The Outcast Blade (18 page)

As darkness fell the night after that, Tycho rolled off his slab in the crypt of the church Giorgio served, about the only place in the near-derelict building out of direct sunlight, and unlocked the door from inside, not bothering to light a candle. The three men were already waiting for him at the jetty.

“Tonight we find her.”

“How do you know, my lord?”

“I just do…” How could he explain this ache in his gut, his sense that tonight was different? Low wisps of summer fog waited above the glistening mud flats as they approached. The entire lagoon was banks and shallows, and since the dukes refused to allow maps to be made showing the channels that knowledge
had to be learnt by heart and no one but a trained pilot knew them all.

The grave island had been made by driving staves around a mud bank, weaving willow branches along the staves and back-filling with dirt planted to grasses to help the ground set. Five hundred years of burials had raised its height.

“Is this fog usual?”

“What fog, my lord?”

That was an answer in itself. “You’re certain it was here you first saw her?”

“My lord, I’m not likely to forget.”

He’d give the man that. They led ordinary lives for all it involved shovelling shit or burying bodies. A creature from hell howling at the moon was likely to leave its mark on the memory. “Tie up there.” Tycho pointed at a jetty.

His order had them scrabbling for their oars.

Tossing a rope around a spar, one dragged the barge close and tied off in that lazy way all Venetians did as easily as breathing. Then Giorgio looked around at the dark lagoon and the thorn-covered slopes of the island and shivered. “Perhaps we should wait offshore, my lord.”

“You’ll wait here.”

“This is our island.” The protest echoed inside Tycho’s head.

In the fog were faces who all said the same.

Hollow-eyed faces with open and miserable mouths. He could see through them to wild roses beyond. A flicker of lights beyond that had to be stars on the horizon or a town on the mainland.

“You can keep it,” Tycho said flatly.

“This is our…”

“I’ve come for the girl.”

“Ahh…” The voices stilled, though the faces kept forming and fading, looming and retreating as they considered Tycho’s
statement. He was in a dream, unless the dream was the three men in the barge behind him too blind to see that the ghosts they feared were already here.

“She is dead,” the voices said.

“Then I am dead.”

The faces stopped, solidified.

White masks with dark hollows where eyes should be. They smiled and scowled at him, looked impassive, angry, intrigued and finally puzzled.

“
You are not us
.” With those words the mist faded, the low litany of misery fell into echo and then silence, and the ghosts vanished as if in agreement that their job here was done.

Kicking over one of the three Castellani he’d found the night before, Tycho examined the corpse. Even putrid and split by gases it was obvious the man had been eviscerated, his guts dragged from his body. His throat was ripped out and his head flopped from side to side so easily his neck had to be broken. The kill was crude, probably swift. Blood had dried to splatter on the grass around him. It was unlikely she’d left herself enough to feed.

It wasn’t hard to track her movements.

A footprint in the mud showed where she stood by the water before looking along the shore in both directions. Her prints ran right round the island. Tycho could read frustration in their pattern.

She’d walked the shore more than once. Walked down to the water’s edge, headed in one direction and returned to this point before heading in the other. Always her prints returned here.

So, why this spot?

He could see one answer.

A line of light glimmered from Cannaregio’s foundries, and linkmen’s torches could be seen as they lit journeys along a distant
fondamenta
. This part of the island looked south towards Venice’s
northern shore. If he listened carefully he could hear the clock in Piazza San Marco strike ten.

The girl would have his hearing.

The other answer lay behind him. A grave pit, the earth of its surface trampled, the half-shell of a small boat covering one corner. Heaving away its rotten wood revealed the entrance to her own private hell.

All he had to do was entice her out.

Not a single mouse ran from Tycho’s approach as he headed back to the jetty. The salt grass was quiet, the wild roses and thorn bushes undisturbed except for a shiver of wind. All the birds, rats, mice and voles were missing.

Tycho could remember what it felt like to be that hungry.

At the jetty, he pointed at Giorgio and told him to come here. The sexton looked unhappy but did what he was told, helped by hissed instructions from the other two.

