The Fallen Blade: Act One of the Assassini (17 page)

“Well, the City Watch want you. And a black girl with braided hair. So Rosalyn thought you must be Mamluk…”

“If he’s not,” said Rosalyn, “he must be a slave.”

“That’s it.” Josh nodded. “Your master’s important enough to use the Watch.” He looked suddenly worried. “He’s not Ten, is he?”

Rosalyn scrambled to her feet.

She bared her teeth when Tycho stopped her. Behind him, Pietro grabbed half a brick. “
You hurt my sister…
”

“I won’t.” Tycho put his fingers to Rosalyn’s head and saw Josh’s eyes narrow and his face harden at the sight.

“
I mean it
,” Pietro said.

Tycho nodded, but kept his fingers in place.

I can do this
, he told himself.
If it can happen by accident, it
can happen intentionally
. He let the question trickle through his body, feeling how it flowed from his fingers to her mind. The black girl she talked about was the Nubian he’d seen earlier. The Watch looked like thugs everywhere.

“Witchcraft,” Rosalyn said, stepping back.

Pietro raised his brick and Josh reached for a dagger in his belt.

Tycho might have had to fight them, maybe kill one, but the moon stopped the fight before it began. Sliding from behind cloud, it lit the door of his ruined wooden warehouse. It also lit his face, although Tycho only realised this when Rosalyn’s own softened and she shifted, almost unknowingly, to put herself between Josh and Tycho.

“Wait,” she said.

They stood as they were. Pietro with his raised brick, Josh scowling and Tycho swaying on his feet. Rosalyn looked into the bleakness in his eyes. “Are you a slave?” she demanded. “Is that why they’re hunting you?”

“I was,” he admitted. “But that was before here.”

“And I suppose your mother was a princess?” Josh said spitefully. “Your father was captured in battle? No doubt your grandfather lived in a palace.” He rolled his eyes derisively. “Never met an escaped slave who didn’t claim he was a prince.”

Tycho wondered how many he’d talked to. And then, wondered how many escaped slaves there were in Venice. A dozen, a hundred, more? What happened when they were caught?

“Were you a prince?”

“
Rosalyn
…” Josh sounded exasperated.

“Just asking.
Did
you have a palace?
Was
your mother a princess?”

“My mother died when I was born. She was a slave before that. I don’t know, maybe she was a princess before she was a slave. No one ever said. The woman who brought me up called her,
Lady
…”

Rosalyn tipped her head to one side. “Maybe that’s the truth,” she said. “Otherwise he’d say his palace was huge.”

“And perhaps he’s just being clever,” Josh said flatly. “He looks clever. Maybe he’s a Jew. His hair is strange enough.”

“Jews aren’t slaves.”

Josh spat. “They should be.”

Rosalyn flushed, her face darkened and she bit her lip, hugging herself. This only made her small breasts jut. And that only made Josh smirk. There was a tension and strangeness to the night. A chill wind holding scents that demanded Tycho find their origin even as they told Rosalyn to flee.

“You hungry?” she asked him.

Tycho shook his head.

“
Rosalyn.
”

“What?” The girl looked nervously at…

Who?
Tycho wondered.
Her brother? Her lover?

Strays, thrown together by chance? He looked more closely, seeing if he could guess which. Siblings, perhaps. There was a family likeness. Unless that was simply the hunger in their eyes and the dirt.

As if hearing his thought, Rosalyn said, “Josh is my boss. Pietro my brother. We’re going to San Michele. You should come.”

“It’s an island,” Pietro added.

“He knows that…”

“How would he?” Josh demanded. “He’s foreign. He doesn’t know anything.” Jerking his head at Tycho, he said, “I say we leave him.”

Tycho thought of telling them that crossing water made him feel sick. That even crossing bridges made him uneasy. But he didn’t want them to know that. So he watched them go instead, seeing Josh snarl when Rosalyn looked back.

