The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini (15 page)

Rising from the lake was the midden itself.

Jagged rocks broke through marbled ice to make a small island occupied by three buildings that filled all the available space. The largest by far was the Red Cathedral, the others were a bell tower and a fortified hall. Originally red, all their walls had faded to ochre, and the sharp roof of the cathedral boasted a cascade of onion domes that looked as if they should have crescents on the top. Ragged patches of gold leaf clung like onion skin, but Tycho could see wood through the peeling primer beneath. Once it had been the high church of the local heresy. Now it was the Red Crucifers’ castle, and Prince Alonzo’s headquarters in his coming war with Alexa.

And on the ice between the island and the shore, Towler’s Company, heads down and shoulders hunched as they pushed themselves on. Undoubtedly, they knew they were watched from the cathedral. Tycho doubted they realised he was watching from up here. As they stumbled forward, the great doors of the cathedral opened . . . At least, a small side door in the great doors did, and a dozen wild-haired archers tumbled through the door into the snow beyond.

Mongols? Tycho wondered. Magyars?

They wore their hair in plaits and stood with the bow-legged gait of those born in the saddle and raised on mare’s milk. Something about their watchfulness reminded him of the Skaelingar, the wild warriors who had destroyed his home village. So, a rotting village
and
foreign mercenaries.

Tycho found comfort in this. If Alonzo felt strong he’d settle in the capital and live in luxury. He might claim to miss the life of a simple soldier, and claim it endlessly until fools believed him; but Tycho had seen the prince’s lavish feasts close up, drunk the wine Alonzo iced with snow brought down from the Altus. He doubted a rotting wooden cathedral would keep the man content for long. No matter how many barrels of Montenegrin brandy filled that storehouse and local maidens had been rounded up to warm his bed.

Whatever Towler said convinced the man who went out on to the ice to meet them. He nodded, Towler spoke to his company, and they followed him through the parting crowd of archers towards the cathedral door. The wild archers kept their bows bent and their arrows notched. Tycho doubted he expected any different.

Move
, Tycho told himself. In the few minutes he’d been watching Towler’s arrival his body had chilled and his thoughts slowed. The cold took his strength, though far more subtly than water.
Anyone would think you were afraid.

The ice spread in front of him, reflecting the moon so that the clouds were lit on both sides and glowed with a sullen fire. Above him were the now familiar constellations of this world. In front, the moonlit sharpness of the Red Cathedral with silhouetted onion domes. Beside that a separate bell tower and a squat hall beneath. As he watched, the hall doors opened and men and carts flooded out and spread around the rocky edge of the island, the night suddenly full of jangling harness and cartwheels squeaking.

Dropping to a crouch, Tycho hugged the ice as four oxen lumbered in his direction, stopping a dozen paces from the island shore. Men in stinking furs tumbled from the back of the wagons, grabbed pickaxes and spread out. In a line, standing a couple of paces apart, they took their orders from a gang boss and raised their pickaxes together, crashing the points into the ice. All around the island, other men did the same. Alonzo was making himself a moat.

Against me?
Tycho rejected the idea as arrogance.

Yet what other reason was there? Captain Towler had probably been happy to boast of having met Tycho on his way here. This, it seemed, was Alonzo’s response. A hundred men smashing ice until dark water appeared. Within five minutes, fifteen foot of open water stood between the island and the rest of the lake. Job done, the men climbed into their carts and trundled on.

Maybe taunting Alonzo hadn’t been so clever . . .

How many cart teams were there? Was there an ice bridge somewhere? And could he find it and cross it unseen before Alonzo’s men turned it too to dark water and left him stranded on this side of the ice? He could overtake the carts and hope to find unbroken ice beyond them, or cross here. Neither option impressed him.

Not giving himself time to think, Tycho shrugged himself from his jacket and slipped into the dark moat, feeling bitter cold knock breath from his body. He swam hard, his lungs too tight to breathe, and reached the edge, dragging himself over it and grabbed a breath. He was almost clear of the water when something grabbed his ankle and he felt himself slide backwards, unable to get a grip on the smooth ice.

What the fuck was that?

