The Outcast Blade (42 page)

Somewhere Giulietta was shouting.

Tycho caught a flash of black as Rosalyn launched herself at the mage and saw her hurled back to lie in a bloody heap. When she tried to rise, the man turned to her. “No,” Tycho croaked. “Your fight is with me.”

Andronikos laughed.

And Tycho’s gut knotted in anger.

Night had given way to the dark-thread moment.

The precursor tints that heralded daylight threatened the horizon. Tycho saw what Giulietta could not. A thousand subtle shades of light in what she saw as darkness. All Andronikos had to do was hold him here.

Sunlight would race from the sandbanks at the lagoon’s mouth, across the beaten lead waters of the lagoon to where he stood, and Tycho would die without having saved Giulietta. To save the woman he loved he would have to become what he became on the deck of the
San Marco
.

Then she would see him for what he really was.

Focusing on the man in front of him, Tycho realised Andronikos was waiting for Tycho’s full attention, that arrogance was unexpected, a weakness.

Tycho knew the next word before it was whispered.

Memories of Afrior began ripping his flesh apart like a thousand glass knives, cutting him to the bone. Battered, abused, betrayed. Her eyes on his as the Skaelingar chief drew his stone knife across her throat. Afrior’s body, the body he’d betrayed his family for, flopping in the dirt as she bled out.

Hell had entered Bjornvin.

“
Tycho…
”

Hearing Giulietta’s scream, he found himself several paces behind where he should be standing. Blood oozed from wounds that in others would be gushing blood. His left arm was broken, splintered bone jutting from his wrist. Loops of entrail showed through a hole in his stomach.

His power to heal would keep him alive. It was his ability to withstand the pain Tycho doubted.

“Sweet Gods,” he whispered. “Help me.”

Only silence answered. There had only ever been silence for him. Looking up, he saw Andronikos, face triumphant. This time the mage merely mouthed,
She was your sister
.

Skin peeled from Tycho’s face as he fought to reply. He felt flesh shred away until only his skull remained. He would happily embrace death if only it could find him. “She was
never
my sister,” he said between breaking teeth. “I was not
them
. They were not
me
. I was
Fallen
. I was always
Fallen
.”

Time’s flow stuttered, dammed upstream.

Until only Tycho and Andronikos were awake. The others a tableau in the earliest of very early morning light. It stuttered again and Tycho saw shock etched on Andronikos’s face as he failed to fight whatever magic entangled him.

“Alexa?” Tycho asked.

The voice snorted.

“You came to my city,” the
genius loci
said. “Now I come to you.”

Venice’s mouth found his in a carrion kiss.

His gut hurt, his throat was sour. Tycho wasn’t sure what had happened but he’d always suspected the island city of Venice was alive. It was too strange, too other not to be inhabited by an ancient spirit of place. Although the very adult version of A’rial that rose to greet him was older than he imagined.

Far older than history claimed.

Venice felt strange because it was strange.

A maze of death and sex, blood, love and hate. Bound by water that locked in ghosts and history until every street and alley, every canal and basin piled thick with overlaying memories from the city’s earlier inhabitants. The words A’rial left him with were raw in his mind.
I was young when you were
.

“Me?” he’d asked.

Your kind. The originals
.

And Tycho remembered Leopold’s words the night Tycho defeated him, and he gave Giulietta Leopold’s life because he didn’t know how to refuse her, condemning himself to torture as a galley slave.
You’re meant to be dead
.

“I’m alive,” he’d said then.

As he’d said it tonight. Unseen hands had clapped. Perhaps mockingly, perhaps in real admiration. “Become yourself,” the city said.

“I am myself.”

“Then become better…”

As time began its flow and A’rial’s carrion presence sank through the water and mud, pilings and gravel to wherever Venice’s mother spirit usually slept, Tycho watched the world return to something approaching normal, or as normal as it would ever be in this strangest of cities.

He saw Andronikos blink.

Watched him turn to where Giulietta crouched, Leo in her arms, Rosalyn standing guard over both. He saw the mage’s gaze flick to Prince Frederick and the wounded Wolf Brother crouching behind their rotten stump.

The man was wondering what had changed.