The sacking of the sultan’s
fondak
lasted until daybreak. A stranger would have thought one house on a canal was attacked by all the others. That was wrong. The area inside the walls was
Mamluk. As foreign as France or Byzantium itself. Just easier to sack, with less distance to carry the spoils.

Screaming told Tycho he was near.

He could feel lightning in the air. Looking up, he expected thunderclouds, but found a sliver of moon that tugged at his mind.

Hunger was the missing fact of his life.

Around Tycho, Venetians slurped stolen pomegranates, licked their lips and looked satisfied. Beggars hunched over dried figs like misers over gold. Dogs fought for pastries looters had taken, half eaten and discarded as too strange for their tastes. It made Tycho certain something was missing in himself.

He could no longer distinguish flavours. Eating or not eating made little difference to his happiness. It didn’t even seem necessary to keep him alive. And yet, he’d lied to Rosalyn about not being hungry. He had a hunger no food could fill. A hunger he dragged after him like a shadow, always half seen and oblique to the world in which he lived.

The dead were dead to him now. Either they’d abandoned him or he’d abandoned them. The empty city, below this one, he tried to avoid revisiting. It was too strange, too lonely, too much like him. The beasts roaming it terrified him. He was beyond being able to meet his fears in its distorting mirror.

The empty city called him, of course.

But not as fiercely as the women’s screams from up ahead. He was almost at their source when a Nubian with silver-tipped braids stopped him. “So are you going to kiss me this time…?” She smiled. “I didn’t think so.”

He flinched as she reached for him, scared of the silver thimbles glittering in the moonlight. “Don’t reveal your weaknesses,” she said. “Only your strengths. And if you don’t yet know what those are, keep silent.”

Tycho tried to say he was silence’s closest friend, but she hadn’t finished. “Change is painful,” she told him. “But not to change is…”

“To die?”

“You don’t have that option. The longer you fight against who you are the harder your transformation will be. Believe me,” she said. “We are different enough to be alike.” The closer she stood the more scents Tycho recognised. Sweat and shit and garlic and cloves, and something else.

The Nubian laughed softly. “What drives your hunger?”

“I don’t know.”

“Most boys want this.” Slipping her hand under her skirt, she touched herself. Smearing her finger across his face, she laughed. “Trust you to be different.”

“I’m not,” Tycho lied.

“You want…
What?
” Looking up, she found the moon. “Not the Goddess exactly. Although your hunger grows as she does. But her blood tides are not the blood you need…” Her voice sounded as if it belonged to someone older. And there was a strangeness in her eyes that made him shiver.

“You will feed,” she said.

“I’ve tried eating…”

Her slap snapped his head sideways. “Listen to me,” she hissed. “Twice I’ve helped you now. Once kindly, this time not. When we meet again it will be as strangers. Understand me?”

Tycho didn’t. “Where am I?”

“Here,” she said. “As opposed to there.
Dust and ashes, dead and done with. Bjornvin spent what Bjornvin earned.
You will never go back. No one does. No one can. There is nothing to go back to. Go now, feed.”

Had there not been snow, and had the
fontego
been built around a proper courtyard it might have held out for longer. But the Canalasso side made it vulnerable to attack from water as well as land. And three luggers filled with Castellani bobbed offshore to make certain no Mamluk barges tried to escape. The barges were burning, and the screams from inside said their crews burnt too. The snows simply meant no one watching this happen worried about accidental fires starting elsewhere, since the embers from the barges landed in the water or sizzled out on slush.

The building itself was intact. Sacked and savaged, shit-smeared and pissed in, but still standing and unburnt. It would be sold by the city to the highest bidder and the buyer could hire men to clean up what this night had done.

In the central courtyard, overlooked by the colonnades of its three sides, a young woman was backlit by burning barges. She looked to Tycho the same age as the girl in the basilica, but there the likeness ended. This girl had dark skin, and hair cut from the night, perfectly black and waterfall straight. Where the earlier girl had been thin this one was not. Her hips were full, her breasts fuller. The anger in her eyes was as fierce as any Tycho had seen.

