The Outcast Blade (35 page)

Tea made and bowl filled, Alexa leant forward and willed what had stopped her sleeping to make itself known. Around her feet curled the dragonet, sleeping off its exhaustion. Nero was sulking in a cupboard. She’d named the dragonet
dracul
, meaning little dragon in her mother’s tongue.

“Show me…” Alexa said.

She expected to see conspirators in a tavern, Republicans wondering how to turn the recent chaos to their advantage, a boat approaching Frederick’s barge, carrying a message that would complicate life enormously. All the bowl showed was fog
obscuring the mouth of the lagoon. The fog itself was not a puzzle since early morning fog was common in Venice at this time of year, but what was Alexa supposed to take from being shown a spit of land few even visited?

She was still asking herself that question when the fog began to clear. It was the way it burnt off that shocked her.

It parted like the Red Sea to reveal a triple-decked galley, banks of oars above each other sweeping in time to a muffled kettledrum. The ship was vast, with a brass-bound ram that skewered the waves in front of it.

Alexa recognised it instantly.

The Will of God
flew the double-headed eagle under a single crown on a background of scarlet. The family emblem on the eagle’s breast was the Byzantine emperor’s own. Her triangular sail held more wind than actually blew. Her silver oars sped the war galley through the water more swiftly than their number should allow.

A blond-haired and handsome young man leant against a blue rail wearing a robe hemmed with imperial purple. At his shoulder stood a thin and clean-shaven man in a simple white robe. Alexa doubted Andronikos had ever been handsome, but she imagined he’d always been striking.

The rail was set with slabs of lapis. The sail was oiled silk and the oars skinned with thin sheets of electrum. Once started, the fog burnt back to reveal a war fleet in the mouth of the Venetian lagoon. No trade ships could leave harbour in the face of such a blockade and none enter without agreement.

Alexa had not sensed their arrival at all.

As an old woman on the sandbank turned to run to raise an alarm, the thin man spoke a single word. In the world behind this one something stirred.

Black wings spread and an infinity of cold space was crossed in the time it took to part the veil between them, which was no time at all. On the sandbank the old woman clutched her chest,
feeling her heart falter behind frail ribs. Death came for her only a little early and Lord Andronikos’s boat glided on.

The Council of Ten had assembled hastily, as well it might. No Byzantine prince had visited Venice since the city broke with Constantinople six hundred years earlier. The odd princess had been traded in one direction or the other. And, notoriously, the Venetians had sacked Constantinople two centuries before, but a visit from one of the emperor’s sons in the emperor’s own ship…?

In an upstairs room of the Ca’ Ducale, the Council were considering Lord Roderigo’s report. The guards first sent to
The Will of God
were dead, their boat found floating and not a mark of violence on any of them.

Lord Roderigo had gone himself the second time.

He went alone, wearing the chain of the Dogana captain and dressed in a style befitting a Venetian noble. For the first time since he’d joined the Customs, he boarded a foreign ship with their permission rather than at his demand.

Roderigo’s meeting had been polite but chilly. Most of the talking was done by a thin man who introduced himself as Prince Nikolaos’s tutor, although Alexa at least knew Andronikos was also the Byzantine emperor’s adviser.

The boy whom Alexa assumed was Prince Nikolaos, although he was not introduced to Roderigo, stood in silence. When he thought no one was looking his gaze had apparently slid beyond
The Will
’s side to Venice beyond. He’d seemed unimpressed and disappointed, as if expecting more.

“And they definitely berthed without a pilot?”

“Yes, my lord.” Lord Roderigo bowed to Alonzo. This fact worried the Regent, as it worried Roderigo, and Alexa imagined everyone in the Council.

The lagoon was Venice’s safety. It was the world’s biggest moat and the only reason Ca’ Ducale could afford to be unfortified.
One of Sigismund’s ancestors ran his fleet aground on its mud banks and had his army slaughtered. Wave after wave of barbarians had failed in centuries gone by to reach the city.

The Will of God
had found her way through unaided.

