The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,13

lady?”

“Alonzo. Who else?” The duchess turned so swiftly Tycho had only just looked round when her dagger stabbed the original guard under his chin and pierced his brain. He tottered, dead without knowing it, staggered backwards as she withdrew her blade. Contemptuously, she tumbled his body into the room.

“My lady,” Tycho protested.

“You disagree with my actions?”

The guard’s smile had been easy and his manner relaxed when Tycho first arrived. Too relaxed? Did Tycho now imagine an uncertainly around the eyes? A slight desperation? “We could have questioned him.”

“And learnt what?” Alexa’s voice was brutal.

“Whatever he knew, my lady . . .”

“Others will give us that information. Where is my niece?”

“Lighting candles for her mother.”

Duchess Alexa froze, and Tycho wondered if even here, even now, so many years after Lady Zoë’s murder, the woman who brought up Lady Giulietta could be jealous of the mother who’d never age, never be cross, never be anything other than perfect in her daughter’s eyes. “I’ll have guards detain her,” Alexa said.

“She’ll want to see Leo.”

“You’d show her this?” Alexa gestured at the window, the nurse bled out on the carpet, the cradle Tycho had righted. Alexa saved Leo’s blood-soaked body until last.

“She has a . . .”

“. . . right to be driven mad with grief?”

“My lady.”

“I lost a child,” Alexa said. “My first son. He died in his cot and I was the one who found him.” It was obvious from the flatness of her voice she stood in that room, not here in the doorway of this. “That was hard enough . . .” Nodding at the bloody scene, “This is more than even I could have borne.”

“I’ll go to her . . .”

“No. You have other work to do.”

Alexa will look after her. Walking away from Giulietta’s scream was the hardest thing he’d ever done. Not even falling through the circle of flames in Bjornvin or waking, chained naked to the bulkhead of a ship in the Venetian lagoon, with silver shackles burning his skin, came close.

I must keep walking.

In that second he was Giulietta and she him. The sound of her anguish echoed inside his head long after it stopped in the hall. He and Giulietta were tied in a way impossible to describe. In a way he wondered if Giulietta even understood. When the screaming was replaced by silence he knew she’d fainted, been drugged or magicked by Alexa into some false peace. By then he was striding towards Misericordia on the city’s northern shore . . .

The area was well named. A fierce wind blew into his face and the tramped earth beneath his feet felt slick with compacted snow. Ice crust cracked as he walked through street-wide puddles, and his boots were soaked and his feet numb by the time he reached a square of dark water. A monastery stood on the inlet’s far side, its walls black with soot from nearby foundries, which burnt all night with a sombre glow, their fires and furnaces never being allowed to cool. The guard Alexa killed had lived in a narrow tenement between the monastery’s wall and the side of a foundry. His wife, Francesca, lived there still.

Francesca was Leo’s usual nurse, and, between her falling sick and a new nurse arriving, she’d arranged for Leo to be looked after by the wife of one of the cooks. That Francesca then called a replacement from the mainland worried Alexa. In a city of a hundred thousand, twenty-five out of every thousand died each year and fifty were born; fifteen of which lost their mothers in birth, and twenty-five died within the year . . . The point was that in a city where five thousand gave birth annually there was no shortage of women able to act as wet nurses, nurses and childminders. So why summon one from the mainland?

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