The Outcast Blade (33 page)

“Look around you,” A’rial said crossly.

Smoke from a torch on an opposite wall had frozen to twists of black marble. The bowman crouched unmoving in his high window, his actions still hidden from those below. A
cittadino
hesitated in the act of lifting wine to his lips. As Tycho watched him the goblet lifted enough to let the first drop touch.

“See? We have all the time in the world.”

The glass masters of Murano said glass was a liquid and windows flowed downwards over the decades, so they became thicker along the bottom. If glass was a liquid so was this smoke. It shifted on its old trail at a fraction of the speed.

Cold, green eyes watched him.

Ancient and knowing, carrion-cruel.

“It seems you met my oldest sister. She liked you.”

The bare-breasted woman with the crow was A’rial’s sister? Everyone said A’rial was Alexa’s
stregoi
. Tycho wasn’t quite sure what a
stregoi
was but he strongly suspected this wasn’t really one of them.

“Just as well. Since without her help I’d never have sunk the Mamluk fleet. I owe her that debt, as you owe me…”

Tycho’s guts tightened as he recalled his conversation with A’rial on the deck of the
San Marco
in the darkest moment of the Mamluk battle.

“
One kill. At my choosing
.”

“
Alexa’s choosing?
”

“
Mine
.” Her voice had been hard. “
One time, I will ask for a kill. You will grant it without question
.”

“
Not Giulietta, not Desdaio, not Pietro
.”

Her smile had been sour. “
You’re not in a position to bargain. All the same, I agree. None of those three
.” Now Desdaio was dead, Giulietta hid in the corridor outside, and Pietro… was safe, Tycho hoped.

“Yes,” said A’rial. “I’m here to collect.”

“Who, then?”

The German princeling he could live with. Hell, Tycho would welcome it. Alonzo. He hoped it wasn’t Alexa, wondering if A’rial had it in her to order her mistress’s murder.

“Hightown Crow.”

Tycho gaped at her.

“Everyone hates their rivals.”

He doubted it was that simple. Little in Venice was.

Tycho spotted his missing sergeant against one of the walls. He’d positioned himself almost directly between the two
piazzetta
windows opposite and occupied a squat marble plinth meant for some statue. He was signalling to his men in the window, his fingers flicking in a code Atilo never thought to teach Tycho or hadn’t known.

The three pretenders on the sill looked at the row of gilded thrones where Alexa, Eleanor, Frederick and Alonzo already sat. Nodding slightly as the sergeant began to raise a crossbow.

Tycho moved.

Colours changed and lights brightened, the hall falling into hard and brutal focus around him as he almost flowed along a beam to which the painted ceiling would eventually be bolted. A small girl looked up, puzzled; and he dropped, grabbing the sergeant from his plinth on the way down.

Blood spurted on to a table behind him in a fine spray and a woman screamed. Tycho could swear his thumbnails grew as he took out the man’s eyes. Screaming exploded as Tycho put a dagger into the throat of the archer in the window. Watched him begin to tip backwards and put another into the man next to him.

On Tycho’s back the
WolfeSelle
shivered.

Everyone else in the room was a bit player, even those who thought the play was about them and believed history turned on the decisions they made. As he began to move again the very city came alive.

It waited to discover what Tycho would do.

He was flame.

Cold as ice, hot as fire.

Tycho saw a
cittadino
child look up, face slack with shock as the entire chamber dipped briefly into darkness. A giant beast passing in front of the sun. A moth casting a vast shadow on a wall beyond imagining. If fear of the sun was his weakness then darkness was theirs.

Their light poisoned his world. His darkness could fill theirs. There would be more darkness in the world than light; the city held its breath as Tycho considered this for the infinity of a split second. And then the longbowman finished tipping backwards and fell out of the window.

Alonzo was scrabbling for his dagger. The Dogana guard behind him raised their crossbows. Shouts of outrage filled the
piazzetta
outside.

“Kill him,” Alonzo screamed.

And Tycho stopped beside Dr Crow, dragged him upright and put the man between himself and the bows. Ripping the alchemist’s dinner knife from his grasp, Tycho held it to his throat.

“Fire,” Alonzo ordered.