If the fragile beauty of Ca’ Ducale – with its pink and cream walls above beautifully carved marble colonnades, and its elegant central balcony looking over the wide stretch of the lagoon, reputedly the most beautiful view in Europe – was a message of defiance, this was the Byzantine emperor’s answer.

“Maybe they abducted a pilot,” Alonzo suggested.

Pilots were forbidden to leave Venice and the penalty for trying was death; the same sentence passed on fleeing glassblowers. Abductions happened, however. Then it was up to the
assassini
to kill the abductee before maps could be drawn using his knowledge. But pilots were licensed, controlled by a guild and all accounted for.

Besides, Alexa knew they hadn’t used a pilot.

She’d seen Andronikos alone on deck apart from the boy, felt the echo of his magic grow stronger as Andronikos neared the city. Tendrils of insight feeling their way through the water to judge which direction was safe and which not.

If Venice was a hundred islands, the Byzantine emperor had a thousand, two thousand, such. Southern Greece was a jigsaw of sea-skirted rock. He took his power from the Middle Sea itself; just as Sigismund’s
krieghund
took theirs from the mountains and forests. Why did people think Venice married the sea each year? The city needed all the help she could get.

“They must quarantine. They’re…”

That would be Lord Corte whose fear of catching diseases from foreigners was infamous. Given his father survived God’s Wrath, when the plague cleared Venice of more than half its citizens and swept across Western Europe killing as effectively as any Mongol army, his nervousness was perhaps acceptable. The virulence with which he expressed it less so.

“They will quarantine,” Alonzo promised.

“My lord,” said Roderigo. “Andronikos refuses.”

Indignation filled the panelled chamber.

“Their mission is urgent. And…” Lord Roderigo swallowed, his next point being unpalatable. “He guarantees
The Will of God
is free from disease.”

“
He guarantees?
”

Alonzo’s tone made Roderigo flinch. “There’s more, my lord. Once Prince Nikolaos is housed here in the Ca’ Ducale, his future home, Lord Andronikos offers his assistance curing Lady Eleanor, whom he gathers is sick.”

“His future home, Roderigo? No
guests
are housed here. That is one of our basic laws; only Millioni sleep at Ca’ Ducale.”

And servants
, thought Alexa.
And, God help us, Tycho
. Unless Alonzo already considered him part of the family and she doubted that.

“My lord…” Roderigo said.

“
What?
”

“He seems certain his demands will be met.”

“Then you’ll have to persuade him otherwise.”

Lord Roderigo swallowed.

The little dragonet did what Alexa’s fruit bat did, only he did it during the day and with greater facility and some unexpected advantages. Those around the palace were now so used to Alexa’s Chinese lizard they often fed it titbits, little knowing their kindness was known.

Both Nero and the little dragonet could give her the night and the day skies, though she had to be behind their eyes to see what they saw, which meant she needed privacy and somewhere to concentrate. Being duchess, this was easy enough to arrange. But the dragonet could give her more than this.

What it saw it
remembered
perfectly, whether she was behind its eyes or not. So perfectly she might as well have been there.
The advantage was obvious, an extra pair of eyes where her gaze was not. The disadvantage was that the memories could only be taken later, when the dragonet and she were together.

That the khan of khans had sent her two presents so valuable was flattering and worrying. Far more worrying now she understood the dragonet’s full powers. For the first week or so, until their heads bumped and Alexa flinched under the slew of memories, she’d thought it no more exotic than her bat.

Her worry was how to get the dragonet aboard
The Will of God
for Roderigo’s next meeting.

In the end, she simply had the dragonet drop into Andronikos’s rigging from high overhead at the exact moment Roderigo’s boat pulled alongside. As an added precaution, she hung its neck with amulets and, from the way the little dragonet preened, imagined she’d have a hard time getting them back.

And so it proved.

Although trading already drained trinkets was a small price for the flash flow of events, the dragonet gave up when she finally rested her forehead against its own. The difference being she
understood
what the dragonet only saw.

The deck of
The Will of God
was still as stone, even though waves rocked all the other boats in the lagoon. Its sails, earlier filled by winds that didn’t exist, now hung furled and untroubled in an afternoon wind that flapped the canvas of Roderigo’s own craft. Roderigo had come aboard alone and unarmed, and no weapons seemed to be trained on him.

