The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,105

vambrace, wheeling clumsily in mid-air to launch another attack. She vaguely realised she’d shat herself. She grabbed her bow, hands shaking, and a krieghund roared past, leaping for the beast. Its claws swept up and ripped the thing open, tumbling guts to the ground. The black winged thing was dead before it hit the ice. That didn’t stop the krieghund stamping on its neck and kicking it hard.

“He really d-does love you, d-doesn’t he.”

Frederick? Gods, was that really . . .

“You k-know how unusual it is for a k-krieghund to think and f-fight at the same time? Mostly they’re m-mindless.” Marco paused. “Well, that’s what my m-mother said. M-maybe it’s a lie.”

“Over there,” said Giulietta. One of the winged creatures flailed at the flames licking its side and fought to reach its home. It landed with a crash on the roof and she realised Marco was smiling. “You intended that all along?”

“I hoped. Injured animals r-return to their lairs. You k-know what Lord Atilo once t-told me? To f-find out where your enemy l-lives, s-stab him and f-follow him home . . . Aim for the b-beasts,” Marco bellowed.

Enough creatures returned for their funeral pyres to lick the sides of the onion domes. And though Alonzo’s men had been doing their best to douse the arrows that flamed against the cathedral walls they could do little about the steep roof; too many fire arrows now jutted from the walls for them all to be smothered.

It was a slow and bloody business. Marco was getting his wish, however. Fire ate at the Red Cathedral and arrows flamed from too many places for the building to survive. The wood was old and still dry from last summer, the falls of snow having spared the walls the drenching rains would have brought. Black wings returned in flames to a roof that was already ablaze. New creatures that popped into existence found themselves burning before they could find their wings.

Around her, knights settled back to watch, while sergeants arranged their men in tighter rows and counted the dead, of which there were dozens. Hundreds, Giulietta corrected herself. Maybe a thousand. What she could see would be repeated all round the island. The archers stood in ragged groups, checking their bows and finding their breath. Boys ran the barrel bridge fetching arrows. The biggest of the carts had been deemed too heavy to cross. Up among the onion domes of the cathedral the screaming was savage, not even animal in any sense she understood. Marco’s zoo back home held every animal in the world, and had even included a unicorn when she was young, but she’d seen nothing like these. “What are they?”

“N-no idea. B-but I want one to examine a-afterwards.”

Lady Giulietta decided to be happy Marco thought there would be an afterwards . . . She looked at the darkening sky and wondered if the battle would last all night. Mostly she wondered why her uncle skulked in his cathedral rather than coming out to fight. The fact worried her. He was a famous strategist; if he decided to stay inside skulking then he had his reasons. Maybe Marco was wrong about there being an afterwards. Giulietta bit her lip.

“C-come on,” Marco said, “t-tell me.”

“It doesn”t matter . . .”

“F-Frederick’s over there s-seeing to his m-men.”

“It’s not that.” She knew where Frederick was. He’d resumed his human form and was delivering comfort and the coup de grâce to those of his followers too wounded to save. He slid the blade between their ribs himself; you couldn’t say that for many princes.

“Tycho, then. You’re w-worried about Tycho.”

Her cousin was wrong, she hadn’t thought about him from the moment the first fire arrow was loosed until now. Maybe that itself was worrying? She should have been wondering where he was, except she knew: under an awning back at the camp and an hour from waking, to judge from the sky. It shocked her how readily she’d come to accept his world was the reverse of hers.

His day, her night. Her night, his day.

Above her, the darkening sky was empty. No clouds, no birds, no raggedy winged creatures trying to kill her. There were broken bodies on the ice. Castellani and Nicoletti were working together to collect the corpses of their friends. The companies of archers were now being reformed into smaller companies made of strangers from companies that had been destroyed.

Lady Giulietta could smell her own shit, feel it under her. Her bowels had voided completely