Lord Roderigo’s guards hesitated, scared they might hit the duke’s alchemist. Alonzo looked panicked, that much Tycho
noticed in the moment that passed before he gave Dr Crow his own order. “Make it dark.”

“It takes… I can’t.”

“I’ve seen you create fire.”

“Quenching it is harder.”

“
I don’t care if it kills you
.” Tycho tightened the blade under Dr Crow’s chin and drew it sideways, blood beading along its edge.

“Do it,” Tycho ordered.

All around him torches guttered, candles flickered and lamps shrivelled. The veins stood out like highways on Dr Crow’s forehead, his face scarlet as a cardinal’s gown. When the light began to return Tycho twitched the blade.

With the guards hesitating and Alonzo shouting, the alchemist uttered a strangled cry and every torch, candle and lamp in the hall went out.

“This is for Giulietta.”

Tycho cut Dr Crow’s throat. He’d find someone else to tell him what was done to Giulietta. Alonzo, if necessary.

High above he heard a longbow creak.

And Tycho flowed through the darkness, avoiding tables and the Dogana guard to catch Prince Frederick full-on, knocking the boy backwards as a woman screamed close by. The arrow had hit blind.

Prince Frederick fought; not well and not effectively but with fierce determination. His sobs of frustration rather then fear. Grabbing his wrists, Tycho growled, “I’m protecting you.” And the princeling went still.

Stupid but understandable.

A huge bat swept through an open window, brushing the hair of a
cittadino
woman who howled loudly enough to make Tycho flinch. It swept a circle around Tycho and Frederick and froze midair, crashing to a clumsy heap.

“
Eleanor
,” Alexa shouted.

The arrow aimed at Frederick jutted below Eleanor’s breast, blood trickling in a slow run down her white silk gown. She tried to stand and slumped, one hand on the arrow’s shaft, uncertain whether to remove it or not.

“Light the lamps,” Alexa ordered.

“My lady, we’re trying.”

The dining hall was in chaos. Nobles standing in the darkness with drawn daggers. Alonzo shouting endlessly for guards. A
cittadino
worked flints as he tried desperately to light a single candle, his strikes as flashy as cheap magic.

It would be so easy to kill Frederick…
Giulietta would have no prince to marry
. No one would know. Well, perhaps Alexa, if her damned bat was still watching.

“Thank you,” Frederick said.

“Go, while you can.”

“Who are you?”

“Tycho Bell’ Angelo Scuro.”

“Giulietta’s…?” He heard the boy swallow.

“Return to your barge and guard yourself well. There are people here who would happily kill you.”

He led the princeling down the darkened halls towards the door to the kitchens, telling him which tables to avoid and when to step over the body of a bowman. The corridor between hall and kitchen had one lamp at the far end. The last Tycho saw was a cook giving Frederick directions. A thin, fair-haired boy trembling like a reed and doing his best not to be afraid.

Because he left by the Molo door, Prince Frederick avoided meeting Duke Marco, Lady Giulietta or Rosalyn, who still stood guard on the first two, knife in hand and teeth bared… She nodded abruptly at Tycho but he looked past her.

“I knew you’d come,” Giulietta said.

Alexa looked from her son to a girl in a muddy dress who knelt on the bed in front of Lady Eleanor. In one hand she held a knife, in the other what remained of Eleanor’s clothes. As Alexa watched, the girl tossed rags to the floor, put her fingers to the blood flowing from Lady Eleanor’s ribs and hesitated.

“Who is she?”

“M-my friend.”

The girl’s feet were mud-encrusted, her dress slashed to the knees. Alexa wasn’t even sure how she got into Eleanor and Giulietta’s old bedchamber on this floor. She imagined Marco had something to do with that.

Alexa’s night eyes were exhausted, hanging upside down in a wardrobe in the duchess’s office. The shock of seeing her niece injured having snapped Alexa free from her tame bat’s mind. “There’s something about her that’s…”

Familiar
, Alexa wanted to say.

But the girl turned to glare as if Alexa’s voice irritated her and she didn’t care if Alexa was the duchess. Grabbing the arrow, she snapped the shaft without asking permission. “Well d-done,” Marco said.

He sat in the open doorway, his knees to his chin.

No staff could enter and only Alexa had dared step over him. His mother’s sharply voiced suggestion that he might want to move simply earned her a defiant shake of his head. “I’m w-waiting.”

