The Exiled Blade: Act Three of the Assassini (6 page)

Letting himself in through the tenement door nobody had bothered to lock, Tycho headed through a squalid hall greasy with the stink of cheap food and poverty, two smells he remembered well, and headed for a door at the back.

“Riccardo?” The voice sounded relieved.

Tycho tapped again. On the door’s far side, Francesca lifted a handle and slid the bolt back in its hoops. She’d been waiting anxiously for her man to return, and, since there’d been no sound of her crossing the room, she must have been waiting on the far side of the door. Tycho felt sick at what that told him. And even sicker at what he would do. Having shot the bolt, she began to open the door.

Tycho was inside before she realised, his hand over her mouth as he positioned himself behind her. At most, she’d have seen a white-clad figure flow ghostlike through the half-darkness. Blowing out the cheap candle she clutched, he felt bitter smoke fill his nostrils. When she stopped struggling, he took his hand from her mouth. “You know why I’m here.”

“Riccardo?”

“Is dead.”

“
No
. . .”

“You know it’s true.”

She did, too. It was in the slump of her shoulders and sag of her body. For a moment she tensed, glancing longingly at the door, then hope leached from her. “Will they torture me first?”

Had she been able to write she could have made no clearer confession. Although Tycho was uncertain what she confessed to. That she would help murder the baby she nursed felt wrong. “It will be a quick death.”

“Thank you . . .”

Such resignation. “How could you agree?”

Francesca opened her mouth and shut it. She had typically Venetian features, wide-cheeked and dark-eyed, with a strong nose. In another life the woman might have been pretty; in this she was cheaply dressed and heavy dugged from years of giving milk to other people’s children. Her husband had died quickly. He had no way of knowing his wife would be offered that luxury and had risked her life anyway. “You didn’t think you’d be discovered?”

“My husband was always Prince Alonzo’s man.”

So Alexa had been right. “But you fell ill because your husband told you to? And he changed his shift at Alonzo’s orders?”

She shrugged. “My man came and went.”

And how would I know which guard shift he pulled?
Tycho could read the question in the flatness of her tone. He had a question of his own. “You knew Prince Leo was to be murdered?”

“What?”

“Stabbed through the heart,” Tycho said. “Your replacement gutted. The nursery looks like an abattoir and stinks like a mortuary. I found the child you fed lying dead beneath his upturned cot.”

Twisting free, she put her hands over her ears, refusing to hear any more.

“
No
,” she whispered. “
No, no.
”

Pulling her hands away, Tycho said. “That wasn’t meant to happen?”

“
Of course not
.” Francesca shook her head fiercely. “Prince Alonzo wanted the child with him so that Mongol bitch couldn’t corrupt the boy. That’s what my husband told me. The Regent wanted to keep Leo safe . . . He’s really dead?”

“I saw the body.”

“What will happen to my child?”

A slaughter for a slaughter?
There were undoubtedly cities and rulers who worked like this. Alexa was more complex and her responses less simple. “He will be looked after. A new family will be found.”

It was a half-truth. Leo’s body would be buried quietly. The slaughtered nurse would simply disappear. A new room would become Leo’s nursery and a new nurse found for the new Leo, who would remain Giulietta’s child for as long as it took Alexa to decide what should be done.

“Where is your child?”

“Sleeping.” Francesca indicated the darkness behind.

Wooden internal walls, tar paper across the windows, a cheap pine table and two stools. A pile of hay in one corner for a goat brought in from a tiny yard outside. The building would burn readily enough.

“He will be safe,” Tycho promised.

“And me . . .?

She was not the cause
, Tycho reminded himself. Reaching up, he put his hand to her cheek and turned her face until she faced him. “Look into my eyes,” he said. “Look into my eyes and don’t look away.” Her pupils grew huge and fell out of focus. Her eyelids fluttered as she reached the edge of sleep and he felt her body begin to slump. She would have fallen but he caught her, his dog teeth descending as he bit into the nape of her neck.

As always, the world fell into sharp focus. Had he gone outside the sky would have been blood-red, the stars hard and distant worlds he could freeze into his memory in a single glance. And he would have seen the stars, because they would have been points of heat through the cold of the clouds.

