The Outcast Blade (7 page)

“You know what I was expected to do.”

Duke Marco stopped swinging his feet. Though he didn’t leave the window seat to which he’d returned, nor take his gaze from a fresh flock of gulls. Both women knew he was now listening.

“I’m sorry,” Alexa said.

You are?
That was what Lady Giulietta wanted to say. “It’s too late,” was what came out of her mouth. Giulietta paled, appalled by what she’d just said.

“Too late for what?” demanded a voice.

Uncle Alonzo, obviously. He stood in the doorway dressed – as ever – in his breastplate with a doublet beneath. A dagger of the finest Toledo steel hung from his hip and he carried his helmet casually.

“To stop me moving into Ca’ Friedland.”

“Why would we want to stop you? I think it’s an excellent idea. You get to live in a shabby, unfashionable ruin. The rest of us are spared the sight of your miserable face.” He looked from
the scarf to her red eyes. “As if there isn’t enough bawling from that brat of yours.”

“Leo’s not a brat.”

“No. Of course not. He’s a zum Friedland prince and you were his father’s virgin bride.”

Lady Giulietta opened her mouth and discovered no words would come. So she swung away and saw Marco watching. When he patted the bench beside him, she ran to where he sat and let him wrap his arms around her. He was eight years her senior, although it looked less.

Up close he smelt like a stevedore.

It’s the sun
, she thought. And then realised she was wrong. His lavender doublet was dark with sweat, his throat slick with perspiration. Tiny bubbles of white froth edged his mouth.

“Aunt Alexa. Come here. Quick.”

The duchess scowled, only to realise Giulietta was serious and what she took for insolence was shock. Grabbing Marco’s face, Alexa turned it towards her. “Tell me,” she demanded. “What have you eaten?”

Marco tried to look away.

“
Marco
.”

“A plum.”

“You know what I’ve said. You mustn’t eat
anything
that hasn’t been tasted first.”

“It was purple.”

“Fetch my poisons box,” Duchess Alexa snapped.

God knows what the guards in the corridor thought, if they dared think at all, as Lady Giulietta hammered her way upstairs and slid to a halt outside her aunt’s office, slamming the door as she hurried inside.

Half a dozen Millioni portraits glared down at her.

Servants whispered that the surface of the chest was poisoned. That simply to touch it and lick your fingers afterwards was to die.

Giulietta hesitated on the edge of picking it up.

And then the thought of Marco’s unhappy face made her grab it anyway, knowing she loved her cousin, idiot or not. She almost tripped she ran so fast downstairs with Alexa’s box held to her chest. At the entrance to Marco’s chamber, the guards opened the door without bothering to come to attention first.

Dumping the chest, Giulietta turned.

“Where are you going…?”

“To wash my hands.”

“No need,” Duchess Alexa said. “I started that rumour myself years ago. It’s been keeping this box safe since.” Taking a parcel from the chest she ripped it open and pulled out dry leaves.

Putting a leaf to Marco’s lips, she scowled.

Opening a second parcel, she touched grass to the froth edging his mouth. A fern frond finally turned pink at its edges. So she took a glass bottle, eased a single drop on to her finger and moistened Marco’s lips. “Leave us.”

“But I can help.”

“Giulietta. Your aunt said go.”

Lady Giulietta ignored her uncle. “Will Marco live?”

“He will if I have anything to do with it,” her aunt said. “Now I want a word with the Regent…”

Giulietta left reluctantly.

A few minutes later Alonzo left too.

Although he didn’t spot her in the shadow of an arch, glaring at him with such anger she found it impossible to put her hatred into words. He’d had Dr Crow use a
goose quill
on her.

Her uncle had ruined her life, had her inseminated with his own seed, treating her pregnancy as nothing but a move in his political games. Since Janus could not provide an heir, Alonzo would provide one for him.

Only Giulietta and Janus never married.

And now she was someone else’s widow, with a child she
adored, by a father she hated and whom magic prevented her naming. Was it any surprise she was unhappy? Wiping a tear from her eyes, Giulietta went to pack.

Not even Marco falling ill was enough to make her stay.

