The Outcast Blade (40 page)

Tycho expected her to attack another.

Instead she dropped to her feet and sunk her teeth into its neck, holding it upright as it began to change. The shuddering figure which hit the dirt was little more than a boy. From the trees came a howl so hideous Tycho looked back. A vast
krieghund
was racing forward, mouth open in an endless snarl.

Tycho’s blow cut it in two.

For a second Tycho howled in exhilaration as the sword sang.

The edges of the world hardened and brightened.
This
, he thought,
is what I was born for
. The brutality of his Bjornvin childhood, the hunger and cold and the fight to stay alive made him good at this.

He could kill the way others breathed, instinctively, without thinking. Running his thumb along the blade, he carried
krieghund
blood to his mouth and felt his throat tighten. In his hand, the
WolfeSelle
shivered.

It rang with a note high beyond human hearing and Tycho felt strength flow into him. The strength of the red-bearded giant lying dead at his feet.

Swinging round, he went for the nearest enemy.

The
krieghund
backed away snarling, jaws wide and foul tongue flopping from its mouth. Its teeth were yellow, its breath stank in the night air. Tycho raised his sword as Atilo had taught him. So he could cut in either direction. Or strike down and cleave his enemy in two. Rosalyn guarded his back, facing away.

Tycho’s breath rasped in his throat.

She was wounded and he was not. The longer he kept the Wolf Brothers from attacking the longer she had for her recent wounds to heal. But the battle had been as swift as it had been brutal. If he had time he could pick them off one after another. He didn’t have time, however. Andronikos had Giulietta.

He needed to kill their leader.

Tycho studied the pack behaviour, watching as they circled. All of those remaining glanced, now and then, at a broad-shouldered
beast which glared and circled without making its move, seemingly unnerved by Tycho’s sword.

That would be Frederick. Killing him would scare the rest. If not enough to break their spirit then he’d settle for leaving them leaderless and kill the next most senior after that. “Take the blade for me.”

“Tycho…”

“I know what I’m doing.”

Rosalyn lifted her hands above her head, fumbled for the handle of the
WolfeSelle
and staggered slightly under its weight. She held it while the pack circled restlessly. Apparently unwilling to attack.

They watched snarling and sullen as Tycho took the red bullet and dropped it into the muzzle of Alexa’s gun, hammering it down with a spike. A flick of the pan cover revealed priming.

The one he thought was Frederick backed away.

As Tycho lifted the pistol the beast retreated further. He checked the
krieghund
on either side, wondering if he was falling into a trap. But they stood as irresolute as their leader. The bullet or the
WolfeSelle
unnerved them.

Perhaps both.

“Shoot him,” Rosalyn growled.

Torn between attacking or not, their leader flexed his brutal claws. Somewhere behind those burning eyes was a human soul fighting an animal on the edge of refusing to listen. Tycho knew what that was like. Though he doubted the animal knew what the bullet did, it sensed the bullet’s power.

The
krieghund
stood there, a perfect target.

“This?” said Tycho, lifting the gun. “Or that?” He pointed to the sword Rosalyn held above them. “Which scares you the most?”

The beast glanced at the sword.

“Even though my gun is pointing at you?”

Kill the
krieghund
leader, find Giulietta and Andronikos, kill
him, too. Add Nikolaos to the dead list. There had to be a quicker way to get her back. Tycho thought about that and wondered how stupid he was prepared to be. This stupid?

“I saved your life once. Remember? In the dining hall? I did that for Leopold’s sake.” Slowly, Tycho tipped out the priming powder, lowered the wheel lock’s pan cover and dropped the gun to the dirt.

“You want Leopold’s sword?”

The
krieghund
that was Frederick nodded.

Tycho could remember his own transformation to whatever he’d been that night on the
San Marco
. Not
krieghund
. He’d been beyond
krieghund
. Something darker and older. Something brooding and brutal. A shadow that lorded it over his soul watched and waited. It wanted blood but not this blood.

“Give me the
WolfeSelle
back,” Tycho ordered.

Rosalyn did as she was told.

As they watched, the
krieghund
leader began to change. His silver fur sinking into his skin, his flesh ripping bloodily, suddenly visible bones splintering as glistening fragments slid against each other. For a split second, Prince Frederick’s entire ribcage was visible as his chest snapped and remade itself.