He was Fallen. The reality of that fact he only remembered now. At other times, he knew it in an abstract way. Here and now, with blood in his throat and flames flaring from him in colours the human eye couldn’t capture he
understood
what it meant. This world was not his world. These people were not his people. Except for him, he doubted
his people
still existed; although he’d made – by simple accident of blood exchanged – one other who acted like him and had his speed and hungers. Dismissing Rosalyn from his memories, Tycho concentrated on Francesca.

It was a small life but dear.

A childhood on the edge of the Arzanale, with her father a ropemaker and her mother a servant to Lord Roderigo’s father. A marriage at thirteen to a man who hardly ever beat her and used brothels only rarely. She had three children still living. A daughter of fourteen, already with child, a twelve-year-old boy apprenticed to the Rope Walk, and the infant still sleeping. Those born in the years between were dead of hunger, illness or bad luck. Her life was familiar in shape. A thousand women within a mile of where she lived would recognise it.

Tycho found no taste of treason.

There was little sense she’d lied to him and the lies she told herself were no more significant than those she told her husband, sins of omission at the most. A small life – now lost through someone else’s greed. Lowering her to the ground, Tycho put his fingers to her throat and felt nothing. She’d died because her man betrayed her and a man sent by Alexa killed her. It was a small debt and a high return, and he doubted if what had just happened was fair or even just.

The tenement burnt easily. A jug of the cheapest fish oil tipped on to the straw let him start the flames, and the stool and battered table he stood over the straw caught soon enough.
Take the child
, Alexa said. On his way out, Francesca’s infant in his arms, Tycho stood in the hall of the tenement and shouted,
Fire
. . . The one word guaranteed to have Venetians tumbling from their beds.

“Come in . . .” Alexa’s voice was firm.

Hesitating, Tycho wiped frost from the infant’s hair and nodded to the guard on Alexa’s door. She had trusted guards, as Alonzo had his. Almost all the guards he’d have expected to find in the corridors were gone, however, and the marble floors echoed with silence. Sent home with orders to say nothing, probably.

Not that they’d know much. The guard on Leo’s door was dead, and the other guard had been sent to fetch Alexa before Tycho discovered the baby dead. At worst, there would be rumours of a failed attack, and not even that if Duchess Alexa got her way, and she usually did. “It’s done?”

Tycho bowed.

Without another word, Alexa crossed her study to take the shivering child from his arms. She stripped off its rags, turned it over and considered it carefully. Tycho knew what she was thinking. About the right age, about the right colouring; dress it in Maltese lace and give it an ivory teether and few would know the difference from a distance. Giulietta would, of course.

He doubted she’d go near the child Alexa would put in Leo’s place.

“She’s asleep,” Alexa said, answering his question before he could ask. Catching his expression, she added. “Poppy in brandy. It’s quick and will keep dulling her pain provided we don’t use it for too long.” Casually, she stripped off her shawl and wrapped it tightly around the grizzling child, considering the result. “I’m going to . . .” A knock at her door prevented Tycho from discovering what.

“You’re back.” Tycho said, although it wasn’t his place to speak. The Nubian woman in the doorway nodded.

“Obviously.”

Tycho was grateful for the smile.

“A job well done,” said Alexa, and it took Tycho a second to realise she meant Amelia’s job, which should be obvious. Little enough about tonight’s events was well done. “She killed the Valois king’s physician. Using her . . .” The duchess hesitated. “More unusual skills.” Amelia’s smile was cat-like. Praise given, Alexa switched subjects. “You’ve heard the palace rumours?

Amelia shucked herself out of a snow-flecked coat. She wore daggers on both hips and her braids were frosted. “An attack?”

“Yes,” Alexa held up Francesca’s child. “They almost got Leo.”

Tycho glanced at the duchess and held his peace, waiting to discover how Alexa wanted this to unfold. He watched her walk the room with the changeling in her arms, tracing a path across a priceless Persian carpet. The restrained fury of her steps and the preciseness of her route reminded Tycho of one of the panthers in the duke’s zoo. In one corner of her room, curled around itself but watchful, was her winged lizard, a gift from the Chinese emperor.