“
Little bitch
,” a man said. Wiping spittle from his cheek, he flicked it to the ground. “Have your men hold her, Roderigo. And make sure they bend her right over. We’ll see how she likes this.”

Two guards grabbed the girl, who visibly flinched when the man with the steel breastplate began untying the laces to his codpiece.

“Strip her, then.”

A squat man stepped forward.

The same man who’d helped free Tycho from the ship, only to make him a prisoner again. Pulling down his cap, Tycho wrapped a filthy scarf around his neck and backed into the crowd.

“Hurry it up…”

Grabbing her collar, the squat man yanked so hard he pulled the young woman free from the two holding her. As the guards reached for her, she spun round and spat full into the face of the man in the breastplate. This time her spittle hit his lips and he didn’t flick it nonchalantly away; he scrubbed his lips with the back of his hand instead. And Tycho watched the smoky evil he felt around him enter the man’s eyes. Pointing at Roderigo, the man snarled, “Nail her to that tree. Flay her.”

“My lord?”

“You heard me, Roderigo.”

“She’s barely a child, my lord. And the building is yours. Cut her throat and be done with it. Take her first if you must.”

“Kindness is a weakness. Tell your man to flay her and do it fast. I’m due at prayers in an hour. You’ll be coming with me.”

As one guard went to fetch nails and a hammer, another disappeared looking for a kitchen knife and steel. His face relaxed when Roderigo ordered him to give both to Sergeant Temujin. The sergeant swore.

“What did he say?”

Roderigo looked uneasy.

“What did your man just mutter?”

“If it takes a Mongol to do the job, my lord. He’s happy to serve.”

Tycho doubted these were the exact words. So did Roderigo’s master, from his scowl. Although the words obviously hit home, because he shot the sergeant a glare and stared round the mob-filled courtyard, his gaze alighting on Tycho. “You,” he said. “Come here.”

The man behind pushed Tycho forward.

“I’m Prince Alonzo, Regent of this city. You hear me?”

Tycho nodded slowly.

“Typical,” the Regent muttered. “The village idiot. Give him the knife, explain what he’s to do. And hurry it up.”

It had been dark in the boat and Tycho’s face was now filthy, framed by a stolen cap and what showed of his hair was matted and greasy. All the same, the sergeant stood on the edge of recognition.

“
Buonasera
,” said Tycho, sounding like the Nicoletti’s son the dead printer had been. Temujin shrugged.

“Cut her a bit. Kill her soon after. Only not too soon…” Jerking his head towards Prince Alonzo, he added. “He needs to hear her scream. His type always does. Right, you two, wrap her arms around that tree.”

Temujin’s knuckles were white as he put a nail to her wrist, drew back his hammer and slammed it down so hard its crash almost drowned her cry. She howled again when the second nail went in. Thrashing as Tycho stepped up behind her with his knife.

“Please,” she begged. Her voice guttural, her Italian so thick he barely recognised the words. “Don’t.”

She knew he was there to hurt her.

Into Tycho’s mind came memories of a flaying.
Bloody Boot
stripped the ankles,
Red Gauntlets
the hands and wrists.
Raw Saddle
flayed the…

“Get on with it,” Temujin hissed.

Slicing fast, he outlined her spine, adding a second cut beside the first, slashing a third at the top and scooping under to give him something to grip. It was over in a second, maybe less. When he ripped, the young woman screamed so hard her voice broke. Behind Tycho someone vomited.

“
Please…
” The word was in his head.

A child’s whisper behind her animal howl. Pain spread like angel’s wings from her body, feathered and bright. Brighter than his eyes could stand.

“
Please
,” she begged. “
Make it stop…
”

He did as she asked, taking the brightness into himself. Feeling her shock as her mind abandoned the bleeding meat nailed to the tree. She was two people now. One silent, inside him. The other loud and bestial.