“Hold out your hand.”

He looked even more unhappy at that.

Tycho drew his dagger, slashed once and returned it to its sheath before the sexton even had time to yell. Blood welling between the man’s clenched fingers dripped on to the dirt around his feet.

“Now run,” Tycho told him.

She came out of the grave pit hard and fast, earth fountaining around her as she sprang free and dropped to a crouch, mouth wide and dog teeth descended. Nothing human stared from her eyes.

“Run,” Tycho shouted.

The wild girl hit him full-on, bowling Tycho backwards into thorns, scrawny limbs wrestling his as she struggled to fight free and go after the man hurtling towards the boat. Tycho refused to let go.

“Run, damn it…”

Poised above him, the wild girl howled in fury as the sexton
jumped into the boat, and his friends cast off, frantically rowing from the jetty.

In life she’d been fourteen.

In death she looked no older. Hunger made the poor age more slowly as children and faster as adults. It had been the same in Bjornvin; a starveling childhood looked the same everywhere.

He needed to work out how to kill her.

But the beast behind her eyes wanted feeding and she was furious.

Everything on this island she could eat was gone, and now her prey was escaping and it was his fault. It was like looking at himself, the otherness in her face, her skin under the pale moonlight sickly alabaster.

She dipped for his throat.

So he rammed his forearm under her chin and worked one foot under her, kicking her off so viciously she arced through the air in a wheel of limbs to land a dozen paces away. Only to pick herself up and charge again.

She closed on him so fast that Tycho slid back as he was rising to his feet, his toes digging into the dirt. He punched for the throat and she blocked without thinking. A second punch was blocked as fast. Dark eyes glared at him.

He could read their hatred.

Hurling her away, Tycho watched her stumble and turn to attack as swiftly as before. There was frustration in her eyes as he sidestepped and she hurtled into thorns, flesh ripping as she dragged herself free. She’d never faced someone as fast as him before.
She’d never faced someone as…

He was missing the point.

Her frustration
proved
she was not mindless. Fear, madness, voices, despair… He could recognise those emotions. His stupidity at not recognising them earlier hit Tycho as hard as her next attack.

She felt what he’d felt.

In killing her he would be killing a version of himself, perhaps the only version of himself there would ever be.

She kicked, and he moved out of the way. She slashed, and he blocked and kept blocking until the wild roses became a blur and the stars a scribble of lines across the sky. They fought in the stretching length of seconds, then in the seconds themselves, and finally in the gaps between. The world was theirs, and no other existed. Eventually Rosalyn’s breath became ragged, her eyes went wide and she knew she was losing.

Drawing his dagger, Tycho hesitated…

His orders from Alexa were to kill her, and to disobey and be discovered would cost him his patron. Why would he be stupid enough to risk that? This
thing
was filthy, once dead, barely human.

Once dead, barely human
.

All the things he’d been. And besides…

Who’d pulled him from the Grand Canal the night he arrived in Venice? She had. In return he got her killed. He refused to be responsible for her second death. Despite knowing he might regret it, despite suspecting strongly he
would
regret it, Tycho sheathed his dagger. The next time she attacked he grabbed her. Picking her up, he carried her to the jetty and tossed her into the sea.

She screamed.

He let the girl crawl up the mud flats before he grabbed her again. She was scrabbling, fighting and hissing as he returned to the jetty to throw her back in. It was brutal, Tycho knew it was brutal. But he kept doing it.

Every time she reached the mud flats, he dragged her upright as if helping her, carried her back to the jetty and hurled her in, until the lagoon finally stole what little remained of her strength and left her unable to crawl ashore. Somewhere in the process, like the alchemical change that transmutes lead to gold, her animal howls became sobs. She still howled, but now she knew who she howled at.

He held her tight as she fought him.

You let them kill me
.

Up to his knees in mud, aware he was being watched in horrified fascination, Tycho carried her ashore one final time. For all she’d fought like a demon – snarling and baring her teeth – she weighed almost nothing. Exhaustion caught her within seconds and she fell asleep in his arms.

“You will tell
no one
what happened here tonight.”