Only what had changed was standing in front of him.

Andronikos looked at Tycho and seemed surprised to find him standing. This, Tycho realised, was a war of words as much as of strength. What you love makes you stronger than the worst damage inflicted by what you fear.

He knew that now.

He had Alexa’s pistol on its lanyard, Frederick still gripped the
WolfeSelle
, but the weapon Tycho needed was already on his tongue. He knew suddenly what he needed to do. Putting his hand to the tattered ribbon circling his wrist…

Tycho spoke a word of his own.

“
Giulietta
.”

The alchemist grinned.

He spread his hands to show that he was unhurt, that Tycho’s words had done nothing to harm him, and was about to raise his gaze to the pre-dawn sky to draw power when his grin faded.

And Tycho felt the word consume him.

His mouth opened in a silent scream as flames flowed up his body, and snapped back having varnished him in light. Shadows flung themselves in all directions, streaming from trees and grave markers in wide circles around him. It was not the change he expected. Inside his chest he could feel a heart.

Burning white like light in the darkness.

Flame pumped through his veins, savage wings of fire flared from his shoulders to shrivel needles on the nearest pine trees. He could smell resin burning as he raised Alexa’s pistol, flipped open the pan cover and exposed the primer. Tycho didn’t even
bother with the trigger, simply touched his thumb to the primer powder and watched it flare.

Too late Andronikos strained for a word, his counter-attack lost in the shock of watching Tycho transform. As the bullet entered his heart scarlet and gold script licked across the mage’s skin. The body that crumpled to the ground was that of an old man, nothing more.

Having inspected the body, Tycho knelt to unclip the mage’s cloak and crossed the bridge to where Rosalyn stood, draping the cloak around her as protection against the coming sun. “Alexa’s soldiers will be here shortly.”

Giulietta nodded. Her face slightly awed.

“This isn’t me,” Tycho said. “The me you can ignore will be back soon.”

She wanted to say she could ignore this version of him, too, but they both knew that was untrue. She could no more ignore it than he could. The monstrous creature on the
San Marco
had not been what he would become. Simply halfway to whatever he had been until a moment ago.

“Leo is safe?”

Giulietta nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Take Leo to the first house you find. Tell them you need shelter until soldiers arrive. Wait there.”

“Yes, master.” Her voice was more mocking than Rosalyn would ever dare. She walked away without looking back.

Tycho grinned.

“Don’t let Lady Giulietta see me like this,” Prince Frederick begged.

In her hand, Rosalyn held the cloak Nikolaos had worn in life. After helping the
krieghund
princeling to his feet, she wrapped it carefully around his bruised and naked body. “Why not?” “She’ll never want to marry me.”

“She’s not going to marry you,” Rosalyn said. “She’s going to
marry him.” A jerk of her head indicated Tycho. “And she’s gone anyway. If I were you I’d go home.”

“My father…”

“Will be impressed,” said Tycho, “that you return with the Wolf Soul. You can also point out that you are alive while a competing Byzantine prince and a Byzantine mage are dead. Leo is your brother’s heir. The odds are on your father’s side. He can afford to wait.”

Prince Frederick nodded slowly.

Day was coming and the graveyard around Tycho had blurred to a harsh whiteness that grew brighter until he had to squint to see anything and even that was agony. Rosalyn at his side was hiding her face in her hands.

“Your eyes…” Prince Frederick said.

“They hurt.”

“Huge,” the prince agreed.

The clarity Tycho’s sight brought to the darkest night was torture in any light this close to dawn. His head ached and he felt a nausea that made him want to hide. The last vestiges of the being he became had withered, without the flamboyant pain changing back usually brought.

Tycho was simply himself again.

“I need your help.”

“You have it,” Frederick said. “What do I do?”

“There’s a half-dug grave over the rise,” Tycho said. “Cover us with earth and pine needles and tell no one. Say we simply vanished. Do it swiftly.”

A week had passed since the bombardment of Venice’s lagoon and the sun was settling over the western horizon when the Byzantine Empire’s commander took his leave of the Ten. The meeting had been formal, scrupulously polite.

At the Council’s orders, the bodies of Lord Andronikos and Emperor John V Palaiologos’s youngest son had been returned. So they could be sent to their homeland for burial as was proper.