Tycho wondered how far Alexa had made it fly and in what conditions. She used the dragonet as her eyes. If Alexa was holding back from sending
Assassini
after Alonzo she had a reason.

“You will guard this child,” Alexa told Amelia.

The Nubian nodded.

“And me,” Tycho demanded. “What do I do?”

If Amelia was surprised he spoke so freely it was because the rumours that he was Giulietta’s lover hadn’t reached her. The fact he wore the duke’s ring, which had been relegated to a copy, since a copy had been declared the original, hadn’t escaped her, though. The duchess had noticed, too, and Tycho was impressed by her refusal to ask where the ring came from. “You wait for me to tell you.”

“How long will Giulietta sleep?”

Alexa’s face softened. “Until tomorrow. Do you want to see her?”

“She’s not in her chamber?”

“She’s in mine. And there she’ll stay until I’m happy she won’t harm herself.”

“Yes,” she said, seeing Tycho’s shock. “She threatened to kill herself.
First my husband, now my child. Why would I want to live?
”

Because I’m still alive?
Wrenching his thoughts from the cut Alexa’s words inflicted, Tycho wondered if it was cowardice or common sense that made him change the subject to something safer. “What do you know about the nurse? Apart from the fact she came from the mainland . . .”

“Walk with me,” Alexa said.

The family chambers were on the floor below, with government offices on the ground floor below that. The civil service used the
procuratie
buildings along one side of Piazza San Marco, the customs had their own offices on the far side of the Grand Canal and the mint was in a small building next to the campanile. With the guards sent home, Ca’ Ducale felt as empty as a drum, their footsteps chiming on cold marble as Alexa led Tycho towards the main stairs.

“The nurse,” Tycho reminded her gently.

“I asked Giulietta when the poppy was just beginning its work. She said Francesca recommended her and she was Francesca’s cousin. My niece trusted Francesca and took her recommendation. Why wouldn’t she?”

“Francesca thought the baby was to be abducted.”

“Did she now?” The duchess considered that point. “No doubt her man was loyal to Alonzo. But she was Leo’s nurse so she was told Leo would be taken and he was killed instead. What worries you about her replacement?”

Tycho tried to pin down his thoughts.

“Tell me later,” Alexa said. “We’re here now.” She opened the door to her chamber and waved Tycho inside. There was a guard by the window. A sergeant whom Tycho recognised from his time in the palace. A hard-faced man with cropped hair who nodded abruptly and opened the inner door at Alexa’s command.

“I’ll join you later,” Alexa told Tycho.

The guard shut the door behind him. The clothes and rolls of cloth that had filled this tiny wardrobe were piled in one corner, and one of Alexa’s servants sat in a chair. She almost tripped as she scrambled to her feet. “My lord . . .”

“Stay there.”

Smoke thickened the air from herbs charring on a brazier. A silver goblet was sticky with residue, and Tycho dipped a finger into the tar. His skin sizzled slightly where it touched the silver.
Opium . . .
He knew the taste and the effects, which would last far longer on Giulietta than him. His body sublimated wine, opium and other drugs. The girl he loved was so deep in dreams he doubted she could find the door between worlds even if he called her. So he knelt by the bed, folding her fingers into his and wished he could do more. “Go,” said a voice behind him. It was Alexa dismissing the servant.

“You love my niece, don’t you?”

“Of course . . .”

“There’s no ‘of course’ about it,” Alexa said cuttingly. “Most men want Giulietta for her lands, her fortune. Even the fools have worked out she’ll probably be Regent after I die. The clever ones have worked out she might be duchess.”

“Marco’s dying?”

“We’re all dying. Well, most of us.” Alexa’s voice was dry.

Sometime in the last few months she’d decided she could talk to him freely. Perhaps she hadn’t had anyone to talk to since her husband had died – except there had been Lord Atilo, obviously. Tycho’s old master had been her lover. The fact she now felt free to talk to Tycho was a compliment. It was also dangerous.

Alexa left a trail of dead. For all he admired the duchess and even in some strange way liked her, he’d be a fool not to fear her. They might be allies for the moment, but who knew how long that would last?

“He’s made for another world.”

Tycho knew she was talking about her son.

“The black moods take him and . . .” Alexa shrugged. “Who will stop him harming himself when I’m gone?”