By night, rumours of Duke Marco’s sickness filled the streets. They were whispered, and then only between friends, because rumours involving the Millioni were always safer whispered and only friends could be trusted.

But everyone in the city was friends with someone and the rumour spread so fast that agents had to be sent by the Council of Ten into the taverns to spread counter-whispers that the original whispers were part of a plot.

This had the desired effect.

As the discussion turned to whose plot this might be.

First the explosion at St Lazar, then false rumours about the duke’s health. Everyone agreed the city’s enemies were trying to unsettle the city but few agreed on which enemy was responsible. The Castellani, comprising those from the parishes nearest San Pietro di Castello, declared the German emperor was behind the outrages. This was enough for the Nicoletti, their natural enemy, to claim it was the Basilius, and only fools and traitors would say otherwise.

The battle between red caps and black caps was quick and brutal, and as quickly and brutally broken up by the Watch. By
the time the young man Duchess Alexa called
that boy
made his way through Dorsoduro around the left bank of the Grand Canal towards San Polo the city was still again.

He walked steadily, his eyes fixed ahead.

Tycho was not thinking about Giulietta. He’d very carefully not been thinking about her since he woke two hours before in his cellar room in Ca’ il Mauros and went up through the evening darkness to the piano nobile to bid goodbye to Lady Desdaio and pay his respects to his old master. Could he help it if Atilo thought he was being mocked?

“Sir Tycho…?”

“
What?
”

“I thought you said something.”

“I was talking to myself.”

The two carters carrying his possessions had the sense to stay silent.

At a butcher’s shop hung with widows’ memories, fat saveloys skinned in an indecent pink, Tycho stopped to watch a merchant’s wife choose her supper. He felt envy for a life so normal.

What must it be like to have lived in only one place? To know this was the step where you tripped as a child, that was the wall you climbed for a bet, the bench there was where you had your first kiss, that doorway your second. Would it be wonderful to belong? Or did those who belonged dream of coming from somewhere else?

The narrow canal ahead of him was edged by a mean quayside that crumbled into green and stinking water. The bridge over it was rickety, made from wood that was rotting rather than from stone. The houses lining his route were old, their thin red brick left unplastered. In a
sottoportego
– a covered passage linking one alley to another – two children rutted against a wall. A better choice than the crowded tenement their families undoubtedly shared, where every ecstasy would be accompanied, like as not, by jeers.

“Almost there,” one of the carters said.

Saint Apollinaire was patron of those who fled to Venice from Ravenna four centuries before. Here he’d become San Aponal, and his church formed the north-east corner of a slightly better square.

The late Sir Tomas Felezzo’s Republican sympathies showed in the statue over the door. Pietro Gradenigo, the last freely elected doge of Venice. In as much as Gradenigo’s election had been free. If the man was remembered at all, it was as the doge replaced by Marco Polo.

Pulling a key from his belt, Tycho let himself in.

The hall was dark and dusty, smelling of emptiness and rotten vegetables. The first thing he noticed as his eyes adjusted was another pair staring back at him from beneath an oak bench. The creature looked starved and intent on escaping the house where it had been trapped. A strip of ham stopped it dead.

“What’s
that
, my lord?”

“A lizard of some sort.”

The carters glanced at the dagger in Tycho’s hand, thought about the magical speed with which it moved from his belt to his fingers, and looked at the previously whole ham. Tycho grinned as they decided not trying to rob him had been a wise choice. “You can go.”

They took his silver gratefully.

After they vanished, Tycho dragged his supplies inside and stacked them by the door. He’d only brought provisions because Lady Desdaio insisted.

Ca’ Bell’ Angelo Scuro
.

He had a palace named after him.

A small and narrow palace admittedly, with crumbling brick walls and fronting a smelly canal, hemmed in on one side by the church of San Aponal and opposite a wine warehouse, but a palace all the same.

Four floors high to judge from the windows he’d seen outside.

His hall was narrow with oak benches along one wall. A stone fireplace opposite the land door still held ash. To his right, a grander door led to a ramshackle landing stage. The gondola tied there looked expensive.

Since Tycho hated water he was unlikely to be using it.

Back in the hall, he turned a slow circle and frowned. The room looked right but felt wrong; as if he somehow shouted and his echo was bouncing off a different wall. Looking down he noticed the lizard staring with open interest.