The three men stared at Tycho, glanced at the naked girl and looked at each other. In their eyes was the flat anger of those who’d become embroiled in matters beyond them and knew they’d be lucky to escape.

“You understand me?”

They nodded.

The trip back to Tycho’s house was as uneventful as any trip through midnight Venice could be. He’d given the sexton and his friends gold, which they weren’t expecting, and a reminder their lives would be forfeit if they spoke of the night’s work, which they were. No one stopped Tycho on his way through the city.

No one tried to catch his eye.

The Night Watch turned into a squalid square as he was crossing, hailed him and raised their torches. One look at Tycho’s rich black velvets, the sword across his back and the near-naked girl in his arms had them retreating the way they’d come, muttering apologies.

On the Ponte Maggiore, where a guard snored on his three-legged stool, two mastiffs raised their heads to watch Tycho, sniffed the scent from Rosalyn’s borrowed shift, considered their next actions and slumped back on all fours.

As he and Rosalyn passed emptying taverns and filling brothels, a young priest locking the doors of an old church crossed himself, and a sharp-eyed Mongol outside his Khan’s
fontego
grinned. The stink of canals filled the air, mixed with acrid smoke from tavern grills and the sulphuric devilry of local foundries.

And for Tycho, at least, was added the scent of the gown Giorgio’s wife surrendered so reluctantly. Salt fish, poverty and breast milk. The smell of Castellani women everywhere.

“
Tycho…
”

He turned, caught unaware.

The elegantly dressed young woman hurrying towards him had been hiding in a doorway. She faltered at the sight of the girl in his arms, and froze when she realised the unconscious girl was near naked.

“My lady?”

Desdaio just stood there.

“Where are your guards?” Tycho asked, already guessing the answer. She’d come out on to the night streets without protection, and, much as he hated Iacopo, he would have preferred Atilo’s body servant to be here rather than have Lady Desdaio walk the streets unprotected.

“Is she dead?”

“No…”
But she was
.

And she would be again if Alexa got her way.

Tycho’s orders had been clear. Hunt down and kill the demon. That was what he’d have the duchess believe had happened.

“She’s just a child.” Desdaio chewed her lip, looking increasingly unhappy. “And she stinks. That shift has holes in it. She’s not decent. Tycho, what are you doing carrying an almost naked…?”

“
Desdaio
.”

She stopped talking.

“Go home,” Tycho told her.

Tears brimmed in Desdaio’s eyes and her bitten lip started trembling. Instinctively she hunched as if expecting a blow. And Tycho wondered about her childhood. About Lord Bribanzo, the richest man in Venice and one of the most ambitious. “You hate me,” she said.

“I don’t. But it’s late and you shouldn’t be here.”

“Nor should you,” said Desdaio crossly. “At least, not carrying that. What are planning to do with her anyway?”

“Wash her,” Tycho said. “Feed her.”

“And then bed her?”

“
Desdaio
.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“She saved my life the first night I was in Venice.”

“Where’s she been since?”

“Prison,” Tycho said without thinking.

To be trapped between life and death in the darkness, and smothered by earth, barely able to move, to fight to the surface, having left all humanity behind, how could it be anything else? When he looked up, Desdaio’s expression had softened. He knew what she was about to say before she said it.

“I’ll bathe her. It’s not proper for you to do it.”

After Elizavet got over her surprise that Lady Desdaio had not, in fact, gone home after being told Tycho was not there, she hurried away to heat water, prepare cloths for washing and fetch soap. And though Tycho accepted Desdaio’s order that he sit outside the bedroom door, his price was that she leave the door slightly open. So long as Rosalyn was unconscious Tycho was prepared to leave Desdaio to her cheerful chatting. Should Rosalyn wake he wanted to be nearby.

I should have killed her
.

Tycho pressed his back against the wall and unpicked his worries.
If Desdaio hadn’t turned up I could have killed her
. Except why bring her here when he could have obeyed Alexa’s orders and killed her on the island? Sparing Rosalyn had been stupid. One monster was enough; the city didn’t need two.