The Exiled Blade (The Assassini) - By Jon Courtenay Grimwood Page 0,26

wide awake and changed the nature of her hunt. She’d caught a hare in its white winter coat, before staining its fur and the snow red with its blood. The mouthful it provided did little to assuage her hunger. Tomorrow she would have to go out again.

At the mouth of a tunnel dug into a snow bank she halted and hesitated before beginning her change. The air shimmered, making the slate roof of an almost buried shepherd’s hut beyond her look like rock seen through running water. There was none of the anguish of a krieghund change, no ripping flesh, shifting muscles and cracking bones. Amelia simply became something else. In place of a sandy-hued leopard stood a young Nubian woman, naked against the white of the snows behind her. Tycho had known she was other. Unless he was a fool, he’d known that from the first night they met, beside a frozen canal in the middle of a battle between Venice’s street gangs. But Amelia doubted he’d known what form her otherness took.

Climbing into her trews, she struggled into her jerkin and slid her daggers into her belt; her sword she slung over her shoulder, not bothering to buckle the baldric that held it, since she’d take it off again the moment she was inside. When Tycho woke she’d tell him about the soldiers.

Captain Towler was older than he looked and younger than he felt. A tallish man, with broad shoulders and cropped hair, his skull was slightly misshapen from being crushed with a shovel during the siege of Belgrade. He’d been young then and his attacker a woman. His reluctance to kill her had almost cost him his life. It was the last time he let chivalry get in the way of self-preservation. At the sack of M’dina six months later, he grabbed the first woman to jab at him with a spear by the throat and tossed her off the city walls. That was the version he told in taverns, with a whore on his lap and his hand up the skirt of the nearest serving girl.

Naive young English recruit learns war’s lessons the hard way. The truth was more ordinary: he’d been clubbed round the head by a German sergeant after starting a bar fight he was too drunk to finish. Five people had known the true story and four were dead. The German he had killed himself weeks later. Of the others, one had died outside Paris, one of plague, the other drowned at sea.

Towler shrugged. His might not be much of a life but it was the only one he had and he wasn’t ready to throw it away. He’d been a corporal back then. One of Sir John Hawkwood’s finest, and carried two gold coins and five silver wrapped in a rag at his hip. Now he banked with a moneylender in Milan and counted his wealth in tens of gold, and hundreds of silver. If Prince Alonzo Millioni’s offer was good – and assuming the world wasn’t actually ending – he’d be counting his gold in hundreds and his silver in thousands before next year was out.

That thought made him happy. Well, if not happy then almost content, and if not content then at least willing to battle along a snow-covered dirt road through twisted firs towards a pass through the mountains above. Once he got above the treeline he’d be able to see where the hell he was and move his men out of this damn valley, and into the next most probably. His map was old but not cheap, and said nothing about this many mountains.

Above him the sky was high and clear, lacking the heavy cloud they’d come to expect since Towler’s Company landed in Montenegro. Still as cold as a whore’s heart, of course. As cold as a whore’s heart and unwelcoming as a nun’s arse. Of course it was. He’d met a Schiavoni merchant in Ragusa who said the canals in Venice were ice. A French merchant had topped that by saying the river through Paris was solid enough for the king’s coach to use it as a road when he fled the starving city. Hedge priests said the world was ending and snow now fell alike on rocks in the far north and southern pastures that had never seen it before. Wolves from Russia were crossing the frozen Baltic into Sweden. Wolves from Sweden were crossing the frozen sea to Denmark. Olive groves in Italy were