“For what?”

“Angels.”

Prince Frederick was safe on his barge and Alexa was grateful for that. The only thing worse than an attempt on the life of the emperor’s son would have been an attack that succeeded. She was already trying to judge Sigismund’s anger when he heard. It would be fierce.

Leopold, his first son, had been lost fighting beside Venetian troops. Sigismund had almost lost his second to assassins in Venice itself. He would hold Alexa and Alonzo responsible.

“Where’s h-horrible Dr C-c-crow?”

“Dead.” The ragged girl didn’t bother to turn round.

Marco clapped. “How do you know?”

“I just do.” She said nothing else, simply turned to the bed and washed Eleanor’s ribs in cold water from a jug on the side. The blood trickling from the injured girl’s mouth was black, sticky like treacle.

“The arrow is poisoned,” the girl said.

How do you know that?
Alexa wondered.

Rising from her chair, she walked to the bed, felt Eleanor’s forehead and sniffed heavily at a sourness that was beyond sweat. Touching her fingers to the trickle, Alexa tasted it and turned to find the strange girl glaring at her. Almost as if daring the duchess to remember who she was.

“My dear…”

What made Alexa say that?

The girl smiled, then glanced at Eleanor and her happiness fled. In her eyes Alexa could see such anger she shivered.

“I know poisons,” Alexa said gently.

“I know blood.”

All the same, the girl surrendered her position.

Lady Eleanor’s body had been poisoned with a mixture of belladonna, wolfsbane and foxglove. When the arrow was finally removed they would find its head drilled through and the tiny holes filled with paste. Alexa would give good money on it.

A second later there was a commotion outside.

Guards beyond the door scrabbled for their swords but the newcomer brushed them aside as if they were not there. His eyes were black, flecked with amber. His hair wolf-grey and set in braids capped with steel end pieces.

He carried fury like its own thundercloud.

A shimmering darkness Alexa she was glad only she could see. He wore black, except for a doublet in Millioni livery thrown over his shoulder. At his side walked her niece. Lady Giulietta’s hand twisted into his, her knuckles white from the fierceness of his grip.

Duchess Alexa understood why her guards hesitated.

Standing to embrace his cousin, Marco whispered something that made her blush. He gave Sir Tycho a slow stare. Then clasped him on the shoulders, looking more like his own father than Alexa could ever remember.

“Without this m-man I’d be d-dead.”

“Marco…”

“Believe it,” Marco said.

He let go of Tycho’s shoulders and stepped into the room he’d been refusing to let anyone else enter. Reaching the ragged girl, he turned her face to a lamp and smiled when he saw her eyes. “I’m M-marco…”

He left a pause.

“Rosalyn,” the girl said.

Alexa was glad of her veil.

When her shock was gone Marco was still smiling, and two people now stared at her. Tycho, who appeared to be waiting for something. And Rosalyn.

“Mother,” Marco said. “M-meet…”

“We’ve met.”

“Really?”

“A year or so ago. There was an…”

Words were power and defined the world, sometimes Alexa suspected they wrote it. Either way, they mattered. “An accident is not quite right. Something happened that shouldn’t have done. Rosalyn was… hurt. I was furious. Mostly with myself for letting it happen.”

“But she’s b-better now?”

“So it would seem.”

There was a feral look to the girl’s eyes. Mind you, there was a feral look to half the street children in the city; as if dropped by squatting dams in gutters and left to find the animal in themselves if they wanted to survive.

“You
are
better?” Alexa asked.

“I’m alive.”

The duchess nodded slowly.

She’d asked Tycho for this. In the days she believed he’d become Duke’s Blade.
Make me an army of people like you
; warriors in Venice’s hidden war against the
krieghund
. The city couldn’t take another blow like the one Prince Leopold inflicted the day Giulietta…

Ran away
, Alexa reminded herself.

Her niece ran away to avoid marrying King Janus of Cyprus and almost all the Blade were destroyed in the single night it took to fetch her back. Their near destruction was a secret Alexa worked hard to keep hidden.

She’d also asked him to kill the monster on the island.

If she was right, this
was
the monster and he’d disobeyed her. Or maybe simply decided her early order cancelled out her later one. Unless he made the decision for reasons of his own.