Prince Alonzo had objected publicly.

Until, in private, Duchess Alexa pointed out the obvious. What looked like kindness was really a warning.
See
, it said,
attack us and you get your greatest mage and an imperial prince back in a barrel, gutted and steeped in brandy for the journey
.

Alonzo was quiet after that.

He would be quieter still after tomorrow’s conversation, which would be very private indeed. It was the one where Alexa told him what Giulietta had told her. That Tycho had originally been shipped to Venice to kill her and, possibly, Marco and Giulietta herself. Seljuk hunters might have captured him, and Mamluk mages prepared him, but it was Alonzo who funded the scheme.

He would bluster that she had no proof. And she would show
him an order, undated and signed in one of Marco’s increasingly common moments of clarity, ordering Alonzo’s arrest and trial for treason. Alexa hoped her brother-in-law would be grateful for the exile she offered. Not least because any trial for treason would reopen the investigation into the explosion at San Lazar, the attempt to poison Marco and the attack on Giulietta’s life.

The penalty for the poisoning would be death.

But first she had the problem of Giulietta. Who had turned up in the early morning a week before, silent and filthy, clutching Leo and firmly refusing to say what had happened on Giudecca the night before.

She slept in her new room at Ca’ Ducale, and had left the palace only once for the burial of Lady Eleanor. And she spent most of that watching the basilica doors as if waiting for someone to join her. Sir Tycho, probably. Unless she looked for the ragged girl who became Eleanor’s friend.

Neither one came.

So now Lady Giulietta glided through Ca’ Ducale’s marble corridors as silent as a ghost, her quiet politeness to guard and servants as unnerving as her arrogance had ever been. She ate little, slept less.

The dragonet was currently out looking for Sir Tycho, Alexa’s bat flew over the streets in all directions every night. Orders for information had been issued to spies. Rewards had discreetly been offered.

Prince Frederick had known something, Alexa was sure of that. He came in person to thank her for returning the bodies of his men. A quiet, subdued young man, shocked by the loss of his friends and whatever else happened. He’d asked permission to say farewell to her niece. Giulietta had refused to see him.

“My lady…” A maid stood in the doorway.

“What?”

“News of Sir Tycho.”

Putting down her cup, Alexa stood. It was hard to know which
would be worse. The boy alive or dead; still in Venice or in someone else’s employ. She had, she hated to admit, become fond of him in her way.

And then there was Marco.

Her son always asked, specifically and clearly, where Tycho was, if he was all right, whether he was happy.
My grievous angel
her son called him.

“Send the messenger in.”

A ragged-looking fisherman entered, instantly shocked to find himself in the presence of the Mongol duchess. After a stammering start he found his voice. His wife’s family lived on Giudecca; the Nicoletto shrugged as if to say he liked her for all that. A baby was due soon so she’d returned to her mother.

One night last week he’d been offered money by a grey-haired young man to sail him and a ragged girl direct from Giudecca to Dalmatia. The girl had remained there and the young man had returned.

The fisherman hadn’t realised… If he had…

“When did you return?”

“An hour ago, my lady.”

“And where is this man now?”

“He told me he was going to change. That he had a girl to see. He thanked me for making the trip to Dalmatia and paid me.”

“What did he pay you?”

The Nicoletto hesitated. “Twice what he offered.”

“And what was odd about the way he wanted your boat prepared?” At her question, the fisherman stared at Alexa and his eyes widened as he obviously decided that everything he’d heard about the duchess being a witch was true. She smiled sourly. “Well?”

“I had to fill my boat with earth.”

Alexa rang a small glass bell and told a servant to give the fisherman five silver grosso, take him to the kitchens and make
sure he was well fed, then find him a clean blanket for his wife. The baby would need it in the winter to come.

The man left, stammering his gratitude.

Fear and favour, and an uncertainty as to which would be found – Alexa had built her reputation on that mix. A second later, her study door burst open and Giulietta was there. Her black dress replaced by crimson velvet and her hair up as befitted a woman once married, but with so many flaming strands escaping in all directions it seemed her hair at least was uncertain of her exact status.