Fingers shortened and nails receded. His jaw crushed under the weight of an unseen blow and his forehead lifted as his skull reshaped. He stood sex erect for one instant; skinless, teeth bared and howling in pain. Then a young man with narrower shoulders and Leopold’s eyes sank to his knees.

Utterly defenceless.

Around him other
krieghund
began changing.

Whimpers of agony sounding from beasts that had howled in fury only a minute before. Some soiled themselves, others sobbed as the transformation reached its end. It was as brutal a misuse of flesh as anything a torturer could do. Unhooking his cloak, Tycho wrapped it round the shoulders of their leader.

“Hell,” Tycho said, “is empty and the devils are here.”

“Indeed,” said Frederick. “Not all of us forbidden from Noah’s ark had the manners to drown.” He had his half-brother’s rueful smile.

Sweeping Tycho’s cloak around him to perform an elegant bow, Frederick said, “Frederick zum Bas Friedland. You have me at a disadvantage…” It took Rosalyn a moment to realise he meant he wanted her name.

“I’m Rosalyn.”

“Delighted.”

“You know my master.”

“Lady Giulietta’s friend…?”

“And Leopold’s,” Tycho said shortly. “The man who stood by your brother in his final battle. And lover to his widow.”

Frederick’s eyes widened. “You admit it?”

“We intend to marry. That will make me Leo’s guardian. I’m sure you’ve been told Giulietta’s son is Leopold’s heir in all things.” Yes, he thought that would hit home. Frederick didn’t know.

“
He’s
krieghund?”

“Yes. Leopold’s acknowledged son. Sworn before King Janus and Prior Ignatius in front of a church full of Crucifer knights. The king gave his permission. The Prior gave his blessing.”

“Then the sword is Leo’s.”

“Giulietta asked me to look after it. The weapon reminds her too much of the man she lost.” That wasn’t strictly true but it would do. “She loved your brother in a way she’ll never love another man.”

That was true, and he would have to live with it.

Taking the sword from Rosalyn, Tycho rested the blade across his forearm and offered the handle to Leopold’s brother.

“You mean it?”

“Until Leo is old enough to wield it.”

“I swear it,” Frederick said. “I will give him the sword at sixteen. When he comes of age. I swear this on my soul.”

Both men knew Frederick was pinning himself down. Just as
both knew that in surrendering the Wolf Soul Tycho had given Frederick undisputed leadership of all
krieghund
for fifteen years.

Quickly, with the Wolf Brothers drawing closer as they realised they were allowed to listen, Tycho unfolded his problem.

“Andronikos has Leo?”

“And his mother.”

“I doubt he knows what he has.”

“I doubt he knows what he has in either of them,” said Tycho, and Prince Frederick looked at him.

“You love her?”

“From the first moment we met.”

“Leopold wrote saying you were dangerous. I said I’d heard you looked like a girl. He replied only a fool would underestimate you.” Frederick stared pointedly at his enemy’s braided hair and black silk doublet, then looked at the dead in the dirt. “I’m not a fool. Nor was my half-brother.”

“You’ll fight?”

“
He who dies this night is quit the next
.”

For a moment, he could have been Leopold, his bravado as big as his heart. Snapping out an order, Frederick began to change and those around him did the same. Their transformation so swift, hard and brutal that even Rosalyn, eyes still dark with fury at Lady Eleanor’s death, looked away.

The islands forming Giudecca were not quite part of central Venice, and the people who lived there liked it that way. As well as fishing huts, it had monasteries, nunneries, warehouses and whorehouses, a cluster of squares and several small farms. Like everywhere in Venice it had churches.

Rich
cittadini
owned cottages here. Red-tiled houses fringed with tiny skirts of carefully tended land. The patriarch kept a sheep garden. Unlike central Venice, from which it was separated by a wide sound, Giudecca had fields and orchards, fir trees and graveyards.

Its name came either from the Jews who lived there, the
Giudei
, or from
Giudicati
, nobles too important to execute and too dangerous not to exile. The islanders considered themselves
giudecchini
first and Venetians second; many of the older ones refused to consider themselves Venetian at all.