He kicked hard, connecting with flesh. The grip on his ankle tightened and yanked harder. A moment later, Tycho splashed into the water, slid under and turned to discover what he faced. His attacker was frog-eyed and broad-cheeked, its wide mouth filled with needle-like teeth. Gills frilled both sides of its neck like wounds.

Tycho kicked for its hand and the thing grinned, letting go of Tycho’s ankle and boosting his foot upwards with webbed fingers. When Tycho’s head smashed into the ice above the world went black, sickness sweeping through him. As the creature hung mockingly out of reach, a subtle change came over its face, and its grin became scarily human. Tycho drew his knife.

The blow to his head left a hangover of giddiness. Smoke-like darkness ate the edges of his vision as the air burnt up in his chest, narrowing the aquarium dark of the world under the ice to a tight circle of light in front of him. He desperately wanted to draw a breath and knew he shouldn’t.

Come closer
, he thought.
Fight me.

Tycho goaded the creature with his knife, jabbing as his strength drained and the chill reached his bones. The face in front of him was familiar now, its cheekbones high and nose strong, wolf-grey braids framing a face as white as alabaster. One monster was gone and another had taken its place. Tycho was looking at himself.

Darting forward, the creature grabbed Tycho’s knife hand and twisted savagely. It had all of Tycho’s speed and strength, which was more than he had. Think, Tycho urged himself. But all he could think was, this is me, as he watched his dagger begin to spin towards the bottom. He was drowning.

The creature blew out its breath and Tycho felt them both sink after the dagger, following it towards the gravel below. The air in his own lungs was gone. He should be dead or already dying but all he felt was numb.

A numbness as bad as that he’d felt the night rip tides caught him in the Venetian lagoon and dragged him under. Finally depositing him on the stone steps at Rialto for a young street rat called Rosalyn to find. She’d thought him already dead and maybe she was right. Who would find him this time? Always assuming this winter ended and the ice melted, and this wasn’t the end of the world as more than half the people in Europe claimed. Feeling the creature wrap its arms more tightly around him, Tycho watched it smile as if reading his thoughts.

The lake was darker here but the water warmer, as if some of the last summer’s heat had survived. Maybe there was simply a warm spring venting somewhere near, or perhaps he imagined it. The water felt warmer the deeper he was dragged. A normal person would be dead by now, drowned when the last of his breath went skyward in tiny bubbles. Only he wasn’t normal, was he? And here was his proof. He was alive when he should be dead.

Fed up with waiting, the creature dragged him close and tried to squeeze air from his lungs. A splatter of bubbles was all Tycho had left. The thing looked worried now, its face less obviously Tycho’s own. In dragging Tycho close, it had given him the opening he’d lacked.

My turn
, Tycho decided.

Opening his mouth, he bit into the creature’s neck and ripped, sour blood mixing with lake water in his mouth. He clung on, gripping tight with the last of his strength as the creature tried to push free, and bit again, spitting flesh into the water. All the while it bled and struggled, and bled some more, until finally it stopped struggling. Tycho held it until it stopped shuddering and then he released it and watched its corpse float gently away, carried by the rising thermal of the hot spring. In death it reverted to its natural form, looking as Tycho first saw it, like a cross between a frog and a dwarf, with needle teeth and webs between its fingers.

The world was roofed in ice. Thick and dark. As strangely jagged and cruel on the underside as it had been marble-smooth on top. If this was the way the world ended, here was where he would remain, locked on the wrong side of an ice wall.

I’ve failed Giulietta
. It was a bad thought to carry for eternity.

Gripping the underside of the ice, Tycho dragged himself in one direction, ice slicing his fingers, until he decided he should have reached the makeshift moat by now if he was going to reach it at all, and began pulling himself in the opposite direction. Except how did he know which was right? The strength the creature’s blood had given him was going, leaching away into the water. And he faced a deeper fear. What would happen when the sun came up?

All that light through the ice. Would it burn him?

He suspected it might. He’d failed Giulietta, and the sun would fry him through the ice if he didn’t free himself soon. Kicking off from the ice, Tycho hit the bottom and crawled on his hands and knees until he reached an incline. The island had to be up ahead, which meant somewhere above was a circle of fine ice or dark water that made up Alonzo’s makeshift moat.

