The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,19

window lay in a heap.

In the richer Venetian houses windows were made from small circles of greenish bottle glass fixed into a lattice with lead, rather than oiled paper. The local pebbles could be ground to almost pure silica; the city had a monopoly on soda ash shipped from the Levant, and the glass was justly famous.

Pulling aside a drape and opening the shutters, Tycho let in fresher air. Shards of glass jutted in like the teeth of a lamprey. A neighbouring pane was cracked and Tycho looked more closely. Two chips revealed the bottle glass had been hit from outside. A single chip showed it had been hit from inside as well.

Several things were wrong with that. The first was that the sound of a window breaking would have startled Leo’s nurse. Why didn’t you call for help? The second was obvious. Who had reason to hit the glass from inside? No one, unless that’s where you already were, and you hit that pane first, found it too tough to crack and tried another instead. Should have let me have the guard.

He wished Alexa hadn’t simply stabbed the man.

The rope the killers were supposed to have used was still tied to its grappling hook and lay coiled in one corner. Rust flecked on to Tycho’s fingers as he hooked the grapple over the window. Slipping out of the window, he lowered himself over the edge and gripped the rope, planning to climb down.

A split second later he was falling.

He kicked off from the wall and turned in mid-air to land knee-deep in snow. The grappling hook remained in place but most of the rope lay coiled in front of him. It was as rotten as the hook was rusted. While most of Venice watched Alonzo’s ship sail for Montenegro the killer had entered the nursery by the door. Tycho doubted the nurse killed the child. He didn’t discount it but he doubted it. A hundred women in the city would be desperate enough to kill a child if the money was right. The nurse had been brought from the Italian mainland for another reason.

Tycho intended to find out what that was.

10

That thought took him through the palace garden, over a lowish wall and into the garden of the patriarch’s little palace next door. Most young men his age probably linked places in the city to kisses taken and kisses given, knee-tremblers in darkened doorways and perhaps the occasional street fight. He remembered places for people he’d killed or deaths he’d seen or overheard.

Here was where Lord Atilo slit the throat of the last patriarch, and Tycho watched before dodging the dagger Atilo threw after him. Tonight Tycho moved swiftly through the snow-covered garden and over a second wall into an alley beyond. And then, as if a man returning from a tavern, sauntered into St Mark’s Square and let himself discreetly through a door into the basilica. He nodded to the stone mother with her halo of glass stars, and stole a candle from a box, lighting it from a wall lamp and gluing it with a blob of wax to the floor at the Virgin’s feet.

The crypt was below the altar, down a cold spiral of steps that magnified Tycho’s careful tread into giant’s footsteps as he descended into a darkness his eyes swallowed and turned to light. A thousand ghosts plucked at the shadows’ edge. Here princes and statesmen had lain before they were buried. Because the ground was frozen hard and the attack on Leo was a secret, here lay a small child and the nurse who’d been looking after him.

Ice slicked the wall in a pottery glaze that made the walls look natural, not something built by man. The sluggish water around the island city was gelid, the canals snaking through its heart colder still. Old women were insisting the canals might freeze. It had happened before when they were children. Touching his fingers to the wall, Tycho believed it could happen again.

In a year when the world turned colder, and canals froze in Venice, blizzards smothered a town beyond a huge ocean no dragonship had crossed for more than a hundred years . . .

Tycho muttered the words so softly they might have been a prayer for the two cloth-covered bodies on slabs in front of him. They came from a book by Sir John Mandeville’s squire; a man who travelled to the world’s strangest places, where the dead walked and dragons lived and