The Schiavoni, Jews and Greeks – being varieties of heathen – had graveyards on Giudecca’s southern edge. Out of sight of the main city and far enough away for their foreignness not to offend. It was towards these that the remaining
krieghund
war pack flowed with such certainty that Tycho let them run.

They raced the edge of darkness with the threatened promise of dawn on one side and the safety of black-hearted night on the other. Tycho ran with them, aware that he too occupied the shifting boundary between human and not.

The
WolfeSelle
looked grotesque slung across Frederick’s back, and he wondered if the prince could even wield it in his
krieghund
form. Maybe he carried it as a totem or a battle honour. Tycho would ask some other time.

Like him, like Rosalyn, the war pack moved through the fog inhumanly fast, shadows and blurs to anyone watching. Not that there was anyone watching. People were hiding in their houses behind locked doors, shutters bolted and lights out, listening to cannon fire roar like distant thunder.

Leaves twisted in the wind as the
krieghund
crossed another orchard, entered a tiny square and flowed around the squat stump of its wellhead before filling narrow streets that became mud lanes and fields shortly after. In a handful of seconds, they reached and half crossed the biggest island, swept round the walls of a farmhouse and down a slight slope towards the gates of a fog-shrouded graveyard. The southern shore of Giudecca was somewhere beyond.

The stink of resin rose from surrounding pines, the smell of urine strong from the fermenting needles crackling under their feet. The mist flowed around them like smoke. It concealed what was up ahead. And hid them in their turn.

“Let the
krieghund
attack first…”

Rosalyn nodded.

The Wolf Brothers were Sigismund’s shock troops and shock troops were disposable. Foot soldiers and shock troops always were. The second might be trained and the first not but both existed to do one thing: die. To that list of the disposable could be added slaves.

They were the first to bear any attack during Tycho’s childhood. He’d seen the man he thought his father driven beyond
the palisade, armed with a crude sword and left to die in his own time. Even if a slave turned and ran for Bjornvin’s locked gates, chasing and killing him would tire the Skaelingar, making the red-painted savages less able to face warriors who fought later with real weapons.

Ahead of them fog swirled and Rosalyn stumbled.

She swung at Tycho blindly when he grabbed her before she could fall; swung at him, missed and cursed him by the wrong name as he dragged her on. Her face was wretched, her words passing through fury into despair. Josh had been her pimp, her protector, her lover… Tycho wasn’t quite sure what he’d been.

“
Run
,” Tycho demanded.

Nursing her wrists as if they’d been bruised, Rosalyn’s fingers found Eleanor’s bracelet, wretchedness leaving her face.

“
Demons
,” she said shakily.

The fog in front of Tycho grew solid.

It formed into the shape of Bjornvin’s gates. A row of sharpened stakes framed by fat gateposts that became more solid as he looked, the wooden palisades on either side wisping away to mist. As he stared, the gates swung open.

He ran, but they remained out of reach.

In the gap, a Skaelingar chief gripped the arm of a naked girl, his fingers digging into her flesh. The chief yanked back her head and cut.

Tycho howled.

Afrior, his half-sister, non-sister, first love…

Whatever she was, Afrior was dead. The girl he’d first loved. The only person he thought he’d ever love. Down in the dirt of Bjornvin’s gates. Shuddering and gasping and bleeding out fourteen years of brutal life.

“
Tycho…
”

His head snapped round.

“In my head, too. Bad memories.”

Rosalyn vomited without breaking her stride and spat to one
side. Untroubled by visions, Frederick shot Tycho a wolfish grin. And through the fading fog of Bjornvin’s gate Tycho saw the real world intrude.

A shield wall of Byzantine soldiers.

Menavlatoi
, the empire’s elite infantry. Drawn up in front of a bridge, each Byzantine soldier held a seven-foot spear topped by a fifteen-inch blade. The points of their spears were raised to catch leaping
krieghund
, the shafts dug securely into the pine-needle-strewn dirt behind them.

Frederick’s war pack could face the
menavlatoi
and their spears, or scramble down one bank, wade a small creek and climb another, leaving themselves vulnerable to side attack. “Follow me,” Tycho told Rosalyn.