Maybe Andronikos considered Venice too cowed for Roderigo to be a danger. Maybe he simply couldn’t imagine anyone being rash enough to attack the emperor’s son. For a moment Alexa wished she’d gone along with Alonzo’s plan to have Roderigo kill Nikolaos. If only because failure would have cost the Regent one of his most powerful allies at court.

Lord Andronikos was amused by Roderigo’s nervousness.

As Alexa suspected, this did not last beyond his delivering the message; and his argument that if the Millioni housed Prince Nikolaos at Ca’ Ducale they would have to house Frederick too produced outright anger.

“
You do not compare them
.”

To Alexa that sounded like an order. One given with such confidence even Roderigo realised Andronikos was more than Nikolaos’s tutor.

“My lord…”

“Did the German Electors pick Sigismund? No, they were simply too scared to disagree. And a ruler chosen by three archbishops and five princes, what kind of mandate is that?
God
has been choosing the Basilius for a thousand years.”

It had taken centuries for the Byzantines to recognise the right of the Holy Roman Empire to call itself an empire at all. Andronikos’s fury might have lasted longer had Roderigo not mentioned where the city intended to house Nikolaos instead.

“In Lady Giulietta’s own house?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Really?” said a new voice. “The house that once belonged to Leopold zum Bas Friedland?”

So Nikolaos had been listening…

Alexa had thought the blond youth too busy adjusting his armour.

Pretty, conceited and unlikely to underestimate his attractiveness to the girls he mistreated, she’d met young men like him before. Most hid a fear of liking other men behind a bullying contempt for women. Her own people’s ways were simpler.
Anda
, the practice of blood partners, allowed young men their fierce friendships. Even the great Khan Genghis had bound to his childhood friend Jamuka.

“Yes, highness. Leopold’s old house.”

“We will take it.”

The thin man at the prince’s side scowled but nodded in the prince’s direction to show he accepted the decision.

“I want Leopold’s bed,” Prince Nikolaos said.

“Highness. I imagine that is where Lady Giulietta usually sleeps.”

“She’s welcome to join me.”

Glancing at his tutor, the prince muttered something and Alexa caught the word,
sweeter
. Andronikos smoothed his disgust when he realised Roderigo was watching.

“And the German?

“Frederick will be offered a house Alexa owns.”

“You may go,” said Andronikos, as if he’d been the one to summon the Captain of the Dogana guard. He glanced towards the rigging, scowled. “Next time tell your duchess to keep her eyes to herself.”

“You offered him what?”

Duchess Alexa continued lighting her candle.

Late afternoon had become early evening as she waited for Giulietta to answer the summons. Hours during which south-easterly winds tossed spray on to the Riva degli Schiavoni and wet those gathered in near silence to stare at
The Will of God
, the largest galley any of them had ever seen.

Now her niece was here and as cross as ever. Apparently unconcerned that between them the Byzantines and Germans had Venice surrounded.

The fanciful whispered they could see the Byzantine fleet at anchor in the mouth of the lagoon. Alexa doubted it. She could barely number them herself from Ca’ Ducale’s famous fretted balcony using her late husband’s leather and brass looking device. Fifty ships, three rows of oars each.

The ships undoubtedly carried mage fire, hardened soldiers and skilled archers, those huge crossbows used to harpoon enemy ships. At speed, any one of them could ride right over a Venetian galley provided the slaves lifted their oars correctly. Alexa hoped their keel depth made them hard to manoeuvre.

Beyond this was a greater worry.

Byzantine artificers were bolting together a floating platform from parts carried on cargo ships behind the war fleet. If she was right they were constructing a gun platform to bombard Venice into submission should it refuse to choose Nikolaos over his German rival.

It would help if so much of Venice’s fleet hadn’t recently been sunk in the battle off Cyprus. Alexa should have known the Byzantine and Holy Roman emperors would move at the city’s first sign of weakness.

We’re in trouble, Giulietta
, she wanted say.
I need your cooperation
.

Alexa wondered what her niece was thinking as she stood there in tight fury. Instead of asking, she said, “Have a look at their fleet.”