“Well you might,” Tycho said.

Well I might what?
its insolent stare replied.

Tycho considered the things he could see. A freshly painted door to a storeroom. A double-fronted oak cupboard. A marble roundel of the Felezzo arms. A fresco of a naked martyr with breasts like apples that looked glued on. As if Sir Tomas had changed his mind about the martyr’s sex at the last minute.

The cupboard contained a single bolt of rotting silk that felt sticky to the touch. The storeroom had a smaller cupboard beyond, filled with cobwebs and dust. A stain inside could have been blood or oil or paint or anything else he chose.

This one
, Tycho thought.

The lizard looked more interested still.

Trying to remove the cupboard’s back achieved nothing. So Tycho tried several other ideas, ending up with him pushing the back down with the flat of his hand to feel it shift a little and then stop with a click.

Pushing it sideways let in night air.

He thought he’d find a passage of the kind Lord Atilo used to move unseen through Ca’ Ducale. Instead, he was in a doorway looking at a weed-strewn little garden with another door directly opposite.

Even the lizard seemed surprised.

The walls looking down lacked windows. At least, windows through which anyone might look. The stuccoed end of San
Aponal had a stained-glass window set so high no one had cleaned it for years. A key jutted from the other door.

Tycho used it to let himself in.

A screw-turn printing press stood in the hall.

The walls around it were hung with layer upon layer of rags, until the hall looked papered with giant leaves. The door itself was thickly padded to reduce the noise of the press. The alley door beyond was bricked up and there was no water door, the little house being too poor.

Piles of printed pages stood on a table, some collected together and a few already sewn. Picking up a sewn booklet, he flicked through and discovered the lizard was standing on the press beside him, also staring.

Return the Republic…

The pamphlet called for the overthrow of Marco Polo’s dynasty and a free and secret vote to select a new duke for all those owning property worth more than 10,000 ducats. The reasons given included the Millioni’s profligacy, their reliance on assassins, the late duke’s love of war, the current Regent’s love of wine and the Mongol duchess’s interest in witchcraft.

The first engraving, cut with surprising skill, showed a peaceful noble stabbed by masked assassins. The second had Prince Alonzo with a merchant’s daughter, his wine bottle empty, his hands not. The lizard froze as Tycho flicked to a third engraving to find the new duke depicted spider-like and drooling on his throne. A fourth showed a brave merchant hog-tied and bleeding, being ripped apart by wild horses. A pamphlet jutting from his belt read
Republic
.

Until then, Tycho had believed the famed Republican conspiracy an invention of the Millioni; an excuse to justify how tightly they clung to power. It seemed, however, there was a conspiracy of sorts. At the very least a swelling of dissent among some of the lesser nobles and richer merchants. So, enemies circling outside the city and wolves waiting within. It almost made him sorry for Alexa.

It was the engraving after that which made Tycho stop.

Alonzo again. And Alexa, still veiled but otherwise naked.

Upturned breasts and slim thighs, her head thrown back to look at bats circling her ceiling. She crouched like a jockey above the barrel-chested figure of her hated brother-in-law. In case anyone didn’t recognise the bearded man, Alonzo’s plumed helm was visible on the floor.

“Burn it,” the lizard demanded.

Tycho turned in shock. The lizard glared back at him, eyes wide and a frill of skin erect around its neck, delicate half-wings spread.

“What are you?” Tycho demanded.

The lizard simply hissed.

Looking around the piano nobile at Ca’ Friedland, Lady Giulietta opened her mouth to disagree with her cousin Eleanor’s opinion that the grandest of the palace’s upper rooms needed bloody good clean – and decided to save her breath.

While she’d been in Cyprus her lady-in-waiting had grown up. Lady Eleanor had already made it clear she didn’t
have
to return to her old position. She would visit Ca’ Friedland and decide.

Giulietta was so shocked she agreed without protest.

And her cousin was right. After Lady Giulietta was abducted, Eleanor joined Aunt Alexa’s household. She could stay there or attend Giulietta. The choice was hers. “Leopold lived here,” Giulietta said, as if that explained why she wanted to return.