists slicked free from bloody rope.

Lifting a dagger from the man’s belt, he flipped it and slammed the pommel into the other man’s temple, dropping him. Shock crossed the second guard’s face as Tycho spun, driving rigid fingers into his liver. The man shat himself before he hit the ground. The next two went down just as quickly.

“
Shoot him
.”

Catching the bolt, Tycho threw it back hard enough to pierce the wrist of the one who fired. And then, grabbing his crossbow, Tycho used it like a club on a guard beyond, and the one with the wounded wrist ran. This was good since he took the temptation of fresh blood with him.

The fight was finished in seconds.

“I knew you’d be my death,” Temujin said.

Tycho saw dark eyes and leathery skin, a sour grin of bravado in the face of expected defeat. Behind it Temujin’s skull glistened yellow in a grin of its own. The young man and skull stared at each other.

“I’ll tell your boss you died to let him live.”

The sergeant’s mouth twitched.

The sword Temujin drew was old and its blade pitted with the evidence of more battles than sharpening could remove. Mongol script ran down its length like rusting swirls.

“Your father’s?”

“He left it with Ma as proof he’d return. He lied.” Raising the
weapon, Temujin grinned. “I’ll be calling him on that when we meet.”

His opening blow would have beheaded an ox.

Only luck, fear and hunger gave Tycho the speed to drop under it. He dipped his fingers in blood spilt by the crossbowman who ran, scooped cooling liquid into his mouth. Temujin’s second blow seemed slower.

His third moved so slowly that Tycho had time to choose a target for the dagger he punched so hard through Temujin’s armour that the point split buffalo horn and pierced boiled leather as if it were paper. Pain twisted the Mongol sergeant’s face and his eyes widened as his mind caught up with what had happened.

A clatter said Temujin’s sword had dropped to the ground. Very slowly, Tycho touched the trickle of blood that ran from the sergeant’s lip.

“What are you really?” Temujin asked.

“I’m Fallen.”

“What are Fallen?”

“Let me see if you know.” Tycho lifted his thumb to his mouth hoping to find an answer in the fragments of a life coming to its end. But there was little in the sergeant’s memories Tycho didn’t know already. Even the story about the Tycho-like demon that killed the Khan was gossip overheard as a child.

“So, you
were
at San Lazar to…”

“Of course I was,” Temujin said. “To blow up the girl and her brat. Alonzo’s orders. There’s something about that child.” He smiled sourly. “I’m sure a demon like you can recognise that. Now, I have a fight to pick with my father. End this.”

Tycho did.

Taking the first unlocked door he found led to a private yard and an open door to a room filled with half-naked Schiavoni children sleeping in a huddle on a rotting mattress. Tycho exited
the room under the gaze of a Schiavoni woman wise enough to stay silent. The blood on his clothes probably helped.

The tenement hall was as squalid as he expected, the lock to its front door broken. Leaving the hall he took an alley so narrow he had to turn sideways. Someone had widened a warehouse into the alley.

He found himself among the early morning crowd in a meat market, where his bloody doublet attracted fewer glances than it might. A church tower stood between the market and the rising sun. The stalls were covered with canvas awnings. For everyone except Tycho it was dark.

His eyes were struggling with the brightness.

He stole a leather apron from a cart and kept walking, the blood-smeared apron flapping around his knees. In his hand was a knife. But then half the people around him held knives or cleavers.

The church door was unlocked and the inside blissfully dark and almost empty. Two old women knelt before a rail that kept them from approaching the altar, where a young man in grey cassock muttered prayers to himself with his eyes fixed on something Tycho couldn’t see.

He left the three of them to their prayers and took the stairs to the tower.

There would be a room without windows that would be full of junk too decrepit to use and too venerable to throw away. The door would be locked, in which case he’d break the lock. Or unlocked, in which case he’d simply let himself in. Either way, he would jam the door from inside. This wasn’t the first church he’d used to hide from daylight. Only now he was hiding from more than daylight. He was an outlaw. By the time he woke there would be a price on his head.