He found it eventually, a crackle of ice thin as leaves and brittle as the skim on a puddle, so inconsequential he barely noticed it as he broke through and gasped air, feeling his lungs fill and his heart restart. Above him the sky was high and clear, and the moon bright enough to show him he was back at the moat’s outer edge.

Fingers clawing ice, he fought for a grip, found one and dragged himself on to its surface, only for something to grab his ankle before he could fight free of the water. Two things happened at once. Long webbed fingers tightened their grip and began to drag him back, and what he’d thought was a mound of snow reared up, hurtled across open ice and raised a spear, hurling it into his captor.

“Have you any idea how idiotic that was?” Amelia demanded, as she ripped her spear free and bent to drag Tycho to safety. He wanted to answer but the darkness took him before he could reply.

As Lady Giulietta entered the family quarters she heard the sound of a harpsichord, its notes rising like birdsong. For an instant, her heart lifted and she forgot Lady Eleanor was dead, remembering a moment later when she found Frederick where her former lady-in-waiting used to sit. “You play?”

“A little,” he said, blushing.

Having thought about it, Giulietta remembered Eleanor wishing she could learn to use a sword and decided Frederick should be allowed to have learnt the harpsichord. “I was wondering,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have news from Montenegro?”

He shook his head and Giulietta’s heart sank. It was physical. Her ribs tightened and her stomach knotted, and she felt her eyes fill with tears as she stared at the distant tower of San Maggiore and willed herself not to cry.

Why not?
she wanted to shout.

“It’s all right,” Prince Frederick said.

“No, it’s not.” She felt his arm go round her and tried to shake free, discovering he was stronger than he looked. After a struggle, she let him hold her, which he did gingerly as if she might break or melt against him. That was how Duke Marco found them a few moments later.

“J-J-Julie’s crying.”

“She misses Tycho.”

“Her angel? Of course she d-does. We all d-do.”

“So here you are . . .” If Aunt Alexa wondered why they were grouped by a window seat or noticed her niece was crying, she kept it to herself. Sitting almost sideways to the window, she joined Giulietta in staring over the Giudecca canal at the islands beyond. “This was my husband’s favourite seat, and his father’s before that. When il Millioni first became duke it was said he’d sit here for hours, looking at the waters . . . Couldn’t believe his luck probably. Either that, or he was hiding from assassins.”

“
Aunt Alexa
.”

“Oh, come on. You know he stole the throne.”

Prince Frederick was on the point of excusing himself, and had got as far as bowing politely before Alexa grabbed his wrist and patted the seat beside her. “All thrones are stolen,” she said firmly. “I’m surprised your father hasn’t told you this already.”

“He says kings are chosen by God.” Frederick sounded unhappy to be disagreeing with a woman rumoured to poison those who offended her. “That everyone knows this is true.”

“After the event, perhaps. God agrees. If God has anything to do with it at all.”

“
My lady . . .
”

“Listen to me,” she said. “All of you . . . A good ruler
knows
that thrones are stolen, and can be stolen again, and does good works to assuage the guilt of the first, and bad works to make sure the second never happens. We have our time on earth and then it’s done. What we do with those years is our choice.” She got to her feet unsteadily, kissed Marco on the forehead, hesitated and did the same to Giulietta. Then she ruffled Frederick’s hair.

“I’m glad we had this talk,” she said, before shutting the door behind her and leaving them alone in the little corridor with its harpsichord, window seat and rotting tapestries.

“What was that about?” Giulietta’s question was for Frederick but it was Marco who answered.

“My m-mother’s scared.”

“Of what?”

“Of e-everything,” Marco replied.

He left shortly afterwards and an awkward silence fell as Frederick wondered what to say to her, leant forward and opened his mouth a couple of times and finally decided to say nothing. Only he couldn’t manage that either.

“Should I leave you be?”

They were the same age but sometimes he behaved like a twelve-year-old. She’d met newly arrived pages with stronger self-confidence. He was watching, waiting for her answer. She sighed.